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 10/25/2011 at 12:08 am by

How to Use Blogging as a Job Search Tool

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Business Blogging, Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by Lior Levin.

Blogging is not just writing your personal notebook these days: it’s a truly open platform where people share their ideas, passion, goals, and thoughts on subjects they care about. Gone are the days when people would consider blogs “a personal affair.” The scene has long since changed.

Blogging as a job search tool

Job seeker

Image copyright Luna Vandoorne - Fotolia.com

As a job seeker, you can use the power of blogs to reach potential recruiters and make them aware of your existence. Googling for potential employees is slowly becoming a trend among recruiters, and you should definitely use the power of blogging to elevate your job profile and establish yourself as an expert in your industry.

Of course you’ll face challenges, and there is no guarantee that you will get hired as a result of your blog. But it never hurts to give this idea a decent try, and see the feedback and response you get from employers who stumble upon your blog.

If you’re seeking a dream job and want to use the Internet to drive potential employers to your online resume, here are a few tips you should keep in mind:

Set up your LinkedIn profile

The very first thing you should do is set up your LinkedIn profile and connect with like minded people, who share common interests and professional backgrounds. LinkedIn is the social hub of career professionals, and employers are always scanning this social site to find enthusiastic candidates who love their work, and are considered leaders in their fields.

By engaging with like-minded people, you’ll understand what they want from you.

Blog about your core interests

Keep your blog focused and up to date on specific topics. It would be better if you leave aside personal rants and ramblings. Instead, blog about your career goals, past projects, lessons, assignments, and so on. The more you blog about your career assignments and skill set, the more people will consider you an “authority” and a “focused person” who knows what they’re talking about.

Blog regularly

If your last blog post was published couple of years back, potential recruiters will think you’ve lost interest. Write often—at least twice a week. Blog about your latest project, blog about the work culture, and remember a golden rule: “Never criticize any of your past employers.”

Engage

This is really important. Write about your interests, but at the same time, engage with the most important asset in any organisation: “People.” Visit their blogs and comment on a post you loved reading. Reply to their tweets, start a conversation with them, and maintain healthy relationships with your peers. Sooner or later, people will notice your online behavior, and they might shoot off an email expecting to hear more from you.

Never lose patience. It takes time to grow a tree, but once it’s there, the shade lasts forever. Just because you don’t see anything on the surface doesn’t mean the plant isn’t growing beneath it. Give your blog some time and keep writing about things you love. That’s what matters most if you want potential recruiters to notice you.

This post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing enthusiast who works for a start-up company that offers a to-do list app for businesses and individuals. Lior also advises for a web hosting company that offers consumers a list of the top 10 website hosting companies available online.

Written on 10/15/2011 at 12:06 am by

6 Lessons I Learned Selling a $50,000 Website

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

This guest post is by Chris The Traffic Blogger.

My hands were shaking like crazy and I had to focus very hard on entering my bank account information correctly. Just minutes prior a buyer had been approved for my website on Flippa (see the actual auction page here), and I had to somehow manage to calm down to fill out my escrow payment options.

The bid was an astonishing $50,000!

Yeah, that amount was almost enough money for the down payment and closing costs of my first home combined. Even now, when I think about it, I still get chills up my spine at the sheer amount of money that my website sold for. If I had been a little more patient, I may have been able to sell it for closer to $75,000, especially with the steady $4,000 it was earning per month on autopilot.

Today I’d like to touch on six major lessons I’ve learned from selling my first website for so much money. It’s my way of saying thank you to Darren, Georgina, and all the contributors of this fine community for your support and advice over the years. Also to you, the reader, for your comments, emails, and patronage.

Lesson 1: Escrow and Flippa were great

I felt that escrow was essential for providing a safe environment for selling my website. The way it works is like this: if the buyer cheats the seller, then escrow holds the money until the seller’s goods are returned. If the seller cheats the buyer, then escrow charges the seller for the transfer fee and cancels the transaction entirely.

I also liked all the options I had for presenting my information on Flippa, such as attachments, a chart of the last year’s earnings, and even Google analytics. All this information was readily available on the auction page, along with countless other little details.

Lesson 2: You need to know the process

The only major snag in selling the site occurred when the buyer couldn’t figure out how to use my EPP codes and login information to transfer domains from my hosting provider to his.

This was one of the reasons why I went through so much stress and agony trying to sell my website—I didn’t totally understand the process either, nor did I have the experience of knowing how to transfer the domains to the buyer.

I lost about three nights’ sleep before I calmed down enough to come up with a solution to the transfer issue. Instead of trying to get the transfers done between the two of us, I had the buyer change my personal information on the domains to his and also my passwords so that he essentially controlled my domains.

Now the transfer process was on the buyer, not between the buyer and seller, since he owned the domains. This decision allowed us to move forward with the escrow payment process, instead of getting bogged down in figuring out the technical issues of transferring between hosting providers. I think I actually had a few hours of sleep that night!

Lesson 3: Submit your oldest domain

I had a blogspot.com domain changed to .org about two years into the site’s existence. When I went to enter my .org site’s age I put down three years. However, Flippa detected that the .org extension was only available for the past year and said that I was basically contradicting the evidence Flippa had discovered.

There was no way to go back without completely cancelling the auction, so I probably lost a few potential buyers to this mistake.

Lesson 4: Know why you’re selling months beforehand

I knew why I was selling my site six months prior, when I decided that I wanted to focus on other projects. I intended on using the influx of quick cash and free time to build up other projects.

