If you're a freelance blogger and get paid as an independent
contractor, then it's highly likely that taxes are not being taken out
of your pay. The IRS wants its share of your pay, regardless of your
status as a full-time employee or a freelancer. Depending on how much
money you make as a freelancer during the year, you could be hit with a
surprisingly painful tax bill when you file your annual tax return
unless you plan ahead. First, you need to understand how freelance blogger taxes work, and then use the tips below to prepare yourself for tax season.
Take All Possible Deductions
Consult with a tax professional to make sure you're taking all the
deductions you legally can. To get started, check out this list of tax deductions for bloggers.
Keep Accurate Records
Save all of your business-related expense receipts, paychecks,
electronic paystubs, and so on. Not only will you need them when you or
your tax preparer completes your tax return, but you may need to
present them in case your return is audited.
Classify Your Freelance Blogging Business
Depending on your personal situation, you might want your freelance
blogging business to be classified on your tax return as a sole
proprietorship, an s-corp (small corporation) or a limited liability
corporation (llc). Read more about classifying your blogging business, and then consult with a tax professional for additional guidance.
Pay Taxes out of Other Income Each Month
If you make a sizeable income from your freelance blogging business,
you could find yourself with a large tax liability when tax season rolls
around. To be sure you aren't underpaying taxes throughout the year,
increase your withholdings from any taxed income that you receive each
month such as your paycheck from your full-time job if you have one or
your spouse's paycheck.
Save a Percentage of Your Freelance Blogging Income Each Month for Taxes
Another way to reduce the tax bill on your freelance blogging income
when you file your tax return is to put aside a percentage of your
income each month specifically for the purpose of paying your annual tax
liability. This way, you'll have the money you need when you or your
tax preparer calculates the tax due on your tax return. Many
freelancers find that setting 20% of their monthly income aside is
usually enough to cover their tax bills each year. Consult with a tax
professional to determine what's the best amount for you to earmark for
taxes each month.
Originally posted in weblogs.about.com
Paying Taxes as a Freelance Blogger with Fewer Surprises
Showing posts with label tips blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tips blog. Show all posts
When To Post And How Long To Post
how often you post is not as important as your consistency in
posting. If you fail to post consistently you will lose your audience,
no matter how good your content is. I have fallen into this trap more
than a handful of times, but not once since I have been successful in
this field. In fact, as I am writing this, I have more than one month’s
worth of blog posts prepared and scheduled for publication. I always aim
to have at least one week’s worth of posts ready and usually am a bit
ahead of that number, just to ensure I never miss a scheduled post.
People expect to see a blog post from me every day, so if I don’t post,
they wonder what is wrong. More importantly, they use the time they
would normally use to read my post to read someone else’s. That’s not
good.
It only takes a few days like that to start shedding readers. You have to be consistent and your readers will reward you for rewarding them.So, when should you post? It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you post. What time of day? This will depend largely on your niche and location, but it does matter. It is one of the key elements that I feel is not tested enough when it comes to posting. While I tend to feel that timing has a bigger impact on social media posting, it matters as much for blog posts in many cases (especially if you bolster your readership with social media a lot of the time.
I recommend starting with one of the two “prime time” posting hours between 11am-12pm and between 3pm-5pm. These are the biggest “wasted hours” of the day when workers spend more time on Facebook and Twitter than on their jobs. It’s a great way to drive traffic through natural procrastination.
Remember, though, that the timing should relate to your audience not wherever you are.
A good question and one that will largely depend on your audience and the type of content they enjoy most. Some blogs thrive on long, detailed how-to articles between 1,000 and 3,000 words. Others get six figure reader counts with 250 and 300 word blog posts and others still use almost no text at all and focus heavily on video (mine in a combination of all three.
You’ll find that the most effective way to build an audience is to provide a little bit of everything. Don’t be afraid to write a really short blog post if you don’t have much to say about a particular topic. At the same time, occasionally, you should sit down and write something truly epic, filled with useful tips that your readers will eat up. They will appreciate it, I can guarantee you. And when you feel comfortable doing it, you should spend a few minutes recording videos even if it’s just you spitballing a little bit about what you think on a topic the less formal the better in many cases.
As your blog grows and ages, you will start to learn more about your audience, both from the comments you receive and the data you find in Google Analytics. Using that data, you can start adjusting your content calendar to reflect what people actually want to read/watch. Don’t assume you know what people want until you give them a little bit of everything and see how they respond.
I like to think of it this way. Imagine you walk into a room filled with perfect strangers intent on telling a story you think is hilarious. You know for a fact that people will find it funny, but you don’t know anyone and don’t want to interrupt everyone to tell it.
So, instead of pulling out a bullhorn and announcing your story to the room, you introduce yourself to people, ask them their names, listen to their stories and build some rapport.
Your network
And networking is exactly what a blog needs to thrive in a world filled with millions of other blogs. Of course, you can’t hop on a plane and visit every blogger and blog reader in your niche personally, so instead you post a comment on posts from other bloggers. This is the single most effective way to generate return traffic to your blog, build your reputation and ensure people are interested in what you have to say.
For now, just make it part of your daily routine. Pick out 10 or 20 blogs in your niche (go to Technorati or Google Blog Search and make a list and start commenting on between 3 and 4 post per day. That’s all it will take.
Original post in http://idealtechblog.com
When To Post And How Long To Post
It only takes a few days like that to start shedding readers. You have to be consistent and your readers will reward you for rewarding them.So, when should you post? It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you post. What time of day? This will depend largely on your niche and location, but it does matter. It is one of the key elements that I feel is not tested enough when it comes to posting. While I tend to feel that timing has a bigger impact on social media posting, it matters as much for blog posts in many cases (especially if you bolster your readership with social media a lot of the time.
I recommend starting with one of the two “prime time” posting hours between 11am-12pm and between 3pm-5pm. These are the biggest “wasted hours” of the day when workers spend more time on Facebook and Twitter than on their jobs. It’s a great way to drive traffic through natural procrastination.
Remember, though, that the timing should relate to your audience not wherever you are.
A good question and one that will largely depend on your audience and the type of content they enjoy most. Some blogs thrive on long, detailed how-to articles between 1,000 and 3,000 words. Others get six figure reader counts with 250 and 300 word blog posts and others still use almost no text at all and focus heavily on video (mine in a combination of all three.
You’ll find that the most effective way to build an audience is to provide a little bit of everything. Don’t be afraid to write a really short blog post if you don’t have much to say about a particular topic. At the same time, occasionally, you should sit down and write something truly epic, filled with useful tips that your readers will eat up. They will appreciate it, I can guarantee you. And when you feel comfortable doing it, you should spend a few minutes recording videos even if it’s just you spitballing a little bit about what you think on a topic the less formal the better in many cases.
As your blog grows and ages, you will start to learn more about your audience, both from the comments you receive and the data you find in Google Analytics. Using that data, you can start adjusting your content calendar to reflect what people actually want to read/watch. Don’t assume you know what people want until you give them a little bit of everything and see how they respond.
Commenting within the Community
There are a number of different ways to build a following in the blogosphere, but few are as effective as going out there and showing what you know. Specifically, you should actively engage people in conversation.I like to think of it this way. Imagine you walk into a room filled with perfect strangers intent on telling a story you think is hilarious. You know for a fact that people will find it funny, but you don’t know anyone and don’t want to interrupt everyone to tell it.
So, instead of pulling out a bullhorn and announcing your story to the room, you introduce yourself to people, ask them their names, listen to their stories and build some rapport.
Your network
And networking is exactly what a blog needs to thrive in a world filled with millions of other blogs. Of course, you can’t hop on a plane and visit every blogger and blog reader in your niche personally, so instead you post a comment on posts from other bloggers. This is the single most effective way to generate return traffic to your blog, build your reputation and ensure people are interested in what you have to say.
For now, just make it part of your daily routine. Pick out 10 or 20 blogs in your niche (go to Technorati or Google Blog Search and make a list and start commenting on between 3 and 4 post per day. That’s all it will take.
Original post in http://idealtechblog.com
When To Post And How Long To Post
How to Build Your Family Tree on the Web
Researching your family tree
seems as easy as conducting a Google search, but there's actually much
more work and fact-checking involved, if you want to do it right.
Ancestry.com is no longer the only option when it comes to searching
digital archives, connecting with others and compiling a family tree. A
new crop of geneaology sites popping up on the Internet are providing
some alternatives. MyHeritage and Archives.com are two useful sites that
have great layouts and access to plenty of documents. On these sites
you can find census records, scanned birth, marriage and death
certificates, family photos and newspaper clippings, and compile these
into a beautiful, digital tree.
MyHeritage uses the social web to broden your family tree using living, distant relatives plus census records.
But the first thing you need to know when researching your ancestors
is that you'll need to get birth, marriage and death certificates of
your suspected family members when those documents are available in
order to be sure you're related to them. Genealogy websites let you
build a tree using information others have already entered into the
site, which can often lead to errors in your family tree if you don't
fact check. You might think there weren't many people named Fanny White
in rural Ohio in the 1800s but, turns out, there are a few -- a lot of
seemingly uncommon names were fairly common in their day. Oftentimes you
can find these documents online; other times finding them involves
reaching out to county clerks' offices in the relevant town and
requesting records via postal mail. Census records in the United States
only go back until 1790 (and are pretty sparse the farther back you go);
the 1890 census records were destroyed in a fire, so you won't find
those, either. If you're researching African-American ancestors in the
United States, it's unlikely you'll be able to find any records that pre-date the Civil War.
To keep things interesting along the way (research like this is a long process), you might want to try to locate pictures and newspaper clippings to add more context to your ancestor's stories.
Denie Kazan, a geneaologist at MyHeritage.com tells Mashable there are two phases in genealogy research: The first phase is when you gather all the information about the direct ancestors that you know yourself, heard about from family or found in the archives. This step is the time-consuming part. In the second phase, you go through all the details, do your best to verify them and, if relevant, add them to your tree.
MyHeritage offers a Smart Matching technology that uses the social web to grow your family tree horizontally by automatically finding matches with other family trees on the site.
"The millions of confirmed Smart Matches we have every month also enable families to take their research global, as our collection of family trees -- currently totaling 24 million and with well over one billion individuals -- is the most geographically diverse and international in the world," he said.
"Although we've built our technologies to try and mimic a human genealogist -- mistakes can still be made and it's up to the user to fully verify the information," Kazan adds.
The Record Matching technology will add some flavor to your family
story by automatically finding relevant historical records relevant to
your ancestors. With Record Matching, users can find birth, death,
census, immigration and gravestone pictures.
Kazan used the social web to help me research my family tree. Using MyHeritage he found 1,004 people, 1,085 Smart Matches and 883 Record Matches in five collections. The MyHeritage Matches (with other user-generated info in MyHeritage family trees and records on MyHeritage) gave me a lot of new leads and also brought up some never-before-seen newspaper articles mentioning my ancestors.
If you've seen the show Who Do You Think You Are?, where each episode a different celebrity has their ancestry traced by historians and geneaologists, you know that birth and death records aren't the only way to find information. Really, if you want to trace your ancestry it's going to take some detective work and a lot of patience. But you can also have a lot of fun in the process -- it's like solving a mystery. Tap into historical societies' databases as well as county clerks offices in the town where your ancestors lived.
You might also find the website FindAGrave.com useful, but keep in mind contributors upload the content, so you'll need to fact check that information too, but it could provide some leads.
Archives.com is a site I tried out for three months with a LivingSocial coupon. The look of the family tree was beautiful, and super easy to navigate. Sometimes when you're looking at generation after generation of people, it can get confusing and you can lose track of who was related to who. My biggest issue with this site is you have to be willing to spend money for every record you access, like $5-$10. And not all of those records will be useful in your search, so that can add up to a lot of money. You might want to use the site for its good family tree layout and find the information elsewhere.
For years, genealogists have used Ancestry.com. The website was acquired by an investor group in late October for $1.6 billion, but a spokesperson for Ancestry.com tells Mashable "There are no anticipated changes in Ancestry.com’s operating structure."
Of course, no matter what site you use, finding out all this information takes a lot of work. If you're not interested in pursuing genealogy as a hobby, you might want to hire a genealogist, which you can find through these sites.
source and image mashable.com
MyHeritage uses the social web to broden your family tree using living, distant relatives plus census records.
To keep things interesting along the way (research like this is a long process), you might want to try to locate pictures and newspaper clippings to add more context to your ancestor's stories.
Denie Kazan, a geneaologist at MyHeritage.com tells Mashable there are two phases in genealogy research: The first phase is when you gather all the information about the direct ancestors that you know yourself, heard about from family or found in the archives. This step is the time-consuming part. In the second phase, you go through all the details, do your best to verify them and, if relevant, add them to your tree.
MyHeritage offers a Smart Matching technology that uses the social web to grow your family tree horizontally by automatically finding matches with other family trees on the site.
"The millions of confirmed Smart Matches we have every month also enable families to take their research global, as our collection of family trees -- currently totaling 24 million and with well over one billion individuals -- is the most geographically diverse and international in the world," he said.
