I’m talking about other search engines that you can use to discover a ton of valuable information about the niche you’re in.

I guarantee that you’ve heard of these search engines before, although you probably never thought of them primarily as search engines:

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook
• iTunes

Let’s go one-by-one through each to discover how we can utilize these search engines to enhance our own websites, blogs and brands.

YouTube as a Search Engine

YouTube is a GIANT search engine, which just so happens to be owned by Google, but instead of websites, we get videos.

The first thing I like to do is just simply type in keywords related to my niches into YouTube’s search field, and see what comes up.

Right away, you’ll be able to notice a few things:

1. What people are talking about when it comes to your niche. This is especially useful if you’re just starting out, because you can immediately get inspiration and ideas for content.
2. Who else is in your niche. You might be able to find some major players that are using YouTube as their primary media outlet. If so, you may want to get to know them a little better, or even find a way to contact them for future collaboration. If they’ve got subscribers, you’ve got the potential to grab them for your own by posting video responses or comments to their videos, or possibly getting mentioned in a future upload.
3. What’s missing from your niche on YouTube. Websites are easy to create, but videos are another story. Many topics and subjects are only lightly touched upon in YouTube videos, so if you find a hole in your niche, fill it. When I first heard the term “Facebook Landing Page”, I immediately looked it up on YouTube to see if there were any good tutorial videos about how to make a Facebook Landing Page. There were none, so I created my own. My video about Facebook Landing Pages is my most popular, and it even shows up twice in the SERPS for “Facebook Landing Page” – the top spot, and another one below. This drives a ton of traffic back to SPI.

Tip: When you’re searching for various terms, you can change the “search options” after you get your results to view which ones are the most viewed, most recent and/or which ones have the highest rating, to help you explore your niche even further.

Twitter as a Search Engine

This microblogging platform is indeed a search engine, and what’s really cool about it is that you can search for things in real time. In other words, you can see how people are talking about the term you search for at the very moment you click search.

I don’t think Twitter even knew how powerful their platform would be for searching for this kind of real time information, because when they first launched the only search bar was in the sidebar of each profile. Now, the homepage of Twitter is a giant real-time search hub, with the hottest/latest tweets and trends right there next to a very obvious search bar.

Apparently, the show Jersey Shore is a trending topic today.

How wonderful.

Anyways, the obvious thing we can do is put in our primary keywords, and see what comes up. Because this is a general search for your term, you’ll get a number of different kinds of tweets from people. You’ll get people who are asking questions, giving answers, posting links and resources, ranting, raving, conversing, etc.

Some of that may be useful to you, but if you want to get some targeted real time information about your keyword, you can try adding additional terms such as:

• “keyword” “need help” – to see what people need help with
• “keyword” “what is” - to see what people are trying to find answers for
• “keyword” “i hate” - to see what people hate about the keyword
• “keyword” “i love” - to see what people love about the keyword
• “keyword” “can’t” - to see what people can’t do related to your keyword
• “keyword” “bit.ly” - to see what links people have been posting related to your keyword
• “keyword” “twitpic.com” – to see what pictures people have been posting up related to your niche

…and the list goes on and on. I’m sure you can think of hundreds of additional terms to use to hone in on important information about your niche – and especially your target audience and exactly how they think.

Facebook as a Search Engine

Facebook. It’s where we hang out and play, and stalk people all day.

Joking aside, beyond a Business Page on Facebook for your website, we can utilize Facebook by using the search engine located at the top of the page.

Simply type in your keywords, and see what comes up. Actually, before you even press enter to perform the search, you’ll see a slew of pages, groups and activities that relate to your niche.

These are all fantastic places to meet new people, exchange ideas and get inspiration for content.

I’ve also used many of the groups and pages I’ve found on Facebook to help promote some of my LEED products. I usually include a special discount just for people from Facebook (using a unique coupon code), so I know exactly how many customers actually came from these postings of mine. To be honest with you, a lot of my customers came from Facebook.

iTunes as a Search Engine

Finally, we have Apple’s iTunes.

iTunes isn’t just for finding cool music or television. We can use it to find relevant podcasts that we should definitely be paying attention to. I’ve just discovered this world of podcasting, it’s potential, and just how massive some podcasters’ audiences are on iTunes, and how much influence and authority they’ve earned as well.

Some podcasts have tens of thousands of subscribers, so if you could somehow land a guest spot on a top show in your niche, or simply get mentioned – you could potentially drive a lot of direct traffic to your site. If not, you’d at least know who the top players are, and you can use them for inspiration for content creation, or even contact them through their website (listed in iTunes), or a message line and network with them or find a potential JV partner or new advertiser.

Additionally, you can find holes to fill if you’re up to starting a podcast yourself.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, just as much as I hope you enjoy your weekend!

Stay tuned for the 2nd Session of the Smart Passive Income Podcast this coming Monday.

Cheers!

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Quick Ways to Utilize These 4 Non-Google Search Engines

Related posts:

1. A Step By Step Plan To Rank Higher in the Search Engines
2. 7 Ways to Be Everywhere – Building a Brand Online
3. Keyword Search Engine Position Experiment – One Week Report
4. How to Hide a Page from Google
5. A Keyword Position and Search Engine Optimization Experiment – Day 0

I built my online businesses with WordPress sites and never once paid for a single plugin, so I was a bit skeptical because I only know a handful of plugins that are worth paying for, such as WP-Wishlist. With so many people wanting my opinion about it, I decided to see what the big deal was.

Before I go on, I just wanted to say this to you up front: I don’t normally do posts about products like this here on SPI. I usually only promote products that I’m hardcore familiar with (i.e. Market Samurai), but I did do my best to get as familiar with the plugin as possible so I could leave you an honest assessment. There was apparently a ton of buzz about this plugin (which I somehow missed until recently), so my goal here is to give all of you my first-hand, educated opinion about it so that you can make your own educated decision whether you like it or not.

I will also disclose that the links in this post to Subscribers Magnet are affiliate links to the product, although I hope you can see based on what is written below that this post is primarily here to help you discover the plugin, not for me to make money from it. I was not asked to or paid to write this post by anyone. This is just me and my opinion about something that may or may not be useful for you and your online business or blog.

After emailing MaxBlogPress myself, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to test out a beta version of the plugin, so I could see how it worked first-hand. I had told them that I may or may not write about it on my blog, and if I do there’s no guarantee that it will be a good review. They were confident in their product (a good sign), and asked me to only be honest about it if I were to share it with you.

I tested the plugin and it’s capabilities over the past week.

What Does Subscribers Magnet Do?

The primary purpose of the Subscribers Magnet plugin is to make it really easy to drastically increase your email list conversion rates. In fact, they have a guarantee on the product that says if you use the plugin and do not at least double your subscription rate, you get 100% of your money back.

After its installed and synced with your email service provider, such as Aweber, the plugin gives any blog the ability to use a number of different methods to get new subscribers, some of which are actually pretty cool and very well thought out. What I really like is that it allows you to do this in a very unobtrusive, non-annoying way.

That is definitely right up my alley, because I hate to use (and see) pop-ups and lightboxes, and this plugin does so much more than that.

Opt-In Forms

First, using the settings menu that is provided, you can insert opt-in forms with a single click of a button almost anywhere on your blog that you’d like. For example:

1. Show an Opt-in Form At the Top of Your First Blog Post

It makes sense to place an opt-in form at the top of your first blog post because that is where most of the traffic to your homepage will go. And if you happen to show full blog posts on your blog’s homepage (unlike me, who just shows excerpts), then an opt-in form will be shown front and center to all visitors of your homepage.

Cool feature, but I would never use it. This goes against my belief for what the primary purpose of a blog post actually is, and that is to engage the reader through your content first, and then have them take some kind of action. This is why I like the next options better.

2. Show an Opt-in Form at the Bottom of Your Blog Posts

Placing an opt-in form at the bottom of your blog posts makes much more sense to me, because people who read your content will be more likely to subscribe to your email list if they like what you had to say.

If I didn’t have an opt-in form at the bottom of my posts already, then I would have definitely implemented this option using the plugin. My current opt-in form is hard-coded into my custom theme, something I had to pay someone to do.

3. Show an Opt-in Form in Your Sidebar

The information in the sidebar of a blog is almost always shown no matter what page a visitor lands on. This is why any blogger who wants to collect email addresses should, at a minimum, place an opt-in form in the sidebar of their blog.

Again, I already have an opt-in form in my sidebar that was hard-coded into my custom theme, but if I didn’t Subscribers Magnet would make it really simple to add one using a drag-and-drop widget.

So far…none of these options do anything for me, mainly because I have these already built into my site. I keep track of where all of my new subscribers come from, and I would say about 70% come from my sidebar, and 30% come from the form at the bottom of my posts.

4. Show an Opt-in Form in a Footer Ad

Subscribers Magnet also has an option to add what they call a “Footer Ad” to your blog. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

The transparent bar at the bottom is meant to be an unobtrusive way to immediately show an opt-in form to a visitor, one that will definitely catch people’s attention. It definitely does that, but personally I feel it’s almost like a popup. Even though it is transparent, doesn’t slide in or pop up out of nowhere and surprise you, it still breaks up the flow of site and forces me to take the time to click the x to close it.

As you can probably tell, I would never use this option myself. It may very well increase my conversion rates, but it may also get rid of some long time fans as well.

I may be too critical here, because MaxBlogPress does include an option to control the frequency of how often it is shown to each visitor, which is nice.

5. Embed an Opt-in Form Within the Comment Section

I’ve never seen this done anywhere before, but I think it’s awesome.

You can enable the plugin to insert an opt-in form into the comment section immediately after someone leaves a comment. Here is a sample of what it looks like when it’s enabled on my blog:

You can mess around with the copy, but the opportunity to grab a subscriber at the very moment they leave a comment is amazing.

What is also nice about this feature is that you can choose when and how often you’d like the form to appear for each visitor. If you don’t think it should be shown to first time commenters, then you can change the settings to have it show on people’s 2nd, 3rd comment, or 4th comment. That way, it’s still a one-time hit so it’s not obnoxious, but it’s shown at a more opportune moment when people are already vested in you and your site.

Although the forms above look plain, you can customize them if you choose to do so. The colors, fonts, borders and sizes are all customizable, and you can even add a background such as the one I made below (although I must admit it took a lot of trial and error to line everything up correctly):

I don’t think there’s an easy way to do rounded corners, which would go nicely with my blog’s theme, and you can’t put images on top or outside of the border, as I have on my customized opt-in form in my sidebar. Additionally, the “submit button” customization is currently limited. I really wish I could change the size of the button and font within – maybe in a later update.

Super Slick Form Auto Filler

If you go two pictures above, to the sample of the embedded opt-in form in the comment section, you’ll notice that the form is already filled out. This is the work behind the plugin’s Form Auto Filler, which automatically places the visitor’s name and email into the correct boxes, for all forms that you show on your blog.

This is sweet and super powerful because now all one has to do to subscribe to your email list is just click the submit button. That’s it.

How does it work?

Well, in order to pull that information from people, they will have had to at least leave one comment on your blog before. After that (and correct me if I’m wrong), it recognizes the ip address and simply fills in the information based on that. Very, very simple idea, that can have a major impact on your conversion rates.

Note: I had this featured enabled over the weekend and it was totally working, but I later found out that if a person is totally brand new to your site, the text fields will be blank. This is fine if you’re using the plugin, because the words “Name:” and “Email:” appear to the left of the blank text fields, but for SPI, I have the words “Name” and “Email” within the text fields, and they are supposed to automatically disappear when someone clicks inside those fields. When a new visitor came to my blog, they would just see blank fields with no instructions as to what goes where. Again, this is because of the way I designed my opt-in forms, which is meant to save space.

Just wanted to point that out just in case any of you came across the same issue.

Other Methods of Capturing Email Addresses

In addition to the opt-in forms, there are a couple of other methods that you can use to substantially grow your list using Subscribers Magnet.

Automatic / Silent Subscription

This method automatically subscribes commenters to your email list…without telling them that’s what they’re doing.

I was totally against this method and was actually wondering why this feature was included, since most of the other features were reader friendly and unobtrusive. However, MaxBlogPress describes it’s proper usage and it actually does make some sense.

First of all, you must have “double-opt in” enabled with your email service provider, which means that if someone attempts to subscribe to your list (in any method), they will first receive an email with a confirmation link, and they must click that confirmation link in order to actually be on your email list. Most providers won’t even let you do a single-opt in, especially using a silent subscription method.

Using this “silent subscription” method, a commenter leaves a comment and then immediately receives that confirmation email to confirm the subscription. But instead of saying the usual “please click the link below to confirm your subscription to the blah blah newsletter…”, MaxBlogPress suggests changing the copy to read something similar to:

“Thank you so much for your comment. I would like to offer you my eBook, (ebook name here) as a free gift. To receive your free eBook, simply subscribe to my newsletter by clicking the link below…”

That’s pretty sneaky, but because you’re still giving people a choice to subscribe, I also think it’s actually really smart.

I have not implemented or tested this method yet, because I’m still trying to decide how I feel about emailing first time commenters in the first place. I once had installed a plugin that just simply emailed first time commenters with a thank you message and a link to my Facebook Page, but I had no idea how people were reacting to those emails.

The smartest thing to do would be to test it out by setting up a separate newsletter list, and feeding new subscribers to it using this silent method, so there are some raw numbers to determine whether or not it works.

Subscribe Checkbox

This is the last feature of Subscribers Magnet that I’ll be going over today, but it’s actually my favorite. The plugin also gives you the ability to place a checkbox in the comment field that, if checked, will subscribe the commenter to your email list. So in essence, the comment fields for “Name” and “Email” double as the opt-in form for your list. The benefit is that it just takes one click to subscribe.

Here’s what it looks like:

If a person clicks the checkbox, then immediately after their comment is published an email will be sent to them to confirm their subscription to the newsletter, just as if they subscribed using one of the opt-in forms on the blog.

Again, this is yet another angle to get people to subscribe to your email list, and probably the most reader friendly one available. There is an option to have this checkbox automatically checked for people, but I like to think that everyone on my list subscribed because they wanted to, not because they accidentally overlooked a checkbox.

It’s up to you though…that’s just how I roll.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really like the plugin and the multiple angles and opportunities you can provide visitors to your blog to subscribe without it being irritating. You can implement all of these strategies at the same time, but I would recommend selecting just a few that work for you and your traffic.

For the few days that I used this plugin (and again I couldn’t use a number of things because they were already hard-coded into my blog) I did see a slight increase in subscribers. However, I can’t say that it was solely because of the plugin because I did have a number of articles and features around the web that brought a large number of people to my site over the weekend, so I honestly cannot say for sure.

That being said, Daniel Scocco from DailyBlogTips.com uses Subscribers Magnet and has seen an nice increase in conversion rates, and other bloggers have seen an increase in conversion rates of up to 300%! A lot of other people are raving about it, so it seems like this could be one of those plugins that everyone ends up getting eventually down the road.

I definitely think it could be a worthy investment if growing your list is your primary goal.

MaxBlogPress is holding a very short introductory discount offer for Subscribers Magnet, which only lasts until Friday, July 30th. You can get Subscribers Magnet for 30% OFF the retail price by clicking here if your interested.

Thanks to those of you who emailed me about this plugin, and I hope I’ve been able to provide you with some helpful information. Thanks, and I wish you all the best.

Cheers!

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Subscribers Magnet WordPress Plugin – Awesome?

Related posts:

1. A WordPress Plugin For Instant Traffic in 5 Minutes
2. How to Retain Your Subscribers Like a Pro
3. 10 Ninja Techniques to Get More Subscribers, Followers, and Opt-Ins
4. 100 Subscribers, and a Small Lesson about Goals
5. The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Newsletter

Although I wholeheartedly believe that guest posting is a tactic that delivers exactly the traffic that you need, and one that you should definitely attempt several times throughout the life of your growing site, the truth is that it’s not always as easy as it sounds.

Why?

Because the author of the blog you are targeting has the option to reject your guest post request. It could be for any number of reasons, many of which are beyond your control.

There is, however, a strategy that I’ve noticed being used on a number of blogs lately that is working wonders – driving large amount of traffic, earning tons of retweets and landing tons of new subscribers. It’s a strategy that I wish I knew when I was just starting out, and the best part is that it’s a post that you publish on your own blog, so there’s no need to worry about rejection.

The strategy?

A list post that features some of the top and up & coming players in your niche.

Call it what you want – a “shout out post”, a “tribute post”, or a “community post” (thanks to @5kmission, @PaulCunningham, @Scottshelden & @NicWirtz for the name suggestions!) – the strategy works.

