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6 Proven Copywriting Techniques That Work
6 Proven Copywriting Techniques That Work
If you’re wondering why your landing pages aren’t making you as much money as you had hoped for, you might be using common landing page copywriting techniques the wrong way.
If that’s you, read on to find out how to increase your marketing conversion rate simply and effectively.
This is not just a ‘copywriting for beginners’ post, and you aren’t going to learn how to become a world class digital copywriter in the space of a few minutes!
The best marketers are experts in direct response copywriting and there are a few tried and tested techniques that can help you to tweak your sales and landing pages to make them convert better. And isn’t that the point of so-called conversion rate marketing? To optimize conversions and thus sales.
While the six copywriting techniques we’re about to cover have been proven to work, too many marketers use them in a way that cancels out their otherwise potent conversion power.
This is a real shame because your landing page could be raking in larger profits if you only paid closer attention to how you implement these proven techniques.
The good news is that once you become aware of how badly you may be implementing these techniques, you can quickly fix them.
The key is to become aware that you’re using them the wrong way in the first place.
1: Tell A Story To Personalize Your Landing Page’s Value
Storytelling is one of the most powerful landing page copywriting techniques you can use. Not only do you pull your reader into the scenario your offer addresses, but you also create emotional urgency with your offer.
Once emotionally engaged, chances are much higher that your viewer would enter his or her email address or make a purchase.
Awesome, right?
Well, sadly, too many marketers tell stories that are simply worthless.
They are duds.
They seem too good to be true. They show extreme conditions. They simply fail to convert.
What went wrong?
The stories most marketers tell in their landing pages fail to focus on putting a human face on the problem the reader is facing.
Instead, these low converting landing pages tend to present almost ‘too good to be true’ situations.
If you want your landing page stories to convert, take the most probable circumstances faced by your target audience members and base your stories on these.
These realistic stories are more believable because more of your audience members can relate to them.
2: Use A Question As A Header Title For Your Landing Page
Questions are very powerful ‘centering’ devices because they draw your prospects attention to one central concept or a small set of concepts. Questions help narrow and define the problems and situations your offer addresses.
If a question is well-defined, it is easier to present your solution and it is easier for the prospect to see the value in your solution.
Sadly, too many marketers use a header question that has little to do with the questions their target audience members care about the most. For example, the question focuses on cost when most users are actually interested in saving time.
To fix this problem, figure out the primary concern of your target audience members and pose relevant header questions.
3: Change Your Font To Emphasize Key Points Of Your Pitch
When you’re talking to somebody, you normally change your tone of voice when you are trying to emphasize certain things. By the same token, text in bold or italics or larger, ‘special’ fonts tend to be noticed more.
The problem here is that too many marketers overuse these font changes. They use them so much that the reader is confused or reads the text like the formatting isn’t even there.
To maximize the impact of special fonts when emphasizing key points in your landing page text, make sure you use them SPARINGLY.
Keep special fonts to a minimum so when you do emphasize certain words, they truly STAND OUT.
4: Use Testimonials From Happy Customers
One of the most powerful selling tools you can use is social proof. People are more likely to buy whatever you are offering if they see that other people have had positive experiences with what you’re selling.
Pretty simple, right?
In fact, this is so simple that you’d think this would be hard to screw up.
Wrong. Marketers actually blow this all the time.
The key problem is RESTRAINT.
Steer clear of using overly positive testimonials that they look fake. People are very suspicious of overly positive testimonials. ‘Over the top’ recommendations make them skeptical.
Make sure you only use REAL testimonials on your landing page.
Real testimonials are grounded in reality. This means there’s a mix of both positive and not-so-positive elements in the testimonials.
Above all else, use testimonials from happy customers who got results that are not outliers.
Otherwise, your testimonials might seem too good to be true and won’t carry much weight with people you’re trying to convince.
5: List Out The Benefits Of What You’re Promoting
One of the most common, yet powerful, copywriting tips you’ll ever come across is to write out benefits of your product, not features.
People buy based on benefits, not features. Benefits solve their problems. Benefits are easier to understand. Features, on the other hand, tend to degenerate into so much sales talk and technical jargon.
Sadly, too many marketers list SO MANY BENEFITS, they flood their prospects with information. This data overflow leads to, you guessed it, lower conversions.
Your landing page shouldn’t read like a laundry list or check list. Instead, it should be focused on a very small set of benefits which were strategically selected to appeal to your target readers. To figure out which benefits to focus on, ask your target audience members.
Of course, you need to cross reference this information with the landing pages of your competitors to make sure you’re operating in the right ballpark.
6: Link Your Call To Action With The End Result Your Target Customers Want
One of the most useful copywriting conversion tricks you could ever learn involves pairing a call to action to a specific benefit the reader wants.