To achieve the selling of my site which was so dependent upon me to survive, I then had to go about the process of replacing myself with a team of writers that could blog in my stead. The new owner was pleased to see a writing staff, as that meant he could take over without needing to create his own content. This was the only reason I was able to sell the site in the first place—otherwise it would be like Darren selling problogger.net years ago when he was the sole contributor. It just wouldn’t have worked.

Lesson 5: Use Google Docs like a champion

Google Docs were amazing for listing all the account logins, instructions, and writer information that was needed to run the site without me.

Given the time difference between the buyer and myself (I was on the US East coast; he was in Malaysia), Google docs provided us with a convenient method for storing information and communicating, and it worked out far better than hundreds of small emails would have.

Lesson 6: Sales funnels are essential

I understand that you most likely do not have a website worth $50,000, but that you would love to get it to that point. If you are serious about blogging and want to turn your hobby into a business, then you need to create a sales funnel.

A sales funnel is simply a system for obtaining leads, building trust, and finally converting leads into buyers. Even if this is simply a post series that you link to, it’s better than nothing. Whether you use email marketing or advertise products on your sidebar, you need to have some method for determining how much money you can make per new subscriber to your site. This will enable you to make calculations regarding what services you could afford to outsource to and still make a profit while growing your site.

Even though building backlinks is crucial for growing your website, you still have to focus a large portion of your effort on your sales funnel, or else you’ll be gambling instead of taking calculated risks.

Other lessons

I’ve learned a lot from this process, and unfortunately I couldn’t possibly fit it all into a single post. I have compiled everything I learned from this experience into a downloadable report which can also be viewed online if you don’t wish to download it. There’s no opt-in: this is my way of saying thanks to you!

Have you ever sold a website? I’d love to hear what you learned from the process, too.

Chris is a self proclaimed expert at showing bloggers how they can get traffic, build communities, make money online and be successful. You can find out more at The Traffic Blogger.

Written on 10/10/2011 at 12:00 am by

Make Money Locally—and Globally—Through Your Blog

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Business Blogging

This guest post is by Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing.

Our blog is less than a year old.

We started Firepole Marketing less than a year ago, and we’ve done pretty well with it over that time. A lot of people know who we are, and what we do.

I’ve even been dubbed the Freddy Krueger of Blogging.

And while we’re not at the scale of a major site like Copyblogger, we still do pretty well, to the point that we make a decent amount of money online, and occasionally even help others to do the same.

Connections

Image copyright Lvnel - Fotolia.com

We aren’t the only ones to have done that, and I remember that a year ago, when I saw others make the same sort of claim, I always wanted more information. I wanted to know how much money they were really making, and where that money was coming from.

All right then, I’ll tell you…

Where did we start? Where did the money come from?

Let me start with a bit of the back-story—who we are, and where we came from.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for longer than my adult life. I quit school when I was 15 to start my first business, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

For the last several years, in parallel with my various entrepreneurial ventures (some of which were successful, and some of which were less so), my regular income was earned by consulting for small businesses, usually in the zero-to-ten employee range. Sometimes I would get involved in an advisory capacity, and sometimes they would bring me in for something very specific (i.e. they need a new website)—either way, I would end up helping them make more money by tuning up their marketing and business strategy.

My partner Peter is a marketing and business coach, with similar expertise. We connected on the networking circuit, and while comparing notes over coffee, we agreed that while there were lots of businesses in our target market that were doing well enough to afford our services, there were also a lot of businesses that really needed help, but hardly had any money. We both gave away a lot of free coaching and advice, but that could only go so far.

So we decided to create our training program—that was the birth of Firepole Marketing.

That was more than two years ago. Fast-forward to last year, and the program was done—now we needed to get the word out about it, and that’s when we turned to blogging.

Obviously, my income started out completely offline. I had grown my consultancy to a six-figure business before we ever launched Firepole Marketing.

I think that’s pretty normal—very few people start their careers online, so it makes sense that you would start your transition into the online world still making money from offline opportunities.

Then we launched our product and blog, and half-expected the sales to start rolling in…

Disappointments and False Starts

Almost immediately after launching the blog, we announced it to our (small) lists, and did a small product launch. This was in the very beginning of 2010.

It flopped miserably.

We didn’t make any money at all from that launch, and in hindsight, it wasn’t hard to see why.

Nobody knew who we were, and our audience was very small (less than a hundred people on our list).

So who were we launching our product to?

Nobody—that’s right!

It was after that false start that we realized we need to focus on building an engaged audience first, and then worrying about product sales later.

So that’s what we did. I wrote lots of guest posts, landed interviews with major figures like Guy Kawasaki, participated in online conversations, and did everything that I could think of to:

  1. get my name out in front of as many targeted people as I could
  2. consistently offer as much value as I could, so that if people remembered me, they would remember me in a positive light.

And it started working. I built real relationships with lots of other bloggers, our traffic numbers grew, and we started seeing some really interesting discussion and debate on some of our posts. In less than a year, our Alexa ranking dropped from over a million to just about 85,000, where it hovers today.

And we figured that as the traffic numbers increased, we’d start seeing more people buy our training program. But we were wrong…

Next: Online Feeding Offline

We did start seeing product sales, but not as many as had hoped, and not as soon as we would have liked.

That was fine, though, because it turned out that there were a much more lucrative income opportunities that literally found us.

