call to actionYesterday, 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. Click to continue…

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

quarter-inch-holeIf 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. Click to continue…

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!

little-known-grow-blogI 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… Click to continue…

newsletter-autoresponderIn 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. Click to continue…

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. Click to continue…

I know a lot of you have been asking me about Article Marketing and what exactly it can be used for. Well, since I only do minimal amounts of Article Marketing, I’ve found someone who has much more experience to write about it for you today. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below if you still have questions unanswered. Enjoy!

This is a guest post by Henri Junttila from Wake Up Cloud.

Do you want to generate more traffic to your blog or website? Do you want to increase your subscribers, sales and fans?

It can be done, but only if you’re prepared to work hard. You’ve probably heard people say that article marketing is dead. I’m here to tell you it’s not, because I’m currently using it successfully.

There will always be people that proclaim that everything’s dead. Google Adsense is dead, blogging is dead and whatever else.

These are the people that have failed and want something to blame. Increasing traffic to your blog and website is extremely simple with article marketing, so let’s get started, shall we? Click to continue…

Infomercial MarketingHello. My name is Pat, and I’m addicted to watching infomercials.

Call me crazy, but I love to watch infomercials. Why? Because it’s a totally free marketing lesson that we can apply to what we do online.

If you think about it, the whole purpose of an infomercial is to get a direct response from its audience, hence the term direct response television, or DRTV for short. Isn’t that the kind of marketing you and I are interested in? Getting a direct response from our audience?

Whether you’re just a blogger, or selling multiple products online, we’re all trying to follow a similar model:

  1. Grab people’s attention and make them stick around.
  2. Connect deeply with people through their desires, emotions, wants and needs.
  3. Make our audience perform some kind of call-to-action (i.e. comment, opt-in, click on an affiliate link, or make a purchase).

Furthermore, the infomercials you see on television are optimized to the highest degree – they weren’t just randomly put together. In fact, they’re the result of proven formulas, months of production and a long history of sales data, all with the goal of engaging the most people and making as much money as possible.

There’s a lot we can learn from infomercials. Click to continue…

things-to-do-nowNo huge intro needed for this post. Here are 10 actionable items that you can do right now to improve your online business or blog:

1. Re-Evaluate Your Goals

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

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

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

button LearnYou have the ability to create the perfect online course for your audience.

The real question is, what makes the perfect course? How do you create a product that your readers would just die to have access to?

Obviously, it would have to have information that your readers want, not what you think they want. But how do you know exactly what that is?

It should also present the information in a way that is best suited for their taste. But again, how do you know?

If only your audience could tell you exactly what they wanted. It would be as if they created the product for you. How awesome would that be?

Well, that’s exactly what you should do. Click to continue…

The most powerful marketing tool is a story.

I’ve recently started to reread one of my all-time favorite books, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, and in it there’s an entire section dedicated to the power of storytelling and how it gets people to pay closer attention to what you have to say.

If you think about it, it’s absolutely true. We’re so much more in tune when someone is telling us a story, as opposed to when someone is just “talking at us”, or lecturing. All of my favorite professors from college were ones that were masters of storytelling.

Stories are powerful, and when combined with marketing, the results can be out of this world. Click to continue…