"Although we've built our technologies to try and mimic a human genealogist -- mistakes can still be made and it's up to the user to fully verify the information," Kazan adds.
Kazan used the social web to help me research my family tree. Using MyHeritage he found 1,004 people, 1,085 Smart Matches and 883 Record Matches in five collections. The MyHeritage Matches (with other user-generated info in MyHeritage family trees and records on MyHeritage) gave me a lot of new leads and also brought up some never-before-seen newspaper articles mentioning my ancestors.
If you've seen the show Who Do You Think You Are?, where each episode a different celebrity has their ancestry traced by historians and geneaologists, you know that birth and death records aren't the only way to find information. Really, if you want to trace your ancestry it's going to take some detective work and a lot of patience. But you can also have a lot of fun in the process -- it's like solving a mystery. Tap into historical societies' databases as well as county clerks offices in the town where your ancestors lived.
You might also find the website FindAGrave.com useful, but keep in mind contributors upload the content, so you'll need to fact check that information too, but it could provide some leads.
Archives.com is a site I tried out for three months with a LivingSocial coupon. The look of the family tree was beautiful, and super easy to navigate. Sometimes when you're looking at generation after generation of people, it can get confusing and you can lose track of who was related to who. My biggest issue with this site is you have to be willing to spend money for every record you access, like $5-$10. And not all of those records will be useful in your search, so that can add up to a lot of money. You might want to use the site for its good family tree layout and find the information elsewhere.
For years, genealogists have used Ancestry.com. The website was acquired by an investor group in late October for $1.6 billion, but a spokesperson for Ancestry.com tells Mashable "There are no anticipated changes in Ancestry.com’s operating structure."
Of course, no matter what site you use, finding out all this information takes a lot of work. If you're not interested in pursuing genealogy as a hobby, you might want to hire a genealogist, which you can find through these sites.
source and image mashable.com
5 Steps to Holiday Success - Online Readiness Checklist
1. Ramp up your advertising
Once your website is ready to go, you need to drive some new traffic. Earlier in the season (there is no ‘too early’ for this!) work on your search engine optimization, or SEO in order to optimize your stores placement in the organic listings before the holiday season arrives. According to a 2011 Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Survey (1), 75% of marketers consider search engine optimization to be effective for their business. 29% felt that SEO was more effective than any other form of marketing. After August, concentrate on more quick- win efforts like blogging and PPC campaigns. Pay-Per-Click remains one of the best ways to drive traffic to your store, even if your store already has good search engine placement for your major keywords.
Nobody wants to start thinking about the Biggest Shopping Season of the year while on summer vacation, but the truth is: If you haven’t started preparing yet, your competitors may have a head start on you already! To help you get started and get your online store in shape for the holidays, we’ve prepared a little Holiday Checklist – make sure you check it twice!
Web.com eCommerce has the services to help make this your best holiday sales season ever! And to help you out this holiday season, we’ve outlined 5 steps to prepare your online business success.
75% of marketers consider SEO to be effective for their business. — Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Survey01
2. Refresh your store design. Search engines love new and dynamic content. Holiday shoppers love clean, modern sites that simplify navigate and make it easy to find what they are looking for quickly. If you haven’t updated your store template in the past 18 months, now is the perfect time. Almost as important, make sure that you have a fresh and current blog to stir up interest in your products. Now is a good time to make sure that your blog matches your online stores, so that customers will recognize your brand. Some things to think about: Clean, simple navigation is one of the most critical elements in your control to help convince browsers to become shoppers once they’ve reached your site. Make sure your navigation supports shoppers by providing categories like ‘For Him’ & ‘For Her’ or ‘Gifts for Dad’ and ensure they can sort the products in each category by price, name, popularity, etc.
3. Maximize Online Shopping Engines. Make sure your products are listed in aggregate shopping engines. When trying to find a lot of gifts, consumers start on sites that display a lot of products to try and start narrowing their search. Make sure your products are listed in popular comparison shopping engines like ‘Shopzilla’, ‘TheFind’, ‘PriceGrabber’ and ‘Shopping.com’ so your store can be found.
4. Execute Enticing Email Offers.
Email Marketing is still one of the best ways to spend your marketing dollars in 2012. Email will boost traffic to your website, help reinforce your brand, and drive repeat customers. To maximize your sales with email marketing this holiday season, use a trusted email provider to ensure the best delivery for your marketing messages - don’t send from your personal outlook, or gmail account! Also, personalize your email to maximize opens and click- through’s, include a strong call-to action and be consistent in your message across the holiday season; eg “Avoid the lines, avoid the traffic, shop online for the Holidays!”
5. Engage a call center to handle volume. By now the holidays are quickly approaching. You love the look of your new store template, you are showing strong in the search engine pages, both in the organic and paid results, and you have email marketing campaigns rolling out regularly – and you are likely running out of hands. A good call center goes beyond simple customer service help. They can answer all your phone calls or just the overflow (talking to customer C instead of making them wait on hold while you talk to customers A & B!) They can help you during regular business hours, or just at nights and on weekends when you are off duty. They can be trained to sell, upsell and cross-sell your products, handle returns & exchanges, answer email, or even run live chat on your site.
Once your website is ready to go, you need to drive some new traffic. Earlier in the season (there is no ‘too early’ for this!) work on your search engine optimization, or SEO in order to optimize your stores placement in the organic listings before the holiday season arrives. According to a 2011 Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Survey (1), 75% of marketers consider search engine optimization to be effective for their business. 29% felt that SEO was more effective than any other form of marketing. After August, concentrate on more quick- win efforts like blogging and PPC campaigns. Pay-Per-Click remains one of the best ways to drive traffic to your store, even if your store already has good search engine placement for your major keywords.
Nobody wants to start thinking about the Biggest Shopping Season of the year while on summer vacation, but the truth is: If you haven’t started preparing yet, your competitors may have a head start on you already! To help you get started and get your online store in shape for the holidays, we’ve prepared a little Holiday Checklist – make sure you check it twice!
Web.com eCommerce has the services to help make this your best holiday sales season ever! And to help you out this holiday season, we’ve outlined 5 steps to prepare your online business success.
75% of marketers consider SEO to be effective for their business. — Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Survey01
2. Refresh your store design. Search engines love new and dynamic content. Holiday shoppers love clean, modern sites that simplify navigate and make it easy to find what they are looking for quickly. If you haven’t updated your store template in the past 18 months, now is the perfect time. Almost as important, make sure that you have a fresh and current blog to stir up interest in your products. Now is a good time to make sure that your blog matches your online stores, so that customers will recognize your brand. Some things to think about: Clean, simple navigation is one of the most critical elements in your control to help convince browsers to become shoppers once they’ve reached your site. Make sure your navigation supports shoppers by providing categories like ‘For Him’ & ‘For Her’ or ‘Gifts for Dad’ and ensure they can sort the products in each category by price, name, popularity, etc.
3. Maximize Online Shopping Engines. Make sure your products are listed in aggregate shopping engines. When trying to find a lot of gifts, consumers start on sites that display a lot of products to try and start narrowing their search. Make sure your products are listed in popular comparison shopping engines like ‘Shopzilla’, ‘TheFind’, ‘PriceGrabber’ and ‘Shopping.com’ so your store can be found.
4. Execute Enticing Email Offers.
Email Marketing is still one of the best ways to spend your marketing dollars in 2012. Email will boost traffic to your website, help reinforce your brand, and drive repeat customers. To maximize your sales with email marketing this holiday season, use a trusted email provider to ensure the best delivery for your marketing messages - don’t send from your personal outlook, or gmail account! Also, personalize your email to maximize opens and click- through’s, include a strong call-to action and be consistent in your message across the holiday season; eg “Avoid the lines, avoid the traffic, shop online for the Holidays!”
5. Engage a call center to handle volume. By now the holidays are quickly approaching. You love the look of your new store template, you are showing strong in the search engine pages, both in the organic and paid results, and you have email marketing campaigns rolling out regularly – and you are likely running out of hands. A good call center goes beyond simple customer service help. They can answer all your phone calls or just the overflow (talking to customer C instead of making them wait on hold while you talk to customers A & B!) They can help you during regular business hours, or just at nights and on weekends when you are off duty. They can be trained to sell, upsell and cross-sell your products, handle returns & exchanges, answer email, or even run live chat on your site.
Proven Ways to Gain an Edge Over Your Competitiors and Become a Blogging Authority
1) Build an Awesome Mailing List
Why it’s perceived as “difficult”:
- Takes time to build (no instant result).
- Autoresponder services cost monthly fees.
- Good email marketing requires your personal involvement.
- Adds the task of email writing to the existing tasks of blogging (more work)
Results you can get:
With a small mailing list of just under 500 subscribers, I launched a product that ended up making 6 figures in it’s lifetime. This shows some of the potential of email marketing. But more importantly, having a mailing list means that you have on-demand traffic, whenever you need it.1000 subscribers on a mailing list can easily mean 100+ clicks on any link you send in an email. How useful is that?
How to Use Email Marketing to Get an Edge:
Start building your mailing list.Right now.
Make Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Google+ connections and RSS subscribers a distant second priority to getting more subscribers.
To turn your blog into a list-building machine, add opt-in forms to:
- Your homepage
- The top of the sidebar
- The bottom of each post
- Optionally add a lightbox or slide-in box as well.
As for the email marketing itself, just follow the number one rule: be cool to your subscribers. Don’t send emails that you wouldn’t be happy to receive yourself.
2) Create Attention-Grabbing Videos
Why it’s perceived as “difficult”:
- Requires a different and new set of tools (compared to writing articles).
- Comes with a bit of a learning curve.
- Is a lot less anonymous than text and can make you feel exposed.
Results you can get with video marketing:
Video gets a lot more attention than text. This helps engage your visitors and keep them on your site and it helps increase your conversion rate on sales-pages. It can also be useful for decreasing your bounce rate and getting more clicks from Google, when you get video thumbnails listed in the search results.As an example of how powerful video can be, I did an experiment with my business partner. We spent a total of only two days to create:
- A video for YouTube, to attract traffic.
- A video to convert people who clicked on the link below the YouTube video into subscribers.
- A video to make an offer for a simple, low-priced product.
How to Use Video Marketing to Get an Edge:
If you’ve never made a video, start off by doing a few quick screencast videos using screenr (a free and very easy to use tool).Alternatively, use your webcam and simply record yourself talking about a topic. If you can write a blog post, you can make a video. You’re delivering the same content, just in a different format.
Yes, it will take a few attempts before your videos start looking awesome. In fact, if you’re anything like me, your first few videos will be pretty terrible. But with a bit of practice, you’ll get the hang of it (and come to think of it, writing also required some practice to get to where you are now, right?).
Learn how to make videos (by starting right now) and very soon, you’ll have an incredibly valuable skill you can use to grow your blog.
3) Host Fantastic Webinars
Why it’s perceived as “difficult”:
- Requires that you do a presentation, similar to video.
- It’s a live event. Many people are terrified of making mistakes, especially in front of a live audience.
- Stage fright applies to a virtual audience as well.
Results you can get:
One of my first webinars, held to just under 100 people, netted $3,642 in commissions. And all the attendees loved the webinar!A decent result for about three hours of work, I’d say.
Also, you can achieve unheard of levels of engagement on webinars and I know nothing more effective for “creating fans”. I’ve now hosted several webinars where the audience was so engaged that more than 100 people were still online, listening, participating and asking questions, 3.5 hours into the webinar.
And just to be clear: I didn’t plan on doing such long webinars. They just kept going, because we kept getting questions and comments and everyone was having a blast!
Another great advantage is that you can host webinars and then turn that content into products, or you can offer coaching webinars as products in themselves.
How to Use Webinars to Get an Edge:
Just do it.The biggest obstacle for most people is their fear of screwing up, in front of a live audience.
In reality, this fear is unjustified. First, things rarely go badly wrong and second, the attendees are usually very understanding.
Open your webinar with something along the lines of “I’m new to this and I’m pretty nervous, but I have some really important things I want to tell you about”. You’ll see that if you really have the intention of delivering great content, the audience members will totally have your back, even if things don’t go smoothly.
Also keep in mind that you don’t have to do webinars on your own. Invite guest experts and leave the major part of the presentation to them, or team up with other bloggers in your niche, to share the stage with you (and make some great connections at the same time).
4) Create Insanely Valuable Products
Why it’s perceived as “difficult”:
- Creating a product is more work that writing a few blog posts.
- You invest effort upfront and hope it will pay off, when you release the product (certain risk involved).
- Fear of selling.
Results you can get:
My first self-created product sold 2,102 copies and made more than $100K in it’s lifetime. This may not be a typical result, but it shows what can be done, even for someone without experience in product creation.Having a product also opens up one of the best traffic sources on the Internet, for you: affiliates. With a product, you can have an affiliate program and get affiliates to send you massively valuable traffic.
In my opinion, your own product is the most valuable asset you can have, as an affiliate.