Those opportunities were offline opportunities … sort of.

It turned out that a whole bunch of people in our networks—some of whom we hadn’t spoken to in years—were reading our blog, and following our growth online. They were impressed, and started contacting us out of the blue, to engage our coaching and consulting services.

Once we noticed the trend, we put out a few feelers to our list (which had a couple hundred people on it by this point), asking if anyone was interested in working with us on a one-on-one basis.

More than a few people said yes, and working with us on a one-on-one basis isn’t cheap!

In other words, before we even started making product sales, we had generated something like $10,000 in extra revenues from new clients that found us through the blog.

But it didn’t stop there.

Product Sales and More Clients…

Eventually, people started buying our training program.

It was just a trickle at first—after all, this is a $900 training program, not a $17 e-book!

But people were buying, culminating in a big chunk of publicity that we got at the end of August, when we took the program off the market.

All in all, we’ve probably made another $10,000 or so from product sales, and we expect that number to grow dramatically each time we open the program to new students, which will probably happen once or twice per year (that way, we can focus on building our audience in between).

And in between launches, we get new coaching and consulting clients, which will realistically continue to make up the majority of the income that we earn online—at least for the next year or so.

So, how can you do the same?

Are you wondering whether you can do exactly what we did, and get the exact same results?

The answer is that no, you probably can’t.

I could tell you what’s worked for us—but that probably won’t be very helpful, because we’re different people with different strengths, we’ve had different experiences, and we’re in different circumstances.

What you really need is some hard data about what seems to be working, across the board.

Everybody talks about making some money locally and some money online, but there’s no hard data about what results large numbers of people are seeing, and how long it’s taking them to get there.

We wanted to change all that, so we created the Semi-Local Business Survey.

The survey will ask you how much of your income is generated locally, how much is generated remotely, and how you came to be where you are today.

Your answers are completely anonymous, and will be added to the answers of many others, so that we can see what the real trends in the industry are.

There’s no offer here, and nothing for sale—we just want to gather the data and share it with the community.

So please, take a few minutes and complete the survey!

Danny Iny (@DannyIny) is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing, the program that turns non-marketers into expert marketers. He wants to know where entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses are really making their money – help out by completing the Semi-Local Business Survey today!

Written on 10/7/2011 at 12:03 am by

The Ultimate Guide to Professional Product Review Pitches

Filed Under: Affiliate Programs, Blogging for Dollars

This post is by Chris Wise of Expressionables.

Product review blogs are one of the best ways for ecommerce sites to spread the word about their products and build backlinks to increase organic search traffic.

That being said, there are thousands of small-to-medium-sizes product review blogs on the Internet all vying for the opportunity to secure free products for reviews and giveaways. Large, recognizable blogs will almost never have to request products to review or give away, however 95% of product review blogs do not fit this description.

In order to keep a steady stream of products to review coming in, it is almost inevitable that smaller bloggers will have to pitch to vendors.

Being an ecommerce marketer myself, I receive on average three to five pitches a week from small blogs wishing to review and give away my products; 90% of these requests are turned down for many of the same reasons.

Hopefully upon reading this, those small product review blogs will come away with a better idea of how to compete with the big boys and score more luxurious and expensive products to review, more often.

Use your own domain

If you host your blog on a blogging platform subdomain, you can’t expect to review expensive products or offer lavish giveaways.

I can tell you now, having a blog at “yoursite.blogspot.com” doesn’t give the best first impression. While it isn’t a deal-breaker, it will definitely hurt your chances of scoring reviews for big-ticket items. I know it may be a difficult task if you already have a large, established site on a subdomain, but in the long run it will help you immensely to switch.

If you don’t mind reviewing small items like toothpaste and doorstoppers, then don’t worry about switching. But for everyone else, rectify this problem by simply purchasing and hosting your own domain; I promise, it will be worth it. Note: make sure you 301-redirect all of your pages to the new domain!

Personalize your email pitches

If you’re going to request a review, don’t send that request in the form of a templated, generic email. It’s understandable that you may not be able to find a specific contact name, however the email should still be personalized with factors that are within your control.

Each email pitch should be personalized with the following details:

  • Who are you requesting a review from (vendor’s name or specific contact name if possible)?
  • Which specific product you are requesting to review?
  • What made you specifically choose that product/vendor?
  • Why is your blog is a good place to showcase a product review?
  • When do you plan to feature the review?
  • How can it specifically help the vendor?

Here is a bad example:

“We love testing out products and blogging about our results, and we believe our readers would be interested in your products.”

Hmmm. Why do you believe your readers would be interested in my products?

Send current, correct stats

Showcasing your blog’s strong points is a great way to convince a vendor that your blog is a great place to review their product.

  • Subscriber stats (email list, blog followers, RSS subscribers, etc.)
  • Unique monthly visitors
  • Unique monthly pageviews
  • Pagerank
  • Moz trust, Moz rank, and domain authority (found using Open Site Explorer)
  • Twitter and Facebook followers/fans.

This stuff is all great. But guess what? If it is not accurate, it is really not great at all. It shows laziness and a little bit of incompetence.

These stats are not that hard to check. If you claim your site gets 50,000 unique visitors a month and I go on Compete or Quantcast and see that your data is unavailable, we have a problem. Pagerank is updated about twice a year, so there’s no excuse for not having accurate figures. And instead of using an exact number of Facebook and Twitter followers just use something like “2,000 plus”.