It does take some extra effort to find the top and up & coming players in your niche, gather all of the relevant information and really put together a killer post, but the results can be quite fruitful for you and your blog.

Why Does this Work?

There are several reasons why this strategy works:

• Everyone appreciates being featured on another blog. Some (not all) will actually spend time to actually read the post and leave a “thanks for the mention” comment as well. This is an easy and friendly way to connect & network with others.
• Often times, the people you feature (especially the up & coming ones), love the free press so much that they want to share it with as many people as possible. This is why it’s important to make sharing easy on your blog by including all of the necessary retweet, like, stumbleupon, and digg buttons, etc.
• These posts are actually very useful. Anyone who is interested in your niche would love to have a list of the top players and get to know everyone and their importance to the industry.

A fine example of this strategy being put to use recently can be seen on Jade Craven’s post at TheNetsetter.com, 50 Netsetters You Should Know About.

Take notice of how many comments were made, as well as how many of those comments were actually from people featured in that article. Also, although it doesn’t say on the blog itself, bit.ly tells me that this post has been retweeted 458 times (as of about 24 hours after it’s post). That’s a lot of reach, and I guarantee you that many of those retweets came from people featured in that post as well. Just imagine how many followers total those 50 people have on Twitter alone.

Taking it to the Next Level

As with most things in life, there’s the standard way of writing these posts, and then there’s the “next level” way.

The standard way is to simply create a list of people and write a short paragraph about each – or, if your post is about a particular subject matter within your niche, you may write about how each of the people you are featuring have made an impact in regards to that.

The “next level” way is wonderfully demonstrated by my friend Corbett Bar from ThinkTraffic.net. In his posts, 10 Blogs with Explosive Growth to Learn From and also 17 Traffic Building Tips From Some of the World’s Most Popular Bloggers, he not only includes a list of featured bloggers and a short paragraph about each, but he also includes an actual quote from each blogger as well. Having a quote from each of the people does a few extra things for Corbett:

1. It increases the social proof of the post.
2. It increases the chances of the article being shared to even more people. Because Corbett took the time to first contact each of the people, and then follow up after the post was written (I know he did this because The Smart Passive Income Blog had the honor of being included in these posts…thanks Corbett!), the authors are less likely to just pass over the post, and will most likely share it with others. If not through retweets and sharing on Facebook, then by posts such as the one I am writing now.
3. And most importantly, it takes the networking aspect of these posts to a whole new level. Corbett contacted me personally to ask for a quotation for both of these articles, and because of that I know exactly who he is, what his blog is about, and that it’s totally awesome. In the future, I’m sure Corbett and I could possibly work together on something, or exchange guest posts, or whatever – because of the trust I now have for him and his blog – all of which came from the initial contact and the quality of his post.

If you take a look at the archives on ThinkTraffic.net, you’ll see that each of the posts before the 17 Traffic Building Tips article average 2 to 4 comments, and the same amount of retweets. Well, after posting this post, he earned 69 comments, and 145 retweets.

It works.

Yes, you will have to work a little harder to first contact each of the people you’d like to feature, but usually they are happy to spend 2-3 minutes to contribute a quote for you. Not all will respond, but the ones that do will be great contacts to have in the future, ones that can possibly help add to the rapid growth and expansion of your site.

So if guest posting just isn’t working out for you (or even if it is), give this alternative traffic building method a shot.

Cheers!

p.s. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is now live on iTunes! You can subscribe to the iTunes feed by clicking here!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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Thank you so much!

How to Get Explosive & Targeted Traffic – An Alternative to Guest Posting

Related posts:

1. A Geektastic Guest Post
2. The #1 Way To Increase Traffic then Income – Be Nice
3. An In-Depth Traffic Stats and Analysis Report
4. Cold Selling Sucks – 5 Ways to Build a Relationship With Your Traffic
5. A WordPress Plugin For Instant Traffic in 5 Minutes

The argument was that a full post is what most subscribers favor, but showing a full post keeps people off of your site. On the other hand, you could get more traffic coming to your site by showing a partial post or “teaser”, but then it would defeat the purpose of having an RSS feed in the first place.

The response was amazing. In fact, more than 60 individual people commented with their opinion – and almost all of them favored ‘full post’.

Although we can easily conclude that a full post is the way to go, I wanted to illustrate two principles that came about as a result of asking this simple question: social proof and putting your readers first.

Social Proof

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when people’s decisions are influenced by making the assumption that surrounding people know more about certain situations than you do.

In layman’s terms: groups of people have influence, and the larger the group, the more influence they have.

For example, if you’re at the mall and you see a huge crowd of people huddled around a store, you’re more than likely going to check it out, or at least acknowledge the crowd of people and wonder what the big deal is.

I decided to write last week’s post about the RSS feed as an “Ask the Reader” because I knew that what you all said as a whole would be more powerful than anything I could suggest or recommend. There is proof in the 60+ comments about what works and what doesn’t.

“The only recommendation better than the one given by somebody else is the one given by a group of somebody elses.”

We all know the power of “somebody else’s recommendation”. That’s exactly why products (both online and off) have testimonials! It’s one thing for a company to say their product is good, but it’s becomes more believable when it’s somebody else providing you that recommendation – especially when it’s a friend, and doubly especially when it’s a group of friends.

The comment section of your blog is a PERFECT place to showcase social proof. If you have something you’d like to prove, why not let your readers do it for you and make it a much more powerful statement.

If you read through the comments section of the post, you’ll actually notice a few people say they will change from a partial to a full post RSS feed. It’s not because of anything I said – I just asked a question.

That’s the power of the masses.

Putting Your Readers First

The second principle that came about from last week’s post deals with the idea of what happens when you put your readers’ best interests first.

As one commenter, Dexter from CashDoodle put it:

“[In a full post RSS feed...] If you are writing engaging content, posing contentious arguments, asking relevant questions and providing a call to action, people will head over to your blog to complete the transaction…”

He then followed up by saying:

“…we keep saying that writing a blog is about giving. Giving value to your readers. Forcing a reader back to your blog makes it about you, and what YOU want.”

It’s true – putting in a partial feed just to get clicks and traffic to your blog is a selfish thing to do, in my opinion. But the fact is that you can still get as much traffic from your RSS subscribers by providing your full post. Actually, you could get more traffic if, like Dexter said, you’re engaging your audience, asking relevant questions and including proper calls to action.

Putting my readers’ best interests first is something I always try to do here on SPI, and it has always come back around to reward me in one way or another.

Help others first, and they’ll be happy to help you out later. Karma…it’s out there.

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

The Power of Social Proof and Putting Your Readers First

Related posts:

1. Think of Social Media Like This, and You Will Make Money
2. Ask the Readers: How to Motivate the Unmotivated
3. Ask The Readers: Is Outsourcing Irresponsible?
4. Ask the Reader: Partial or Full Post in RSS Feed?
5. 5 Little Known Ways to Grow Your Blog

“Pat. You seem to be EVERYWHERE online. Everywhere I go, people are talking about you and your name always comes up. How do you do it?”

To be honest, I never believed I would become this successful online, especially with SPI – a blog in the “make money online” niche, which as you probably know is wildly over saturated. Although my success is partially accidental I know exactly why I’m here.

What it really comes down to is this:

If you want to become successful online, you must think about what you do as building a brand. In order to build a brand, you must do what you can to be everywhere.

A successful blogger is not just a blogger. True – it’s the blog where things get started. It’s where authority is constructed and content is published. But if you stick to just a blog, you’ll be just that – stuck to your blog.

Your blog or your website is only the beginning. It’s your hub, your homebase where people can go to find out more about who you are and what you do, but it’s also just one piece of the giant puzzle that is your brand – your omnipresent, influential and (if applicable), money making brand.

Below are 7 ways to simply be everywhere:

1. Step Out of Your Comfort Zone

Before I get into more specific, actionable items, you must first realize that “being everywhere” isn’t going to be a walk in the park. It’s going to be uncomfortable at times because you’re doing things that you aren’t used to or even scared to do.

With that said, let me tell you this: the only thing holding you back is you.

In The 4-Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss gives us some exercises to perform throughout the book to help train our entrepreneurial minds. One particular exercise was to enter a crowded area and lay yourself down flat on the floor, looking upwards.

What’s the point?

The point is that it will train you to do things that you wouldn’t normally do, to get you to not worry so much about what other people are thinking and just take action – no matter how silly or ridiculous an idea may be at the time.

When I first thought about writing my first eBook, it was something I honestly did not want to do. I was afraid of the process and I didn’t know if it would sell even one copy. Well, I’m glad I stepped out of my comfort zone and decided to write that eBook, because it turned into a six-figure online business.

2. Keep Your Brand Consistent

The goal is to be everywhere, but the trick is to make it as easy as possible for people to recognize that you are indeed everywhere. This means using the same graphics and the same logos where ever you are online.

This is important, because image recognition is the number one way that people make connections in their brain. Huge companies know this, and even babies know this when they recognize the face of their mother for comfort and food.

This is why I do my best to brand each of my pages online the same. My blog, my Twitter account, and even my Facebook Landing Page all look very similar. My gravatar (which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar – the image that shows up next to my comments on any site that I leave comments on) even uses the same exact picture as in these profiles.

3. Explore Other Forms of Media

So you have a blog.

Have you ever thought about expanding your brand onto other media types such videos? How about podcasting? Live streaming? Printed books?

Only only will this help you get more traffic by reaching people you wouldn’t normally reach with a blog alone, but it will definitely expand your brand as well.

Darren Rowse from Problogger.net was the first person I knew from online that was “everywhere”.

I knew about his blog, but then I went to Barnes and Noble and saw his printed book in person. Seeing that book really changed my view about who he was and made him (and his blog) even more of an authority in the blogging niche in my eyes. He has definitely done a great job expanding his brand because he also has videos, podcasts and has done some live streaming in the past, not to mention an additional printed book that he just recently published.

He’s at the top of his niche for a reason.

For myself, I’m getting there. I have a great following on YouTube and am about to launch a podcast as well.

4. Get Onto Social Networks

This one should be a given.

If you’re not utilizing Social Networks like Twitter or Facebook as an extension of your blog (not just to spy on your friends, but to network with your audience and actually provide good, relevant content on), then you’re not doing everything you can to be everywhere. The thing is: THIS is where everyone is!

Plus, the simple viral nature of these sites alone does wonders to help expand your brand and get noticed by people who would never have heard of you otherwise.

Luckily, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to setup a Twitter account (although it may take a bit more time to change the graphics and “brand it”), and I’ve laid out exactly how to setup your Facebook Page here.

5. Write Guest Posts on Other Blogs

This is huge.

HUGE!

Guest blogging is probably the easiest way to get a load of relevant traffic to your blog in the shortest amount of time. Beyond that, and even more important for your brand, you and your site’s url (and possibly your logo too) will be shown to tons of people who may have never heard of you or your website before. After getting published, you’ll be instantly known by that much more people when they come across the blog post live on the site or in the blog owner’s RSS feed.

There are several free guides about how to guest post online. My favorites are Glen Allsop’s Guest Blogging: The Ultimate Guide and Chris Guthrie’s Guest Posting [Ultimate Guide]. Yep – that’s two ultimate guides right there.

6. Over-deliver On Your Content

Okay, I have to mention by buddy Glen at Viperchill.com once again. He’s the master of over-delivering and a prime example of what can happen to a blog when you over-deliver on your content.

About 95% of the posts he writes on his blog are massive, tutorial-like blog posts that I’m sure take hours and hours of research and work. His posts are art in the form of words, and he goes into so much depth about everything that it literally makes me drool.

Recently, he just surpassed the 10,000 subscriber mark (although Feedburner is acting weird lately, but nonetheless), which means he earned about 9,000 subscribers in less than a year. That’s unheard of in the blogging world.

It didn’t happen because he writes blog posts consistently. He doesn’t – even though that’s “the rule” we’re all supposed to follow. It happened because his posts always over-deliver, and because they do, they spread like wildfire and his subscribership grows as a result.

When I’ve taken the time to write KILLER posts (and I mean posts that take days of research and just really have a ton of great content in it), I’ve seen all of my numbers grow as a result, including viral numbers like retweets and likes, which help expand my brand to people I’ve never reached before.

7. Create Raving Fans

It takes time, but if you continue to provide good content on your blog and build a nice community behind it, after a while you’ll eventually see that you and your blog may accumulate a number of “raving fans”. I like to think I have a few here on SPI, and I love each and everyone one of them to death.

Ravings fans should be treated like royalty, and you should go out of your way to make them happy. Do favors for them, or just spend time talking to them on Facebook or through email.

Why?

Because they are the ones who spread the word about you and your site. Some raving fans are more enthusiastic than others, but each one plays an important role in expanding your brand and influencing people who you alone cannot.

Let me say that again: your raving fans will influence people who you alone cannot.

This is why each and everyday I notice a huge influx of traffic from a few random websites that I’ve never been to before. My name and a link to my site show up on forums and blogs around the world not because of me, but because of my raving fans and their recommendations.

Thank you – you know who you are.

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7 Ways to Be Everywhere – Building a Brand Online

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2. 5 Little Known Ways to Grow Your Blog
3. Cold Selling Sucks – 5 Ways to Build a Relationship With Your Traffic
4. 5 Ways to Hack Giving Up
5. 3 Ways to B*tch Slap Fear in the Face and Laugh

“Oops! We couldn’t find what you were looking for.”

or…

“Page not found.”

What you’re actually seeing when you come across this error is the “404 Page”, which is a page that your browser goes to when the page you were looking for was – well – not found.

Common reasons for landing on a 404 page include:

• A misplaced letter or misspelled word in the URL when typing manually into the browser’s address bar.
• A misplaced letter or misspelled word in an existing link.
• The link or URL is typed correctly, but the page just no longer exists (aka. broken link)
• A redirection error.

Whatever the path may be, when people land on your 404 Page they will most likely exit your site.

It’s sad, but true. People are spoiled, especially when it comes to searching and surfing online, so when they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for – it’s on to the next thing like there’s no tomorrow.

However, there are things we can do as website owners, bloggers and internet entrepreneurs to decrease the chances of people leaving our sites when they do reach a 404 Page, which I’ll outline for you below.

How to Optimize Your 404 Page

Before anything, you should take all the necessary precautions to make sure your links are all typed in correctly and that you don’t have any broken links on your site. You can use a tool like Google Webmaster Tools to do help. Even after that, people can still land on your 404 page by mistyping a URL or clicking on a misspelled link from a site other than your own.

On your 404 Page Template itself, there are a number of things you can do:

• Include friendly text that clearly mentions that the page they were looking for cannot be found, but that you’re also willing to help them find what they were looking for. Something other than “Page not Found” will really make a difference and get people to engage with you on your page, even though it wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. Then, you can keep them on your site reading content using the stuff below.
• Include a search function for the content on your site. It’s always nice to give people an option to search, especially if they were looking for something specific and don’t know where else to go.
• Insert your most popular posts. These posts are the most popular for a reason, so they’ll give you the best chance of keeping people on your site.
• Insert your most recent posts.
• Include the categories or tags of your blog.
• Include an opt-in form for a newsletter.
• Include an Advertisement or Promotional item – I wouldn’t recommend this, but it is an option. This might work because if the visitor was planning on leaving anyways (because they couldn’t find what they were looking for), you can try to get them to click on an ad or go somewhere else that may help you earn a little bit of cash. I want to keep readers on my site, so this technique is not for me, but I just wanted to throw it out there for you.

Also, it’s important to make sure you design your 404 page to have a similar style and structure as the rest of your website, so visitors won’t feel like they’ve been kicked off of your site.

Lastly, if you’re slick, you can include a form on your 404 page to report broken links to you.

How Do You Design an Optimized 404 Page?

The easiest and most hassle-free way to optimize your 404 Page would be to outsource it to your web designer, or find someone on Elance or Odesk to do it for you. Simply tell them what you want on the page, and boom – done in less than an hour, if they know what they’re doing.

But, since I know a lot of your are curious or just don’t want to deal with outsourcing, I’m happy to share with you exactly what the code on my own 404 Page template looks like.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, every theme (I believe) has a 404 Template that you can edit, which can be viewed in the Appearance > Editor area, and then looking under Templates on the right hand side:

Typically, it will have code that looks something like this:

This is your plain jane 404 code and it definitely needs an update.

Instead of pasting my own, I’ve attached it here in a text file (in rich text format) so you can download it and use it as you wish. Note that it may or may not work perfectly with yours, because you may have different plugins installed or a different version of WordPress which may affect the code somehow, but whatever you do, if you plan to make changes yourself, please save what you had in a separate text file just in case.

