How To Create a Must-Read Blog : Let’s not beat around the bush. Blogging successfully takes some hard work. You have to write quality content every week and generate some new ideas for blog posts. You also need to be involved in an email and social media campaign.
There are times in the lives of most bloggers when they have to ask themselves “are my efforts paying off?” They don’t know if they should keep it up, write more anyway, or step up their promotional efforts.
They even entertain the thought of just quitting. Not having to worry about what your next blog post will be can be appealing. They’d have more time to spend with friends, read a book, or go sight-seeing.
The reason quitting should never be an option is because the benefits to blogging can be awesome. It can change your life. Blogging generates web traffic, builds your authority, and brings you leads. You blog is the nerve center of your business and social media activities.
Case studies reveal that many companies and entrepreneurs fuel their businesses by blogging. For me, blogging generates nearly all of the leads for my business.
So what exactly can you do to turn your blogging efforts into a raving success, engage your visitors, and create more business without working yourself into a stupor?
I have listed some of the best advice to help you streamline content creation, engage visitors, and close the deal with potential clients who will find themselves wanting to work with you.
Let’s get started…
How to Streamline Content Creation
(1). Create a publishing schedule and stay committed to it. Plan it in a way that works well for you as well as for your readers. Never overextend yourself. It’s not necessary that you publish on a daily basis. Some bloggers post weekly or even bi-weekly.
(2).Throughout your day when good blog post ideas come to mind, stop and write them down. When clients ask questions add those answers and the ideas that come from them to your list.
(3). Create an outline for your posts. This can keep you on point so you don’t wander off on short tangents that are not relative to your post. It helps save time on both the writing and the editing of your posts.
(4). Always have a few backup posts ready for times when life throws you a curve and your time and attention is needed elsewhere.
(5).Don’t try to re-invent the wheel. Follow blueprints of blogs that are tried, tested, and proven. Blogs are structured in a fairly straightforward way.
(6). One neat little trick is to take a kitchen timer and set it at 30 minutes. Every 30 minutes take a break and reward yourself with something like a cup of coffee or a donut. Getting up from your chair is what helps you. When you get back to it you are more re-focused and more energized.
Naturally, streamlining blog content is a great idea. However, never turn it into a speed-writing contest. Blog for the sole purpose of helping and delighting your target audience.
How to Win Customers & Get More Business
If your blog posts all sound like a sales pitch, you’ll have a hard time finding loyal readers. You could alienate your targeted clients. Your blog could easily end up as a whisper in the wind with no-one around to hear what you have to say.
The majority of people don’t want to hear a sales pitch. Some don’t even care about your business. They are looking for something for THEMSELVES. If you want to create business using your blog, don’t think like a salesman and step into the shoes of being a ‘mentor’ for your readers.
You achieve this by –
a. Knowing your target audience. That means understanding what they’re looking for, their desires, their needs, secret wished, and dreams. Put yourself in their shoes and ask the questions they would ask, and then give some good answers in your blog. Work at ‘helping’ them.
b. Never go click-chasing using hyperbolic headlines. Aim your writing at your clients.
c. Don’t worry about alienating some people. You only want to attract the right ones, the ones who will understand you and respond to your message.
d. Define the purpose of your blog. Decide what it is you want to achieve through it. I, for example, teach small business people how to create more persuasive content to help them get more business.
e. Study blogs that are successful and find out what makes them that way. Analyze them carefully and learn from them.
f. Write when you find yourself feeling inspired or enthused. Energy can be contagious and can flow through your words when you write your posts.
Salesmen are always wondering how they can make another sale. Mentors care about what the students are learning and how they are making out. A mentor has a desire to help the students get ahead so they can live a life that is more fulfilling.
Readers are smart and will notice immediately if you are the salesman type or mentor type. Become a mentor and you can watch your business grow.
Creating a Must-Read Blog
There is poor content spread out all over the Internet. Yawn-inspiring blog posts are a dime a dozen. The stock photography is so boring you want to pull your hair out.
If you want to create a ‘must-read’ blog, then make it stand for something. You should be an authority for whatever your blog is about. That means never rehashing old content that is already saturating the web.
8 Major Focus Point for Making Yourself an Authority:
1. Develop a strong opinion and don’t be afraid to say it the way you think it. A true leader stands his/her ground.
2. Leave out the ifs, buts, and maybes. Avoid saying ‘in my opinion’ because it is naturally your opinion if you’re the one writing the post.
3. Don’t waste people’s time with posts that are shallow or plain common sense. You want to add value to the conversation and not fill it with generic babble.
4. Don’t use the ‘free stuff’ ploy that many bloggers do. What you want to give away free is good solid ideas and unique information. Those are the things that will generate loyal customers.
5. Drop names of heavy hitters. It doesn’t hurt to add some clout to your posts by quoting industry experts. It shows you’re on top of things in your area of expertise.
6. Never try to impress people with big, hard to pronounce words. Write things in simple language that anyone can understand.
7. Take advantages of case studies and relevant examples. They help to breathe life into your content.
When you are generous with your advice and ideas, potential clients are going to find your blog and then purchase your products.
How to Keep Your Readers Coming Back Time and Again
Being an authority can sometimes be a boring place. If you mishandle it you can create a total catastrophe. You will never win friends by keeping yourself on some kind of high-horse and lecturing them. They should be treated the same as you. Everybody is on an even keel.
Keep your readers motivated, energized, and inspired. Work at being a great mentor. Empathize with them, try to understand where they’re coming from, and help them find solutions to their problems.
Don’t diminish your most valuable information and tips by listing them beneath very drab subheads. Your subheads need to be vibrant, strong, and appealing. They should appeal to your reader’s curiosity.
Let your readers get to know the real you. Share little insights into your life while remaining focused on how you can help your readers. Sprinkle short little questions throughout your content. That makes if feel more like your readers are involved in a conversation and not a lecture.
Inspire your readers when you write your closing paragraph. Sum up the problem and state the solution to clarify the point of your blog post.
Practice the art of infusing your ideas into the minds of your readers. As the writer you have a lot of control over the interaction taking place between you and them.
Create a voice that is uniquely you. Your readers should be able to recognize your writing style whenever they come across it, and know what you mean and why you say things the way you do. Add personality to your posts.
