Sunday, August 28, 2011

Alertpay Register

How to Use AlertPay as a Seller

Friday, August 19, 2011

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the optimization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the pitfalls that must be avoided. So, rather than charging $400 an hour to give advice on the subject, I thought it would be valuable to share many of the most common pieces of advice here on the blog (business part of Rand fights with open source Rand, but loses, as usual).
  1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
    The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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  2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
    Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
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  3. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
    First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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  4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
    Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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  5. Tag Your Content
    Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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  6. Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
    There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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  7. Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
    Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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  8. Link Intelligently
    When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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  9. Invite Guest Bloggers
    Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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  10. Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
    I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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  11. Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
    Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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  12. Cover Topics that Need Attention
    In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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  13. Pay Attention to Your Analytics
    Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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  14. Use a Human Voice
    Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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  15. Archive Effectively
    The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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  16. Implement Smart URLs
    The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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  17. Reveal as Much as Possible
    The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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  18. Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
    Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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  19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
    If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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  20. Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
    When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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  21. Build a Brand
    Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.
Best of luck to all you bloggers out there. It's an increasingly crowded field to play in, but these strategies should help to give you an edge over the competition. As always, if you've got additions or disagreements, I'd love to hear them.
p.s. Note to self - starting long blog entries at 11:30pm is not conducive to a good night's sleep. At least Angela got kicked off Project Runway tonight.

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Thursday, August 18, 2011

Top 10 Tips For Affiliate Promotions

Top 10 Tips For Affiliate Promotions

Product Launches – How To Dominate Them – My Top 10 Tips!

Today’s post is all about YOU earning more money as an AFFILIATE promoting other peoples products.
Now I appreciate some of you will be thinking — I don’t have much of a list or much of a following – so how can I go about promoting a product launch.
Well of course in theory the bigger the list you have the more sales you will have – but let me make another point. Some of the most successful affiliates for the Pre-Launch of PopUp Domination actually had relatively small lists but what they had that more than made up for it was a very responsive list.
So you might ask how do you build a responsive list? There are a number of factors that matter – but the two I would highlight are:
1) Your reputation with the subscribers on your list. If you are someone who consistently offered your subscribers great value in the way of information and strategies then the more likely that they will read your emails and more importantly take action based on your recommendation in those emails.
I have said it before, but I will say it again (and please take it as read when I discuss any affiliate promotion) – only ever promote products you believe in and would buy yourself. The quickest way to lose that good reputation is to constantly be peddling and hyping STUFF – just because you might make a few commissions.
2) The second factor is of course your niche. I have a pretty responsive list but if I was to start promoting a course on Pay Per Click marketing I can bet the response would not be so good. You see most of the people on my list are not using PPC – but rather are bloggers.
People (myself included) have often said the Money is in the List — well that is true, but the real fact is that the money is in the responsiveness of the list!

OK, let’s get started – here are my Top 10 Tips for being a successful Product Launch Affiliate:

1. Review The Product

Reviews have been one of the most powerful things I do for launches, for a lot of reasons including:
  • Proof I have the product and am not just promoting to make money
  • Proof it works
  • Long team sales from new readers coming to my site
  • SEO Rankings. Tip: Name your post something people will search in Google to find it.
You want to of course do a write up on the product and include screen shots and a video would be a great addition. One great example of a review was by David Risley for my launch, he was able to sell over 100 copies of my plugin by writing a post, adding images and a video then emailing it to his list. He still get’s regular sales although he posted it nearly 2 months ago which just goes to show the power of blog posts, long term sales!
ANOTHER TIP: Not sure when product launches are happening? Visit your competition and the gurus in your industry and sign up to their list, if there is a product being launched, they will be promoting! Then you can go about getting involved, usually you can find the affiliate page is linked to in the footer of the sales page.

2. Email Pre-launch

For a long time I was against emailing pre-launches because I was scared I would lose a whole load of my list to someone else, however this isn’t the case, your readers will not unsubscribe just because they opt-ed into someone elses list, the fact is, they probably already are on dozens of other lists already. As long as you provide value, your subscribers will stay with you!
squeeze page Top 10 Tips For Affiliate Promotions
Emailing pre-launch is great because it builds momentum and interest. The problem with emailing a direct sales page is that people have no idea why they need to look at the product in the first place, it’s a lot easier to tempt them in with a free video or download from the pre-launch so that they can learn about the product and why they so desperately need it. It’s also a good opportunity to build trust and the fact is, most of the time, your readers don’t realize you are promoting a squeeze page because your make money of it, but rather because you are being nice.