How to Use Product Creation to Get an Edge:
Start by creating a simple free product, such as a report. You can use this as an opt-in incentive, to build your mailing list and in addition, it can serve as “product creation practice”.Once you have a few subscribers, ask them some questions. Find out about their biggest problems. Find out what they want and need. Then, create a product based on that and sell it.
This approach eliminates some of the risk from product creation. If you base your product on the answers you get from your potential customers, it’s much more likely that your product will be well received than if you just think of something all by yourself.
Obviously, product creation is quite a broad topic and I can’t cover everything here. But as with all things, the most important part is to get started and then trial-and-error your way forward.
The Challenge
Here’s my challenge to you: pick one of these four methods (or maybe one I haven’t though of myself) and dedicate 30 days to it.Yes, it’s a bit more difficult than just keeping on doing what you’re already used to, but that’s exactly why it’s easier to get good results with it.
Think about email marketing, video marketing, webinars and product creation. You know that most bloggers don’t do these things. You know that most people reading this post won’t follow through and actually do the 30-day challenge. And that’s exactly where the power of this approach lies. Do it, and you’re instantly in a different league.
Shane Melaugh
21 Tips to Build Your Brand on a Shoestring Budget
One of the most common questions I get from friends, clients and
strangers alike, is how to build a powerful brand with little to no
budget.
There’s a popular saying that you either have to spend time or money to build your business. When you don’t have the budget, you’ll be putting in more time. Thankfully, putting in the time allows you to connect, engage, create and converse – all offering the opportunity to build your brand and your community.
A brand is built through the total experience that it offers – everything from your communications and logos to customer service, the quality of your products and services, and the way you answer the phone. All of these associations with your brand are called touch points.
The good news is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to create effective brand touch points for your clients. In fact, some of the most powerful touch points are simple and inexpensive (when was the last time you paid for a firm handshake and a smile?)
ALWAYS ask yourself, how can I do a better job of creating a total brand experience for my client? What is she experiencing through my brand touch points?
Here are 21 low to no-cost ideas for enhancing your total brand experience for your customers:
There’s a popular saying that you either have to spend time or money to build your business. When you don’t have the budget, you’ll be putting in more time. Thankfully, putting in the time allows you to connect, engage, create and converse – all offering the opportunity to build your brand and your community.
A brand is built through the total experience that it offers – everything from your communications and logos to customer service, the quality of your products and services, and the way you answer the phone. All of these associations with your brand are called touch points.
The good news is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to create effective brand touch points for your clients. In fact, some of the most powerful touch points are simple and inexpensive (when was the last time you paid for a firm handshake and a smile?)
ALWAYS ask yourself, how can I do a better job of creating a total brand experience for my client? What is she experiencing through my brand touch points?
Here are 21 low to no-cost ideas for enhancing your total brand experience for your customers:
- Use the back of your business card for your brand message. Offer something of value that brings people directly to your website.
- Use your email signature for your brand message and link to your website, recent press, blog posts and social media platforms.
- Set up a profile on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Google+ and get busy connecting and engaging. Use Hootsuite to manage your content distribution.
- Set up a Facebook business page to share industry trends, tips and ideas.
- Run a monthly contest through your Facebook business page.
- Use your signature color whenever/wherever possible – tissue paper, note cards, labels, pens, gift boxes etc.
- Purchase the URL (domain) for your name and point it to your business website (if the name of your business is different from your actual name).
- Write a monthly newsletter or weekly tip and send out to all of your past and current clients.
- Create a “signature” talk – a specific topic that you are an expert of, and can give valuable information in a one hour presentation. Offer to give your signature talk to business groups, Chambers of Commerce, non-profits and associations that are aligned with your target market. Make sure you have information about your signature talk on your website, blog, newsletter and the back of your business card.
- Write articles pertaining to your area of expertise and post them to article submission sites online (your author bio for these sites will start showing up on the first page of Google search before your know it!).
- Write guest posts for well-known blogs in your industry. Better yet, write posts for blogs that are complementary to your industry, but not necessarily competing with you.
- Use your outgoing voice mail as a branding opportunity.
- Add your talks, workshops, events etc. to your local news service’s free online calendar of events.
- Stay in touch with your current and prospective clients with cards – birthday, holiday, anniversary etc. Pick a special occasion that you love to celebrate and send a custom card to everyone in your database.
- Reward people for sending referrals. I am a big fan of sending gift cards with a thank you note – Starbucks, Container Store, Barnes & Noble, AMC Theatres etc.
- Join a group – networking, philanthropic, cultural etc. Find one that resonates with you and attend two meetings or events each month.
- Always ask your clients for testimonials – these can be used on your website, in marketing materials and on sales pages.
- Create a testimonials document that consists of 10-20 of your best testimonials, and give to all potential clients and anyone who inquires about your services.
- Develop a simple “Speaker’s Kit” (your bio, photo, one sheeters of signature talks, testimonials) and send it to at least five program chairs, event planners and association heads each month.
- Create a valuable tool in your area of expertise (checklist, e-book, roadmap, MP3 interview, etc.) and give it away for free on your website.
- Host a free monthly call for your community to answer questions about your area of expertise. Use a free service such as freeconferencepro.com.
7 Tips for Picking Content Management Systems for Design Needs
Despite the apparent advancement of HTML-driven websites and
old-school methodology of designing Dreamweaver or NetObjects-based
websites, programming, designing and editorial preference has shifted
almost entirely to content management systems (CMS).
Since frameworks such as cascading style sheets (CSS), Java and other rich PHP classes are designed for easier navigation and compliance with language standards, content management systems have become the epitome of all that is and is to come in the future of the Internet.
Unlike shopping for design software, choosing the appropriate content management system with which to build feature-rich applications, is not about picking the easiest program — it’s about choosing the best program.
We now explore the seven tips for picking content management systems for design needs:
Scalable Architecture
For full support of futuristic marketing, developmental growth and adherence to W3C standards, the architecture of the CMS framework needs scalability without close-loop scripting sequences. Whether platforms use Java or .Net frameworks to build content management systems is secondary to the fact that scalability needs to have impending changes in mind.
If CSS classes, plugin containers and other necessary implementations change, the architecture must support these changes or face certain demise. Our initial investigation has revealed that Joomla should definitely be last on your list if architectural scalability is high on your list of needs.
The Top 5 which offer the most mountable architecture (in any order):
Open Source
The necessity for open source software or Web applications has become critical from the programming perspective because one programmer can simply piggyback off the coding of another. Simply look at the YUI monstrosity that continuously adds CSS framework updates to reapply toward content management systems, plugins and other cloud-based necessities. If your CMS platform is closed, innovating closes with it — it also makes the programmer’s job nightmarish because he or she will have to strip the CSS and PHP apart to propagate the correct sequence of calls, file complements and style sheets. Therefore, without deploying an open-source content management system that is built by all, and works cross-browser, you’ll have little room for growth when future implementations are necessary.
Here are the Top 5 open source platforms currently on the market today (no particular order):
Mobility
Although currently speculation, it’s likely our future will be reliant on complete mobility, even on the content management services platform. With clear navigation, easy to scale front-end CSS templates and properly-interwoven PHP, mobile content management will dominate the blogosphere, business world and, therefore, will be an inevitable need in both the entrepreneurial and programming sectors. With this in mind, and the necessity to have easily accessible SQL scripts, we looked closely at the most technically-sound content management systems for mobile-friendly browsers that won’t snowball the end-user with errors:
Security
Security on both front- and back-end portions of CMS sites is an important programming feature. Code protection prevents hacks and sandbox testing prevents publishing CSS that doesn’t fly with security standards your clients want. To survive the CMS decision-making cut, we disseminated the major content management systems and verified whether they’ve updated, or planned program updates to enhance coding security within CMS frameworks and database programming relevant to end-user needs. Running test suites, updating patches and code reviewing are instrumental in any CMS developmental stage or later enhancement.
Here are the picks of the litter when security is obligatory:
Database Servers
Why would the authenticity of database servers be important when choosing a CMS? Simple: MySQL and Oracle seem to be arm wrestling for speed, reliability and framework compatibility — a fight that seems to favor MySQL considering Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Facebook are all on-board with SQL, leaving many of the non-conforming server-side scripts fighting for crumbs. Since the big dogs rely on SQL, it will be shaping the future of our current Internet as we know it. The decision of which database script will connect your completed CMS to databases, tables and the like, will fall under your choosing, although the top current CMS platforms are using Linux or Unix servers for SQL speed.
Packaged Size
When working with content management files, grid sheets, PHP scripts and plugin containers, your final package needs to be small enough to adhere to speed requirements of browsers, end-users and even your clients. The final packaged size needs to be portable enough to install quickly yet be equally powerful, meaning the code integrity needs to be outstanding. These are the best final package CMS platforms guaranteed to be smaller than competition platforms:
Development Costs Versus Final Value
Although more compulsory for those who develop the actual platform, keep in mind, programmers are vital in all phases of development, open source additions and CSS template creation. Bear in mind, customers want something for nothing. Your programming hours need to be considered, however, because, obviously, you will not spend hours on framing plugins or nifty CSS snippets to make $15,000 on your finished product, unless extremely customized. Considering most CMS platforms are Commons Licensed, these are perhaps the CMS platforms that offer easy and quick scripting updates so both you and your potential clients can come out winners:
Summary
Choose your CMS based on the information above, although it would appear the overall champion is WordPress. You should focus on mobility, security and cost because the perfect culmination of the three from both a programmer and customer standpoint will be key in the future.
Tim Wilson Post from: SiteProNews
Since frameworks such as cascading style sheets (CSS), Java and other rich PHP classes are designed for easier navigation and compliance with language standards, content management systems have become the epitome of all that is and is to come in the future of the Internet.
Unlike shopping for design software, choosing the appropriate content management system with which to build feature-rich applications, is not about picking the easiest program — it’s about choosing the best program.
We now explore the seven tips for picking content management systems for design needs:
Scalable Architecture
For full support of futuristic marketing, developmental growth and adherence to W3C standards, the architecture of the CMS framework needs scalability without close-loop scripting sequences. Whether platforms use Java or .Net frameworks to build content management systems is secondary to the fact that scalability needs to have impending changes in mind.
If CSS classes, plugin containers and other necessary implementations change, the architecture must support these changes or face certain demise. Our initial investigation has revealed that Joomla should definitely be last on your list if architectural scalability is high on your list of needs.
The Top 5 which offer the most mountable architecture (in any order):
Open Source
The necessity for open source software or Web applications has become critical from the programming perspective because one programmer can simply piggyback off the coding of another. Simply look at the YUI monstrosity that continuously adds CSS framework updates to reapply toward content management systems, plugins and other cloud-based necessities. If your CMS platform is closed, innovating closes with it — it also makes the programmer’s job nightmarish because he or she will have to strip the CSS and PHP apart to propagate the correct sequence of calls, file complements and style sheets. Therefore, without deploying an open-source content management system that is built by all, and works cross-browser, you’ll have little room for growth when future implementations are necessary.
Here are the Top 5 open source platforms currently on the market today (no particular order):
Mobility
Although currently speculation, it’s likely our future will be reliant on complete mobility, even on the content management services platform. With clear navigation, easy to scale front-end CSS templates and properly-interwoven PHP, mobile content management will dominate the blogosphere, business world and, therefore, will be an inevitable need in both the entrepreneurial and programming sectors. With this in mind, and the necessity to have easily accessible SQL scripts, we looked closely at the most technically-sound content management systems for mobile-friendly browsers that won’t snowball the end-user with errors:
- Radiant CMS — Built on ROR (Ruby on Rails) with logical CSS integration.
- WordPress — Already the leader in mobile content development of their open-source CMS.
- Contao (formerly know as TYPOlight) — Integrates Ajax and PHP5, which makes static pages and general blog layouts easier to manipulate.
- Frog — Similar to Radiant except uses solely PHP5, offering cleaner coding.
Security
Security on both front- and back-end portions of CMS sites is an important programming feature. Code protection prevents hacks and sandbox testing prevents publishing CSS that doesn’t fly with security standards your clients want. To survive the CMS decision-making cut, we disseminated the major content management systems and verified whether they’ve updated, or planned program updates to enhance coding security within CMS frameworks and database programming relevant to end-user needs. Running test suites, updating patches and code reviewing are instrumental in any CMS developmental stage or later enhancement.
Here are the picks of the litter when security is obligatory:
- WordPress — although presently open source, programming contributors continually make security updates to PHP code and offer easy-to-implement plugin API’s to enhance SSL.
- Joomla — Continually updates program patches and potential coding loopholes to tighten security.
- DotNetNuke — A very large community of active developers assure that current security trends
remain free of security attrition. - Orchard — Microsoft gets its hands dirty in this New BSD License CMS which, backed by a corporation built on secure platforms, should make this an excellent choice for programmers.
- Umbraco — Released in 2004, this relatively new CMS is written in C# which is historically an expandable and secure programming script language.
