The Smart Passive Income Blog » marketing

Quick Ways to Utilize These 4 Non-Google Search Engines

Pat — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:44:59 +0000

Non-Google search engines are a beautiful thing – and no, I’m not talking about Yahoo or Bing.

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:

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.
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.
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!

---------------------
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!

Quick Ways to Utilize These 4 Non-Google Search Engines

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

Pat — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:17:14 +0000

We all know that guest posting is one of the best ways to get highly targeted traffic to your website. Everyone makes it sound so easy too: write a killer post, deliver it to a fellow blogger in your niche, and then BAM…instant traffic, and some new subscribers to boot.

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:

It increases the social proof of the post.
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.
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!

---------------------
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!

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

The Power of Social Proof and Putting Your Readers First

Pat — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:10:11 +0000

Last week, I posted a question asking all of you whether you prefer a full post or a partial post in your RSS feed.

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.

---------------------
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

7 Ways to Be Everywhere – Building a Brand Online

Pat — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:13:00 +0000

Last week, an SPI reader asked me the following question:

“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.

---------------------
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!

7 Ways to Be Everywhere – Building a Brand Online

YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 1

Pat — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:58:04 +0000

YouTube.

It’s been around for over 5 years, yet for some reason most bloggers still haven’t explored the video sharing platform where millions of people around the world are watching over 2 billion videos a day.

I took the SPI brand onto YouTube on September 26th, 2009 for the same reason I do everything else I report on this blog – to see if it’s a worth while place to invest my time.

276 days later, I can truthfully say that I’m more than pleased with the results of my experiment with YouTube to expand the SPI brand and audience base. Here are some quick numbers from my account as of today:

15 Uploaded Videos
59,582 Total Views
720 Subscribers

That’s an average of about 1 new video every 2 to 3 weeks. Considering that the average length of my videos is about 6 minutes in length, you can get a feel for just how much time I’ve really dedicated to this “experiment” – 6 minutes every 3 weeks.

Not a huge amount of time invested, but you can see that I’ve earned a considerable number of views and a good amount of subscribers as a result, which has ultimately increased traffic to my blog as well as helped to earn a few affiliate sales here and there. Without much additional effort, my daily viewership continues to grow as you can see below:

By no means would I call myself a YouTube expert, but I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way that may help you expand your brand, increase your views and grab more subscribers if you do decide to expand onto YouTube, if you’re not on the platform already.

Mindset Stuff

1. Provide Good Content

This is not really a trick, and I’m sure it’s something you heard before, but I’m reiterating it here because it’s still the most important thing to understand before anything else. Much like with your blog or online business, if you don’t provide good content, then everything else you do doesn’t really matter.

2. Video Quality Does Matter

If you upload a blurry, crappy and laggy video, people won’t stick around to watch it – even if the content is good. Your video doesn’t have to be in High-Def or an Emmy Award Winning production, but it does have to be watchable. Use your common sense here.

I try to upload all of my videos in HD (1280 x 720 resolution), because it looks really good on the YouTube and any embedded players.

3. Stand Out From the Crowd

There are a TON of videos on every subject imaginable, so in order to get more views and get people’s attention, you’re going to have to do something different than the “other guys”. What it is really depends on what niche you’re in and what kinds of videos other people have uploaded, but just do your best to find something that’s uniquely “yours”.

For example, a lot of my videos comprise of my “electronic white board”. Many people enjoy watching these videos because no one else uses this technique, and it makes learning about internet business and blogging fun.

4. What’s the Worst That Can Happen?

Many bloggers don’t use YouTube because of the fact that it is video, and video means they’ll have to be on screen, or at least talking over some slides or a presentation.

Well, you can’t hide behind your blog forever if you want to get anywhere, and YouTube is the perfect place to “practice” stepping out of your comfort zone and publishing more than just typed text.

I was scared too, at first, but then I thought to myself, “What’s the Worst That Can Happen?”

Really, what is the worst that can happen? So you upload a video and it get’s no views. So what? You learned from your experience, and you can only do better from there. Plus, I doubt you’ll ever get zero views if you follow the tips later in this post/series.

Within Your Videos

5. Place a Watermark of your Blog’s URL on the Video.

A watermark throughout most or all of your video will give people an easy way to know exactly where this content is coming from, and where they can go to get more.

More importantly, if anyone chooses to embed the video on their own website, their audience will know it originates from you and your blog, which they can see the url for right in front of their faces – driving traffic and expanding your brand at the same time. The description of the video on YouTube doesn’t show up when embedded onto another site, so a watermark will at least include your url.

6. Begin with a Quick Overview

Your job as a publisher of a video on YouTube is to get people to watch your videos, and to continue watching your videos all the way through. The best and easiest way to do this is to simply begin your video with an overview of what you’re going to cover and approximately how long it will take.

Even though there’s a video title, a description and a timeline, just saying what your video is about will engage your viewers and increase the chances of them sticking around, especially if you can get them excited about what you’re about to talk about.

7. Don’t Forget Your Calls to Action

Many people shoot fantastic videos, but fail to leave out any calls to action. If you want the highest impact from your videos, you have to include at least one call to action at the end of your video, preferably telling them to visit your website. I’ve often included more than one, sometimes telling them to say hi to me on Twitter or on my Facebook Page as well.

Just think – if a viewer makes it to the end of your video, they’re going to be in the best state of mind to follow any calls to actions that you have to say.

8. Screen Sharing is Awesome

There’s a huge difference between just telling someone how something works (or even listing out the step-by-step instructions) and actually showing people exactly how to do it.

If you have an opportunity to teach your audience something by showing them how it works on your computer, do it. Screen recording and sharing is a fantastic way to engage your audience, as well as easily give them the steps needed to do whatever it is you want them to do.