For example, instead of relying on the tired and weak “Click Here” try using “To finally get rid of the high costs and headaches of random outsourcing, enter your email here to take your labor sourcing results to the next level!” See the difference?
People buy because they are looking for solutions. By pairing the action you want people to take with the benefit they are looking for, you increase the likelihood they will take that action. Clear, right?
Well, marketers tend to blow this technique when they end up listing a ton of benefits with the call to action. Not only does this result in horrible run on sentences, this dilutes the conversion power of your call to action.
The reader is simply too confused to take any action at this point.
The solution?
Focus on one central benefit and pair that with the conversion action.
This is quite risky because your target audience might be looking for a number of benefits instead of just one.
This is where split testing comes in. Test different landing pages with different action-tied benefits and see which pages produce the best results with your traffic.
Don’t Be A Victim Of ‘Proven’ Landing Copywriting Techniques
Make no mistake about it, the landing page copywriting techniques we’ve just covered can turn your landing pages into quick winners.
However, you have to use them the right way. Avoid the common implementation pitfalls outlined and truly take your landing page conversion rates to the next level!
If you want to know more about avoiding these and other copywriting mistakes, take a look at the featured resource below where you can download a copy of a free report, Copywriting Blunders, so you will be further forewarned. Download, read it and take action 😊
Podcasting Basics For Beginners
Podcasting Basics For Beginners
Podcasting is the relay of information through audio. Rather than read an article or watch a video, your target audience will listen to your pre-recorded “internet radio show” as you provide content on topics of interest to them.
Once your podcast is recorded, it can be broadcast to a wider audience in a number of ways. It can be listed in directories so it can be discovered and listened to. It can also be broadcast to other websites and listened to anytime, anywhere, by people who subscribe to your podcast.
Podcasts are available via a service known as RSS (Real Simple Syndication). When they subscribe to your podcast, they will receive the latest files right in their RSS feed reader. Other websites in your niche can also embed your feed into their site so their audience can listen to it too.
Understanding Podcasting Terminology
It is important to understand key podcast terms if you wish to create a podcast of your own.
* Podcast – A series of recording audio programs, usually published on a regular schedule, such as once a week.
* Podcatcher – Software which detects each new podcast you publish and delivers it to your subscribers.
* RSS (Real Simple Syndication)– A way to share files with your target audience, or allow others to publish your content, or syndicate it, at their site.
* Aggregator – An aggregator, or RSS aggregator, collects RSS feeds. It will deliver podcasts and other contents you subscribe to. Feedly and Feedbin would be two good examples of RSS aggregators.
* Channel – A series of podcasts. Think of it as a radio station that can be listened to any time by people who subscribe to your channel.
* Enclosure – The file for the podcast. It is enclosed in a reader in order to be listened to.
* Metadata – The most important information about the podcast, so it can be discovered by readers and search engines. It will usually include title, recording artist, file format and so on.
* ID3 – ID3 is a metadata specification that allows information to be added to MP3 files. Commonly, items like track title, artist, album and track number are placed within ID3 “tags” that identify the type of data. It helps your podcast get discovered in locations like iTunes.
* iPod – The popular digital audio player from Apple. The word “podcast” comes from the combination of the words “iPod” and “broadcast”.
* Juice – Juice is a free program that automatically downloads new shows when they become available and synchronizes them with your iPod or other digital audio player. Formerly known as “iPodder”.
* Item – A single show in your podcasting channel. It should be metatagged, preferably with ID3 tags.
* iTunes – iTunes is Apple’s multimedia store and software, which will allow you to buy, or access or subscribe for free, a range of content such as music, videos, TV shows and podcasts. It links to a directory of podcasts and acts as a podcatcher by allowing users to subscribe to podcasts and delivering them to their iPod or other player.
When you upload your content on iTunes, metatags for it will be created, making it discoverable to those interested in your topic or niche.
* MP3 – MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3) is the standard format for podcast files. The format compresses the data into a very small file while still maintaining sound quality.
Now that we’ve covered the basics about podcasting, it might be time to think about adding a podcast to your marketing mix. So let’s now look at how you can grow your audience after you have started your podcast.
How To Grow Your Audience For Your Podcast
Once you have decided to launch a podcast, the next main concern for most people is how to grow an audience for it. Your growth and marketing plan should actually be built right into the podcast.
- Give it a strong, interesting name
It needs to appeal to your niche and be searchable on sites and aggregators.
- Create strong titles for each podcast
Every podcast should have a keyworded name, not just numbers, to tell people what to expect and to make it more discoverable.
