Generating Traffic
Is There Really A Secret To Generating Traffic?
It’s the subject line of so many e mails,The Secret Of Generating Traffic,it’s the lifeblood of an Online business,no Traffic equals no customers,equals no money,it’s that simple really
But is it really difficult to Generate Traffic? well yes and no, sorry to be vague but there is a world of difference between thousands of clicks on your website domain name and dozens of clicks on your order button or names and e mails into your auto responder, for that you need targeted traffic and that’s a whole different animal
We’ve all been offered the opportunity to blast your offer to millions,ever been tempted,of course you have,but then like me you thought about the mass of spam complaints,so that’s not Generating Traffic more like it’s just generating a massive headache, just remember how you feel when all those fake watch and ridiculous claims about male enhancement products show up day in day out,not to impressed are you?
So just Generating Traffic in itself is no use whatsoever,a high Alexa ranking doesn’t pay a single bill,it might massage your ego but it might also get you into hot water,targeted traffic on the other hand want’s to know about your offer,it’s been looking for what you offer
But even Generating Traffic like this isn’t enough unless your offer is compelling, but it’s a start your chance to make a free offer and then to build trust with your new prospect,to demonstrate that you are the real deal in your market
People have become wary of websites that sound to good to be true,it’s been drummed into us from an early age, it it sounds to good to be true it probably is,your job after you have done the job of Generating Traffic is to prove otherwise
So What Are Our Options For Generating Traffic That Is Targeted?
It’s a really important question,what are our options when it comes to Generating Traffic? well if we read all the e mails that arrive in our inbox we are told that Google doesn’t work any more, but contrast that to how many times you use Google or another major search engine and that just gets blown out of the water,I use them all the time in both business and domestic decisions
You see most of the people selling you products for Generating Traffic want you to see some thing shiny and new and therefore buy their product,it doesn’t use any of these methods it says listing all tradition methods known to man,when you open it up however in 99.9% of cases it does use tradition methods, it just dresses them up differently
Now don’t get me wrong,these people need to cut through the clutter and far from all of these products for Generating Traffic are anything other than good,we know that the biggest enemy is people jumping onto the newest shiny thing without actually using what they had before and that never works and it burns money
So do things such as SEO,Keywords,Linkbuilding still work as a way of Generating Traffic in late 2010,you bet your bottom dollar they do,are they slow as we are told,well they are not instant but they last forever once done and yes they need tweaking but they are important parts of site building anyway
But surely Google is banning tens of thousands of sites a week,why go to all this trouble? yes it’s true that Google doesn’t like affiliate based sites,it’s searches are based on relevance and an opt in page isn’t giving detailed information,a lot of people have had their adwords campaigns closed but that really is a different issue
So in essence Generating Traffic from traditional organic traffic is as relevant now as it ever was, in fact as adwords now accounts for just 8% of traffic you could argue it’s more relevant today than it’s ever been
What About Generating Traffic At The Push Of A Button? Can It Really Be Done?
Ah yes the pushbutton way of Generating Traffic,all your problems solved in a few clicks then into your Ferrari and down to the beach,ever heard that story,sounds nice but does it have a basis in truth,well again yes and no,can you the new guy or girl generate $186,927.42 in a week no but you can get things moving a whole lot faster
Many of the pushbutton ways of Generating Traffic use paid methods and there’s nothing wrong with that,paid traffic is highly targeted,it’s looking for what you are offering but Caveat Emptor [Buyer Beware for those of you not familiar with Latin] it can empty your bank account faster than a cute croupier on a table in Las Vegas
Of course you need to know your conversion rates and using a little bit of paid traffic will help you establish those numbers, just don’t go mad on this way of Generating Traffic until you know your Return On Investment,once you know your ROI you can roll it out on a much bigger scale
So if Google Adwords only attracts a small percentage of traffic what other ways of Generating Traffic that is truly targeted are there,well there are quite a few actually,let’s delve in and take a look
When we read about pushbutton ways of Generating Traffic we are often using demographics and there are many great demographics tools out there,two of them are attached to very powerful ways of Generating Traffic,lets take a closer look at one of them Demographics Tool
By using these you are Generating Traffic that really is very interested in what you do and say,it’s not scatter gun it’s laser targeted and it wants to buy
Can I automate this way of Generating Traffic? well again yes you can
These Toolsgive you a way of automating the traffic,the video is spammy the people behind it really know their stuff
Have you seen anything really new that works when it comes to Generating Traffic? good question and yes I have,this guy is highly trusted,remember his Scammers Rant a couple of months ago exposing some of the scams out there?
This Idea Is Simple And Unique but as he explains it was the culmination of 9 years of business online
So there a lot of different ways we can go about this,both traditional and new and many of the traditional ways will be around for years to come so dont dismiss them when it comes to Generating Traffic
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 1st, 2010. 4 Comments. 