You can use software such as Camtasia Studios (for PC) or Camtasia for Mac to get the job done quite nicely. There are cheaper options out there, such as Jing, Screencast or Screenflow (for Mac) that again make it easy to record your screen and then quickly upload to YouTube.

Most of my videos are done on Camtasia for Mac. It can record my screen easily in the 1280 x 720 HD format that I like, and also my face on my iMac camera at the same time. After a little bit of editing, I simply click share -> YouTube, and it’s up in no time.

Also, if you have the chance, utilize some of the cool features that come with the software to enhance the look of your video. Using things like fade in and fade out, zoom in and zoom out, or even adding titles and little notes to your video, which you can see me utilize on this YouTube video. (see the 40 sec. mark)

Again, not so many people do this, so it’s another way to make your videos stand out of the crowd.

9. Intro / Outro Screen and Music?

Putting intro or outro screen and music is debatable, and really depends on your style and what you like to do. If you already have a brand that has a recognizable tune (i.e. a podcast with intro music), then you may very well want to bring that music over to your YouTube videos for continuity.

I had intro music in my first few videos, along with a title screen for each, but I stopped doing that because they didn’t really serve any purpose. They just took up precious time (YouTube’s max video length is only 10 minutes), and for all I know hundreds of people who watched those videos exited right away because they didn’t like the music, even before they get to the content of the video.

In my later videos, I skipped the intro music entirely and went straight to an overview of what’s to come. If they still leave after that, then at least they are leaving for the right reasons.

It seems to be working out much better, and it’s less editing for me to do as well.

Up Next

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll be going over some tricks you can do with your video title, description and tags to get more YouTube search engine traffic. Also, I’ll be going over how to improve your channel as well.

Cheers!

How One Little Minute Can Increase Your Email Open Rate

Pat — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:36:19 +0000

Have you ever had one of those moments when you thought to yourself, “It can’t be that easy…can it?”

Well, that’s what I thought after I learned this technique to increase the open rates of broadcast emails. Keep reading, and you just might think the same thing.

For those of you who don’t know, an “open rate” is the ratio of emails opened by the number of emails sent. Sadly (but truthfully), not everyone who you send an email to will open it. In fact, some say that an open rate of only 50% is actually quite high, but it all really depends on a number of factors, including:

The size of your list. Usually, the bigger the list, the smaller the open rate.
The quality of subscribers to your list.
The copy of your subject line. It’s wicked important to have an enticing and eye-catching subject line to grab your subscriber’s attention.

No matter what your initial open rate is, there is one thing you can do that will immediately increase your open rate, and it only takes a minute:

Re-send the email to everyone who did not open it.

Think about it – sometimes people accidentally overlook certain emails in their inbox, or they may plan to open an email but simply forget. Resending your email to these people almost guarantees an increased open rate.

Of course, you do run the slight risk of a spam complaint.

As mentioned on many email service websites: “[Company] does not recommend that you resend the same email to contacts who didn’t open it the first time. Resending an email may result in a spam complaint against you as the contact may see multiple copies of the same email in their account.”

There are a few things you can do in your re-send, however, that will decrease spam complaints:

Wait a Good Number of Days Before You Re-Send. I’d say 4 days minimum, just to be safe. That way, it gives people who receive the initial email time to open it before receiving a duplicate email from you. Plus, after 4 days, those who do not open it may truly have missed or forgotten about your initial send.
Change the Subject Line of the Re-Send email. By doing this, your subscribers cannot simply look at their inbox and see two of the exact same emails. They won’t know the body is the same, because, well, they didn’t open it the first time.
Be Honest and Mention the Re-Send. You can change the subject line and/or text within the email itself to mention that you are indeed resending this email. With copy such as, “In case you missed it the first time”, or “I had to make sure you read this because…”, you’ll decrease your chances of a spam complaint. I wouldn’t blatantly mention that you could tell they didn’t open your first email, because that may creep people out, especially those who aren’t tech savvy who may think you’re spying or up to some kind of voodoo.

It’s up to you whether or not you feel comfortable with this technique. I’ve used it several times in the past (not on the SPI newsletter, but on another newsletter that I manage), and it works every single time, sometimes increasing my open-rate 10-15% more. With a list of over 5000 subscribers, I have yet to hear any complaints.

Resending a Broadcast Email

I will be walking you through how to quickly resend an with Aweber, although I’m sure there are ways to do it on other email platforms as well.

1. Sign in and click on “Subscribers”

2. This will take you to the search subscribers area. In the “Select Field” drop down menu, select “Message Not Opened”

3. Click on the field on the immediate right and select he exact message that you want to resend.

4. Click on “Search”.

5. You will then see a segment of people who did not open the selected message. Name the segment and save it so you can recall it in the next step.

6. Now – copy/paste your original broadcast into a new one. Under the “send to segment” option, use the drop down menu to select the segment that you named in the previous step, which is again those people who did not open this email originally. This is the step where you can update the copy of the subject line and/or body of your email so that you can lessen the chances of spam complaints.

Theoretically, you could re-re-send your email to those who do not open your resend, although I definitely would not recommend it. If for whatever reason a person does not open your email after two tries, I would save your energy and just be happy with those who did open your email, and focus on your next campaign.

Ask The Readers

My question to you is:

Is this a good technique to practice? What are your thoughts about it? I’m interested in hearing from you, because I’ve heard both sides of the story before.

If you don’t have an email list yet, please check out The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Newsletter.

---------------------
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!

How One Little Minute Can Increase Your Email Open Rate

Mastering Keyword Research and SEO Competition

Pat — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 10:27:50 +0000

Today, I thought I’d mix it up a bit and publish a video post. I really enjoy doing them, especially when I get to use my “electronic whiteboard”, as you’ll see.