If you want to see my 404 Page live, just add some random text to the end of this post’s url in your browser and press enter.

I won’t mention any specific sites, but I went ahead and tried adding random text onto the ends of other popular sites’ urls, and was surprised to see that not all of the top bloggers and top websites that I visit actually implement this strategy. Many are still using the plain ol’ 404 Page template.

I hope you found this “not-so-common” tip useful! As always, thank you for your support.

If this is your first time visiting this blog, please subscribe to my RSS Feed. Cheers!

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Are You Optimizing Your 404 Page? Yes, Your 404 Page.

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5. How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 6 – 10 Steps to a Great Sales / Landing Page

There are a lot of other resources on the web about what you should do before you publish your post, but there isn’t that much information about what to do after – at least not in an easy to read checklist format that you can use, until today.

Why is this important?

Because to me, 50% of a blog’s success comes from the actual posts on the blog itself. The other 50% comes from what happens after that content is published.

Unfortunately, many bloggers tend to work hardcore only on the first 50% (publish and done) and therefore only see 50% of their potential results. Growing a successful blog takes work, and the work doesn’t end with the content on your site. Follow through with your posts and you’ll see better results in less time.

Below, you’ll find a description of each check, but you can download a PDF version that you can print out if you’d like.

Immediately After Publishing

1. Did I read my published article and check for spelling & grammar errors?

Although we should check for spelling and grammatical errors before we publish our posts, we should also do it after as well. Seeing it published and live will make you more aware of the details and you may find some mistakes that you may have missed while proofreading.

If you do find errors, don’t worry. Just go back, edit and update.

2. Did I read my published article and check for formatting or spacing errors?

Luckily, WordPress gives us the ability to preview our posts before they go live, however,  Murphy’s law often likes to make it’s way to our blog posts and screw up how things should look, even when we’ve done our best to make sure everything is perfect before we publish.

Our graphics aren’t aligned,  line breaks aren’t where they should b, or some piece of code in your post made your entire blog lok screwy. Whatever the case, now is the time to fix it.

Thanks Murphy.

3. Did I tweet about my blog post?

You should definitely be tweeting about your published post to your followers.

Make sure you shorten the url to your post using a site like bit.ly, so you can keep track of the clicks to your article as well. Or, you can tweet using a third party software such as Tweetdeck to easily shorten the lengths for you, and keep track of who is retweeting your articles.

What you say in your 140 character limit really does matter. It’s your “ad copy” for your blog post, and the better copy you write, the more traffic and buzz you’re receive

Choose your characters wisely.

4. Did I share my blog post on Facebook?

If you don’t know why Facebook is so important for bloggers, then I suggest recommend demand that you read The Blogger’s Guide to Facebook.

Like Twitter, Facebook can be a major source of traffic for your blog. In fact, people are on Facebook more than any other site in the world, so you’d better take advantage of this by sharing your post and getting it in front of their eyes.

You might be wondering if it would be easier to use an automatic application or tool on Facebook that detects your new blog posts and pastes them onto your Facebook Page’s wall for you. Although this is easier, I’d recommend posting about each new blog post manually and separately. It will seem more personal, and you can add in your “ad copy” along with the link to optimize your click-through rates.

5. Did I share my blog post on all other social media platforms that I joined?

Twitter and Facebook aren’t the only social media platforms out there. If you’re a part of any other networks, make the most of them and share your post.

Tip: You may be able to use a site like ping.fm to easily do this across all social media platforms for you, in one shot.

6. Did I social bookmark my blog post?

Social bookmarking sites offer a fantastic way to drive traffic and get backlinks to your site too.

I would be cautious about bookmarking my own posts on the major bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious, since they crack down on self promoting bookmarks.

Other sites, however, are great for driving traffic and building authority for your post in the search engines. You can use the free tool at SocialMarker to easily bookmark your site across a number of social bookmarking websites.

Soon After Publishing

7. Have I responded to comments made on my post?

One of the best things you can do is come back to your post some time later and respond to the comments that other people have left. They took the time to leave you a comment, and the least you can do is spend a little bit of time to answer them back, especially if they have a question and are looking for answers.

This really helps with credibility and building trust with your readers. Also, it encourages more discussion because people are more likely to comment knowing that they are actually being read.

8. Have I thanked people on Twitter for Re-Tweeting my blog post?

If you tweeted your blog post (see #3), then chances are you will have a few people who re-tweet your tweet to their own followers. Take a moment to thank some of these people, because re-tweeting is totally voluntary and can lead to massive amounts of traffic. If you thank them, they will be more likely to re-tweet your tweets in the future.

9. Have I commented on a commenter’s blog post?

I’ve never shared this with anyone before, but I encourage you to do this too if you aren’t already.

On each of my blog posts, I’ll single out one commenter and click over to their own website. If the site is not a blog, then I look for another commenter’s site until I do land on a blog.

Then, I look for an interesting article, read it, and make sure to leave a comment.

Why do I do this?

1. It forces me to learn new things from other people.
2. It disciplines me to practice the “old art” of blog commenting, which can sometimes help with backlinking.
3. Many top bloggers seemed to have lost the motivation to leave comments on other blogs. So, when I do it myself, it really helps me stand out of the crowd and be even more personable than some of the more successful bloggers out there.
4. It slowly builds even more trust with my readers.

I try to pick out blogs from new commenters and bloggers, because you never know which of the newbies will end up going big someday. Maybe when they get big, they’ll remember my small gesture and hook it up in the future somehow.

Later After Publishing

10. If my post contained audio or video, have I begun getting a transcript made for it?

If you’ve got audio or video in your post, then you definitely need a transcript. If you’re good, then you’ll already have this completed before you publish your post, so you can insert it into the body of your content for people to read or download immediately after it goes live.

But, sometimes transcripts take time, so now it is good time to get started on it.

You can write it yourself, but I would suggest hiring a virtual assistant to do it for you. You’ll save a lot of time.

You can then publish this in a separate post (which is great for SEO purposes), or simply update your existing post and place the text or a download link to a PDF in it.

11. Have I re-written / summarized my post for article marketing distribution?

Many bloggers like to repurpose their content and syndicate it onto article marketing directories.

Never copy/paste your blog post word for word for article marketing. You should always re-write your content, and you can even put a little spin on it to give it a fresh look, while not having to spend so much time writing a totally brand new article from scratch.

You should also always include a link to your blog post from your article to optimize your search engine rankings.

Be sure to read the terms and conditions of each of the article directories you choose to write on for where links are allowed to be put in the articles.

For Your Reference: Some of the top article marketing directories include: EzineArticles, GoArticles, Buzzle and ArticleDashboard, just to name a few.

12. Have I checked the stats on my page including traffic, click-throughs and sources?

After some time, it’s important to check the statistics of your post. Based on what you find, you can act accordingly.

For example, if you find that your post is bringing in more traffic than normal, you can find out why and go to the source to see what’s going on. There may be more opportunities to network with people or get even more traffic if you find out where it’s coming from.

Also, if you placed affiliate links in your blog post, you can check to see how they are converting. If you’re getting 100 clicks to a product a day, but no sales, then you may want to reinsert a different offer, or try a different landing page.

Have I Missed Anything? What would you like to add to this list?

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The Blog Post Checklist: After You Publish Your Post

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I wholeheartedly believe this statement because I would not be where I’m at today if it weren’t for the mastermind groups that I’ve been a part of since I began doing business online.

Sure, you can make progress without one, but in order to quickly get to that next level in your business, where things can really begin to accelerate, you need to join a mastermind group.

If you’re serious about wanting to achieve high levels of success, you need to join a mastermind group.

What is a Mastermind Group?

For those of you who don’t know, a mastermind group is just a fancy term for a group of people with a common goal that meet (in person, on the phone, via Skype, chatrooms, meeting software, etc.) to share and learn to improve what they do. Think of it as a show and tell (and ask) for highly motivated individuals who want to get things done.

In these meetings, members of the group share their ideas, questions, triumphs and downfalls. Members with questions get immediate feedback from the others, while everyone learns from everyone else’s experience and wisdom.

Most mastermind group meetings are held in a very formal matter (as outlined below) probably because it’s the most effective structure for the sharing and learning process:

• Beginning: Each person, one-by-one, talks briefly about their goals from the previous meeting.
• Middle: A predetermined person in the “hot seat” shares, in detail, any number of issues, complications, questions and concerns about his or her own situation. The rest of the members then respond and contribute to the discussion by offering suggestions or comments based on their expert knowledge and/or experience.
• End: Each person, one-by-one, talks briefly about the goals that they want to accomplish by the next meeting. Also, the next “hot seat” person is determined so he or she can be ready with questions for the group.

Depending on the mastermind group, the structure may be a little different, however the general idea is the same.

What’s really nice about this format is that because it is so formal, everyone gets to participate and learn from everyone else. I’ve been in non-formal business meetings before, and there’s always a few people who never speak up and don’t get anything out of it. I was one of those people.

The One Benefit We Can All Use

The primary benefits from participating in mastermind groups should be obvious:

1. You can get any questions you have about what you’re doing answered, or at least talk through how to solve any problems you may be encountering.
2. You can get a lot of new ideas that you may have never thought of to improve what you’re doing.
3. You get a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.) opinion about any decisions you make with your business. While doing business online, we often experience “tunnel vision”, where we think something is good because we’re so involved in it. But, we sometimes fail to step back and see how things really are, or that it should be approached in a different manner. Your mastermind group can help you step back and see what’s best for you.

Besides those three benefits, there is one extremely important benefit that is rarely mentioned about mastermind groups, and that is accountability.

When you talk to others about what you want to do or what your goals are, you are far more likely to achieve them. Just imagine sharing your goals with a group each week and how much more you would want to accomplish because of it. Maybe it’s because we don’t want to let others in the group down. Or, maybe it’s because we don’t want to seem lazy in front of them. It could even be a subconscious thing. Whatever it is, talking to others about what you want to do will help you achieve success.

How to Find a Mastermind Group

Below is a list of several different ways to find a mastermind group:

• Start One Of Your Own: Surely you know others with common interests who also love to improve their businesses or blogs too. Why not get a few of them together on a weekly or monthly basis, and start your own mastermind group?
• Ask Other People: Many people are a part of, or have been a part of mastermind groups that may be looking for new members. It never hurts to ask someone in your niche if they know of any that you could participate in. You might be surprised.
• Meetup.com: Meetup.com is a fantastic site that connect like-minded people with a number of different interests, from scrapbooking to online business and blogging. You can easily search for groups that are already meeting in your area and when the next meeting is scheduled that you can attend. Some of the internet business meetup meetings I’ve been to have been a great learning experience (not to mention great for networking), while other meetings I’ve been to have been just okay.
• Craigslist: Craigslist may have a number of people with similar goals as yours that you might be able to easily connect with.
• Internet Business Mastery: I have to credit Sterling and Jay from Internet Business Mastery here because in their Academy, they have a section in their forum that is dedicated just for hooking people up locally for the specific goal of starting a mastermind group. I’ve met with people in San Diego from the Academy and have built long lasting business and personal relationships with these people which have directly helped my businesses. Crazy stuff.

All mastermind groups are different, and it make take a few trials in different groups to find the one that works for you. Good luck with your search, and I hope you find them as useful as I have.

If you have ever been a part of a mastermind group, please share your experience and whether or not you feel they are valuable. Also, do you have any tips to help others who may be looking to join a mastermind group find one?

Cheers!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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Thank you so much!

How to Find a Mastermind Group

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If you’ve ever heard the phrase “Content is King” before, then you should know by now that the quality of the writing on your blog, website, ebook etc. is important.

Duh right?

In fact, you’ve probably heard it so often you almost hit the back button on your browser, but before you slam your head through your monitor or do something else drastic I suggest you hear me out. Instead I’d like to suggest the simplest way to write content that is both unique and worthy of being called king – case studies.

Why Case Studies?

In almost every niche on the web, readers can appreciate a good case study or in depth analysis on a subject because they’re designed to tell a story based on fact. They aren’t filled with regurgitated ideas based on someone’s feelings about a topic (like most of the blogs that clutter the web). Instead, case studies are a factual representation of a real life event.

On my own blog, for example, I wrote a post about earning $41,438.42 with Amazon Associates. Sure enough, that blog post has been one of the most popular posts every month because it’s based on data I collected over an entire year of trying various ideas to make the most money on Amazon. This is the same reason why I enjoy reading Pat’s blog. Most of his posts are based on actual experience that document how he earns an income online or teach lessons based on experience like how to earn money creating iPhone apps, for example.

Case studies can be very interesting and eye opening for readers because you can share information in a way so that people learn a lot about a topic they knew nothing about or were unable to find enough information on elsewhere around the web. The fact that you’re sharing a case study based on your own real life experiences already makes it a story they can’t get anywhere else and they can also do wonders for your credibility. If you claim you’re a Social Media Guru (just saying that makes me want to throw up) then show me who you are. What specifically have you done for your blog or a client that improved their ROI, number of Facebook fans Likes, Twitter followers etc., and how did you do it?

If you spend some time putting together a unique story based on facts from your own personal experiences, you’ll reap the benefits of grateful readers and improved credibility.

Chris is the owner of Make Money on the Internet where he shares the successes and failures that come from being a full time internet entrepreneur.

Pat Chiming In:

Hey – this is Pat just putting in a word after Chris’ post about just how important case studies are for the success of your blog or articles. Case studies BY FAR have been the most successful types of blog posts that I’ve written here on SPI. My monthly reports, keyword research experiments and Facebook studies (just to name a few) are all top traffic and comment generating posts. And the cool thing is…they’re really easy to write, since most of the information is factual or data that you’d already have in hand.

Can you think of any case studies you can do for your blog? If you don’t have any real life events or experiments to blog about, it’s about time you make ‘em happen for yourself.

Cheers!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

The Simplest Way to Create Unique Content

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5. Content Without Design is Dumb

“Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.”

Does that phrase sound familiar to you? If it does, that’s because our grade school teachers used it over and over again to help us learn how to do math in the proper order.

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally = Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.

This is the order of operations. It’s important because it helps us solve our math problems correctly. If you have an equation such as this…

[(2 + 3)^2] – [(6*5-3) / 9] = X

…using the order of operations makes it relatively simple to find that X = 22. Without any particular order, we would never find the correct answer, and the world would end.

For those of us in the online business and blogging world, there’s a specific order of operations that we must follow too. If we don’t, it will be much more difficult to reach our goals.

The Order of Operations for Online Business and Blogging is something I just came up with, but it sums up (pun intended) everything I’ve done since I started doing business online.

Here’s the mnemonic (you can make up your own, but I like this one for obvious reasons):

“In comes Dr. Flynn.”

Get it? “Incomes”?

Anyways, here is what it stands for:

In Comes Dr. Flynn = Intention, Content, Design & Follow-thru

Intention

Everything you do online must have intent. In fact, it should start with it. There must be a reason and motive behind every action you take - even all the way down to the headline that you write on your next blog post.

Without purpose or goals, there will be no passion, no excitement, and you will see no results.

Why are you doing what you’re doing?

Content

With a purpose and intention in mind, content must come next. Remember, content is King.

Your content is the information that people absorb, it’s the text that search engines find, and it’s exactly the vehicle you’re going to use to achieve your goals.

There are some debates between quality vs. quantity when it comes to your content, but really what it comes down to is how much value you’re providing to your audience. Provide tons of value and you will find success.

Design

Design matters. Whether it’s the look of your site, how people flow through it, what’s on it (or what shouldn’t be on it), it’s all important.

It’s not as important as content, but it’s the next most important thing.

You’ve heard me say this before: design without content is useless, but content without design is dumb.

The thing about design is that it can have a major impact on what you’re trying to do. Take the same content, illustrate it in two different ways, and you’ll have two different results. If that’s not a reason to make sure you optimize every single part of your website (by testing, experimenting, redesigning, etc.), then I don’t know what is.

Follow-thru

Last (but definitely not least), is your follow-thru.

If you’ve ever played golf or basketball, you know what “follow-thru” is all about. Even though it’s being applied physically in these sports, it plays the same role here in business.

For those of you who don’t quite understand, when taking a swing in golf or shooting a basketball with your wrist, it’s the follow-thru motion and action that you make after you swing or shoot that make sure you:

1. Don’t lose speed and keep accelerating.
2. Stay on target and maintain accuracy.

We should always be following through, because “just enough” isn’t good enough.

It can be really easy to stop or to give up – but that’s just like taking a golf swing and stopping the club right when you hit the ball. You’ve done a lot of work already, so you’ve got to keep going and make sure you’re doing what it takes to make sure you don’t lose speed, stay on target and maintain accuracy.

