Articles
The Secret To Making Money Online
The Secret To Making Money Online
If someone were to ask you what the #1 ‘secret’ to making money online was, what would you say?
Any guesses? I’m sure that you can think of many answers to this question, I know I can!
Maybe you’d start by saying it’s to find a starving crowd. Or perhaps the best way is to build and nurture a list. Or to get in on the beginning of a hot new trend.
All of these are good answers.
And all of these are wrong. That’s a rather sweeping statement I know, but please bear with me for a minute!
THE big secret to making money online is one that crosses all niches, applies to all markets and marketers, and works just about every single time to make REAL money.
It’s how six and seven figure incomes are almost always earned and it’s also how YOU can begin earning 6 figures in the next 12 months.
Now then – before I reveal this ‘secret,’ let me warn you that you might have heard it before; in fact I can virtually guarantee it.
In fact, some online marketers have to hear this a dozen times or more before it really starts to sink in and that’s because the most powerful techniques often masquerade as something a bit boring. Or tedious. Or uninteresting; after all, taking a wheelbarrow full of cash to the bank is exciting but earning it is often something altogether different. And people also hear it so often that it becomes rather blase and it doesn’t get taken seriously which is a BIG mistake!
OK are you ready for the big reveal?
Here’s the ‘secret…’
“Find a profitable formula – and then SCALE it up.”
Yup. That’s it. Pretty simple, I know.
Yet 98% of marketers will never do it. And 97% of marketers will stay broke because of it.
Let’s say you spend time making the perfect product for a super hungry niche. You tweak the offer to get it converting sky high. You bring on affiliates to help you promote. Everything is in place. You launch, you have an extremely profitable week…
…and then what?
For most marketers, they will turn their attention to creating the next product and doing the entire process again. And because of that, they will leave a tremendous amount of money on the table.
If your offer sells for $19 and you’re converting at 5%, then you’re making $95 for every 100 people you send to your site. This doesn’t even include the list you’re building and will market to over and over again.
Now then, if you can buy those 100 visitors for $40, you’ve just make a profit of $55.
Buy 1,000 visitors and you’ve made $550.
Buy 10,000 visitors and you’ve made $5,500.
But wait, there’s more!
What if you add a backend product? Just one sale per 100 visitors of a $100 product increases your profit from $55 to $155.
10,000 visitors? $15,500 profit.
You can also add coaching, continuity (membership) programs, etc. for even more profit.
Are you following me here?
Let’s use an analogy: Someone invests 3 months to open a hair salon. They have a big grand opening with lots of customers. And when that dies down, they close shop, move across town and do it all over again.
Yeah, that would be pretty crazy. Yet that’s what 98% of online marketers do; they create a product, launch it, have a great week and then start all over again, and they wonder why they are still struggling.
So what’s the takeaway?
- Invest time in building a profitable, high-converting funnel.
- Test it out and do the math – how much can you spend on advertising and still make money?
- Start by investing small and ramp your way up.
- Don’t forget to build your list – your funnel is your upfront money, and your list is your “go to” money. That is, whenever you need funds or simply want to boost your income, you can go to your list and make them an offer.
What will derail you in this process:
- Getting lured away by the glamour of creating another new product funnel when you should be scaling up the one you already have.
- Fear of spending money to make money. Yes, spending $1000 or more to make sales is scary. That’s why you want to start small, make sure your entire funnel is working, and then scale up. And up. And Up.
Your biggest mistake – would be brushing this advice off. Don’t be that person who thinks, “Yeah, yeah, heard it all before!” You may have heard this information/advice before but have you actually implemented it?!?
Fortunes have been made simply by creating a profitable funnel and then scaling it up.
FORTUNES.
As in nearly 7 figures made from one Clickbank product…
Per MONTH.
That’s right – 6 Pack Abs at the pinnacle of its success was earning over $11 million per year. So, it works plain and simple!
Now, your results will vary; there is never any guarantee but isn’t it nice to have this information and now you (hopefully) understand the power of it, you can actually take action on it!
