Info Marketing Rocks!
March 16, 2009 by Jeffrey
Filed under Blogging, Information Marketing
Information marketing is incredibly powerful, and there are many reasons for this. If I had to choose a single business model to focus on, and I was forced to drop all other aspects of my business, I would stick to information marketing.
Here’s why information marketing rocks!
1. The profit margins are incredible! There is no other business on earth where you can create a product and sell it over and over again with no additional costs for production and raw materials. Once you’ve made back your initial costs for creating the product, the rest is almost pure profit!
2. Creating information products is so much simpler than creating physical products. You don’t have to buy supplies and raw materials. You don’t have to build factories. You don’t have to hire employees to work in your factory. In fact, if you have the skills, you can create every product yourself!
3. There’s no inventory or shipping. You don’t have to stock shelves with merchandise. You can’t “run out” of an information product, unless you purposely limit sales, and you can’t have the item lost by the shipping company. Sure, you may have to deal with people who don’t know how to download the product, or other minor issues, but it doesn’t cost you anything but time to send the buyer another download link.
4. You can have hundreds of products of your own very quickly. In physical products, creating hundreds of product lines would probably take you many years to accomplish. Online, you could have hundreds of products just by hiring writers and designers to create the products for you.
I feel that information marketing is simply the easiest and best business to get started in. Even if you have no experience at all, you can outsource every single step. You can have a business up and running in days, and it costs almost nothing to get started. What can beat that?
Create Information Products
March 16, 2009 by Jeffrey
Filed under Blogging, Information Marketing
Creating digital products is time-consuming. The average ebook may take anywhere from 8 to 100 hours to write, depending on the length, complexity, and speed of the writer. But there are ways you can speed this process up, and even create an info product in an hour or two!
1. Dragon Naturally Speaking
Dragon Naturally Speaking is a software program that lets you speak words instead of typing them. Most people speak far faster than they type, so you can save a lot of time by using this software! Some people double or even triple their product creation speed with this tool.
2. Interviews
Interviewing people via telephone or Skype is a super way to create a product. Find an expert in your niche, ask them for an interview, and create an audio product. You can have this product transcribed relatively cheaply, which means you will have both audio and a written product to sell. A one hour interview with an expert could be sold for a great deal of money if the information is good!
3. Videos
Creating a video can take a lot less time than creating a written product. Let’s say you want to show someone how to create a Squidoo lens. You could create an entire video showing the process from start to finish in the time it takes you to create the lens. This might be an hour, for example. But it would probably take you at least 20 pages to explain the process in writing, not to mention the necessity of creating screenshots to show people what you’ve done. A written product might take 3-4 hours. By creating a video, you could accomplish the same thing in 1/4 the time! Plus, video products usually sell for a lot more than an ebook because the perceived value is greater!
Remember to get creative. You might think of some new ways to shave time off of your product creation, and you might find that your products sell even better when delivered in a new format.
5 Steps to More Blog Traffic
The biggest question people have about blogging seems to be, “How can I get more traffic to my blog?”
Getting traffic to a website or blog is no easy thing to do. There are millions and millions of websites and blogs on the internet, and you’re probably competing with thousands, of not millions of sites in your niche. Why would a visitor come to your blog instead of one of those other sites or blogs?
Well, it’s all about saturation and visibility. You need to make sure that no matter where a visitor goes on the internet, they’re almost assured of running into a link to your blog. If they visit another blog in your niche, they should be able to find a link to you from it! It’s a lot of work, but it can pay of big time!
So let’s look at the ways you can get more visibility and saturation:
1. Comment on other blogs. You should comment on as many blogs as you can in your niche, but be sure to leave quality comments! Don’t just stop by and say, “Nice post.” Tell them WHY you like the post, or comment on what you DON’T like about it. Just make sure you contribute something to the conversation. Leave your link in the URL field, but do NOT put it in the comment itself!
2. Use social bookmarking. Bookmark posts on your own blog, and encourage readers to do the same. Use social bookmarking plugins to encourage readers to bookmark posts, and to make it easier for them to do so.
3. Write guest posts for other blogs in your niche. Ask other bloggers if you can author guest posts for them for free in exchange for a link back to your site. Many bloggers would be thrilled to get high-quality content for their blog for free, so it doesn’t hurt to ask.
4. Write articles and post them to article directories. This gets you valuable backlinks to help improve your SEO, but can also drive traffic straight to your blog.
5. Take the time to do proper SEO. Keyword research is crucial, so be sure every post you make contains keywords that could attract search engine traffic. Use SEO plugins to make sure you get the most search engine traffic possible.
Anything you can do to get more links to your blog is great. Spend a few minutes each day looking for new ways to get links back to your blog. The more saturated the ‘net is with links to your blog, the more traffic you will end up getting.