- Write enticing teaser copy
Make sure the description of your podcast channel, and each podcast you create, is keyworded and sounds exciting enough for your audience to want to listen.
- Be consistent
Set a schedule of regular podcasts so people know what to expect. It’s a big commitment, but it’s the only way to keep an audience coming back for more and telling others about it.
- Tell your lists
If you have email marketing lists, send an email to invite them to subscribe to the podcast, send in topic suggestions and guest suggestions, or even get involved by being interviewed online.
- Social media
Tell everyone in your social media account about your new podcast channel. Each time you create a new podcast, post about it on your social media pages. Encourage people to share the post with anyone they know who might also be interested in it.
- Forums, discussion boards and groups
Post information on your podcast on niche-related areas on the internet where your target audience will congregate.
- Your blog
Embed your podcast feed into your site. Also, give a page to each podcast you create. Add a transcript to attract the search engines. Include a call to action or subscribe button.
- Be a guest blogger
Guest blog: that is, give free content to one or more blogs related to your niche. Use the link back they should give you to point to you podcast subscription page.
- Be a guest on other podcasts
Grow your audience by being a guest on high-profile niche blogs. In this way, you will get a chance to point your URL to the listeners who like what you have to say. Offer a guest spot in exchange and ask the guest to share the URL once the podcast has been created. Or offer them a copy they can use as is on their podcast feed once you have finished editing it.
- Help a Reporter Out
The HARO website allows you to list yourself as an expert in your niche. Your biography can list your podcast. You can also mention it if you are interviewed and used as a resource for a journalist’s story.
- Issue a press release
Tell the world you have a new podcast with the help of a press release. Chances are that journalists interested in your niche or looking for interesting information to pass along to your readers, will be happy to pick up your story and share it. There are free and paid press release distribution services which can help you spread the word.
- Blogger outreach
Blogger outreach is similar to issuing press releases, only it targets top bloggers in top niches. They might be interested in the podcast, the transcript, or having you on as a guest blogger.
Growing your audience for your podcast does not have to be an uphill struggle if you follow these tips and tricks. Use all you’ve learned, and you should soon have an ever-growing audience of eager listeners.
Are you going to add podcasting to your business? It’s definitely something worth considering.
Of course, a podcast is only a small part of any online business; the primary concern is to get visitors to your business and then to convert them from visitors into buyers.
If you want to know more about converting visitors into buyers, check out the featured resource below for a free Conversion Boost report; download, read it and take action 😊
Automate Your Way To Success
Automate Your Way To Success!
I’m sure that many of you are familiar with the term ‘automation’ especially if you are an entrepreneur or online marketer.
Marketing automation is the process of using technology to streamline marketing efforts and make them more effective.
Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns — not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers and this makes good business sense.
But automation isn’t just for business. You can use the principles of automation in your daily life too.
Think about it. The smart home is now a reality and the technology is getting smarter and cheaper. More people are working from home, either as an employee or entrepreneur and they need to use tools that can keep help them be more productive, and the line between home and marketing automation will start to blur.
In this post we’re going to look at ways to automate both your life and business so you can make the most of the tools available to you at present. Things will develop and only get better as technology improves but even now, there is a lot that you can do to automate your life, so let’s get started.
5 Ways To Automate Your Life
Wouldn’t it be great if, like your oven, you had a self-cleaning home? Or taxes that just magically did themselves every year? Or how about bills that pay themselves on time every month?
While we can’t automate everything, there definitely are a lot of things we can automate in our lives to save us time and energy so that we have more time to do those things we enjoy or those that will make us money!
- Automatic Bill Payment – This is one of those “why have I never done this before” type things. Once you’ve set this up in your bank account (if a physical check needs to be sent) or with the business receiving the payment (most have online automatic payment options), your regular monthly bills will magically get paid every month.
They’ll get paid on time and you won’t even need to think about it, except for the initial setup, and making sure you have money in the account to pay with when the payment is scheduled to go out.
- Computer Health and Security – Invest in good system scan and maintenance software (Iolo System Mechanic is highly recommended) and create a schedule of periodic system scans and clean-up.
In the same vein, an automatic backup system is also a necessity, if you want to protect everything that lives on your hard drive, like irreplaceable pictures.
- What You Eat – It’s an onerous task, but the only way you can truly get a firm hold on your diet is to do meal planning and prep once a week and stick to the plan.
There are so many benefits to this – not only do you save money by not eating out, but you save all those empty calories consumed, and you can be sure your body is getting what it needs.
You can take this one step further and either order from a service like Plated.com, where you’ll receive recipes as well as all the ingredients you need or hire someone to do the meal planning and prep for you, so all you must do is open the fridge or freezer, heat, and eat.
