Content Marketing

Develop A Content Publishing Calendar For Your Blog

Creating a content calendar that includes matching promos, helps ensure that you meet business goals, such as list building. When you plan your written content, match it to an existing or new opt-in freebie.

This will help grow your list and create multiple points of entry. You can also match written content to other types of promos, according to your goals.

Write it all on your content calendar so you can remember what purpose each item serves.

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OK, let’s look at how you can flesh out your content marketing calendar.

Set Your Goals

A few goals you might set are to expand brand awareness, promote thought leadership, increase word of mouth, get more leads, or make sales.

Determine what tactics work best for your audience. For example, sharing an informative article you published on “Huffington Post” can help spread thought leadership.

A funny meme can help you get more likes, shares, retweets, and spread brand awareness.

Product & Freebie Benefits

The best way to ensure that your content works with your products and freebies is to get familiar with them.

Whether it’s your product, an affiliate product, or an opt-in, you must know how it will benefit your people.

In other words, you must know “what’s in it for them” and what problem it solves.

Plan Publishing Frequency

Always publish to your website first and foremost. It will serve as the hub of your business and support content will lead visitors back to the site.

Begin by planning to add three to five new pieces of website content per week. Then, decide where you want to publish related content that drives traffic back to your “new” website content.

If you add “supporting content” on social sites, you can safely plan on adding something several times per day. Make sure each addition is “fresh”; otherwise, you will lose followers, instead of gaining opt-in subscribers.

Create, Curate, Or Contract

You’ll want to create some of the content yourself, but content can also be easily be curated or contracted out.

There are a lot of places where you can buy private label rights (PLR) content. You can also hire a writer through a company like All Custom Content.

Another option is to collect related bits of information from multiple places to create something new.

Write it Down

Once you have created your plan, write it down.

You can use a spreadsheet or even a Google Calendar. The WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin can also help you pre-schedule and keep track of your website’s content.

Begin planning your content at least three months before you intend to use it. This includes your written content (website posts, articles, reports, tweets, etc.) and any items that support or promote it, such as opt-in freebies, memes, info graphics, videos, etc.

All of this is content, so it makes sense to plan a week or more at the same time. Planning this way helps to ensure that you have every piece of content needed to meet your goals. In this case, the main goal focuses on growing your mailing list.

Post Content Regularly

Posting content on a regular basis is important. When you post unique content in a variety of places, it gives your audience more opportunities to see what you’re publishing and promoting.

Doing it once or inconsistently won’t get you the exposure you want. Forgetting to update your blog is not going to encourage more traffic to your opt-ins and build your list.

Therefore, stick to your plan and ensure that you add new, relevant content on a regular basis.

Website/Blog

Content comes in many forms. Add a variety to keep readers’ interest and meet their needs. Inform and educate your audience with relevant audio, video, memes, infographics, charts, interviews, how-tos, statistics, and more.

You can curate, create, or contract the content you need that matches with the information that is important to your audience.

What’s important is that you post something regularly, at least three times a week, to drive traffic to the content and the related opt-in offer.

Social Media

Each social media platform has a different “personality” so it’s important to post regularly. It’s also important to look at your analytics so you can identify when your audience is most active and reading.

On most platforms, posting three times a day is a good rule of thumb.

However, check the rules and “best practices” at each platform to get recommendations specific to that site.

Email

Don’t neglect to email your subscribers regularly about new content on the website or provide them with exclusive info related to that content.

Ask subscribers to “share” the website content with their friends, associates, and even customers/clients, when appropriate.

The bottom line is that if you want to make profits regularly, you need to write content regularly, and regularly ask for it to be shared.

Enlist the help of your subscribers and reward them for that assistance with a special offer just for them.

Guest Posting

To get more traffic and opt-in subscribers from your guest posts, link to an opt-in that is relevant to the audience in your author profile or byline.

This gives you a huge incentive to guest post exceptional content frequently.

Guest posting provides multiple benefits to all parties. So, consider accepting guest blog posts from trusted, experts and associates in your niche. It’s an effective way to get more content on your site.

This is a win-win-win opportunity when you post on a regular basis.

Providing content for a variety of locations helps to increase targeted traffic and targeted traffic increases opt-in rates. The more you publish, the more people read your quality content and see your opt-in offer…unless your headlines aren’t persuading viewers to click to read more.

And remember, if you want to know the best way to get started with blogging you can check out Rapid Blogging Blueprint, a premium training on creating and monetising a blog the right way.

Or you can simply click on the featured resource below for a free Blogging Fundamentals report; download, read it and take action 😊

How To Make Money With Your Free Blog Posts And Articles

As a marketer, are you one of those who has a blog or not?