Mastermind Group
The Power Of Motivation From Your Mastermind Group
I just wanted to look at the power of motivation in keeping you in check,it’s very easy when working on your own to get down,to get off track and to start to doubt yourself,it’s okay to admit it,we all have these moments,that’s why we all need to be part of a Mastermind Group
So how does a group,your own Mastermind Group help? I thought it might help to list ten things that we can do today to get fired up
Function No1 of your Mastermind Group must be to get yourself a mentor,ideally physical but failing that online,I had the great fortune to be mentored by Alex Jeffereys he in turn was mentored by
Rich Schefren you are never to experienced to get a mentor,in every field of endeavour the best people always have one and you should to
Function No2 of your Mastermind Group is to take that first step, sometimes the task seems huge but every journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step,break it down,today,tomorrow,next week,one step at a time
Function No3 of your Mastermind Group has to be your to do list,be crystal clear in what you need to do and the result that you require,remember no clarity equals no result
Function No4 of your Mastermind Group is having got it started is to get it done,don’t spend weeks polishing it,everything evolves but the best people sell that as a benefit,think Windows 7 was my idea,brilliant instead of our customers ironed out the bugs in our system it was Windows 7 was my idea genius
Function No5 of your Mastermind Group is Outsource the technical stuff will drag you down and bring you to a halt,you know what you want now get somebody else to do it for you,it’s a simple time verses money equation
Function No6 and I think one of the most powerful reasons for being in a Mastermind Group is to find an accountability partner,that person who will both reassure you but also give you a firm push when things get difficult
Function No7 and another powerful reason to be in a Mastermind Group is for your R & D not so much research and development as Rip Off and Duplicate,don’t reinvent the wheel,somebody in your group has already done it,let them help you,just remember to return the compliment when you can
Function No8 has to be continued learning,a good Mastermind Group will meet regularly,either online or in person,continued learning with like minded people is essential,for motivation and for accountability,if your in striking distance of London you could Join Us but wherever you are it makes sense to join a like minded group
Can A Mastermind Group Be Fun As Well As Benefitial?
Now so far our Mastermind group has focused on work but you know what you need some fun as well, some reward,taken that first step,reward yourself,finished everything on this weeks to do list? take the afternoon off, remember as a kid we were told all work and no play makes [Jack/Jill] a dull [boy/girl] well it’s still true, we just forgot somewhere down the line
Lastly but by no means least in our Mastermind Group is to celebrate our success,you’ve got your product finished,you’ve got your JV partners to tell their lists about it as well,now celebrate,have some fun and get fired up to start again
But enough of my ideas,why not add your own key motivators by way of a comment,I’d love to hear what keeps you motivated
So hopefully you can start to see how powerful this can be,it motivates, it educates, it picks us up in moments of weakness,so two promises to make to yourself over the next few days,if you don’t already have one,get yourself a mentor and become part of what Napoleon Hill started after he met up with Andrew Carnegie it was the birth of something we benefit from to this day, the birth of the Mastermind group
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 3rd, 2010. 59 Comments.
Search Engine Friendly
Are Your Posts Really Search Engine Friendly?
Can we make our posts Search Engine Friendly? I ask that question for an important reason because really all of our posts hopefully talk to two different audiences, one being your regular readers but the second being potential new readers and new prospects,those people searching in google or another of the key search engines for your choosen topic
Have you discovered more by accident than design in the past that certain of your posts are getting a fast running stream of comments even though you didn’t ask your readers to comment,chances are that post was highly Search Engine Friendly and is probably ranking in the top 4 or 5 searches on that page
It’s become fashionable in online circles recently to proclaim the death of Search Engine Friendly as being valid,with the massive growth of Social Media we might be forgiven for thinking it doesn’t matter but in truth it’s still a really important part of our mix
Most of us are not naturally geared to writing Search Engine Friendly copy so we need to give ourselves a helping hand and do a little research before we start writing because we need to keep our content relevant to both our reader and to the search engine and clearly to still write in a way that is readable and interesting
Now that said if you have a few tools at your disposal it will help, software to keep you on track as to what a Search Engine Friendly post looks like and I will go into some of those a little later
Now for those of you that have written yourselves off of the page and have passed the task of writing Search Engine Friendly posts to a member of your team or to a trusted outsource partner then congratulations, it takes a task off of your shoulders, for the rest of us it’s part of the learning curve
The acid test of Search Engine Friendly posts is really two fold, does it compel people to comment on it, to bookmark it and want to share it with others and do people want to link to it
Search Engine Friendly Posts Drive Lots of Traffic
In the end Search Engine Friendly posts drive lots of traffic and traffic put simply is the lifeblood of your blog or website and remember this is highly targeted traffic and that means the conversion rates should be much higher
Now of course we could take the view that to make our posts a lot more Search Engine Friendly that we need to Outsource our writing to an Expert Writer somebody who has a team that can take on your writing tasks such as articles, Blog posts and the like, but will you lose your identity in doing so?