These may seem like small details, but they make a big difference in the eyes of a vendor.

Provide evidence

This is a no-brainer. Mention recognizable brand names that you have worked with in the past. By showcasing past successes to your prospective vendors—via testimonials, case studies, and so on—your conversion rates will undoubtedly increase. Though this is not something I would include in your email directly. It should be incorporated something like this:

“See how our other sponsors are raving about their experiences with us here.”
Or:
“Our product reviews have the ability to increase your traffic by this much.”

The idea is to provide a vague reference to the positive experience others have had, with a hyperlink to a page full of content that talks about it in more detail. This leads to more engagement and helps to increase your chance of securing a product review.

Be concise and typo-free

Keep your product review pitches short and sweet. While you want to be thorough in your request, you do not want to overwhelm the recipient to the point that your email gets deleted without even being read. Here are some pointers:

  • Use bulleted lists whenever possible.
  • Do not include unnecessary information (I don’t care to read an “about us” in a review request. Just link to your “about us” from within the email).
  • Don’t include unfavorable data (e.g. a Pagerank of 0).
  • Do a spell check before sending an email.
  • Let someone proof read it.
  • Ask yourself, “If I got this email, how would I respond to it?”

The ideal length of a product review request is between 150 and 350 words (depending on the products requested, size of the vendor, etc.), but definitely no more than 400 words in any case.

Do use PR services, but don’t spam

PR networks are a great way to reach hundreds of vendors at the same time with your product review pitches. Try services like:

I must warn you, though: do not spam these services. People who are subscribed to these services will see that your are spamming (the emails are mailed daily) and will undoubtedly be turned off by your desperate tactics. Do not make more than one request on the same day, and do not make requests daily (I would say no more than once a week).

Include your phone number and address

So many of the requests I receive are lacking these two vital tidbits or information, and it always raises a red flag for me.

If you are going to take the time to contact me and ask for free stuff (albeit for promotion in return), at least have the decency to include basic contact information so that I may discuss the proposal further with you if needed. For big-ticket items, many ecommerce vendors would like to speak with the reviewers over the phone, rather than simply communicating by email. It’s a simple addition to your pitch that can make a world of difference.

Follow up if your request goes unanswered

I can honestly say that I have received review requests from bloggers that I intended to follow through with, but simply forgot to answer due to other pressing issues that popped up throughout the day. Had the blogger simply sent a polite, brief follow up, it would have:

  • showed me that they were truly interested in my products
  • enabled them to actually do the review for my products
  • made me more likely to offer additional items for review.

So keep records of your requests, and make it a point to follow up on the emails that get no responses.

Don’t ask for extras in your initial pitch

Patience is a virtue. Even though you may be interested in exclusive coupon codes or help with promoting the review (links, PR, or social mentions) do not bring that up in your first email. Believe me: ask for too much and you will get nothing. Relationships need to be fostered first, then the additional requests will be better received.

The perfect pitch

Follow those guidelines and I can almost guarantee you will have an opportunity to review more expensive products, more often. The best part is, after a while, so many vendors will be coming to you for review pitches that you will have to turn them down.

There are definitely other do’s and dont’s out there—if you have any experiences, examples, or suggestions of your own. I would love to hear about them in the comments.

Chris wise is head of SEM for the Expressionables family—an online network of sites specializing in everything from personalized gift wrap and party invitations to B2B products and customer appreciation programs.

Written on 10/5/2011 at 12:06 am by

20 Ways to Make More Money from Your Blog

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

This guest post is by James Penn of AcceleratedNicheProfits.com.

A few weeks ago, on the ProBlogger Community Boards, I started a new forum topic titled, “Help Me Monetize 1,000 Visitors Per Day.”

My natural health blog had experienced some rapid traffic growth, and had grown from 80 visitors per day to over 1,000 visitors per day using these seven strategies.

Yet my income was pitiful.

Income

Image copyright Monkey Business - Fotolia.com

My only monetization strategy was linking to relevant Amazon products, and I was generating just over $100 per month. I worked out that if I carried on like this, simply promoting Amazon products, I’d need to be clocking 50,000 visitors per dayto make a comfortable, full-time income with this blog.

That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so I sought advice from fellow ProBlogger forum members, undertook my own research, and carried out my own experiments in a quest to discover alternative ways to increase the revenue I generated from my blog.

In this post, I share twenty strategies you can use to increase your blog income. Many I’m already using, many I plan to use, but some I don’t think would work on my particular blog, though they may work on yours!

1. Google Adsense

I’d always been against adding Google Adsense to my webpages for fear of it taking away from the user experience.

I needn’t have worried as I’ve been able to add one ad unit in a fairly prominent position and one in a more secluded area of the blog without disrupting my readers.

I’ve only had these ads up a few weeks but initial results suggest they will earn me more this month than I earned with my entire blog last month.

2. Sidebar linking

Your sidebar appears on every single one of your blog pages. You need to be making the most of it.
Something I’ve experimented with is adding a new link category with a title that’s something like, “My Top 5 Health Books.”

Then below that title I’ll link to my favourite health books on Amazon. It’s a good way to get more readers in the door at Amazon and earn more Amazon commissions.

3. Deep-linking Amazon products

Sidebar links can work well, but deep linking to specific products that are relevant to the content I’m sharing is the most effective strategy for driving Amazon sales.

For example, on my health blog, if I have a post about the benefits of avocado oil for skin and hair, then linking to the most effective avocado oil on Amazon will generate a number of clicks and sales.