In this 10 minute video, I talk about how I do keyword research when it comes to the blog posts that I write, the articles that I submit to article sites, and selecting potential profitable niche sites. I also show you exactly how I do a bit of SEO “espionage” to scope out exactly what I have to do to out rank my competition.

I’ve included a rough transcription below the video for your convenience.

(Watch Mastering Keyword Research and SEO on YouTube)

Market Samurai Free Trial: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/market-samurai

Transcription:

[Intro]

Hey everybody! What’s up?! This is Pat Flynn from the Smart Passive Income Blog.

Today I’m going to be talking about something really important for your blog or online business, and that is keyword research.

Whether you’re doing keywords research on your own using tools like the Google Keyword tool from Adwords, or you’re hiring out someone else to do it for you, you have to understand what the number one goal is behind all keyword research, and that’s to rank on the first page of Google. That’s what really matters.

If you’re on the second page, you might as well be on the 30th page, because everything happens on the first page. It’s super, super, super important that you understand this, because that’s your goal. So, whenever you’re doing keyword research, which I’m going to show you how to do in certain ways in a second, you gotta analyze who is on the first page and know how to beat them.

Now this goes if you’re going to write blog posts, and you’re looking for keywords for your blog posts. Or, if you’re looking to get into new niches, for niche sites. And, if you’re doing articles like on eHow, or Infobarrel, or Squidoo, or Hubpages, or whatever…

You want to be on that first page. That’s where all the money is – that’s where the traffic is. If you’re on a blog, that’s where the subscribers are, your rss readers – everything.

So, if you’re doing any of these things (blog posts, niche sites or articles), you have to remember that you want to rank on the first page of Google.

So how do you do this? How do you properly do keyword research?

First you have to understand searches. How many people are searching and for what keywords.

Secondly, you have to understand everything about your competition. Backlinks, Page Ranks, Indexed pages, Domain Age – everything, so that you know what you have to do to beat them – then rank on the first page, and then be all good!

So, what tools can you use to do proper keyword research?

Well, there’s a number of free ones that you can use – the Google Adwords Keyword tool – that’s one that a lot of people are using.

But, there’s a paid one out there that I use every single day – when I’m writing blog posts, when I’m writing articles, and I’m about to do niche sites as well and it’s been helping me out tremendously to filter out all the crappy keywords out there that have no searches or are too competitive to rank for – and that’s Market Samurai.

[Market Samurai Segment]

[03:40] – In Market Samurai, I type in my primary keyword for smartpassiveincome.com (passive income)

[03:52] – Click on SEO Competition and click on Generate Results to get list of top 10 ranked sites in Google for the keyword. Each of the listings show relevant SEO data, including Domain Age, Page Ranking, Indexed Pages from Google, Page Back Links, Domain Back Links, Back Links from Educational and Government Sites, Directory Listings, Keyword in Title of the Page, Keyword in URL, Keyword in Description, and Keyword in Header.

[04:50] – I compare my site to the site above me, based on the above factors.

[05:30] – Market Samurai tells me that the reason I’m not ranking higher than some of the other sites is because my keyword is not in my header.

[06:15] – Page Rank Analysis – Market Samurai discovers all of the websites that backlink to my competitor’s website and their pageranks. Higher page ranks are worth more.

[06:45] – You can click on those backlinking websites and scope out where your competition is mentioned on those sites. On some sites, you can grab a link back to your own site as well. I go through a couple of examples – the first is a trackbank link, and the second is a comment on a dofollow blog.

[08:40] – You can use this technique to “catch-up” to your competition and eventually rank higher than them.

[09:15] – You can click on the link below to download your free trial of Market Samurai. If you don’t like it, no worries, but it’s a product that I highly, highly recommend that you try.

Market Samurai Free Trial: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/market-samurai

Thanks for your time everyone. Cheers!

How to Retain Your Subscribers Like a Pro

Pat — Fri, 21 May 2010 08:05:53 +0000

This is a guest post from Jonathan Beebe from MMO Work.

You’ve learned the benefits of starting an email newsletter and how to get started in “The Beginner’s Guide to Staring a Newsletter“, so today I’m going to share with you even more strategies to literally supercharge your subscriber opt-in rate, as well as some techniques—or “best practices”—on what to do after you’ve gotten their email address—because getting them to subscribe is only the first step.

Why Focus on Retaining Your Subscribers?

No matter what your goal is for your website, repeat traffic (those who have been to your website before) will always be more valuable than your first-time visitors—especially the “one-hit-wonders” who are bouncing around.

And here’s why…

If your goal is to produce more sales (or affiliate commissions), it has been said that on average, a visitor needs to see your offer about seven times before making a purchase. So with that being said, repeat visitors are essential when it comes to producing as many sales as you possibly can.
If your goal is more ad-clicks, it’s obvious why repeat visitors would benefit you: the more opportunities they have to see your ads, the more likely they’ll click on them.
If your goal is more blog comments and community interaction, repeat visitors who are your loyal fans are much more likely to post a comment than someone who’s getting their first impression. Think about it, on the blogs you’ve commented on, how many of them have you visited in the past? (probably most of them)
Even if your goal has nothing to do with money and it is only to HELP as many people as you can in your niche, then YES, repeat visitors are still a better fit for you. The more times someone sees you, the more likely they will trust you and actually take your advice. Would you be more likely to take advice from someone you know and trust, or from a complete stranger you’ve never seen/heard of before?

And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the BEST way to get repeat visitors is to get them to subscribe; the most responsive method being your permission-based email list.

How to Boost Your Subscriber Rate Ten Fold

Breaking News: “Most Internet Surfers Are Downright LAZY!”

Oh wait, that’s old news! But it’s the truth, so therefore, a simple reminder to “Subscribe to Email Updates” or “Subscribe to my RSS Feed” (if they even know what that is) usually isn’t enough of a push to get them to go through the HASSLE of entering their name and email address (I know, it’s hard isn’t it? Especially for us lazy folks).