In a word no,the right Outsource partner is just that, they are a part of your team, they have your best interests at heart in the end any partnership that is not win win is not a partnership, they should add a layer of strength to what you do and in this case will make your content more Search Engine Friendly
What does a search engine look for in Search Engine Friendly content? in terms of crawling clean fast loading pages are really important, so trying to be to clever here kills your site, just think what happens to you when a page you are looking at takes forever, you click off of it and go elsewhere
The spiders are indexing your hopefully Search Engine Friendly content for future people looking for this information, lastly it’s ranking the content with it’s complicated algorithms but in laymans terms is your content relevant to the keyword the searcher used to find it?
So in essence we are spoon feeding the search engines with Search Engine Friendly content but on the other hand we are not stuffing our content full of keywords just for the sake of it, once you get over around 5% it would be seen as cramming and that gets into the territory of keyword spam and with it goodbye ranking
With all of that said it’s interesting to note that actual words on the page are only around 4th in the order of things after such factors as how trusted is a domain, the link popularity of a page and anchor text linking back from external pages so you can’t do it all yourself you still need the respect of others to really succeed
So What Can Make Your Post More Search Engine Friendly
Well as we touched on before we can bring a little technology into the mix,firstly we need good keyword research and there are some great tools out there for this googles own Keyword Tool is a great starting point to acheiving more Search Engine Friendly posts
In terms of the Best Keyword Tool to ensure that you are Search Engine Friendly then I think you will go a long way to beat this and you can try it free, watch their video on why 99% of people get this wrong and just in case your wondering this is not a pitch from me, it’s their free trial link
But how about a tool that actually tells you as you create a post if it’s Search Engine Friendly, does such an animal exist? well yes it does, it works in the background and literally tells you in real time how to improve right up to 100% I think
This Tool is priceless and if you don’t have it you are really missing out
So we can see that there are quite a few things that come into the mix and it’s not all about what’s directly visible on the page but one things for certain that you need to make your posts Search Engine Friendly
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 5th, 2010. 4 Comments.
Backlinking Equals Traffic
Does Backlinking Equals Traffic Really Equal Profit?
I talked on Friday about being search Engine friendly and I wanted to talk today about a supposedly simple equation that says Backlinking Equals Traffic which in turn equals profit to see if it’s really true
What is undoubtedly true is the fact that Backlinking Equals Traffic, the traffic that it brings in is targeted therefore highly interested in your topic but as always the trick is in converting that traffic into profits
So if Backlinking Equals Traffic then I guess the simple answer to the question everybody is asking is why do I get such a small return on my time, many blogs produce high quality content but very few make any real money from it and yet most websites would kill for the amount of targeted traffic that they get
So what’s going on, why does the fact that Backlinking Equals Traffic not lead to profit as we were lead to believe? much of it in the end must be down to what we do or don’t ask people to do when they arrive on our blog,our call to action is unclear and many peope are frightened to ask visitors to buy but why would that be?
You’ve built up your audience, put together some great information, invested a lot of time and by extension money into what you so surely you have a right to turn that equation Backlinking Equals Traffic equals profit into being
So Here’s How Backlinking Equals Traffic Does Really Equal Profits
In the end we all have a decision to make, is this a hobby or a business? Backlinking Equals Traffic, that part is straightforward but surely the next part asking your customer or visitor to spend money is a simple extension of what you do, we all know that not everything can be for nothing
So while certain of your visitors will expect that you keep giving everything away that simply can’t carry on, you have bills to pay and let’s face it you need to reinvest in your business to keep making it better, you don’t want to appeal to everybody after all, you want to appeal to the section of your market that want’s to grow with you
By making sure Backlinking Equals Traffic we now need to be equally sure that our audience understands the need to take continued action, the mark of an audience that just seeks free information is in the end an audience that keeps looking for the next push button idea and sadly it’s the biggest lie on the Internet today and incidently the reason why 97% of people will not succeed
But surely I will offend my audience if they just think that I want money won’t they, in a word no, there is that small section who might drop off but they would anyway, remember that you are investing in your business to provide your customers with a service and you with a living, Backlinking Equals Traffic but it also must deal with reality and your audience certainly won’t thank you if you stop posting because you have run out of money
So What’s Your Backlinking Equals Traffic Equals Profit Action Plan?
