Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category
Here are 51 blogging and internet marketing tips that you can use as inspiration for the upcoming year.
Mindset
1. Revisit your goals. Take a moment and rewrite your goals. You may find that they may have changed since the last time you really took a good look at them. If you don’t have any goals, than what are you working towards?
2. Remember where you were. Where was your online business or blog at one year ago? Are you seeing any improvements? If yes, be proud of how far you’ve come along and the fact that you haven’t given up. If you haven’t seen any improvements, why do you think that is?
3. You can always do a little bit more. If you’re up to it, try this 2-step exercise:
- Raise your hand as high as you can.
- Raise your hand even higher.
If you do this exercise, you’ll notice that you can always stretch your hand a little higher, even though you were told to put it as high as you can at first. When I did this exercise as a teenager, it changed how I thought about everything I did after that moment. It made me realize that I can always do a little bit more. Apply this to what you do online.
4. Take action. As I mentioned in my first law of business and success, every business in a state of motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. With that in mind, you can read and get inspired all you want, but nothing will happen unless you take action. Become the external force that is required to get your blog, business and life to exactly where you want it to be.
5. Flaunt your unique. In other words, know what makes you stand out from the crowd, and milk it. In order to succeed, especially online, you can’t blend in and just be another blog or website that talks about X. Your site can still be about X, but you should be one of the only ones that does Y, or Z.
6. No fear. Fear kills progress, and it kills business. When you’re reluctant to take an action or do something new, take a minute and think to yourself, “what’s the worst that can really happen?”. The worst usually isn’t as bad as you might think.
7. Failing is okay. We all want to succeed, but we shouldn’t ever be afraid of failing. Failing is part of the process and teaches us valuable lessons along the way. Learn from your mistakes, and improve on your next attempt.
8. Don’t work more, work smarter. When we think of putting in the extra mile to get things done, we often think that means just putting in more hours of work. Instead, think of ways that you can work smarter, which will accomplish the same (or even more), in a considerably less amount of time. It may take a small investment of time in the beginning to figure out how to work smarter, but you’ll make up for that time (and stress) soon enough.
9. Give back. I truly believe in “online karma”. The more you help others and the more you give back, the more success you will find. If your primary motivation is just to make as much money as you can and do things just for yourself, you’re only going to see a limited amount of success, if any.
10. Just freakin’ enjoy what you’re doing! If you enjoy what you’re doing, it doesn’t become work anymore. You’ll accomplish more, and be happier. If you’re not doing something you enjoy, why not?
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In my latest monthly income report, you may have noticed that my affiliate income had surpassed my direct income from the electronic products that I sell online. I received a lot of comments, asking me to explain more about where my affiliate income comes from and how it works.
Instead of just breaking down where it all came from – how much this, and how much that – I decided to turn this post into something a little bit more useful that would do more than just tell you how much I earned. Again, I’m not here to show you the money I make online, I’m here to show you how I make money online, and what I’ve learned along the way.
When thinking specifically about affiliate income, I determined that I could divide how people earn money as an affiliate into three primary categories: Unattached, Related, and Involved. I’m speaking in terms of how we are associated with the product or products we may be an affiliate for.
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When I was attending architecture school at Cal, I took a class called Environmental Design 11A: Intro To Drawing. It was four hours of class on Monday and Wednesday, and a meetup for an hour on Friday as well. The crazy part was that this didn’t include the time that was needed to complete our weekly projects. In total, I was averaging about 35 -40 hours a week just for this one class out of my entire schedule. Ah, the life of an architecture student.
During the semester, we were taught that one technique to make our drawings look more realistic is to not focus on the object that you’re drawing, but to focus on the shadows on and around the object instead. Why? Because shadows are everywhere, we just don’t realize it.
If you take a quick glance around the environment you’re in right now, whether your inside a home or office, or outside in a cafe – you’ll begin to notice that shadows are everywhere. Even in and around the keys of your keyboard lie a very precise pattern of shadows.
If you try to draw something, it will not look realistic without shadows.
After I learned this lesson, I began to look at the world in a different way. I noticed shadows everywhere, and I became a better artist as a result. Some of my non-architecture friends thought I was weird, because I would point out certain shadows that looked really fancy or interesting to me. Ah, the life of an architecture student.
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“Hello, my name is Pat.”
“Hi Pat. Nice to meet you!”
“Would you like to buy my eBook? It’s only $29 dollars, and I promise it will tell you everything you need to know. Hello…HELLO?!”
(insert obnoxious game show “incorrect answer” sound effect here)
Cold selling, similar to “cold calling”, is when someone tries to sell something to a prospective customer who does not know that person and was not expecting such an interaction. It does not work. You may be able to get a sale here and there, but if you want to create a successful business online, especially one that you can be proud to say you own, you cannot cold sell.
Do you like to get calls from a telemarketer? Do you like to sign up for email newsletters, only to get bombarded with emails that say “buy this” and “buy that”? Do you click links for products in tweets from people you’ve never heard of?