- Papers and Things – First, go paperless whenever you can. Most bills that you pay online have a paperless option, so use that. For everything else that you feel you need to keep, utilize a scanner so that you can keep everything on your computer instead of in physical filing cabinets or all over your desk surface.
Then, do a bit of research online to find a folders/files system that will work well for you and that you feel you can stick with, and then go organize everything. Luckily, this will only need to be done once if you stick with it.
- Shopping and Coupons – Whether it’s groceries, sundries, or extraneous goods…everything can be found online and delivered to your door. Amazon.com even has an option where you subscribe to things you need to purchase repeatedly (paper towels, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, etc.) and they’ll be automatically delivered on a schedule of your own choosing.
And, you’ll get discounts, too! When you do shopping like this online, you’ll often get coupons to use that give you an even deeper discount. And think of the time you’ll save not having to traipse through the supermarket!
5 More Ways To Automate Your Life
Automation is the future, and that future is now. It’s no longer science fiction to think about automating your interior lights or furnace or to have coffee already made for you the minute you get out of bed in the morning.
These things and much more have been utilized for years now by people who realize that doing less is how to get more (important stuff) done.
Here are five additional ways to automate your life!
- Automate Your Car – Automatic (automatic.com) is a service whereby you’re able to monitor gas mileage, service records and maintenance, trips, vehicle tracking, immediate accident reporting, and more all by plugging in a dongle to your car’s computer that then communicates with your smartphone via Bluetooth or 3G.
There is a Lite version and Pro version, so if you don’t want to think about things like maintenance schedules, Automatic is for you.
- Make Your Smartphone Smarter – You can tell your Android smartphone to do certain things at certain times by using the Tasker App. Everything from dimming your screen to turning off notifications, to customizing your battery-saving settings, Tasker can do it.
If you’re an iPhone user, you’ll need to jailbreak your phone first, and then search out individual apps to accomplish the tasks you’d like to automate.
- Integrate All The Things – If integration is your thing, Zapier.com is probably already on your radar, but if not, it’s worth the time to check it out. Want to create Google Calendar events from your Evernote reminders?
How about adding your ‘liked’ Instagram posts to Google Drive? Or maybe you’d like to save your new Freshbooks clients to a Active Campaign Client List? Zapier can get it done. And it is amazing!
- Home Automation – Home automation isn’t just for burglar alarms anymore. No, you can automate lighting, heating and air conditioning, sprinkler systems, outdoor grilling, vacuuming, mopping, even mowing the lawn!
As technology reduces the gap between where we are now and fully automated living, we’re sure to see many interesting inventions pop up in the near future, and beyond.
- Mundane Daily Chores – Remember the broom in Fantasia? Don’t you wish we all had one of those? While this isn’t a “true” automation, creating a schedule that utilizes time in your day in which to get those mundane tasks done will have you doing them without even realizing it.
For instance, while your coffee is brewing in the morning, wipe down the kitchen counters and stovetop. Wipe down the bathroom sink while you’re waiting for the shower to get hot. Utilizing these minutes to accomplish necessary tasks will help you avoid having to do a “big” once-a-week housecleaning that will take hours out of your weekend.
4 Areas To Automate In Your Business
Automation can seem overwhelming at first – where do you even start? You know that automation is, in some capacity, necessary to your business success.
You also know that you can’t do everything yourself manually, nor do you desire to. Automation gives you the ability to work on your business without working so much in your business. It allows you to have necessary steps that happen automatically without you getting involved.
In this section we’ll explore four common areas for business automation.
Social Media Automation
There are many marketing automation platforms and tools such as ContentStudio make automating your social media posts easy as pie. You simply queue up as many posts as you want, with or without images or video, and schedule them to publish, and you’re done!
You can spend an hour or two once a week and schedule up your posts to several different social media platforms at the same time.
After that, all you need to do is follow up and respond to comments on those posts, and you’re good to go!
Web Hosting And Management
Your website is the cornerstone of your online business, and your web hosting is the building that houses it, so it pays to have a web host that will do the maintenance you need so that you don’t have to worry about it.
This will keep your site(s) up and running, and as secure as they can be.
Try to find a web host with stellar support so that if something should go wrong, they’ll be immediately available to get your site back up again.
Website Analytics
You’ve got to know your numbers. But this can be fiddly and overwhelming because you’re not just dealing with website traffic anymore.
Your best bet for automating this task is to find an all-in-one dashboard (such as Cyfe.com) that can analyze and give you data on your website traffic, as well as your social media engagement, Facebook or Adwords ads performance, keyword ranking information…and with just one place to log in to get this information, it’s a true gem!
Yes, you can use Google Analytics or AWStats, but the point here is to automate and free you up!