3. Follow Up

Often you have 3 or even more opportunity to email, blog, Facebook, Twitter etc… a launch:
  • Launch Day
  • 24 Hours Till Close/Price Increase
  • Reopen for 24 hours/Webinar
We all know email is the most important thing you could be using right now, that’s why all the big marketers do so much to build a list. It’s simple really, you build a list and then at any given time you can email your subscribers a product launch and cash in. For me it literally is the closest thing to printing money. I have friends who travel the world and live off just emailing promotions to their list, a lot of people don’t mind being send promotions, heck if I minded, I wouldn’t be on half the lists I’m on. If you want more information on list building, check this post out!

4. Interview Creator

Typically product owners will be mega busy coming up to their launch, however this is pure gold as well. I often interview people before launches such as Adam Horwitz. When he launched his most recent product I was getting 100′s of visitors a day from people interested in who the guy was before they bought. A great chance for you to “steal” traffic and sales from other affiliates.

5. Split Test Emails

I have many different lists, something I recommend everyone does. What I do is email one of my lists (for example my Retireat21 subscribers) a new promotion / product launch. When I do this I use two different Subject Lines in the email sent out and then whichever SUBJECT LINE gets the best open rate – I roll out and use on the rest of my lists. I mean if your email doesn’t get opened – you may as well not have sent it!.
This is a very simple split test (there are a lot more complicated split tests you can do another day) and I have been blown away with how beneficial it has been to me. I used to just use one subject line — sometimes I nailed it and got lots of OPEN’s but other times I did not. At least with this simple Split Test I am assuring myself a lot more opens with the majority of my list by testing on part of the list first.
The other advantage of doing a smaller mailing first is that you can discover if the OFFER is converting. If I get bad results with my initial mailing using two different subject lines I may well not roll out across all my lists.
split test Top 10 Tips For Affiliate PromotionsFrom the screen shot above you can see to emails I sent out to my Aweber list, same content just different titles. One got 5.9% open rate and the other 6.7% which may not seem like much but when your talking about 1000′s of people, it soon adds up.

6. Promote The Right Product

There is no point me promoting a Pay Per Click product to my readers and buyers because I have never talked about PPC and most probably don’t have a clue about it and if they do, they probably don’t want to do it, hence why they are on my site learning about blogging. You want to promote something with broad appeal to the subscribers on your list. Let’s take for example, PopUp Domination – this is software that could be used on just about every website because it will make the website owner more money. That means that just about everyone in the internet marketing industry can promote it. Bloggers, Social Media People, PPC guys, Product Creators — all of them need a product like PopUp Domination. The advantage to me of course is that I have a very wide range of people who I can approach as potential affiliates – even though in many instances it would not make sense for me to promote their product in return because my subscribers are not interested in their specific niche. That is what I mean by BROAD. Of course there are lots of people who will say to go NICHE and sub-niche. That works as well – I am just pointing out that with PopUp Domination we deliberately went BROAD.

7. Offer a BONUS!

This is one of the most important things you can do when promoting someones product – ADD A BONUS for all the buyers who buy via your affiliate link. A lot of people follow most people in the industry so by you offering a free consult, review, product, download etc.. you will stand out and choose to buy via your affiliate link over someone elses.
siteprofit copy Top 10 Tips For Affiliate PromotionsRecently when promoting a product launch by Gideon Shalwick I put together a special bonus offer for people who bought via my link. This proved to work quite well because several people commented that they bought via my link because of my bonus offer. This also means they can’t go through their own affiliate link to buy but instead have to buy via me if they want my great bonus! James Schramko mentioned how he built a business around offering a bonus for each product he promoted in an interview with Yaro Starak, click here to see it!
TIP: Adding a exit popup will also increase your sales conversions.

8. Use It In a Tutorial

Depending on what you are promoting, you can sometimes use it in a tutorial, for example, Aweber. I can teach people how to make money with email and promote Aweber as my choice of email software. This I have also found to bring in a good quality of long term sales.

9. Use All Of Your Resources

There are so many ways to get the message out, some people simply over look them, you can:
  • Blog about the product
  • Tweet/Facebook about it
  • Build a review site (someone did this to PopupDomination and is making a lot of sales)
  • Email your mailing list
  • Submit articles to article directors targeted about the niche of the product and at the end promote it.

10. Think Out Of The Box – Just Ask!

Most of things I have got in life are simply just because I asked, it’s something we all need to learn to do. Sometimes it doesn’t work however when it does, it’s work it so here a few examples of things you can ask for:
  • $1 Trial Offers
  • Special Landing Pages
  • Webinars (these convert like crazy, see Lewis Howes and Steven Beck)
  • Discounted Price
  • Special Bundles
  • Coupon Codes
At the end of the day, product creators rely on affiliates to make their launches a success so will at least listen to what you have to say.