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Affiliate Marketing Research, Kindle And Automation
Affiliate Marketing Research, Kindle And Automation
Sometimes when you’re launching a new business, especially online when you’re doing it all alone, it can feel overwhelming not knowing how to find the best path to profits. You have to know how to research niches and products and people and keywords to decide where you want to grab your affiliate links. It’s enough to make anyone throw up their hands in frustration.
There are some easy tips that can help you conduct your research online. Researching niches is a piece of cake. What you’re looking for is competition. Some people will look at competition and feel like there’s no way they could go up against the other sites.
But competition actually means it’s a healthy niche – with room for everyone. If you find a niche that no one’s selling in, then it probably means there’s no interest in – and that should set off warning bells for you.
Look on bookshelves in your local Barnes and Noble and see what non-fiction topics have plenty of resources. Glance at the covers of the women’s magazines at the checkout stand the next time you buy groceries.
You’ll see everything from insomnia to nutrition and more. They’re good about showcasing trendy topics, too – niches that are just now growing big enough for major publications to pick up on them.
News sites give lots of good insight into trends within a niche, too. Most major news sites like FoxNews and CNN have categories for science, technology, health and more. Look at those to stay abreast of what’s happening in your niche.
Also, set up a Google Alert so that you get news and information delivered straight to your inbox whenever something happens – or in a digest version if you want to check it sparingly.
Product research is sometimes a bit more in depth. You first want to go to sites like Ubersuggest and see what kinds of things your audience wants to know about the product. Type in the product name or niche topic and get hundreds of results that help steer you in the right direction.
Then, go to the manufacturer’s website and see what the specs are on the product. You can even download instruction manuals to read more details about it and share that with your visitors.
If it’s something you can find locally, don’t be afraid to go into your store and look at the product and jot down some notes. You can even take some pictures or a video to put on your blog.
Researching people is easy if you trace their social media accounts. Look at their blog and the interaction they have with people (if you’re promoting an info product). Look at their Twitter account, their Google Plus and Facebook, too.
Keyword research is a cinch with free and paid tools that are available to you. Ubersuggest again is a great tool, but you can also invest in paid tools like Market Samurai that show you the competition and profit potential of a niche.
How To Use Kindle For Affiliate Marketing Purposes
Kindle is a fantastic resource for affiliate marketers – and the strategy you’re about to learn is one that few affiliates have applied, so the field is wide open. It’s going to require a small amount of product creation on your part, but there are double benefits involved.
Kindle is a platform on Amazon that’s 100% free for you to use where you can self-publish your eBooks and reports to a large global audience. But as an affiliate, your goal is to promote other people’s things.
Affiliates are like all other marketers – they have to produce a variety of content – for their blogs, websites, email autoresponders, opt in giveaways, and more. So creating a short report shouldn’t be too difficult.
Your goal is to create these short reports, load them onto Kindle for sale at a low price point of $0.99, and let the book sell to the masses – with your link in it! The link will go back to your affiliate site, or even to your squeeze page where you promise them another book (only free this time) if they sign up to your list.
So let’s say you had a site that promoted household organization products. You could write an entire series of Kindle creations about how to organize various rooms in your house (and outdoors, too).
Start with a broad “How to Get Organized” book and then branch off into more specific areas. Kindle has a Select program that you can enroll in, too – and this lets you give the book away for five days out of the 90-day period.
During this time, you’ll want to sign up to promote it at all of the major Kindle promotion sites that like to feature free books for the day. This greatly expands your exposure because you’ll get free downloads from all of the people who signed up for notification.
Plus, Amazon Prime members can borrow your book from the lending library if you enable that feature. But you still get paid for the borrow – sometimes even more than what you’d make for selling it at your cheap price point.
If you choose not to use KDP Select, which restricts your eBook from being sold elsewhere, then you’ll have the opportunity to sell it on your website, too. But you might want to try it out first for at least 90 days to see how it works for you.
Make sure you avoid linking to products inside your Kindle eBook. That’s against the rules. You want to link them to your site so that you can capture their name and email address and then promote items in your niche for a long period of time.
Is Affiliate Marketing Automation A Good Idea?
There are many automation tools on the ‘net that supposedly help you free up some time and effort in running your business as an affiliate marketer. There are definite pros and cons that you need to be aware of before you begin using them.
Automation helps you avoid tasks that you dread. This can be beneficial because there are so many little tasks that we don’t look forward to, so putting a few on autopilot helps us continue enjoying the affiliate marketing journey.
