Building Your Mailing List with Downloads

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage “the money is in the list” cannot be true enough — if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.

You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!

In reality, you do not need to offer such a “heavyweight” download such as a full-feature software like iTunes.  You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.

However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the harddisk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.

I wanted to write a little something about one of my pet peeves when it comes to internet marketing.

As you can see from my “about me” page, I admit I am a relative “Newbie” when it comes to internet marketing. I try to drink in all that I can in advice, services, etc., but one of my pet peeves is when a “Guru” sends me

1. an email where their links don’t work properly or it’s the wrong page
2. or they send me to their site and it doesn’t work properly.

I don’t buy too much stuff anymore because I have gone almost completely broke and I have a ton of stuff sitting on my harddrive I haven’t even used yet. Yesterday I went to a site where the offer was just to cheap and to good to pass up, so I punched the order button. Nothing happened and after 3 tries I went away. They lost the sale.

One of the first questions that comes to my mind when I get an email or go to a site where the links don’t work is “how are they going to teach me when they can’t even get their own stuff working right?” I think that’s a valid question, especially if they’re trying to get my money.

Whether you are building a website, blog, “one time offer” page, when you’re done, go to the site as a visitor would and check your links to verify they are doing what you want them to. To me this is one of those “kindergarten” rules of Internet Marketing.

I personally usually email the person and let them know what’s not working right, but a lot of them have email addresses that go to a “noreply” autoresponder so they will never get the message. If you’re trying to earn money from your site, there will be a lot of people that don’t bother to tell you and you end up wondering why you’re not making any sales. I have a ton of email to check and by the time I notify someone their links don’t work right, I’ve already moved on to something else. Many times I don’t bother going back and that person has lost me

1. from their list
2. left my money in my pocket instead of theirs

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot like I have here. One of the most important things when you first start a blog is to blog consistently. Some people blog a few times a day, some every day and some whenever.  Many people feel blogging more than once a day is too much. I feel when you’re first starting out, every day is important. If you’re going to blog less often, it’s a good idea to let your readers know what your schedule will be. Readers can get frustrated coming back to you only to find old information. Most people won’t waste their time and soon won’t come back at all. In this way a blog can be a lot more work than a website, where you don’t have to change too much too often.

With that being said, here’s a little info on “blogging for profit”.

Blogging For Profit Starts With A Long Term Plan

Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal is not far beyond the reach of someone with average intelligence, a willingness to work hard, and a basic grasp of blogging technology. However, very few people manage to reap the profits they want from their blog. Most people who attempt to make money with their blogs do not succeed for two reasons.

Often, bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging. The other trap that many bloggers fall into has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a realistic plan and stick with it. To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that you will need is a large readership. The higher your traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you. However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will need in order to make a profit isnt easy. As more and more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get attention. You need to be able to market your blog effectively.

Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and almost no time marketing their project. As I said above, updating as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog search engines like technorati, and once your readers know that you update frequently they will return to your site on a regular basis. However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody is reading your page, so dont skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to your site. To make your dreams of blogging for profit a reality, try decreasing your number of posts and using some of that time to draw new visitors. You can do this by

1. setting up link exchanges with other bloggers
2. making contacts in the blog community,
3. following other established modes of winning traffic.

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a really great idea for a blog, success is not going to happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all likelihood it will be at least several months before you are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay committed to your blogging project during this initial rough period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

Good luck and much success in whatever you choose to do.

 Rank High In The Search Engines For Your Keywords
 
Every internet marketer or webmaster aims to have their websites in the first page of the organic search results for their targeted keywords. I’m going to reveal some vital search engine optimization tips that will boost your chances of being listed in the Top 10 results for your chosen keywords.

SEO has its advantages. It’s free, unlike pay per click where you have to pay every time someone visits your site, regardless of whether they buy anything or not. Being listed in the organic search results may also attract more visitors to your site than the paid listings; people are not inclined to click on ads and prefer to click on natural search items. The downside of SEO is that search engines change their algorithms often; but don’t worry. By following the search engine optimization tips below, you’ll stand a much bigger chance of being listed in the Top 10 for your desired keywords and keeping your position for a long time to come.

1) Keywords must be in the anchor text of incoming links

A different site linking to you counts as a vote in the eyes of the search engines. And if the anchor text of the incoming links has your keywords in it, then you will have better chances of ranking for those keywords

2) Keywords must be within the title tag

The search engines place great emphasis on the title tag; it tells them what your website’s topic is about. Place your keywords at the start of the title tag for best results. The title tag must not be longer than 60 characters. 

3) Your link should contain your keywords

Having your keywords in your link will help you get ranked for those keywords. For example, if you want to rank high for the keywords “website copywriting,” your link should look like this: http://yoursite.com/website-copywriting.htm.

