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When Should You Build a List?

You should build a list as soon as you possibly can. Everyone is different. Some things are going to work one way for someone and the totally opposite for someone else. One thing is for sure, the sooner you start, the faster you will make MORE money.

I would venture to say that if your an absolute beginner at marketing products online then you may want to start a blog first. This way you can learn a little about getting traffic, uploading files and registering a domain, which are all things  you’ll need to know when building your list. Plus you’ll be able to start making a little money ASAP and actually use your blog to build your list too. Building a list takes a little more patients and if done right will take a little longer to get to a sale.

If you are familiar with uploading files and some of the technical stuff then building a list first might work better for you, but I think more times than not, that people new to Internet Marketing aren’t privy to these things.

So basically to sum up when to “Build A List?” ” The Sooner the Better.”

What are You Going to Need?

The first thing you’ll need is an auto responder. The two more popular auto responders are AWeber and Get Response. Then your going to need traffic just like you would a blog. Just use the same methods that you use to get traffic to your blog, the only other thing that you can do that you may not do with a blog is start a small pay per click  campaign.

You’ll need a product or a really BIG SECRET. You can find plenty of resale rights products out there for free. You may want to look at the product very closely if it’s free, because it’s quality might be really poor and need some brushing up. It might be so bad that you couldn’t pay people to take it, so you really need to take a good look at it first. You could also make a small investment for one, which isn’t too much, yet more likely to be better quality. Consider upgrading when you find a good resource for resale rights products to save time in the long run.

If you just want to give away a “Secret” just offer a video to let your customer in on it. You should make sure that this is something real good though, so your not telling someone something they already know.

How to Keep Customers on Your List

In order to build a list you have to make sure you lose as few people as possible. If  people unsubscribe from your list  more than people are subscribing the building process is going to take a very long time right. So since your trying to build a list as fast as possible there is a couple of things you need to do to manage your list the right way.

1. Start by sending out valuable content right off the bat. Something that is going to help them out. You want to send anywhere from 20 to 30 e-mails before you consider asking your customer to purchase from you. This is something you can test out and see what works better for you, but make sure you build a relationship with them first.
2. Stay in contact with your list on a regular basis. You don’t want to overwhelm your customer either, a good rule of thumb is to send out one e-mail a day, maybe two if there is enough value there. This way you’ll also leave some openings for product launch’s you may be promoting in the future.
3. Keep the content as fresh as possible, so your not just echoing what someone else is saying, always be on the search for the hot content.

Why is a List So Important?

There are several reasons why a “List” is so important. The most popular reason is no surprise. MORE MONEY. When your selling products from your blog one person is going to be worth say $30. When someone is signed up for your mailing list, you now have the potential of  making 2 - 10 more sales from them. So instead of one customer being worth $30 they are now possibly worth $60 - $300 or more.

You are now also developing a relationship with them and promoting products is easier when someone has a bond with you. This trust will translate into more sales without a doubt.

“Social Media” is another way to build your list, although it can be a little tricky. The best Marketers on the Internet are still running tests to see what method works best with “Social Media.”

If your interested in using “Social Media” I would not go it alone. You really should look to one of the experts that have already gone through the trial and error process. Ryan Deiss is one of these people and has figured out a way to build a big list fast with Twitter. The method he has come up with works with just Twitter and nothing else, but it works amazing. Some people don’t agree with Ryan’s  method including his good friend Perry Belcher, but it works and it works really good. I highly recommend you check out what Ryan has to offer because he always puts out amazing products and Twitter is so easy to use you’ll be building a big list in no time.

“Twitter List-Building” by Ryan Deiss

Feel free to leave a comment whether you like the post or didn’t like it let me know. If you have any unanswered questions please ask I will do what I can to help.

If you have a blog you are probably looking for ways to market that blog. The first things that probably come to mind are how can you do this online. There are also a lot of ebooks and other blogs out there telling you exactly how to market your blog online. There is everything from article marketing to posting in forums. What a lot of people don’t think of is there is another way to market that not many people are even considering doing that you can take full advantage of right now. You can market your blog offline too. There are some very simple yet, not talked about ways ( from what I’ve seen anyway) too market and advertise your blog offline and be very effective.  So, what are some of these methods you may ask, well here they are:

1. Conventions or Conferences: If you see any of these two things taking place in your area it would be a very smart thing for you to attend. When you get there you may find that your one of the few with promotion of your blog or product in mind. You could even have a shirt printed with your blog URL on it.
2. Business Cards: This may seem like a no brainer, but how many people do you see doing this or talking about it for that matter? The great thing about business cards is you can virtually hand them out anywhere and to almost anybody. One thing you should keep in mind if your going to have some printed up is make sure they stand out and catch the eye. I have even seen business’s that have a board or a place specifically for people to post their business cards. Hell, throw them up in the air and let the wind catch them. ( Just kidding, don’t do this please.)
3. Postcards: You could have some eye catching post cards printed up and either pay to have them mailed out or mail them out yourself. The good thing about post cards is they don’t have to be opened and people will more than likely just throw them over by their computer were it can grab their attention.
4. Blogger Meet Ups: If there are any of these in your area I would take full advantage of showing up. Meeting up with other bloggers is a great way to make new connections and potential promoters for your blog.
5. Stickers: This is another great way to advertise your website or blog. You can put one on your car or I just recently read about a guy who brought some stickers to a gathering he attended and the ended up everywhere, on people and in pictures.
6. Offline Newsletters
7. Flyer’s
8. Newspaper Ads
9. Yellow Pages
10. Radio Advertising
11. Brochures
12. Classified Ads

Now I realize that these may cost anywhere from a little bit of money to a lot of money, but it may be something for you to think about in the future.

The best thing for you to do, especially if your new to making money online, is to just experiment with the least expensive of the ideas and put just a little money in to it to see if it’s going to stick. If it does then you can run with it and invest more money into it.

The main idea of this post is to get you to think outside of the box and not get stuck thinking that all your efforts have to be online. There is a whole market out there waiting for you to grab their attention in the offline world.

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In this post Dan Kaufman from Bar Zine shares some tips on writing Sharp Snappy Blog Posts.

When you write a story you’re lucky if you can get a reader beyond the first paragraph. This is true in print and it’s even worse online (a recent study by Jacob Neilson at http://tinyurl.com/mubtmr makes for interesting reading). After all, your post is just one out of millions online – and the difference can lie in how well written your copy is.

Writing is a craft that involves a continual learning process.

Having been a journalist and editor for the past 15 years (and I’m now a blogger as well) I still find myself learning – but there are some hard and fast techniques to make your copy snappier and more engaging. Here are some of the basics:

1) Write Short Sentences

Next time you pick up a book and can’t put it down, stop and have a look at the sentence length – you’ll often find the sentences are short and punchy. 32 words is the maximum for an article’s first sentence and while there are exceptions they ought to be rare. Aim to only have one point per sentence.

2) Use the Active Voice

Have a look at the following two sentences:

The cat chases the mouse

and

The mouse is being chased by the cat

Which one is punchier?

It’s the former because the subject (the cat) is doing something to the object (the mouse). As such, it makes sense to have the subject appear in the sentence before the object. In other words, the sentence is written using the active voice (whereas “The mouse is being chased by the cat” is passive).

Using the active voice is more direct and requires less words – and the less words, the snappier the sentence becomes.

3) Write in the Present Tense

Which of the following headlines seems punchier?

PM halts peace talks

Or

PM halted peace talks

Unless your blog post takes the form of a hard news story you should use the present tense. Even hard news headlines are written in the present tense to make them seem more immediate.

4) Use Positive Language

This means avoiding negative words such as no, not and didn’t when appropriate. You’ll see why when you look at the following example:

Troops have not pulled out of war zone

Vs

Troops stay in war zone

The bottom example reads better since, as with using active voice, making sentences positive often makes them snappier. We also changed the tense from past to present.

5) Write in a conversational tone

A lot of people don’t realise that good writing means using a conversational tone – albeit with better grammar than you would use when talking to a friend in a bar.

Avoid hype, pretentious words, jargon and acronyms – instead of impressing readers it’s a turn off. You should never talk down to your reader by using language they may not understand and you should never assume they know something they may not. Unless you’re trying to spin something or confuse, use simple, clear and direct language. As the old saying goes, if you confuse your readers you lose your readers.

George Orwell put it another way in The Politics of the English Language.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

Dan Kaufman publishes Bar Zine (barzine.com.au), where he reviews Sydney bars. He also writes for The Sydney Morning Herald and teaches online journalism at UTS.

Video from Problogger.net

Got a messy sidebar on your blog? It’s time to clean it up (like I cleaned up my sock drawer today).