5 Vital WordPress Plugins
There are thousands of plugins available for WordPress, and many of them can be very useful. It can be tempting to add dozens to a single blog, but this can be time consuming, and isn’t really necessary. I don’t recommend adding more than a handful of plugins to each blog, because you’ll have more to update and keep track of.
So let’s look at the 5 WordPress plugins you should absolutely be using on every blog you create!
The Platinum SEO Pack is an update version of the old All-in-One SEO Pack. It takes things one step further by automatically doing a 301 redirect any time the permalink of a page changes, so you don’t lose any PageRank or SE listings. If you only add ONE plugin, this is the one!
A sitemap is very important on any site, but especially on larger sites. It helps Google (and other search engines) find all of the pages on your site. This plugin helps you automatically generate a sitemap, which you should then submit to Google Webmaster Tools.
This plugin will remind visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed a certain number of times. It may alert them only the first time they visit, or you could set a specific number of visits, or you could set it to display all the time. It puts the reminder at the top or bottom of each post, as you specify.
Comments are the lifeblood of a blog. You should always encourage readers to leave their comments, and this will allow you to easily respond to specific comments. It will turn your comments into a type of forum thread. It’s very crucial for building a community on your blog.
Repeat visitors are also very important for blogs. When users subscribe to comments, they can be notified if someone responds to a comment they made on your blog. This can make visitors come back weeks or even months later when someone responds and digs up an old conversation! This is a super way to encourage repeat visitors.
Overall, you want plugins that bring in traffic. Each of these plugins focuses on bringing in new or repeat traffic, and encouraging visitors to return again and again. Other plugins may be fun or cute, but make sure you have these important plugins in place first!
ClickBank Product Owner Tips
March 16, 2009 by Jeffrey
Filed under Blogging, Featured, Information Marketing
ClickBank product ownership is one of the most lucrative things a beginner can do to make money online. But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of ClickBank product owners who aren’t making any money with their products. They probably have no clue why they aren’t making any money, but some of the reasons are pretty obvious.
We’re going to look at some ways you can make more money as a ClickBank owner, so you won’t have to be one of those people who puts up a product and makes no money. Your time is worth more than that!
1. Provide Affiliate Support
One of the most vital parts of a ClickBank business is providing support for your affiliates. You need to give affiliates a clear and easy way to contact you if they have questions or need additional help.
Yes, you will have people spamming you, asking for joint ventures, and sending you other mail that isn’t important. But supporting your affiliates is so important, that you should let people contact you, anyway.
2. Don’t Require Affiliate Email Signup
So many ClickBank publishers require affiliates to enter their name and email address just to get promotional material, and that is probably costing them dozens of affiliates. Only the most well-known and successful product owners can get away with this. Unless you are extremely well known, don’t do this!
3. Test Product Conversions
Nothing makes an affiliate more angry than sending hundreds, even thousands of hits to a product and getting no sales. While there is obviously no way to guarantee conversions, you should test your copy very well and tweak it for maximum conversions. If the product doesn’t convert, any affiliates you do attract will soon leave.
4. Make Your Site Attractive
The design of your page is very important to affiliates. While it may or may not make a difference to conversions, the design is crucial in the eyes of most affiliates. Affiliates are far more discerning than standard visitors, and they expect a nice-looking sales page.
Choosing Blog Topics
Choosing something to blog about is one of the most difficult parts of blogging for many bloggers. Almost everyone experiences “writer’s block” from time to time, but when you need to be blogging regularly, this is tough.
There are a few methods I use to break through these blocks. I need to find inspiration, so that’s what I do. I go looking for inspiration in a few different places.
My first stop is always Ezine Articles. With thousands and thousands of articles, there are plenty of topics to choose from. I don’t copy the articles there, I just use them for ideas about topics. Once I’ve chosen a topic, I write each article from scratch.
Each day, Google sends me alerts with the latest news and blog posts about the topic I choose. This is incredibly helpful, and best of all, it’s free!
Other Blogs
The most obvious choice for getting ideas would, of course, be other blogs in the niche. Almost any niche you can think of has dozens of blogs available, and most of them have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of posts to inspire you.
News Websites
If you’re in a major niche, the various news websites should also provide you with some inspiration. If you’ve written about nearly everything you can think of, sometimes breaking news will inspire you. In fact, sometimes a news story that isn’t even related directly to your niche will give you inspiration.
Inspiration is all around you. You just have to look for it. If you take the time to look for the inspiration, you can break through these blocks and think of topics to write about. Just don’t give up. One of the most important secrets to making money blogging is to keep posting regularly. If you don’t, your rankings could slip, your readers could stop coming back, and your traffic could fall. Just keep blogging regularly and you will succeed.
