Articles
4 Ways To Help Your Customers Get To Know You
If you are trying to build a personal brand in order to build trust and authority in your niche, then one way to achieve this is to get your visitors to feel as if they know you. By doing this, they will be far more likely to trust your future posts and far more likely to want to listen to you when you suggest buying a product.
Think about it: who would you be more likely to listen to your recommendations to purchase a product; a friend or an advert? Obviously it is the friend and that’s because we feel as though we know them and can trust their judgement. If you can be seen in the same way by your audience, then your suggestions will carry much more clout and your offers will be much more persuasive.
So how do you go about establishing this level of trust? Well here are a few options…
Write in the First Person
Try to write some of your messages in the first person. This is rather different to what you may have learned in school. Most schools will teach that writing in the third person is preferable for business as it sounds more professional and authoritative but the point here is that you want your readers to feel as though they know you and as though you are personally recommending something. And you can do this by writing in the first person. Use ‘I’s and ‘Me’s and generally write as though you’re talking to that person; write as if you are writing a letter to your mother!
Honesty is the best policy
And don’t just write in first person, make sure you’re being honest too. If you have concerns about a product, let your audience know; believe me, they will appreciate it. Not only does this fill in your personality but it also shows that you’re willing to ‘tell it how it is’ and boosts your integrity. The same goes for talking about issues in your personal life which has the added bonus of making you more relatable; you can be seen as a fellow traveler along the journey.
Make good use images or photos
Including images of yourself is a great way to help people feel as though they’re getting to know you. Remember that a picture paints a thousand words and it is always nice to put a face to a name. If you’re writing about the benefits of a certain exercise, then why not include an image of you performing that exercise? This is also a good way to get graphics for your site without paying the high prices charged for stock images.
Get on camera!
Why not go one step further and put yourself on camera?! If you are confident enough, then going on YouTube is a great way to reach a larger audience in a way that will leave a more lasting impression. Video is infinitely more engaging than text so if you have the confidence, go for it!
6 Tips To Help You Live A Successful Life
Irrespective of how old or young you are, what you do for your living or where you belong, everyone has one thing common i.e. they want to have a successful life. However, one person’s definition of being successful may vary greatly to other people’s. While some may call success as having a faithful spouse or being a responsible parent, others equate it with fame, power and wealth.
What is success to YOU?
So, before heading forward, you need to define “success” and what it means to YOU. You cannot be successful if you don’t know what it actually means to you. Set clear goals and, more importantly, try to be as much realistic as possible.
Plan ahead and plan BIG
The next step in the journey towards success is to plan ahead about what you want to achieve in life and plan big for yourself. Never underestimate your worth or skills and plan accordingly. Don’t be afraid to dream; it will keep you going through the tough times!
Achieve balance
After careful and wise planning, you now need to balance your life; things such as your professional life, financial burdens and your personal life. Try to be very logical and practical.
Find your purpose in life and your reason why
Recognise the things that move and inspire you, the things you simply love to do and the ones that provide you utter satisfaction. As you identify these things, you can use them to find the main goal of your life. Knowing what you love will help to motivate you along the course of your life’s journey towards attaining success.
Beware distractions
Distractions can be the spice or forbidden fruit in your life, depending on how you view it! So remain and focused on your goals. Distractions will always be present but don’t allow them to affect you. When you see that your goals take a back seat because of such distractions, just banish them for once and for all.
Accept things as they come
You need to accept the fact that life can be really unfair. You can repent about it and just wish it to be different, or you can be proactive and move on. Stop wasting your time moping about a negative situation and use them for your own benefit. Just think that Newton may have complained about the apple falling on his head and hitting him but instead of that he discovered the law of gravity!
Abolish fear
Remove fear from your thinking and stay focused on positive things in life. And when you fail, just don’t be fearful, be positive and start again. Always fail forward!
In truth, the road to success will be complete with hard work, rejections, pain, disappointment and many other obstacles; but as you reach the end you will definitely feel victorious and happy. You will feel really proud about overcoming the obstacles and achieving your goals. You will also be satisfied and happy when you start experiencing the success that is coming your way. So, stick with it, try the suggestions above and you will truly be successful in no time. Always remember that success comes to those who try hard and REALLY want it. Just follow this and enjoy YOUR successful life ahead.