You are not selling, you are having a conversation. Their decision to buy will spring from a feeling of trust and confidence in you. Work every day on polishing your written communication skills. Create ideas that are worth writing about and never be afraid of being unique. Be passionate about your blog and readers will respond to you.
How To Build a Responsive Email List when you are a begginer
Every online marketer understands that the best way to generate sales is to have a large email list of subscribers. After they build that list, however, many marketers begin to recognize that the list is large, but it doesn’t function to create sales. That’s because it wasn’t built with the idea of creating a responsive list, and instead focused on quantity instead of quality.
The time to start building the right type of list is just as you get started, but even if you’ve already got a list, you can still tweak your business processes to get a better response after the fact.
The biggest secret isn’t that you need a huge number of people on the list, but that you want a better conversion of subscribers to customers. You can do this by paying attention to how you are creating the list, how you are marketing it, and what is actually happening when you send out an offer. Here are some basic things you should know about a responsive mailing list.
Buying email addresses doesn’t work
For the most part, you can buy thousands of emails on another person’s contact list and still generate very poor sales. The secret to creating a good list is to build one up naturally and organically so that people have a good relationship with you and your business.
Single opt-ins can be fooled
You may put out an opt-in list and be congratulating yourself on the number of sign-ups, that is, until you find out many are fakes or generated by online bots. Learn how to use a double opt-in strategy to build a better list.
Targeted demographics are better than niches
Demographics tell you the reasons why people buy, while niches just assume everyone on your list is interested. You will have better luck by understanding the psychology of your list, rather than just relying on categoric niches, for email marketing.
Automate what you can
There are plenty of products and services to help streamline your online business. There’s no reason why you should be struggling with responding to each and every email, unless there is some reason for personally responding. Learning about the technologies and tools available can save you valuable time and increase your bottom line.
People do have a price
It’s up to you to figure out what that price is. It may be that they are willing to subscribe if you give them a free short report. It might be that they will do it to enter a contest. It might be that they will reply to an email when they see a savings in a product they like or when they get your personal attention. Pay attention and do what works for you.
Organic, or naturally occurring lists, generally are quite a bit more responsive than lists created by buying email addresses from other marketers. The reasons for this are that bought lists can contain a number of bad email addresses or contain people on them who are getting so much email from other marketers, that they ignore everything as spam. One last reason, and the biggest reason, to use organic lists is that you can be liable for sending email to an address that hasn’t opted in to having their email published.
When you build your own organic lists, you know that the person has specifically requested to subscribe to your list and are genuinely interested in either you or your business.
In this age of social networking, you will find that it isn’t as hard as it used to be to create an organic list. People are networking more and more online, and all you need to figure out is how to put the power of the Internet at your fingertips. Don’t just put an opt-in form on your website and expect that using that simple action will generate a large organic list for you. People will still have to find your site, and if your traffic is low, this can be a major stumbling block. The solution is to not just advertise your opt-in on your site, but to do it elsewhere where traffic that is interested in your niche congregates. That’s where social networking comes into play.
Get in the habit of building an online presence on various social networking sites. You will have to post a profile and start networking with people on these sites to hook into potential customers. Once you have them interested in either who you are or some common interests (related to what you market), you can start posting updates or links to things that you want to promote to get traffic from these sites back to your opt-in offers.
Facebook has a very crisp, business-like interface that helps you to maintain a more professional image for your profile. Join groups, network with like-minded people, or even advertise within Facebook. It’s a great way to find demographics very quickly.
For people who don’t have enough time to put up a full profile, just hop onto Twitter. Using 140 characters in each update, you can build up a quick following without too much time involved.
This is more of a business directory, but also a great place to network.
Demographics ARE Key
Internet marketers will tell you that when you go to set up a website or online business, you have to pick a hot niche. That is completely true, as without a hot niche, you have less chance of generating enough traffic to make good sales.
However, when you go to market that niche via email lists, you will find that you will need to market to demographics more than to a niche. In other words, you will want to focus on getting up close and personal with your prospective buyers, instead of just assuming that they want to buy your products because they signed up to your list.
Who Are These People?
Demographics are typically segregated into a few marketing categories: gender, age, income bracket, ethnicity, and education level. Of course, you can set up any number of demographic variables to help you market to your niche, but these are pretty standard. Just knowing several of these demographics about who is visiting your site can substantially help you to increase the responsiveness of your list. How? The trick is to send emails that talk personally to a specific group’s needs and provides that demographic with solutions to the problems that they see day to day.
For instance, say you are marketing laptops. You want a demographic of college-aged students or business professionals who require this piece of equipment. You may also find that they need to be within a specific income bracket. You can put up surveys on your site and reward people for identifying who they are and what demographic they fall into. After that, you take that information and you set up different lists.
The one with college-aged students gets emails on how laptops can help them to complete assignments in between class or to take their studies with them anywhere. The email that goes to business people may target people who are in their cars (like real estate agents) or who spend a lot of time travelling for business. In that case, the biggest benefit is that it will increase their work productivity as they get the essentials of their business travel done.
Split Your Mailing Lists into Demographics
Once you start to figure out why people are buying, you can start to separate people into different mailing lists, according to their demographics. You can set up one list for 18- to 25-year oldâs and another for those over 30. Next time you want to send out a promotion for a particular product or service, you will have a good idea what psychological triggers work best with either list.
Technology to Track Responsiveness
Once you start building mailing lists for marketing purposes, you will find that there are tools and services out there to help simplify the process. There’s no reason why you have to learn how to build a responsive mailing list from scratch when you can use the tools and services provided by others. Just make sure that they are simplifying your life and not complicating it. Here are some tools or services that can help you do just that, while encouraging your subscribers to be more responsive.
Instead of a single opt-in, you can choose to implement a double opt-in where the subscriber must confirm his/her email address via a response link that gets sent there. This is a great way to keep out spammers and fake email addresses from ruining the quality of your list.
Check Open Rates
You should be able to set an embedded image (sometimes it’s even a blank) that pings a server to download the image when a person opens your emails. This gives you a good idea of how many people are opening your emails and whether you are getting a good
Autoresponders
Set up automatic responders to certain types of actions people take, like registration or ordering. They can be for thank-yous, for back-end offers, and for confirmation of the action. The point is to make sure that customers feel they are being interacted with, even if you know it’s on automatic.