Ah yes the show me the money moment, how does Backlinking Equals Traffic really work in practice? well as with most things you need an actionable plan and you need to break it down into daily, weekly and monthly activities, next you need to reduce the gulf between the time you have and the action you need to take, we need to Outsource some or all of this function and when you think about it, it lends itself well to this
We need to automate as much of the rest of the Backlinking Equals Traffic process, services such as
Onlywire will generate high quality backlinks on autopilot, yes it takes a bit of time to set up but remember that push button is the biggest lie on the Internet today
Use the free technology at your disposal today, the Firefox Browser with the Alexa plugin tells you about the sorts of sites you are visiting, search out the authority figures in your market and comment on them, don’t spam them but add value to their discussion, this will really ensure that Backlinking Equals Traffic for you, and don’t forget to out task this when you can
Ping your Blog after each new post and don’t forget that you can get plugins to do this for you, you will in time get pingbacks and trackbacks and yes you will get spammers as well but as long as you have Akismet in your plugins you can just remove these fairly simply
What about these services you see that generate 3000 backlinks for $9 Dollars, that really would be Backlinking Equals Traffic but make sure you find our where these backlinks are coming from, are they relevant to your niche or are they as I am getting at the moment 15 or 20 of the same advertising style comments that you treat as spam, particularly when they just keep arriving even after you write to the person concerned to ask them to stop
I think the best Backlinking Equals Traffic program that I have seen, one with the biggest range of high quality free tools and run by a man I think has the highest of integrity in Online Marketing today is this
Backlinking System his tutorials are really good, if you follow this you will rank highly and get lots of free traffic that converts
So clearly a topic we could talk on all day and one I would love to hear what you think on and what ways you have found to generate high quality backlinks to your sites, so all it really leaves for today is to say that Backlinking equals Traffic
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 8th, 2010. 2 Comments.
Using Leverage
Are You Using Leverage In Your Online Business?
I wanted today to look at the power of Using Leverage in the sales of your own products or in gaining credibility in your marketplace or lastly on gaining free traffic to your blog or site in all three you can benefit from this technique
Why are we Using Leverage? simple really you are using the established credibility in the marketplace of the person concerned and they in return are getting another opportunity to either offer their subscribers some great information that is of value or they are recommending one of your products
When we think about it when you start out you could have the greatest product, the best sales letter or video but there is still something vital missing and that is the doubt in your buyers mind, I love the sound of this but I don’t know this guy or this girl, by Using Leverage you get over this hurdle really quickly
So if we can boost our sales and our credibility in the market place as easily as that why are more people not Using Leverage, in short why are we all making life much more difficult than it needs to be?
Well I think not Using Leverage is a product of how offline businesses work or more importantly how most people think they work and that is to treat everybody else in your industry as competition, but what none of us consider is that for years many of the imformation based companies have agressively been leveraging each others mailing lists, in short they’ve known this all along, it’s not really even a secret
People who have been clients of the likes of Rich Schefren Jay Abraham Tony Robbins and the like have been exposed to these practices, even selling their lists of prospects that don’t buy from them to their competitors, by Using Leverage they have grown exponentially whilst others grow by a few percent a year at the most, it’s a very different way of thinking and one me must all learn from
So the theory is all well and good but how can we go about Using Leverage in practice, how can we make it work for our businesses maybe even to generate that same explosive growth, let’s put the boot on the other foot and look at it from the point of view of the established marketer, that person known as the Guru
Other Key Ways Of Using Leverage
Now of course there are other key ways of Using Leverage, The real way Ray Krok found McDonalds, read more on page 6, The 5 best ways to reduce your workload by 75% whilst expontentially increasing your profits,turn to page 8 for this,The best country to makes this all happen, read more on page 10
The one vital piece of advice my mentor gave me that turned on the lights,find out on page 14 and the one vital ingredient to make the difference, page 12 of this report talks further about it on how you can help when it comes to Using Leverage, good copywriters have always tempted us to explore further
Back to our Gurus view, what do they want out of this besides money? well they are busy people with big lists and those lists have a thirst for great information, remember great information? it used to be everywhere so how can you provide this, a well researched information packed report is a good start
An interview with a leader in your niche would be even better, turn it into an MP3 and use the transcript as an e book, sell it for $7-$17 Dollars and offer your Guru 100% commission, do you think he or she will be motivated to send traffic to your site for that? it’s an easy sell for them, great information for their list, it builds your list really fast and it’s a great way of Using Leverage, a real win win
So Why Isn’t Everybody Using Leverage Like This?
On the face of it this should be easy, so why isn’t everybody Using Leverage like this? well it’s a good question and I think it has two answers, number one being that around 97% of people have never thought of this as a possibility and of the remaining 3% most of those are unsure how to approach the authority figures
So how would you get their attention? well for starters how about writing about them on your blog, many of these people will keep a watchful eye on what is written about them both good and bad, they are also looking for ways of Using Leverage, remember that the worst answer you will ever get in life is no but what if they say yes?
