Written on 10/27/2011 at 6:05 am by

8 Ways to Use Autoresponders to Drive Traffic and Increase Your Blogging Income

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Blogging for Dollars, Featured Posts

Yesterday I wrote a post titled Introduction to Autoresponders. It recommended them as a tool that bloggers should consider as a means of driving traffic, deepening reader engagement, and increasing profits. I also showed how to set up an autoresponder sequence of emails in just a few easy steps using Aweber’s service (another great service that offers Autoresponders is MailChimp).

Today I want to suggest a number of practical strategies for actually using autoresponders alongside your blog.

Some of these I’ve used with success myself, and some are based upon the experience of other blogging friends. It should also be said that you could combine some of the following ideas into a single autoresponder sequence (more on this below).

1. Free mini-course

Set up a sequence of emails that walks readers through the teaching around some aspect of your niche. This is what I did when developing an early version of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Back then 31DBBB wasn’t an ebook—it was a series of 31 emails that readers signed up for. Each day, readers received an email with some teaching and a task to do. This later evolved into the ebook with extra content.

2. Paid course or product

Numerous bloggers have set up autoresponders as central parts of paid products or courses. One of the best examples of this is Chris Guillebeau’s 365-part autoresponder, which forms part of a product. Chris’s product took a mammoth amount of work, but was hugely successful with those who bought it, and as a result, it would have been a very profitable endeavor.

3. Introduce readers to your archives

One of the challenges that many bloggers face is that new readers to your blog don’t ever see your old posts sitting in your archives. So why not showcase the best of your older posts by putting them together into an autoresponder sequence? Perhaps you could send one “classic” post per week. In doing so, you’ll be constantly driving readers to your archives for as long as new people keep signing up.

Another alternative is to do a compilation email on a particular theme. For example, on our photography blog autoresponder, one email that goes out in our sequence lists ten posts from our archives all on the theme of composition. It shoots readers deep into the site, and we often get emails from readers thanking us for it.

4. Affiliate promotions

Is there a product in your niche that you highly recommend your readers buy, and which has an affiliate program attached to it? You can easily add an affiliate promotion into your auto responder sequence. I recently put such a promotion into my photography blog’s autoresponder, and it has already driven thousands of dollars in sales (and will continue to do so). You can read about this concept more here.

5. Relaunch your own product every day

For those of you who have an ebook or some other kind of product that you’ve previously launched, building a mini-promotion of that product into an autoresponder sequence is a must. In our photography email list, we give new subscribers a discount on our portrait photography ebook 7 days after they join the list. That offer drives sales every single day.

6. Upselling

This is another one for those with your own products to sell. The idea is that when someone buys one of your products, you then follow up the purchase with an offer for a second product.The second product could be another of yours, or it could be an affiliate promotion.

For example, when people buy our travel photography ebook, they get an email a couple of weeks later with a discount offer on another travel photography ebook by the same author. The ebooks make good companions, the author is now familiar to readers, and as a result, these emails convert pretty well.

7. Showcase what you do

If you have an offline business that you’re promoting, use your an autoresponder sequence to showcase what you do. I know of one photographer who has a sequence of emails that goes to all clients (and potential clients that he meets to give quotes to). This sequence simply sends out an email every month with a couple of photos from another client shoot, and the story behind it. In sending these emails, he’s showing off the photography he does and positioning himself as a known photographer for them time when those who receive the emails are next looking to hire someone.

8. Tips

Another offline business that I heard of recently who uses an auto responder sequence is a butcher who collects email addresses from customers with the promise of sending them recipes for the meat that they’re buying. He gets their permission to email them and at the end of every day he sends each person that he sold meat to a recipe for the meat that they bought (he has a range of recipes for the different meats and tailors this first email to customers’ purchases).

Once the first email is sent the customer gets weekly emails (via an auto responder) for other recipes and tips for cooking with meat.

The butcher reported a sharp upswing in repeat business from the strategy—again, he was putting his name out there in front of people through his emails, building his brand, deepening personal relationships, and giving those subscribed a reason to keep coming back to him.

Multiple autoresponders, or one with mixed objectives?

The above array of uses for autoresponders is certainly not an exhaustive list. I’d love to hear how else you use them below.

It is also worth mentioning that some bloggers have multiple autoresponders running at once, while some mix a number of the points I mentioned above into the same autoresponder sequence. Personally, I do a bit of both.

At Digital Photography School I have a number of single-purpose autoresponders running in category #6 (upselling), where if someone buys an ebook they get a followup email/s with further recommendations.

However, my main autoresponder sequence on dPS is a real mix of the above, plus it also mixes in weekly newsletters, which are sent manually each week in addition to the automated emails. The sequence looks like this:

email-auto-responders-sequence-dps.png

I’ve written more on how I combine a mix of weekly newsletters and autoresponders here.

Written on 10/26/2011 at 6:03 am by

Introduction to Autoresponders [And How You Can Use them to Drive Traffic and Profit]

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Blogging for Dollars

Today I want to talk about a tool all bloggers treating their blogs as a business should at the very least be familiar with—and should probably be using. It’s something that has the potential to drive significant traffic to your blog in the coming years. It could also add significant profits to your blog in that time.

It is a tool that can be used in a variety of ways. It isn’t overly expensive to set up, and it’s not difficult to use.

The tool is the email autoresponder—something that is central to my own blogging business today, but whose power I ignored for several years.

In this post, I want to introduce you to the concept of autoresponders. Tomorrow, I will highlight a number of techniques for using them to drive traffic and profit.

Introduction to autoresponders

Autoresponders are a tool that most email service providers offer. An autoresponder is a sequence of emails that will be sent to anyone who subscribes to them. The emails are set up to go out at predetermined intervals to a user who subscribes to your email list.

The service that I use for my autoresponders is Aweber, but most providers offer them (another that many use is Mailchimp).

How to set up an email autoresponder

Using Aweber to set up a sequence of emails is simple (the process is simple at Mailchimp).

  1. Set up a list: Log in to Aweber (once you’ve signed up, it’s free to test drive), and then hit Create a New List. Enter your list name and details as prompted. Aweber will also get you to come up with a “confirmation message.” This is sent to anyone who signs up for your list so that they double opt-in to receive your emails.
  2. Add your first email: Once your list is set up, head to the Messages tab in your Aweber account and choose the Followup option from the drop-down menu.

    aweber messages followup

  3. Create your first message: You’ll be taken to a page which lists any messages you have in your sequence. If this is a new list, it will be empty: it’ll look like this:
    Screen Shot 2011-10-05 at 12.25.16 PM.png
    Hit Create New Followup Message, and you’ll be taken to a page where you can create your first email. This page is pretty simple to set up—you just need to enter a subject line and the message you want to send.

    This being the first email in your sequence, you’ll probably want to welcome people to the list and set some expectations about what will follow: when they’ll get their next email, and what the emails that follow will be about.

    Screen Shot 2011-10-05 at 12.29.24 PM.png

    Once your email is ready, hit Save. Since this is the first email, it’ll be sent to anyone who signs up to your list immediately upon signup, so do get this email right before you invite people to sign up.