So if you want to “squeeze” as many subscribers as you can out of your daily visitor total, you need to offer some kind of incentive to subscribe. As you can see, Pat does it here on Smart Passive Income with his eBooks the $mart Way guide, and I guarantee it has increased his opt-in rate (as opposed to just offering “Email Updates”).

And the easiest way to offer an incentive is to once again, do exactly what Pat does: offer an informative report. Many people get overwhelmed at the prospect of this, but it’s really nothing to be afraid of. You’re already providing value on your blog, so simply come up with something useful and create a short PDF report. It doesn’t matter how long it is, as long as it is both useful and convenient.

You can use OpenOffice.org to write your report and export it to PDF at absolutely no cost.

Another tip to boost your subscriber-rate is by using an eCover (aka “Boxshot”) to grab your visitors’ attention and increase your report’s “shiny” factor.

Where to “Advertise” Your Free Report?

I recommend putting your free offer (in exchange for their name and email address) in your blog’s sidebar, at the bottom of each post (see the Add Post Footer Plugin), and also on a separate “squeeze page”.

Pat’s article I mentioned earlier goes over how to add your opt-in form to your sidebar using Aweber, and you can also apply that advice to putting it at the bottom of each post (using the plugin I mentioned).

Another technique I recommend is to create a separate page on your domain that is dedicated solely to outlining the main benefits (not features, but benefits) of your free report, and then ask them for their name and email address. This is otherwise known as a “squeeze page”.

To get traffic to your squeeze page, you can go through your past posts and whenever you see a sentence that matches any of the benefits of your free report, link that text to your squeeze page. Be sure to keep this in mind for future posts as well.

For example, if you wrote a free report on “How to Change Your Motor Oil”, and you had a blog post describing the things to check for before a long road trip, you can then take the sentence from that article that reads, “Be sure to check your oil before leaving home.” and link the words “check your oil” to your squeeze page.

You can also use article marketing as an effective way to drive traffic to your squeeze page to get more email subscribers. If you feel guilty for driving traffic to your squeeze page over your blog, just remember that the responsive folks who join your email list will always end up on your blog eventually, which takes me to my next point…

“I’ve Got Their Email, Now What?”

As I mentioned earlier, getting your visitors to subscribe is only the first step. Just because they entered their name and email address doesn’t automatically mean Presto! You’ve got a repeat visitor! You have to actually get them to come back to your website.

The good news is, there’s an easy way of accomplishing just that.

The best way to do this is to offer a simple newsletter subscription, but it’s not as hard as you think. You can leverage the existing, high quality content already on your blog and the work is done for you!

Here’s my simple strategy for running a hassle-free newsletter subscription that produces repeat visitors, loyal subscribers, and SALES:

Every six days I send an email to my list.
Two out of every three emails, I send send them a link to a high-quality article that I posted to my blog. I simply provide a short description of the article, and give them the link. Or, I might give them another free report I found that I think they could benefit from—the point is, I give them something that’s not only valuable, but free.
Every THIRD email I send to my list is some kind of promotion in the form of a product recommendation, or a review. However, it is ALWAYS a high quality product that is sure to deliver (it’s best to test the product out for yourself).

Simple as that! I’m never scraping to find information for my newsletter, because I simply leverage the high quality articles that I’m already posting to my blog on a regular basis. Following a six-day mailing schedule will keep your name in the forefront of your subscribers’ minds, but it’s not too often that they’re going to get annoyed at you. It’s perfect.

The reason why I send a promotion every third mailer is to not only make sales on my “promotion days”, but to keep my list “conditioned” so I that a good percentage of my list remain buyers. The fact that two out of every three emails is providing them pure value (and no offers) let’s them know that you’ve got their best interest in mind, and will get them used to clicking the links in YOUR emails.

In fact, do things that way and your subscribers will actually look forward to your periodic emails. It’s a sure-fire strategy for building trust and producing RESULTS.

But Don’t Take My Word For It…

I could keep explaining the benefits of retaining your visitors, and even more reasons why you should be building your list, but the best way to find out is to see for yourself. After all, testing is important to incorporate into ANY business (be it online or offline), so I encourage you to do your own testing (you won’t be sorry, trust me).

Create a free report, advertise it on your blog (as well as a “squeeze” page), and follow an effective (but very “do-able”) mailing schedule like I described above and see what it does for your online business in a very short amount of time.

I guarantee that after a few months of putting more effort towards retaining your visitors, the only thing you’ll regret is not doing it sooner.

Jonathan Beebe is an online entrepreneur who writes at MMO Work. Visit his blog for more information on how to make money online, and to download a FREE report that takes you step-by-step through the exact method he used to liberate himself from his day job FOR GOOD. He also has a great Online Income Formula eBook you should also check out.

Read This Post to Find Out Exactly What You Need to Know About Calls to Action

Pat — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:06:05 +0000

Yesterday, we had another iPhone app approved by Apple (yay!), however this post is not about iPhone apps. It’s about getting people to take action, whether it be new visitors to your site, newsletter subscribers, people reading your sales page, or iPhone owners reading the copy of an ad you created to try and get them to download your new iPhone app.

Immediately after our new app went live in iTunes, we decided to promote it with advertising. Our goal was to break the top 100 in the Paid Utilities category, which is important because once you break 100 in any category, your app will have additional exposure on the top 100 lists on iTunes.

The most popular advertising platform for the iPhone (at the moment) is Admobs. It’s kind of like Google Adsense and Google Adwords all bundled into one: for free you can put code into your own applications that generate ads (and you get paid per click), or you can pay to have your ads shown in applications that have that code in them.

After setting up our advertising campaign and letting it sit for an hour, we were surprised to come back and see that the ads were not performing well at all. In fact, the CTR (click through rates) were abysmal, hovering around 0.25% to 0.5% for each variation.