5 Even More Powerful Content Marketing Secrets
5 Even More Powerful Content Marketing Secrets
As I stated in my previous 2 posts, there is no single magic trick that will skyrocket your blog’s growth overnight. But fortunately for you, there are a lot of little things you can do, that when combined, will lead to steady continuous growth – the kind of growth that seems to take on a life of its own. In this final post in this series I will give you 5 more powerful content marketing secrets so you now have 15 tips that you can use to make the most of your content marketing strategy. If you want to take a look at the other 10 secrets you can find them here and here.
OK, without further ado, here are content marketing secrets 11-15.
11: Build Real Relationships with Your Fellow Marketers
Your fellow bloggers and marketers have the ability to send vast amounts of traffic to your blog. But before this will happen, you’ve first got to build real relationships with them.
This means reaching out and connecting without expectation of receiving anything.
Think of it as making friends because that’s exactly what it is.
If and when they later send you traffic, cool. But in the beginning, focus solely on building the friendship.
So how do you go about becoming friends? Here are a few tips…
- Follow them on social media
- Engage their content on social media with likes and comments
- Share their content on social media
- Leave valuable comments on their blog posts
- Subscribe to their newsletter
- Ask them how you can help them with whatever they’re doing at the moment. For example, you see a blogger talking about their latest product they’re creating and you’re a whiz at video editing – ask if you can help them edit their videos. Yes, for free.
- Do interviews with them for your own blogposts, podcasts, products, etc.
- Buy their stuff and let them know you bought it
- Meet them on Skype, or for coffee, or at a conference
12: Open A Twitter Account, Connect It To Your Website And Get 1,000 Followers Fast
If you don’t already have a Twitter account, go ahead and get one for your blog.
Then focus on getting 1000+ followers in the first week or so. The key here of course is to get targeted followers, not just anybody. You want folks interested in your niche.
You already know who your target audience is. Now make a list of Twitter accounts they are likely to be following.
You can either find the Twitter accounts of your competitors to see who is following them.
Or you can do keyword-based targeting using an app such as: http://narrow.io/, https://statusbrew.com/ or https://www.crowdfireapp.com.
Use the ‘copy followers’ menu to add the Twitter accounts from your list. Follow those people who look like a good match. After a day or two, you can unfollow those who did not follow you using the same app.
13: Use Pinned Tweets To Increase Engagement
You can stick one of your tweets at the top of your profile page. Then when anyone visits your profile, they will see this particular tweet.
Make it a good one – something that points to your best or most recent piece of content.
Doing this is simple: Visit your Twitter profile and select the tweet you want to feature. On the bottom right of the tweet, click the three dots. Select “pin to your profile page.”
Refresh your page and you should see your new pinned tweet.
14: Use Embed Tweets In Your Content For More Engagement
Just one click is all it takes for your readers to engage with your posts when you embed your Twitter updates.
Plus, an embedded tweet is a sign of social engagement, further extending your Twitter reach. And it’s easy to do.
Simply login to your Twitter account, go to updates and select the tweet you’re going to embed.
Click on the three dots at the bottom right of your tweet. From the drop down menu, select “embed tweet” and just copy the code and insert it into your blog post.
15: Think About Using Buzzsumo To Get Your Content Shared (Paid Strategy)
Asking random people to share your content won’t work. But asking people who have already expressed interest in your topic AND shared content on that topic can work really well.
Here’s what you do:
Create a list of articles that are similar or related to your content.
On Buzzsumo, paste the links to each article one-by-one. Click on “View Sharers.” This will show you everyone who shared the content.
Yes, it’s a paid feature, but as of this writing you can try it for free.
Add these people to a list and approach them on Twitter.
Here’s where it gets tricky: If you send out the same tweet to too many people too quickly, it’s going to look like spam. Instead, create variations of your tweet and send them out over a period of time.
Your goal: To make contact with these folks, hopefully to become friends and get them to comment on and share your content.