And remember, this doesn’t mean you have to work harder – it may just mean you have to work smarter.

For You

1) Do you agree with the Order of Operations for Online Business and Blogging? If not, what’s missing or how would you change it?

2) Do you have a different mnemonic? (This is just for fun).

3) Please retweet or share if you have the opportunity. Thank you! Cheers!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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The Order of Operations for Online Business and Blogging

Related posts:

1. 51 Blogging and Online Marketing Tips for the New Year
2. 10 Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW to Improve Your Online Business or Blog
3. My Top 5 Profit Leeching Online Business Mistakes
4. 5 of the Best Internet Marketing and Blogging Forums
5. Why I Closed My Service Business to Start an Internet-Based Business

If you are interested in Internet marketing, copywriting or even marketing in general, you’ve probably already heard the saying “benefits sell, features don’t”, right? It basically states that if you want to sell something, your marketing messages should focus on the benefits of your product to potential customers, and not on its features.

Not everyone understands this concept, however, and that is probably the reason why people forget to apply it to their copy or marketing material.

So let’s explain how it all works.

The main reason why features don’t sell is because customers don’t care about them. Sure, they might use a list of features to decide between two similar products, but the features per se won’t make the customer want to buy the product.

We could go a step further and say that customers don’t even care about the product itself. They don’t want to buy it because it is a cool product, because it is the latest model or anything like that. They don’t want to own it. They just want to use the product to accomplish a certain task or result. In other words, the product is not the end but the means to an end.

Theodore Levitt was a very famous professor at the Harvard Business School, and he used to summarize this concept to his classes with the following example:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

We can extrapolate this notion to as many products as we want.

People don’t want to buy web hosting, they want their websites online and accessible to web visitors.

People don’t want to buy cooking ebooks, they want to invite their friends and relatives to dinner and have a good time.

People don’t want to buy light bulbs. They want to be able to work or read at night.

That is why benefits sell and features don’t. The feature, or the product itself, is the first part of the examples we used above. The benefit is the second part.

As we mentioned before, in a sense customers don’t even want to own the product. They just want to “hire” it to accomplish a certain task or solve a certain problem. If you focus your marketing on that task or problem – instead of focusing on the product – your message will resonate very strongly in the customer’s head, and that is what will trigger the sale.

Want a practical example? Suppose that you are a bit over-weight, and that you are shopping around the web for a good weight-loss ebook. You then come across ebook A, with the following list of points describing it:

• 156 pages of pure content!
• Images and illustrations to illustrate the concepts.
• Many diets you can choose from.
• A complete list of cardio and strength exercises.

After a while you then come across ebook B, with the following list of points describing it:

• Start losing weight in the next 30 minutes!
• 20 exercises that will melt that abdominal fat away.
• Discover how to lose 4 pounds every week with proper nutrition.
• Tone your muscles while losing all that fat.

Which ebook would you be more likely to purchase? Probably the second one because its description is focused on the benefits you’ll get from it, while the first ebook focused on the features.

The next time you are writing your sales copy or working on a marketing campaign, remember to focus on the hole and not on the drill, because that is what your customers are looking for!

Daniel is the owner of Daily Blog Tips. He is also the author of the Make Money Blogging ebook, which you can download for free by signing up to his newsletter.

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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Thank you so much!

Benefits Sell, Features Don’t, And Here is Why

Related posts:

1. How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 4 – Getting Ready To Sell It Online
2. Let’s Discuss: Which of These Books Do You Think Would Sell Better?
3. How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 6 – 10 Steps to a Great Sales / Landing Page
4. How to Retain Your Subscribers Like a Pro
5. 5 Little Known Ways to Grow Your Blog

I just finished off a large Starbucks Doubleshot and have now settled into my favorite chair to share with you some of my favorite (largely untapped) traffic strategies.

These aren’t your traditional, run-of-the-mill traffic tactics that you hear all over the web… article marketing, guest blogging, forum marketing, Twitter, etc…

All of those are fine and good, but in this article, I’d like to go outside the box a bit and show you 5 little-known traffic strategies that I’ve been using to grow my blog.

So, without further ado, let’s dive in…

1. Convert Your Content into Ebooks

This one little strategy is bringing me thousands of extra visitors with very little extra work on my part.

You simply convert one of your articles (or a collection of related articles) into a PDF. You can do this for free at http://www.youconvertit.com or http://www.pdfonline.com/convert-pdf.

You then submit your newly created ebook to:

• http://www.free-ebooks.net
• http://www.getfreeebooks.com, and
• http://www.myebook.com.

There are hundreds of ebook directories online, but these are the most popular one’s that will send you 99% of your traffic.

If you’re a blogger, you could easily be driving thousands of extra visitors to your website simply by converting your existing content into ebooks.

Important Note: You MUST make sure that you have links pointing back to your blog within the report. I also highly recommend that you include a promo at the end of your report that sends people to your squeeze page where you can grow your list of subscribers.

If you have paid ebooks, you can submit them to http://e-library.net/add.html.

You can also submit your ebook to a few document sharing sites like Scribd.com, DocStoc.com, eSnips.com, Calameo.com, Issuu.com, and Yudu.com.

There are so many ways that you can re-purpose your content for extra exposure. You could easily be getting 10x more traffic from every article you write simply by reformatting it into ebooks, videos, podcasts, forum posts, etc…

2. Build Your Tribe

Social media seems to be all the rage nowadays.

However, there are very few people really teaching how to take full advantage of this worldwide phenomenon.

But as a blogger you have a very unique opportunity to create exponential growth using the power of social media. But to do that, you must first build your tribe.

With a blog you’re able to create a small cult-like community of raving fans. However, very few people are building and fostering their tribe appropriately.

Because to build a real community, you’ve got to be in the trenches… replying to every comment, engaging in every Twitter conversation that touches your sphere of influence, reading and replying to ALL of your emails, offering special chat times, and most importantly – adding value at every point of contact.

Once you have a tribal community, you will have created an invaluable asset – an ARMY of people who will comment on your posts, Tweet your content, engage in conversation, and become your very best social evangelists.

Everyone on the Web has now become a content creator or buzz facilitator using tools like email, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Wikis, and instant messaging.

It is now easier than ever to create rapid growth in your company using the buzz factor of your existing audience.

Create remarkable content and then allow your readers to promote your content for you. Your readers are now the center of any successful marketing.

3. Content Integration

I’m sure you’ve heard about the power of article marketing and guest blogging, but you can take this a step further with the use of content integration marketing.

Content integration is basically where you integrate your content into other people’s traffic funnels. So this could be blogs, membership sites, products, emails, etc…

But the one’s I’d like us to look at further are products and membership sites.

Most of you are probably very familiar with creating content for other people’s websites, but we rarely think about creating exclusive content for other people’s products or membership sites.

These are HUGE, largely untapped traffic sources.

Membership site owners are constantly looking for great content that they can put inside their member’s area. In fact, that’s one of the hardest parts of owning a membership site (continuously updating it with new content).

But it represents a huge opportunity for you to come in and provide exclusive, high-quality content in return for massive exposure to a large group of buyers.

I’ve done this myself with other Internet Marketing membership sites and it has sent me thousands of extremely high-quality visitors and hundreds of subscribers.

You can also integrate your content with other people’s products. Simply find a popular product in your market and then create some extremely high-quality complementary content that they could offer as a bonus.

This is a win-win for both of you because they get to delight their customers with even more premium content and you get exposure to a large base of buyers.

By pairing your products and content with other products within your market you are going to create an instant, perpetual flow of traffic to your website.

4. Ad Swaps

One of the biggest mistakes bloggers make is not building a list of subscribers. Bloggers could dramatically increase their income if they focused on building their list of subscribers rather than their RSS readers.

(This is Pat stepping in really quick. I just have to reiterate what Kim just said, because the list is hugely important! For those of you who do not yet have your own lists setup, you can check out my Beginner’s Guide to Starting a List Here.)

So, why is a list of subscribers so powerful? Well, essentially it allows you to create traffic on demand. With a list, you can send thousands of visitors to the page of your choice with the push of a button.

So you instantly have a built-in community of readers that will read all of your future posts, comment, tweet, and drive sales 10x higher than you would be able to produce with your blog alone.

With a mailing list, you have now built extreme leverage into your business. It doesn’t matter how Google changes their algorithm, because you’ll always have a fan base that you can tap into at will.

Plus, once you’ve built an initial “seed” list of 500-1,000 subscribers, you can then start building your list exponentially using the power of ad swaps to add hundreds of new subscribers in a single day.

Essentially, an ad swap occurs when two list owners each agree to mail their list about the OTHER person’s free offer. This is usually a free offer placed on a squeeze page in exchange for someone’s name and email address. As a result, they both add hundreds of subscribers to their lists in a single day.

Some of the best places to look for ad swap partners include:

• Matt Garrett’s Internet Marketing AdSwaps
• Warrior Joint Ventures
• Adswap Finder
• ListSwapper.com
• JV Notify Pro Joint Venture Community (You Must be Registered to View this Section)
• JvMe.com
• The IM Joint Venture Social Network

5. Bonus Strategy

Now, before I end this article (and the caffeine high wears off), I’d like to share my all-time secret traffic strategy.

You can generate all the traffic you could ever want by using this one little secret…

Are you ready?

Come a little close so I can whisper it in your ear…

*** At the end of the day, it’s really all about VALUE.

If you deliver truly remarkable content on an ongoing basis, then no one can hold you back. You’ll be surprised how quickly you start to build up a group of raving fans when you put out truly great content.

And when I say truly great content, I’m not talking about good content or even great content. I’m talking about producing remarkable content on an ongoing basis.

I need to crave your content more than I do my daily Starbucks.

It’s got to be that good.

Turn your marketing into an experience that your readers look forward to each and every day.

If you’d like to discover ALL 24 of Kim’s hidden traffic sources, go to http://www.buzzblogger.com/freetraffic to claim your FREE Underground Traffic Report.

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

5 Little Known Ways to Grow Your Blog

Related posts:

1. 7 Ways to Be Everywhere – Building a Brand Online
2. Cold Selling Sucks – 5 Ways to Build a Relationship With Your Traffic
3. Quick Ways to Utilize These 4 Non-Google Search Engines
4. How to Boost Blog and Website Traffic with Article Marketing
5. 5 Ways to Hack Giving Up

It’s seriously a jungle out there, and for newly hatched blogs, it’s even harder to survive.

But, there are a number of things you can do right away as a “hatchling” to immediately gain ground “in the wild” and transform yourself from a newbie, to what may seem like a seasoned pro.

Below is a list of things (big and small) that you can do as a newbie, so you don’t stand out as a newbie.

1. A Professional Looking Domain Name

If you haven’t built your blog yet, I recommend grabbing a domain name and hosting package from a web hosting provider such as Bluehost. You can easily build your blog with their one-click WordPress install (in less than 4 minutes), and you’ll have the benefit of having a professional looking domain name.

So, instead of having something like:

yoursite.wordpress.com or yoursite.blogspot.com

…you’ll simply have:

www.yoursite.com

The free blogs you can setup on wordpress.com and blogspot.com aren’t bad. In fact, there are many successful ones out there – but if you’re planning to be a successful long-term blogger, then you might as well start on a self-hosted site.

2. Update the Favicon For Your Website

A favicon is the little 16×16 icon that appears next to your web address at the top of most browsers, and it sometimes shows up next to the tabs or in the bookmarks section too.

A new blog usually has what looks like a blank sheet of paper, or sometimes it’s your hosting provider’s logo. Either way, it screams “Newbie” to a lot of new visitors. Spend 5 minutes to update your favicon, and it can be a small detail that makes a big impact.

To update your favicon, you’ll need to place a 16×16 pixel icon (named favicon.ico) into your website’s root folder. For WordPress users, that’s directly into your public_html folder. You can create a picture file in Photoshop and simply rename it to favicon.ico, or you can create one easily for yourself on a website such as Favicon.cc.

3. Update Your Permalink Structure

The permalink is the URL that your blog creates when you publish new blog posts. By default, they usually come out looking ugly, like this:

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/?p=123 (where p=123 simply means post #123)

Not cool, and it definitely doesn’t do any good for search engine optimization.

Before you write your first blog post, you should change the permalink settings to simply be the name of the post that you create. For WordPress users, it simply means doing exactly what the picture below shows:

Under Settings > Permalinks, click on Custom Structure, and insert the code below into the Custom Structure field:

/%postname%/

Your ugly URL problem solved, and now you look like you know what you’re doing.

4. Skip the Unnecessary Plugins and Widgets

What’s nice about WordPress is that there are tons of plugins and widgets to choose from that can do a wide variety of things for your blog, which makes customization really simple. The problem with this feature is that a lot of people tend to go overboard.

Not all plugins and widgets are useful. Be conscious about what plugins and widgets you’re placing on your site, and remember that sometimes less is more.

What good does a calendar on a blog do anyways?

5. Do Not Add an RSS Counter

New blogs should never include an RSS counter, because a counter with only 9 subscribers is basically a huge sign that says: “Hi! I’m new at this!”

Leave it out until you have over 100 subscribers (at least), and then you can incorporate it into your blog if you really want it on there. In the meantime, work on your content and making other parts of your blog awesome.

6. Add a Video To Your Blog

A quick and easy way to establish yourself as someone who knows what their doing as a blogger is by adding a video onto your blog, preferably somewhere in your sidebar.

A nicely recorded welcome message, or even a quick tip to share with new visitors can definitely make you stand out from even the more experienced blogs in your niche.

7. Format Your Blog Posts

Newbie bloggers almost always write excellent material. It’s probably because they’re super excited about starting a new blog and the possibilities of what’s ahead.

However, the format of many newbie posts always end up looking the same: a long, undivided post that resembles an essay.

In other words, the posts are lacking headings, subheadings, bold keywords, italics, lists, white space, pictures, charts, diagrams, and even links!

Take a look at some of your favorite blogs, and you can see that most are made up of several different parts, which makes it far easier to read and consume.

It might take a little practice, but if you can start off by writing blog posts with an eye-pleasing format, you’ll be far ahead in the game.

Darren from Problogger.net wrote a fantastic post about how to polish your blog posts, which I definitely recommend you read before you even begin to write your first post.

Tips From SPI Readers

I know I’ve only begun to scratch the surface about how to not blog like a total newbie, so I’m going to pass the baton to many of the SPI readers out there who do have experience with blogging, to hopefully add their own tips too. So please, feel free to leave a comment below with 1 tip that you’d give anyone who wants to start blogging tomorrow.

Cheers!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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How to Not Be a Newbie Blogger When You’re a Newbie Blogger

Related posts:

1. Three Questions Every Blogger Who Wants to Make Money Online Should Ask Themselves
2. THE Blogger’s Guide to Facebook
3. Passive Income Tools of the Trade
4. 5 Free and Random Tips for Bloggers You Probably Didn’t Know – My 100th Post!
5. Are You Optimizing Your 404 Page? Yes, Your 404 Page.

1. Re-Evaluate Your Goals

On a piece of paper (yes – paper), write down where you want your business or blog to be a year from now. Think about the following when doing so:

• Number specific items, such as:
  • earnings
  • traffic
  • sales
  • subscribers / followers
  • etc.
• Non-number specific items, such as:
  • authority
  • design
  • happiness
  • lifestyle

So often, we get stuck in the routine of just doing things, that we forget exactly why we’re do what we’re doing. Re-evaluating your goals will give you that boost of energy you need to get things done, and possibly even help you realize that you need to do things a little differently to get to where you want to go.

2. Visit Your Homepage for the “First Time”

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – first impressions are HUGELY important, especially online. You’ve got less than 10 seconds to make a new visitor decide to stick around, or else they’re going to leave.

So, what can we do?

Role play.

Pretend to be a brand new visitor to your site. Go to your homepage and run through the following questionnaire in your head:

1. What do I notice first?
2. Can I understand exactly what the site is about without scrolling or clicking anything?
3. Have I seen other sites like this before?
4. How easy is the website to navigate?
5. What seems to be missing?

By quickly answering those 5 questions, you can easily see what kinds of things need to happen to improve your website. Maybe it’s just as easy as making some fonts larger, or taking away some annoying advertisements or popups.

If you find that any of these changes will take less than 5 minutes to, do them right now. If it will take you more than 5 minutes to do something, make sure to write it down or put it on a to-do list so you can catch it later.

3. Check and Correct Crawl Errors

Using Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can see if there are any errors on your website that you can fix right now.

Step 1: Visit Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Step 2: If you haven’t already, setup a Google Account (if you have gmail, you’re good), and verify your website address. To verify, you’ll have to “add new site”, and either use a meta or html page on your server to verify your website. (They walk you though how to do this).