Automation helps you do things better than you do manually. Sometimes there are tasks that we’re just not good at. An automated tool might be able to do things faster, easier or more thoroughly than we do them ourselves.
Automation tools mean you get to work on something else. Freeing up time is one of the biggest reasons affiliates utilize automated tools in the first place. It’s certainly a benefit to have less work on your to do list.
But automation isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, either. There are problems that can arise, so it’s important that you recognize where they can hurt your business.
Automation can prevent you from seeing errors that arise. Tools like software and plugins can have bugs in the system. If you have a completely “hand off” system for running your business, then you could go months without noticing that things aren’t working right.
It’s usually only when sales begin grinding to a halt that an affiliate heavily invested in automated tools goes to check things out – and discovers that there’s an issue with the tool, or perhaps a necessary upgrade they didn’t see that keeps it running properly.
Automation removes that human element that makes a connection with your target audience. Most automation tools simply remove a small task from your to do list. But there are those that remove you from your site entirely.
For example, any automated tool that whips up content or automates comment approval means that your site won’t carry your natural voice in it. It will be difficult for visitors to engage with you or trust you enough to click through on your links and act on them.
Automation tools can sometimes get you in trouble with the search engines, too. If they’re black hat tools that do anything illegal, or unethical, then you could find your site plummeting in the search engine ranks. It’s better to approach affiliate marketing from a morally sound perspective so that your profits increase over time and there are many affiliate marketing strategies that are above board.
If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊
Fear Based Motivation
Fear Based Motivation
Fear can be an effective catalyst for motivation. For example, if your boss tells you to get your project done on time or you will lose your job, you can be sure you’re going to do everything in your power to get that project done. You may resent your boss for doing this, but you are probably going to do as he or she wishes unless you are looking to get fired.
Another situation where fear will motivate you is when something crucial breaks in your home. It could be the furnace giving out in the middle of winter. You are at a point where you have no choice but to call for expensive repairs. If you don’t, you’ll risk the pipes freezing and being uncomfortable.
We all have a certain amount of fear-based motivation. But, is it the best way to get people to do things? In the case of the furnace, you’ll have no choice and have to chalk it up to being a part of life.
But, in the case of your boss harping on to you, is there a better way for him or her to handle the situation? Can you continually work in an environment based on that kind of fear?
It’s questionable whether motivation based on fear is sustainable. If you are an employee and there aren’t many jobs available as alternatives, you may feel like you have no choice but to comply. But, sometimes, this kind of negative working environment gets people more motivated to get out of the situation.
In other words, the motivation tactics may work in the short-term, but eventually, employers may experience a high turnover when those employees recognize there are other choices. The internet is a great equalizer in this regard as more people can choose to freelance on their terms.
There’s an old saying about how you catch more flies with honey. If managers would recognize they would get more loyalty out of people by offering incentives rather than scare tactics to get their employees to do the work, maybe turnover wouldn’t be so high.
Unfortunately, these managers don’t learn this until it’s too late. And even then, will they make any changes? Often, they make the justification that it’s the employee’s fault and they decided to leave.
Think about the impact you have if you are a manager trying to motivate your employees. If you have used fear as a motivator, is it something that has worked for you in the long-term? Or, did you simply set an environment where people couldn’t wait to get away?
Does Time Of Day Matter In Motivation?
Do you find you get more done in the morning? Or are you one of those types of people who like to work during the mid-part of the day? There are also those who are night owls and do their best work in the evening or night.
Is there an optimal time for your motivation or does it vary from day to day? People who claim to be morning people say they love that time because it is serene and gives them time to think. During the early morning hours, before 6:00 AM, for instance, the phones aren’t ringing. The rest of the family is asleep unless there is another morning person in your family. But hey, they get it too! They’ll both leave each other alone.
Others need the hustle and bustle to get motivated. These are high action types that like to get thrown into the situation. They love solving the problems that arise and the challenges they face. These types are often at their best in the afternoon.
The night owls wait for people to go to bed and then they are in their sanctuary. It’s a long wind-down period for them, and in fact, many of them will fire up the coffee to make it last even longer. These are usually the light sleepers who believe they can get by with only three or four hours of sleep.
None of this is scientific. People seem to naturally give their best at the time of day they feel the most comfortable in. But, it seems like there is something to it, science aside. Just think about the people you live with. Which periods do they excel? Ask your co-workers which period they prefer? How about the people that live in their homes?