  4. Create further emails: With your first email in place you can now begin to develop your sequence of emails. What goes into these emails will depend a little upon your goals for the autoresponder (tomorrow I’ll highlight a few potential strategies), but whatever you put in them, you will also want to think a little about the interval and delivery times of these next emails.

    When you’re editing these emails, look under the space in which you enter them for the area where Aweber lets you set mailing intervals.

    Screen Shot 2011-10-05 at 12.38.30 PM.png

    The “4″ signifies that this second email will be sent four days after the welcome email. You might want to lengthen or shorten this timeframe depending upon what the autoresponder is for.

    Click the check box below this to specify times and days on which you want emails to be delivered.

    Screen Shot 2011-10-05 at 12.40.25 PM.png

    In this case I’ve chosen to have the emails delivered on any weekday, between 9am and 12 noon, based upon the subscriber’s timezone. If you’re sending daily emails, you will want them to go out every day of the week; alternatively, you might choose to mail weekly on a certain day.

    Once you’ve got email #2 in place, repeat the process with further emails.

  5. Promote your list: Once you’ve got your welcome email and perhaps another couple in place, you can promote your autoresponder to get people to sign up to it. You can do this in a variety of ways using the Forms that Aweber provides. How you promote your autoresponder will depend on what the autoresponder sequence is about.

What can you use an autoresponder for?

Okay, so you know how to set up an autoresponder sequence in Aweber, but what can you actually do with it?

I’m going to follow up this post tomorrow with another post that answers just that question, and shows you a number of different ways bloggers can use autoresponders to drive traffic and bring in revenue.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear how those of you who already do use autoresponders use them in your blogging. Please share your experiences of them below in the comments section!

Disclaimer: I am an affiliate for Aweber. While I make a small commission if you sign up for Aweber from links in this post I’m also a long-term user of their service and recommend you consider them as an email provider. Here’s why I use Aweber.

Written on 10/24/2011 at 12:02 am by

My 3-Step System for Finding Guest Post Opportunities

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Writing Content

This guest post is by Jocelyn Ann.

Tired of haphazardly, randomly struggling to find guest blogging opportunities? Or finding yourself stressed to the max because you’re unable to locate your next guest-post goal for the month?

You’re not alone. Most bloggers don’t know where or how to search properly, and if they’re trying to search at all, generally end up with dead-end leads.

Developing a systematic method that you can implement to ensure a never-ending supply of opportunities is your best option. The three techniques I’ve listed below will help eliminate your random searches, cut down on wasted time, and leave you with a renewable contact list for finding the right guest blogging opportunity every time.

1. Know your Google search strings

People

Image used with permission

Google can provide you with the best of results … or the worst of results. It’s only as good as the search terms you feed it. What you get, and what that means, is all tied up in your combination of search terms. Knowing what words with what words provide the results you want is a unique formula you’ll have to figure out for yourself.

Let’s say your blog is about baking, and that’s your keyword to target for a link. Here are some search queries you could start off with:

  • baking AND guest post (will provide you with sites where other people were able to get a guest post who were also promoting baking; you know the site allows guest writers)
  • baker AND guest post (will provide you with posts attributed to authors who are most likely bakers themselves)
  • baking AND guest author (same)
  • baking | bake | dessert | pastry | pie | etc. AND guest author (try every form of dessert and every variation of bake)
  • baking AND write for us (will provide you with cooking sites actively seeking out guest writers; it should be very easy to get these)
  • baking AND submit (should return more baking sites who want guest writers; again, should be easy to land these spots).

2. Start a blogger shadow list

Every time a blogger turns up who’s doing the same thing you are, enter them into a spreadsheet. Enter in their name (Lucille Ball), the keyword anchor text they used (comedy tv) and who they listed as their employer, if any (TBN).

As your list grows, you can start to group the bloggers into various categories that might help you later, depending on what you want to write:

  • related-content writers
  • unrelated-content writers
  • writers on high-PR sites
  • writers on low-PR sites but lots of them
  • writers who are representing a product for sale (these are harder to get; fewer
    sites want to link out to commercial products or sites)
  • writers who are representing their own blog (you can likely find these by the dozen)
  • writers writing about everything (a sure sign they’re marketing for a company; it’s good to follow them, as they’ll lead you to a variety of blogs guaranteed to post pitch bylines)

When you have a list, all you have to do is run a search query for any one of the following keyword combination types:

  • Lucille Ball AND guest post
  • Lucille Ball AND guest author
  • Lucille Ball AND comedy TV
  • Lucille Ball AND TBN (in case she has other anchor text, like “romantic TV” or “red
    hair dye” that you don’t already know about)
  • Lucille Ball AND comedy TV AND TBN.

3. Generic, anything-goes post outlets

When you’re just starting out, it may not matter all that much whether you can get guest spots on baking-specific sites. It will probably just matter that you can start writing for someone, anyone, in order to build up a portfolio.

If that’s you, you can get by with generic writings and searches.

Run a Google search on “write for us” and “submit content” and “contribute.” You’ll get a list of generic sites willing to accept your writing. Who knows what the content will be? You’ll just have to do a little research and make it work for you.

Check out myblogguest.com. Once you create a profile, you can browse the forum boards to find all kinds of people who want content. From here, you just have to email them and submit your posts.

Use Twitter hashtags like #contentavailable, #guestauthor, and so on. Let people know you’re willing to write anything and, chances are, they’ll take you up on it.

Making it work for you

As you go along, you’ll likely discover new searches and new ways of finding guest blogging opportunities. Pick and choose those that work best for you to really make this idea work for your blog.

You may detest writing content about topics you know nothing about, or you may love getting to learn and write about that which you previously knew nothing about. Have some fun with it, and enjoy watching that portfolio grow!

How do you find guest post opportunities? Share your ideas and tips in the comments.

Freelancer Jocelyn is dedicated to helping families live healthier, happier lives. At the moment you’ll find her writing alongside Air & Water, a company that loves to help families find the best heater for the elderly in their lives.

Written on 10/16/2011 at 12:02 am by

65 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Filed Under: Blog Promotion

This guest post is by Satrap of BlogStash.com.

What is the best way to drive traffic to my site? What’s the fastest way to generate traffic to my site? What’s…?

We all want to know the best way to drive the greatest amount of traffic to our sites. However, the truth is that there is no best or fastest way to drive traffic! What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. Just because I manage to get 500 visitors a day from an article I submitted to article directories doesn’t mean you can get that much traffic doing the same thing.

Of course, there are some traffic generation methods that produce better results than others. But again, it all depends on you and your situation. Let’s take article marketing as an example. Article marketing is one of the oldest and best ways to generate traffic. But the success of your article marketing campaign depends on many different things, like the number of articles you write, the number of article directories you submit to, the quality of your articles, how many articles a day you submit, and more.

My advice would be to pick a few methods from the 65 I’ve listed below, and start implementing them. Test them for yourself. Depending on your skills, you might find a method that would work wonders for you.