Database Servers
Why would the authenticity of database servers be important when choosing a CMS? Simple: MySQL and Oracle seem to be arm wrestling for speed, reliability and framework compatibility — a fight that seems to favor MySQL considering Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Facebook are all on-board with SQL, leaving many of the non-conforming server-side scripts fighting for crumbs. Since the big dogs rely on SQL, it will be shaping the future of our current Internet as we know it. The decision of which database script will connect your completed CMS to databases, tables and the like, will fall under your choosing, although the top current CMS platforms are using Linux or Unix servers for SQL speed.
Packaged Size
When working with content management files, grid sheets, PHP scripts and plugin containers, your final package needs to be small enough to adhere to speed requirements of browsers, end-users and even your clients. The final packaged size needs to be portable enough to install quickly yet be equally powerful, meaning the code integrity needs to be outstanding. These are the best final package CMS platforms guaranteed to be smaller than competition platforms:
- Drupal
- WordPress
- Concrete5
- Joomla
- Orchard
Development Costs Versus Final Value
Although more compulsory for those who develop the actual platform, keep in mind, programmers are vital in all phases of development, open source additions and CSS template creation. Bear in mind, customers want something for nothing. Your programming hours need to be considered, however, because, obviously, you will not spend hours on framing plugins or nifty CSS snippets to make $15,000 on your finished product, unless extremely customized. Considering most CMS platforms are Commons Licensed, these are perhaps the CMS platforms that offer easy and quick scripting updates so both you and your potential clients can come out winners:
- WordPress — Since many nifty themes can be programmed to perform balancing acts, this CMS is the long-standing champion of quick updates, integrations and CSS.
- Joomla — Packaged nicely and offers quick PHP, CSS and plugin integrations.
- Drupal — Building impressive websites quickly using gridded CSS sheets makes this CMS programming choice for database-savvy designers.
- DotNetNuke — ASP.Net programmers love this CMS since the scripting is small, meaning the time necessary to update front-end scripts is much quicker.
- Kentico — A newer CMS built on ASP.Net framework and perhaps the newest CMS to integrate quick coding scripts. DevNet gives this CMS a high rating. Kentico has had an impressive 550 percent growth in three short years.
Summary
Choose your CMS based on the information above, although it would appear the overall champion is WordPress. You should focus on mobility, security and cost because the perfect culmination of the three from both a programmer and customer standpoint will be key in the future.
Tim Wilson Post from: SiteProNews
17 Tips Before You Start Your Blog
Starting a blog is no longer enough.
There are millions of blogs out there, and most of them get nowhere because they don’t have a strategy in place.
In this post, you’ll not only learn blogging for beginners, but you’ll get 17 concrete steps you can take to dramatically increase your chances of success.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t started a blog yet, or if you’re a veteran, because just one of these tips can make a big difference in your life and in your blogging.
With that said, let’s start with the first tip.
1. Passion
Don’t just start a blog because you want to make money. There are no shortcuts to success.
If you want to build a thriving blog that brings in revenue, you will have to work hard, and to stay motivated, you have to find something you’re passionate about.
Or at least something you’re interested in.
2. Purpose
When your purpose is weak, your chances of giving up somewhere along the way go up dramatically.
So ask yourself the following questions:
3. Niche
The next step is to find your niche. The best way to stand out from all the millions of blogs out there is to become an expert in a highly targeted area.
Think opt-in conversion expert instead of email marketing. Think turning your blog into a book instead of just general blogging tips.
Get specific and you will go far.
4. Solve a Problem
One addendum to finding your niche is to make sure you solve a problem.
Money is made by solving problems for people. If you can help someone get more subscribers on their list and make more money, you’re solving a problem.
So think about what problem you’re solving, and then do some research on if people are willing to pay for having that problem fixed.
5. Personality
To really stand out from all the noise, you have to inject your personality and expertise into your blog.
There are too many people out there teaching something they have no experience in.
If you don’t have experience, get some. The more you know, the more you can share with your audience, and the more they will grow to know, trust and like you.
6. Come Up with a Domain Name
There are many ways of coming up with an excellent domain name, but in the end, you alone have to decide what kind of name and brand you want to build.
A few tips for coming up with a good domain name is to make it:
7. Tag line
Coming up with a tagline is not absolutely necessary when you’re starting out, but it can be a lot of fun.
Go for a tag line that communicates who you help and what you help them with. If you help small businesses get more leads on their email newsletter, a simple tag line could be:
“Turn your readers into leads, and your leads into raving customers.”
8. Pick Your Web Host
Avoid using a free blogging option like WordPress.com or Blogger.com. If you’re serious about blogging, you need a self-hosted service.
There are plenty out there, like BlueHost and HostGator. They are just a few dollars a month and will get you started on the right path.
9. Pick Your Theme
Next up is picking a WordPress theme that makes your blog look professional.
Again, there are several free options out there, but I recommend you spend some money and get a good premium theme. Some of my favorites are:
10. Pick Your Plugins
Once you’ve got a web-host and a good looking theme, it’s time to get your plugins in order.
Keep the amount of plugins you use to a minimum. Each plugin you add will (usually) make your site slower, which isn’t the best thing you can do.
Here’s a list of plugins I use:
The next thing you have to do is get analytics set-up, which will help you keep track of how many visitors you get, where they are coming from, and what they are doing on your site.
If your traffic isn’t growing from month to month, something needs to change, but remember, traffic isn’t everything.
If your goal is to make money with your blog, you should be building your email list, and converting that traffic into email subscribers.
12. Content Strategy
You need to have a solid content strategy in place, so think about the following questions:
13. List Building
I mentioned building your list above, and it’s crucial if you want to make money with your blog. Think about how you will get people on your list, and what email service provider you will use.
One of the easiest ways to start is to give away a free 5 to 10 page report when people sign-up.
There are many email list service providers out there, and they do cost money, but it’s an investment worth making. One of my favorites is Aweber. I’ve been using them for over 5 years.
Do not skimp on starting an email list, because while you may save money now, you will end up losing thousands in lost opportunity down the road.
14. Monetization
The next step is to think about how you will monetize. How will you make money with your blog?
If you don’t want to make money with your blog, you can skip over this step. But I see so many people jump into blogging without having a simple business plan.
You have to have an idea of how you will generate revenue. You don’t have to be crystal clear, but there needs to be opportunities for you to do so.
Look at what people are already paying for. Go to ClickBank, Amazon, or just use Google to find products and services people are selling in your market.
15. Traffic Generation
How will you get traffic to your site?
Write down at least three traffic generation strategies that you will start off with. For example, I started with blog commenting, but I quickly moved over the guest blogging, because it was so much more effective.
To this date, I’ve written close to two hundred guest posts for different blogs, and they all keep bringing traffic to my site and building my list, and consequently, my business.
16. Outreach
How will you connect with peers in your field?
If you blog about knitting, how will you connect with other knitters?
This part scares people, and it scared me for a long time. Or to be honest, it still scares me, but in reality, it’s about making friends and being yourself.
Just write down how you can connect with fellow bloggers. Maybe you can comment on their blogs, see if they hang out on Twitter or Facebook, or simply shoot them an email.
Start connecting with people right away. Think about how you can add value to their lives and people will appreciate your help.
17. Expectations
Last, but not least, write down what your expectations are. Here are a few questions to get you going:
But if you equip yourself with the truth, you’ll know what to expect, and you will keep going when the going gets tough.
Summary
Whatever you do, don’t just move on and read another article. Pick one of the tips above and implement it.
If you haven’t started a blog yet, look at the first few tips on passion, purpose and finding your niche. Sit down and brainstorm some answers and then move forward.
Starting a profitable blog is not easy, but it is worth it. It opens doors, helps you grow as a human being, and if you work at it, can help you make a living working from home, just like it has done for me.
It’s not easy, but it can be done.
Henri Junttila is the founder of Wake Up Cloud
There are millions of blogs out there, and most of them get nowhere because they don’t have a strategy in place.
In this post, you’ll not only learn blogging for beginners, but you’ll get 17 concrete steps you can take to dramatically increase your chances of success.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t started a blog yet, or if you’re a veteran, because just one of these tips can make a big difference in your life and in your blogging.
With that said, let’s start with the first tip.
1. Passion
Don’t just start a blog because you want to make money. There are no shortcuts to success.
If you want to build a thriving blog that brings in revenue, you will have to work hard, and to stay motivated, you have to find something you’re passionate about.
Or at least something you’re interested in.
2. Purpose
When your purpose is weak, your chances of giving up somewhere along the way go up dramatically.
So ask yourself the following questions:
- Why are you starting a blog?
- What do you want to get out of doing this?
- Why do you want to succeed?
3. Niche
The next step is to find your niche. The best way to stand out from all the millions of blogs out there is to become an expert in a highly targeted area.
Think opt-in conversion expert instead of email marketing. Think turning your blog into a book instead of just general blogging tips.
Get specific and you will go far.
4. Solve a Problem
One addendum to finding your niche is to make sure you solve a problem.
Money is made by solving problems for people. If you can help someone get more subscribers on their list and make more money, you’re solving a problem.
So think about what problem you’re solving, and then do some research on if people are willing to pay for having that problem fixed.
5. Personality
To really stand out from all the noise, you have to inject your personality and expertise into your blog.
There are too many people out there teaching something they have no experience in.
If you don’t have experience, get some. The more you know, the more you can share with your audience, and the more they will grow to know, trust and like you.
6. Come Up with a Domain Name
There are many ways of coming up with an excellent domain name, but in the end, you alone have to decide what kind of name and brand you want to build.
A few tips for coming up with a good domain name is to make it:
- Unique
- Memorable
- Easy to spell
- Concise
7. Tag line
Coming up with a tagline is not absolutely necessary when you’re starting out, but it can be a lot of fun.
Go for a tag line that communicates who you help and what you help them with. If you help small businesses get more leads on their email newsletter, a simple tag line could be:
“Turn your readers into leads, and your leads into raving customers.”
8. Pick Your Web Host
Avoid using a free blogging option like WordPress.com or Blogger.com. If you’re serious about blogging, you need a self-hosted service.
There are plenty out there, like BlueHost and HostGator. They are just a few dollars a month and will get you started on the right path.
9. Pick Your Theme
Next up is picking a WordPress theme that makes your blog look professional.
Again, there are several free options out there, but I recommend you spend some money and get a good premium theme. Some of my favorites are:
- WooThemes
- Thesis
- Genesis
10. Pick Your Plugins
Once you’ve got a web-host and a good looking theme, it’s time to get your plugins in order.
Keep the amount of plugins you use to a minimum. Each plugin you add will (usually) make your site slower, which isn’t the best thing you can do.
Here’s a list of plugins I use:
- Akismet – to prevent spam.
- Audio player – to play interviews and podcasts.
- Broken link checker – so I can remove and fix broken links.
- Contact form 7 – so people can contact me.
- Google XML sitemaps – to create a nice and simple sitemap for Google to crawl.
- Popular posts – to help people find my best content.
- Sharebar – so people can share my content on social media.
- WP smush.it – to reduce image file sizes and make my site load faster.
- WP super cache – another plugin that helps my site load faster.
The next thing you have to do is get analytics set-up, which will help you keep track of how many visitors you get, where they are coming from, and what they are doing on your site.
If your traffic isn’t growing from month to month, something needs to change, but remember, traffic isn’t everything.
If your goal is to make money with your blog, you should be building your email list, and converting that traffic into email subscribers.
12. Content Strategy
You need to have a solid content strategy in place, so think about the following questions:
- What kind of content will you produce? (audio, text, video)
- How will you produce it?
- How often will you publish new content?
- How will you make new readers aware of old content?
- How will you use your content to grow your business?
13. List Building
I mentioned building your list above, and it’s crucial if you want to make money with your blog. Think about how you will get people on your list, and what email service provider you will use.
One of the easiest ways to start is to give away a free 5 to 10 page report when people sign-up.
There are many email list service providers out there, and they do cost money, but it’s an investment worth making. One of my favorites is Aweber. I’ve been using them for over 5 years.
Do not skimp on starting an email list, because while you may save money now, you will end up losing thousands in lost opportunity down the road.
14. Monetization
The next step is to think about how you will monetize. How will you make money with your blog?
If you don’t want to make money with your blog, you can skip over this step. But I see so many people jump into blogging without having a simple business plan.
You have to have an idea of how you will generate revenue. You don’t have to be crystal clear, but there needs to be opportunities for you to do so.
Look at what people are already paying for. Go to ClickBank, Amazon, or just use Google to find products and services people are selling in your market.
15. Traffic Generation
How will you get traffic to your site?
Write down at least three traffic generation strategies that you will start off with. For example, I started with blog commenting, but I quickly moved over the guest blogging, because it was so much more effective.
To this date, I’ve written close to two hundred guest posts for different blogs, and they all keep bringing traffic to my site and building my list, and consequently, my business.
16. Outreach
How will you connect with peers in your field?
If you blog about knitting, how will you connect with other knitters?
This part scares people, and it scared me for a long time. Or to be honest, it still scares me, but in reality, it’s about making friends and being yourself.