When companies offer flexible schedules, people will try to get the time slots that fit the time of day they enjoy. They feel they can get the most done. This is why you’ll find people swapping with each other when they don’t get the desired period.
Whether there is statistical evidence to support this is not the point. Most people find the period that works best for them, and they tend to stick with that for a good portion of their lives. This is the one time when going outside your comfort zone may not be a good idea. If the time of day is right for you then just go with it and don’t fight it.
Do You Find Memes To Be Motivational?
People love memes. There all over the web. They are a sort of mini billboards if you will. They can tell a story in one shot with some text thrown it to help the message.
Many of them are created with the intent to motivate. For exercise, they show people in fantastic shape with a message stating, “This could be you,” or something like it. You see the message, and you get excited that it is possible. But, then the phone rings, and you are once again dealing with your routine.
It’s possible for memes to motivate. However, you need to reinforce the message over and over. Seeing a meme once is not likely to produce any changes. Seeing them constantly may get your brain set to take some action.
You have to be careful of the message, though, especially when you are dealing with important subjects. Too many people pass off political memes as fact, and they usually are far from that. No one challenges these messages, and people tend to accept them as is. There have been instances of sayings associated with people who never said the sayings. The practice of not fact checking these memes is quite dangerous and leads to an increase in propaganda. This happens across party lines.
It does depend on the subject. Memes that try to motivate people to work out probably don’t need to be fact checked. They simply give you a vision of what you could look like if you were to exercise.
You also must be aware that many memes are created for marketing. Ultimately, they are trying to get you motivated to buy their products or sign up for their newsletter (which may eventually lead you to buy something). It’s not that there is anything wrong with this nor is it illegal or unethical. It’s just something you should consider when you view the memes.
If you are into marketing yourself, you could use memes to increase your marketing message. The truth is they are effective in getting whatever message you want to get across. The best approach is to give something away when someone clicks through your meme and get them on your newsletter. This has the potential to create long-term customers.
Some people hate memes and want nothing to do with them. They believe they are manipulative and also because of the political reasons described above. These are probably not the people you want to target if you decide to use memes.
As you can appreciate, changing the way you think can have a huge impact on your life, and if you want to know more about developing an inspirational mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
How To Sell Via Email
How To Sell Via Email
Building a mailing list is a fantastic way to make your audience feel as though they are on-board with your message and to gain more trust and more authority within your niche. But while building relationships with your fans or customers is important, what’s also highly important is that you make a profit in the short term!
Most of us can’t afford to wait months or years until we start selling and so sooner or later, you will need to try promoting something that people will want to buy.
The way you go about this is different for emails though as compared with other forms of marketing. Read on and discover how to best go about selling through email marketing and making as many conversions as possible!
The Structure
A good structure that you can use in order to hype and then sell a product over a series of messages is referred to as AIDA. This stands for:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
The key thing to recognize is that when you first contact your new subscribers, they will have no awareness of your products or services and no reason to be interested. You ned to start here then before you try and get them to really want whatever it is that you’re selling.
This allows you to focus on providing value and building that trust initially, while simply mentioning your product in a very subtle way.
This is the same strategy that many film studios will use when they release ‘teaser trailers’. We often don’t see enough to be excited by the film yet, but we’ve seen just enough to be aware that it exists.
Interest comes through repeated mention and desire then comes when you start to describe the way in which your product can make your audience’s lives better. It’s when you start describing what it is like to hold your product or to use it and how it will inherently raise the status of the people using it.
The best thing about this stage is that the readers now have to wait until your next message before they can buy. Waiting is a great way to build more anticipation because we always want what we can’t have!
Finally, the action email will be the one where you ‘seal the deal’. This is where you will close and get the audience to act as quickly as possible by clicking and buying. Make sure to incentivize a raid decision, whether with a limited discount or limited stock!
Using Value Proposition And More Techniques To Promote Your Mailing List
Email marketing can be used to do a lot of things from building trust and authority in your niche to helping you to make more direct sales.
Whatever you end up using your mailing list for though, you first need to encourage people to sign up in the first place. This can be easier said than done, especially as most people are dubious about giving out their personal details.
After all, most of us get enough spam as it is!
Here is some advice that can help you to get around that objection and grow your list nevertheless.
Sell The Value Proposition
The value proposition is the thing that makes your list worthwhile and the thing that will make it stand out. This is not simply the sum of its parts. A value proposition cannot be ‘getting lots of free emails’ but rather it is what those emails do for the reader.
For example, if your mailing list is about fitness, then the value proposition comes from the fact that your messages will help the readers to lose weight and build muscle, thereby becoming more attractive, more confident and more successful.