OK, there you have it. Now you have 15 really powerful tips that can make a really big difference in the efficacy and success of your content marketing efforts. Pick and choose which ones to start with and implement them, and once you have them up and running, try implementing a couple more.
If you do this on a consistent, regular basis, you won’t believe the difference this can make to your business by positioning you as a premium content producer and authority in your niche. And hopefully this authority will increase trust and ultimately end in more sales and profit for your business.
To get the most out of your content marketing you also need to be able to convert all these visitors and readers into buyers and if you would like a handy resource to refer to about increasing your conversions I have a great free checklist that will become an incredibly useful tool for you, and you can get it here.
OK, get to work, implement these strategies and watch your business grow!
5 More Powerful Content Marketing Secrets
5 More Powerful Content Marketing Secrets (That Drive Conversions!)
As I stated in my last post, there is no single magic trick that will skyrocket your blog’s growth overnight. But fortunately for you, there are a lot of little things you can do, that when combined, will lead to steady continuous growth – the kind of growth that seems to take on a life of its own.
Don’t forget that while you are creating your content, you need to be continuously experimenting to see what works, and constantly learning from your audience. Test, test and test again!
And don’t forget to keep things simple…
Experiment – did it work? And if so, how can you make it work even better?
And learn – who is my audience? What do they want? What do they fear? How can I become so valuable to them, they turn to me and my blog for advice and help? Nail this and your conversions will take off!
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into some more tips that will complement the others (in this post here) perfectly:
6: Don’t Be Afraid To Stand Out
The fact is, more content is published every minute of every day. It’s not enough anymore to have great content – you need content that stands apart from the crowd. It’s got to deliver value in a unique way with a radical new perspective.
Some tips to help you:
- Try new content formats. For example, try an info-graphic instead of an article, or perhaps make a video.
- Put a lot of thought into your headlines and make them really pop. If you can trigger emotions, curiosity, or a burning need to know what’s in your article, you’ve got a good headline.
- For the content itself, either present something no one else has presented, or present the content in a way no one else has. I know, it’s a tall order but it’s something to aspire to.
- Tell stories. It’s hard to go wrong if you become a great story teller. In fact, people will revisit your blog just to read your new stories.
- Give stuff away. It could be pdf’s, prizes or whatever. Try creating info packed posts, and then giving away pdf versions of those posts for people to refer to later.
- Take a stand. Don’t be afraid to express your opinions and back them up with evidence, facts, stories, etc. Having strong opinions you’re not afraid to voice can be one of the quickest ways to get your content shared and build yourself a loyal audience.
7: Work On Your Headlines
According to CopyBlogger, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will check out your post. Yes, headlines are THAT important.
To get your copy read, write at least 5-10 headline variations that each incorporate at least two of the following: Curiosity, urgency, uniqueness, usefulness, specificity and news.
Choose the best 2-4 headlines and promote your content on social media using the different variations. After a few hours see which one gets the most engagement and keep that headline.
As much as you might be tempted, don’t use click-bait headlines. When people see your post doesn’t line up with your headline, they’ll click away.
8: Draw The Reader In…
Keep your readers reading by using this old sales letter trick. Insert words and phrases that naturally pull the reader into the next sentence, and the next, and the next…
Examples:
- “Here’s what I’m talking about…”
- “You might be wondering…”
- “I know you think this is crazy…”
- “Here’s why…”
- “Meanwhile…”
- “On the other hand…”
- “But here’s the really strange thing…”
- “Want to know the best part?”
- “And yet…”
- “But that’s just part of the story…”
- “As it turns out…”
- “No wonder…”
- “Sadly…”
- “What does this mean for you?”
- “I couldn’t believe what happened next…”
- “Best of all…”
- “By the way…”
9: Create Viral Content Using S.T.E.P.P.S.
Now, some folks will tell you that you can’t predict what will and what won’t go viral.
Companies have spent fortunes trying to make viral content. Sometimes they succeed, and many times they don’t.
So how can you, a solo entrepreneur, increase your odds that your content will go viral?