Just write down how you can connect with fellow bloggers. Maybe you can comment on their blogs, see if they hang out on Twitter or Facebook, or simply shoot them an email.
Start connecting with people right away. Think about how you can add value to their lives and people will appreciate your help.
17. Expectations
Last, but not least, write down what your expectations are. Here are a few questions to get you going:
- Where do you expect to be with your blog in 6 months?
- What will happen if you don’t reach those expectations?
- Why do you want these results?
But if you equip yourself with the truth, you’ll know what to expect, and you will keep going when the going gets tough.
Summary
Whatever you do, don’t just move on and read another article. Pick one of the tips above and implement it.
If you haven’t started a blog yet, look at the first few tips on passion, purpose and finding your niche. Sit down and brainstorm some answers and then move forward.
Starting a profitable blog is not easy, but it is worth it. It opens doors, helps you grow as a human being, and if you work at it, can help you make a living working from home, just like it has done for me.
It’s not easy, but it can be done.
Henri Junttila is the founder of Wake Up Cloud
Great ways to find and create free interactive stories
If you ever wanted to be able to create your own interactive stories
for others to enjoy then read on! In this article, we take a look at
three different free tools that will let you create ‘interactive
stories’ that can combine photos and videos and maps, as well as stories
and pages that exist out there, with your own narrative.
We present three interactive-story tools: Meograph is a great site that tells your story using Google maps and a Facebook-like timeline-based approach, Storify will let you create, share and swap stories with others in a network and Twine has a simple interface that will let you create your own text-adventure style stories!
Meograph is one of the best ways I have found to get started creating your own interactive stories, and it has been featured by some pretty high profile sites and channels simply because it is so easy to use. Right on the splash page it tells you that you don’t even have to sign up to get started, and that’s a rarity in this day when everyone wants your email address and life story. Best used for things like biographies and other things that can be connected through Google maps, Meograph excels in simplicity and scope.
There’s a demo you can watch on the home page that will give you a much better idea of exactly what can be done with it, and using it is as simple as following step by step instructions. While I wouldn’t think it would be that great for the young kids, it sure is ideal to create a fast and easy interactive ‘timeline’ style story. It should be familiar to those who use Facebook, as it works on a timeline system that lets you add moments where and when you want along the way, and view the playback at any moment. All in all, it’s a great place to start.
Storify could almost be considered the Facebook of the interactive story world, and it lets you create what they call ‘social stories’ that are interactive by allowing others to engage in a community based on those creations. It follows many of the social conventions found on sites across the ‘net that allow us to connect and discover new people and their social stories as well as creating our own. It allows you to sign up using your existing Facebook or Twitter account to get a head start on the social aspect that is so strongly emphasized on Storify, and will also allow you to easily get your friends from those networks involved with your stories.
You’ll also be able to use Storify’s interface to connect various media elements from social networks, like photos and video clips, even status updates from your friends or people you admire, to your topic, which creates an engaging and eye-catching experience for those that are taking part in your creations. Whether they are just reading or helping it to grow, people will see immediately that your story there is rooted in the concepts of social media sharing. Essentially, you might look at Storify as a new layer to the online social communities that we already use on a daily basis. For those that want to create something interactive but also dynamic that can evolve and change over time through those interactions, Storify is the way to go.
Twine is a free downloadable program for Windows and Mac that will let the storyteller with a more advanced background and idea to create interactive stories through a series of menu layers that will add depth to the subject matter.
At it’s heart, Twine is a great program to create text adventure programs, which can be exported as a single, simple web page but it also allows you to add more than what you’d find in a standard text adventure. There are a number of great video tutorials to learn how to use Twine, and you’ll find that you can use the graphic interface just as easily as the command line within Twine to create and edit your story any way you want. You can even add links to other web sites into your text based story, which can give you the option to connect videos, photos, and anything else you can find on the Internet to the whole experience.
While Twine allows you to create a static story that doesn’t change unless you want it to, it also allows you to go further into the concept of story ownership as well as giving you the option to publish your story in nearly any way you can think of, including selling it if you so desire. Twine is absolutely free and you will be able to create your first stories within minutes of downloading and installing it. It’s my favorite way to create interactive stories and then share them with my friends.
We present three interactive-story tools: Meograph is a great site that tells your story using Google maps and a Facebook-like timeline-based approach, Storify will let you create, share and swap stories with others in a network and Twine has a simple interface that will let you create your own text-adventure style stories!
Meograph: A great place to start your own interactive story experience
Meograph is one of the best ways I have found to get started creating your own interactive stories, and it has been featured by some pretty high profile sites and channels simply because it is so easy to use. Right on the splash page it tells you that you don’t even have to sign up to get started, and that’s a rarity in this day when everyone wants your email address and life story. Best used for things like biographies and other things that can be connected through Google maps, Meograph excels in simplicity and scope.
There’s a demo you can watch on the home page that will give you a much better idea of exactly what can be done with it, and using it is as simple as following step by step instructions. While I wouldn’t think it would be that great for the young kids, it sure is ideal to create a fast and easy interactive ‘timeline’ style story. It should be familiar to those who use Facebook, as it works on a timeline system that lets you add moments where and when you want along the way, and view the playback at any moment. All in all, it’s a great place to start.
Storify: Share your stories with the world for free!
Storify could almost be considered the Facebook of the interactive story world, and it lets you create what they call ‘social stories’ that are interactive by allowing others to engage in a community based on those creations. It follows many of the social conventions found on sites across the ‘net that allow us to connect and discover new people and their social stories as well as creating our own. It allows you to sign up using your existing Facebook or Twitter account to get a head start on the social aspect that is so strongly emphasized on Storify, and will also allow you to easily get your friends from those networks involved with your stories.
You’ll also be able to use Storify’s interface to connect various media elements from social networks, like photos and video clips, even status updates from your friends or people you admire, to your topic, which creates an engaging and eye-catching experience for those that are taking part in your creations. Whether they are just reading or helping it to grow, people will see immediately that your story there is rooted in the concepts of social media sharing. Essentially, you might look at Storify as a new layer to the online social communities that we already use on a daily basis. For those that want to create something interactive but also dynamic that can evolve and change over time through those interactions, Storify is the way to go.
Twine: A program for the more advanced story teller.
Twine is a free downloadable program for Windows and Mac that will let the storyteller with a more advanced background and idea to create interactive stories through a series of menu layers that will add depth to the subject matter.
At it’s heart, Twine is a great program to create text adventure programs, which can be exported as a single, simple web page but it also allows you to add more than what you’d find in a standard text adventure. There are a number of great video tutorials to learn how to use Twine, and you’ll find that you can use the graphic interface just as easily as the command line within Twine to create and edit your story any way you want. You can even add links to other web sites into your text based story, which can give you the option to connect videos, photos, and anything else you can find on the Internet to the whole experience.
While Twine allows you to create a static story that doesn’t change unless you want it to, it also allows you to go further into the concept of story ownership as well as giving you the option to publish your story in nearly any way you can think of, including selling it if you so desire. Twine is absolutely free and you will be able to create your first stories within minutes of downloading and installing it. It’s my favorite way to create interactive stories and then share them with my friends.
How To Become A High-Demand Designer (And Get the Good Clients)
There are two types of designers in this world: those who are in high-demand, and those who aren’t. Most of us start out in the latter category, and, unfortunately, some of us remain there for the duration of our careers.
But there’s a way to cross the gap between being in high demand and low demand that isn’t always obvious. It’s not easy, otherwise, everyone would be doing it. But I’m going to assume you’re a designer interested in improving the quality of clients you get, so I’m going to give it to you straight.
Here are several steps you can follow to boost your appeal to your potential clients, and climb the ladder from mediocre performer to becoming a high-demand superstar designer.
Before you meet with a high-level client, it’s helpful to arrange your portfolio so that it tells a story. When you do present your portfolio to a potential client, don’t just show a bunch of pretty pictures, explain the thought that went into your decision-making process.
You want to take potential clients through your market research covering unique selling points, and all that is relevant that goes into creating a marketable, effective design.
Interview your users, start an email list, make polls or surveys whenever appropriate. Don’t just listen to what people say, but also look at their activities and reactions to the designs you’ve created. Observe the clicking, reading, or buying habits of your clients. Cross-reference those habits with what you get from the horse’s mouth to get a better, more complete indication.
Show the process behind the visuals themselves. Why these colors or that logo concept, and most importantly how did your choices improve the effectiveness of the design? Go deeper into the psychology of your ideal clients and the markets they serve. High-demand designers do this every day.
How do I know this? Because I’ve been a design client as well as a designer. Even though I’m a designer myself, I love it when a freelancer can seemingly "read my mind" and figure out what I really want before I even say it. If you’re thinking that no designer can accomplish this reliably without the use of a magic wand and sparkly cape, think again.
Learning to quantify the needs of your target market is a very learnable skill in any industry. However, it does require you to be ultra-specific about the exact industry or industries you want to serve – you can’t read everyone’s minds, after all.
This dilutes the strength of your personal brand and takes away valuable time that you could be using to focus your attention on the markets you genuinely want to serve. It can be hard sometimes to walk away from lucrative jobs that you have no apparent interest in. But you need to free up time to conduct the proper research into the kinds of design jobs you really want to take; the kind that will make you a high-demand designer.
By having a target market, high-demand designers will automatically know what their clients want, because it’s the same thing that they themselves want. This has a bonus effect of giving one more experience with one’s niche market, which is something all clients want.
This practice is detrimental to your path to becoming a truly high-demand designer, because it creates dark spots in your portfolio. Every mediocre project you put into your portfolio is taking the place of a potentially awesome project. But if you do each project like it’s the most valuable one in your entire career, you’ll eventually have a portfolio full of amazing work that any client will salivate over.
It’s also important to do side projects which show your thought process to potential clients. Many designers don’t really understand how important this is, because they think that all an art director or freelance client wants to see is the result. But high-level clients aren’t paying you for your design skills. They’re looking for people who show a superior thought process from initial sketches to the final solution, and their ability to interpret demands and demonstrate them in the results.
If a client is confident that you can deliver their needs and wants unsupervised, it won’t even occur to them to ask you for spec work. Spec work for me is quite unnecessary, it doesn’t show your problem-solving side, just your designing skills, and everybody has that.
High-level clients want their high-demand designers to go beyond designing, they want designers who know how to think and connect with their target audience. Remove yourself from the kiddie pool, do your research into the target markets of your cliens and create opportunities for yourself.
But there’s a way to cross the gap between being in high demand and low demand that isn’t always obvious. It’s not easy, otherwise, everyone would be doing it. But I’m going to assume you’re a designer interested in improving the quality of clients you get, so I’m going to give it to you straight.
Here are several steps you can follow to boost your appeal to your potential clients, and climb the ladder from mediocre performer to becoming a high-demand superstar designer.
Do the Thinking
The most important asset a designer can have is his or her thought process. High-level clients – the kind you want to go after as a high-demand designer – are far more interested in what you were thinking about when you created the work in your portfolio, rather than just the visuals.Before you meet with a high-level client, it’s helpful to arrange your portfolio so that it tells a story. When you do present your portfolio to a potential client, don’t just show a bunch of pretty pictures, explain the thought that went into your decision-making process.
You want to take potential clients through your market research covering unique selling points, and all that is relevant that goes into creating a marketable, effective design.
Know who you are designing for
With new clients, take the opportunity to explain your choices that make up your past designs. Why and how did your choices work with your target users? Get the answers to these questions, and you can do that by pulling data from the people you design for the most often.Interview your users, start an email list, make polls or surveys whenever appropriate. Don’t just listen to what people say, but also look at their activities and reactions to the designs you’ve created. Observe the clicking, reading, or buying habits of your clients. Cross-reference those habits with what you get from the horse’s mouth to get a better, more complete indication.
Show the process behind the visuals themselves. Why these colors or that logo concept, and most importantly how did your choices improve the effectiveness of the design? Go deeper into the psychology of your ideal clients and the markets they serve. High-demand designers do this every day.
Think for your client
Every design client loves to have a designer who can think for them. Someone who knows their exact needs before they even voice them, and who can intuitively draw out their true desires for a successful project.How do I know this? Because I’ve been a design client as well as a designer. Even though I’m a designer myself, I love it when a freelancer can seemingly "read my mind" and figure out what I really want before I even say it. If you’re thinking that no designer can accomplish this reliably without the use of a magic wand and sparkly cape, think again.
Learning to quantify the needs of your target market is a very learnable skill in any industry. However, it does require you to be ultra-specific about the exact industry or industries you want to serve – you can’t read everyone’s minds, after all.
Choosing to Specialize
If you’re after true high-level clients, you can’t be an "all-purpose" designer. Unless you’re really, truly strapped for cash, it makes no career sense to take on just any design job you can find, regardless of your level of expertise.This dilutes the strength of your personal brand and takes away valuable time that you could be using to focus your attention on the markets you genuinely want to serve. It can be hard sometimes to walk away from lucrative jobs that you have no apparent interest in. But you need to free up time to conduct the proper research into the kinds of design jobs you really want to take; the kind that will make you a high-demand designer.