One of the really high profile Bloggers David Risley often posts on what he thinks about his readers Blogs, it’s a great education for us lesser mortals and it proves my point in the sentence above, think these authority figures don’t have time for this well think again, they too are looking for new ideas
Now clearly this topic has a ton of mileage, really I have just scratched the surface here and I think your mind can run riot on this topic, I know mine can, think about your strenghts,is it writing, interviewing, product creation, in the end all great ways of Using Leverage
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 12th, 2010. 8 Comments.
Fastest Ways To Traffic
What Are The Fastest Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Site Today
If you look in youe inbox today it will be stuffed with e mails promising you the holy grail of traffic generation but how many times have these promises of the Fastest Ways to drive traffic left you feeling cheated out of a real way of acheiving it? if your anything like me quite a lot I suspect
Now we shouldn’t for one momemt start to think that there are not ways of driving a lot of traffic quickly, far from it but we must temper our enthusiasm and our credit cards because the promises of the Fastest Ways of traffic generation keep coming and the ones promising automated free traffic are often stretching things more than a little bit
Let’s face it turning on the traffic taps would be nice, that really would be one of the Fastest Ways to high profits and the often vaunted hours work a day with money pouring in while you sleep with a new glitch and undiscovered method known only to the gurus hmm!
And yet if you get most of the gurus to be honest about what they do they will admit that the Fastests Ways to drive traffic are to use paid traffic and that media buys seems to be the flavour of the month at the moment, so what’s really going on
Well we know that Googles platforms are not attracting the advertising that they once were,paid Google advertising on a search page now accounts for just 8% so clearly that’s fadeing away, clearly they have started to price themselves out of the market, this was always seen as one of the Fastest Ways to drive traffic and it still has it’s place in small scale testing of new sales page conversions but it is now too expensive for general advertising
But how about the massive untapped torrent of free Google traffic that we are now being told is out there, wouldn’t this really be the holy grail, one of the most legitimate and Fastest Ways of driving unlimited targeted traffic, well in part it’s always been there, it’s just not been fashionable to look for it in recent times
The Common Myths on The Fastest Ways To Drive Traffic
Okay put your hand up if you’ve ever bought into one of these undiscovered, untapped, black hole, etc, etc method of driving traffic, be honest we all have, when you opened it one of two things happened, either it was an established method dressed up in new clothes or as has happened recently it was asking you to try and trick one of the paid traffic sites with a script, I don’t know about you but I don’t think that’s a good idea on perhaps the fastest growing traffic site online
Let’s be totally honest here, if these Fastest Ways to drive unlimited free targeted traffic existed do you really think it would be a secret for long, in the end this is a business and businesses have to balance cost against income and traffic generation is a cost period
Ah I can here you saying, free traffic has no cost but I would argue that it does because either your or your Outsourcers time is not free, so really none of the Fastest Ways of driving traffic are truly free, if you balance the perhaps hundreds of hours a year you spend researching it then it is far from free
How about unlimited free traffic that we see advertised, you know the one, I was getting 1000 visitors a day but after I installed this push button 3 clicks software I now get 95,000-100,000 vistors a day, surely that really does represent one of the Fastest Ways of driving free traffic, well the truth is rather different
Yes I do believe that people are generating incomes of 100,000 Dollars a month and upwards selling digital products on sites like clickbank but if you read a number of blogs some of these people are being rather less than honest in what they do, so myth number one is most of that income comes from paid traffic, we are talking 50,000-75,000 Dollars a month paid traffic
So there are a stream of products coming out selling free unlimited traffic generated we are told be cutting edge software when really these people are buying the traffic to promote their offers, the second thing is the income claims are based on their total results across a range of affiliate products not on the income from the product they are talking about
Clearly then the people who are selling this holy grail, this dream if you like using the Fastest Ways to drive targeted traffic and it’s not free and it’s not quick because myth number two is the amount of time involved in doing this, far from the 1 hour a day and off to the beach many are working 7 days a week at it
So What Really Are The Fastest Ways To Drive Traffic
So myths shattered, push button simple isn’t really that simple and it certainly isn’t free, what are the Fastest Ways to drive targeted traffic to your site? well there are two main competitors to Google for paid advertising along the lines of Google adwords and certainly they represent the Fastest Ways to drive targeted traffic
Now it’s not going to come as a great shock because these really do exist,they are less expensive, you can control your budgets easily and they do represnt two of the Fastest Ways to drive truly targeted traffic to your sites, put simply they are
Facebook and the dating site Plenty of Fish
When you think about it, both models which are very different hold a lot of information on their subscribers, ideal for a demographic model and both have Demographics Tool ,so their Fastest Ways to drive traffic can also be very profitable, just check what they do and don’t accept before you try and advertise
Of course if you have something that converts well then your JV partners represent one of the Fastest Ways to drive traffic and being a warm market there’s less resistance, it also represents the only really true way to get free targeted traffic but you must be prepared to do the same for others, it’s not a one way street
We often read about a truly viral product,a great report or a great piece of information that somebody gives away, now clearly this is not free for the person creating it but the returns can be enormous,Rich Schefrens
Internet Manifesto truly was one such product and as such represented one of the Fastest Ways to drive targeted traffic, over 1 Million people downloaded that report and no serious marketer should be without it
Now clearly these do not represent the only ways to drive traffic but they do represnt ways that you can actually do it today, they are completely as they seem, in another post I am going to look at other ways of driving traffic, not immediate but methods that keep delivering visitors but if you want quick traffic these are the Fastest Ways
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 15th, 2010. 8 Comments.