According to Jonah Berger, author of Contagious, there are six principles to making viral content:
- Social Currency – People want to feel smart and cool, like they’re on the ‘inside.’ We share things that make us look good.
- Triggers – Which gets more word of mouth – Corn Flakes or Disney? Be Disney and remember that top of mind is also tip of tongue.
- Emotion – The higher the emotion, the more it gets shared. Remember, when we care, we share.
- Public – There are always people who will jump on board the latest trend. Think if it as, ‘Built to show, built to grow.’
- Practical value – the more valuable and useful content is, the more it tends to get shared. Think of it as, ‘News you can use.’
- Stories – Stories are like Trojan horses, coming in under the radar in the guise of entertainment, when really they are delivering a message
You don’t have to hit all six principles, but the more you do hit, the more likely your content will go viral.
10: Use Great Images
I hate to tell you this, but odds are the images you’re using now aren’t helping you. In fact, they might even be hurting you.
You already know that great images enhance a great post. But for this to happen the images need to be relevant and interesting. A stock photo of models in business attire staring at a laptop won’t cut it anymore.
Best bets: Take your own photos. A photo of you holding something relevant or being in a relevant place will do wonders. People love to see who they are reading, especially if it is a REAL shot and not some studio photo that’s been photo-shopped to death.
Source HIGH quality free images and be choosy. It pays to spend that extra time finding just the right picture.
Here’s a list of 21 sites with ‘breathtaking free stock photos’ to get you started.
https://blog.snappa.io/free-stock-photos/
Don’t have free time to find great pics? Hire a graphic artist on Fiverr to do it for you. They already have great sources and a knowledge of where to find what you’re looking for.
If you want to save some cash and create and design your own images there are a number of tools that you can use which are pretty inexpensive and cost you less in the long run than continually outsourcing.
One such tool is Design Wizard and is well worth checking out to create stunning viral images and video. Check it out here
Try using these 5 “secrets” in your content marketing strategy and see what happens to your traffic, and more importantly, your conversions. I think you will be surprised 😊
I will cover even more of these tips in one more post, but for now don’t forget that if you want to know more about converting your traffic into customers, I have a great guide for you that can give your traffic and conversions an enormous boost. And even better, it’s free 😊 To download your free copy just click here
OK, that’s it for this time. Now go and put these tips into practice in your content marketing.
Discover 5 Easy To Do Powerful Content Marketing Secrets
Discover 5 Easy To Do Powerful Content Marketing Secrets (That Drive Wicked Traffic!)
Firstly, let me be blunt with you; there is no single magic trick that will skyrocket your blog’s growth overnight. But fortunately for you, there are a lot of little things you can do, that when combined, will lead to steady continuous growth – the kind of growth that seems to take on a life of its own.
Here’s the mindset to have when it comes to your blog and content marketing in general… you are continuously experimenting to see what works, and constantly learning from your audience.
It’s rather simple, don’t overcomplicate things…
Experiment – did it work? And if so, how can you make it work even better?
And learn – who is my audience? What do they want? What do they fear? How can I become so valuable to them, they turn to me and my blog for advice and help? Nail this and your conversions will take off!
Now that you have the mindset, let’s get into the tips, in no particular order whatsoever:
1: Know Your Audience
We already talked about this, but it’s so important we need to go deeper.
Where is your audience coming from, both physically and mentally?
By physically, we mean what brings them to your site. Is it an ad? A blog post? A mention somewhere on the web? Social media?
Where your readers come from plays a large part in what they expect from your blog.
That’s why some marketers set up separate squeeze pages for each traffic source, so they can custom tailor it to their audience.
And where are they mentally when they hit your blog? Did they just discover they have a problem and they’re looking for solutions? Are they looking to be entertained more than informed? What are they looking for, and why are they there?
If you can, interview your readers. You might get them on Skype, send them a questionnaire, ask questions on your blog, etc.
Ask things like:
What are your biggest challenges in <your niche>? You’re looking for the pain points you can help solve.
What have you done to overcome these challenges? This will show you how determined they are.