Value propositions work because they are what provide the ‘emotional drive’ behind your product. This is the hook and it’s what will get your potential buyers daydreaming about what life could be like when they sign up.
So, sell this vision in your copywriting and make sure that your audience knows just what an exciting opportunity this is and how it is going to improve their lives.
Use The Right Incentive
An incentive is a freebie that you will give away in exchange for people signing up to your mailing list. Very often, this will be something like an ebook or a report.
What’s important here, is to make sure that your incentive is something that will attract people and get them to sign up when they were otherwise on the fence – but not something that will be too valuable and encourage people to sign up who otherwise wouldn’t have been interested at all.
Otherwise, you will end up with subscribers who are only there to get the free gift. Not only that, but if you give away something like an ebook or online course entirely for free, then you will actually undermine the value of the things you sell later on.
Top 4 Ways To Improve Your Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation is a little like a credit rating. This is a score that will be shared between the different email providers and that will be tied to your IP address and domain.
Things that can hurt your sender reputation include having lots of emails that bounce, lots of complaints from contacts and a low open rate.
If your sender reputation gets too bad, then you risk becoming blacklisted and the number of messages that will get through to your audience will go down significantly.
So how do you prevent this from happening? How do you keep your sender reputation in the black? Here are some powerful strategies:
‘Warm Up’ Your Ip
One advanced technique that many people aren’t aware of, is to ‘warm up’ their IP address.
This means that you’re going to give your emails the best start possible and the way you’ll do that, is by starting out with a very small mailing list that is filled with only your most engaged fans (and maybe even some friends and family!).
When you do this, you’ll build up some positive ‘credit’ as it were, and this will then help make your address more resilient against future negative influences.
Keep Friends And Family Involved
This is one reason it can be a good idea to invite your friends and family onto your mailing list.
What’s more is that if you keep them there subsequently, you’ll then have at least a few opens and reads guaranteed.
This is a good way to avoid a scenario where you get zero opens and every little bit helps!
List Hygiene
List hygiene simply means that you are looking after your mailing list by removing the contacts that never read a single one of your messages or that always bounce.
This is a simple matter of logging into your Autoresponder and deleting those users, but it will make a big difference.
Double Opt-In
Finally, it is crucial that every single email list these days use a double opt in.
This means that your new subscribers will need to confirm their email address via a confirmation message and that in turn ensures that the email address is real and also that the recipient checks it often and that they really are interested in signing up.
These small changes can make a massive difference to your deliverability, so get started right away!
And, if you want to know more about nurturing your list, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about simple list building to expand your knowledge further. If you do download it, please read it and take action and good luck 😊
8 Productivity Hacks To Reach Goals Quicker
8 Productivity Hacks To Reach Goals Quicker
We all have goals. We all have ambitions. We all have things that we’d like to have happen in our lives. The good news is that all of those goals, ambitions and positive occurrences are possible.
All we have to do to achieve them is start doing the work that needs to be done in order to make them real.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “carpe diem”. That’s Latin for “seize the day”. If you want to move your life in a different direction, one that produces positive changes, then make carpe diem your motto.
You need to begin seizing the day and using your time productively so that you begin building the future that you want to live in.
The leadership guru John Maxwell once said that “You’ll never change your life until you change something that you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
This article is all about helping you to establish “power habits” in your daily routine that will allow you to crank your productivity to eleven.
Adopting some or all of these habits and incorporating them into your day-to-day schedule will crank you into overdrive. You’ll not only begin reaching your goals, you’ll also begin reaching them sooner than you ever thought possible.
1. Rise And Shine
When you get up earlier than normal two things happen. First, you have more time in you day to get more things done. Productivity is all about accomplishing tasks. The more hours that you have to play with, them more likely it becomes that you’re going to initiate and complete projects.
Second, let’s talk about energy. Now, maybe you’re already are a morning person. In which case, you already know what I’m talking about. However, if you’re not naturally a morning person, it may be time to think about becoming one.
Study after study has shown that the most personally productive hours in the day occur before noon. It all has to do with natural body rhythms and cycles. So, when you get up earlier you not only have more time to get stuff done, you also have more energy. It’s a productivity win/win.
2. Be Punctual
Ok, you should have a schedule of what you want to accomplish on any given day. (If you don’t, then start using one.) In order to make the schedule as effective as possible, you need to be places, take phone calls and generally do things on time, as you scheduled them.