Some marketers don’t use a blog to build their brand or visibility but rather prefer to use more direct response type marketing techniques and have a website to showcase their products with great sales pages and they constantly send paid traffic to those pages.

However, most marketers probably try to incorporate some type of blog into their business to try to gain some visibility using SEO and get some free traffic from the search engines to build the KLT (Know, Like Trust) factor.

Visitors will consume their content, come to think of them as someone they can trust, and will be much more likely to buy from them in future. This takes longer than the direct response marketer but is infinitely cheaper and is a good model for someone just starting out who may have limited capital to put into their business.

It’s the second type of marketer to whom this article is addressed.

I’m constantly amazed at how marketers seem to think free content and paid content are two entirely different things. The fact is your most successful blog posts and newsletter articles can make you more money than many of the products you’ve promoted or created in the past an it is super quick to do this and costs you nothing, so what are you waiting for?

The key is to pay attention to how your content is received.

Repurposing content is hardly a new strategy, but it mainly focuses on creating a video from an article, and then extracting the audio from the video, plus perhaps creating an infographic covering the main points so you now have 4 pieces of content instead of just one.

This works great for building brand awareness across multiple platforms and can indirectly lead to sales.

But now let’s take that strategy and put it on steroids and make it a much more direct way to make sales; after all, you are in business to make money!

So, this content repurposing strategy is designed to specifically make you money from your previous content!

Look back at your posts from the past year and see which ones gained the most attention. Which ones did people comment on and forward to others the most?

And don’t just look at blog posts but look at your posts on social media too; these are great because you get instant feedback if it resonates with your audience.

For example, a little 200-word FB post that people are engaging with and liking the content is trying to tell you that you’ve struck gold.

If it’s a longer article, maybe a blog post and it gets great feedback, even better.

You might choose to expand that article into a full-blown product and sell it or you could use it as a lead magnet that leads to a high-ticket offer (either yours or an affiliate offer).

And talking of lead magnets…

If you are producing free reports as lead magnets (and you should be using these to grow your email list) these are another potential untapped goldmine.

Take your most successful free reports and turn them into paid coaching programs. If you have 4 or 5 reports covering roughly the same topic, it is really simple to bundle them up and sell as a full-blown product.

Add some video and/or audio and some weekly/monthly webinars and you have your brand-new coaching program which has a much higher perceived value than a solely text-based product so you can now charge a premium price, all from existing free content!!

The other good thing about using these lead magnets is that you probably have links to offers peppered throughout these reports, so not only can you now profit from previously free material, but you can still profit from readers clicking on the links embedded into the reports.

Answer a customer’s question and then send that answer out to your list and see what happens. Do you get a lot of response? Bam! There’s another product waiting to be made.

This is such a simple way to do direct market research and you will know that the demand is there from your existing audience.

The point is to monitor the reception you receive on every piece of content you create, whether they’re posts, recordings, videos, launches, emails, reports or whatever.

If you’re not sure how something is being received, ask your readers what they thought of it.

Take the most popular topics and expand them or repurpose them into something else. You don’t have to continually come up with new ideas. Instead, figure out which ideas are working and then get most out of those.

And you can also purposely float your idea for a new product by creating a mini version of it as a post and then seeing how people respond.

Do you have 10 ideas for products? Create 10 posts, see which one is the most popular and start working on that product right away.

When creating the posts, if they are long, let’s say 1000 words or more, then offer the reader to download them as a convenient pdf. This is a type of content upgrade and they will need to give you their email address to get the report.

This way, you can easily see in your autoresponder which reports people are signing up for and start creating your product around those topics.

This stuff sounds simple and it is, but it also works so please don’t dismiss this strategy.

And because it is mainly using pre-existing content, you can be up and running in a matter of hours.

If you are just starting out and are building out your first blog, bear this in mind for the future.

And if you want to know the best way to get started with blogging you can check out Rapid Blogging Blueprint, a premium training on creating and monetising a blog the right way.

Or you can simply click on the featured resource below for a free Blogging Fundamentals report; download, read it and take action 😊

5 Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies

There are a plethora of affiliate marketing strategies and tactics employed by many successful affiliate marketers to ramp up their sales and commissions.

While some strategies may seem advanced, they are all usually based on the fundamentals of affiliate marketing.

You need content. You need traffic… and you need to position the right offer in front of the right audience. The goal is to help and also gently guide the reader towards a purchase.

As an affiliate marketer your job is to be a ‘conduit’ that takes an interested visitor to the sales page which will go on to sell the product.