Using Articles
Why You Should Be Using Articles To Drive Video Traffic
I was introduced to this as an idea a few months ago and immediately saw the power of Using Articles to drive video traffic, we all have a lot of articles already created in our niche posted on most of the main article sites driving some traffic to our sites so in a way some of the work is already done
The idea I was sold on was a highly professional conversion Using Articles to create talking Videos, I wanted to know more and as always with the next big thing piece of software is where the trouble and the extreme disappointment started
In this case Using Articles to create Videos produced a highly ametuer result, not one that you would want to duplicate in any way and put your name on, doing a quick Google search for the company I am not that shocked to see it’s not coming up so clearly I was not the only one that thought this way
So having tried the next big thing I put that to one side and would probably have forgotten about it until I started looking at some more education based training products around a month ago, that for me was the point at which the idea of Using Articles to create Videos came back into my mind
I had taken my first faltering steps on Camtasia and realised what a simple yet excellent piece of software it was, not only in terms of initial creation but also in what you can do with it next and the penny immediately dropped that this was going to be an obvious way of Using Articles to create Videos
So How Am I Using Articles To Create Videos?
Quite simple really, it occured to me a few months back that most of the how to Videos on sites such as Clickbank were using slides either created in Powerpoint or similar, running them in Video format with Audio added that that in turn would lend itself to Using Articles to Create Videos, in fact it’s so straight forward even I can do it
Now you may be thinking that I don’t have the time to be Using Articles in this way and that’s fine, just Outsource It either to your own people, I talked about this in my post on Oct 29
Alternatively you could Outsource the individual projects to a site such as
Fiverr or Gigswood but bear in mind that a typical article is just ten to twenty frames so they don’t take long to do yourself
My personal experience of Outsourcing this exersize is that you can get around 40 slides done for around $20 Dollars and if you want the Audio done you’ll pay around another $5 Dollars per video for somebody to do the voice over for you, finished article in other words takes around 2-3 days and costs around $15 Dollars
If on the other hand you have the time to do it yourself it will take around 20-30 minutes a Video Using Articles to create them into powerpoint and then turning the powerpoint presentation into a video with you doing the audio yourself, it’s all built in your just need a microphone or more ideally a headset with a micrphone built in
Using Articles To Get Videos Online
So having got these produced how are you going to go about Using Articles as Videos how do you get them out there? well as always there are a number of ways of doing it, step one is the do it yourself method which is quite a time consuming process, so perhaps that’s not the best way to do it
Getting to automation in how you are Using Articles means really one of two results, one of which offers a free trial and lets you get your videos out to around 100 sites including many social media sites, your first 4 are free, it offers a very wide distribution base and gives you full details on what the results are and that is
Traffic Geyser
Your second choice offers you both paid and free options, the free option offers you distribution to around 16 video sites, going to the paid version gives you more options in terms of metrics and that is
Tubemogul
So dust down your old articles and see if they are suitable for making in video, it’s a major way of driving traffic and it’s a great way of Using Articles
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 19th, 2010. 8 Comments.
Articles As A Source
Using Articles As A Source Of Traffic? You Should!
I talked on Friday about the power of using articles to create videos a very powerful method of driving fresh traffic to your site but have you considered the other opportunities that come from driving traffic using Articles As A Source?