To get the types of tools above, many Internet marketers go to a service like AWeber | Powerfully-Simple Email Marketing for Small Businesses that will provide email marketing support using some of these tools and more. They will help people set up email campaigns using double opt-in lists and autoresponders and will give you a good idea of who and how many are opening your emails.
They charge by the number of people on your list with an initial 0 to 500 subscribers being just $19 per month. They even offer newsletter creation and email templates to help simplify your campaigns. They are a recognized quality subscriber of email marketing services and can easily scale to any number of people on your list.
Basic Email Tips
How you write your email is just as important as the tools and services you use to run your email marketing campaigns. You want to implement good practices to tempt people to respond to the email and avoid practices that turn people off.
Sometimes, this is all anyone bothers to read, simply because they can’t avoid it as they hit the delete key. You want a headline that pulls the reader in enough to get him/her to open the email when it lands in his/her inbox.
Use A Personal Name, If Possible
If you know the name of the person to whom you are sending the email from your list details, be sure to use that within the text. It adds a personal touch and makes the email more customized. There is coding you can use to pick up a first name in a database to add to the content of your emails so that it can be automated.
Keep It Short
There just isn’t enough time in the day to read long messages anymore. People will tend to skip large messages or skim them for the salient points. One way to get past the resistance to reading the email is just to keep it somewhat short.
Highlight Salient Points
Use white space, bolding, subheadings, noticeable fonts, and bulleted lists to get your message across. If a person can open your email and quickly determine what you want without too much fuss, you have a better chance of getting them to click your link offers.
Add Your Links/Offers
Make sure your link is easy to spot and available to click. Tell the reader what you are offering them if they click on the link. Make sure to sell benefits.
Unsubscribe Information
As a matter of courtesy, you should have unsubscribing information in every email you send. It’s not because you actually want people to unsubscribe, but because you don’t want to be accused of spamming them.
Avoid This
Do not spam people. This practice isn’t just annoying; it can get you in trouble with Federal regulators.
How to Tempt Them To Respond
There are some offer strategies that can significantly increase the odds that people will click the link you provide in your emails and reply to your offer. Giving out some sort of reward or bonus for taking the action you requested is a good way to motivate people to respond. It can also be a great way to introduce people to your products and services if you do it right.
The minute someone responds to an offer, they get entered into your sales funnel and you can market to them further down the line for a sale. While you do want to try to have regular sales emails, some emails to prospective customers are better set up to generate leads and introduce yourself to the potential customer. Keeping that in mind, here are a few strategies to get closer to people who may be seeing your emails, but haven’t overcome their resistance to buy from you yet.
Writing up special reports that inform people about your niche or about different ways to solve their problems is a great way to introduce yourself to a prospective client. They are easy to send via an instant download and you can make subscribing to your email list a prerequisite for getting the free report. It costs nothing and it generates good rapport with your prospective clients.
Quizzes and Polls
People love to give out their opinions or to test their knowledge with online quizzes. Setting a link to a poll or quiz in an email is easy, and if the subject is interesting enough, you may find your email gets forwarded to others. Make it a condition to submit an email address to see the results of the poll or quiz, and this will also provide you with leads.
Free 15-Minute Consultations
If you are selling coaching services, a free 15-minute consultation can be the open door you need to get a larger contract. Whether you choose to do it via a phone number, chat, or show call-in, you can use this format to not only introduce yourself, but to sell your services too. It sets you up as the expert in a particular topic and is a way to get people to trust you enough to buy from you, someone they now know.
Know When To Send
Responsive customers aren’t just a function of technology and slick marketing offers. They can also be a function of availability. Let’s face it; most people are NOT available during holidays. That’s the time they are spending face-to-face time with their families and relatives and are generally not online. If you create a stunning email marketing campaign and roll it out during a holiday, it is bound to flop. Therefore, knowing when to send and what times are best for what type of mailing action is crucial to getting better response rates.
Think Work Week
As an Internet marketer, you may not follow a standard workweek, but more than likely, your customers do. That’s why it’s important to understand the psychology of why some days are better than others for different actions, and mostly it’s because people are following a standard workweek. Research has shown some clear trend on specific days for open rates.
Friday Is Fun Day
Friday rolls around and people are ready to relax and take in the weekend. They may hop online to see what’s going on and what their friends are doing. That’s why Friday has the highest open rates of any other day of the week. If you want to have a better chance of people opening your emails, make sure you send them out before Friday.
Tuesday
It seems Tuesday is the day Internet marketers send out most of their emails as it has the highest send rates. Realistically, Wednesday may be a better choice if you want to stand out from the crowd and get your emails in line for Friday. However, by Thursday, you will probably start to experience some drop-off in response rates.
When Should You Send It Out?
Does this tell you when to send out your own email marketing campaigns? Yes and no. It’s a good idea to try to use the standard workweek to make sure to avoid days when it definitely is not a good idea to send a campaign out, like Sunday. Other than that, you can pay attention to the open rates for your particular subscribers to be sure they follow similar trends. It may be that their business doesn’t work on a standard workweek and that the general model won’t be well suited for you. So, do some testing of your own.
Have you seen the âforward to a friendâ request at the bottom of some emails? That’s an attempt to get you to refer the offer to one of your friends. It’s generally well known that referrals make the best lead-in to a sale because you are more likely to buy or trust something a friend has recommended than you are to just believe the marketer. In that view, referrals are really good for business, but are they good for email campaigns? They can contribute to helping you reach more people, but they shouldn’t be your only email marketing strategy. Here is how to properly implement a referral-getting email program.
Ask for The Referral
Your reader won’t know that you even want a referral if you don’t ask for it. Make it a point to ask for a referral at the end of your email if you want to use this strategy. Try to offer some benefit for getting the word out about you or your products.
Offer Discounts and Coupons
Offering discounts and coupons for sign-ups can also increase the probability that someone is going to take you up on your offer to forward the same thing to a friend. Friends know what other friends are shopping for and are always willing to forward discounts and coupons that can save their friends money. Some reward programs are specific to people who sign up, but when you offer the discount or coupon, you can tell them to forward to a friend who, when registering, will also get an additional coupon or bonus.