4. Localize your Amazon links

One of the problems I was having with my blog is that I was only linking to Amazon.com. Only 55% of my traffic was from the US—meaning I was missing out on a huge portion of commissions from the rest of the world.

There are a few plug-ins that “localize” your Amazon affiliate links, so a reader from the UK is taken to Amazon.co.uk, for example. This is a good way to pick up extra commissions that you wouldn’t have received otherwise.

5. Sell your own products

A large chunk of Darren’s revenue is now generated from selling his own ebooks. In January and February of this year, ebook sales were his number one revenue generator.

Bloggers have a huge advantage when it comes to selling their own products since they’ve already gained trust from their readers and displayed their expertise. If your free blog content is good, then readers will assume your paid content is even better—and you won’t need to be a copywriting whiz to get sales.

I have two ebooks already written from a few years ago that I have simply let gather digital dust. A few tweaks and a new design and these ebooks will be promoted on my blog to my reader base.

6. Adding promotional boxes

On problogger.net, at the end of each individual post page, Darren has a promotional box that promotes the Genesis Framework.

ProBlogger promotional box for GenesisI know this box works because I ended up buying Genesis via this promotion.

After setting my blog up with Genesis, I had my programmer design a promotional box for me, promoting a hair care product that pays $40 commissions. I added this box to every single post in my “Hair Health” category, meaning the promotion is shown only to the most targeted prospects. I’ll now be making more of these boxes so that I can put them into other categories, promoting other specific products.

7. Find alternative affiliate programs

With my health blog I got a little too comfy with the Amazon Associates program. It was so easy to just find a product, get a link, and put it on the blog. It was easy to set up, and easy to keep track of, but I was only getting about 7% commission.

Now when I go to insert an Amazon affiliate link, I do a search first to see if I can find a better commission rate.

8. Pop-ups

This is another technique Darren’s using on prologger.net currently. At the top of the page is a very unobtrusive, 1cm thick pop over that simply serves to get people to click to his 31 Days To Build A Better Blog course.

This is something I plan to add to my blog when I have my eBooks up for sale, but it’s something you could do today to get people to click through to affiliate products.

9. Donate button

I’m not a big fan of this strategy, but some use it effectively. If you have a loyal following that you treat well and really help, many may be happy to send a few dollars your way for blog maintenance, or merely as a thank you.

Perhaps put a Donate button on your blog for a few days and see how it works? Have you ever tried this? Did it work?

10. Convert more visitors into subscribers

If you aren’t building an email list, then every single person who leaves your blog is gone, forever, unless they find you again via a search engine or link on another blog, which is unlikely.

But if you manage to collect their email addresses, you can stay in touch. You can send them back to your blog regularly and you can promote your own ebooks or affiliate products to them.

If you can get their email addresses, you can send them back to the blog every time you publish a new update. This achieves a number of goals:

  • It gives them another opportunity to click on one of your Adsense ads.
  • It gives them another opportunity to buy your ebook or an affiliate product.
  • It increases your number of pageviews, which increases your revenue from CPM banner advertising.
  • It gives them an opportunity to share your blog on Twitter, Facebook, or Stumbleupon, thereby increasing your traffic and revenue.

This ability to retain readers will help you generate more revenue from the same visitors, which can only be a good thing.

11. Promote products via email

Prior to my mission to make more money from my blog, I was simply sending updates to my subscribers directing them to new blog posts.

I realized that to increase my blog revenue, I needed to sell in my emails, too.

I sent a test promotion of a natural hair care product I’ve previously mentioned to an extremely targeted list of just 340 subscribers generated from the blog. I made four sales from one email resulting in $160 in commissions.

Before I monetized my email list, it would have taken me one and a half months to earn this kind of money from my blog.

12. Charge for email advertising

Many are happy to pay to get an ad, or an entire solo ad, in an email list. Consider offering email advertising packages to further increase the revenue generated from your email list. Create an Advertise With Us page on your blog and state your rates.

13. Reviews

Seven days ago I wrote my first product review on my health blog. I don’t want to share what product it was, but after pressing Publish, I was instantly ranking in the top 10 for a number of keywords such as “[product name] review” and “buy [product name].”

This review, with no promotion, has generated $120 in commissions in the first seven days, and I expect it to continue like this for the foreseeable future.

14. Sponsored competitions

Something I see a lot of on popular health blogs are sponsored competitions. A company donates a few of their products to a blogger and the blogger runs a competition giving away these products.

These competitions are free to run, and can be immensely profitable. Firstly, they are capable of drawing huge traffic, and secondly you can promote the product using an affiliate link. Competition entrants who don’t win, or who don’t even enter, may end up buying the products via your affiliate link giving you a nice commission boost.

15. Sponsored posts

A few months ago I was approached by a plastic surgeon. They wanted to publish a post on my blog promoting their plastic surgery business. They offered $125 for a 500-word post which they would write.
I had to reject their offer because my blog focuses on natural alternatives, but it opened my mind up to the possibility—and profitability—of charging for sponsored posts.

I’ve yet to try it, but in the very near future I’ll be approaching natural health and beauty companies offering them an opportunity to publish a post promoting their business. I won’t be able to use this method too often or fear of annoying readers, but one or two sponsored posts a month is an extra $100-200 monthly. If you’re really cheeky, you may also be allowed to use your affiliate link to promote their products.