By having a target market, high-demand designers will automatically know what their clients want, because it’s the same thing that they themselves want. This has a bonus effect of giving one more experience with one’s niche market, which is something all clients want.
Not Good Enough
A lot of designers when faced with less-than-appealing work, approach it with a lackluster attitude. This inevitably affects the quality of the finished project. It is an unavoidable fact that there will always be work that’s not going to have your steadfast attention. In those cases, you may be tempted to do work that’s merely ‘good enough’, and not put your full effort into delivering a quality piece.This practice is detrimental to your path to becoming a truly high-demand designer, because it creates dark spots in your portfolio. Every mediocre project you put into your portfolio is taking the place of a potentially awesome project. But if you do each project like it’s the most valuable one in your entire career, you’ll eventually have a portfolio full of amazing work that any client will salivate over.
It’s also important to do side projects which show your thought process to potential clients. Many designers don’t really understand how important this is, because they think that all an art director or freelance client wants to see is the result. But high-level clients aren’t paying you for your design skills. They’re looking for people who show a superior thought process from initial sketches to the final solution, and their ability to interpret demands and demonstrate them in the results.
Get Out Of The Kiddie Pool
One of the advantages of becoming a high-level designer is that it eliminates requests for spec work – the bane of every designer’s existence. Except for a small set of very special circumstances, high-level designers never get asked to do spec work. And when they do, it’s for a very specific, mutually beneficial purpose.If a client is confident that you can deliver their needs and wants unsupervised, it won’t even occur to them to ask you for spec work. Spec work for me is quite unnecessary, it doesn’t show your problem-solving side, just your designing skills, and everybody has that.
High-level clients want their high-demand designers to go beyond designing, they want designers who know how to think and connect with their target audience. Remove yourself from the kiddie pool, do your research into the target markets of your cliens and create opportunities for yourself.
One Great Source of Ideas You Might Not Have Considered
Right now, I’ve got dozens of blog post ideas sitting in a
spreadsheet on my computer. It took me next to no time to gather them …
and I know that they’re spot-on for my audience.
How?
I surveyed my readers, and one of the questions I asked was what they wanted me to write about.
Of course, not everyone wrote down an idea. But many of them did – lots of great ideas that I might not have considered myself. And it took me just seconds to download all those ideas into a spreadsheet.
Have you ever tried this? If your blog’s new, or if your readers don’t seem very engaged, you might be reluctant to give it a go – but even a few responses can be enough to give you some extra blogging inspiration.
Continue Reading ...
How?
I surveyed my readers, and one of the questions I asked was what they wanted me to write about.
Of course, not everyone wrote down an idea. But many of them did – lots of great ideas that I might not have considered myself. And it took me just seconds to download all those ideas into a spreadsheet.
Have you ever tried this? If your blog’s new, or if your readers don’t seem very engaged, you might be reluctant to give it a go – but even a few responses can be enough to give you some extra blogging inspiration.
Continue Reading ...
12 Steps to Launch a Successful Blog
This is a guest post by Ilias Chelidonis. If you want to guest post on http://www.dailyblogtips.com/,
I decided to launch my first blog back in February 2011, I was all excited and ready for being able to share my knowledge and experience with the world. Although, in the beginning traffic was very low, after having a specific plan in place and knowing the subject I was blogging about very well, managed to reach 4000 unique visitors last month. In a nutshell, the key ingredient for a successful blog is to create great content that teaches people something, optimize the content for search engines and distribute it via social media.
I made a list of 12 steps you need to follow in order to create a successful blog. They are all coming from personal experience, starting from a single idea to creating a blog that help people learn lessons on social media, search engine optimization and blogging.
1. Decide what you are going to blog about, this is by far the most important decision in order to create a successful property. It is acceptable if the subject is broad in the beginning, as you gain more experience and learn what your readers want, you can become more focused. For example, in the beginning you may blog about online marketing in general but down the road realize that you want to focus on just seo practices or social media marketing.
2. Decide for your blog’s name. The name needs to be memorable, easy to spell and it would be advisable to include a keyword of the topics you will be blogging about, that is if you blog about online marketing and social media it, try to add words like social, media, marketing, in your domain name.
3. Get a professional blog theme, I would advise Thesis theme and Woothemes, they are very easy to customize with tons of features. Do not try to save few dollars by getting a free theme, because most of them do have limitations and do not come with support. You do not need to have a custom design for your blog, at least in the beginning, as you gain more experience and readers, you can consider that for a major update.
4. Get a professionally designed logo, it will cost you few dollars to have a designer do that but will put you ahead of competition, furthermore, readers will take you more seriously and they see you invest money and time in creating a serious blog.
5. Select a good and reliable web host, shop around for a reliable web hosting provider that can help you in setting up your blog as well, do not go for the cheapest but for those specializing in wordpress. Start with a share hosting account and if you grow big, move to a dedicated server.
6. Install few but powerful wordpress plugins. I have personally used them and highly recommend them. Avoid stuffing your blog with as many plugins as possible because they will eventually make your blog hard to navigate and make readers lose focus.
7. Install google web analytics. If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it, so make sure google analytics are on place. Check your stats often but do not get over obsessed with traffic especially in the beginning as it will not be much.
8. Write down any ideas for topics you may have, sit down 1 hour a week and brainstorm on what to blog about next week, do not worry if you eventually change the topics but having a list of idea topics will help you to stay focus. How to and list topics work the best e.g How to run an online store or 10 ways to run an online store.
9. Install social media sharing widgets and buttons, this will help your readers share your content with their friends and fans, thus bringing in more traffic and loyal readers, people love to share only content they like.
10. Optimize all your posts for search engines, make sure that keywords are on the subject title and repeated at least once every 150 words in the main text content. Use images to increase readers’ curiosity, internet is all about photos.
11. Blog as often as possible but try to have a post at least 3 times a week, do not expect to build a successful blog if you have just 1 post a week, blogs need content and lots of it.
12. Develop a system to get new content ideas. You do not need to create the content for all your posts because you will eventually get drained. Find interesting content from other resources that will help your readers learn something new and do a post at your blog, do not just tell them to visit the link but do an analysis instead. For instance, if you found a great post on another blog about Search Engine Optimization, do a 150 word analysis on the post, what is your opinion and experiences on the subject. Do not forget to add the link and the blog you found the topic.
I decided to launch my first blog back in February 2011, I was all excited and ready for being able to share my knowledge and experience with the world. Although, in the beginning traffic was very low, after having a specific plan in place and knowing the subject I was blogging about very well, managed to reach 4000 unique visitors last month. In a nutshell, the key ingredient for a successful blog is to create great content that teaches people something, optimize the content for search engines and distribute it via social media.
I made a list of 12 steps you need to follow in order to create a successful blog. They are all coming from personal experience, starting from a single idea to creating a blog that help people learn lessons on social media, search engine optimization and blogging.
1. Decide what you are going to blog about, this is by far the most important decision in order to create a successful property. It is acceptable if the subject is broad in the beginning, as you gain more experience and learn what your readers want, you can become more focused. For example, in the beginning you may blog about online marketing in general but down the road realize that you want to focus on just seo practices or social media marketing.
2. Decide for your blog’s name. The name needs to be memorable, easy to spell and it would be advisable to include a keyword of the topics you will be blogging about, that is if you blog about online marketing and social media it, try to add words like social, media, marketing, in your domain name.
3. Get a professional blog theme, I would advise Thesis theme and Woothemes, they are very easy to customize with tons of features. Do not try to save few dollars by getting a free theme, because most of them do have limitations and do not come with support. You do not need to have a custom design for your blog, at least in the beginning, as you gain more experience and readers, you can consider that for a major update.
4. Get a professionally designed logo, it will cost you few dollars to have a designer do that but will put you ahead of competition, furthermore, readers will take you more seriously and they see you invest money and time in creating a serious blog.
5. Select a good and reliable web host, shop around for a reliable web hosting provider that can help you in setting up your blog as well, do not go for the cheapest but for those specializing in wordpress. Start with a share hosting account and if you grow big, move to a dedicated server.
6. Install few but powerful wordpress plugins. I have personally used them and highly recommend them. Avoid stuffing your blog with as many plugins as possible because they will eventually make your blog hard to navigate and make readers lose focus.
7. Install google web analytics. If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it, so make sure google analytics are on place. Check your stats often but do not get over obsessed with traffic especially in the beginning as it will not be much.
8. Write down any ideas for topics you may have, sit down 1 hour a week and brainstorm on what to blog about next week, do not worry if you eventually change the topics but having a list of idea topics will help you to stay focus. How to and list topics work the best e.g How to run an online store or 10 ways to run an online store.
9. Install social media sharing widgets and buttons, this will help your readers share your content with their friends and fans, thus bringing in more traffic and loyal readers, people love to share only content they like.
10. Optimize all your posts for search engines, make sure that keywords are on the subject title and repeated at least once every 150 words in the main text content. Use images to increase readers’ curiosity, internet is all about photos.
11. Blog as often as possible but try to have a post at least 3 times a week, do not expect to build a successful blog if you have just 1 post a week, blogs need content and lots of it.
12. Develop a system to get new content ideas. You do not need to create the content for all your posts because you will eventually get drained. Find interesting content from other resources that will help your readers learn something new and do a post at your blog, do not just tell them to visit the link but do an analysis instead. For instance, if you found a great post on another blog about Search Engine Optimization, do a 150 word analysis on the post, what is your opinion and experiences on the subject. Do not forget to add the link and the blog you found the topic.
5 Strategies For Efficient & Effective Blogging
Continually cranking out content for your blog that is consistently
fresh, engaging, and audience-building can be challenging, to say the
least. And unfortunately, blogger’s block doesn’t discriminate, and it
can affect everyone from the greenest writer to the one pulling in six
figures.
So, what does it too create a chain of content that grows your traffic and keeps audience enthusiasm high? Here are five tips to help you refocus your blog and succeed at creating quality, memorable posts:
1. It’s all about the reader
You know what you like to read… now forget about it. What interests you specifically isn’t worth a hill of beans as compared to what interests your readership. They’re in the driver’s seat and you’re barely a back seat navigator. Every blog post you approach has to be taken from the perspective of your reader.
You have to instinctively know the questions that the reader will ask about the industry sector you cover and you must cater to those queries by providing in-depth, unique, and compelling information.
It is also extremely important, especially for bloggers in the technical field, to give industry buzzwords and other assorted jargon a wide berth. Sure you may know exactly what “you can’t get decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today’s net volumes” but what chance does your non-programmer reader have at deciphering that gobbledygook?
2. A picture sells a thousand blogs
What is the reason behind the massive explosion in interest for Pinterest? The answer is fairly simple as it is that since Pinterest is essentially a blogging platform for people who don’t care to write and for readers who don’t care to read, it’s at the forefront of the new blogging world! By replacing long-winded gray blocks of type with pretty pictures, Pinterest is a vivid example of what bloggers should be striving for in building visual allure into their blogs.
Visual allure doesn’t mean changing the color of your header or background, it indicates a blog that has integrated both static and video imaging into its story telling process. There will likely never be an age when written blogging is completely extinct and only replaced by images, but all bloggers should strive to incorporate as much visual flair into their posts as they possibly can in order to further engage your readership.
3. Hawking your wares should be an ancillary, not primary focus
We’ve all witnessed the disintegration of blogs that we once treasured but have since descended down into nothing more than thinly disguised shilldom. Many bloggers start out by offering phenomenal and insightful content and as their audiences grow, they shift their focus almost entirely to improving their monetization.
So a blog which was once chock-full of great information is now doing little more than pushing the blogger’s latest paid ebook, online paid course, or selling tickets to their national seminar tour. Although a certain level of ancillary marketing is expected from bloggers who have to pay the rent somehow, when the entire blog turns into a sales pitch, you can be certain your readers will pitch your blog… right into the trash.
4. 95.5% of the world’s population is not American
Sure, you were born in Nebraska, went to college in Michigan, and raised a family in Texas… but that doesn’t mean that the perspective reflected in your blog should end at Portland, Maine on one side and Portland, Oregon on the other.
The vast majority of blogging topics are of equal interest to readers in Portland, Canada; Portland, England; Portland, Australia; and every other port on the high seas. With the rise in international blogging, your readers outside of the USA may be finding your Americancentrism disturbing and detracting from the value of your content. Either neutralize your geographical references or make a solid effort to cover events outside the USA.
5. Write well
Far too many bloggers write like uneducated dolts. Set yourself aside from the lowbrow, inept, and artless by cultivating a high standard of spelling, grammar, and overall mastery of the English language. You can accomplish this by double-checking your writing, but you should also use the Internet to learn tricks to help you write cleaner and faster.
Efficient and effective blogging isn’t a fantasy, you can achieve it today by applying these top five key strategies. The rewards for succeeding are steady traffic, plenty of comments, and lots of incoming links.
Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.