Sweepstakes & Contests
Everyone loves a sweepstakes and word-of-mouths on contests and sweepstakes rank right up there with coupons and discounts. With sweepstakes, the more chance people have to win, the more often people will enter. In order to increase their odds of winning or having someone they know win, people will forward sweepstakes to friends and family to sign up. Sweepstakes don’t usually involve buying anything, just registering for the prize.
Contests, on the other hand, may require that you produce something to compete in a contest. The winner of the competition gets the prize. These are still forwarded to people who may be uniquely suited to compete, but they are not as open to every person unless the contest is not skill-specific, but more game-oriented.
Techniques to Increase the Odds
What’s better than sending out mailings to one email list? Sending out mailings to two email lists. This can definitely increase the odds that people will respond, just because there are more people seeing your offers. Where can you find more email lists without organically building them yourself or buying them? The answer may surprise you, but your competitors have lists that you can market to if you can convince them that doing so will benefit them also.
Ad Swaps
Ad swaps are a technique to offer a one-time promotion to another list as well as your own, typically a competitor’s list. You offer to do the same for them and expose them to your list for a one-time offer in exchange. If you both have similar-sized lists, it can be a reasonable way to generate more subscribers, even if you are giving your competitor some advertising exposure. There’s no guarantee they can capture your subscribers; you are only allowing them an advertising spot to swap and it’s up to them to convince people to sign up to their site or offers. The same goes for you too.
The advantage of an advertising swap is that it costs no upfront cash. If you have similar-sized lists and similar niches, you will instantly be exposed to just the target market you want and stand a good chance of gaining new subscribers. You pay by doing the same for your competitor, instead of fronting cash to advertise. In a tight economy, doing an ad swap can be a smart thing for your mailing list and for your budget.
Put Sign-up Information Everywhere
Even though you may be trying to market online, the fact is that you can offer your sign-up information in many different places. You can use the signature line in your emails to add a link to sign up for information for free offers, quizzes, or polls that entice people to register. If you have a retail storefront, you can also add a sign-up sheet by the register to increase the odds that people will find out about your online services.
Keep in Constant Contact
Research has shown that people have to see an advertisement several times before they actually make the decision to buy. In an email marketing campaign, that means that perseverance pays off. You may think that because you didn’t get a good number of bites the first time you sent out an offer that it’s not a good offer. It may simply need a bit more repetition to get the message across.
People tend to cozy up to things that they get more and more familiar with, so try to continue to market something a few more times before giving up on it. Also, try to keep in constant contact with the people on your mailing list. If you let many days go by without a word, you really do lose the attention of the people on your list. In the worst case, they may already be wooed by your competitors. To keep this from happening, follow some easy rules.
Be Frequent
You don’t want to deluge people with emails that are just sales promotions; however, you do want to be in constant contact with your mailing list. If you send out an email on Monday about some hot tips you discovered that can help make your subscriber’s life easier, they may be more willing to open the next one you send, which might be a product promotion. Be frequent, but don’t overwhelm your readers with emails that are only to your own benefit. That’s a sure way for them to unsubscribe from your list.
Be Consistent
If you say you will send out a newsletter every first Tuesday of the month, try to keep to that schedule. The more your subscribers understand the schedule, the more they will anticipate your next email and be looking forward to what you have to offer. In a way, by being frequent and consistent and giving your customers things that appeal to them, you generate an enthusiasm for being on your email list.
Finally, the best way to generate a responsive email list is to also be responsive to your list’s needs. When problems arise, if you are there to provide solutions and generate good will, they will be there for you when you knock on their inbox to send them a marketing offer. Try to respond to people personally when they first contact you so that they have some human relationship with you before you start to market to them.
Email is not the only way to keep in contact with your mailing list. Offer them alternative ways to reach you and the other people participating on your site. This can be done through social networking sites, through online forums, and through informational seminars or courses offered online.
This can also be a great way to generate word-of-mouth for your business via referrals as friends tell other friends when some online event or interesting discussion is taking place online. If you host these areas for discussion and networking on your own site, your list can grow astronomically bigger overnight with very little effort on your part. The nicest benefit of all is that it won’t just be a big list; it will also be a very responsive list that participates in the discussions and networking that are happening on your website. It is a captive audience to which you can market your products and services.
Build credibility and become the marketer of choice. This is done by always delivering great content that will benefit your list and help them succeed.
Always test and look for ways to improve.
Develop the skills of writing your emails and getting the results, you want.
Donât let fear hold you back!
Use the information in this ebook to help you launch your Business and build new, lasting relationships with JV partners and customers. Good luck!
So, you want to generate your first thousand website visitors. Thatâs a reasonable goal and one that you should be able to achieve easily if you follow the tips in this guide. Having a website is one of the most rewarding things you can do if it starts making money or having visitors that are getting value from your content.
When you see that traffic start to trickle in and then grow to a steady number of visitors onto your website youâll know that you are a true webmaster and are competing with the other websites out there. But if you want to get visitors to your website, youâre going to need to develop a strategy to get them there. Here are some ways to do exactly that.
WATCH THIS VIDEO TO LEARN HOW TO DRIVE REAL HUMAN TRAFFIC
Before You Begin, You Need Analytics
Before you begin getting traffic to your website youâre going to need to install some sort of analytics or web stats application. Thatâs because it is impossible to know if youâve gotten your 1000 visitors or not if you donât have some sort of analytics program. Google analytics is one of the best programs out there and will not only help you count the people that are coming to your site, it will also give you a number of other metrics that youâll want to know later on as you begin to develop more advanced strategies.
For example, Google analytics will allow you to measure a visitorâs bounce rate. The bounce rate is how long they stay on your website before they go somewhere else. Youâll also see where they go when they leave your website, whether that is back to Google by pressing the back button, or onto a different page of your own site. Obviously, your goal is to get them to stay on your site as long as possible.
Analytics will also help you measure what search terms people use to find your website, which pages they are viewing the most and many other factors that will help you improve your website so that you can get the maximum amount of traffic possible.