16. Bestseller lists

Darren gave me this idea with his post about creating a bestseller list. This involves creating a list of the most popular products your blog readers are buying as judged by your Amazon affiliate reports.

I immediately went away and created my bestseller list on a new page of my blog. This page is linked from my top navigation bar so it receives exposure on every single page of the blog.

17. “Gift ideas” posts

Prior to major holidays, such as Christmas, Mother’s and Father’s days, and so on, it’s a wise idea to create a “Top 10 Gifts For Health/Nature/Photography/Sports/ Enthusiasts” list. Simply create a gift ideas list for your blog’s market, and you’ll see an increase in affiliate commissions as you get traffic from keyphrases like “gift ideas for photographers.”

Another idea is to create Top 10 DVDs or Top 10 Books lists for your market. On my blog I have articles such as The Top 5 Natural Sunscreens, and The Top 5 Natural Shampoos. Pick a product in your market and write a list of the top five or ten brands.

18. Premium content

This is not something I’ve tried, but I know some bloggers have used it well. I’m not sure it would work too well in my market, but I’m sure there are many markets it would work in.

This idea simply involves creating a premium quality, longer-than-normal blog post. You publish the first part as a teaser and then require the reader to pay a small fee to read the rest of the post—perhaps $5 or so.

Like I mentioned earlier, if your readers love your free content, they’ll assume your paid content is even better.

19. Plug your high-value content

On my blog, I have certain content that I know generates more revenue than others. Therefore, to increase my revenue, it makes sense to push my readers towards this content.

Darren pushes his high-value content on the homepage by making certain posts “Featured.” You can also push people towards high-value content by interlinking within your posts, and linking to your high-value posts from the sidebar. You should also focus on building backlinks to your high-value content to push them up the search engines and attract more organic traffic to these posts.

20. Charge to review guest posts

This is a slightly out-of-left-field strategy I learned from Darya Pino of SummerTomato.com and it’s not actually a way to increase your own revenue, but instead to raise some money for charity.

Darya was disillusioned with the number and quality of guest posts she was receiving and so decided to require a $10 donation simply to review a guest post.

I’m getting between three and five guest post submissions per day. I reckon I could cut this number down significantly, increase the quality of guest posts, and raise some money for charity by charging to review guest post submissions.

What can you add?

Above I’ve presented 20 strategies you can use to make more money from your blog and your existing traffic.

What strategies are working best for you when it comes to monetizing your blog? Do you have any “out of the ordinary” strategies that are helping you to profit from your blog? Share them with us.

James Penn is a keen blogger and shares his internet marketing experiments, tips and secrets at AcceleratedNicheProfits.com. He is also a big fan of building niche email lists and has documented his top list building strategies in his step-by-step guide 100 Subscribers Per Day.

Written on 10/3/2011 at 12:07 am by

What to Do When Your Product is Only a Suggestion

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

This guest post is by John Hoff of securemyblog.com.

When we’re new to making money online, many gurus tell us we should think about what we know, what we’re good at, and what we enjoy doing.

They tell us to think about it like this:

If money wasn’t a factor, what would you do?

They tell us to then take that thought and turn it into something we can create a business out of, but remember…

It’s not about making money.

No, it’s never about the money, is it? (Wink… nudge, nudge, wink.)

Solution or suggestion?

Image copyright Nikolai Sorokin - Fotolia.com

It’s about doing what you love and helping people better their lives because of the things you do. Do that and the money will follow.

The problem is, the money doesn’t always follow, does it?

Sure, you might get a nice burst of sales when you launch, but typically what happens after that launch-promoted surge of traffic disappears is a dip. A dip in sales and a dip in your attitude.

You don’t understand why people aren’t buying your product.

It’s good. Darn good. But sales trickle in slower than a race between a snail and a turtle.

Assuming you’re getting traffic to the site and very few people are buying, here’s the problem you might be having…

Your product is a suggestion, not a solution.

What your product may be lacking

Many of us bloggers look to make money online, and as you have probably figured out, blogs don’t make money: people do. If when you signed up for this Internet marketing gig your information came from a reputable guru, they probably told you that you needed to focus on these potential customer issues:

  • fears
  • pain
  • desires
  • wants
  • needs.

But sometimes when we’re all jazzed up about getting our own first product out there, we tend to forget things—or even worse, don’t listen.

It doesn’t matter what kind of product you have: ebook, membership site, advice, or coaching service, if your product fails to tap into any of these fundamental reasons that motivate people to “need to buy” your product, you’ve got a suggestion product.

If you’re one of those people who owns a product which is seen as a suggestion rather than a solution, the way I see it, you have two choices:

  1. Educate customers about the problems and convince them to buy.
  2. Set up a clever sales funnel.

Option three, of course, is to give up, but sometimes giving up isn’t what we want to do even when our logical brains tell us otherwise.

Option 1: The time suck—suggestion education

Hey I’m all for educating, after all, teaching sells, right? In fact pretty much everything I do online involves either teaching something or learning something.

But strictly speaking about product creation for a moment, I never lose sight of the fact that a product that provides a solution to something will require less teaching and educating than one which only provides suggestions.

This means it’s easier to sell.

As an example, my first information product is a WordPress security ebook.

When I created the product, I thought to myself, “John, there’s a real need out there for people to secure their blogs against hackers, and when you show them how bad a hacking problem WordPress has, people will be fearful and want to buy this product.”

Notice how I mentioned three of those big issues we need to tap into? But here’s the problem: they weren’t problems my target customers felt or understood (yet).