How do you find the information you need? This tells you where and how they are looking
What content format do you prefer? Video, written, audio, etc.
You don’t have to interview a lot of people to find the answers. In fact, according to research experts you should see a pattern emerging after just 5 interviews in the same audience segment.
Your goal of course is to learn as much about your audience’s needs and desires as you can. It’s not always about building buyer personas – after all, not all of your readers will be 37-year-old college educated women with 2.4 kids and a $200,000 mortgage.
Once you have gone through this process you will have a customer avatar for your perfect customer and ALL your sales copy and content should be written with this person in mind at all times.
2: Get a Bird’s Eye View of Your Blog
Buzzstream put together a list of questions that will give you a good view of your content marketing strategy and help you identify your weak points.
You might go over this list of questions every 3-6 months and make sure you are still on track with your blog:
1. Who is your audience? <dog owners>
2. What are you offering them? <tips on dog training and care>
3. How will they find you? <through guest blog posts and social media>
4. Why will they care? <I give great tips they can use immediately>
5. How will they interact? <they will watch videos and read blog posts>
6. What will be their next step? <signing up for my dog training course>
7. Why do they share it? <it’s great info, entertaining and awesome dog photos, too
8. They might not share it if… <it’s too dry>
9. A solution for this is… <inject plenty of humor and personality>
3: Use Competitive Analysis To Find Your Audience
Finding your target audience can be difficult. But then again, who says you have to reinvent the wheel? Just find out what is working for your competitors, and you can often use the same sites and techniques to drive targeted traffic to your own site.
First, make a list of websites that are closest to yours in topic and intended audience. If you don’t know them, try searching Google using your top keywords. Or use this Google query (related: yourcompetitorwebsite.com)
Next, enter the competitor’s domain on SimilarWeb.com to see where their visitors are coming from, which social networks they use, total visits, traffic by countries, search traffic and more.
4: Use Competitive Analysis To Uncover Their Social Media Activity/Strategy
Use http://www.fanpagekarma.com and http://buzzsumo.com to find out:
- What is their average engagement rate?
- How often do they post?
- When are they posting?
- What types of posts are they posting?
- And most importantly – what is their best performing content?
Discovering what’s working for others can shorten your own learning curve dramatically.
You can also use http://likealyzer.com to get metrics on likes, growth and engagement.
If you want to analyze their Twitter account, use https://www.twitonomy.com to find their average tweets per day, total retweets and favorites, as well as how many tweets contained hashtags, links, mentions and so forth.
To learn about their SEO performance, you can use https://seranking.com for backlink research and more.
5: A.P.P. Your Content!
Keep readers on your content longer by using this formula:
Agree: Begin with something your readers agree with. “These days politics are scary and unpredictable.”
Promise: Show them you have an answer, creating a contrast between what is and what could be. “But there is something you can do that will put your mind at ease and keep your politicians in line.”
Preview: Show them what will happen when they read your content. “In this blogpost, I’m going to reveal the 3 steps to easily making your elected representatives actually listen to you and act in your best interests.”
Try using these 5 “secrets” in your content marketing strategy and see what happens to your traffic, and more importantly, your conversions. I think you will be surprised 😊
I will cover more of these tips in another post, but for now, if you want to know more about converting your traffic into customers, I have a great guide for you that can give your traffic and conversions an enormous boost. And even better, it’s free 😊 To download your free copy just click here
OK, that’s it for this time. These are not the only ways to optimize your content, and I will give you some even more powerful tactics next time. Now go and put these tips into practice in your content marketing.
Amazon Affiliate Success Part 3: Creating High Converting Content
Amazon Affiliate Success Part 3: Creating High Converting Content
Are you aware of the saying that content is king? While there is no denying that content can make or break a website, you need to ensure that you are creating quality, future proof content for your website as this is just as important to your rank as using the right type of target keywords.