Step 3: After you’re all setup, click on your verified website and on the right hand side, you’ll see a section called “Crawl Errors”. What happens is Google’s bots that crawl through your website keep track of any errors that they find along the way for you, which may include broken/dead links, or links that people should have access to, but for some reason don’t. You can click on each individual error and find out exactly where it’s happening, and correct the problem right away.

4. Grade Your Website

An even more thorough way to check the health of your website is to get it graded by a site such as Website Grader. It’s free (and you don’t even have to enter your email address like they ask you to), and it spits out a nice, lengthy but easy to understand report about your website and the things you can do immediately to make it better.

For example, if your meta data or website descriptions are too long, it will tell you (and by how much). It also checks your RSS feed, social media, your image tags, and a whole bunch of other things you should have optimized on your website.

Try it out, it’s free!

5. Ask Someone a Question

No matter what level you’re at with blogging or online business, you’re always going to have questions that you’d like to have answers to. I have questions all of the time, and I’m not shy about going to someone more experienced than me for an answer. More often than not, I will hear back from them.

It’s easy, and you can do it right now. Don’t be shy. When you think about it, what’s the worst that can really happen? You won’t get a response back?

Boohoo.

6. Shoot a Video

That’s right. Turn on that camera that’s connected to your computer and shoot a video of yourself right now.

What are you going to talk about?

Anything related to your blog.

Spend 5 minutes shooting an unedited video, and upload it to YouTube. After it’s uploaded, make sure you have relevant keywords in the title and in the tags section, and make sure to write out your entire URL in the first line of the video description. Blast it to all of your social media buddies without a thought.

In Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Workweek, he likes to give us exercises that we can do that help us step out of our comfort zones. This needs to happen every so often in order to make real progress and take bold actions.

For example, one of his exercises is just to lay down, flat on the ground in a public place, and look straight into the air. It might sound weird, but if you can do that, just imagine what you can do in front of a crowd when you’re talking about something you love and are passionate about.

Shooting a video on a whim like this will help you learn how to step out of your comfort zone, and it’s good practice for public speaking.

7. Spend 5 Minutes to Thank 5 Of Your Customers, Subscribers or Readers

Going the extra mile to just say thanks to someone for no particular reason can make someone’s day. Not only will those 5 people remember who you are just a little bit more, but you’ll never know, one of them may come back and repay you somehow later in the future, just for being extra nice.

Like in happy, successful relationships, it’s the small little, unplanned gestures that make the relationships really special.

(cheesy, I know…)

8. Test Something

You should always be testing something on your website or blog.

Always.

Using Google Optimizer, split test something important on your page and wait to see the results. Even if you’re not selling anything, you can still test conversion rates for subscribership, email opt-ins, and even click-through rates for various links on your site.

If you don’t know about Google Optimizer or exactly how to use it, you can read more about it here at How to Run Free Split Tests Using Google Optimizer (this was a blog post I wrote in 2008, but it’s still good!).

9. Turn Off the Distractions

Distractions are all around us (especially those of us who blog and work from home), trying to stop us from progressing and getting things done.

First, understand what those distractions are. Secondly, conciously make an effort to turn them off, and only turn them back on once you accomplish something and reach a particular goal or finish something that you meant to finish.

For me, I specially have to turn off my Twitter client, as well as my Mail program, so I don’t get notified of a message in the middle of doing something. Also, I put my phone on silent, and sometimes work in full screen so I’m not tempted to click on certain icons.

In the same sense, I consciously think about what’s helping me progress, and what is not. Sometimes, what I think is helping me isn’t doing much for me at all. I take the 80/20 rule, figure out what that 20% is that’s making a difference in my business, and I work on that.

As a great internet marketer once said, “You gotta starve the horses, and feed the stallions.”

10. Follow Up With Your Audience

Whether you have an online business selling some kind of product, or just a regular ol’ blog, you can always benefit by asking your customers or readers what they would like to see improved.

Seriously, if you ask, they will tell you.

Send an email to your previous customers (you’re keeping track of their email addresses, right?), or your email list (you have an email list, right?), or even write a blog post asking for suggestions on how to make their experience a little better. Remember, it’s all about your audience’s experience, not your own.

This is how I finally ended up with a website design for this blog that I love. I went through a previous redesign, asked what people thought, and I got great feedback from you, which is all that really matters.

With my LEED customers, I usually send an email every two months asking my existing customers how their studying was going, and if there was anything I could do to improve my study guide.

Not only will this help you figure out what you can do to improve your business or blog, but it will show everything that you care enough about them to ask.

So there you have it. 10 things you can do right now for your online business or blog. If you’d like to help me out, please feel free to leave a comment, or retweet this post on Twitter.

Thanks for your support, and wishing you all the best!

Cheers!

p.s. Here’s to my son’s 2 month old birthday!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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Thank you so much!

10 Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW to Improve Your Online Business or Blog

Related posts:

1. My Top 5 Profit Leeching Online Business Mistakes
2. The Order of Operations for Online Business and Blogging
3. How to Create an Online Class On Your Blog – Part 1
4. Why I Closed My Service Business to Start an Internet-Based Business
5. Cool Things We Can Learn About Internet Business From Analytics

Well – technically I never really left, but I have been moving into a new house for the past couple of weeks, and it really does take a toll on productivity. Even without a 9 to 5 job, I felt like all I was doing and all I could think about was moving and painting.

So now, as I write my first blog post from the new office in my new pad, I’m happy to say that I’m ready to crank out some more useful content for you.

The following is my checklist for evaluating a good domain name. If you’re a beginner, I recommend using this as you begin the process of selecting a domain name for your blog or business. If you already have an established website, run through the checklist and see how your domain name does, and be sure to keep these in mind for any future projects.

1. Self-Hosted

First and foremost, although it’s not directly related to the domain name itself, your website should be self-hosted.

As you may already know, there are two types of websites: hosted and self-hosted.

With a hosted website, such as ones running free from WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org, where you can download WordPress for your self-hosted site) or Blogger.com, your running on another company’s server and using their storage for your content. Although there are some benefits to starting your work online on a hosted website (i.e. it’s free), I always recommend starting a self-hosted website instead.

Here’s why:

• The Domain Name: In most cases, with a hosted website, you’re going to have the hosting company’s name in your domain name. For example, if this blog was hosted on blogger.com, it would be: smartpassiveincome.blogspot.com. To me, it’s far less professional looking, especially if you want to establish yourself as an authority in a niche. Additionally, “word of mouth” becomes less convenient too.
• Maximum Control: Many of the free hosting services limit what you can do with your site, especially with the design – and that makes sense. If the company’s name is in the domain name, they’re going to want to control what can and cannot be done. With a self-hosted website, what you do to your website is limited only by your imagination.
• It’s YOUR Content: What scares me the most about hosted websites is what would happen if WordPress.com or Blogger.com were to get bought out and shut down, or simply just stopped working. Your content would be gone. Although the content is always yours, it really isn’t yours unless it’s on your own self-hosted site.

I always use the domain and hosting services from Bluehost.com. They are the recommended host by WordPress.org and they have a one-click WordPress blog install, which is what attracted me to them in the first place.

If you’re still uneasy about starting a WordPress blog, it’s not very difficult. You should check out this video where I walk you through how to start a blog, write your first post and insert a picture, in less than 4 minutes.

If you already have a hosted blog on another website, that’s okay. You can still migrate to a self-hosted site without losing all of your content. There are articles online about how to do this, but if I were you’d I’d save myself the trouble and pay someone to do it for me for a small fee.

2. Keywords

Your domain name doesn’t have to have keywords in it to be successful, but it sure does help.

Primarily, the keywords help the search engines rank your website for relevance to a particular topic, and of course it also helps when people are searching for the same terms online.

As you can see in the screenshot from the keyword tool I use, Market Samurai, it shows that the keyword in the URL is indeed a factor in determining search engine page rankings:

How you integrate the keywords into your domain name is up to you, but there are a few things to think about:

1. For some long-tail keywords related to your niche, it might sound weird to have the entire keyword phrase as your domain. A blog about fly fishing in North America at flyfishinginnorthamerica.com doesn’t have that “branded” feel to it.
2. Don’t just tack on a target keyphrase unless it makes sense. Smartpassiveincome.com makes sense. Makemoneyonlinepassiveincome.com does not.
3. Don’t fuss too long about the keywords if you can’t seem to find the right ones, or all of the good domains are taken. There are millions of examples of successful websites that do not have the keyword in the home url. Remember, when you write a blog post or create a new page, you can incorporate the keywords into the url then as well.

3. No Numbers

I would do my best to avoid using any numbers in your domain name.

Why?

Because when you say a number, you don’t know if it’s supposed to be written numerically (5), or spelled out (five). If your website goes huge and you happen to land an interview on the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien Show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, you wouldn’t want to give anyone the chance of misspelling the domain.

Here are some hypothetical examples for the number 105:

• onehundredfive.com
• 100five.com
• 105.com
• 1hundred5.com
• onehundredand5.com
• one-hundred5.com
• and so on and so forth…

Yes, you could always just clarify it each time you say it, but let me tell you from experience (since my personal email has a number in it) – it gets really annoying.

Again, if you already have a number in your domain name, don’t fret. If you do go big, you may want to think about grabbing all of the different spelling combinations before someone else does and tries to capitalize on your success.

4. No Confusing or Easily Misspelled Words

Along the same lines as “no numbers”, you shouldn’t have any confusing words or words that could be easily misspelled.

We have the usual suspects, such as their vs. there vs. they’re. But we also have a number of people trying to be “cute” while only making things harder for them. I think this comes from the younger generation who is into texting and instant messaging and those kinds of things.

For example, they’ll write “qt” instead of “cutie”.

Try to explain to someone that your website is at qtbakery.com, and you may end up offending that person when you do that thing where you talk extra long and slow to emphasize something:

“I’m at qtbakery dot com”

“CutieBakery dot com?”

“No, Q………..T……….Bakery dot com!”

“That’s what I just said!”

“…What?”

5. No Trademarks

When I started my LEED exam prep website, it was actually first at intheleed.com before I switched it to GreenExamAcademy.com. The reason for the switch?

I was using a registered trademark (LEED) in my domain.

I started that blog without the intention of ever making money from it. If I knew any better, I probably would have done more research about the domain name I chose, but I was sure it was okay because there are a ton of other websites out there that used registered marks in the domain name, right?

The truth is, if you have a trademark in your domain name,  you’re putting yourself and your site at risk. Those other sites that have trademarks are just lucky that the company who registered the trademark either doesn’t care, or has yet to notice.

For a good year and a half, I was using a trademark in my domain and everything was fine, until one day I received a Cease and Desist Letter which basically said “Stop or Else”.

There were arguments in my favor for keeping the domain, such as the fair use doctrine and prior court cases, and I did hire a lawyer to help me out, but it’s such a gray area and really when it comes down to it, these companies have so much more money and manpower than I do, and it’s just not worth the time and effort it would take to fight it.

So, I dumped intheleed.com, took on greenexamacademy.com, and with the help of a temporary 301 redirect, I was still able to keep all of my “Google SEO Juice” and keyword rankings. All is well, but I did go through a lot of stress.

Save yourself the trouble and stay away from trademarks in your domain name. You can check to see if certain words or phrases are trademarked at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Again, if you have a website already and you break some of these “rules”, don’t worry about it too much. You probably have already been somewhat successful with what you already have, so keep at it and don’t give up.

Thanks again for your support. Happy Monday!

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A Checklist for Evaluating a Worthy Domain Name

Related posts:

1. The “How to Tell if Your Ideas are Good for Online Passive Income” Checklist
2. The Blog Post Checklist: After You Publish Your Post
3. A Step By Step Plan To Rank Higher in the Search Engines
4. How to Not Be a Newbie Blogger When You’re a Newbie Blogger
5. Mastering Keyword Research and SEO Competition

This is, obviously, something that I’ve come up with for my own blog that may not be suitable for all bloggers. But – as always, I’m happy to share with you the tips, tricks and techniques that I use that have helped me achieve some success. As you read through this, you may want to think about how to adapt a similar approach to what you publish on your blog.

Types of Posts

Before I write a new post, I choose from a variety of post types that all serve a different purpose for this blog. Here’s my list, which I’ll expand upon later in this post:

• How-To / Instructional
• Reports / Case Studies
• Analytical / Rational
• Psychological / Theoretical
• News / Updates
• Ask the Readers
• Linkage
• Personal

The purpose of doing this is to keep my posts fresh and new, as well as to cater to most types of people.

For example, many of you are probably “left-brainers”, which means you’re more of an analytical, rational and numbers type person. As a left-brainer, you probably enjoy my reports and analytical posts more than anything else. For you “right-brainers”, who are generally more subjective with holistic thoughts and creativity, you probably enjoy my psychological / theoretical type posts more.

I guarantee that if all I did was talk about numbers and statistics all day, that I wouldn’t have as many followers and loyal readers as I do. And on the flip side, if all I did was talk about internet marketing theory and creative marketing strategies, I wouldn’t have as many followers and loyal readers as I do today as well. The nice thing is that the types of articles that I write for both sides of the brain can compliment each other very well.

So, when I decide what my next blog post will be, this list is what I turn to first. If I’ve recently written one specific type of post, I normally don’t write the same type again until a few posts later.

Lastly, besides my monthly report, which is typically published on the first Monday of each new month (which I’ll go into why later), I don’t have a hard core calendar that tells me when I’m supposed to write a specific type. I just let it happen naturally, although I do use this list as a guideline.

I do believe in structure, but I also believe in room for flexibility and creativity.

The Post Type Breakdown

As I previously mentioned, each post type serves a different purpose, which goes beyond the whole left-brain / right-brain stuff. Here’s what I mean:

How-To / Instructional

Everyone loves how-to stuff. It’s a format that’s easy to understand, and even easier to write. That’s why sites like eHow.com have taken off, although some may say that eHow is in for a rough landing, but that’s a whole different story.

So, I always make sure to include some type of how-to or instructional blog post that is useful for people. Here are a few examples:

• How to REALLY Profit From Your Blog
• How to Get 25 Hours in a Day
• How to Test Your Online Product Before it’s Even Made
• How to Get the Most Out of Your Custom Website or Blog Designer
• THE Blogger’s Guide to Facebook

Reports / Case Studies

As they say, you can’t “talk the talk”, unless you “walk the walk.” The primary purpose of these types of posts are to show results.

Yes – they are partly used as a means of validation. I’m honest and I’ll admit that. But additionally, I think it’s important (and useful) to show results with some explanation about how to achieve those results as well, which is what I always include in my reports. If you just show the numbers and don’t teach anything, you’ll just come across as being cocky.

Here are a number of my case studies and reports:

• My Monthly Income Reports (page)
• An In-Depth Traffic Stats and Analysis Report
• Keyword Search Engine Position Experiment – Week 1
• eHow Income Reports (page)
• BabyMaker iPhone Application – One Week Later

Analytical / Rational

These posts are about the facts, and using those facts and logic to draw some sort of conclusion about something.

The cool thing is that you can’t deny facts, so no matter what level you’re at (even a beginner with no experience) you can benefit from writing these types of posts because you don’t have to be an expert, and they can be extremely persuasive.

Even though these posts consist of things that people may already know about, if you can reformat it in a way that’s intriguing and interesting, you’ll make a big impact. It’s kind of like why some of the funniest comedy bits are from comedians who just cleverly restate what we already know.

Here are some examples of some analytical posts that I have written in the past:

• The Path to an Audi R8 (Or Anything Else You Want)
• 3 Types of Affiliate Marketing and the One I Profit From
• 6,795,850,072 Reasons Why You Can Make a Successful Living Online
• Passive Income Streams 101
• The Triple Threat of Products You Can Easily Create

Psychological / Theoretical

These kinds of posts, the ones that you read where the author begins to speculate about why things are the way they are, or why you should be doing one thing over another, can be very, very powerful. However, if your readers don’t see you in the right mind, what you write can just be rubbed off and not taken that seriously.

You have to have some kind of authority or leadership in a niche in order to begin theorizing about it. Until you have that authority, you’re not teaching anything. Instead, you’re basically just stating your opinion.

Here are a few of my own:

• The Obvious Part of Online Marketing That Most People are Missing
• Pat’s Three Laws of Business and Success: Law #1
• The One Thing You Absolutely Need if You Want to Succeed Online

News / Updates

It’s nice to step away from all that you’ve been teaching for a while to keep your audience updated on any plans or special announcements that may effect them. I’d advise to keep these kinds of posts to a minimum because they are not “evergreen”, meaning – after a certain point, they are pretty much useless.