In the end your writing the article in the first place is the hard bit, now using Articles As A Source is really just a question of lateral thinking, because if you do then you can increase your traffic many many times over and remember this is not clogging your server with people who have no interest in you this is highly targeted traffic
On Friday we concentrated on Video as our main generator but as Edward De Bono taught us by putting on our different hats we have many options, let’s see how using Articles As A Source can really ramp things up
First off does it lend itself to educate people? in many cases that was the key point, in which case add some additional detail to it, this is a great way of using Articles As A Source, a quick search on Google will produce many sites like e how for you to post to, use your anchor text links in the normal way
Clearly this starts to establish you as an expert way outside of your normal realm, this use of using Articles As A Source is something that most people are not even thinking about but it’s very powerful
Using Articles As A Source To Create PDF’s
By using Articles As A Source for a PFD document you have another use of your Article again it gets it out to a different audience and in both of the above cases people are looking to be educated so you are catching this audience at an early stage,becoming the authority figure is clearly going to be an important tool in attracting future customers
Free ebook sites are your main destination for these and again make sure it adds value and is not just an advert, it may work for you but it won’t work for your target audience, it’s a powerful use Of Articles As A Source of extra traffic
Going back to our lateral thinking how about converting it into an audio, I don’t know about you but I listen to a lot of educational MP3′s on how to topics and as always you can go down a fully automated route such as say
Read the words this will literally take your post and convert it into spoken word
For many of you though you will want it to be a rather more personal way of making use of Articles As A Source and the software that I personally use for audio is Audacity, just make sure you convert the files down, 20 minutes of speach will be around 200mb,once you compress it to MP3 that same twenty minutes is more like 3 to 4mb with no lose of quality
Now this of course leads us into using Articles As A Source of podcasts, I personally listen to a lot of speak based radio but at times it all sounds the same, it helps people to keep things unique and it’s another way to get your message across, just add your URL spoken this time at the end of the broadcast
A quick search for podcast directories produces many sites that offer you the opportunity to get your message out there, as in many of my earlier posts you are going to see the importance of Outsource some or all of these tasks but by making use of Articles As A Source in this way you are spreading your message much wider
Other Ways Of Using Articles As A Source,Keep That Lateral Thought Process Going
I talked on Friday about how you can use Powerpoint to produce Videos but have you thought of using the Powerpoint presentation as a way of using Articles As A Source because you should? again it lends itself to the person who is looking for good information and some of the sites sharing this information are very high pagerank
One such of these is Slideshare it has a pagerank of 7 and is Alexa ranked under 2000 and yet most people in this field wont even have it on their radar which really does make this a great use of Articles As A Source of both extra traffic and extra authority
Lastly but by no means least in ideas on this one is to share your related posts on these issues with the various blog content sharing sites, by going to the communities that deal in this you need to have something to educate people with but clearly the rewards are as always more traffic
So where can you go to make great use of your Articles As A Source of new traffic? well two key ones come to mind and they would be Bloggers Base & Blog Engage both allow distribution of blog posts, read through what they do and don’t allow and remember you are not advertising you are educating here
So hopefully this exersize has got your lateral thinking muscles going and in all probability you can come up with some more but I think you will start to get the idea but the crital thing is instead of seeing things as once and it’s done think instead of how many ways you can use Articles As A Source
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 22nd, 2010. 2 Comments.
Personal Branding
Are We Making The Most Of Personal Branding?
How do we make the best of brand you, to give your posts a sense of Personal Branding whilst seeking to educate our readers and add value to their businesses?
In many ways it seems to be a question that a lot of people a wrestling with at the moment, how do I add value instead of just blowing my own trumpet, welcome to the world of Personal Branding
Marketing Online covers such a diverse range of subjects and such a diverse range of people, all of them seeking Personal Branding to set them apart from others in a me too world
And yet if we look in our inbox on a daily basis we can see a host of people involved in that me too approach, all selling the next big thing,site coming down anytime naturally
It is no great shock however that against that background that certain people really stand out, far from following the herd they plough their own furrow and they use Personal Branding as the key identifier for the readers, theirs tend to be highly trusted and widely read and often quoted, clearly they are getting something right
So if these people are making such an impact using Personal Branding why does it seem to be passing everybody else by, why are they missing the opportunity to get their names out there
Use Personal Branding To Build Authority In Your Niche
Against this background you will not be surprised to hear that the first e mails I tend to open these days are rarely those offering me push button solutions, of course automation is important but I believe that by using Personal Branding you can get much closer to your subscribers and create a win win solution
It’s also no accident that Brian Clark of Copyblogger said in a Recent Podcast that many people start their time learning from their site then quietly go away and earn a great living based on the information that they have learned there, he says that his parting shot is to invite them to buy something before they go,clearly they are using Personal Branding to good effect
A lot of my recent reading online has been on a fairly new blog that has been Online for barely two months and yet in that time the lady concerned has got herself an Alexa ranking of under 26,000 she makes great use of Personal Branding and it’s well worth reading
Personal Branding also gives you the opportunity to stamp your personality on your writing when placing your work on many of the blog sharing sites but in doing that we must remember that we need to add value not just blow our own trumpets
So How are you going to build brand you,what makes you different that allows you to use Personal Branding to set you apart from the crowd, there will come a time when the wild claims will be stamped out
So What Should Your Personal Branding Strategy Be?