Add Your Website Link Anywhere You Can
Now, this doesnât mean that you go around spamming your site on as many websites as possible for posting it places where it doesnât belong. It does mean that you take advantage of things like your email signature, which could contain a link to your website. There may be other places that you have profiles online where you might be able to post a link to your website legitimately and without spamming.
Start Commenting on Blogs – Especially the High-Traffic Ones
Most of the time, blogs will allow you to place your website URL as part of your blog comment profile. That means that if you typed your name as the person that is going to be doing the commenting it would link to your website. Course, if your website is something completely different – like for a product or service – then you want to use your website name instead.
Find these blogs that allow you to post a URL and link when you register and then comment on them – and make sure that youâre adding valuable insight and that youâre not just spamming and saying random things to get your link on there. The more eloquent and insightful you can be the more people are apt to click on your name and see where links to. The name that you used is also something that can entice people to click if you can come up with something clever that will make people want to know more.
If you want people to find your website, youâre going to have to make sure that your indexed in the search engines. To ensure that all of your pages are indexed in the all the information is proper and correct youâll want to submit a site map to Google. If youâre using WordPress there are solutions for submitting site maps that make it much easier than if you are manually designing a website or using a different program. No matter what, you should submit a site map to Google as soon as you want your site and you should update it if your site structure changes drastically.
You should also check Google regularly and make sure that your site is indexed for the proper keywords and where you are ranking for them. How do you know what keywords you should be ranking for or should be indexed for? Hopefully, you have tried to target a long tail keyword phrase that there isnât much competition for but that people are searching for regardless.
For example, if your site sells electronics, choose a keyword phrase that combines a product type with a specific use such as a computer monitor the can be combined with the video card for multiple monitor setups. So your keyword phrase might be âcomputer monitors for multiple monitor setupsâ. People are going to be searching for that particular phrase, but there isnât going to be near as much competition for that is there would be for the phrase âcomputer monitorsâ.
Another way that you can get traffic to come to your site is to write indispensable content. This means that you write content that people simply canât live without. The information is so good, or so well-written that they simply must share it with others because they know that youâve solved a problem that many other people are experiencing with your content.
Of course, writing indispensable content is easier said than done but if you have a few dollars to spend you can hire a freelance writer to create something amazing. Make sure that you specify exactly what youâre looking for and come up with the idea beforehand, and make sure that it is edited and as polished as possible before publishing.
Fiverr is a website where you can hire people to do things for five bucks. There are many people offering traffic services for five bucks on Fiverr. Of course, you kind of get what you pay for, so the traffic that you get may not be quality traffic or may not stick around for very long but the point is, you can spend a few dollars and get some people coming to your website.
There are other websites out there as well that offer more comprehensive and expensive services in fact there are entire companies that revolve around getting traffic or optimizing your website for search so that you can start getting a huge flow of potential customers. You may want to consider hiring a SEO service if you can afford it – but make sure that you do your homework and you find one that has a great reputation and has actually gotten results for many, many other websites.
Encourage and Participate in Comments
When you post something on your site you definitely want to encourage people to comment on whatever the content is. You can do this by adding a line to the very end of your article inviting them to voice their opinion or answer a specific question. The reason that you want people to comment on your content is that every single time someone posts a comment you get indexed for new keywords and Google and your chances of getting discovered through search engines goes up.
For that same reason, try to respond to every comment, or at least a few of them. This is a great way to get your site indexed for more keywords and participating with readers will make them want to come back and read the next thing that you write or publish. Never disable your comments or make it difficult for people to register to be able to post, such as requiring an admin to approve their account before they can make a comment.
Become Social on Social Media
You can discuss getting traffic to your website without talking about social media. Social media is the number one way to get the word out about your website, but it is only effective if you already have a following. If you donât even have social media accounts of this present time, or you have just started them you are going to have a very difficult time getting people to visit your site through social media. However if you already have a following on Facebook or Twitter posting a link every once in a while – particularly when you publish something new – could get you some new traffic.
Conduct Interviews People Will Want to Read
If you can conduct some interviews with popular bloggers or anyone else that is well-known and has a following you will get traffic to your website into different ways. First, people will discover your article when they are using keywords that relate to the person that you interviewed. This is a great way to get traffic to your site and it builds a relationship with an influencer that may help you later on.
The second way that you might get traffic is if the person that you interviewed posts the link to the article on their own social media websites or on their own blog. If they tweet out your article link or post on their Facebook page, you will probably get a huge amount of traffic coming in, reading the interview, and then commenting on it as well. This is a solid strategy as long as the person that you are interviewing is well-known and has people all over the Internet the know who he or she is.
Add Your Blog or Blog Posts to Directories
There are all kinds of places around the Internet that you could add your blog or your blog post that might get you some traffic. First of all, you can submit blog posts on Reddit which is one of the more popular places on the Internet for people to have conversations. There are also specific blog directories that you can submit your blog to or even sometimes, your individual blog posts.
When you link to another page, chances are fairly good that whoever runs that page is going to know about it or find out eventually. If you link to them they might come and see what your site is all about and if they like it, they might just link to you back or tweet your article out on their social media platforms. Either way, these popular bloggers or webmasters will get you tons of traffic if they like your content. But of course, that means you have to have awesome content in the first place.
Solicit Good Guest Posters
If you let people write a blog post and publish it on your blog in order to get a link back to their own page, you could definitely get some traffic. The problem with this method is that you already have to have some traffic established in order for them to want to post on your blog. But if you can find someone that is willing to help you out or once a couple links from your site to content of theirs, you might be able to get traffic using this method.
Use Question and Answer Sites
Whatever your particular website is based upon, you can use it as a resource for answering questions. If youâve written a great blog post that answers a common question, you might be able to go on something like Yahoo answers and answer a question that someone has posted and then list your website as the source of that answer. This doesnât always work, and it depends entirely upon the questions that you find in the website that you post them on that you may be able to get some traffic this way as well as build your expertise in the industry that you are in.
This is How to Get the First 1000 website Visitors
How To Make Passive Income From an Email List ? Good Question……
Turning your email list into a passive income money maker isnât as difficult, or time consuming as you may think.
Every day, thousands of online marketers are transforming their mailing lists into powerful cash funnels, and quite often, they donât even have their own product line!