Don’t just follow what everybody else says. I’m not saying, “Don’t listen to experienced people who are successful in generating traffic to their site.” By all means, listen to them and do take their advice—but experiment to find out for yourself which traffic generation methods work best for you and your situation.

With that said, here are 65 simple and (mostly) free ways to generate traffic to your site.

  1. Turn your articles and blog posts into PDFs using free PDF converters like OpenOffice. Then submit your PDFs to document sharing sites like Scribd and DocStoc.
  2. Write truly informative and useful articles related to your niche, and publish them on WikiPedia.
  3. Hold a contest and give prizes to your readers. Use social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to let people know about the contest. A good contest with good prizes will attract a lot of people.
  4. Build a wiki page for your blog. To ensure your page doesn’t get deleted, create an article that is educational, informational, and not self-promoting.
  5. Write list posts like the one you are reading. Readers love posts like “10 ways to make money” or “6 ways to drive traffic to your blog”. List posts are amongst the most popular kinds of posts, and people tend to share list posts with others more often than other posts.
  6. Make flyers with a catchy title and a description of your blog, and post them on bulletin boards in the entrance to supermarkets and other community buildings.
  7. Post frequently, but don’t sacrifice quantity for quality. Both search engines and visitors like to see fresh, quality content. The more content you have, the more chances you have for ranking for variety of keywords, which will mean more organic traffic for your blog.
  8. Make a lens (or more) using Squidoo and in it, place a few links back to your blog.
  9. Submit your blog to directories relevant to your niche, like InsLink.com (an SEO/webmaster directory).
  10. Make it easy for non-technical readers to link to your blog or share your links with other people by making a “How to link to us” page. Here, give readers easy instructions on how to link to your blog with your keywords as anchor text.
  11. Submit your blog to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Or simply use AdMe.com to submit your site to over 25 search engines for free.
  12. Use sites like Odiogo to turn your blog into a podcast, then submit your podcast to podcast websites.
  13. Answer questions related to your niche on YahooAnswers and other Q & A sites. Include a link to your blog in the resource box.
  14. Submit your blog to social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.
  15. Write and submit articles to article directories like EzineArticles and ArticleDashboard.
  16. Turn your articles to videos using free video creation services like Animoto, and submit them to video directories such as YouTube and DailyMotion.
  17. Build a Facebook fan page for your blog.
  18. Make use of plugins like Tell-a-Friend to let your readers quickly share your posts with their friends and family vie email.
  19. Use Hi5 to build a page for your blog and create a community around it.
  20. Don’t clutter your blog with too many pictures, ads, and so on. Keep it clean and easy to navigate. This will help both search engines and visitors to navigate around your blog easily and quickly.
  21. Join BlogEngage to submit your blog and create a community around it.
  22. Ping your blog posts using free ping services such as Pingler and Pingoat.
  23. Create a hub about your blog on HubPages.
  24. Register with few good niche-related forums and use your signature to place links pointing to your blog. Participate in discussions and contribute as much as you can.
  25. Make it easy for your readers to share your posts by installing social bookmarking plugins like SocialMarker and Digg Buttons.
  26. Readers like to read other people’s comments, especially those who responded to their comments. So, take advantage of that by using a plug-in like Comment Notifier to automatically let your readers know of new comments posted on your blog.
  27. Make your blog more search engine friendly by using SEO plug-ins such as Platinum SEO Pack.
  28. Target long-tail keywords with low competition and try to rank for them. Such keywords are easier to rank for in search engines and give you much more targeted traffic.
  29. Make a MySpace page for your blog.
  30. Make business cards with your blog info on them, hand them to friends and family, and ask them to pass them on. Mall parking lots are good place to pass your cards around. In some states you can even put your business card on windshields. You can get up to 250 free business cards using sites like VistaPrint (although you do have to pay $5 shipping).
  31. Submit your blog to the free directories like DMOZ (hard to get into, but well worth the effort!).
  32. Write a good press release, or hire a professional to do it for you (you can get a pretty decent press release written for you for $5 on Fiverr.com), and submit them to free press release distribution sites like PR.com.
  33. Write creative and attention-grabbing ads about your blog, and publish them on free classified ads sites such as CraigsList and UsFreeAds.
  34. Controversial posts attract visitors. Write a controversial post. Be creative and bold, but be careful not to cross the boundaries.
  35. Ask an expert or a trusted, well-known person in your niche for an interview. Then post the entire interview on your blog, either as a text post or as a video.
  36. Leave quality comments on blogs that are related to your niche. Make sure your comments add value to the blog. Don’t just spam-comment and hope for the best. It never works, and your links will get deleted. Worst of all, you might get blacklisted from the site. If you leave a useful comment, people will be more likely to visit your blog.
  37. Use free banner-making tools like BannerFans to make an interesting banner for your blog. Then find other bloggers in your niche and exchange banners with them.
  38. Exchange links with other blogs in your niche. Don’t go overboard with this technique, or exchange links with each and every blog you find—be selective and make sure the context for your link is appropriate. Most people use their main keyword as the anchor text for their link, that’s good for SEO. But, if you want to get more traffic from those links, instead use attention-grabbing text as your anchor text. Don’t use “Make Money Online” for your link text—people are used to seeing those links all over the web. Instead use something like “10 ways to make $10 in 10 minutes.”
  39. If you find interesting posts on other blogs, write a post about them and link to them. The other bloggers will notice and might do the same for you.
  40. Find good blogs in your niche that accept guest posts. You can either search manually or make it easy for yourself by registering for free with MyBlogGuest, which matches guest bloggers with blogs that accept guest posts. Write and submit your best articles to get the maximum exposure. Don’t just submit the article and leave. Make sure you follow up and respond to comments and questions that readers of those blogs ask.
  41. Submit your site to review sites that write reviews on other websites and blogs, like CoolSiteOfTheDay.
  42. Submit your blog to BlogCatalog.
  43. People love free stuff, so give out freebies that are related to your niche. If you are in “online money making” niche, a free ebook that teaches people who to make money on Twitter might make an appropriate freebie.
  44. Write a page on 43things.com about your blog and what you want to do with it.
  45. Use your keywords in the title of your posts. Having your keyword in the title makes it easier for you to rank for that keyword, thus bringing you more organic traffic.
  46. Use your blog’s name as your username on forums, social networking sites, and other places like YahooAnswers. People are curious by nature, so they may check out your blog out of curiosity and if you have good compelling content, they may become your loyal readers.
  47. Make a bumper sticker with your blog address on it, and place it on your car’s bumper. You can even ask your friends and family to do the same for you!
  48. Make a Twitter profile for your blog and tweet each and every post you publish on your blog.
  49. Register with EntreCard and start dropping your card on other blogs. You will be amazed how much traffic you can get from EntreCard.
  50. Register with ComLUV.com and download their plugin.Then use the Global CommentLuv Search to find blogs related to your niche and comment on them. It will return up to ten (recent) posts that will be sent back when you comment on a CommentLuv enabled site. Most are dofollow blogs, and you will get dofollow links back to your most recent posts. This is good for link building and getting some traffic.
  51. Make a free ebook with a link back to your site in it, and submit it to free ebook sites like GetFreeEbooks.com.
  52. Buy .info domains with long-tail keywords in them and use a redirect to send the traffic they receive to your main site.
  53. Rent a mailing list and send high-quality content with a link back to your site to all the subscribers. Take care with this technique so that you’re not blacklisted as a spammer, though. Find a reputable list broker—or, if in doubt, why not start your own?
  54. Post a classified ad on eBayClassified with a link to your site.
  55. When you eat out, leave a good tip along with a business card with your site info on it.
  56. Create a short report with resell rights and and include your links in the report. Give it to people for free: those people can sell the report to others as their own, so long as they don’t remove your links. The results of this technique will surprise you.
  57. Come up with a really crazy but buzz-worthy post and submit it to NowPublic.com (Previously known as Truemors). If it’s good enough, it might just go viral!
  58. Go to YouTube, find popular videos related to your niche and start commenting on those videos with a link back to your blog. Youtube videos get thousands of views, and since most people are sociable creatures, they will read the comments no matter how far down the list your comment is.
  59. Create a page (personal or business) at LookUpPage.com. You can add as many links to your blog as you like. Write a short “about” post about yourself or your blog, and make sure to link to your Twitter and other social networking sites as well. After creating the page, bookmark it using SocialMarker and ping it with Pingler (or any other tools you like).
  60. Register with Visible.me for free, and add links and information about your blog. Its a great way to build your brand and get a few backlinks from a high-PR (6) dofollow site.
  61. Submit your RSS feed to RSS aggregators. Here, I don’t mean just your blog’s RSS feed: grab the RSS url of every site you have a link on (example: if you submit articles to ezine.com, you will have your own “author RSS” URL), and go to RssMix.com. It will let you make a custom RSS feed. Take that and submit it to RSS directories and aggregators. This will put your RSS feed on steroids—and will give you many more backlinks.
  62. Make a few (yard) signs with your blog’s URL and a good title related to your niche, and place them on highway exit ramps, at busy intersections, and so on. Make sure you abide by the laws in your own state or country if you try this approach.
  63. Put an ad in your local newspaper. If you live in a small town, it may not be very expensive to have an ad on your local newspaper—or on TV or radio, for that matter.
  64. Order some T-shirts with your blog URL and title printed on them and give them away. People will check out your URL!
  65. This is just for fun, so enjoy it! Make a big and I mean big sandal (or flip flop) with your blog’s URL engraved on the bottom, go to a busy beach, and start walking all over the sand! Leave your mark for others to see.