And that’s the difference between educating to create a sale (a suggestion) verses educating to close the sale (a solution).

The problem with educating to create a sale for a product which is a suggestion is that it typically takes a lot of time and effort, and unless you’re a top-notch content marketer, your sales will likely be sporadic.

Also, assuming this is the only strategy you use to entice people to buy your product, it is likely that many of your prospective buyers will never find you.

Why?

That’s simple: because they aren’t looking for what you’re offering them; they’re looking for something else. They are looking for a solution to a problem they have today, and your suggestion product couldn’t possibly be targeting every problem your target customers are having.

Option 2: Setting up a clever sales funnel

Okay, so you’ve got yourself a darn fine product and you know people will benefit from it. The problem is that even though you’re trying to educate them as to why your product will be good for them, sales just aren’t coming in the way you thought they would.

If this is the case, the most important thing you can do is take a really close look at where your buyers are coming from, and where they could be coming from.

You probably have a decent idea of what kind of person would buy your product. Now take that person and spend some time really digging into their true wants, needs, problems, desires, and so on.

If your product teaches people how to take control of their money and budget better (your suggestion product explains how to do it), then one of the needs your prospects might have is to make their next month’s mortgage payment.

Now imagine if you could create the website and a product which solved that problem for them.

Perhaps you partnered with a Payday Loan company or an investor, and offered a loan program which solved that problem for them in twenty-four hours.

After buying that frontend product and capturing their email addresses, you can then begin marketing to them about your how-to budgeting product.

Another problem your prospective customers might have is divorce over money. Assuming a person does not want to get divorced over money, they need to find a way to fix the problem they’re having.

So you create a site and new info product or service on how to solve divorce problems related to money issues. And there’s your second funnel.

What we’re doing here is creating secondary products which give people immediate solutions to their problems, then funneling them into your suggestion product.

The key point to remember is that when you’re setting up your funnels, you need to position yourself as the person with the answers they need. In other words, you need to be the authority in their eyes for the fill-in-the-blank niche.

Your best bet, of course, is to do both option one and option two as I’ve explained them here. But if you ask me, one option deserves the majority of your time (option 2).

John Hoff is a content marketer… but you don’t care about that. What you might care about is what he can do for your WordPress security. He can also help you with that blog SEO thing (free download, no email required).

Written on 10/2/2011 at 12:02 am by

How a Blog Can Help Grow Your Offline Business

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Business Blogging

This guest post was written by Gordon McLachlan of 8 Gram Gorilla.

I’ve been both an avid blogger and a huge advocate for blogging for many years now. But until recently I’ve never had any personal “success” to be able to back up my claims that blogging isn’t just an excellent pastime, it’s also a tremendously useful business resource.

Sure, it’s easy to point people to the likes of ProBlogger as a testament to the power of blogging when answering the question “why have a blog?” but I’ve always struggled to relate any major achievements of my own as further proof to my assertions.

Until now.

How my blog helped my offline business grow

It all began three years ago when I first started blogging in earnest and opened the doors to an online gaming blog (think World of Warcraft et al), the subject matter being a hobby of mine that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed for many years.

I guess, if I’m being truly honest, I did have a little thought/hope/dream in the back of my mind that one day I might “make it” as a blogger and become so popular and make so much money through advertising that I could relocate to the Bahamas and live out the rest of my life sipping Mai Tais whilst blogging from a laptop on the beach. Of course, that never happened.

I wasn’t particularly cut up about that, though, because I was primarily blogging for the simple reason that I enjoyed it so much. Plus, within a year or two, I’d managed to establish myself as one of the more popular blogs in my niche with a loyal readership and tens of thousands of visits a month.

I was content and never thought my blog would help me in any other way.

Then something magical happened.

Five months ago, I took the biggest risk of my life and left my job with a company I’d been with for over six years. I started up my own business, a web agency, with two other very talented individuals. The web has always been my passion and not only did my new colleagues and I want to make a living running our own design and development company, we also knew that we wanted to engage with the Internet through all available means.

Taking a punt, I wrote up a post on my gaming blog advertising my new company site and new company blog, 8 Gram Gorilla, hoping that we might be able to pass through some link juice and garner a little bit of interest from my gaming readership.

The response was overwhelming.

Securing international business

Within a few days of my blog post, we’d received emails from readers about job opportunities, some national, here in the UK, and some international. These people had looked at our company blog, our company website, and our portfolio of work, and decided that we, as a business, were worth investigating.

Long story short, through contact stemming directly from my gaming blog, we were able to secure international work that, as a result, has helped us survive and thrive—no mean feat given how tough it is for new businesses to establish themselves in the current economic climate.

I think it’s important to stress here that we didn’t have people just phoning us up and offering us guaranteed jobs or easy money—we still had to pitch for the work and go through the usual hoops of tendering and proving ourselves to be the right people for the job. In fact, not every lead even converted into a project. But that’s not the point.

The point is, just like any form of networking and relationship building, it’s about getting in front of people who might actually have a need for your service, and who respect and trust you enough to give you a shot at going up for it.

At the end of the day, we only won the work we got because we were the right people for the job. What my blog did give us, though, were some amazing leads and the ability to pitch for work that we would never have known about otherwise. And that’s been truly invaluable.