This is not an extensive list of marketing automation by any means. I haven’t even covered email marketing automation platforms, such as Active Campaign or Aweber.
Help Desk Support
If you’re still answering support emails one by one, you need to get out of the dark ages and begin automating this task immediately!
There are so many excellent solutions for help desk automation – Freshdesk.com and Zendesk.com are just two of hundreds of providers who will allow you to utilize automatic responses, FAQ sections, and will save you hours of answering individual emails.
Having a centralised support portal is best for both your customers and you so look into implementing this change now.
So far, we have looked at some useful ways to automate many things in your life and business by mainly using technology.
But you can also delegate tasks to others so let’s look at that now.
3 Key Steps To Delegation
If you’re going to be a success in the business world, you need to learn to delegate those tasks you either don’t like doing or aren’t good at.
Delegation is a hard thing for some to do – those who like to be in control of anything find it difficult to give up that control to someone else.
On the other hand, since you’re an automation expert now, this quite possibly won’t be an issue for you.
The key is really in the balance – the balance between your ability to trust that others will complete the tasks given properly and on time, and making sure that those you delegate to have what they need from you to get the job done right.
Here are three steps that you can take to ensure that all the tasks you decide to delegate to others get done when you want, how you want.
- Set out very clear instructions for the tasks to be completed. This is the most important step and the one that you’ll have to put the most work of your own into. But doing so will ensure that you get the results you want.
First, outline what is to be done. Use visuals if necessary. If you were going to get a brand-new haircut, you would bring in several pictures to be sure that your vision was the same as the hairstylists, right? So set this up clearly, leaving nothing to guess at.
Also, spell out how the tasks are to be completed because you simply want them done correctly the first time. So, don’t leave this to chance.
- Be available to your team when they need you. Make certain that they have your contact information and clear instructions that if there is anything they don’t understand that they should contact you instead of making their own judgment call.
To facilitate this, you will need to be available to them when they need you. Never simply assume that your tasks are getting completed. Check on them, but not obsessively. This is supposed to make your life easier, remember?
- Improvise, adapt, and improve. To create as close to a hands-off experience as you can, after one project is done, get together with your team to decide what went well, what went wrong, and how to better facilitate success on the next project.
This level of intimacy is necessary for getting your hands-on time whittled down to next to nothing, thereby allowing you more laziness.
OK, so you are now an automation and delegation expert. But what about goal setting? Is it something you should always be focused on, especially if you are trying to slacken off and reduce your efforts?
Well, let’s see if setting goals is all it’s cracked up to be.
Give Your Goals The Boot
We’re told to make goals and stick with them. Make big goals! Make little goals! Make interim goals! Tell everyone your goals! Don’t tell anyone your goals! And in reality, your goals could very well be hurting you, instead of pushing you forward into success.
In the laid back success lifestyle, which you’re trying to achieve, you need less to do, not more, and goals are one thing that should go to the chopping block.
Here are five clues that goal setting may not be the right thing for you to focus on.
- You love to set goals, but you don’t accomplish them. Really, what’s the point in that, aside from subjecting yourself to the guilt of an unfinished task? If you’re a starter, but not a finisher, find someone to partner with who will finish the projects you start, and then you can both benefit.
- Are your actually taking action? Setting goals allow you to feel as if you’ve achieved something, but it’s just a mental game you play. It’s the action that follows the goal-setting that makes a difference, not the goal setting itself. Don’t mistake one for the other, and feel that just because you’ve set a goal, you’ve done something significant.
- Are your goals working for you? You feel that setting goals set you up for future success. Again, the success comes from doing – are you doing what you need to do to achieve that goal? You can’t secure a great future by setting goals and then letting them sit.
- You set goals because you’re supposed to. Everyone does it, so it must be a good thing to do, right? Not even close. Stop following the masses and begin making your own choices based on what you value, and what you want out of life. And then act on those things…goal or no goal.
- You feel you’re a nobody if you don’t accomplish your goals. Listen, the worth that you have in this world doesn’t have to do with what you do or don’t do. Your worth is infinite and it’s inside you – so why pressure yourself into doing stuff you don’t want to do?
By removing goals from your life, you may just feel a huge weight off your shoulders Especially if you’re just following everyone else who is setting goals, but don’t really feel it in your heart. Let go of that sense of guilt, let go of the goal setting, and just focus on the action!
Using automation, delegation etc. to get what you want in life all comes from having the correct mindset and this is why many entrepreneurs and business owners work on their thinking to achieve at the highest levels.
If you want to develop a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
4 Traffic Generation Tips For Affiliate Marketers
4 Traffic Generation Tips For Affiliate Marketers
So you are interested in affiliate marketing. That’s great because it is a relatively quick, virtually risk-free way to start making money online.