These methods will keep you busy for a while. But perhaps the most important tip I can give you is to be patient. Getting traffic to a blog takes time and a lot of work. You cannot expect to have hundreds of visitors after a few weeks, or months of starting your blog. But, if you are a dedicated person who’s willing to put enough time and effort into it, you can’t help but attract more visitors to your blog over time.

Which of these ideas do you like? What has or hasn’t worked for you? Share your experiences with us in the comments.

Satrap writes at BlogStash.com about different work from home opportunities. Visit BlogStash to learn real ways to make money online.

Written on 10/12/2011 at 12:05 am by

9 Lessons I Learned from Running a Sweepstakes

Filed Under: Blog Promotion

This guest post is by Jonathan Thomas of Anglotopia.net.

A common way for a blog to build its newsletter and traffic base is to hold a contest. My blog, Anglotopia, has been around for over four years now and we’ve had various successes and failures with contests. Eventually we basically just stopped having them, as they really weren’t worth the time.

Winners

Image copyright Yuri Arcurs - Fotolia.com

Then earlier this year, an opportunity presented itself, thanks to the generosity of one of our airline partners, to hold a sweepstakes—this time the prize was a free trip to London. The airline would provide the tickets, we roped in some other partners to provide other aspects of the trip, and then covered the rest of the costs ourselves.

What followed was a huge lesson in how to manage a major sweepstakes—something we’d never done before. It was a true trial by fire. Here are some of the key lessons we learned.

Lesson 1: Prepare infrastructure

Take what you think your server will need, and double it. We moved to a new server right before we launched the sweepstakes, but when the competition really started to get traction, our server couldn’t cope and crashed several times.

A major organization plugged the contest to their email list of 300,000 subscribers and the server just collapsed under the deluge. This leads to angry entrants who won’t hesitate to email you and complain, but it also hurts your credibility.

Lesson 2: Find a good third-party data collector

The biggest problem we had off the bat was finding a way to gather what we hoped would be thousands of entries. Because of compliance issues (explained below) and the types of data we had to get from entrants, we couldn’t use a simple Mailchimp form.

We needed a custom form that collected all the data into a database that we could download in Excel format to share with the partners, as well as automatically add to our mailing list. We also needed a service that would send entrants right into Mailchimp, rather than have us import the list (which creates more compliance problems). And we had to balance cost as well.

In the end we chose Formstack as we could easily scale their pricing to work with the number of entries we were expecting, and then scale it back down when the contest was over.

Lesson 3: Canadians get cranky

Because of the nature of the prize, the contest was only open to US residents in the lower 48 states. I got several dozen emails from Canadians who were cranky that they couldn’t enter the contest. They usually get a raw deal when it comes to contests like this. I wished I could have opened the contest to other countries, but realistically we just couldn’t.

Think about your target audience, and also think about who you’re going to offend when putting together the prize. We didn’t suffer any long-term damage from mad Canadians, but it wasn’t pleasant getting their angry emails.

Lesson 4: No matter how simple you make it, people just won’t get it

People by and large are not easy to reach—even when they enter a contest. They’ve got lives, they’re busy, and most of the time they just don’t read the pages they’re looking at.

Keep entry to the contest as simple as possible—all we had was a form that people filled out, and even this proved too much for some people. You may be tempted to make a complicated process, but if you do this, you’ll just get more angry emails from people who just don’t get it. The KISS principle applies here: keep it simple, stupid.

Lesson 5: Provide several ways to enter

A custom contact form feeding into a database is a simple enough solution to allows people to enter a contest. The problem we ran into that situation was that people using older browsers (*cough* IE6 *cough*) couldn’t see the form, period. I would get very angry emails from people wondering why they couldn’t see the form, despite instructions telling them it was there. Telling someone to use another browser just made them angrier.

So, my advice is: provide the form entry, also provide a hard-coded link to the form, and also have buried in the terms and conditions a way for people to enter manually. Also, it’s fine to use Facebook to generate entries, but I would not recommend making a Facebook-only contest, as this makes people who hate Facebook angry (and there are lots of them, I now know!).

Lesson 6: Understand compliance

The biggest issue you face with running a contest is complying with various laws and regulations which vary from state to state. I am not a lawyer: I am a small business without the resources available to hire a sweepstakes lawyer. So, I did the next best thing—I grabbed the terms and conditions from a similar contest, then just edited them to fit my site, and put everything under my LLC (in the USA, a Limited Liability Company).

Don’t even think of holding a sweepstakes if you’re not incorporated, as you can open yourself up personally to lawsuits. You’ll also need to check with your local tax authority about how to deal with the value of the prize. Most companies pass off the tax liability to the winners—something they’ll have to understand when entering.