It might sound obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times a day I’m shown some kind of cold offer. In emails, in tweets, on websites – it’s ridiculous. Not only will cold selling leave you wondering why you don’t make any sales, but you’ll lose the respect of people who may have eventually bought something from you, and maybe even help you promote and sell more products.
So the question is, how can we as internet marketers, bloggers and entrepreneurs sell something to people online, without cold selling?
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Yesterday, on my Facebook page, I had asked the following question:
Which of these book titles do you think would sell better? “How to Be Happy With Your Dog”, or “How to Stop Your Dog From Biting You”? And why?
26 interesting and intriguing comments later, I decided to write a blog post about it because I think we could all benefit from the conversation.
Before I begin, I’d like to mention that seeing this conversation unfold directly on my Facebook page was really amazing. I honestly don’t think interactions like this, involving this many people and being so useful for everyone (even people not directly involved in the conversation) can happen on a platform such as Twitter. Google wave…maybe. If I only had an invite 
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I love experiments. I try something…then I see what happens. It’s so simple, yet so powerful. If only experiments in high school chemistry were as much fun as doing experiments like this on the internet.
Last week, I initiated my keyword position experiment, implementing various strategies to rank as high as possible for the specific keyword phrase, passive income streams, which I was unranked for when this experiment began. Below is a detailed report of exactly what I did and when, and what my Google keyword position was at that time.
The experiment officially began with my blog post entitled Passive Income Streams 101, which included an embedded YouTube video, with the same title. FYI, the keyphrase passive income streams is searched for approximately 1600 times every month. Here’s the log:
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Today, I’m going to outline a plan to rank higher in Google for a certain keyword phrase. Before I tell you exactly what I’m going to do, we must first understand how things work.
In my experience, there are three primary ways that search engines (namely, Google), will determine the rank of your website relevant to certain keywords:
1. The number of backlinks to your website. We all know that one of the biggest things search engines look at is not the quality and quantity of websites that we link to, but the quality and quantity of websites that link back to us. It’s no wonder then why there are tools dedicated just for finding backlinks and showing you exactly which websites are linking back to you.
2. How active your website is. Have you ever heard anyone say that “Google loves blogs?” Well, it’s true – Google and other search engines love blogs and will often rank them higher than static websites on the same topics. This is because they know that blogs are more active and there is an actual discussion about the topic on the website itself. I’ve also noticed that some of my posts will get a little “bump” in keyword position soon after a new comment on that post was made.
The cool thing is, the more active your website is, the higher you will rank. The higher you rank, the more active your website will be. It’s a nice little perpetual cycle once it gets going.
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If you’re at all interested in ranking higher in the search engines for certain keywords, I’d pay close attention to my following experiment.
Today, I’d like to pick a keyword phrase that I currently do not rank particularly high for. On Monday of next week, I plan to implement various strategies to hopefully raise my keyword position and climb into the top spots in Google. We’ll see how long it takes, and if the various strategies even work. Hopefully, if all goes well, you’ll then have a good understanding of the things you can do if you really want to rank higher in the search engines.
Today, on day zero, we’ll hone in on a particular keyword phrase to use.
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Facebook. I hear that word everywhere now: on the radio, on television, and even in conversations while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. Facebook seems to be taking over the world…and judging by the numbers, that statement isn’t that far off.
- Over 300 million active users (that’s one for each U.S. citizen!)
- An Alexa ranking of 2, just behind Google.
- The fastest growing demographic is people age 35 and older.
- People spend an average of 20 minutes a day on Facebook.
A couple of notable points here:
- That’s a LOT of people. A lot.
- The fastest growing demographic (35 years and older), is probably the same demographic that has and is spending the most money.
- Guess what the average time people spend on a given website is…10 seconds. Facebook: 20 minutes.
Ridiculous numbers. Ridiculous.
I guess this is why we’re seeing more and more companies today ditch the website address on commercials and are putting in their Facebook addresses instead. It makes perfect sense, and it’s a sign that we should be doing the same thing.
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Imagine you’re in this scenario:
You have an online business as a graphic designer coach, which means you teach other graphic designers how to make money with their talent. You have a coaching program that has videos and tutorials about how to contact potential clients and really expand their own freelance graphic design business.
To promote your $497 coaching program, you decide to hold a free webinar where you’ll be giving a short presentation and then pitching your course to whoever is watching. 300 people come online to watch your presentation. At the end of your extremely helpful and convincing webinar, you tell your audience about your coaching program, why it will sky-rocket their graphic design business, and where to get it. You also tell them that if they have any questions, to shoot you an email. You go to bed with dreams of seeing an inbox full of transactions in the morning.
You wake up to see that you have 75 unread messages in your inbox! Payday baby! But wait…
You open your inbox to see that you’ve only sold 4 programs, and the other 71 messages are questions from the webinar. 71 emails that you have to go through, some of which are a bit lengthy.
At this moment, how you would feel?
Go ahead, really think about it for a second…
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No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
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