*Note, I would show you the screenshots of the data and the actual ads I used, but I don’t exactly know what AdMobs’ policy is for doing so. I know Google Adsense has some restrictions on publicly showing data, and because Google ended up purchasing Admobs, I think I’m better safe than sorry. Thanks for your understanding!

What it really comes down to is the copy - what’s written in the ads. It’s the ad copy that gets people to click an ad, not the product itself.

So, with only 80 characters to work with, we had to figure out the best way to drastically increase the efficiency of our ad copy. How do we get people to click on these ads?

The answer is simple: Add a call to action.

Without a Call to Action, There Will Be No Action

For those of you who don’t know, a call to action is simply a request or direction to do something – or take action.

A link that reads: Call to Action: A Powerful Marketing Tool is not an example of a call to action.

A link that reads: Read Call to Action: A Powerful Marketing Tool is just an okay example of a call to action.

A link that reads: Click Here to Read Call to Action: A Powerful Marketing Tool is a better example of a call to action, because you’re telling people exactly what they have to do (which is to “click here”).

It’s not that people are stupid and they need instructions on how to click on something. It’s more of a subconscious thing that tells people in their “automatic” state of minds to do certain things.

This is the theory at least, so we wanted to put it to the test.

We revamped each of our ads and made sure to place a call to action in the ad copy, simply by adding words such as “get”, or “download”. We let the ads brew for another hour and then checked our results.

The CTR was much, much better.

Now we were seeing between 2-3%, which is huge, especially over hundreds of thousands of impressions. Of course, getting people to click an ad is only half the battle – converting that traffic into sales is the other.

So did we ever crack the top 100?

In about 12 hours, we were able to reach #95, thanks to some call to action copy in our ads, and within our app description as well.

We’ll see if it continues to climb or if it drops off, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters here is that call to action copy works and it’s absolutely necessary if you want people to do something, even subscribe to your blog.

The next time you run into a sales letter, or even a sales pitch on TV, on the radio, or in a podcast, listen for those calls to action.

They are there because they work.

Powerful Call To Action Words

So before I finish up, I’d like to leave you a list of words that you may find useful the next time you want to write call to action copy. Some may be more appropriate than others in certain situations, so really the only way to know which ones work best is to test, test, test!

Get…
Download…
Click Here to…
Press the…
Enter your…
Grab Your Copy…
Go to…
Insert your…
Add to Cart
Buy Now
Use my…
Order Now.
Reserve your copy of…
Select the…
Choose a…
Enroll in…
Attend…
Pick up the Phone and dial…
You can start by…
Act now by…
Order now and get…
Create a…
View Demo
Register…
Donate…
Subscribe…
See in action…
Take a tour…
Sign up now…
Cast your vote…
Send…
Check out…
Share…

Obviously this isn’t a list of all of the call to actions, but I’m sure you’ve seen many of these before.

And don’t forget, a call to action doesn’t just have to be used in the body of your website, it can and should be used whereever you want people to do something. For example, a call to action within a button you want people to click is a great idea.

Lastly, if you can combine your call to action with some verbiage that creates a sense of urgency, you’ve got yourself some great “take action” copy:

Order now to get your free gift.
Sign up now because this offer will expire soon.
Reserve your copy before it’s too late!

Are you showing people what they should do, or are you telling them?

If you use calls to action on your on website, please leave a comment below and give an example of how you use one.

I’ll start: I usually always include some text similar to “leave a comment” at the end of my blog posts.

Cheers!

---------------------
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!

Read This Post to Find Out Exactly What You Need to Know About Calls to Action

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

Pat — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 07:48:31 +0000

This is a guest post from Daniel from Daily Blog Tips.

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.

5 Little Known Ways to Grow Your Blog

Pat — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:05:12 +0000

This is a guest post by Kim Roach of BuzzBlogger.com. She provides us with some novel ideas for growing our blogs, some of which I’ll be trying out very soon. Enjoy!

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:

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.

Tips For What To Include In Your Newsletter Autoresponder Series

Pat — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 08:21:54 +0000

In my last post, The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Newsletter, I detailed the why and how to get started with a newsletter for your blog or online business. I’ll have to admit that I’m quite proud of that post (with 5 hours and 4000 words invested into it), however there’s one thing that I did not touch on that is probably the most important element to understand when it comes to your newsletter: what to put in it.

That’s what I’m here to discuss today.

Specifically, I’ll be going over what to include in your follow-up/autoresponder series – not your broadcasts. Broadcasts are one-time emails that get sent to your entire list at the same time. Your follow-up series are the emails that you write that get sent one after the other, in a time interval that you determine, immediately after someone new subscribes to your newsletter.

The beauty of the autoresponder is that you can write any number of emails once, and they’ll be sent to new subscribers as if they were brand new. A person who signs up for your newsletter today and a person who signs up a year from now will be taken through the exact same series of emails.

But the question still stands: what do you include in your newsletter?

Below are some thoughts and ideas that I use for myself. Feel free to borrow them as you wish.

Exclusive Content

You should do your best to make sure the primary content of your newsletter is exclusive to the newsletter itself. If the content isn’t unique, then there’s no point in staying a subscriber.

It might will be hard, at first, to determine exactly what you want to write about because you’ll think that you’re wasting valuable content that could be potential blog posts or articles for your website – but, you have to remember those famous words: “The money is in the list.” And even though you may not be using your newsletter to generate an income, you are using it to do something useful – aren’t you? Either way, the list is a powerful tool for your blog or online business and you should not discount the content of your newsletter. If anything, the content should be just as good, if not better than the normal content that you produce.