While many guides will tell you that itâs important to build your list up before you begin to monetize it, this special report will make it easy for you to start making money with your subscriber base even if youâre just starting out.
I know, youâve likely heard that phrase more times than you care to count, but thereâs good reason for it. Itâs simply true.
Email marketing isnât just a rock-solid, evergreen method in which to build an online business, but itâs also one of the easiest ways to maximize your income, even if youâre just starting an online business with little experience, history or outreach.
Email marketing offers many other advantages as well, including:
Youâll be able to quickly position yourself as an authority in your market, even before you ever launch your own product line.
Building valuable connections and relationships within your market will help you learn more about your audience and what they are most interested in. This information is incredibly valuable, especially when it comes to knowing how to best monetize your list with affiliate offers, or your own line of products or services.
With an email list, youâll be able to generate passive income easily by powering up your email campaigns with high-quality content that your audience will love, combined with attention-grabbing offers that convert.
Youâll be able to set your income on complete autopilot by creating a marketing strategy that automatically sends out fresh content and relevant offers to your subscribers every month.
Email marketing can help you build a tribe of your own, dip your toes into the waters of affiliate marketing, test out different platforms, and generate valuable feedback that will help you create a bestselling product of your own.
There are very few opportunities that can match the profit potential and incredible benefits of email marketing!
In this special report, weâll show you how you can join the ranks of successful list builders quickly and easily, while increasing engagement, building your tribe and positioning yourself as a thought leader in your market.
So, without further delay, letâs get right to it!
High Powered Incentives
While itâs true that you can start monetizing your list even if you have fewer than 100 subscribers, obviously the more targeted your list building efforts are, the easier it will be to convert those people into loyal buyers.
The size of your list isnât the most important component in successful email marketing. The connection you have with those subscribers is everything.
That means that youâll want to open a channel of communication immediately. As soon as someone subscribes to your list, you should introduce your brand and give them with a reason to stay subscribed to your emails.
You do this by creating a content marketing strategy that warms up your list and demonstrates to subscribers that youâre willing to provide them with the information they need.
Making money from your list is all about relationship marketing.
You can increase engagement several different ways, and weâll get to that in a later chapter. For now, letâs focus on the best practices for creating a squeeze page that converts.
If youâve ever read a guide or course on email marketing before, chances are you already know the importance of a well-constructed landing page.
These pages serve as the entry into what will be your sales funnel. They greet your visitors, introduce your brand and offer them an incentive to subscribe to your list.
Incentives are incredibly important because they act as a sort of bribe that entices visitors into giving up their name and email address.
With so many people being bombarded by email-based offers and advertisements each day, itâll take more than asking them to join to persuade them to become part of your inner circle.
Thankfully, there are a few easy ways to build a high-converting landing page that is guaranteed to get results.
First up, design.
You want your squeeze page to be attractive, but more importantly to resonate with your target market.
This means youâll want to spend some time coming up with a powerful, attention-grabbing headline that instantly tells your visitor whatâs in it for them.
To do this, youâll need to think from your average visitorâs perspective. What kind of incentive offer would likely convince them to subscribe to your list?
Most people in your market have probably already seen the same offers being featured on squeeze pages.
Incentive offers such as reports, eBooks or email-based courses are often used to motivate visitors into joining a list, but if you want to get their attention youâll have to do something different â something to stand out.
Here are a few ideas that are proven to work:
Offer a checklist of the steps needed to accomplish a goal.
This checklist would be available in downloadable PDF format and would be delivered immediately after someone joins your list.
Tip: You can also direct traffic to your blog and give visitors the option of saving your content to their desktop so they can read it later. This is a great strategy for increasing visibility, improving engagement, and maximizing the value of your incentive offers.
One easy way to do this is with the Post Gopher plugin. This works perfectly with WordPress to convert posts and pages into downloadable PDFâs. Thereâs no easier way to turn your blog content into super targeted, high-converting lead magnets.
Provide subscribers with exclusive access to a private membership site.
By making access available only to subscribers, and automating the signup process, youâll be able to quickly build a highly-targeted mailing list in no time at all.
Membership sites are great ways of building your audience and connecting with your tribe because people often place a higher value on content thatâs protected.
Give them a step-by-step action plan relating to your market.
Youâll want to make sure that your action plan clearly outlines the steps needed to complete a task or accomplish a goal.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you want to cater to the majority of your market, rather than a smaller segment, so you can maximize subscription rates.
This means youâll want to consider creating a few different action plans and then allow visitors to choose which one they wish to download after they subscribe to your list.
Offer them private access to training videos.
You could easily create a YouTube channel for your niche and keep all your videos unlisted. Then, create a private page that features your videos and make it accessible only by those who subscribe to your list.
This is a great way of giving something new and exclusive to your market while also encouraging people to subscribe to your new channel that you can further monetize.
The idea is to offer something new and exclusive in exchange for their name and email address. Stand out from the crowd by taking the usual offer and placing it behind a protected directory.
The idea is that the more exclusive your offer is, the more value your visitors will place on it making it drop-dead easy to persuade them to subscribe.
What other ideas are you able to come up with? What would your target audience likely be most interested in? How can you take existing content and turn it into a powerful lead magnet?
If youâre struggling for ideas, look at the ready-made lead magnets available at indigitalworks.com. These are done-for-you squeeze pages but they offer far more than professional templates, responsive landing pages and gorgeous graphics. The lead magnets available at indigitalworks.com.all come with a high-quality content package that includes a report written by professional writers as well as a 7-day autoresponder series that you can instantly plug into your email marketing campaigns in order to open the channel of communication and build a relationship with your subscriber base.
Theyâll save you a lot of time and money and make it easy for you to start growing a profitable list.
If you want to build your own landing page without having to learn code or mess around with design (not to mention, make sure that your page is responsive so it looks great on mobile devices), youâll want to look at indigitalworks.com. WP Landing Page makes it easy to create beautiful, high-converting landing pages in just minutes without touching a single line of code. It makes building high-converting landing pages a breeze while eliminating the usual learning curve. That way you can focus on building your lists and maximizing your income and leave the landing page design to the pros.