Let’s quickly explain affiliate marketing for beginners in case you are unsure of how it works.
Basically, affiliate marketing is when you promote someone else’s products and when someone buys through your affiliate links, you get paid an affiliate commission.
As an affiliate marketer, you’re acting like a salesperson for the company. You sign up for their affiliate program, help to make a sale, and then the company rewards you.
The best thing about affiliate marketing is that it is incredibly scalable. A typical salesperson will only sell products from one company, or their own products and services. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products from many different sources and earn commissions from all of them.
Many people try to start with Amazon affiliate marketing because Amazon is such a large, household name. The problem is that their affiliate commissions are tiny compared to other affiliate programs. Don’t rule Amazon out but you need to have realistic expectations when using it.
How much money can you make as an affiliate marketer? Well, the possibilities are endless, and the top performers are easily making 6-7 figure incomes online, and best of all, they don’t have to create or support their own products.
There are many affiliate platforms and programs that you can apply to join depending on your niche.
But if a product or service looks like a good fit for you and they don’t offer an official affiliate program, you can reach out to them and see if they would be willing for you to promote it to your audience in return for a commission. Many companies will agree because it is a win-win for them, After all, you are sending traffic to their offers so it’s not costing them any time or effort unless they make a sale.
And on the topic of traffic…
As an affiliate marketer, it’s crucial that you know how to drive traffic to your offers. This is a skill that will make or break you. So, you’ll to need to devote a huge chunk of your time in the beginning to learning how to drive traffic. While simple in concept, it’s not entirely easy and will require effort on your part.
Unlike product creators who can rely on affiliates to drive traffic, as an affiliate, you can only count on yourself. The traffic you generate can either be from free methods or paid traffic.
If you have the budget for it, you can use paid traffic. It’s faster and you get feedback much quicker. You have complete control of targeting so you will know who sees your ads and if you get your targeting right, you should be able to break even on your ad spend on your front end offers.
This effectively means you are building a buyers list for free and this is a crucial part of any online business as these buyers can be put in front of more offers.
However, if you’re a beginner and short on funds, there are many free methods of traffic generation that are effective too. The term ‘free’ is deceptive because you’ll be paying for it in time and effort, and you must be patient before you see any noticeable results; this may be frustrating, but you need to understand this from the beginning!
Nevertheless, you can drive free traffic and still make sales if you know what to do. Below you’ll find a few tips that you should always bear in mind when driving traffic.
Know Where Your Audience Hangs Out
You must know where your niche audience hangs out. If it’s a bodybuilding crowd you’re targeting, they’ll probably be on bodybuilding forums, fan pages for bodybuilders, YouTube channels featuring fitness experts and so on. So, you can go into these places and start siphoning traffic from there to your sites.
It is important to know who your target market is and what they are looking for. This is so often overlooked by marketers of all persuasions because it isn’t the most interesting thing to do, but it is one of the most important!
Create an ideal customer avatar and refer to it whenever you are writing sales copy, blog posts or creating videos to promote your affiliate offers.
If you know who they are, what they want and their specific pain points, you will be much more successful in gaining the sale.
Start With One Method
The reason so many marketers never do well with traffic is because they never focus their efforts on one method. If you’re going with video marketing, create a good channel and keep making videos till you have a following. Learn how to optimize your channel and videos so that you rank.
If you’re using Facebook groups, learn how to get more members in your group and post stuff that they like, and which can be linked to your web properties.
If you are blogging, learn to write interesting and engaging posts that are crammed with helpful information that your readers will enjoy and appreciate. Be consistent and write often. Don’t write short posts but instead go for longer posts that can go into more detail (a 1000 word minimum is a good benchmark to aim for). Learn about SEO so you can get your blog posts ranked in the search engines.
Pick one traffic method and strive to master it until you have an avalanche of traffic coming to your sites, etc. Once that’s successful, you can move on to the next traffic method while maintaining the current one.
Repeated And Relentless Effort
Driving traffic is a continuous process. Keep repeating your efforts and never give up. Even if your first few videos have only 10 or 20 views, keep going. Over time you will get more views and a bigger audience.
It takes time for things to snowball. remember what I said earlier; patience is key with free traffic methods.
The same applies to most traffic methods. The more videos you have, the more traffic you’ll get. The more people in your Facebook group, the more comments and engagement you’ll get. The more blog posts you write, the more visitors will come to your website. The more paid ads you create, the higher your chances of finding winning campaigns. It’s all a matter of time and repeated effort.
Engagement
This is another important factor. Engage with your traffic. Reply to comments on your videos. Like and respond to comments in your Facebook groups and ads. If you have commenting enabled on your blog and someone takes the time to comment, reply to them and thank them for taking the time to comment.