A “Filter” Email

The number of people on my list is not as important as the quality of the people who sign up. That’s why my first follow-up message after the welcome email is what I like to call a “filter email”, where I actually encourage people who I do not want on my list to unsubscribe. It may sound like a weird tactic, but having a filter email helps me in several ways:

It makes the people who are still on my list after the filter exactly who I want to help.
It makes the people who are still on my list after the filter feel like they are invested in continuing to read my emails and listen to what I have to say, because they were given the choice to unsubscribe and they did not.
I don’t waste people’s time with content they don’t want to receive.
It makes my subscriber numbers more realistic. My open rates, click-throughs rates and all other statistics become more honest.
It tells people right away that I mean business, and at the same time it tells me that my continuing subscribers mean business too.

Filters are used in business all of the time. Zappos.com, for example, offers $2000.00 to potential employees during training to just get up and leave and never work for the company. This makes sure that the employees who do stay on board are in fact the ones that really want to work there. This tactic seems to be working because I hear that the company culture at Zappos.com is awesome, not to mention the rapid success of the company as a whole.

If you’re interested in exactly what my filter email says, feel free to subscribe to my list by entering your name and email in the sidebar of this blog if you haven’t done so already. After a confirmation email and the initial email with a free copy of eBooks the $mart Way, you’ll see the filter email a day later.

What you write in your filter email obviously depends on your niche and exactly who you want subscribing to your newsletter. You don’t have to have a filter email in your follow-up sequence, but I hope you can see why I like to use one.

Over-Deliver On Your First Real Followup

Filter email or not, when you finally get around to writing your first real email with real content on it, you’ll want to really impress your subscribers. I mean really impress them. Like, blow their minds!

Under-deliver, and you give people an opportunity to feel the need to unsubscribe. They might think to themselves, “Is this really what I have to look forward to in each newsletter? No thanks.” [Click]

Over-deliver, and you will never have to worry about people unsubscribing. They might think to themselves, “Wow! This is awesome, I can’t wait for the next one!” [Drool]

One thing to remember is that the content you’re providing in your followups will be read via email, which is different than content that is read on a website. Try not to go overboard with the length of your email, since most people are used to reading and replying to emails that are only a few sentences long. If you write an entire novel, it won’t be read.

Ask Questions

If you don’t mind getting a number of high-quality replies from your subscribers, then feel free to (sparingly) ask your subscribers a question in your autoresponder series. They are probably your most dedicated followers who may have the best insight on whatever it is you’re trying to find out.

Here’s a secret that I use:

One question you’ll see from me in my followup series is “What would you like me to write a blog post about?”

Instead of asking this question in a single blog post to everyone at one moment in time, I can get a number of high-quality responses from my most dedicated followers in the same time interval that people subscribe to my newsletter. So, I will never run out of new blog post ideas, since they keep coming in as long as new people keep subscribing.

How awesome is that?

So What Do You Think?

If you’re subscribed to any newsletters, what kinds of emails make the most impact on you? What kinds of things do you like to read about?

Does exclusivity matter to you?

Also, am I crazy for using a filter email? I think I may be the only one at the moment who does has one. I’m interested in what you have to say.

Thanks for your support everyone! SPI is growing so fast, thanks to you! Cheers!

---------------------
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!

Tips For What To Include In Your Newsletter Autoresponder Series

The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Newsletter

Pat — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:34:57 +0000

At the beginning of the year, I started a newsletter here on SPI and used an eBook I wrote, eBooks the $mart Way, as a free gift to help generate more leads. Three months later, I now have over 2,250 people signed up for the newsletter and it averages about 30 new subscribers a day.

I have no previous email list to compare these numbers with, so I can’t say for sure whether those are stellar numbers, or just average – but either way I’m very happy with the results and would love to share with you how it’s all done, especially for you beginners out there who have been emailing me non-stop about it. I apologize I’ve waited this long to write this post.

What is a Newsletter, and Why Would You Want to Offer One?

Before I get deep into the how-to of building a newsletter, I’d first like to address what a newsletter is, and why you might want to think about offering one for your blog or online business.

For the sake of this post, I’ll be talking only about email newsletters. Many websites, especially those doing hardcore business in a specific niche, offer a print newsletter, which is a fantastic way to keep in contact with customers and subscribers through “snail mail” (mail that is sent to your home address), but that’s a whole different ballgame that I have yet to experience, and it’s probably better suited for a more advanced type of post for the future.

When you setup an email newsletter, you’re offering your audience a way to subscribe to get emails from you that contain informal news or broadcasts that you send out. This is usually in addition to the content that you already have on your blog or online business website, and totally separate from an RSS feed subscription.

Now, you might be wondering: “What’s the point of offering a newsletter subscription to my audience, if they can already subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed?”

Good question.

The short answer is: the email list.

By offering a subscription to your newsletter, you’re giving yourself the ability to capture email addresses, which is something that you cannot do with an RSS feed. It’s important to capture email addresses because:

It’s a great way to communicate with your audience on a more personal level. There’s just something about receiving an email from somebody that makes it extremely effective at getting a point across, or making people take some kind of action.
An email list will never die. In other words, if you have an email list, you will always have a way to communicate with your audience. Blogs and websites can die. RSS readers and feed subscription services could vanish. But, those email addresses will never change and you can always keep your audience informed of what you’re up to, even if you go completely off the radar.
It’s where the money is.

Regarding #3, you may or may not have heard this expression before: “The Money is in the List.”

It’s an expression that has been used in the internet marketing industry since the birth of email (or “snail mail” for that matter), because it’s true. However, you have to be careful if you’re going to try and use your email list to make money online.

Like with any platform that you use to communicate with people (blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), the moment that you start to become “all about the money” is the moment that you might will end up losing credibility (and the respect) of your followers. That’s why I make sure that in whatever I do online, helping and informing people come first. I’m speaking from experience when I sat that if you can make your primary goal helping others, the money will come your way.

Online karma does exist.