That’s really all there is to it. All other intricacies can be boiled down to this goal. Let’s look at a few highly effective strategies employed by thousands of affiliate marketers all over the world.

Niche Sites

This is without a doubt the most popular strategy. To promote a variety of products you need a niche site. The content that’s interspersed with your affiliate links will make you sales if you do it right.

You’ll need to learn the basics of setting up a site, optimizing it, creating content that converts and a few other things. Once you get a grasp of the fundamentals, the sky is the limit.

As long as you grow your site, your earnings will increase exponentially. Some of the large authority sites make 5 to 6 figures a month in affiliate commissions. That’s how powerful this method is.

Facebook Groups/Pinterest Boards

Everyone is on social media these days. Having Facebook groups and Pinterest boards dedicated to your niche, will allow you to tap into existing hotbeds of traffic while targeting and audience that is interested in your niche.

Through the links in your posts and pictures, traffic will trickle to your site and you’ll get sales. Some affiliates prefer to direct link the pictures in Pinterest to the affiliate products.

That’s fine too. What matters is that you hang out where your audience hangs out.

YouTube Channels

If you’re shy to be on camera, you can still do unboxing videos or PowerPoint presentations with a voiceover. YouTube is an excellent source of free traffic.

You just need to invest your time in creating interesting videos that are optimized to rank well.

Links in your video descriptions can either go to a landing page or your website. While some affiliates prefer to directly link to the product, it’s wiser to try and capture the lead.

BTW, for an excellent course on video marketing, I highly recommend Video Marketing Insider

Email Lists

As mentioned earlier, always strive to build your list. Have a pop up on your site with a freebie that encourages the visitor to opt in.

Have your links in your social media sites pointing to your landing pages. Do whatever you can to build your list.

Once you have a list and you build a relationship with them, you can promote products that will be well-received. A list will be your greatest asset.

Paid Ads

Many marketers stay away from paid advertising because it’s almost inevitable that you lose money during the testing phase. However, you should give it a try when your budget allows for it. You’re not losing money – you’re buying data.

Once you make this mindset shift, you’ll be encouraged to keep trying till you find a few winning ad campaigns. A winning campaign can restore your losses within days and yield you an attractive profit. Such is the power of paid advertising.

Give these 5 strategies a try and watch your affiliate commissions soar. They will take you some time to do, but if you’re consistent and stick to the plan, your future self will thank you for it. These strategies will work wonders for your affiliate marketing.

Of course, a major part of affiliate marketing is knowing which products to promote, so how do you decide which to promote and which to leave aside?

What Should You Look For When Choosing Products To Promote?

As an affiliate marketer, when you choose a niche to market in, ideally it should have a wide variety of products to promote. There should be a mix of tangible and digital products to cater to a wide variety of customers within the same niche.

There are several pointers you should bear in mind when choosing products to promote to your niche. Sometimes, things can get tricky and what may be snapped up quickly by some people within the niche may be ignored by others.

So, it’s important to put right product in front of the right person at the right time to get maximum sales. Below you will find a few tips to guide you.

Does It Fit Your Niche?

This is a very important point. You need to know what your audience is looking for. If you’re in the golf niche, promoting bodybuilding supplements such as mass gainers might be a flop. However, an eBook about improving one’s shoulder strength may be a hit for people hoping to improve their golf swing.

You must be aware of the needs and problems your audience is facing. A busy mom looking to lose weight will quickly buy a guide that shows how one can shed the fat with 15-minute interval workouts.

However, that same guide will not be as eagerly bought by women looking to lose weight with an easier program like yoga.

As you can see, even though the problem is the same, the products that’ll interest your audience will be different. So, you must really understand your niche and expect a period of testing.

Vendor

Another factor that you should look at is the vendor. If you’re promoting products on Amazon, you don’t have to worry too much.

Everybody trusts Amazon and they do a great job at selling.

However, if you’re promoting a weight loss guide from another site, the credentials of the author will be important. An overweight person selling a weight loss eBook, or a bald guy selling a hair restoration formula will not inspire confidence in anyone.

Always check the vendor’s credibility.

Sales Page

Is the sales copy for the product convincing?

This is applicable to both tangible and intangible items. Does the gadget on Amazon come in different colors?

Is the description accurate and convincing? Read the sales copy and ask yourself if you’d buy the item. If you would, your site visitor or subscriber might probably buy it too.

Does It Solve A Problem?

Products that solve problems will always sell better than those that are just for satisfying wants.

Nobody thinks twice about buying aspirin when they have a splitting headache… but the cool pair of sunglasses that cost $180 may require much more persuasion on your part.