Lesson 7: Your email list will not be golden

When all was said and done and the sweepstakes was over, we added 15,000 people to our email list. We were at 1,000 before, so this provided a massive amount of growth. Good things happen when we deploy our weekly newsletter to that number of subscribers.

The problem, though, will be with the quality of your list. Sweepstakes listing sites picked up on our contest, so we got a lot of entries from people who wouldn’t normally visit our site and weren’t interested in our niche or our message. When we deployed our first post-content newsletter to our email list, we got hundreds of unsubscribes and spam abuse reports from people who couldn’t figure out who we were despite the fact that the only way they’d be on the list was because they entered the contest.

This is all well and good except that if you use a third-party service like Mailchimp and you have a high abuse rate, you’ll have your account suspended—no matter how much you’re paying them. The lesson here is that sweepstakes lead to a low-quality email list—we’re still shedding subscribers weekly three months on—but the list is still going strong and it’s been very worthwhile. There will always be list attrition, especially as your list grows.

Lesson 8: Choose a winner the right way

To choose a winner—even if you have thousands of entries—is simple: go to Random.org and have it generate a random number between one and the total number of entries you have.

Choosing the winner takes five seconds. Contacting them and letting them know they won is a whole other matter. Set out in the terms and conditions that if they don’t respond within a reasonable window, you’ll choose another winner. Once you’ve contacted the winner, it’s your duty to make sure they are able to claim their prize, and that includes hassling sponsors. If your sponsors pull out after the fact, you’ll have to provide the prize instead to avoid a lawsuit.

I think this is the most fun part of running a sweepstakes—making someone’s day (or in our case, their year) by telling them they’ve won a major prize. The winner of our sweepstakes was very responsive and grateful for everything we were doing for them.

Lesson 9: Manage costs

Despite the prizes being provided for free, it cost money to run our contest, and your costs may vary. We had to invest in server infrastructure, Formstack for data collection, and so on. When the contest was over, we had to upgrade our Mailchimp account to a much more expensive tier due to the size of our new email list.

You may also want to consider marketing costs—we got a lot of free promotion for the contest, so we didn’t spend much on marketing, but we had to have graphics made, and it’s not a bad idea to do some Google Adwords or Facebook advertising to get the attention of the right people. Ideally, the costs of running a contest will lead to direct growth in your business, so that it won’t matter too much.

Have you ever run a sweepstakes? What lessons did you learn?

Jonathan Thomas runs Anglotopia.net—the website for people who love Britain—it started off as a hobby blog and turned into his full-time job thanks, in large part, to advice from ProBlogger. He also runs Londontopia.net—the website for people who love London. You can connect with him on Twitter: @jonathanwthomas.

Written on 9/27/2011 at 6:04 am by

How to Increase Conversions With Google Website Optimizer

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Blogging Tools and Services

This guest post is by Joe Burnett of Who’s Your Blogger?

“I have a pretty (un)healthy obsession with email lists. I’m constantly telling my readers to focus on growing a list of active, engaged, and interested email subscribers.”—Blog Tyrant

You can capture emails with only one ethical plan: the visitor will have to give you his or her email by typing it in.

How do you get your readers to type in their email addresses? Will you use a pop-up lightbox, a sidebar subscribe form, or a subscribe form below your posts? Maybe you’ll give your readers a small, ethical
“bribe.”

What do I use? All of them! Each and every one of my past and present blogs went through a quick elimination process to find which tactic captured the most emails.

Never ask someone which email capturing tactic works best for them. The answer depends on the style of your readers, and the niche your blog is in. Is the readers’ attention span short, do they get annoyed, and do they take time to look at their surroundings?

But on your own blog, there is a reliable way to find out which tactic works best.

Testing your email capturing tactics

Google Website Optimizer is a great tool you can use to increase email opt in conversions. It’s surprisingly easy to use and produces great feedback, graphs, charts, and results.

How do you get started? First, you obviously need to login, or create a Google account. Click the Get Started button, agree to their terms and get ready to capture so many emails other bloggers think you’re stealing them.

Getting started

Currently you should be at your dashboard looking something like this…

Google Website Optimizer dashboard

Google Website Optimizer dashboard

Once you’re at the dashboard, click Create a new experiment.

You have two option here, and one is a lot easier to use than the other. The first option is called the A/B Experiment. You shouldn’t choose that, because it will involve completely changing the page you test, and for this exercise, we only want to change the opt-in form on our page.

The Multivariate Experiment gives you the ability to change specific section(s) on the page in isolation. In this case, we want to change our subscribe form.

Google Website Optimizer multivariate experiment

Google Website Optimizer multivariate experiment

Next, you need to enter in the URL of page that you’re trying to test. This could be your blog’s home page or a specific post or page you’ve created. If you’re really daring go straight into your themes files to edit them, allowing the testing to be done on your entire WordPress blog!

The Conversion page is the location where new subscribers land after the subscribe to your blog. Both Mail Chimp and Aweber give you the option to redirect visitors back to your website after subscribing.

Setting up the experiment

Setting up the experiment

Now Google Website Optimizer knows the pages that are used in the conversion process. We need to give the service access to those pages by using a little bit of JavaScript. Google will give you some code snippets, and all you need to do is paste it inside the pages you specified above.

Google Website Optimizer provides the code

Google Website Optimizer provides the code

Once, you’ve added all of your JavaScript tags, click, Continue to verify the tags. A small lightbox should pop up to let you know that Google found the tags on your blog.

Click Continue to verify the tags

Click Continue to verify the tags

Making changes to test

Now it’s time to make changes to the areas of the page that you specified. You can change your opt-in form to produce a higher conversion in many ways.

  • Change the headline.
  • Add a picture.
  • Reduce the amount of textboxes. (Instead of Name and Email fields, try just an Email textbox.)
  • Change the background color.
  • Edit the text.
  • Change the Submit button to something less standard.

Once you’ve made the changes you want to test, you can sit back and wait to see which opt-in form converts the most visitors into subscribers.

The results

Below are the results for testing the opt-in form on my website. When I ran the test, I decided that whichever combination of visuals achieved the best results would be the combination I’d use on my blog.

Google Website Optimizer test results

Google Website Optimizer test results

As you can see, I created five different versions of my opt-in form. During this test, the original actually performed better than all of my other combinations, with an almost unreal 41.7% conversion rate. That’s almost one out of every two visitors signing up.

The combinations were different because of the headlines and descriptions I used. I used three different headlines along with two different descriptions:

  • Headline #1: How Does It Work?
  • Headline #2: Guest Blogging Rocks!
  • Headline #3: Guest Blogging Never Fails.
  • Description #1: Who’s Your Blogger is an online guest post exchanging platform. We make it easy to accept guest posts, and find blogs to guest post on. Best of all, it’s fast, easy, and free!
  • Description #2: Who’s Your Blogger has helped me land my guest posts on ProBlogger, Copy Blogger, and even John Chow. Trust me, Who’s Your Blogger has tripled my guest post production rate!