When you’re not on time, you begin to fall behind on what your schedule. That means that you have to start rushing to catch up, and rushing usually means that you aren’t doing your best work.
Make an effort to be punctual. Get to appointments, meeting and phone calls on time. The more punctual you are, the more you’ll get done.
3. Sleep And Move
Besides food and water, your body only has two other absolute needs – sleep and exercise. When you don’t get enough rest, you cannot maintain the mental energy levels that are required for you to be optimally productive.
Likewise, when you don’t get enough exercise you don’t have the stamina it takes to remain productive over the course of a long day.
Make sure that you put enough time aside for adequate amounts of both sleep and exercise. If you do, you’ll find that you have more energy and more energy equals greater productivity.
4. Develop Keystone Habits
All positive behavior is nothing more than habit. When you perform a positive action over and over it becomes habitual. You continue making the positive action without even thinking about it. In addition, one positive habit will lead to other positive behaviors which, over time, will also become habitual. That’s why developing keystone habits are so important to increased productivity.
Keystone habits are nothing more than simple acts that you routinely perform throughout your day. For example, if you make your bed every morning after you get up, no matter what, you establish a tone of positive production that will stay with you as you go about your business.
This effect can be enhanced by layering one keystone habit on top of another. So, you not only make your bed every day, you also make it a habit to rinse and stack your breakfast dishes in the sink or put them in the dishwasher.
The point is that when you routinely do what needs to be done, you start to develop a habit of treating everything that you do in a similar way. The end result is that your productivity soars.
5. Have A Plan
One of the major drains on productivity is simply not knowing where to direct your attention. Let’s face it, each day we are faced with information overload. We get phone calls, e-mails, text messages and more.
We use apps that are supposedly designed to make our lives easier, but instead start to compete for our attention by adding their reminders to the mix of information that is already bombarding us.
What can happen is that we spend our time and energy dealing with situations that do not promote our goals and best interests.
One of the best ways to combat this problem is with a daily plan. When it comes to any task, ask yourself “What is this?”, “Why am I doing it” and “What do I want to get out of it?”
Simply posing these questions to yourself prior to doing anything will allow you to begin to prioritize what truly needs to be done and eliminate what truly is a time waster. Again, the end result is greatly increased productivity.
6. Make Room For Down Time
There is a tendency to want to remain plugged in and on top of all communications simply because we can. However, to do so is a major mistake. One of the key ways to remain optimally productive is to know when to take it easy and not be productive at all.
Think of your productivity like a well. You lower down a bucket and pull up a drink of cold, clear water. However, if you lower down that bucket too many times in a row, you’re bound to come up empty because you’ve drained all the water.
You need to give yourself enough time to recharge and rejuvenate. You cannot be fully productive when your batteries are drained and you have nothing left to give. Remember to walk away from all of your tasks on a regular basis.
This means no checking your phone for messages, no answering e-mails, and no quick phone calls. Your time away is sacred. It is key to you being truly effective at what you do. Treat it as such.
7. Eliminate Distractions
In order to be fully productive, you have to be focused on the task at hand. However, in today’s always connected, modern world maintaining focus is increasingly difficult. Studies have shown that, on average, we are only able to concentrate on a given task for three to five minutes before being distracted by social media, e-mails or other things that interfere with concentration.
Obviously, you are not going to be very productive and task oriented when you are only able to focus in three to five minute intervals.
The secret to keeping focused on what you’re doing is by removing the sources of those distractions. Because social media is one of the biggest culprits, it’s important to install safeguards that allow you to resist the allure of checking for updates on social media sites again. There are now apps that will completely block your ability to access certain sites for specific periods of time.
The less distracted you are, the more you can maintain your focus and the more productive you become.
8. Make Your Workspace Inviting
Each of us spends a great deal of time in the space where we work. Now, that might be a physical office at a remote location or it might be a room or corner in your residence that has been reserved for that purpose.
No matter where your “office” is located, it needs to be inviting, comfortable and welcoming. It has to reflect your personality and your style.
There’s absolutely no reason for your workspace to be spartan, cold or off-putting. You are not an anchorite and your office is not your cell. You are not literally or figuratively chained to your desk. Work should be rewarding, not a punishment and your office should reflect that fact.
Make sure that the furnishings are comfortable. A desk may be a necessity, but it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. The same thing goes for a chair. Use a chair that makes you feel that your glad you sat down in it.
Lighting, art, music and color all have an appropriate place in your office. Imagine how your productivity will skyrocket when you actually enjoy being in your workspace.