So, what does it too create a chain of content that grows your traffic and keeps audience enthusiasm high? Here are five tips to help you refocus your blog and succeed at creating quality, memorable posts:
1. It’s all about the reader
You know what you like to read… now forget about it. What interests you specifically isn’t worth a hill of beans as compared to what interests your readership. They’re in the driver’s seat and you’re barely a back seat navigator. Every blog post you approach has to be taken from the perspective of your reader.
You have to instinctively know the questions that the reader will ask about the industry sector you cover and you must cater to those queries by providing in-depth, unique, and compelling information.
It is also extremely important, especially for bloggers in the technical field, to give industry buzzwords and other assorted jargon a wide berth. Sure you may know exactly what “you can’t get decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today’s net volumes” but what chance does your non-programmer reader have at deciphering that gobbledygook?
2. A picture sells a thousand blogs
What is the reason behind the massive explosion in interest for Pinterest? The answer is fairly simple as it is that since Pinterest is essentially a blogging platform for people who don’t care to write and for readers who don’t care to read, it’s at the forefront of the new blogging world! By replacing long-winded gray blocks of type with pretty pictures, Pinterest is a vivid example of what bloggers should be striving for in building visual allure into their blogs.
Visual allure doesn’t mean changing the color of your header or background, it indicates a blog that has integrated both static and video imaging into its story telling process. There will likely never be an age when written blogging is completely extinct and only replaced by images, but all bloggers should strive to incorporate as much visual flair into their posts as they possibly can in order to further engage your readership.
3. Hawking your wares should be an ancillary, not primary focus
We’ve all witnessed the disintegration of blogs that we once treasured but have since descended down into nothing more than thinly disguised shilldom. Many bloggers start out by offering phenomenal and insightful content and as their audiences grow, they shift their focus almost entirely to improving their monetization.
So a blog which was once chock-full of great information is now doing little more than pushing the blogger’s latest paid ebook, online paid course, or selling tickets to their national seminar tour. Although a certain level of ancillary marketing is expected from bloggers who have to pay the rent somehow, when the entire blog turns into a sales pitch, you can be certain your readers will pitch your blog… right into the trash.
4. 95.5% of the world’s population is not American
Sure, you were born in Nebraska, went to college in Michigan, and raised a family in Texas… but that doesn’t mean that the perspective reflected in your blog should end at Portland, Maine on one side and Portland, Oregon on the other.
The vast majority of blogging topics are of equal interest to readers in Portland, Canada; Portland, England; Portland, Australia; and every other port on the high seas. With the rise in international blogging, your readers outside of the USA may be finding your Americancentrism disturbing and detracting from the value of your content. Either neutralize your geographical references or make a solid effort to cover events outside the USA.
5. Write well
Far too many bloggers write like uneducated dolts. Set yourself aside from the lowbrow, inept, and artless by cultivating a high standard of spelling, grammar, and overall mastery of the English language. You can accomplish this by double-checking your writing, but you should also use the Internet to learn tricks to help you write cleaner and faster.
Efficient and effective blogging isn’t a fantasy, you can achieve it today by applying these top five key strategies. The rewards for succeeding are steady traffic, plenty of comments, and lots of incoming links.
Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.
How to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog
Imagine that you’ve taken the giant leap to start a blog to bring more brand awareness and exposure to your small business.
You’ve taken all the necessary steps to build your blog platform and now comes the day when you create your very first blog post. You spend hours crafting a post that is educational, inspirational and positions you as an expert in your field. You’re as proud of this post as if it truly were your own flesh and blood. And, most of all you can’t wait to share it with the world.
So, you hit “publish” and wait for your readers to react to your nuggets of wisdom. (And, you wait and wait and wait…)
Why aren’t you generating any comments? Why aren’t people emailing you thrilled with your expert advice?
It’s called “lack of traffic” and if there’s no traffic to your blog, no one will ever see it. Period.
So, how can you begin enticing readers to visit your blog? Here are ten quick ways to generate a flow of non-stop blog traffic:
1. Create Great Content
Obviously, this goes without saying. But, your content needs to educate, entertain, inspire or offer a solution to your reader’s problems. You want to try to accomplish at least one of these tasks with every blog post.
2. Keep Your Posts Short, Sweet and to the Point
We’re living in an age where short attention spans are the norm. Keep your posts around 500 words so that you don’t lose your ADD readers.
3. Get Your Blog Indexed With the Big Boys
Take the time to index your blog in the top directories such as Dmoz.org, Yahoo, Google and Technorati. You can easily do this manually in less than 30 minutes.
4. Submit Your Blog Feed to Smaller Blog Catalogs
There are hundreds of niche blog catalogs on the Internet. When readers are searching catalogs for blogs to read, you want to make sure that your blog is there. For about $25, you can use a service such as SEOFlicks to manually post to hundreds of blog catalogs.
5. Entice Your Readers to Subscribe to Your Blog
Offer your readers a free goodie (such as a downloadable ebook, whitepaper, audio class, etc.) if they subscribe to your blog. Make sure that your readers can subscribe to your blog through an RSS feed as well as email. You can use Feedburner to manage your subscriptions.
6. Include Your Blog URL on All of Your Social Networks
Include an obvious link to your blog on all of your social networks including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Flickr, Slideshare, etc. You’ll be surprised how many folks find your blog through your social networks.
7. Get Involved in the Blog Community
Blogging is a social activity. Read other blogs, comment on other blogs and link to other blogs within your own blog posts.
8. Engage With Your Readers
When your readers make comments on your blog, make sure that you comment back. You want to encourage a natural back and forth dialogue between you and your readers.
9. Offer to Write a Blog Post for a High-Traffic Blog
Research various blogs within your particular industry by heading over to Technorati. Read the blogs, comment on the blogs and interact with the blogger. Once you’ve established a relationship, send them an email politely letting them know that you would be willing to be a guest blogger for them at any time in the future. Include a link to your own blog so that they can check out the quality of your work.
10. Use Your Blog Posts in Your Ezine or Newsletter
Instead of writing a brand new article for your weekly ezine or newsletter, send out the first few paragraphs of one of your past blog posts. Then include a link for the reader to continue reading the post on your blog.
Once you implement these ten strategies, you’ll certainly notice a spike in traffic and begin generating comments and interaction from hundreds (even thousands) of readers in your particular industry.
You’ve taken all the necessary steps to build your blog platform and now comes the day when you create your very first blog post. You spend hours crafting a post that is educational, inspirational and positions you as an expert in your field. You’re as proud of this post as if it truly were your own flesh and blood. And, most of all you can’t wait to share it with the world.
So, you hit “publish” and wait for your readers to react to your nuggets of wisdom. (And, you wait and wait and wait…)
Why aren’t you generating any comments? Why aren’t people emailing you thrilled with your expert advice?
It’s called “lack of traffic” and if there’s no traffic to your blog, no one will ever see it. Period.
So, how can you begin enticing readers to visit your blog? Here are ten quick ways to generate a flow of non-stop blog traffic:
1. Create Great Content
Obviously, this goes without saying. But, your content needs to educate, entertain, inspire or offer a solution to your reader’s problems. You want to try to accomplish at least one of these tasks with every blog post.
2. Keep Your Posts Short, Sweet and to the Point
We’re living in an age where short attention spans are the norm. Keep your posts around 500 words so that you don’t lose your ADD readers.
3. Get Your Blog Indexed With the Big Boys
Take the time to index your blog in the top directories such as Dmoz.org, Yahoo, Google and Technorati. You can easily do this manually in less than 30 minutes.
4. Submit Your Blog Feed to Smaller Blog Catalogs
There are hundreds of niche blog catalogs on the Internet. When readers are searching catalogs for blogs to read, you want to make sure that your blog is there. For about $25, you can use a service such as SEOFlicks to manually post to hundreds of blog catalogs.
5. Entice Your Readers to Subscribe to Your Blog
Offer your readers a free goodie (such as a downloadable ebook, whitepaper, audio class, etc.) if they subscribe to your blog. Make sure that your readers can subscribe to your blog through an RSS feed as well as email. You can use Feedburner to manage your subscriptions.
6. Include Your Blog URL on All of Your Social Networks
Include an obvious link to your blog on all of your social networks including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Flickr, Slideshare, etc. You’ll be surprised how many folks find your blog through your social networks.
7. Get Involved in the Blog Community
Blogging is a social activity. Read other blogs, comment on other blogs and link to other blogs within your own blog posts.
8. Engage With Your Readers
When your readers make comments on your blog, make sure that you comment back. You want to encourage a natural back and forth dialogue between you and your readers.
9. Offer to Write a Blog Post for a High-Traffic Blog
Research various blogs within your particular industry by heading over to Technorati. Read the blogs, comment on the blogs and interact with the blogger. Once you’ve established a relationship, send them an email politely letting them know that you would be willing to be a guest blogger for them at any time in the future. Include a link to your own blog so that they can check out the quality of your work.
10. Use Your Blog Posts in Your Ezine or Newsletter
Instead of writing a brand new article for your weekly ezine or newsletter, send out the first few paragraphs of one of your past blog posts. Then include a link for the reader to continue reading the post on your blog.
Once you implement these ten strategies, you’ll certainly notice a spike in traffic and begin generating comments and interaction from hundreds (even thousands) of readers in your particular industry.
10 SEO and Link Building Mistakes
Mistake 1
Neglecting On-page Optimization:
I think more people are beginning to understand the importance of on-page optimization when it comes to ranking their web pages. With so much focus on keywords and link building though, often I see webmasters focusing too heavily on the “off page” stuff, without realizing what they do “on” their website is just as important. Proper internal linking, keyword density, LSI, image text, no follow tags, just to name a few, are also very important to search engines. There are free plugins available to help you with a lot of this stuff, so do your due diligence and implement whatever strategies need be.
Mistake 2
Freaking Out When Rankings Plummet:
Go onto any internet marketing forum and you will see this every single time. People are literally freaking out when they see their rankings drop. Most often this is due to a thing we call the Google dance. All new websites go through what is called a “honeymoon” period where their websites rank very well at the beginning, but after a couple of weeks they settle in the search results… usually at a much lower ranking, again, this is natural.
If your websites have age and have dropped in rankings, you may need to work harder to get your position back. You may need to update your content more often, you may need to build more backlinks or you may need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. Google’s algorithm is changing frequently these days so it’s important to find out what they want, and go give it to them. The days of gaming the system through black-hat techniques is coming to an end.
Mistake 3
Writing for the Search Engines:
This is one of the biggest mistakes I see being made day in and day out. Webmasters are writing terrible content that is keyword stuffed for the bots. While it is important to have a certain keyword structure within your content so that the search engines know what your content is about, it is very important that you write for the human visitor FIRST. Some say for every 100 words, you should have your keyword inserted once. So, if you have a 1000 word post, you will put your target keyword into the article 10 times. I think this is a good rule of thumb to follow.
Make sure that when you read your article out loud, that it sounds natural and not robotic like. Always remember, if inserting your keyword too often into your post takes away from the natural flow of the article itself… then do not do it. Google is clamping down really hard on over optimized websites. Always write with your target human visitor in mind.
Mistake 4
Building Thousands of Low Quality Links:
I cannot believe this is still going on with all of the changes Google has made. There are still idiots out there blasting thousands of links to their money sites in the hope of climbing the serps. I was offered 10,000 free links the other day to my website and I told the person to take a run and jump. Those kinds of links are going to have an adverse affect on your ranking. It has to be bloody obvious that Google hates these kinds of links and, if your business is solely dependent on this kind of strategy, then you are playing the fools game. One solid PR5 backlink from a relevant site will be far more powerful than a million links from low quality, non-relevant crappy sites.
Mistake 5
Not Being Aware of Nofollow and Dofollow:
When I first started out in this industry I had no idea about these two terms. I built a lot of links to one of my first websites and it was taking forever to gain traction in the serps. After a bit of investigating I found that almost all of my backlinks were placed on web pages that were nofollow. Needless to say, those links were just not as effective for rankings as the dofollow links I needed. I’m not saying that nofollow links don’t have their place. In fact, it’s important to have diversity in your linking structure, but most of your links must be dofollow to gain maximum benefit.
Mistake 6
Expecting Quick Results:
I know when I first started online, I expected to make a lot of money fairly quickly. Boy was I brought back down to earth over the next 6 – 12 months. I almost threw in the towel on more than one occasion because it became very frustrating, trying to make this thing work for me. I built website after website, built a hell of a lot of backlinks, wrote hundreds of articles and participated in all the social media sites, but, it just wasn’t happening as quick as I was led to believe it would.
I realized later on that NOBODY makes money online quickly. They all have to put in the hard work. Your progress can be accelerated if you are willing to spend some cash and outsource a lot of the grunt work, but in my experience, expecting to make money very quickly online usually works against you in the long run. The failure rate is so high because people find this out the hard way.