You need to supply people with what they want, not necessarily what they need. This is just the way of business and marketing; hopefully they will eventually find what they need through you.

Reviews

Look at the testimonials and customer reviews on the site. Amazon makes this easy by providing ratings and reviews from verified customers. Promote products with a high rating and many positive reviews.

The same applies to digital products. You may even wish to ask the vendor to email you a review copy.

Send them a link to your site and mention that you’d like to promote their product, but you wish to review it first.

Many vendors will gladly accede to your request. If they don’t, just move on and find another product.

Trends

Last but not least, check on Google Trends to see if the product is in demand. Sometimes, products are very popular because of a craze, but then it all suddenly dies down.

Think fidget spinners and Pokemon Go… now you get an idea of how fast crazes can start and end. Stick to promoting evergreen products which are popular but have stable trends.

These are the pointers to look out for when choosing products to promote. Exercise due diligence in your research and only recommend proven and profitable products to your audience. This will ensure that they trust you and your reputation remains intact.

If you want to know more about affiliate marketing then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 🙂

Expand Your Online Business With A Complementary Business Model

If you are like most entrepreneurs, one business simply isn’t enough! Many entrepreneurial business owners have so many ideas that they want to start a dozen businesses all at once; unfortunately, if they do the likelihood result is one of failure.

The savvy entrepreneur will start with a single idea and build a business around that before even thinking about expanding or creating another business. This is just common sense!

If you’ve already grown a successful business and have now made the decision to expand your business into another branch, rather than simply expanding the current branch that you’re in, then you want to choose something that you would be able to leverage off each other.

Going in two completely different directions may be personally satisfying for you, but to maximize your success, it’s best if you choose something that fits seamlessly with your current business branch and it will make things much easier to manage.

There are many different ways you can do this.

For example, let’s say you have a thriving digital affiliate marketing business. You’re making money recommending courses that are delivered in the form of videos or text downloads.

This could be in any niche, not just online marketing. For example, you might be recommending fitness courses for your audience. A great way to expand your business would be to begin offering promotions for tangible items as well—such as dumbbells, yoga mats and so on.

This is a similar business branch, because it’s still affiliate marketing, but it’s just slightly different. You can go one step further and create an entirely different business branch that also pairs well with affiliate marketing.

One good way to do this would be to begin creating your own information products. As a product creator, you would develop your own courses and present them to your customers so that you could keep 100% of the revenue.

You’ll also be able to expand your profits by recruiting people who are in the affiliate marketing business to promote your info products.

Another example might be someone who is currently publishing fiction on Kindle.

As a self-publisher, you’re aware of the ins and outs of all of the technical tasks as well as the strategic ones that allow an author to publish their work on Amazon or a variety of platforms and make money from it.

So how can you expand on this business model in a new direction?

One way is to begin developing your own info product courses that teach other would-be authors how to do what you’re doing. This is essentially a non-fiction creation. However, instead of only making a few dollars or cents publishing a book about it on Amazon, you would be able to charge much more selling a digital course on your own website.

What about someone who started their online business as an info product creator? Maybe your first endeavor online was to create a course teaching people how to set up a blog.

One thing you can do is expand your business into becoming a service provider, where are you are charging people to handle the task for them. You could make money installing their blog and setting it all up for them.

As someone who is familiar with creating your own info products, you may also want to offer services creating info products for other online marketers. These would be people who don’t know how to brainstorm, research, and write or record their own lessons, but they would like a product of their own to sell.

If you started out as a service provider, you can also pair that business model with something your clients might like. For example, let’s say you started off as a ghostwriter. Your clients may be people who don’t have the time or knowledge on how to set up their own blog with the content you’ve created for them.

That could be an info product that you create and sell to those same clients. You may also want to spend some time creating content that you put on a private label rights store.

While your current ghostwriting clients may be able to afford your services for exclusive content to some degree, they may love to have the opportunity to buy your PLR in bulk to beef up their site, emails, and other needs.

Anytime you’re doing something online and succeeding with it, there is an opportunity for you to sell the information about how you’re doing it. So whether you’re currently an info product creator or not, think of everything you know that a newbie may not.

Use this as an opportunity to develop courses that could help others learn the ropes. Look at your current business model and see if there are affiliate marketing opportunities in your niche.

If you’re creating products or providing services, you may be able to add a business branch where you’re simply promoting others who do the same – your competitors! Of course, you don’t have to start a new branch that pairs well with your existing one.