For example, a post about how I plan to redesign my blog becomes useless after the blog has been redesigned. That is, unless I were to somehow incorporate some lesson or some kind of timeless information that could help people as they redesigned their blogs too, which I always try to do.

Ask the Readers

I love these kinds of posts because they get people involved – which is vital for the growth and expansion of a blog.

Also, an “Ask the Readers” type post is great to publish when you don’t have enough time to write a killer post, and want to stay on schedule. You can get your readers involved and pretty much create the content on their own through the comments, which is awesome.

Here are some examples of times when I’ve asked you for your opinion:

• How Will You Know When You’ve Reached Financial Success?
• Let’s Discuss: Which of These Books Do You Think Would Sell Better?
• What Are Your Un-Goals for 2010?
• Help Me Name my eBook…
• Ask The Readers: How to Motivate the Unmotivated?

Linkage

Every once and a while, I’ll write a post that specifically lists or mentions a number of links that either regurgitate some of my older articles, or highlights some of the better posts around the blogosphere that I’ve been reading.

No matter the age of your blog is, it’s great to resurface some of your older blog posts because you’re always going to have new readers who probably have yet to dive into your archives. Also, it can also be a great “filler” post that you can quickly write if you’re shot for time or can’t think of anything to write about.

One tip is to not just list these posts, but somehow present them in a way that’s useful for your readers. This post that you’re reading now is an example of that, if you haven’t noticed already.

Personal

Lastly, but definitely not least, we have personal posts. These are posts that I write that have nothing to do with what my blog is about. It’s all about me, my family, and what I’ve been up to.

You may be thinking, “Pat – why waste precious space on your blog for stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with internet marketing, blogging, or making money online?”

I hope you already know what the answer is…

The reason is because in order to really engage your audience, especially nowadays with an internet that is constantly being filled with tons and tons of similar looking websites and blogs all talking about the same exact topic, you’re going to have to throw a little bit of your personality into it.

No one in this entire world is like you. Put yourself into your blog, and it truly becomes unique – something that people can easily relate to.

This is why I’m a big advocate for throwing in pictures of yourself and talking about what’s happening in your life every once and a while.

As I’m sure many of you know, I have a dog named Gizmo, and I just had a son named Keoni. And I’m sure some of you have also seen the wedding video of my wife and I, busting out a hip hop routine in the middle of our first dance. I wrote specific blog posts about each of those things. Did it hurt my blog?

Absolutely not.

If anything, they helped me connect with a lot of you in ways that no internet marketing or blogging information could.

• Random Fun Post of the Weekend – Gizmo!
• Gone Fishin’
• I’m Going to Be a Daddy
• It’s a Boy!
• The Best Christmas Gift Ever – Our Son

Of course, some posts that I write can be put into two or more of these categories, but again – I try to mix things up to keep things fresh for everyone.

When I Post

Some of these posts have a bigger impact than others (by impact, I mean a greater response and higher traffic value). Therefore, I try to maximize their use by consciously making an effort to publish on appropriate days.

Mondays, for example, are my most active day. It’s the day of the week that I have the most traffic, both from new and old visitors. Because of this, I typically save my “best” articles for Monday. These are usually my How-To and Report type posts.

Friday, the last day of the week that I publish a post, is reserved for more of the “non-impact” type blog posts: news/updates, ask the reader, linkage, and personal. Again, this isn’t always the case, because I may find some inspiration during the week to write an article that I want to share with you right away.

So, whatever days you publish, give an extra second to yourself to not only think about the type of article you’re writing, but also what day it’s being published as well.

Thanks!

So – that’s a detailed, insider view of my blogging strategy. It may not be the best, but it’s definitely working for me – so feel free to jack any part of it that you wish for your own strategy. If any of you other bloggers out there have anything to add, or would like to share your own strategy, please feel free to leave a comment below!

Have a great week! Cheers!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

Different Posts for Different Folks – Beyond Just Being Consistent

Related posts:

1. Ask the Readers: How to Motivate the Unmotivated
2. Hidden Gems at Problogger.net – Launching the 31 DBBB Ebook
3. The Blog Post Checklist: After You Publish Your Post
4. Affiliate Links – To Hide or Not to Hide – What’s Your Opinion?

After I hit the 100 comment mark earlier today, I had received no less than a dozen emails from some of you asking me exactly how I get so many people to comment on my posts. Part of the reason is because my community of readers are AWESOME, but also because of certain strategies that I use, which I coincidentally recorded a YouTube video about earlier this week.

Please feel free to watch Tricks to Get More Comments on Your Blog on YouTube (opens a new window):

What Else Can You Do To Get More Comments?

What other strategies or tactics have you used or heard of to get more people readers involved and commenting?

Thanks, and have a great weekend!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

Tricks to Get More Comments On Your Blog

Related posts:

1. YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 3
2. YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 2
3. YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 1
4. The Smart Passive Income Blog Makeover and eBook!
5. The End of a Blog Post is Just the Beginning

I was excited, not only because we were having sushi, but because I love helping people, especially those who I can tell have that drive and passion to succeed. Many people ask me about what I do online, but only a handful actually ask me how to setup an LLC or use Google Optimizer to increase conversion rates.

At lunch, after some catching up and small chit-chat, I finally asked him, “So what’s this business idea of yours?”

Here’s the rest of our conversation:

Friend: I want to start a blog about X.

(X is “code” for his niche of interest)

Me: Sweet. Go on…

Friend: I want to start a blog about X because I’m already considered an expert at it. People come to me for advice all of the time, it’s something I’m totally passionate about, and I can see myself doing this full-time for years down the road.

Me: Nice. Those are all important things to consider when choosing to decide what niche you want to get into.

Friend: Right? So what do you think? Do you think it can work?

Me: So you want to start a blog?

Friend: Yeah. Why, what’s wrong with that?

Me: Nothing is wrong with starting a blog, but what’s the business? How will you make money?

Friend: Well, I thought the blog was the business. Don’t you have blogs that you make money from? I could advertise on it. Then maybe I could start other websites and make money from those too from advertising. How about that?

Me: You can make money from advertising – yes, but think about it. When you advertise, you’re the middle man. Would you rather be the middle man, or would you rather be the man?

Friend: [head nod]

Me: Okay then. So, my question to you is this: after you start this blog, how will you make money? How will this blog turn into a business?

Friend: Um…

Me: What comes next? What comes after the blog?

We actually ended up talking for a couple more hours, mostly about how one can use a blog as a launching pad for a business. I’m happy to share what we talked about with you.

Turning a Blog into a Business

If you’re at all familiar with how I got to this point in life, you know that when I started my exam prep blog, I had no intention of making money from it whatsoever. It was only after I got laid off that I eventually started to monetize it and mold it into a real internet business.

And even then, I started monetizing it by utilizing Google Adsense, which eventually led to selling advertising space on my blog. At this point, could you call my blog a business?

Maybe.

I was directly dealing with third-party companies to fill those advertising spots. I was, in fact, “conducting business” – but I wasn’t seeing the kind of income I really wanted (and needed) at the time. Not even close.

It was only after following the example of some of my favorite bloggers (like Darren and Yaro), and some excellent advice from the Internet Business Mastery Academy that I knew I had to do something more than just blog to make some real profits. Soon after, I formed my LLC and leveraged the authority and trust I had earned on my blog to launch a profitable internet business.

It’s my belief that anyone with a blog, passion, and a good work ethic can do the same thing.

So, as my friend and I sat there eating our spicy tuna rolls, we discussed how we could possibly take his idea of “just a blog”, and turn it into some kind of profitable business. Here’s what we came up with:

Write an eBook

This is the most logical step for many of us “just bloggers” out there. We already write on a blog, so it’s not all that difficult for us to write an eBook too.

In many cases, we can simply reformat what we’ve already written on the blog and turn that into an eBook. Even though our readers could get most of the same information for free, if you’ve established yourself an an authority, people will gladly pay you for a neatly organized and formatted eBook.

Here are some other examples of bloggers utilizing an eBook in their business repertoire:

• Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog
• Glen Allsopp’s Cloud Living
• Cookbooks on Cooking During Stolen Moments
• David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating eBook
• Leo Babauta’s Zen to Done

If you’re interested in writing an eBook, please check out my comprehensive free eBook guide.

Oh, and don’t forget about the audio guides and videos you could add to your product line.

Write a Book Book

Maybe you’re not an eBook kind of person, and that’s okay. Many bloggers use their blog as a stepping stone to get an actual printed book published.

This is something I would love to do someday. I would love to take my son into Barnes & Nobles or Borders, point to a book on the shelf and say, “Look son! I wrote this book.”

Someday.

Anyways, it takes a lot longer to build your reputation as a blogger to have the ability to write and publish an actual printed book (not including those who self-publish via sites like LuLu.com), but doing so can definitely skyrocket ones authority in a niche and income potential as well.

Here are some examples of bloggers who have gone to the next level and have published an actual printed book:

• Ramit Sethi’s book I Will Teach You to Be Rich, from IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com.
• Darren Rowse’s book Problogger: Secrets For Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, from ProBlogger.net
• Leo Babauta’s book The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limited Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life, from ZenHabits.net
• J.D. Roth’s book Your Money: The Missing Manual, from GetRichSlowly.com (Feb. 18th)

All of these guys were at one point “just bloggers”, and now they’re authors (or in J.D.’s case, a soon to be author – congrats man!).

Why can’t we do the same?

Start a Membership Website

A membership website is probably the most attractive business model for most bloggers who don’t want to be “just bloggers” anymore. Usually, these membership websites have either premium content or exclusive content that cannot be found on the blog and require a recurring payment to access. Here’s what really makes membership websites attractive:

Let’s say we set up our own membership website and charge a $20 monthly fee (which is relatively low, but a nice round number I can use to prove my point).

In the first month, we sell 50 memberships. That’s $1000.

In the second month, we sell another 50 memberships. That’s $1000, plus another $1000 from the 50 members from the first month. That’s $2000 total in the second month.

In the third month, we sell 100 new memberships. Now we have 200 total members, which is $4000. And so on and so forth…

Obviously, people drop out and don’t stay members forever, but still – profits can add up quickly. Setup your membership site once, and just reap the benefits month after month.

Sweet.

Here are some examples of membership websites with premium content:

• Will Hamilton’s Tennis Membership Site (post from Entrepreneurs-Journey.com)
• Cici and Shaun from LearningIndonesian.com
• Darren’s Problogger Community
• Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips

Create and Sell Courses

Somewhat related to membership websites, you can create a full line of courses to help teach whatever it is you want to teach. The difference between a membership site and selling courses, is that the courses don’t necessarily have to be something that is only accessible online. Think DVD packages and audio CDs.

Here’s a great example from a site that helps people learn how to play the guitar:

• John’s Online Guitar Lessons at LearningGuitarNow.com

Become a Consultant / Start a Service

Many bloggers use their leverage in the blogosphere to actually launch their own consulting or service businesses that are related to their niche. Think about the type of businesses that a successful graphic artist and blogger could create. Or how about a social media expert, or an interior designer?

Yes, these kinds of businesses aren’t as “passive” because they require your direct services (at first), but it’s definitely a viable way to start earning a profit as a result of who you become on your blog.

Here are some examples:

• Maren Kate from Twitterpreneur.com (A Twitter PR Firm)
• Sergio from SOSFactory.com (Mascot, Logo and Web Designer)

Sell Something You Actually Make

This wasn’t an option for my buddy, but it might be for a lot of other bloggers. Maybe you knit really awesome sweaters, or build record breaking remote control cars. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to develop a following and begin to sell your creations online.

What about food? (Although – I’m sure there are some strict regulations for selling any kind of food online. Better check on that before you sell your Grandma’s cookies online.)

For you software developers and coders out there, maybe you’ve created some type of awesome software or program that does something we all wish we had the ability to do.

How about a WordPress theme?

Something Innovative That’s Never Been Done Before

When it comes to innovation and blogs, the first thing that comes to mind are Jason and Evan from iwearyourshirt.com. If you haven’t heard of them, they basically get paid to wear company t-shirts. That’s it.

Maybe you’d call it a flash in the pan, or a gimmick, but these guys are making bank. They are pretty much sold out for the year 2010 already. (Today’s date, by the way, is January 20th, 2010…for all of you future readers out there.)

Here’s their “buy your spot” page, where you can see the few spots that are left, which are going between $516 to $538 a day.

Props to Jason and Evan for their success, seriously.

After Our Lunch

At the end of our lunch, my buddy thanked me and said:

Friend: I have a lot of options.

Me: Yep! But keep that enthusiasm you have with your blog, because it can take you places.

Friend: I will. But what should I do after the blog. I mean, what’s my next step? An eBook, like you?

Me: Maybe, but I wouldn’t worry about that right now. If you go into building your blog knowing that you’re going to launch an eBook on such and such date, or start a membership website right away, you’re going to fail. Work on your blog, build it naturally with the primary purpose of helping people. If you do that, you’ll gain authority and by then you’ll know what you should do next. Keep everything we talked about in mind so you’re ready when that happens.

Friend: Cool, thanks Pat.

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

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How to REALLY Profit From Your Blog

Related posts:

1. My Top 5 Profit Leeching Online Business Mistakes
2. 3 Types of Affiliate Marketing Explained, And The One I Profit From
3. 5 Little Known Ways to Grow Your Blog
4. How to Create an Online Class On Your Blog – Part 1
5. The End of a Blog Post is Just the Beginning

Note: all screenshots taken from Google Analytics (data since October 2008 for The Smart Passive Income Blog)

Overall Traffic

Here’s a snapshot of my traffic since I started this blog:

A few important things to take away from this graph:

• You can go several months after starting a site before seeing any decent traffic. If you look at the very beginning, I had little to no traffic for 3 or 4 months before things finally started to pick up. This just reiterates the fact that you should never give up, especially when you’re just starting out. This is crucial to understand, because it’s those first few months when many potentially successful websites die. Keep at it, and you will start to see results.
• The pattern. There’s a very distinct pattern that goes like this: plateau -> spike -> higher plateau -> spike -> even higher plateau -> etc. The spikes are obviously large influxes of traffic (for various reasons which I’ll get to in a second), that cause more people to stick around later (and spread the word through social media). As you can see, the fastest way to get traffic is by getting these spikes, which can come from things like:
  • Guest posts on other blogs
  • Links posted on other websites
  • Podcasts or interviews
  • Posts on your blog that get passed around via social media or social bookmarking websites
• You Don’t NEED Search Engine Rankings to Get Traffic: Sure, ranking high in the search engines for keywords related to your niche is great. I’ve been fortunate enough to recently earn the top 3 spot for the keyword “passive income”. However, search engine traffic only accounts for 22% of my traffic! The other 78% comes from direct traffic and referring websites. So, if you’re worried about keyword rankings, don’t. Write good content that other people will link to and your loyal fans will come back to read, and your numbers will begin to rise.

For those of you interested in exactly where these larger spikes came from, here they are:

• Jan 2009: Featured on Lazy Man and Money – The Best Money Blog You Aren’t Reading
• March 2009: A post I wrote got picked up on StumbleUpon and was shared between 2,500-3,000 people – How to Make Money for Doing Almost Nothing – Part 1
• November 2009: I was featured on both a blog post and podcast on Yaro Starak’s blog at Entrepreneur’s Journey – How Pat Flynn Lost His Job Then Made $203,219.04 In His First Year Online

My goal for 2010 is to get even more “spikes” by doing more guests posts, and writing more valuable content that could possibly go viral.

Visitor Overview

The adjacent graphic shows the overall visitor stats for the blog. I don’t think there’s much to talk about here, except what some of those terms mean. What’s more important is how those terms are affected by different traffic sources, which I’ll talk about in the next section.

• Visits: This is the number of times your site has been visited, both by unique and returning visitors. Multiple page views per visit do not count as a new visit.
• Absolute Unique Visitors: This is exactly how many different people have actually visited your site. It’s important to look at the AUV because it will tell you how many NEW people stop by, which is significant if you’re looking for new readership, subscribers or customers.
• Pageviews: Obviously, this is how many pages of your site have been viewed.
• Average Pageviews: The average number of pages a visitor views upon each time they visit.
• Time on Site: The average time a visitor spends on your site.
• Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of new visitors who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on other pages within the same site.
• New Visits: The percentage of your web traffic that is from new visitors.

The only metric that we want to keep as low as possible is the bounce rate, because we’d rather have people explore through our sites, rather than just leave or “bounce”, as they say in Ebonics. I honestly don’t know what a good bounce rate is, but I’m always striving to minimize the number.