Want to learn more about increasing efficiency and productivity? Then check out the featured resource below to grab a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
Can You Really Make Money By Blogging?
Can You Really Make Money By Blogging?
Blogging has been around for a long time on the Internet. It started out as a creative outlet for people to take their personal journals online to share with family and friends.
It branched out into outlets of information to be shared by experts and now people use them for a money-making opportunity.
Blogs are excellent tools to earn some extra money without having to invest start-up cash. They’re loved by the search engines because blogs are usually updated frequently, unlike websites that are updated less often.
Millions of people visit blogs every day for information or entertainment purposes. A lot of the blog visitors are ones that come back to check in on the latest entries into a blogger’s world.
They link their blog to your blog, which increases your reader base. The blog’s traffic becomes so huge that your chances for earning increase. Using AdSense ads are the most popular way to generate income from your blog.
By strategically placing the ads on the blog, you can entice visitors to click on them, with each click earning you a share of the profits Google takes in. While a couple of clicks earn you very little, a high flow of traffic and clicks earns you a substantial amount.
To make a lot of money with AdSense, you have to drive traffic to the blog. The most important concept with AdSense is to remember that you have to make the ads visible and not hidden somewhere in the blog where they can’t be seen. The more people who click away, the more money you’ll make.
Another way some people make money from their blogs is by using advertisement space. Advertisers scramble to place one of their banners on the more popular blogs. They’re willing to pay you based on the traffic numbers you generate and the prime space available within your blog.
There are many ways you can monetize ad space. You might charge a flat fee, take a commission based on the number of click-throughs, or make a deal where you get a percentage of the sale of a product, much like an affiliate marketer does.
If your blog is extremely popular, then there’s more of a chance that advertiser’s will compete to have their banners placed in your space. Blogs are a good way to earn some money by sharing your thoughts, feeling and even your daily tasks.
Choose a topic that has a high number of searches, launch a free blog at Blogger.com or WordPress.com, and strategically implement your ads and offers to start seeing a steady income build over time.
However, if you want to take blogging seriously, you need to consider paying for hosting and a domain name and using WordPress.org because you will have much more control over your blog and this is critical for your success in the long run if you are thinking about using your blog as a serious money maker.
By the way, if you are serious and want to take your blogging to the next level, check out the Rapid Blogging Blueprint. This is a premium level training that takes you through each and every step of setting up your own highly profitable blog and profiting from it. You can check it out here.
Now you have your blog up and running, you need to get traffic to it and spread the word about it and there are a number of ways to do that.
Where To Advertise Your Blog For The Best Results
Getting your blog set up is the easy part of the process. Now comes the difficult part – getting visitors! You need to find traffic to come to your blog or it won’t be a profitable investment of your time.
There are several different places where you can advertise your blog. Some will cost a small amount and others won’t cost you a penny.
Start with the free options and as you begin to see a return on your investment of time, you can invest some profits back into marketing your blog with paid options.
Free
- Join message board communities. This is a simple way to advertise your blog. Interact with your fellow users and advertise your blog in your signature line, if it’s allowed. If it’s not allowed, there’s usually a folder available within that forum that does allow you to advertise your sites. Use them.
- Join a social networking site. These sites are a good way to network with like-minded people who are interested in the same subject your blog is about. Join the community and get to know the other members and then you can supply them with a link to your blog. Many in social networking circles provide cross-promotions, so you’ll probably accumulate a lot of valuable backlinks to your blog.
- Utilize social bookmarking sites. Write a great thought provoking post on your blog and submit it to sites like Digg.com or del.icio.us. There are hundreds of people who spend hours at these sites searching for good websites to check out. Your blog can get a surge of traffic through this strategic and viral sharing method.
- Join a blogging community like BlogEngage (Paid) or DoSplash. This offers you a way of connecting with other bloggers who may do a review of your blog on theirs, which would help drive more traffic to your site.
Paid
- Use advertising campaigns like Google AdWords. Place an ad on the search engine result pages and pay only when someone clicks on the link. Make sure you use the best keywords to get the ad noticed, so that you can drive more traffic to your blog.
- Use text link advertising. Contact some of the more popular blogs in your niche and see if they would be willing to sell you some advertising space through text links. If the price is right, take the chance to have traffic driven to your site from theirs. Not all sites will be willing to do this, so keep trying different ones until you get one to say yes.
There are certainly more ways to accomplish effective advertising for your blog. You can market it the same way you would any other website online. The key is to keep costs down while maximizing your selling potential within the blog.
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