Build A Blog And Make Money Part 2
Optimize Your Settings
Most default settings are perfect, but there are a few things you want to do to ensure that your site performs at its best. Go through the sidebar on your blog dashboard and check each area to make sure everything is filled out.
Under Settings and General, add the name of your site and a tagline. Set your timezone and make sure the other elements are how you prefer the.
Under Settings and Writing, scroll down to where it says Update Services and add a list of ping sites that you want notified whenever your site has fresh content. You can find recommended sites online, so just cut and paste that list in there.
Under Settings and Reading, make sure your blog is set to show the Latest content, not a static page. Remember, when people land, they may not be bloggers themselves, so they might quickly glance to see if you have fresh content and, not realizing that it’s a set static page, assume you haven’t blogged in a long time and leave.
Make the settings show a few posts, such as 5 and the syndication feed much more, like 55. In the feed, choose to show the full text. Double check to make sure the Search Engine Visibility is UNchecked. You don’t want to block search engines from visiting your site.
Under Settings and Discussion, check to allow people to comment on new articles, make them fill out their name and email, enable threaded comments, and choose to manually approve and get notifications whenever anyone posts a comment.
Under default Avatar, choose Gravatar. This is where most people have their avatar registered. Go to Gravatar.com and use the same email address as you use for the site. Upload a headshot so that your blog readers can build that trusted bond with you and put a face to the name.
Under Settings and Permalinks, it should be defaulted correctly, but you want to make sure it uses this format:
http://www.yourdomain.com/sample-post
You don’t want to use the official default where it uses ?p=123 instead of the sample-post style because you want the URL of your blog posts to include the keywords in your title. Just glancing at it, you can see which is helpful to both humans and search engines:
http://www.yourdomain.com/how-to-stop-panic-attacks
versus…
http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=1077
The first one is clear. The second could be any topic under the sun.
In part 3 we will look at plugins…
Build A Blog And Make Money Part 1
When you pick a niche and have a domain, you want to move to the next step and start creating your site. Many newbies want to know whether they need a website or a blog.
Static sites are great for narrow topics like a little minisite where you’re reviewing one particular coffeemaker and you want a page on brewing tips, a page on the specs of the machine, a page on comparisons with another coffeemaker, etc.
They’re also great for service providers like freelancer ghostwriters who want a page of samples, a page of testimonials, a page of rates, etc. But for most marketers, who are leading a niche, you want a blog.
Blogs provide freshness that Google (and humans) crave. As long as you stay committed to the topic and post on it continually, it will be an evolving online entity that grows in authority over time. Don’t worry about the thought of continual content – we’ll address that later.
For now, let’s just talk about the important elements you need to remember when you have a blog platform and want to profit from it. Before you get started, set your domain up with hosting and then log into your hosting account’s cpanel.
Click on QuickInstall and then WordPress and follow the prompts to install your blog. Ideally, your blog will be located at yourdomain.com – but some of you may have future plans to put a squeeze page on yourdomain.com, so you might want your blog installed at yourdomain.com/blog – either will work.
Once you have it installed, log into your WordPress dashboard. It will always be located at yourdomain.com/wp-admin. It’s time to set it up for maximum authority and monetization!
Install An Appropriate Theme
If you’re a newbie with deep pockets and want to start out with a premium paid theme, more power to you! But it’s completely not necessary. Free themes that are built into WordPress are great starts and you can always upgrade your theme and keep everything intact at any time in the future.
What you want to watch out for is downloading free themes off the Internet randomly. These often have things you don’t want in there, like hard to find links to seedy websites. Just keep in mind that nothing is totally free – they have a reason they put that out for the masses to use.
A better way to do it is to choose a free theme from those already installed. So in your dashboard click on Appearances and then Themes. You’ll see a variety of themes if you click on Add New.
You can sort by Featured, newest, Recently Updated – or check off theme specifics you want, like colors, columns, layout, features and subject. But there are some things you want to make sure you get.
Unless your blog is a photography-based blog, you want one where text is showcased more than images on the home page. It’s good to have some images, but not just images.
You also want a theme where the header doesn’t take up the entire “above the fold” area. The above the fold area is everything you see before have you to start scrolling down the page.