In fact, if you really think about it, quality content on an Amazon affiliate website is only possible once you find the correct keywords so that you can base your content around these targeted keywords so finding the best keywords is a critical step in content creation. Now, quality content on an Amazon affiliate website is not the same as quality content on, say, a bird watching website. What do I mean by that? well read on 🙂
You already know that the first rule about creating quality content is to base it around your most profitable, most traffic generating keywords, but there are other elements that, put together, will make it much more likely that your niche website will rank on the first page.
The first one is length. One thing that you will notice about most sites on the third and fourth pages of results when you start doing your keyword research as explained before is that they do not offer lengthy content around their keywords. They conform with throwing and repeating their keywords around on 250 word articles in hopes that keyword stuffing will get them ranked higher than they deserve. This was the old version of SEO but this doesn’t really work any more.
The thing is that short form content doesn’t work very well for quality written content. So the second rule to follow when creating quality content for an Amazon affiliate website is to make it long, and by long we mean 2,000 words long and over. Yes this is long but is well worth the effort and if you are writing a review this should be easy to do. If you want a feference as to how long a 2000 word post is; this post you are reading is exactly 1104 words long.
Actual online marketing researchers have found that the average length of articles on Affiliate websites ranking on the first page of Google results is 2,000 words and longer. The effect that this has is three fold.
In the first place, it allows you to target your niche keywords several times without stuffing, which is just pretty bad for rankings. This appeals to the Google algorithm because it will find your target keywords repeatedly throughout content that is not a string of repeated keywords.
The second factor in play here is that it will allow you to create content that is truly relevant to prospective buyers because a piece of content that is 2,000 words long has to include a lot of information about the product being promoted.
In that sense, these product centered articles are then perceived both by your visitors and Google as buyer’s guides, which complies both with Google’s own requirements for quality content to be relevant and with your visitors’ desire to find help with their purchasing decisions.
That takes us to the third factor in play here, which is reducing the amount of time that it takes a buyer to jump to the checkout once they see a product link or image for the second or third time. Now, to achieve this you will need to highlight the pros and the cons of the product in the article promoting it.
And you have to highlight them at the beginning. This creates the effect of informing your leads on the things that they want to learn about the product right before they get to read the entire article, making them very likely to skip the article, click through an image or link, make the purchase, and then coming back to keep reading in anticipation.
This is possible because they will unconsciously realize that the article is long and that they can simply keep reading about the product that they just decided to buy right after they check out, to build up on the excitement in anticipation of receiving the actual product.
Also, longer content allows you to make it future proof because it helps you to build up authority. Speaking of which, we highly recommend you to print the following statement and to paste it on the wall behind your computer so you can see it every day:
“You Shouldn’t Be Building Niche Site. You Should Be Building AUTHORITY Sites”
Building Permanent Traffic Sources
Now, this is where most marketers will recommend you to focus on getting on the paid advertising bandwagon, but like I said before, Amazon affiliate marketing is different, and generating traffic sources takes a different approach.
The best way to create a permanent source of traffic is by creating a series of lists with evergreen content, by which we mean content that stays relevant over time.
These are lists that you have to be updating on a regular basis to always attract traffic through a very specific set of purchase based keywords which include the following keywords:
Best sellers
“Best of”
“Best on a budget” (Such as “Best budget wireless headphones)
The good news is that keeping these lists updated is as easy as going to the Amazon marketplace and sorting through the best sellers list on your niche category, by sorting through the products with the highest buyer review scores and also sorting through the lowest priced items in your niche with the highest scores.
Now, the science behind these updated lists is that it is pretty easy to rank on the first page when you use keywords such as “cheap” alongside a product based or niche keyword as they have very high search volumes on a monthly basis.
In order to keep these lists bringing you fresh traffic all the time through search engine queries is by creating a separate category page on your site. Remember that each product that you insert on your “best of” lists needs to have its own long form product based article that you can redirect to from your list.
Follow these strategies and you will be giving yourself the very best chance of running a successful online Amazon affiliate business. So what are you waiting for? Find your niche, source your items, setup your website and create some great content and by leveraging the Amazon marketplace you can tap into a huge market. So, get started today and keep on working on your Amazon niche sites and your business will blossom. Good luck.