The more you engage, the better your relationship with your audience will be. They’ll grow to like you, trust you and will eventually buy through you.
Remember these pointers when driving traffic. It’s not as difficult as most marketers make it out to be. Once you understand how it works and you’re consistent, you will see results. The key to traffic generation is consistency. That’s where most marketers fail.
Get this right and you’ll have all the traffic you want.
Once you have started to make progress you can rinse and repeat with another traffic method.
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Make Money Blogging As A Career
Make Money Blogging As A Career
Blogging has been a widely known concept for quite some time now. While they may not know the technical ins and outs of how it works, many men and women have heard about blogging in pop culture.
Julie and Julia is a good example of this. It’s a movie that originated from a true-life tale of Julie Powell, who set out to blog about her experiences cooking each of Julia Child’s 524 recipes from her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just 365 days.
Her blog became so popular that she was offered a book and movie deal for her efforts, and she also published her second book. Her success isn’t common, but not everyone needs a book and movie deal to make a substantial profit from their blog!
The benefits of blogging are huge; it is free or cheap to start so the risk-reward benefits are huge. Starting a blog is simple; you can start with a WordPress blog for free if you want to, but I would suggest paying a few bucks for a domain name and hosting if you want to take the whole thing seriously and really want to make money blogging.
How Blogging Works And Where Most People Go Wrong
Looking for “blog jobs” online is something many people do these days. They know they love to post on Facebook, and they hate their current 9-5 job, so they think they’d love to get hired as an official blogger for a company.
It’s true that more and more companies are coming onboard as blog entities – because they understand the value of having a social media presence online, part of which is their blog audience (in addition to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, for example).
But you have to understand that when a company sets out to attract a blogger to represent their business online, they don’t want an amateur blogger. They want someone who knows how blogging works and understands the business side of blogging – because when you’re a blogger, you’re building a brand (or destroying it, in some unfortunate cases).
When you start looking at professional blogger-for-hire jobs, you’ll see that they want you to understand online marketing fully, they want you to deliver a certain number of blog posts per week (usually five), and sometimes want you to go out and find guest blogging opportunities where you can blog elsewhere and link back to their main blog.
It’s not a good career for someone who is new to blogging and thinks it “might be fun.” This is for seasoned professionals – and sometimes the company will even want to investigate to see what kind of current reach you have with your own content in the social media world.
If you’re already at a company that doesn’t have an online presence, then maybe you can make a suggestion that they allow you to head up that operation. This would give you a little experience so that you could then go out and brag about launching and generating a good buzz for your current company.
Blogging To Make Money
The do-it-yourself blogging to make money route is far more rewarding. It’s something you can do anytime – in the morning before work, on your lunch hour, after work and on the weekends.
Then when it becomes profitable, you can use it to replace your current income and begin blogging fulltime. When you choose this path, you have much more personal satisfaction in your blogging career.
If you want to learn more about monetizing your blog, check out this post here.
Blogging is a real business when you start pursuing it for financial reasons. Yes, it gives you much in terms of happiness – but when you’re making money doing something you love, it’s very rewarding.
You have to treat this like a business from the very start. If you start blogging haphazardly, then your readers will recognize that it’s an amateur site. Yes, some will become fans anyway – but others want to know they’re following a leader in whatever niche you choose to blog about.
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.
How do you pick a niche for your blog? Some blogs have a multitude of topics – from entertainment to fashion to business to health. You can do that, but unless you have a team of contributors, it’s hard to maintain the momentum needed for a broad blog like this.
A better option might be to narrow down your focus into something that you really love. It can still be broad – like a women’s health blog for example. But it’s not as narrow as “everything” or “health in general” (including both genders).
You can even drill down more and go with one form of women’s health, like menopause or pregnancy. You don’t even need to be an expert in it – it’s all about sharing information and as you learn, you can share!
One thing that’s important is that you make sure that you love whatever topic you’re blogging about. You should want to wake up every day, eager to get to your computer.
If you dread it because it bores you or it’s depressing, then you won’t help your readers and the blog won’t become profitable for you.
Aside from the overall slant, you get to choose what each individual entry on your blog is all about. If you were blogging for another company, they might tell you what to blog about each day – even if you found it mundane.
You can set an entire editorial calendar for your blog where you choose which topics are presented to your readers. You also get to pick the tone for the blog pieces.
For example, let’s take the diet niche. You could be a fad and trend diet blogger who emphasizes fast weight loss – or someone who harps on the fact that weight loss should just be the adoption of better nutrition and exercise and the pounds should come off slowly.