Here are three things we can do to minimize the bounce rate:

1. Make the first impression of your site one that is inviting and welcoming. If your site is 98% advertisements, for example, you will probably see a very high bounce rate.
2. Provide content that people are looking for or is interesting and relevant to your visitors.
3. Make navigation easy. If it takes people more than 5 seconds to figure out how to move around your site, they’re just going to leave.

Traffic Sources

Here’s an overview of my 10 top traffic sources. I’ll go into more detail about some of these below, but I’ve highlighted some key things you should definitely take notice of:

Facebook

Facebook, as I’ve mentioned before in THE Blogger’s Guide to Facebook, is a very unique medium for traffic. Beyond the actual interactions you can have with your audience on your fanpage (which is amazing and unlike anything else, including Twitter), the traffic tends to be stickier and more loyal. As you can see, my referrals from Facebook provide the second highest avg. time on the site, and a bounce rate that is lower than all of the other sources, excluding direct page referrals.

If you have yet to setup your own Fanpage, you should definitely consider doing so.

StumbleUpon

I sort of have a love/hate relationship with StumbleUpon. As you can see from the numbers above, StumbleUpon is the 3rd top traffic source, but the quality of the traffic is very poor. It has the lowest number of pageviews, avg. time on site, and the highest bounce rate (at 82%)!

When you think about it, it makes total sense. With the way StumbleUpon works, your site can go through a vast number of people in a short period of time because of all of the friends of friends of friends involved with this social bookmarking site. The people who were the ones to bookmark your page may be very interested in what you have to say, but their friends and those people’s friends are probably not.

Google

Search engine traffic always brings in quality visitors because they are people who found you when searching for certain kind of information. That’s why you see that it has the second highest avg. page views per visitor. They are actively looking around for information.

Remember when I was talking about strategies to minimize bounce rate? You can see an example here of what happens when people come to your site and you don’t provide them the information they are looking for. For the keyword iphone app development cost, it has a 72% bounce rate, which is definitely above average on this blog.

Direct Referrals

The other red circles on the above traffic overview illustrate exactly the kinds of high-quality traffic you can get from other blogs. Higher page views, more avg. time on the site, and a lower bounce rates all contribute to the “higher plateaus” that I pointed out in the beginning of this post.

People coming from Yaro’s blog at Entrepreneur’s Journey, for example, spend an average of 7 minutes and 18 seconds on my blog for each visit! That’s a lot of time that people take out of their own day to read what I have to say. Craziness!

Summary

I hope you can see that not all traffic is the same. Let me repeat that. Not all traffic is the same.

Focus on getting that higher quality traffic and you’re sure to see better numbers down the road. This is why writing guest posts is such a popular and powerful thing to do for the growth and expansion of one’s blog. Do you have a guest post writing campaign?

Lastly, don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results right away. Like I said before, it takes time to see results, but the work you’re doing now and putting into your blog will eventually pay off down the road.

One post at a time.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my first traffic report! As always, comments are welcome and encouraged. Cheers!

p.s. If you really enjoyed this post, please consider helping me out and spreading the word below! Thanks!

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An In-Depth Traffic Stats and Analysis Report

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2. The #1 Way To Increase Traffic then Income – Be Nice
3. Discover How Facebook Can Snowball Traffic to Your Website
4. How to Get Explosive & Targeted Traffic – An Alternative to Guest Posting
5. A WordPress Plugin For Instant Traffic in 5 Minutes

What I mean by this statement is that a lot of a blog’s success is not only determined by what you write, but what some of your readers do after they finish reading what you write.

Blog readers are divided into two groups: those who just read, and those who read and take action. One isn’t better than the other (since our primary goal is to reach and teach as many people as possible), but it’s obvious which group of people help to accelerate a blog’s success.

So how do we convert the “just readers” to become those who take action? We don’t.

Why?

Because what people do online usually reflects their personality, and we aren’t here to change people’s personalities for the sake of our online success.

So what can we do? How can we accel?

We can cater to those who do take action.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to determine if you’re catering to those who take action, which in turn optimizes the performance and growth of your blog:

• Are you writing content that’s worth sharing with others?
• How are you encouraging commenting on your blog?
• Are you making it easy for people to bookmark your post on social bookmarking websites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon, and Delicious, or share on Twitter and/or Facebook?
• Are you making it worth their while to do more than just read?
• Have you tried asking?

I’ve pondered these thoughts much as of late. This is what led me to redesigning the area after a blog post here on the Smart Passive Income Blog, which I’m actually quite proud of. It’s what I like to call the “take action area”.

Major props goes out to Brady and Brody over at BlazerSix for their wonderful web design work.

Have a great weekend! Cheers!

p.s. Thanks for all of the awesome comments about my eBook guide! I just released a printer-friendly black and white version for easy printing, so you don’t waste your ink. If you haven’t gotten my eBook guide yet, just enter your name and email below to get it for free! Killer content coming in the newsletter as well. Take care!

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Thank you so much!

The End of a Blog Post is Just the Beginning

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3. 5 Free and Random Tips for Bloggers You Probably Didn’t Know – My 100th Post!
4. How to REALLY Profit From Your Blog
5. Ask the Reader: Partial or Full Post in RSS Feed?

Warrior Forum

Warrior Forum claims to be the #1 Internet Marketing Forum Since 1997, and I don’t doubt that. If we take a quick look at their statistics (as of 12/23/09), we can get a feel for just how popular this forum is:

• # of Members: 166,167
• # of Threads: 112,250
• # of Posts: 1,228,715

When I just visited the forum to grab those statistics, I noticed that there were 2,330 people actively on the forum at that very moment. That’s insane! Depending on any posts that you write, the likelihood of getting a quick response is very high.

I also really appreciate the fact that there’s an entire section dedicated to mindset within the forum, entitled: Mind Warriors – Success, Power, Self-Improvement. The description of this section says it all:

This forum is dedicated to discussion on all topics related to self-improvement. This most certainly fits into a money-making forum because power, energy and creativity translates into being able to make more money.

Almost everyone I’ve seen and met from Warrior Forum is super friendly, and you can tell that they have great pride in being a part of the community. Adrian from 36pounds.com, and Howie who is actively working on his own eBook project, are very active on Warrior Forum and are some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met online.

The experience and knowledge of the members range from total beginner all the way up to expert, so where ever you’re at with your online business or blog, there will be something you can learn in the Warrior Forum.

Wicked Fire

Wicked Fire is known as one of the top Affiliate Marketing Forums on the web, so if you’re dabbling in affiliate marketing, especially in regards to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Networks, this forum is for you.

• # of Members: 55,149
• # of Threads: 79,103
• # of Posts: 693,839

Some of the people on Wicked Fire are raking in tons of money and like to share how they do it. My only caveat about this forum is that it can be rather vulgar, and if you don’t know what you’re talking about, they’ll eat you up and spit you out. If you’re a beginner interested in affiliate marketing, I’d definitely read the threads and soak in as much information as you want (which is gold), but I wouldn’t start or participate in any conversations.

I am not a member myself, but I used to read a lot of the posts on Wicked Fire back when I was actively affiliate marketing with PPC.

Self-Starters Weekly Tips

The Self-Starters Weekly Tips Forum (SSWT) is a forum administered by Lynn Terry, a 12 year internet marketing veteran and owner of Click Newz. Because this is a significantly smaller forum than the rest, I find that the advice and the attention given to each post is much more personal. Lynn herself can always been seen on the forums offering her advice as well, which is really cool.

SSWT is a great spot for beginners who may be intimidated by some of the larger sites. The close-knit community is definitely very attractive and always keeps me coming back to see what everyone is up to. Personally, I find myself giving out more advice than I am taking in, which is okay with me because I love to help other people – but if you’re looking for more advanced advice, you may want to check out Lynn’s Elite Members Forum (paid), or one of the other forums mentioned here.

Digital Point Forum

The Digital Point Forum is the latest forum I’ve become a part of and seriously – it’s HUGE. It has sections for everything about internet marketing, including:

• Search Engines: with subcategories Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Directories
• Marketing: with subcategories General Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Networks, Link Development, PPC Advertising, and Affiliate Programs
• Business: with subcategories General Business, eCommerce, Payment Processing, Legal Issues, Domain Names, Copywriting, and Buy/Sell/Trade
• Design & Development: with subcategories HTML & Website Design, Graphics and Multimedia, Content management, Programming, Site and Server Administration, and Databases
• Products & Tools

The content is great, people are quick to respond to new posts, and from what I’ve experienced in the past week I’ve been a registered user, everyone is very friendly and happy to help each other out, no matter what level you’re at. Here’s a quick glance at the forum stats:

• # of Members: 336,561
• # of Threads: 1,537,338
• # of Posts: 12,453,623

Yes – that’s A LOT of content, but imagine how much great information has been passed between people on those threads.

A couple of notable things to point out. They have a great marketplace where you can post things you want to sell, be it a website or domain name, whatever – and people are usually quick to respond with questions to learn more about your offer. Even further, if you want something designed, you can hold a contest for it and get some stuff designed for you in no time. People scour the contest sections just waiting for a chance to earn some extra cash, so take advantage of that if you want.

There is, however, a 7 day “probation period” that you must endure before you can post within certain sections (like in the marketplace and contest areas), and before you can edit your signature. I like this because it keeps the spammers away and really shows that they care about the quality of posts and people on their forum. Most of the other parts of the forum are accessible from day 1. Good deal.

Problogger.com

Problogger.com (not to be confused with Darren Rowse’s blog at Problogger.net) is a new forum that Darren just debuted in October. The cool thing about this forum is that it’s all about blogging. Here are the sections of the forum, just to give you a sneak peek:

• Blog Promotion / Finding Readers
• Making Money with Your Blog
• Writing Content
• Blog Design
• Tech Issues
• Collaboration
• Critique
• Tutorials
• General Chit Chat

In just a few months, there are over 21,500 posts, so you can imagine how active this forum is. I’ve been a member since the beginning, and the quality of information here is superb. Probably the best part about being part of the community is the ability to connect and network with other bloggers, all with the common goal of managing a successful blog.

There is, however, a subscription fee of $5.95 a month, which is totally worth it. If you really want to take your blog to the next level and join a fantastic community, it’s worth sacrificing a couple of non-fat decaf caramel white chocolate mochas a month. Wouldn’t you think?

You can find me there under the username: PatFlynn

Before You Forum Away

If you’re excited about joining one or more of these forums, excellent! Before you do that, I’d like to leave you with a few final things you should know, no matter which forum or forums you may be interested in.

1. Don’t Join Just to Promote Your Own Site. If you go into these forums and just link back to your website without providing any quality content or asking relevant questions, you’ll get kicked out. Please, don’t do that.
2. Utilize Your Signature. To promote your site, you can simply place a link within the signature portion of your profile. Your signature gets shown in every post you write, so if you interest people with what you have to say, they’ll click over to your site.
3. Read the Rules Before Posting. Each forum has their own set of rules and regulations, so take a moment to read them. They are usually posted as a “sticky post” in the very top of the forum.
4. Before you Start a New Thread, Perform a Search First. Almost every post since the beginning of a forum’s life is saved, so to not waste everyone’s time (including your own), do a quick search to see if any questions you want to post are already answered. Everyone will appreciate this.
5. Help Other People in Need. If you come across a thread or post that asks a question that you know the answer to, respond! That’s what keeps the forum alive, and remember – each time you post, your signature gets shown. If you totally blow people’s minds with your answers, other people will notice, and you’ll get some clicks to your own site.

And my final piece of advice is this: don’t get lost in the forums. In other words, these forums are great resources that you can utilize for help, and even lend a helping hand in, but it’s really easy to click from post to post and lose track of time and not actually get any work done.

Be a part of the community, but don’t forget about your primary goals!

Which Forums Are You A Part Of?

I’m interested to see which forums, if any, you a part of – even if they aren’t listed here.

Cheers everyone! Happy Holidays! Thank you for making 2009 a special year for me.

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5 of the Best Internet Marketing and Blogging Forums

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5. The Order of Operations for Online Business and Blogging

“Hi Pat. Nice to meet you!”

“Would you like to buy my eBook? It’s only $29 dollars, and I promise it will tell you everything you need to know. Hello…HELLO?!”

(insert obnoxious game show “incorrect answer” sound effect here)

Cold selling, similar to “cold calling”, is when someone tries to sell something to a prospective customer who does not know that person and was not expecting such an interaction. It does not work. You may be able to get a sale here and there, but if you want to create a successful business online, especially one that you can be proud to say you own, you cannot cold sell.

Do you like to get calls from a telemarketer? Do you like to sign up for email newsletters, only to get bombarded with emails that say “buy this” and “buy that”? Do you click links for products in tweets from people you’ve never heard of?

It might sound obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times a day I’m shown some kind of cold offer. In emails, in tweets, on websites – it’s ridiculous. Not only will cold selling leave you wondering why you don’t make any sales, but you’ll lose the respect of people who may have eventually bought something from you, and maybe even help you promote and sell more products.

So the question is, how can we as internet marketers, bloggers and entrepreneurs sell something to people online, without cold selling?

The answer: build a relationship with your traffic.

Build a relationship, and the cold selling immediately vanishes. Become their friend, and they’ll naturally be attracted to what you have to offer. The more you can interact and engage with your traffic, the better chance they’ll stick around and help you out in one way or another, whether its by tweeting your next post, linking to you on their own website, buying something from you, or becoming an affiliate.

Here are 5 easy ways you can interact and engage with your traffic so you can begin to build those important relationships:

1. Don’t Hide

You cannot build a relationship with someone if you’re not there, so why would you try and hide yourself online. As you can probably tell, I’m a big proponent of being totally honest and authentic, telling you exactly who I am and what I’m about. I think that’s partly the reason why this blog has taken off like it has.

Especially online, if you can bring out your personality in your blog posts or articles, and even show a picture here and there of your face, people will be attracted to what you have to say, and eventually what you have to offer. Seriously, what you look like doesn’t matter, so get over the fear, and put your face on your website!

When I think of my favorite websites, like Problogger, Entrepreneurs-Journey and Shoemoney, whenever I read their content, I imagine their faces – Darren, Yaro, and Jeremy, respectively. I don’t think about what they look like or if they’re attractive people, but I take in their content as if they were speaking to me, as I can imagine them doing so.

How many successful blogs do you know that don’t have some kind of face or personality connected to it?

2. Encourage Comments

Another simple way to begin to build a relationship online with someone is to actually get them to contribute something. There’s no easier way than in the comment section of your blog posts! Think about this: if people take the time to actually fill out their name, their website, email, and also a comment, that’s 2 to 4 minutes out of their day given just to you and your post. That’s huge.

Not only will people ask you questions or add to what your blog post was about, but it will encourage others to do the same. Every comment is an engagement that adds to the relationship you have with your traffic.

So, make sure you ask for comments! Encourage them! Talk about a controversial subject that can’t help but be commented about!

Does that make sense? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below

3. Respond!

Simply put, respond as much as you can. It does take work, and it does take time, but it also works wonders. Responding to people’s comments, emails and inquiries is the next best thing to actually meeting with someone and talking with them in person.

People notice when you take the time to email or respond back, especially if it’s something thoughtful and useful. They’ll remember that, so when you do tweet something, link to somewhere, or even offer a product, they will be more than likely to at least give it a good look. Most importantly, however, you won’t lose their respect, because that relationship has already been established.

4. Hook Up

When I say “hook up”, I mean become friends on social media platforms, like Twitter or Facebook. In this way, you’re in essence really becoming “friends”, not only because Facebook or Twitter tells you so, but like real-life friends, you get to know and understand things about each other that a regular person would not.

In addition, the simple act of accepting a friend request, or following someone on twitter is an engagement that consciously or subconsciously starts a relationship between the two parties.

Make sure to give people a chance to become your friend on social media platforms. Include links in blog posts (just like I did above), or in your sidebar. You are on social media platforms, aren’t you?

5. Mini-Transactions

Lastly, a great way to set yourself up for a possible consumer transaction is to have your traffic go through some kind of mini-transaction. To me, examples of mini-transactions are the following:

• Entering a name and email into an opt-in form for a newsletter
• Entering a name and email into an opt-in form for a free gift
• Answering a poll question or survey
• Performing some kind of action in order to qualify for a prize or reward in a contest

These are just a few examples, but they all go through the same process:

Thought -> Action -> Receive

These mini-transactions train the mind, so that when an offer for a paid product does come around, the thought process is one that the customer has been through before and are comfortable with. Thought -> Action -> Receive

How About You?

Based on your experience, which of these 5 strategies is the most powerful to you?