Does it Have to Be a Newsletter?

You can setup an opt-in form to capture email addresses on your website and only email your subscribers when you need to – but let me tell you why I think this is a bad idea.

Imagine signing up for my free eBook and never hearing from me again until months later, when you finally get an email from me promoting some kind of product. You will probably do one of the following:

Forget who I was and think my email is spam.
Unsubscribe from the list because you’d realize that there’s really no point of being on it.
All of the above.

What you write in your emails doesn’t have to be “news”- it can be anything really. But, it’s important that you consistently contact your subscribers and provide them with some kind of useful information in order to keep them around. All it takes is one click to unsubscribe from your list.

What’s the Difference Between RSS Email Subscription and the Newsletter Subscription?

This is actually the most common question that I get about newsletters and email subscriptions, so I’m happy to finally address here on the blog publicly.

The RSS Email Subscription (through services such as FeedBlitz, which is something you can setup within your FeedBurner account) is a way for your readers to get your blog posts (and only your blog posts) emailed to them. This is convenient for many people, especially those who work 9 to 5 who like to catch up with their favorite websites at work, who are unable to use a standard RSS feed reader. Here on the SPI blog, I have this option in a link at the upper right hand corner of the page.

The newsletter subscription is totally separate from the content of your blog. With it, you have the ability to email your subscribers whatever you want, whenever you want. Again, it’s a more personal way to communicate with your readers and you can utilize that ability for marketing your own products, affiliate products, or just simply driving traffic. The possibilities are endless.

Yes – people will have to sign up twice if they want your blog content and newsletter both sent to their email. And even though many email list services have the ability to send out broadcasts that contain your blog’s RSS feed, I’d much rather keep those things separate so that people can have the freedom to choose how exactly they want to receive your content.

Now that I believe I’ve answered most of your questions, let’s get down to business…

How To Start Your Own Newsletter Subscription

Understanding the Process

First, it’s good to know exactly what happens once someone signs up through a form on your site. Here’s a diagram below that outlines everything that should happen:

As you can see, there’s quite a bit involved, but I’ll help you through the entire process below. Please note that rectangles represent webpages, and circles represent emails.

Step One: Signup For an Aweber Account

You have many options when it comes to signing up with an email marketing service, but Aweber is by far the best in my opinion. I use it and have been really impressed with the ease of use and quality of customer service. In fact, the other day I sent them an email about a small issue I was having, and they immediately solved the issue and 4 days letter I get a postcard in the mail thanking me for contacting them and being a customer.

Aweber is definitely the way to go.

Also, you have the ability to manage several lists from different websites under the same account, if you choose to do so.

Step 2: Setup Your First Email List

After you register for your account and sign in, you’ll be taken to your control panel. Now, we need to setup your list.

First, click on “create and manage” lists:

Second, fill in the settings for your list. The “From” Name:, and “Address” are all things that your newsletter subscribers will see when they get your emails. The “List Name” and the “List Description” are mainly for you for organizational purposes.

Lastly, the “Contact Address” is the address that is in your account settings. It will be shown at the bottom of each of your emails, as required by law (the CAN-SPAM Act). If you’re on my email list, you can see this address at the bottom of my emails, which is my business address. If you don’t have a business address, that’s okay – you can simply insert your home address, but just know that whenever you send an email to your subscribers, your address will show up – so you may want to use an address other than your home address if possible.

Step 3: Setup Your Confirmed Opt-In Email

A confirmed opt-in email is an email that gets sent to people immediately after they subscribe to your newsletter. This email contains a link that is used to confirm that the person is indeed a human and is someone who is interested in joining your list. Also, it helps you make sure that the email address that they entered is valid, and not a fake one that they used just to grab a hold of whatever freebie you might have to offer.

You are given the option to turn this feature off, but it is not recommended for the reasons mentioned above.

This email is usually already pre-written for you, but you can customize it a little if you wish, just to make it a little bit more personable. Here is a snapshot of mine below:

You may have noticed at the top of the email a piece of code that look like this:

{!name}

This is code that can be inserted into any of your emails (both in the subject line and in the body), which will automatically convert into the person’s name who you are sending an email to. In fact, there are several different types of codes that convert into various kinds of text. You can normally find a drop-down menu with all of your options next to the field where you are writing your emails, which look like this:

And here is a link that shows us all of the variables and what each piece of code converts to.

Moving on…

Step 4: Set Up Your Success Page

Below where you customize your confirmation message, you’ll see an area marked “Success Page”. This is where you insert a URL back to your website which is exactly where your subscribers will be taken after they click the confirmation link in the email (Thank You Page #2 in the Diagram):

On this page, which you’ll have to create on your own website/blog first, you can do a number of things:

Thank the person for their confirmation.
Welcome them to your newsletter, and announce that they will be shortly receiving an email from you.
If you’re giving away something like an eBook, for example, you can let them know that links to their gift will be included in the next email.
You can ask your new subscriber to “white list” your email address so it will not be blocked by spam filters.
You can provide a way to easily contact you in case they have any issues regarding your newsletter.
Advanced: This is also a great opportunity to add in an offer for either a product that you already have for sale, or an affiliate product related to your niche.

If you’re interested, here is my Success Page.

Note: The “pass subscriber info (for personalizing this page)” option you see is an advanced option that allows you to insert certain pieces of code on your own website that can convert into things like the subscriber’s name, for example.

Note #2: Thank You Page #1 as shown in the diagram is setup when you create a web form that you insert onto your webpage. I’ll talk more about this in a second.

Understanding “Follow Up” Messages

A followup message is a pre-written email that gets sent out to your subscribers. The first one is always a welcome email that is sent out immediately after they click the confirmation link in the first email that they receive. An unlimited amount of additional followup messages can be pre-written and setup to be sent out in certain time intervals that you can customize. This is where the term “autoresponder” comes from, because after new subscribers sign up for your list, they are automatically sent the series of followup emails that you create in the time interval that you set.