The results were:

  • Original: Headline #1 & Description #1 – Conversion Rate: 41.7%
  • Combination #1: Headline #2 & Description #1 – Conversion Rate: 20%
  • Combination #2: Headline #3 & Description #1 – Conversion Rate: 30.4%
  • Combination #3: Headline #1 & Description #2 – Conversion Rate: 25%
  • Combination #4: Headline #2 & Description #2 – Conversion Rate: 31%
  • Combination #5: Headline #3 & Description #2 – Conversion Rate: 21.4%

As the results show, my original message outperformed all of my other combinations, so it would make no sense to change the headline and description.

What can I do now? Of course there are many different tests I can run on my site. I might want to do the same test over again, but spend some more time coming up with headlines and descriptions that really rock!

Have you used Google Website Optimizer before? How do you like it? Leave your opinion below…

Joe Burnett is an amazing guest blogger. He created Who’s Your Blogger? to help increase your chances of landing guest posts on popular blogs by over 534%, and to find free unique content to publish on your blog. He teaches you exactly how to guest post and build a popular blog at the Who’s Your Blogger? Guest Blogging Blog!

Written on 9/20/2011 at 6:06 am by

Run an Awesome Blog Contest in 5 Steps

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Blogging Tools and Services

This guest post is by Kiera Pedley of Binkd.

Running a contest on your blog can be a great way to generate new readership, reactivate stagnant subscribers, and increase the engagement of your readers.

Competitions can be a lot of hard work for little or no results, unless you run them to a plan and have a clear objective in mind.

Here are five tips for running an awesome blog contest campaign.

1. Set a clear objective

As bloggers we love readers, we love engagement, we love community—a contest can help you achieve any or all of these things. When planning your contest, set a goal as to what you need to achieve.

Do you want more:

  • email Subscribers
  • RSS readers
  • social media fans
  • sales of your product
  • comments and engagement?

Set your goals as numbers—if you wish to increase your email subscribers, how many do you want?

The true measure of a successful competition is in its metrics, and without a clear, numerical goal in place, you won’t know if your hard work is paying off.

2. Don’t go it alone

If youíre hoping to attract new readership to your blog, you want your contest to be seen by as many people as possible. You can do this using a few strategies:

Use a third-party social media competition platform to help send the contest viral

Increasing your contest’s visibility is the key to success, and the easiest medium to send your contest viral is social media.

A third-party app helps you to encourage your fans to share their entries on social media. You can either use a blog plugin to run your contest, or use a Facebook based application such as Binkd or Wildfire App. (Full disclosure here, Binkd is my product!)

Joint venture with partner

Leveraging someone else’s list is a powerful way to attract a fresh audience. Team up with a non-competing colleague in your niche and share the rewards of your contest. In exchange for the cross promotion, you could allow them to market to the list generated by the contest.

Approach sponsors

Getting a high-profile sponsor of your contest to assist in the promotion or in the donation of a prize is another way to help market your contest. It also adds credibility to your contest by transferring trust.

3. Choose your contest carefully

If you’re using a competition app, there are several types of contests available:

Skills contest

A skills contest requires your entrants to perform a task to be elligible to answer. Short story contests, answer a question contests, and write a jingle skills contests are popular. Entrants can then either be drawn randomly, or encouraged to share their entries to get their friends to vote. Skills contests are similar to sweepstakes, but the entrants can influence their success or failure in the competition.

You can select to have the entrant with the most votes win, or have each vote count for an entry, and drawn similar to a sweepstakes contest.

Photo contests

A visual form of skills contest, here, your entrants upload a photo, and then appeal to their contacts to vote for the photo. This is a really good way to visually promote your brand. Getting a photo of your fans using your product, or performing a stunt related to your brand spreads the word about you far and wide!

Challenge contests

A challenge contest can send your entrants on a virtual scavenger hunt around your site and social media pages, searching for answers to your questions. This type of contest is powerful for creating engaged and interactive entrants.

Sweepstakes

Your entrants submit their entry, and the winner(s) are randomly drawn. Sweepstakes are a game of chance, not skill.

4. Build engagement

Increase the stickiness of your contest by increasing the engagement of your entrants.

Multiple entry steps

Statistically, contests with multiple entry steps deliver more engaged and sticky entrants. A challenge contest gives your entrants the opportunity to explore your site, and interact with various articles on your blog.

Achievable goals

Make the contest goals achievable for your entrants to complete. For example, if you’re running an article contest to generate some awesome new articles, don’t set word counts or criteria too high or tight.

Don’t make your challenge contest questions too difficult to answer, or be too cryptic in your clues.

5. Automate the process

You can effectively run a contest just on your blog, or by a forum and email management system, but it’s a lot of hard work and can be an administrative nightmare!

There are several applications on the market that automate running a contest and allow you to keep the list of entrants to market to during and after the contest.

Some of the most popular are:

  • Binkd a contest platform that offers a WordPress plugin and Facebook Sweepstakes and Challenge contests
  • Wildfire App, for Facebook Sweepstakes, Photo Contests, and Vote to Win
  • Bulbstorm, for Facebook Sweepstakes, Photo Contests, and Vote to Win.

Running a contest can really help you build up your readership and drive quality, qualified fans to your email subscriber list and social media platforms. You can simplify the job by using a third-party application to handle the grunt work of administering the contest.

Have you used a contest to promote your blog and engage readers? Share your experiences and tips in the comments.

Kiera Pedley is the CCO (Chief Caring Officer) at Binkd home of the Binkd Promotion Platform.

Written on 9/19/2011 at 6:01 am by

How Tumblr Helped Put My Site on Top

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Search Engine Optimization

This guest post is by Ryan Shell of Fashables.

I won’t even begin to act like I’m some sort of SEO ninja, because I’m not. What I do know is that a particular post on one of my sites has ranked in the top three spots on Google, with a majority of that time spent at number one and outranking a major clothing brand.

Tumblr played a huge part in making that happen, and I’d like to share my almost accidental findings.

The backstory

Fashables

Break dancing (Image courtesy PhotosbyRy.com)

I’m a marketer by day, but one of my many side projects is running a men’s and women’s fashion blog called Fashables. I attended a Dockers event on April 7 for the launch of one of a new line of pants, the Alpha Khakis.

After the event, I went home, wrote a new post and scheduled it to be published the following day. The post was well optimized for the phrase “Dockers Alpha Khakis” and search engines have since sent my site a good amount of traffic for those keywords.

One of the reasons why I’ve received the traffic is because of keyword optimization, but another huge part of the SEO puzzle is what happened with Tumblr, and that’s the real story here.

The accident

This could get confusing, so keep I mind that Dockers Alpha Khakis is the primary post in question.

A recurring feature on the site is a street style fashion post that is published twice a week. One of the photos previously published is the one you see to the right—it’s of a young girl taking part in a break-dancing circle at Union Square in New York City.

One of Fashables readers evidently liked the photo enough to share it on Tumblr. Now, this is where the accident happened.