In the next chapter, weâll take a closer look at how you can begin to drive traffic to your lead pages, so you can beef up that mailing list with loyal buyers and take your income to the next level.
Transforming a Simple Page Into A Cash Funnel
While there are many different ways to monetize your email list, one of the most overlooked areas yet one of the most visited is thank you page of your opt-in form.
When people opt in for your offer, theyâre interested in your brand and your products, right? So, turn these interested subscribers into customers right away by including an offer on the thank you page after theyâve already subscribed!
To increase conversion rates, make sure you are using a responsive theme.
You should also add snippets of feedback from past customers, if you have it available. Including reviews from satisfied buyers will immediately increase conversion rates as it provides social proof and helps to reassure potential customers who are just learning about your brand for the first time.
Your thank you page is the very first thing your new subscribers see after joining your email list. This is their initial greeting and so itâs likely theyâve never even read an email from you yet!
That makes it a prime opportunity to introduce those leads to your products or services, or at the very least move them deeper into your marketing funnel.
I know this goes against the grain of what some other email marketers teach. You know, those guys who tell you to spend months cultivating a relationship with your subscribers and building trust, loyalty, and all that jazz.
But the truth is, while you wonât convince every subscriber to purchase from you right away, what do you have to lose?
Iâd rather strike while the ironâs hot than simply direct them into my mailing list while waiting weeks to even give them the opportunity to purchase a product that will help them.
Itâs been said that at no other time will your subscribers be more engaged than they are immediately after subscribing to your newsletter.
After all, youâve done your job at persuading them to give you their name and email address. Theyâve let you into their life, theyâve given up valuable real estate in their inbox so that they can hear more from you.
So, give it a shot. Set up a simple thank you page that gives them the opportunity to purchase your best-selling products. Or, if you have yet to create a product of your own, introduce them to an offer you are signed up to promote.
If youâre nervous about promoting or selling so soon after theyâve signed up to your list, consider creating a trip wire offer.
A trip wire offer is typically a lower-priced offer (somewhere between $5-25) that is designed to move someone deeper into a sales funnel without requiring a huge commitment from them. Trip wire offers are a great way to speed up the subscriber-to-buyer transition.
And if you want to skyrocket conversion rates, consider creating a bonus product that extends the value of the products youâre promoting. Give your leads more bang for their buck and youâll build a loyal following in no time.
Important Reminder: Iâve mentioned earlier that successful email marketing is all about the relationships you build with your subscribers.
Your subscribers need to trust you and the offers you promote. They need to know they can rely on you as a quality and responsible source of information and recommendations.
This means you need to be extremely careful with the products and services you promote throughout your email campaigns.
Youâve worked hard to build a list. Youâve spent time (and possibly money) generating leads and cultivating relationships with your subscriber base.
So, you should want your efforts to count, right?
One easy way to maximize your email marketing income is to seize the power of a great upsell.
âDo you want to upsize your drink and fries?â
McDonaldâs certainly understands the profit potential of an upsell, and so should you.
Offering subscribers that purchase from you the opportunity to upgrade or enhance their order by adding additional tools and resources is an easy way to skyrocket your income.
The key to an upsell is that itâs priced higher than the initial offer and offers clear value.
Your buyers need to understand how they benefit from spending that extra money to upgrade their initial purchase. This means that your upsell needs to double the value of the original product.
For example, if your customer purchased a 10-pack of social media graphics, you could offer them the chance to double their inventory by upgrading to a 20-pack of graphics.
The key is to keep your upsell tightly connected to the main product. You donât want to stray too far from your original offer so that youâre able to paint a clear picture of how the upsell improves, extends or enhances the product they already have.
Consider what kinds of products you could create as upsells that align with your existing product line.
And believe me, thereâs always room for an upsell. Even if you think your high-quality course offers everything a person could possibly ask for, chances are youâve overlooked an area that you could fulfill with an upgrade offer.
In fact, some developers leave a segment out of their main products or training programs intentionally because they know it would serve as a killer upgrade.
Now, you donât want your upgrade to be forced onto buyers, nor do you want it to cover a key area or step needed to accomplish their goal.
If someone purchases a product from you, it should do its job at fulfilling all promises made on the sales page, and should also serve as a stand-alone product. The upsell only works to expand someoneâs knowledge, provide someone with alternative methods, steps, or extends the training they are interested in.
Thinking back to McDonaldâs and how theyâve integrated upsells into their sales process, without upgrading the fries or drinks to a larger size, the meal you ordered is fulfilling and complete. Upgrading only gives you more of the same thing, right?
Thatâs the key to a killer upsell thatâll convert.
Now letâs look at the opposite approach: a downsell.
A downsell attracts a customer who is attempting to back out of making a purchase. Theyâre obviously interested in your product or service, but perhaps itâs too expensive for them at this time.
Thatâs when a downsell should kick in and do its job at saving the sale and moving the prospect further into your funnel, even if theyâre not paying full price for your offer.
Your downsell should typically shrink the size of the original offer. For example, if you were selling 10 social media graphics, your downsell might offer only 5 graphics at a fraction of the price.
Or, if youâre in the business of selling software, your downsell might provide them with a limited license that removes some of the power packed into the full-price option.
Make sense?
Both upsells and downsells will help you to maximize your email marketing income. By directing people to one main offer but giving them multiple options depending on their actions throughout your funnel, youâll be able to close more sales and make more money.
Cross Selling for Maximum Profits
Have you ever heard of cross-selling? Itâs when you direct a buyer to additional relevant products that you feel they may be interested in.
Amazon has cross-selling down to an art form. Whenever you purchase a book from them, youâll be immediately introduced to other books in that genre or category.
Just the same, if you browse an authorâs website on Amazon youâll see âBuyers of this Book have also purchasedâ (known in the publishing industry as âalso-boughtâsâ), and theyâre a powerful way to keep someone active within the sales funnel.
In fact, when it comes to self-published authors, many of them have seen an immediate increase of sales whenever theyâve appeared in another authorâs also-boughtâs just because theyâre able to siphon traffic and connect with a competitorâs readers base just by being featured as a similar author.
When it comes to squeezing every dime out of your email marketing campaigns, directing people to other relevant offers is a great way to extend the sales funnel without having to have other products or services of your own.