You want your above the fold area to show your header, navigation bar and the first snippet of the latest blog post as well as the sidebar that has your opt in form and freebie item in sight.
So you might notice the Twenty-Eleven theme has a huge header – takes up almost he whole screen. But the Twenty-Ten is much smaller. You can also upload your own theme if you want to.
There are some newbies who plan to launch an affiliate site for Amazon so they consider going with a specific review theme. That’s okay – as long as it’s not some automated system that simply pulls content in to your site.
In order to truly succeed, you want unique content with a personal style, not scraper sites that simply grab text from elsewhere. People don’t trust that. You might get the traffic, but when a consumer is looking for a review, they can tell the difference between a personalized post and scraped content.
In part 2 we will look at optimizing your settings…
Five Things You Can Do Today To Achieve Your Goals
There is a lot more to achieving any goal than just having the goal. But it is a first step. You may wonder how some people seem so great at achieving their goals while other people aren’t so good at it. Part of the reason why some people fail is that they do not have a specific goal, one that is clear and focused. In addition, they do not have a schedule of action to actually work toward achieving the goal. In order to meet any goal, start doing these five things today.
1. Craft Clear, Specific and Doable Goals
For any goal to be achievable it must first be clear and very specific. But, it also must be possible. You do want to challenge yourself a bit, and set the goal high, but you want to ensure that any goal you set is possible. Therefore, you will need to do a little research in order to set a goal. For instance, let’s say your ultimate goal is to lose 50 pounds.
Obviously, anyone who needs to lose 50 pounds and sets their mind to it can do so, but they can’t and shouldn’t do it in one month. So an unreasonable goal is “I want to lose 50 pounds in a month.” Instead, a more reasonable and doable goal is to state “I want to lose 50 pounds in 30 weeks.” This is in line with health recommendations not to lose more than 2 pounds per week, and gives you a little cushion for plateaus and other issues.
2. Each Goal Needs Set Actionable Tasks To Monitor Progress
Additionally, any goal that you really want to meet needs to have the “why” and the “how” included with the “what” of the goal. In the example above you want to lose 50 pounds in 30 weeks, which will be a little less than 2 pounds per week. You’ll need to look at your diet, compute the number of calories you should consume and the amount of exercise you need to see those results.
Thankfully, today there are online calculators to help you determine this easily, but let’s say that you determine that if you consumed 1800 calories a day, and walked for 20 minutes each day, you would achieve your goal that you set within the time limit. So, now you need to include planning your meals and fitting in the exercise necessary to reach your goal. But because of the research you did, you know exactly what is needed to be successful with the goal you set. You can see a clear path to success just by going further and adding these actionable tasks:
* Eat 1800 calories a day
* Walk fast for 20 Minutes per day
Seeing that in black and white you can see that it’s very doable and achievable. But, there are a few more steps necessary to achieve your goals.
3. Schedule Everything
Do not leave anything to chance. Instead, schedule in the work necessary to reach your goals into a real calendar. Writing a list isn’t good enough – you need to schedule in everything so that you don’t miss a single day due to losing track of your schedule. You’ll need time to eat healthier, which requires more chopping and cooking, and you’ll need time to fit in the exercise, which is going to really take more than 20 minutes due to prep time and recovery time. You need to be realistic about how long each thing will take and schedule them into your day properly.
4. Take Action
No goal will ever be achieved if regular action isn’t taken each day. Each morning, look at your calendar and follow through on the plans that you’ve made and the criteria you’ve set for yourself to get things done. All you have to do is the minimum necessary each day to reach your goal. When you get through each day having done the minimum, you’re a success – each and every single day. There is nothing else that can be the result of daily action other than success when you think of it this way.
5. Repeat
Finally, you’ll need to repeat these steps every single day. When you make very specific and clear goals with very specific steps to achieving the goal, based on reality, you will soon discover the secret to success that seems to escape so many people. The real secret is in the doing. It’s like going on a long hike – if you take one step at a time, moving in the direction of the map that you’ve planned out for yourself, you will get to the end and you will be a success.
Reaching your goals is just a matter of setting reasonable and realistic goals, and then setting up a schedule of actionable tasks and steps that bring about the end result you want. You can start today to achieve your goals.
If you would like to learn more about goal setting and improving your mindset, and using both to increase your success in your business then please take a look at Building The Business Within now