When they shared the photo on Tumblr they, for a reason unknown to me, linked the photo to the Dockers Alpha Khakis post on Fashables.

Once the photo hit Tumblr, it got reblogged and reblogged—maybe 40 or so times in total. Each reblog provided another link back to the Dockers Alpha Khakis post on Fashables and increasing the post’s Google juice.

The result

Before long, I started noticing that searches for “Dockers Alpha Khakis” were sending a decent amount of traffic to Fashables.

In fact, for quite some time my post was coming up number one in Google searches and outranking the main Dockers website. This was a huge deal: my little fashion blog was outranking a major brand’s website. This had my inner nerd awfully excited, which made my mind curious about how these findings could be used, on purpose, in the future.

Contest your way to links

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about ways things were done or ideas about outcomes, but at the end of the day, you need to know how they can impact you.

For this Tumblr example, my immediate thinking is that this could alter the way bloggers, or anyone wanting to promote a specific webpage, run contests.

Currently a lot of people who do giveaways focus on email entries, comment entries, Facebook entries, and Twitter entries. The time may now have come for Tumblr to be part of that game. If you want a high search engine rank for Widget X, using Tumblr to have a link reblogged time and time again will add significant influence to a specific page and its keywords.

Keep in mind that the photo that was posted to Tumblr from Fashables had only one link that connected it to the Dockers post. To be clear, there wasn’t a mention of the product or keyword in the original Tumblr post, so this method can be used without appearing overly spammy or self promotional.

In the end, I didn’t plan on ranking so high for “Dockers Alpha Khakis,” but I certainly welcome the traffic that has been driven to Fashables from search engines. Do you think this tactic could work for you?

Ryan Shell is a marketer by day, and he runs the fashion blog Fashables by night. Connect with him on Twitter at @RyanShell. And if you like fashion, make sure you connect with @Fashables.

Written on 9/16/2011 at 12:00 am by

Start a Magazine that Complements Your Blog … in 5 Steps

Filed Under: Blog Promotion

This guest post is by Deidra Wilson of deidrawilson.com.

They say that print is dead. That the Internet laid waste to the magazine rack at the airport. But that line of thinking has the good old boy driving the diesel pickup today behind the wheel of an electric car tomorrow.

Print is, and always will be, alive and well. You blog, eBay, search for Thai food recommendations and interact online, but you will always read magazines.

Have you ever considered adding a print arm to your digital empire?

If you have ever entertained the idea of publishing your own magazine, it is not as difficult as most suggest, and can be done for a small initial investment. Maybe you want to start a magazine that compliments your online business. For example, if you run a wedding website/portal/blog, look into self-publishing a local/regional wedding publication (and you already have the best advertising and self-promotions spots saved for yourself).

The potential of print

Let’s talk about how a print arm of your blog can benefit your brand and your bottom line. Whether you will admit it or not, you on occasion take a peak at your closest competitor’s Twitter follower count and compare it to yours. If their count far outweighs yours, you assume that a large part of the public would consider your more followed competitor’s brand more legit than yours and to an intelligent extent you would be right.

What does adding an offline component to your blog’s brand achieve?

Perceived credibility

Similar to that monster Twitter follower count, the general public believes what it sees. It is rational to place a value on the increase in credibility your blog will gain from self-publishing your own print magazine. If you structure your whole effort properly by always pointing your magazine readers to your blog and other online efforts, you now trump the most common online “noise” your competition is creating due to the simple fact that stands the test of time and always will—magazines are perceived as glamorous and convey credibility. Run your own impromptu poll. “Media company” sounds more Fortune-500 than just “blog”—creating a strong and professionally credible percecption will make everything you do online easier, which leads to more readers and more profits.

That’s the sound of opportunity knocking

As soon as your first issue is on the streets and in reader’s hands, you will hear a knocking on your door. Answer it and you will see new revenue streams, new readers, new traffic and new business relationships that can not be created in the 100% online world. If you sell/manage your own advertisements on your blog, you now have added value to offer your advertisers by either offering a la carte print advertising space or a bundled package of both online and print.

Diversity is the glue that holds media companies together. There have been times where I have relied heavily on revenue generated by Google Adsense, and that always made me nervous. I found myself asking “What if the Adsense market fails? What if Google fails?” Those fears lead me to always seek out a balanced diversity for all of my businesses. Adding a print publication to an online-only identity adds a solid amount of diversity to build overall value in your business should you ever decide to sell and also help you weather any rough cash flow storms along the way.

“Pass along” is the offline “Add this”

You work hard on your blog, writing solid content that you hope goes viral and gains a web of deep inbound links, retweets, digs, etc. When you put your magazine in one person’s hands there is a high probability of them “passing along” that copy of the magazine to a friend—especially in multi-occupant households. Why is this important?

Studies have shown that pass-along copies of magazines generate the same positive value in the hands of the secondary readers as the first reader, and that all readers share the same measurable action ratio, ie: one copy of your magazine will bring multiple new people to your blog and online efforts.

Start the Presses!

1. Check your wallet

Each and every new small business startup needs some capital, and magazines are no different. Just how much do you need? As little as a few hundred dollars will work (not including your printing costs) to get your first issue on the streets and/or news stands. I started my first magazine on roughly $300. If you have your sights set on producing a higher end magazine, you will need significantly more, depending on what market you are entering and how big you are going right off the bat. Bigger is not always better here—this magazine is a supporting effort for your online business, so think light and fast.

You have solid computer skills which will benefit you here, as you won’t have to hire an office full of employees. The key is to do it yourself. Stay away from the urge to make a lot of noise (advertising, events, etc.) about your new magazine in the beginning. You have a computer, you own a camera, and you own Adobe Photoshop. All you need now is publishing/layout software. Adobe InDesign is the gold standard of magazine layout and costs around $300 online.

2. Develop the framework

You probably have an idea of what type of magazine you want to publish, but from here you need to construct some basic framework. Pick a name for your magazine carefully. Make sure you are not stepping on anyone’s trademark by searching national trademark databases. Be creative: you can’t survive without offering something new to your readers in an attractive package, and for this, being creative is a necessity.

Your website’s domain name is also something to consider when choosing your name. Search for open domains that match your magazine’s name as closely as possible. It is okay to use a few pseudo-odd takes on domains for magazines, like magazinenameonline.com or magazine-name.com. Keep your targeted keyword in mind when selecting your magazine’s domain name.

Your website does not need to be award-winning right out of the gate; it just needs to be something professional that’s clear about who you are and what your magazine is about—or consider adding your magazine’s online identity to your existing website. You can always offer your web design company a service trade—they design, and you advertise their business both in print and online if you do not code your own websites. A website or some sort of online presence is an essential part of this process, though; do not skip out on this one.

Okay, you have a name and a website, what’s next? Figure out what you are going to include in your first issue by writing out an editorial outline. That’s a fancy name, but in reality, just write out what you want to feature, how many pages you want to devote to each item, and how many pages you want to stash away for ads (this will be dependent on how many ads you sell for your first issue).

