One day I was shopping for groceries and as I walked through the magazine section, I was stopped in my tracks. A title on one of the magazines had caught my eye and it read “One Wedding secret Prince Charles must take to his grave”. I just had to stop to pick it up to find out what they were on about. If you live in the UK, you always are interested in some crazy thing the royal family does. This moment reminded me of how powerful a great headline can be.
The Power of a Headline.
In a previous post, Pat explained why an incomplete headline will help you get more traffic to your blog and this post is a follow up to expand on that idea. In the age of social media and millions of other blogs competing for your audiences attention, it has become a noisy world out there. Today it is not who shouts the loudest that gets the most attention but who shouts the smartest. Especially if you are a new blogger, you could write all the great content you want, but to get that content read, you need to have a great headline that pulls people in from the RSS readers, Twitter or wherever you may be promoting it.
How to Learn to Write Great Headlines
Writing great headlines is not hard at all, you just need to know what works, the psychology behind why it works and put that into practice. Click to continue…
Last year, I made a conscious decision to turn my growing Smart Passive Income blog into the Smart Passive Income brand.
I knew nothing about “branding” at the time, except that I knew that successful brands utilized all different mediums to reach their audience. Stick to one medium, and you’ll limit your reach to only those who use that medium.
That’s why you see major brands on television and on the radio (and everywhere else it seems), or why you see many of the top bloggers syndicate and expand their written content with videos and podcasts too.
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 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. Click to continue…
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.
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. Click to continue…
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: Click to continue…
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.
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.
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show you what I've learned...
Pat's eBook Guide
Enter your name and email below to get Free Instant Access to the most comprehensive guide available on how to Publish, Market, and automate your own killer eBook.
Over 25,000 people have enjoyed my eBook and receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive online business and blogging tips.
This is a guest post by James Tayo of Entrepreneur Blog’r.
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.
YouTube.
Have you ever had one of those moments when you thought to yourself, “It can’t be that easy…can it?”
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
Enter your name and email below to get Free Instant Access to the most comprehensive guide available on how to Publish, Market, and automate your own killer eBook.