We have all heard that stuffing your blog or website with keywords is a good way to get traffic. Posting in forums or starting some external blogs like blogger.com or hubpages.com ( which is technically a external blog)  is also great ways to drive traffic to your website or blog as well. These are all the well known things to do and what a lot of your “experts” are talking about. You can also make videos for Youtube or Myspace to get traffic as well. All these strategies are great and are essential. Yet, there are some other things that you should do to get even more traffic which are really less time consuming as well. The only thing with these methods are you can’t abuse them. You really only want to use these methods maybe once a day or every other day per site. I think once a day is fine though. If you try using a few of these other methods more than once a day you’ll probably be seen as a spammer. They way it works is you usually give a title for the blog your submitting and a short description, then enter the url and submit it. That’s all it takes and you’ll get great results if you do this consistently. Some of these very simple things you can do to get some more traffic is submit your articles and website or blog to:

• Digg.com: Digg is a website for people to share and discover content from all over the web. You simply submit a story or article you have written and that’s it. You can boost your traffic by doing this one simple task. You can also find good material there as well.
•  botw.org or Best of the Web Blogs:  Another online community tool were you submit your blog or website.
• Blog Hub: Another good place to submit your blog which also has a blogger forum.
• Blogged.com:  A mix of blogs and blog news were you can submit your blog for free.
• Google.com/addurl: Yes of course the big daddy of them all. It’s probably a real good idea to add your url here from time to time.

This is just a few sites where you can submit your blog or add your url. If you do a search on google like ”submit blog, website” you’ll find a bunch of  websites that offer this service. This is just one of the things that you can do to get traffic. Another way that you can accomplish this is to ping your website or blog. Basically what your doing when you ping is notifying a web server or servers that your site has been updated. This signal is sent to multiple servers across the Internet. Some of the sites where you can ping your site are:

• http://pingomatic.com/
• http://www.pingoat.com/
• http://autopinger.com/
• http://www.pingmyblog.com/
• http://technorati.com/ping/

These are just a few of the many websites that you can ping your blog. Again, if you want more just do a search and you’ll find more of them than you will ever be able to use. I would suggest sticking with the more popular ones, you don’t want to get caught up doing this all day ya know. There are some more ideas for you to get traffic and it won’t take up hardly any of your day, unless your trying to use every single ping service available. So go give it a try, come back and let me know if this helped you get more traffic.

Please feel free to leave your comments or suggestions. If there are any questions that you have had just ask them below. Maybe someone else will answer them besides me.

Find out another way that I get 25-50 new visitors to my blog everyday.

If you have been working on a blog or posting articles then you probably know how hard it can be at times to come up with content for your blogs or articles. If you have been listening to some of the top Internet Marketing experts then you have probably learned a few tricks for coming up with content. Some of the ebooks and articles I have read talk about doing searches and visiting forums to see what questions people are asking or what they are searching for to get ideas. I’m sure these strategies are good ones, in fact I know they are, yet they can be very time consuming. So, what I have done is come up with another strategy to save some time.

Here’s what I have come up with. Now some of you may already be in a niche that you have a lot of knowledge in, but this may come in handy for you on certain days as well. Maybe your having a bad day and are experiencing a bad case of writers block. If you are new to the niche your trying to work with I think this strategy will work great for you.

• Go to your favorite blogs and do your research there. I have noticed when I am reading someone Else’s blog I will suddenly come up with an idea of something to write about. I don’t know why this happens, it just does. If nothing pops into your head, just take one of the articles, absorb and understand it, then go write about the subject on your blog. I am by no means saying copy anyone, your post should be 100% original. By doing this your going to be helping someone who may not have read about the subject and you are learning at the same time. If you draw a blank on a particular point refer back to the article just to refresh your memory. But again I say, do not copy anything, this should be done in your own words. The way I see it is everybody starts somewhere, and as  long as your trying to learn, be original and help someone then this strategy is ok.
• If your like me you probably have 10,000 free ebooks on your computer. Take one of the short ebooks or a chapter of one of the long ones and read it. Fully digest the material so that you know and understand it. Now you know something that someone may not know and can therefore make a post on the subject.
• Read some of  your own past posts. You have most likely mentioned something in some of  them that could be elaborated on.

I try to get all my information from the most popular blogs and ebooks. Try to focus on the names you are hearing about all the time. Here are a couple of my favorite blogs to get ideas from:

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

http://www.surefirewealth.com/

If you don’t have a lot of  ebooks I recently came across a website with so many free ebooks it made my head spin. I think I spent an hour downloading material and still only have about 45% of what was there. If you would like to check it out go to PLR Wholesalercom. There is seriously so much material here it will be coming out of your ears. So don’t get frustrated if you can’t think of anything to post, just go read and learn. Something will come to you one way or another.

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world - reporters and experts - and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc� experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something - experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts - there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a �guru� (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry - the Internet marketing industry - not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche - Internet marketing - and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things - email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it - making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) - your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion - your stories - and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of�well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from �scratch�, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

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