So for example, I have about 15 pre-written emails with killer content that are timed to be sent out every 7 days. It doesn’t matter when you sign up, you’ll be taken though the series of emails from the beginning. I add about 1 new followup message every week, just to keep content fresh and expand my “autoresponder series”.

To create your Welcome Email and any additional followup messages, you can simply hover over the “Messages” bar at the top, and click on “Follow Up”, and then click on “Add New Followup Message”:

Step 5: Writing Your Welcome Message (Follow Up #1)

Your first followup message is always sent out immediately after subscribing, so it’s always good to put some kind of welcome message within this email. In it, you might want to include:

A formal welcome and thank you for signing up for your newsletter.
Any links to any freebies that you might be giving away.
What to expect in the newsletter (i.e, what your subscribers have to look forward to).
Again asking your subscribers to “white list” your email address.
A way to contact you.

You can add other things if you’d like, but as far as a welcome email followup message goes, those things are pretty standard.

Now, when you write your first followup message, you’ll notice that you have the option of writing an email in html format, or plain text format:

Aweber recommends writing your emails in plain text, because plain text emails can be read by those who cannot receive html messages. However, I’ve ran split tests before and the open rate (the percentage of emails that you send out that get opened) are virtually the same. This is why I choose to write HTML Messages instead, because I have a lot more options to dazzle up my emails.

When I say “dazzle” up, I simply mean having the ability to make words bold or italic and underlined, which you cannot do in plain text format. You also have the ability to add color and even some fancy looking templates with html, but I don’t want my emails to look like a newsletter you’d subscribe to from a retail store.

It’s really up to you though.

Step 6: Send Yourself a Test Message

After you finish writing any email, you should always send yourself a test message first so you can see exactly what your subscribers are receiving from you, and so you can re-read your emails and check for any errors too.

After you save your messages, you’ll be shown a screen that lists all of the messages you have in your autoresponder series. To the right of each message, you’ll see the following options:

The “Spam?” number you see there is a rating that is given to each of your emails that show you how “spammy” your email is. It’s based on a number of things, including some of the words you write in your email, as well as the number of links you include (and what they link to), but if you write an honest email, even if it includes a few links, you should no problems at all. A high score will be a good indicator that your email may be blocked by some your subscribers’ email programs.

When you click on “Test”, you’ll have the ability to send a test email to any email address that you want. If after you receive your email you want to update or change a few things, you can always go back and click on your message to edit it. Make sure you save it for any changes to actually take place.

Step 7: Setting Up Your Opt-In / Web Form

The web form is the form that you will place on your blog or website to collect email addresses. The one you see here on SPI was custom built for me by my web designers, but you can actually customize really well using the built in web form builder within Aweber.

Click on “Web Form” at the top, and then “Create Web Form”:

This will load a “web form generator”, which gives you the ability to choose from several options, fonts, colors, etc. to create your own form. You can play around with this until you finally come up with a design that you like. Remember where you will be placing this opt-in form on your website, as this will have an impact on the size of the form that you create.

Many people, including myself, choose to place an opt-in form in the sidebar, mainly because it gets shown on every single page. However, you can create multiple web forms for several different pages of your site, like the one I created on the page where I explain more about my eBook.

Typically, people collect just the name and email address of the subscribers, although depending on what you do and what niche you’re in, you can add different fields, including phone number, address, or any customized field that you’d like. Some people don’t even grab the names, and simply ask for an email address, although if you do this you won’t have the ability to use the {!name} code for personalizing your emails, which we talked about earlier.

Additional Tip: The default text within the submit button is simply “submit”. I recommend changing this text to something better that either tells your potential subscribers what they are getting, or is an actual call to action. For example, on my own buttons I have “Free Instant Access”, because it’s describing the free access you get to my eBook.

The Settings

After you’re happy with your web form design, you’ll need to customize your settings. Under the settings tab, you’ll see the following screen:

The Form Name is a unique name for the specific form you just created. This is mainly to help you keep track of each of the forms you create.

The Thank You Page is the “Thank You Page #1″ that is in the diagram that I showed you earlier. This is the page that people arrive at immediately after clicking on the “submit button” while the confirmation email is being sent to them at the same time.

You have 5 options of what you want to happen to your subscribers at this point:

The first three options are pages on Aweber that they’ve created for our convenience. They each let the subscriber know that an email will be sent to them that contains a confirmation link that they must click in order to subscribe to the newsletter. The Audio and “Smart” Video Versions are cool because they tell the user exactly what to expect and what links to click, so there is no confusion. However, understand that many people may not be able to listen to audio, or may not have the ability to watch a video (i.e., people subscribing while at work who have restrictions on internet access).

I choose to use a Custom Page because it keeps the subscriber on my site. Here is what you should include on this page:

A short note that a confirmation email has been sent to them that contains a link that they must click.
You can include pictures of what the link will look like, just to avoid any confusion.
What to expect after they click the confirmation link in the email.
A notice to “white list” your email address so their spam filters will not block your emails.
Advanced: This is again a great opportunity to add in an offer for either a product that you already have for sale, or an affiliate product related to your niche.

What you decide to happen to your subscribers at this point is really up to you.

The Code

After you design your web form and finish with the settings, you’ll need to grab the piece of code that you insert onto your website that will show the form to your visitors. It’s not as hard as you probably think.

Under the Publish tab, in “I Will Install My Form”, you can either grab the Javascript Snippet, or the Raw HTML Version of the code. It’s much easier to copy the javascript snippet because if you go back into Aweber and change your form, it will automatically update on your website. Also, you can keep track of statistics like impressions and signups easier too.

Here is a screenshot of what this screen looks like:

You can see the code above which starts with “