How many pages should your magazine contain? Two factors are in play here. One is the cost of printing the magazine—obviously, it costs more to print a bigger magazine. The second question is: how much editorial can or do you want to produce? You do not need a 100-page magazine your first go around so, depending on what your competitors are doing, aim for around 40-50 pages for a local or lifestyle magazine and 90+ for a magazine you want to distribute on national news stands.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not need an army of journalists to publish your first issue. I have produced content for hundreds of magazines by myself or with the help of just a handful of people; it is simply a matter of putting together text and images that will occupy a predetermined amount of space.

Start with item number one on your editorial outline. Write your text first, making sure to follow basic guidelines for writing editorial (Google search it for tons of help). Have friends read the copy and get their honest opinions. Did you lose your readers’ attention at any point? Are your facts correct? Do you have any typos? Does anyone actually want to read this? What type of content that’s relevant to your niche has worked on your blog in the past? Could a version of it work in your magazine?

A picture is worth a thousand words—literally. People like pictures—big, colorful pictures and lots of them. Now it is time for the fun part. You own a camera, so get out there and start snapping. Make sure you are shooting in RAW or on a setting the produces 300 dpi images (every image in your magazine needs to be 300 dpi, no larger, no smaller—nothing comes off as more rookie than low-res photos in magazines).

Remember that if you have any people in your photos, you’ll need to get them to sign a “model release” allowing you to use their image in your publication. Your readers will quickly form their opinions of your magazine based on three things—your cover, your layout/design and your interior editorial images.

After you have knocked your editorial out, sleep on it and go over it yourself. Is it good? How many magazines have you seen that all regurgitate the same tired “electronics features” on iPhones, or some silly gadget that not many people care about? Lots. You have to have a new take on things if you want to see issue number 2, 3, 4, or 54.

Going back to my example of the local wedding magazine, you have to offer your reader new venues, vendors, and ideas that they have not seen anywhere else. Instead of writing about “How to pick your wedding colors,” think along the lines of “CityName’s hottest wedding colors for 2011″ and include information straight from local wedding venues, with actual images and quotes from planners, brides and photographers. Never underestimate the power of putting someone’s name in a magazine!

3. Start selling advertising yesterday

New publishers often fall into the trap of just focusing on the creative side of the magazine and ignoring the sales. As an independent publisher, you have to wear both hats. Start by putting together a media kit for your new magazine. A media kit is a couple pages, printed out (on good card stock), that act as a resume for your magazine. It features all of the details of who your magazine is for, how many you print, your distribution tactics, what ad spaces you offer, how much they cost, etc. I have always lived by the motto that the media kit should look better than the actual magazine.

In the beginning, most of your sales will not be because of your media kit—this is just an essential tool to have that you can leave with prospective advertisers. I could go on and on about how to sell ads for new magazines but if you read it, you’d have to send me a pretty big check as that is closely held information by all in the industry.

What I can tell you is: start with a plan. Call on advertisers that make sense for your magazine. It is a waste of time to try and sell an ad to Budweiser if you are a new magazine that is about quilting—it’s just not going to happen. Put yourself in that business owners’ shoes: would you consider buying the ad space? Back to the wedding magazine example, go and see all of the local wedding venues, planners, photographers, cake makers, dress designers, etc. Include a vendor directory in your magazine and offer inclusion in that directory at no extra charge for all new advertisers.

Now is not the time to get rich quick. You want to sell ads to pay the bills, and hopefully recoup your investment and promote your online business. That means pricing your ad offerings in reality. For an idea of what reality is, try and find out what similar magazines in your market are charging. Do not go too low on your pricing however. Believe in the value of your magazine—giving it away free almost guarantees future failure.

I know of one magazine that just kept throwing money at itself, starting in new markets without first being profitable in one and, to appear successful, they gave away their ad space for free. A couple years later and it is common knowledge in the media buying industry that no one pays for ads in that magazine, ever. If a potential advertiser says they want the space for less than you want to sell it for, pass on them politely and come back to them in a few months, when you can prove a stronger value to justify your rate card.

Most importantly, offer value to your advertisers. There are a gazillion different ways to do this, but it all starts with you delivering a strong, readable publication on time. The old under-promise and over-deliver adage works well here.

4. It’s layout time

It’s crunch time! Layout is hardly ever pleasurable. The first issue of a magazine I ever designed took me about 72 hours of work with about six hours of sleep in that period—not exactly what I call an awesome time. Make sure you know how to use your software before you need to start laying out your publication.

If you flip through a random magazine here and there, you will notice that a lot of them have an inconsistent layout throughout the book, meaning that the fonts and styles change every few pages or every story. If this style appeals to you, knock yourself out—just know that it is not a good practice to follow. You need to aim for a balanced flow with your layouts and a consistent overall look. The first page of content should look similar to the last page, and don’t stray too far in between.

Use a text font at or above eight points in size, and never smaller. Don’t forget those pictures: use lots and lots of pictures! Get into Photoshop and clean your photos up. I have spent at least 60 seconds with every photo I have ever placed in a magazine layout—it is a crime to run photos with zero post work done on them.

What you need to do is end up with a PDF file for each page of your magazine that you will give to your printer. Name each file in a standard way, e.g. p01_NAME.pdf. Covers will be labeled C1, C2, etc. You will have the option to view proofs of your files before your printer fires up the press to start your job (a big chunk of what you are paying them to do). Always look at every proof of every page; once it gets put on a plate and starts laying down ink, you are locked in.

Make sure you are happy with your printer. Do some research, talk to all of your local printers, and get quotes. It is tough to do but I have pulled it off many times—you can offer your printer one full page of advertising in the magazine for a discount on printing. Always control costs. I recommend getting your finished magazines carton-packed rather than skid-packed and wrapped in plastic, as this practice guarantees a percentage of waste as the magazines on the outside of the skid aren’t protected.

5. Distribute your magazines

If you are starting a magazine that will have National or a large ranging distribution, head straight to one of the two major magazine distributors. I won’t name them because they, in my opinion, make it very difficult for startups to get in the game. I will leave it at that.

If you are starting a locally distributed magazine, read on. Yes there are services that offer to distribute your magazine for you, they will do a poor job and charge you and arm and a leg for the privilege. Distribution is paramount. If no one sees, picks up or reads your magazine then it is just a waste of time, money and trees. A major part of your focus should be dialing in the best distribution strategy possible. Do not just toss magazines in front of stores, offices, bars, etc. and expect them to take the time to place them out in a neat fashion – they will end up in the dumpster out back. Do your own distribution. Personally ask permission from each distribution spot, not only is this the right thing to do but it is a great way to get your name out there and meet a few potential advertisers and/or clients for your online business.

The process never stops in the magazine game; it is a fight at all times. There will always be strong competition, new people looking for their share of a market and times where you feel like you are the only person that reads your magazine. But if you do not fight at all, it’s a guarantee that you will not win. There is a special satisfaction for standing on the end of a large printing press and peeling back that cover for the first time. Good luck!

Byline:

Deidra Wilson is a Las Vegas wedding photographer and has a background in small business and publishing magazines. You can check her out on Twitter where she posts about her life as a photographer in the desert she calls home.