Better than any networking event

I’ve attended a lot of local networking events and I can tell you that most of them are a waste of time. Aside from the fact that they’re usually filled with people all trying to sell their own wares and services to each other and not actually buy anything, they don’t tend to offer enough time to really get to know anyone properly. And that’s why blogs are so beautiful.

Over the two and a bit years my blog had been running, I’d written several hundred posts on, mainly, my views of gaming, but also about my personal experiences at home, details about my wife and family, and other bits about my life, like my reading interests and holiday activities.

All this information helped cement a relationship of trust and friendship with my readers. They felt like they knew me enough, and perhaps more importantly, liked me enough, to give me a chance when I started my own business.

Funnily enough, this intimate connection has also made the business relationship with any readers easier and more relaxed than any other because, after all, it’s hard to maintain a stern, impersonal corporate facade when someone’s seen your embarrassing holiday photos. I can be completely natural with them because I know that they’ve already read hundreds of hours of my thoughts, moans, and opinions, leaving me nowhere to hide—even if I wanted to.

And all of this is why a blog, any blog, can help benefit your offline business. It allows you to make connections with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people from all across the world whilst constantly establishing a relationship of trust, authority, and kinship.

It doesn’t even matter what your blog is about, because your readers will ultimately share your passion for the same subject and, importantly, over the course of time, they’ll come to relate with you more and more.

The moral of the story

You don’t need a blog that makes money itself by selling products or generating huge ad revenue to reap the real, tangible life-changing benefits of having one.

Just writing about what you love, regardless of what it is, is enough. People respect passion and admire talent, and sometimes, just using a blog as a vehicle to establish trust and connect with others is enough.

Indeed, one of the best things a blog can do for you is introduce you to thousands of people who share your interests and hobbies and, just like networking in the “real world,” maybe one day one of those people will need the services your offline business has to offer.

After all, you never know who might be reading.

This post was written by Gordon McLachlan, one of the founders of Primate, a digital agency driven by an overwhelming passion for the web industry. In addition to having a slightly unsettling love for monkeys he also co-authors their rather witty blog, 8 Gram Gorilla.

Written on 9/29/2011 at 12:03 am by

A Practical Strategy to Increase the Value of Your Blog

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

This guest post is by Sunil of the Extra Money Blog.

Not long ago I wrote about determining the value of your website or blog here on problogger.net. Now that you know how a web property is or can be valued in the free market, in this article I want to discuss a practical strategy you can apply to increase the valuation of your web property.

The value of a website or blog, or any other business for that matter, is derived from its earnings or free cash flows before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—a term referred to as EBITDA in the professional sector.

Grow your value

Copyright Gorilla - Fotolia.com

Therefore a web property’s value is predicated on its earnings, multiplied by a factor X called an earnings multiplier that is derived from similar transactions in the recent past. 

For example, if a similar blog sold for four times its earnings couple months ago, there is a good chance you can count on a similar multiple when putting a value on your web property.

What do I know about website valuations? For starters, I sold an ecommerce website in 2007 for $250,000 to one of the top power sellers on Ebay at the time. Since then I have sold several niche websites for five figure cash out deals.

The best way to boost value

If valuations are based on earnings, it is obvious that earnings must increase if the value of your web property is to increase. Many online entrepreneurs take their time growing their web property organically, often on their own due to funding restrictions.

However, once the web property starts generating a little bit of money, one of the best investments you can make to increase its value is by reinvesting those earnings right back into the business.

For example, let’s assume you have a niche website that has 30 pages, each of which brings in $1 a day, roughly on average, from Google Adsense. If you took your earnings and invested in 30 freelance articles, you can hypothetically double the earnings from your website.

Let’s walk through this example with numbers. A 30-page website generating a dollar per page per day generates a total of $30 per page per month. $30 per page per month multiplied by 30 pages gives you a monthly income of $900.  If you took the $900, or one month’s earnings, and invested it in 30 high-quality articles at $30 each, you would now have a total of 60 articles. 60 articles generating $1 each per day equates to an income of $60 per day, or $1,800 per month, which is double of the initial $900 you were making.

Now here is a question: since your income has now increased by $900 per month, or $10,800 per year, has the value of your web property also increased by that amount as well?

No it has not.

It has increased even more.

Let’s have a look at the reasons why. $900 generated per month equates to $10,800 per year. If you were to sell this web property at an earnings multiple of four, you could expect to get $43,200 for it. However, your web property now generates $1,800 per month, or $21,600 per year. At the same earnings multiple of four, we are looking at a valuation of $86,400, which is not just $10,800 more, but double the initial $43,200 valuation.

The math reads pretty simply. Assuming the same multiple is in place, double your earnings and it will double your valuation. This example is very simplistic in that it assumes no operating expenses, stable multiples, certain Adsense earnings correlations, etc.

A valuable concept

Even though it’s not always quite this easy, or simplistic in nature, don’t get fixated on the facts. Instead, keep the general concept in mind. 

A web property may never grow, or may grow slowly if you were to work on it on your own, but hiring outside help can boost your earnings in the short-term and pay large dividends down the road if and when you sell your web property.

What do you think of this method of increasing the valuation of your business? Do you have additional tips or strategies that you can share with us?

Sunil owns over a dozen profitable niche websites and is the author of “How to Go from $0 to $1,000 a month in Passive and Residual Income in Under 180 Days All in Your Spare Time“, a FREE report you can download instantly from his Extra Money Blog, where he discusses how to create multiple streams of passive and residual income, entrepreneurship, internet marketing, blogging and personal finance.