So for example, if you are offering access to a training program that teaches people how to self-publish on Amazon, chances are you canât cover every aspect of self-publishing.
After all, thereâs: marketing, editing, proofreading, learning how to increase writing speed, productivity and focus, and the list goes on.
In other words, there are dozens of other tasks relating to self-publishing that new authors would likely want to learn more about. Rather than continuously adding new modules and training guides to your program, you could cross-promote guides and books featured on Amazon and make money from every sale you make.
Cross-promoting via email campaigns is no different from traditional email marketing. Youâre promoting products that are in the same niche as your own yet they cover new ground.
Think about the different areas you havenât covered in your own products or courses. What other avenues of training would your customers likely be interested in? What subject matter have you overlooked, or you couldnât cover in one product or training program?
Those products make fantastic cross-promotional items that you can introduce your subscribers to throughout your email campaigns.
Quick & Easy Monetization Strategies
Here are a few fast and furious ways to monetize your lists.
Membership/Continuity Websites Membership sites will never go out of fashion. People love receiving fresh content automatically every month without having to think about renewing their purchase or manually paying for access.
From a website ownerâs perspective, it simply simplifies the process of keeping customers active within a funnel, while giving them the reassurance of a stable monthly income they can count on.
You can also choose to host your download pages and files on your own hosting account, or simplify the process by allowing InDigitalWorks Bitreveal to do all of that for you.
Regardless of what software or platform you use to create your membership site, youâll want to tie it in with your existing email campaigns. For example, you could offer a subscription model that takes place entirely via email that gives your subscribers access to premium content.
You could also set up your membership site so that whenever a subscriber joins they are given access to a private Facebook group, or can view videos that are otherwise unlisted on YouTube. Thereâs no shortage of ways to incorporate a paid-access model into your email marketing campaign.
Membership sites also donât have to cost a lot of money. You could simply start out with a lower-end price point just to move subscribers into your funnel so you can begin to qualify leads and segment your lists for better engagement.
Even subscription sites that charge as little as $10 a month are great tools for weeding out tire-kickers and converting readers into buyers.
Think about how you could create a subscription website into your email campaigns and maximize your income quickly.
Tip: Offer subscribers will early-bird access at a lower rate. This is a great way to jumpstart your membership site by offering people with a heavily discounted price for the first few months, or grandfather them in by letting them continue paying a lower fee as long as they keep their account active.
Email Based Coaching
Coaching and consulting is big business and more and more email marketers are getting into the game by charging for either personal or group training.
If you have an engaged email list, you could easily maximize your income by setting up a short-term coaching program that provides in-depth training on a certain topic.
Your coaching program could be designed to be completed over Skype, through email, via a private Facebook group, or you could set up a fully loaded training program via a site like Teachable.com in order to streamline your business and grow your audience outside of your email campaigns.
Training programs are also a great way to position yourself as an authority in your market and to increase brand awareness. They also serve as great testing grounds for future product launches as youâll gain valuable feedback from students who move through the course.
There are many different training platforms you could use, including:
Email Based Service You could easily set up a series of paid-access emails that go out every day, or every week. Only those who pay for access will receive this content. Just make sure that you mark your campaigns as private from within your mailing list account as by default some providers will make your email broadcasts available to the public, or anyone who shares the link.
Facebook Group Weâve talked about Facebook groups already, but itâs worth mentioning again. Facebook groups are easy to set up and manage. You can add additional administrators or moderators who can help keep on top of posts, comments and remove any spam.
However, there is a major downside to using Facebook groups – you arenât in full control of your community. Should Facebook limit your account or put you in whatâs called âFacebook jailâ, you could find yourself locked out of your own group.
The best way around this is to run your coaching program from your own website, but offer access to a private Facebook group as a bonus to those who subscribe.
Webinars Webinars are great ways of introducing your brand to new prospects. You could easily set up a series of Webinars as part of your coaching program, or run them independently if youâre looking to gain new email subscribers.
Just make sure you email the registration link to existing contacts as well as a reminder link on the day your webinar is set to take place.
Affiliate Marketing Obviously, affiliate marketing is one of the most common methods of monetizing your email list. Itâs a great replacement for those who donât have a product of their own, but even if you do, itâs a fantastic way to maximize your income during the times where youâre working on developing new products that arenât market ready.
Just match quality products with your audience and earn a commission!
Here are a few affiliate networks worth considering:
Turning your list into a money-making machine takes careful planning, but itâs one of the easiest ways to jumpstart your business, build a memorable brand and maximize your online income with very little start-up costs.
The key is to work towards constantly expanding your outreach, drive targeted traffic to your landing page, provide an irresistible, exclusive incentive that will convert that traffic into leads and work towards building your back-end system so that fresh content is being pumped out to your list every single week.
Then, monetize your list with affiliate-based offers as you learn more about your target market and generate valuable feedback that will help shape the outline of your own products or services.
Even if you never create a product of your own, your email lists can serve as the foundation for your entire business just by working towards creating the perfect blend of free, valuable content and promotional-based offers.
Test out different systems only after youâve seen success with one. Broadening your outreach by dominating one email monetization strategy at a time will help you stay focused, while keeping a close pulse on what is effective and what should be abandoned.
Donât overcomplicate the process! With a strong lead magnet like the ones available at InDigitalWorks.com, combined with a series of high-value follow up campaigns, youâll be able to siphon cash out of every email you send!
Always be on the lookout for other ways you can monetize your email campaigns, such as by selling ad space in your newsletters to others in your niche market. This is a great way to introduce quality products to your audience while making money doing it. GetResponse has a great article that shows you how to do this easily. Youâll find that here: https://blog.getresponse.com/can-sell-ads-email-newsletters
The bottom line is making money via your email list is not hard. Build an email list, nurture a relationship with your leads by offering free valuable content, and plug in any of the monetization methods weâve discussed in this special report and youâll be able to make money easily.
Creating a passive income pulling Affiliate Business does not rely only on hard work. But it takes Also TOOLS, Get The Onces Below if You Want a long term Solid profit Generating affiliate marketing business!
If You’re Serious About Building An Online Business that gets Earnings … You Should Really Consider Getting The Following Tools.
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