Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category
I know a lot of you have been asking me about Article Marketing and what exactly it can be used for. Well, since I only do minimal amounts of Article Marketing, I’ve found someone who has much more experience to write about it for you today. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below if you still have questions unanswered. Enjoy!
This is a guest post by Henri Junttila from Wake Up Cloud.
Do you want to generate more traffic to your blog or website? Do you want to increase your subscribers, sales and fans?
It can be done, but only if you’re prepared to work hard. You’ve probably heard people say that article marketing is dead. I’m here to tell you it’s not, because I’m currently using it successfully.
There will always be people that proclaim that everything’s dead. Google Adsense is dead, blogging is dead and whatever else.
These are the people that have failed and want something to blame. Increasing traffic to your blog and website is extremely simple with article marketing, so let’s get started, shall we?
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Hello. My name is Pat, and I’m addicted to watching infomercials.
Call me crazy, but I love to watch infomercials. Why? Because it’s a totally free marketing lesson that we can apply to what we do online.
If you think about it, the whole purpose of an infomercial is to get a direct response from its audience, hence the term direct response television, or DRTV for short. Isn’t that the kind of marketing you and I are interested in? Getting a direct response from our audience?
Whether you’re just a blogger, or selling multiple products online, we’re all trying to follow a similar model:
- Grab people’s attention and make them stick around.
- Connect deeply with people through their desires, emotions, wants and needs.
- Make our audience perform some kind of call-to-action (i.e. comment, opt-in, click on an affiliate link, or make a purchase).
Furthermore, the infomercials you see on television are optimized to the highest degree – they weren’t just randomly put together. In fact, they’re the result of proven formulas, months of production and a long history of sales data, all with the goal of engaging the most people and making as much money as possible.
There’s a lot we can learn from infomercials.
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No huge intro needed for this post. Here are 10 actionable items that you can do right now to improve your online business or blog:
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.
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You have the ability to create the perfect online course for your audience.
The real question is, what makes the perfect course? How do you create a product that your readers would just die to have access to?
Obviously, it would have to have information that your readers want, not what you think they want. But how do you know exactly what that is?
It should also present the information in a way that is best suited for their taste. But again, how do you know?
If only your audience could tell you exactly what they wanted. It would be as if they created the product for you. How awesome would that be?
Well, that’s exactly what you should do.
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The most powerful marketing tool is a story.
I’ve recently started to reread one of my all-time favorite books, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, and in it there’s an entire section dedicated to the power of storytelling and how it gets people to pay closer attention to what you have to say.
If you think about it, it’s absolutely true. We’re so much more in tune when someone is telling us a story, as opposed to when someone is just “talking at us”, or lecturing. All of my favorite professors from college were ones that were masters of storytelling.
Stories are powerful, and when combined with marketing, the results can be out of this world.
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Here are 51 blogging and internet marketing tips that you can use as inspiration for the upcoming year.
Mindset
1. Revisit your goals. Take a moment and rewrite your goals. You may find that they may have changed since the last time you really took a good look at them. If you don’t have any goals, than what are you working towards?
2. Remember where you were. Where was your online business or blog at one year ago? Are you seeing any improvements? If yes, be proud of how far you’ve come along and the fact that you haven’t given up. If you haven’t seen any improvements, why do you think that is?
3. You can always do a little bit more. If you’re up to it, try this 2-step exercise:
- Raise your hand as high as you can.
- Raise your hand even higher.
If you do this exercise, you’ll notice that you can always stretch your hand a little higher, even though you were told to put it as high as you can at first. When I did this exercise as a teenager, it changed how I thought about everything I did after that moment. It made me realize that I can always do a little bit more. Apply this to what you do online.
4. Take action. As I mentioned in my first law of business and success, every business in a state of motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. With that in mind, you can read and get inspired all you want, but nothing will happen unless you take action. Become the external force that is required to get your blog, business and life to exactly where you want it to be.
5. Flaunt your unique. In other words, know what makes you stand out from the crowd, and milk it. In order to succeed, especially online, you can’t blend in and just be another blog or website that talks about X. Your site can still be about X, but you should be one of the only ones that does Y, or Z.
6. No fear. Fear kills progress, and it kills business. When you’re reluctant to take an action or do something new, take a minute and think to yourself, “what’s the worst that can really happen?”. The worst usually isn’t as bad as you might think.
7. Failing is okay. We all want to succeed, but we shouldn’t ever be afraid of failing. Failing is part of the process and teaches us valuable lessons along the way. Learn from your mistakes, and improve on your next attempt.
8. Don’t work more, work smarter. When we think of putting in the extra mile to get things done, we often think that means just putting in more hours of work. Instead, think of ways that you can work smarter, which will accomplish the same (or even more), in a considerably less amount of time. It may take a small investment of time in the beginning to figure out how to work smarter, but you’ll make up for that time (and stress) soon enough.
9. Give back. I truly believe in “online karma”. The more you help others and the more you give back, the more success you will find. If your primary motivation is just to make as much money as you can and do things just for yourself, you’re only going to see a limited amount of success, if any.
10. Just freakin’ enjoy what you’re doing! If you enjoy what you’re doing, it doesn’t become work anymore. You’ll accomplish more, and be happier. If you’re not doing something you enjoy, why not?
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In my latest monthly income report, you may have noticed that my affiliate income had surpassed my direct income from the electronic products that I sell online. I received a lot of comments, asking me to explain more about where my affiliate income comes from and how it works.
Instead of just breaking down where it all came from – how much this, and how much that – I decided to turn this post into something a little bit more useful that would do more than just tell you how much I earned. Again, I’m not here to show you the money I make online, I’m here to show you how I make money online, and what I’ve learned along the way.
When thinking specifically about affiliate income, I determined that I could divide how people earn money as an affiliate into three primary categories: Unattached, Related, and Involved. I’m speaking in terms of how we are associated with the product or products we may be an affiliate for.
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When I was attending architecture school at Cal, I took a class called Environmental Design 11A: Intro To Drawing. It was four hours of class on Monday and Wednesday, and a meetup for an hour on Friday as well. The crazy part was that this didn’t include the time that was needed to complete our weekly projects. In total, I was averaging about 35 -40 hours a week just for this one class out of my entire schedule. Ah, the life of an architecture student.
During the semester, we were taught that one technique to make our drawings look more realistic is to not focus on the object that you’re drawing, but to focus on the shadows on and around the object instead. Why? Because shadows are everywhere, we just don’t realize it.
If you take a quick glance around the environment you’re in right now, whether your inside a home or office, or outside in a cafe – you’ll begin to notice that shadows are everywhere. Even in and around the keys of your keyboard lie a very precise pattern of shadows.
If you try to draw something, it will not look realistic without shadows.
After I learned this lesson, I began to look at the world in a different way. I noticed shadows everywhere, and I became a better artist as a result. Some of my non-architecture friends thought I was weird, because I would point out certain shadows that looked really fancy or interesting to me. Ah, the life of an architecture student.
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“Hello, my name is Pat.”
“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?
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Yesterday, on my Facebook page, I had asked the following question:
Which of these book titles do you think would sell better? “How to Be Happy With Your Dog”, or “How to Stop Your Dog From Biting You”? And why?
26 interesting and intriguing comments later, I decided to write a blog post about it because I think we could all benefit from the conversation.
Before I begin, I’d like to mention that seeing this conversation unfold directly on my Facebook page was really amazing. I honestly don’t think interactions like this, involving this many people and being so useful for everyone (even people not directly involved in the conversation) can happen on a platform such as Twitter. Google wave…maybe. If I only had an invite 
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No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
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