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Cold Selling Sucks – 5 Ways to Build a Relationship With Your Traffic

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2. 5 Little Known Ways to Grow Your Blog
3. 7 Ways to Be Everywhere – Building a Brand Online
4. Discover How Facebook Can Snowball Traffic to Your Website
5. The #1 Way To Increase Traffic then Income – Be Nice

In fact, when I started doing business online, I used a free wordpress theme and was still able to generate a great income from both Adsense and selling information products. So, if you’re worried about how much money it takes to get something started online, don’t – because it doesn’t cost much at all. Find a niche, get a domain and a host, and start creating content and building authority for yourself.

Free themes are great, but there two major drawbacks:

1. Their features can be very limited.
2. They are not unique.

Everyone has access to them, so it’s not very uncommon to come across a website that uses the same free themes, even in the same niche. Although content is what really matters, I have to be honest and say that if I came across two websites that had the exact same design, it would bother me. Maybe it’s just me.

Beyond the Free Theme

You may have considered using a premium theme for your website or blog.

Premium themes are great because they usually have wonderful features that you cannot find in any of the free themes. Also, depending on where you find them, premium themes usually have excellent customer support for any customizations or troubles you have while setting it up.

That being said, I personally don’t really like to use premium themes for the following reasons:

1. Although they have more, cool features, they may not be combination of features that I want or need.
2. Even though they are far more unique than free themes, they are still not totally unique. (The Thesis Theme is excellent, but I’ve stayed away from it just for this reason.)

Personally, I think a website should be designed to how you want to present your content, not the other way around, meaning – your content shouldn’t be adjusted to tailor to a certain theme just because it looks cool.

This is why I chose to eventually go with a custom design for both of my primary blogs. Not only do they have the exact features that I want, but no one else in the world has the same design.

Getting A Custom Design

If you’re thinking about a custom design…sweet! Here are some of the places I’ve used to find really good designers:

• Elance.com: On Elance, you post your job description, and like eBay, people will bid to work on your project. Depending on your project requirements, you could get numerous bids ranging anywhere between $100 and $2000. For this blog, I paid $175 – so hopefully that just shows you it doesn’t cost as much as you’d think. You’ll have to spend some time carefully selecting your designer by reviewing their previous projects, their reviews and feedback, and their portfolio. Usually, you end up finding one that has a portfolio that matches a style you like, and you can go from there. Again, the turnaround time depends on your project requirements, but for this blog, it was a little over a week.
• Odesk.com: Odesk is just like Elance, except it has the capability to make sure your designer is working on schedule and doing things that meet your requirements. Odesk will actually require the designer to upload screenshots of their work in certain time intervals, so you can sporadically check up on his/her progress and message them if something doesn’t look right, before they go further into it and waste time. Pretty cool. Again, you’ll want to do a thorough portfolio and feedback check before selecting a designer. Remember, most of the time, you get what you pay for.
• The Footer of Websites That You Like: More often than not, a webmaster will give credit to his or her designer at the bottom or footer of their website, especially if the design is good. If you find a website design you like online, you’ve already seen and have been impressed by what the designer can do, so now it’s your turn to initiate contact and hope for a response. I’d recommend selecting 3 or 4 designers in this way so you’re not waiting around for a single response that may never come, however if they are good, active designers, they should respond to you in no time. Just so you know, quotes from these types of designers are usually (but not always), more expensive.

Selecting the right designer is very important, but there are a few things you can do on your end to make sure you get exactly what you need (and pay for) from your designer, no matter who you end up selecting.

If you’re on, or planning to use WordPress as your blogging platform, make sure you mention “Custom WordPress Theme” in your inquiry.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Designer

1. Share Your Inspiration Sites

Inspiration sites are websites that you like that may have a certain style, or certain features that you’d also like to include in yours.

Of course, you should never copy someone’s logo or text verbatim, but if you really like how something works on a website that you dig, there’s no reason why you can’t do something similar. For example, I really liked how many websites began to use a “tabbed” area to organize information like “popular posts” and “recent comments”, so I asked for that in this blog. Unfortunately, I took it out in an interim redesign, but it’s coming back in soon.

On my blog at greenexamacademy.com, I have a feature that reloads a different testimonial on the homepage after every reload. I didn’t come up with this idea on my own, but it totally works for what I do here.

Realize, however, that you can’t have every feature that you like from every website, so you’re going to have to prioritize. After selecting inspirational websites that you like and prioritizing the features that you love, your designer will create a custom design for you that is totally unique and your own.

2. Draw It Out

You can talk it out as much as you’d like, but there is no better way to communicate your custom website or theme than actually sketching it out. By doing this, you’re going to eliminate most of the “is this what you mean?”, or “like this?” conversations that often lead us amateur bloggers into headaches and frustrations. You’re going to have to sketch something up front, but you’ll end up saving time and money in the end.

You don’t have to be perfect. Even just boxes with descriptions of what they represent will help. If there is something you’re not sure of that you want them to figure out on their own, point that out on your sketch too. I usually point to a section and say something similar to:

“Here, I’m not exactly sure how to organize these three parts. I’ll leave it up to you and your creativity, but just make it looks nice and congruent with how the rest of site looks.”

Here’s a sample sketch I did for the redesign of greenexamacademy.com:

and here’s the result after the redesign:

3. Ask For a “Mock-Up” Design

In each successful custom web design experience I’ve ever had, each of the designers showed me a photoshopped “mock-up” version of the website before they actually went in and hard-coded everything. I’m not quite sure if this is standard practice within the industry, but if you find a designer that you like, and they don’t mention any kind of preliminary design review or mock-up – make sure you ask for it.

Making any changes during this phase requires far less work than after everything is coded.

4. Don’t Settle

Remember, YOU are paying THEM, so you should be satisfied with your end result. If you get a design that you feel is not up to par with what you had expected, make sure you tell the designer to fix it right away.

I’ve seen so many custom designs that are sooooo close to being perfect, but just fall short on one or two things because the webmaster just expected the design to be perfect on the first try. Don’t settle, but at the same time, don’t try and get more than you negotiated for.

My Current Redesign

The redesign of the Smart Passive Income blog is soon to come, and I’ve been having a great time working with my designer, which is why I was inspired to write this post. If you’re interested in some of the things the redesign will entail, as well as some tips that might help you for your current or future websites, I invite you to watch this 7 minute video:

(if you cannot watch this video, click here to watch Is Your Website or Blog Optimized? Here Are 5 Questions You Can Ask on YouTube).

Wishing you all a fantastic week! Thanks again for your support, and if you’re new to the blog, please feel free to subscribe to get automatic updates to your favorite RSS reader.

p.s. Here’s a bonus tip. To save some money, lots of people end up buying a premium theme they like and hire a designer to customize it, instead of creating a custom site totally from scratch. If you see a premium theme you sort of like, but its missing some features you want, this may be the best way to go. Have fun!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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Thank you so much!

How to Get the Most Out of Your Custom Website or Blog Designer

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4. How Well Can You Describe Your Website in Just Three Words?
5. How to REALLY Profit From Your Blog

Last week, I initiated my keyword position experiment, implementing various strategies to rank as high as possible for the specific keyword phrase, passive income streams, which I was unranked for when this experiment began. Below is a detailed report of exactly what I did and when, and what my Google keyword position was at that time.

The experiment officially began with my blog post entitled Passive Income Streams 101, which included an embedded YouTube video, with the same title. FYI, the keyphrase passive income streams is searched for approximately 1600 times every month. Here’s the log:

Keyword Position Log for	Passive Income Streams
Tuesday, 10.20.09
3:08pm	Blog post published	n/a
3:10pm	Tweeted about the new blogpost using keyword "Passive Income Streams"	n/a
3:12pm	Posted about blog on Facebook Fan Page	n/a
6:10pm	Bookmarked on Digg	n/a
6:12pm	Bookmarked on StumbleUpon	n/a
6:14pm	Bookmarked on Delicious.com	n/a
6:20pm	Bookmarked on 25 sites via Socialmarker.com	n/a
8:15pm	Checked status: Tipd.com bookmark was #61 Blog post was #74.	74
9:45pm	Checked status	30
Wednesday, 10.21.09
12:00am	Checked status	27
1:00am	Uploaded to 5 video sites via TubeMogul.com	27
9:00am	Checked status	27
Thursday, 10.22.09
9:00am	Checked status	25
12:00pm	Wrote eHow.com Article	25
8:00pm	Checked status	25
9:00pm	Bookmarked eHow.com Article via Socialmarker	25
Friday, 10.23.09
9:00am	Checked Status	25
12:00pm	Checked Status	25
6:00pm	Checked Status	25
9:00pm	Checked Status	25
Saturday, 10.24.09
9:00am	Checked Status	15
3:00pm	Created a Squidoo Lens	15
5:00pm	Article submitted to EzineArticles.com	15
6:00pm	Article submitted to GoArticles.com	15
9:00pm	Checked Status	15
Sunday, 10.25.09
9:00am	Checked Status	9
12:00pm	Checked Status	9
7:30pm	Article submitted to ArticleAlley.com	9
11:00pm	Hub created on HubPages.com	9
Monday, 10.26.09
All day	Checked Status	9
Tuesday, 10.27.09
All day	Checked Status	9

note: my keyword position may have changed since writing this article

I reached the first page in the first week, which is great, but is somewhat expected because I ranked so high already for the keyword passive income. That being said, it was not easy. A lot of things had to happen to get there, as you can see.

Many times, I’d find myself in a plateau, but after implementing something new, I’d move up again the next couple of days. This just shows that these kinds of things do work. Here is some more detailed explanation about some of the things I did:

The Blog Post

• I included the keyword phrase, passive income streams in the title. This is a no-brainer.
• I made sure the URL also contained the keyphrase.
• I included the keyphrase in the description in the All in One SEO plugin for this post.
• I also included the keyphrase in the first sentence of the blogpost, which is also a must.
• I bolded the keywords every once and a while in the body of the blog post as well, which has been said to help in the past.
• I embedded a YouTube video, with the same title, into the blogpost. I also linked to it using the keyphrase as the anchor text.
• I also included a relative picture, which is named “passive-income-streams.jpg”

Social Networking

• I immediately Tweeted and Facebooked a link back to the blog post as soon as it was published. I made sure to put the keyphrase into my tweets and Facebook posts. If you lookup “passive income streams facebook”, and “passive income streams twitter”, my name or website shows up near the top, which means it’s doing something for it.
• Blasting it out on social media websites at least increases the visibility of your post, which gives it potential to be linked to by other people on other websites.

Social Bookmarking

• When bookmarking the blog post, I made sure to write a title, summary and tags that all contain the keyphrase.
• Bookmarking on Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious should be done manually, and very carefully. If abused, your account will be banned rather quickly. Luckily, I have a history with these websites with normal activity, so bookmarking this new blog post was not an issue.
• On other sites, I used the tool SocialMarker to make bookmarking a little easier for me. It’s not entirely automatic (like Bookmarking Demon is), but it’s a lot faster than dealing with each site individually.
• Again, this creates backlinks, as well as increases the visibility of your blog post.
• Note that you can also bookmark your YouTube video or any related articles, which will all help your campaign in one way or another.

Video Syndication

• I submitted the video to 5 video websites similar to YouTube.
• I used TubeMogul to make this process a little easier for me. It allows you to upload your videos to several video websites all at the same time. Depending on what kind of content you are uploading, you may or may not be restricted to upload to certain video sites.
• Again, I made sure to title the video passive income streams, as well as put that into the description, using html to create an anchor text with the keyphrase in it pointing back to the blog post.

Article Writing

• Article writing is different than social bookmarking because you’re actually writing new content and publishing it on another website.
• For this particular keyword, I’ve written new articles on eHow, eZineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleAlley. I do plan to do more.
• For eHow, it has to be in the form of a “how-to” article, which is why I wrote How to Create Multiple Passive Income Streams. I also included pictures with the keyword as the file name, and I social bookmarked this article like I did with my original blog post. Of course, I added links back to the blog post in the Resources section at the bottom, using the keywords as the anchor text. I even included a link to the YouTube video as well. Be careful though – if your article isn’t in a how-to format, or just seems spammy, they will not hesitate to delete it.
• For other article sites, you can write whatever you want, although you still have to provide something unique and non-spammy. I wrote a new article entitled, Passive Income Streams and The New Rich, which I’ve submitted to a number of these sites. In the “about the author” area at the bottom, I include a backlink to the original blogpost using the keyphrase as the anchor text.

Squidoo and Hubpages

• Squidoo and Hubpages are unique websites that sort of allow you to easily create a webpage from scratch. Instead of dealing with HTML and blogging platforms, you can basically drag and drop different “modules” together and customize your own page. You can also share revenue on the ads that are placed on the site as well, or donate them to charity, which is pretty cool.
• On Squidoo, I created a “lens” (their name for a page) called passive income streams, which pulls an RSS feed from this blog, includes a few of my YouTube videos, as well as other links and resources about passive income. Of course, I’ve also included backlinks to my original blog article using the keyphrase as the anchor text.
• On Hubpages, I’ve basically done the same thing, with a page I created entitled passive income streams business.

Summary

All of these techniques are great for ranking higher in the search engines because they do help in one way or another. However, they do take time. Much of this can be done by someone else, such as virtual assistant, if you have one to work with.

The nice thing is that the strategies that you implement now will forever keep working for you and your blog. It’s the perfect kind of thing for getting free traffic for any type of passive income stream you may have working for you.

After all of that, I’d love to leave you with one last piece of advice. The best thing that you can do if you want to rank higher in the search engines for a particular keyphrase (especially one that is fairly competitive) is to write a killer blogpost that provides excellent, unique content that others would be crazy NOT to link to and tweet about. If done correctly, you may not need to implement all of the strategies that I’ve outlined above. This is how I was able to make a living online and not spend a dime on advertising.

I’ll keep working at it and shooting for that #1 position, and I’ll report back with more results soon. I really hope you’ve enjoyed this post and found it useful.

Thanks, and I wish you nothing less than success. Cheers!

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Keyword Search Engine Position Experiment – One Week Report

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1. A Keyword Position and Search Engine Optimization Experiment – Day 0
2. A Step By Step Plan To Rank Higher in the Search Engines
3. Mastering Keyword Research and SEO Competition
4. My FREE SEO and Keyword Research Webinar!

…Yourself.

This is fine if you start each piece with “Dear Diary”, but in the world of internet marketing and blogging, writing to yourself can be the biggest mistake that you can make – especially if you’re spending lots of time creating information products that you eventually want to sell.

Before each blog post that I write,  I think about who will be my reader. Not readers….reader. Singular. I often choose a previous commenter, and pretend to write specifically for them.

When I created my study guide eBook, I imagined one person the entire time that I wanted to help pass the test. I even gave this person a profile, with a name, age, location, likes and dislikes. It may sound kind of weird, but it works. I receive at least 2 or 3 emails from my customers each week saying that my guide was super easy to read and understand, and they often say it’s like I was right there with them as they were studying.

Why This Works?

Writing for Joesph, a 34-year old engineer from San Francisco, who only has a couple of hours of free time each day to study, is a lot easier than writing to Mr. blank computer screen. After reading that profile, didn’t you just imagine what Joseph might look like in your head?

By imagining a specific person as “your reader”, your writing becomes clearer, the progression of what you write makes total sense, and you have a lot more feeling behind your words, which can absolutely translates to your audience.

So, Who is YOUR Reader?

If you have a blog or an online business, do yourself a favor and make up a person with a profile who is your ideal reader. This will not only help you understand who your ideal audience is, which will improve your writing, but it will also remind you of exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing.

If you’re up for sharing, leave a comment with a made up:

Name:
Age:
Occupation:
Location:
Pains:
Why He/She is Interested In What You Have To Say:

I’ll start by using my LEED exam website and study guide as an example:

Name:Joseph
Age: 34
Occupation: Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA.
Pains: Works hard at his job, but wants to climb the corporate ladder. He wants to pass the LEED exam as a way to improve his resume, but he doesn’t have much free time. He’s also struggling while looking for good, organized information about the exam.
Why He/She is Interested In What I Have to Say: I have an easy-to-use, organized resource that he can use to find all of the information he needs to pass the exam. I passed myself, so he knows I personally have experience with it.

You try =)

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

A Quick Exercise That Will Help You Write Better – You Try!

Related posts:

1. Quick Ways to Utilize These 4 Non-Google Search Engines
2. Do You Pass the Test? An Online Entrepreneur Mindset Exercise
3. The Next Best Revenue Sharing Site to Write For Is…
4. How to Determine the BEST Revenue Sharing Website to Write For
5. Smart Passive Income Podcast Survey Results and Some Quick Analysis