There’s always the possibility that you would like a complete break from what you currently do so that you have something exciting and new to pursue online. You might be able to do this with a new niche, or a completely different business model that has nothing to do with what you’re currently in.

The only reason you may want to consider pairing things together is because it makes it much easier to use the momentum of your existing successful business branch to get the other one off the ground. For example, as a service provider selling ghostwriting services, it would be very easy for you to get those same clients to purchase your PLR.

By the way, if you want to learn about 5 lucrative online business models you can try, from affiliate marketing, to FBA/eBay and more, check out the featured resource below for a free report that covers 5 online business models that you can choose from. Pick one and get started today… 😊

Which Online Business Model Should I Choose?

This sounds like a simple question to ask yourself before venturing into any type of business endeavour and online business is no different.

It is true that online businesses are less risky as they don’t require a lot of capital to get started, but you still need to see which ones are viable and a good fit for your personal circumstances and likes.

So, before you leap into a new business venture, you want to make sure that this will be sustainable for you in the beginning and for the long run. You don’t want to get started with something, only to discover there is a missing piece of the puzzle that will prevent you from achieving success with your efforts.

Analyze

You first need to analyze each business model to see if it’s viable in several different ways. The first thing most internet marketers will want to know is whether or not a particular business model will be lucrative for them.

If it’s not a profitable venture, then you’ll want to focus your efforts elsewhere. For many, it’s not just about the amount of money that they can make, but also the speed in which they can make it.

If you’re only making a few pennies every month, that won’t be enough to sustain your efforts. You have to think in terms of exchanging your time for money. Take a look at what other marketers are earning with that business model.

If you’re adding this branch to another business, then you don’t want to take away your time and effort on a very lucrative business model only to funnel it into one that won’t earn you as much money.

This may or may not be important to you. If you’re adding a second business model on specifically for personal satisfaction reasons, then the financial slant of it may not be as important to you.

But this is rarely the case, because people like to see a return on their efforts. Don’t forget, when you’re determining the profitability of a business model, you’re not just looking at what comes into your bank account.

Upfront Cost

You’re also looking at the expenses you were required to pay ahead of time to get that business model off the ground and operating functionally.

Also, make sure you take a look at any alternate approaches to implementing this particular business model.

For example, let’s say you decided to go into affiliate marketing. If you promoted information products that either had recurring income or a higher ticket cost, you would earn more than someone who was simply recommending books on Amazon, where you would only earn a few cents for every sale.

Implementation

The next thing you want to do when determining whether or not a business model is viable for you at this time is to think about how easy it will be for you to implement. No one wants to engage in a frustrating activity, but if something is difficult, it can severely impact the amount of time, money, and effort that you have to put forth in making it work.

When you first start thinking about adding a second business model, make a list of all of the skills it requires to implement this particular plan. You might find that you have a number of the skills readily available to you.

However, you may also discover that you are incapable of handling one or more of the tasks. If this happens, you will need to look at one of two options.

Your first is to simply delegate the task to someone who does have the knowledge and skill to handle it. This will undoubtedly add to the financial burden that will be required to get this business off the ground.

Another way you can approach it is to simply adopt the realization that you will need to learn the skill in order to implement the business plan.

Some skills are easy to learn and cost-effective for your budget. Others take more time and discipline to understand, and may come at a high cost due to the learning process. Think about all of the tools that you will need in order to pursue a specific business plan.

Sometimes, marketers will teach a method and say no special tools are required. But without them, it makes the process much harder to achieve. You’ll have to decide whether or not you’re capable of handling it without special tools to help you along.

Enjoyment

The final way you want to analyze this business model to see if it’s viable for you is to think about how much you will enjoy working in this business branch over time. There are many people who start out pursuing a particular business branch simply because it looks profitable and easy.

Then they get started with it and discover that it doesn’t bring them a great deal of personal satisfaction. They begin to dread having to work on this business branch, and then it withers and dies.

One of the biggest perks in working for yourself online and at home is that you get to choose what you work on. Instead of being forced to handle projects that bring you grief, you’re able to selectively decide which projects, niches, and path you want to take in your business.

The last thing you want to do is abandon that freedom of choice only to suffer because you added a business branch you thought you would enjoy, but don’t. Before you commit to this particular new business branch, think about what it would be like to engage in this topic or concept every single day.

In fact, you might give yourself a test to do something in the niche for an hour or two each day for a few weeks. This trial run will enable you to gather enough information to see if this is a business branch that will keep you enthusiastic over time, or cause you to quickly avoid and abandon it and waste all of the time, effort, and money that you have put into it.

So, there you have it. A quick insight into how you can pick the best online business model(s) to suit you.