Mistake 7
Not Being Consistent:
If you are serious about making money online then you must be consistent every single day with your efforts. This can be the biggest stumbling block for many. It almost was for me. You can work very hard to get top search engine rankings for a particular keyword, but even after the fact, you still have to be consistent with your efforts, else your competitors will overtake you fairly quickly. Everything you do in regards to your online business has got to be consistent. You must put the work in everyday if you are to see the results you’re after. Go read Jeff Olsen’s “The Slight Edge” and practice what you learn.
Mistake 8
Not Diversifying Your Link Building:
To make your link building look natural, it’s important to gain backlinks from many different sources. Backlinks from just article directories and no other places for example, do not look natural and can hurt your rankings. You need to get links from social media sites, article directories, blogs, blog comments, forums etc. Diversifying your link building looks natural and can put you ahead of your competitors in the search results. A naturally good website will get links from many places, not just one or two.
Mistake 9
Not Getting High Page Rank Links:
Every day you are backlinking, you should be looking to place your links onto high PR websites. Google values links placed on higher PR websites exponentially higher than low PR websites. These links are obviously harder to get, but that is exactly the point. The harder it is to get a link, the more valuable that link is likely to be. This is why all these push button software programs that can get you thousands of links are crap. You will not come across a software program that gets you high quality backlinks with the push of a button. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or a moron.
Mistake 10
Not Updating Your Content Often Enough:
Obviously the more high quality backlinks pointing to your content, the higher your search engine rankings will be. You will then get lots of free traffic. While this is the basic approach that everybody uses to climb the serps, there is another way. Google loves websites that update often. I have built a website that has very few backlinks pointing to it that gets me 10,000 visitors a month from the search engines. The reason for this is because I regularly update my content.
I see webmasters spending so much time building backlinks to their websites every day. This is important of course, but if they actually spent an hour each day writing a new post for their website, they would get far more traffic further down the line. I know this works because I have used this approach many times in the past. With all the Panda’s and Penguins about these days, I have found my websites gain higher search rankings, simply because I always have fresh content on my sites. If you do not want to write every day, then write at least 3 times a week – it helps.
10 Things You Can Do To Get Traffic Right Now
I have been working quite a bit on SEO lately. It works but it is
very time-consuming. It is frustrating because every time I create a new
Squidoo page, create a new blog post or relevant link I know I will not
see immediate results. So what can you do to get traffic to your site
now? What if you can’t or will not wait? I believe in long term strategy
over short term strategies because tomorrow generally rolls around.
However, the two strategies are not mutually exclusive. You can work a
short term plan and a long term plan at the same time. Here are 10
things you can do to get traffic relatively quickly to your website:
1. Send an Email to Your List – Ok you already knew this. However, if you are not building a list you are crazy. A targeted email list of people who actually have come to your website and specifically requested info from you about your niche is a gold mine. You should have opt in forms on every page of your website. Being able to send an email blast to a real, interested targeted list of followers is one of the fastest and best ways to generate traffic to your website.
2. Send an Email Blast to Somebody Else’s List – What if you do not have a list? Well see if you can find other people in your field who will allow you to pay for a solo email to their list. There are places like the Warrior Forum where people swap mailings and offer solo email spots on their lists. Here is a list of several reputable places where you can purchase solo ad slots. If you already have a list, even a small one, you can find a few other sites in your niche with quality offers and propose that you mail an offer for them if they mail an offer for you. This way you both benefit from each other’s audiences. Places that accept solo emails.
3. Post Classified Ads – I love Craigslist. They make more money than almost anybody, even without the escort ads. They have not changed their site design since 1980, they don’t care about social media, and they are the best classified ad site out there because they get real eyeballs looking at their ads. Start posting some classified ads for your business on Craigslist. Here’s an article which tells you how to post on Craigslist. There are many other classified ad websites as well. Here’s a list of 36 classified ad websites that I have successfully posted ads to. All the sites are Alexa 100k or less and are easy to post to. The downside with classified ad marketing is that it is very time consuming. If you want to try using a classified ad submission service here is one that will submit your site to 500 classified ad sites monthly.
4. Start a Google Adwords Campaign – I used to spend about $3000-$4000 per month on Adwords. Then they started slapping me, banning me, humiliating me. It was horrible. I guess I just did not know the safe word. I tried to comply with their TOS but it seemed that they just did not want my ads. Now a few years later I received a coupon in the mail for $100 saying they wanted me back. Hmmm? I set up a campaign with normal keywords. My site even has a pop up on it. I started the campaign and it seems to be going fine. Of course time will tell. But it seems as if, at least for the moment, Adwords is back. You might try setting up a campaign. The traffic is generally very good if a bit expensive. But Google Adwords is one of the fastest ways to get traffic, if they run your ads.
5. Start a Yahoo Search Marketing Campaign – Yahoo has traffic. It is not quite as good as Adwords, but they are a little easier to work with. Plus, the prices are slightly lower. Hint: I seem to get better conversions and lower prices for Australian Yahoo traffic. If this market applies to your business, you might try going down under.
6. Purchase PPV Traffic – PPV traffic is short for pay per view traffic. Generally, pay per view traffic is pop ups that you buy on pay per view traffic networks. One network I work with has about 5 million users who have downloaded their applications and agreed to receive ads. When they type in their favorite sites in the browser or search bar, little pop up ads are triggered according to the URLs and keywords they type. The traffic is keyword and/or URL targeted. So, if you want your ad to pop up on your competitor’s site, you can do this with ppv traffic. Remember you only have a second to capture their attention. You must create a landing page which immediately catches their attention and gives them a clear call to action. Generally, email opt ins work best. Here is a site which explains more about ppv traffic.
7. Guest Blogging – Wait a minute, we are supposed to be talking about fast traffic techniques not long slow SEO type of stuff. Getting a guest blog post published on a busy blog that actually has real readers eye-balling your post and commenting is a fast way to get traffic. Once the article is published potentially thousands of readers will see your post immediately. Getting
your post published on an A list blog is also about the best SEO you can get as well. You also have the implied recommendation of the host blogger. Guest blogging is both a long term and a short term strategy for traffic and SEO. Give it a shot. Here is an article which will give you some ideas about guest blog posting.
8. Video Marketing – YouTube is the second busiest search engine after Google. And, of course Google owns YouTube which does not hurt. I have noticed that videos on YouTube show up quickly in search results. Depending on the how hot your topic is, traffic can start flowing pretty quickly too. There are several techniques you can use to get more targeted visitors such as
using your video as a video response to other videos and commenting on other related videos. Do not forget the other video hosting sites such as DailyMotion and Metacafe. Here is a list of 35 video hosting sites that I actually submit videos to.
9. Buy Cheap Paid Click Traffic – This is traffic that Google hates. If you have Adsense on your site, you cannot use any type of incentivized traffic. This is traffic where people are actually either paid or given an incentive to view your site. If you have a site with no Adsense, you can use this type of traffic. The advantage of this type of traffic is that it is cheap. Real cheap. Plus you do get real eyeballs looking at your site because generally they have to type in some sort of code or test to show that they viewed your ad. If your offer is great and appeals to a wide audience you might have a shot with them. I have made sales and recruited affiliates using this type of traffic. Conversions are very low, but you do not need high conversions because you can get so many views for so little. I have paid prices in the neighborhood of $20 for 100,000 views. Two more advantages to this type of traffic is that it is quick and it starts to give your site some momentum in the search engines because of all the views. I suggest using this type of traffic in conjunction with all the other techniques. A site to check out for this type of traffic is Donkeymails.
10. Cold Calling – Are you kidding me? Nope, I am not. Get on the phone and actually call prospects who you think would be interested in your service and direct them to your site. It actually can be fun! Ask them for referrals, ask them if you can add them to your list, Facebook etc. Better yet, go door-to-door and cold call. Get rejected, sweat, and try to close some deals. Get off your iPad and hit the streets. It’s brutal, it works and is more effective than Tweeting. Plus, you could actually make some “real” friends.
1. Send an Email to Your List – Ok you already knew this. However, if you are not building a list you are crazy. A targeted email list of people who actually have come to your website and specifically requested info from you about your niche is a gold mine. You should have opt in forms on every page of your website. Being able to send an email blast to a real, interested targeted list of followers is one of the fastest and best ways to generate traffic to your website.
2. Send an Email Blast to Somebody Else’s List – What if you do not have a list? Well see if you can find other people in your field who will allow you to pay for a solo email to their list. There are places like the Warrior Forum where people swap mailings and offer solo email spots on their lists. Here is a list of several reputable places where you can purchase solo ad slots. If you already have a list, even a small one, you can find a few other sites in your niche with quality offers and propose that you mail an offer for them if they mail an offer for you. This way you both benefit from each other’s audiences. Places that accept solo emails.
3. Post Classified Ads – I love Craigslist. They make more money than almost anybody, even without the escort ads. They have not changed their site design since 1980, they don’t care about social media, and they are the best classified ad site out there because they get real eyeballs looking at their ads. Start posting some classified ads for your business on Craigslist. Here’s an article which tells you how to post on Craigslist. There are many other classified ad websites as well. Here’s a list of 36 classified ad websites that I have successfully posted ads to. All the sites are Alexa 100k or less and are easy to post to. The downside with classified ad marketing is that it is very time consuming. If you want to try using a classified ad submission service here is one that will submit your site to 500 classified ad sites monthly.
4. Start a Google Adwords Campaign – I used to spend about $3000-$4000 per month on Adwords. Then they started slapping me, banning me, humiliating me. It was horrible. I guess I just did not know the safe word. I tried to comply with their TOS but it seemed that they just did not want my ads. Now a few years later I received a coupon in the mail for $100 saying they wanted me back. Hmmm? I set up a campaign with normal keywords. My site even has a pop up on it. I started the campaign and it seems to be going fine. Of course time will tell. But it seems as if, at least for the moment, Adwords is back. You might try setting up a campaign. The traffic is generally very good if a bit expensive. But Google Adwords is one of the fastest ways to get traffic, if they run your ads.
5. Start a Yahoo Search Marketing Campaign – Yahoo has traffic. It is not quite as good as Adwords, but they are a little easier to work with. Plus, the prices are slightly lower. Hint: I seem to get better conversions and lower prices for Australian Yahoo traffic. If this market applies to your business, you might try going down under.
6. Purchase PPV Traffic – PPV traffic is short for pay per view traffic. Generally, pay per view traffic is pop ups that you buy on pay per view traffic networks. One network I work with has about 5 million users who have downloaded their applications and agreed to receive ads. When they type in their favorite sites in the browser or search bar, little pop up ads are triggered according to the URLs and keywords they type. The traffic is keyword and/or URL targeted. So, if you want your ad to pop up on your competitor’s site, you can do this with ppv traffic. Remember you only have a second to capture their attention. You must create a landing page which immediately catches their attention and gives them a clear call to action. Generally, email opt ins work best. Here is a site which explains more about ppv traffic.
7. Guest Blogging – Wait a minute, we are supposed to be talking about fast traffic techniques not long slow SEO type of stuff. Getting a guest blog post published on a busy blog that actually has real readers eye-balling your post and commenting is a fast way to get traffic. Once the article is published potentially thousands of readers will see your post immediately. Getting
your post published on an A list blog is also about the best SEO you can get as well. You also have the implied recommendation of the host blogger. Guest blogging is both a long term and a short term strategy for traffic and SEO. Give it a shot. Here is an article which will give you some ideas about guest blog posting.
8. Video Marketing – YouTube is the second busiest search engine after Google. And, of course Google owns YouTube which does not hurt. I have noticed that videos on YouTube show up quickly in search results. Depending on the how hot your topic is, traffic can start flowing pretty quickly too. There are several techniques you can use to get more targeted visitors such as
using your video as a video response to other videos and commenting on other related videos. Do not forget the other video hosting sites such as DailyMotion and Metacafe. Here is a list of 35 video hosting sites that I actually submit videos to.
9. Buy Cheap Paid Click Traffic – This is traffic that Google hates. If you have Adsense on your site, you cannot use any type of incentivized traffic. This is traffic where people are actually either paid or given an incentive to view your site. If you have a site with no Adsense, you can use this type of traffic. The advantage of this type of traffic is that it is cheap. Real cheap. Plus you do get real eyeballs looking at your site because generally they have to type in some sort of code or test to show that they viewed your ad. If your offer is great and appeals to a wide audience you might have a shot with them. I have made sales and recruited affiliates using this type of traffic. Conversions are very low, but you do not need high conversions because you can get so many views for so little. I have paid prices in the neighborhood of $20 for 100,000 views. Two more advantages to this type of traffic is that it is quick and it starts to give your site some momentum in the search engines because of all the views. I suggest using this type of traffic in conjunction with all the other techniques. A site to check out for this type of traffic is Donkeymails.
10. Cold Calling – Are you kidding me? Nope, I am not. Get on the phone and actually call prospects who you think would be interested in your service and direct them to your site. It actually can be fun! Ask them for referrals, ask them if you can add them to your list, Facebook etc. Better yet, go door-to-door and cold call. Get rejected, sweat, and try to close some deals. Get off your iPad and hit the streets. It’s brutal, it works and is more effective than Tweeting. Plus, you could actually make some “real” friends.
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