You may be wondering how can I get my personality across, how can I implement my own version of Person Branding? there are after all so many others out there already, well yes but often in a really me to way and that’s instantly forgettable
Think of your favourite offline businesses, what is it they do well that others do either indifferently at best or really badly at worst, usually it’s a combination of personality and service, it personal, the service is special and you leave with a smile not that empty feeling of disappointment
There’s more good news on the way as well for the businesses online that are doing things the right way as the FTC promises to crack down on the claims and testimonials that are out there, a good time for those of us who do things the right way, a good time for Personal Branding
So think about what you do that is different, your USP as the business schools have taught us to think and make it part of how you do business, remember the way you feel in those great offline businesses, you make a point of telling your friends of spreading the gospel and make it part of your Personal Branding
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 26th, 2010. 4 Comments.
Facebook Should We Be Worried By It’s Explosive Growth?
Should we be worried by the continued massive growth of Facebook? It’s growth which includes adding another 150 Million users this year is quite amazing and clearly the best in terms of what it offers is yet to come
Much has been made of the fact that it’s traffic has now overtaken that of Google and certainly Google must be worried about that both in terms of where the traffic goes and the fact that the average user stays on Facebook for around 55 minutes a day
Many have dismissed the type of traffic that Facebook generates as being just social chat and clearly there is an element of truth in that but as marketers can we seriously ignore the growth that is going on and the upcoming developments because they surely flag up what the company sees as it’s future direction
By planning to integrate Ebay and Paypal into their platform it is clear that Facebook sees itself as a serious business platform and by choosing Bing as it’s preferred search engine based on the wishes of it’s own users it shuts Google out of the picture for a rapidly growing group of people, many of whom could be considered to be early adopters
The other trend that we are seeing from Facebook is that already 52% of access is via mobile devices and we already know that there are over 5 times as many mobile devices as there are static computers, so a whole new customer base is occurring here
And yet for all this something else really important is happening, Facebook users tend to buy on recommendations from their Facebook friends, which is good news for the majority of honest Online businesses and will spell the beginning of the end of the wild claims and lies that sadly are too common at the moment
Harnessing The Power Of Facebook
It is in the power of the Facebook friend that businesses can really start to see growth, on average each user has around 130 friends and you have the opportunity to put your message or your product in front of them, of course with opportunity comes responsibility
Now the reverse of this is the power of the Facebook Like Button we are starting to see this popping up all over the Internet and it gives us a good idea of the rate at which it will continue to grow, it’s influence will be enormous
As of April 2010 5.4 Billion like buttons had been hit,1 Million sites have the Facebook like plugin and as of June 2010 10,000 more are added every single day, just take a moment to think of the opportunity that presents to all online businesses
So following on from that 500 fans on your business page would give you a reach of around 65,000 people and given that Facebook users tend to buy on recommendation that is a powerful group, as always your offer needs to be good and we must remember that at this point we don’t have any control over the traffic, it all belongs to Facebook
Therefore offering your potential customers an ethical bribe is critical for their e mail address to bring them into your normal funnel, Facebook uses FBML a form of HTML so you will need some basic knowledge in terms of how to set up your opt in box on your business page, a good idea would be to look at North Social for this
Now the other great thing I think with Facebook is the fact that the messages you get depend on your chosen interests and the activity levels of the people interacting with you, so spam should be reduced dramatically and you will see the things that interest you most first
So How Do We Monetize Facebook?
First of all it stands to reason that we must build up some good content in order to get people to like us, from here we must keep in touch regularly to remain visible, so far quite standard practice, bu using some of the low cost Outsourcing services we can put our search for like minded people on autopilot, just go and see how many people will do this for you
But and it’s an important but we are selling based on a recommendation culture here, so wild claims on income such as those seen frequently in your inbox currently won’t endear you to your Facebook friends, the information needs to be good and the products need to deliver
A couple of resources that you will find useful, the first one being an e book written by Irene Bennistone shows how to drive free traffic and how to really make your pages work, 20 minutes work based on this will give you great returns from pages that index rapidly
His guy has been successful on Facebook, his friends laughed at him when he told them he was going to make money from it but predictably it was not that long before they want to know how he was doing it, he explains more in this Facebook Traffic program, he also explains how he to has fallen victim to the claims being made out there and wanted to do something about it
So in conclusion should we be worried about the rapid growth? in a word no, it will be a force for good, less spam, more relevant content from more honest people, sounds like progress to me not a step backwards, yes there will be those who just use it for chatter and that’s fine but I think the message is clear business needs Facebook
Filed under My Online Journey by on Nov 29th, 2010. 6 Comments.