Benefits Of Blogging: Developing A Relationship With Your Readers
Having a relationship with your readers means they value your blog, and they share the link to it with other people. You want that type of connection because as a professional, the traffic and branding that you gain will be priceless.
When blogs have a loyal readership, they enjoy a fantastic word of mouth traffic flow. While many bloggers are out there buying links back to their site and paying people to help them get traffic, you can do it all for free.
First, pick topics they want to know about. Part of your job in relationship building is to listen to your audience and meet their needs. There are many ways you can do this.
Do some preliminary keyword research to find out what people want to know in your niche. Using the menopause example, you could go to UberSuggest.org and type in what are menopause.
This is known as a sentence starter – and it gives you some insight into what type of blog post you might want to do, such as:
- What are menopause hot flashes like?
- What are menopause symptoms caused by?
- What are the best menopause vitamins?
A good keyword tool gives you help on what to blog about. But there’s more that you can do to find topics. You can look in forum threads and see what people are asking.
You can also simply invite your readers to submit questions to you. You can do this on your email autoresponder opt in form, or have a special contact form on your blog where people can engage with you that way.
Whenever someone emails you with a question, you can assume there are more people out there who are wondering the same thing. Use those questions as fodder for your blog topics.
When you start blogging about all of these things, it makes the audience feel like you’ve really got your finger on the pulse of the marketplace – like you have great instincts.
Next, write in a highly conversational style and end each blog with an invitation to connect. People need to feel like you’re speaking just to them – even if you’re not.
If you write, make sure it’s conversational and not stuffy like you’d write for a professional publication. If you make a video blog, look right in the camera and be casual and relaxed, not stuff and nervous.
When you end a blog post, you can ask a question or invite people to share their own $0.02 about the topic in the comments. Make sure that whatever comment system you’re using, it’s easy to find – because some are almost hidden.
Participate in the conversation that goes on in your blog comments. If people are kind enough to take you up on your invitation, then make an effort to have a dialogue with them.
Thank them for their comment, call them by name, and open up a discussion about what they had to say. You can use a plugin to help the comments become “threaded,” which helps all of your readers see who was responding to who.
Supporting Yourself Financially And Make Money Blogging
When you start blogging for profit, you should be consistent with your efforts. You should blog regularly – daily if possible, but at least several times a week. There are a few ways you can make money as a blogger.
Build a list from your blog so that whenever you have a new blog post, you can notify people about it. Also have an RSS system set up for people who use RSS feed readers to get notified of your new content.
Whenever you have a list, it gives you a certain amount of power – the power to instantly communicate with your target audience when you are selling or promoting products.
Because of this, you have to make sure that you don’t abuse that power by spamming their email with useless or irrelevant offers. If you do this, you build a reputation as a spammer.
Sell ad space for a certain amount of profits. You can arrange a specific area of your blog for ad space that people rent on a monthly basis, paying the ad revenue to you directly.
If you go this route, make sure you have specifics in place to control what kinds of ads can get placed on your blog – all the way down to the colors and animation of it if you want.
Sign up for AdSense, too. This can help you get clicks and revenue. You can put different sized ad banners on your blog, from buttons to skyscraper ads. You can include images or go with just text.
One thing you have to remember whenever you place any ads on your blog is that yes, it gives you some money when people leave your site for somewhere else – but in leaving, it also means someone else is capturing their name and email address and selling something to them, not you.
Promote tangible products as an affiliate. You can sign up as an Amazon Associate and promote anything they sell there that they offer a commission on. Using our menopause example, if you promoted a chilled pillow, you could earn a percentage of each sale from your blog post.
Promote digital products as an affiliate. Digital products can be found at sites like ClickBank.com. You can sign up for free and get a hoplink (affiliate link) where you earn around 50% for each sale.
Create your own products and sell them from your blog. You don’t have to promote other people’s stuff. Why not create an info product (eBook, video or audio course) and teach something you blog about in more depth – or in a more comprehensive manner?
Offer services from your blog. Freelancing like writing, graphics, or other services can be offered right from your blog. Coaching is something you can offer. Many people pay top dollar for one-on-one coaching sessions via Skype or even email!
Blogging can be a very fun and very profitable venture if you approach it correctly. Don’t make the mistake of flying by the seat of your pants. If you do this, your blog will be scattered with topics, have no set monetization plan, and you’ll end up unhappy with the effort you’ve put in.
With proper planning and enthusiasm, you’ll never need to look for “blogging jobs” again – in fact, you might be the one putting out feelers for a professional blogger to come onboard and help you with your content needs! Being in a position of power makes a world of difference.
And remember, if you want a premium training on blogging the right way, check out the Rapid Blogging Blueprint which includes over the shoulder training on blogging the right way.
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