4) Play it safe with your keyword density

There is no specific rule regarding the “right” keyword density, because the search engines change their algorithms often. There have been theories that Google considers a keyword density of more than 2% to be spamming, but Yahoo and MSN are fine with up to 5%.  Different SEO experts have mixed opinions on the ideal keyword density; so don’t focus all your energies on this. Just mention your keywords near the beginning and write naturally. To be on the safe side, aim to have no more than 2%, but space out your keywords from each other so they would look natural in the eyes of the search engines.

5) Put your keywords in headings (within the H1 tags, H2 tags, etc.)

The search engines place great emphasis on words between headings (H1, H2, etc.) so it would be a smart idea to have your keywords placed within them. Just make sure that the keywords are suitable to the content and you’re not “forcing” them.

6) Put bold, strong, or italicize tags between your keywords

The search engines take more notice of words that are either bolded or italicized, so placing your keywords within the bold, strong, or i tags can help you rank higher for those keywords.

7) Put your keywords near the start of your content

Although this does not count as much as the search engine optimization tips above, putting your keywords at the beginning of your content (not necessarily html code) is a good SEO strategy because the search engines place great emphasis on the first few parts of your webpage.

Put your keywords in metatags

This is another subject of controversy. Google overlooks metatags, but Yahoo and MSN still read them. So spend a few seconds putting your keywords in metatags to add to your search engine credits.

9) Put your keywords within alt tags

The search engines can’t read graphics or images, but they can read the text descriptions within the alt tag. If you have images on your site, fill in the alt tag with your keywords, but don’t overdo it.

10) Target specialized keywords

Some keywords have very high competition that you have lesser chances of ranking for them. If you have a target audience or niche, it might be a good idea to focus on those keywords that are more targeted and have less competition. For example, instead of having a competitive keyword phrase like “jobs bartending,” you can focus on “alabama bartending jobs” if your target audience is in Alabama.

11) Observe LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

Don’t let that technical-sounding phrase put you off. To explain it simply, the search engines look for synonyms or words related to your target keywords to determine the relevancy of your content to your keywords. The search engines place more emphasis on those pages that have words related to the keywords as opposed to pages having only the targeted keywords. For example, if your target keyword is “self-hypnosis,” your webpage would have better search results if you have related words such as “auto-suggestion” and “visualization” rather than having only “self-hypnosis” in your document. For LSI suggestions, use Google Sets at http://labs.google.com/sets

12) Observe keyword proximity

Keyword proximity is the closeness of the keywords to each other. For example, you’re optimizing your webpage for the keywords “marketing strategies.” If you have “marketing” in the first sentence and “strategies” in the 4th sentence, it still counts but doesn’t have as much effect as having “marketing strategies” together without any words in between. Keyword proximity is used for keyword phrases that have 2 or more words.

13) Never engage in keyword stuffing

Don’t fill your content with keywords unrelated to your topic. This will have a negative impact on your search results for other targeted keywords. Never stuff your content with keywords deliberately, especially those unrelated to your content. If the search engines see you filling keywords in an unnatural way, you might get banned from the search results.

Hope these search engine optimization tips help you get first page rankings for your chosen keywords. Best of luck to your SEO efforts!

Don’t forget to check the “Freebies” page for some new resources.

Whether it’s a "free report", software, or an article, almost everything has a license attached. You will see PLR, MRR, Creative Commons, etc. It’s good to know about each of these so you don’t get yourself in some kind of trouble.

1) Creative Commons License

If you see that something is covered by a Creative Commons License it usually means that while it’s useable by the public, the author of the works, be it writing or images, etc. has a list of what you are or are not allowed to do with the stuff they’ve created. To quote Wikipedia,

The Creative Commons licenses enable copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

2) PLR- Private Label Rights

Private Label License tells you specifically what you can or cannot do with a product, article, etc. Some let you republish with your name on it as if you are the creator. Some let you republish but only if you leave everything in tact as you received it. You need to go through the list to verify how whatever you have may be used.

3) Master Resell Rights

Master Resell Rights are pretty much just like it sounds. They are usually more expensive and while there is still a list of dos and don’ts, the product is pretty much yours to do with what you want. In most cases you can rebrand it as your own, you can sell it and keep 100% of the money, etc. A lot of times there are restrictions on how you give it away, as the author doesn’t want the value of the product to disapate.

4) Public Domain

Many times it’s hard to tell what is Public Domain and what is not. You need to do your research here. A standard rule is that anything written prior to 1923 is public. Also, usually on the bottom of an article etc. it will tell you about any copywrites.

One thing you don’t want to do whether you’re just getting started or been online for awhile, is wind up in court over stealing material. Also if you write something or put something really good together, you may want to copywrite your own stuff to determine how people are allowed to use it.

Getting Started

The first place to start like anything you do is with a plan. No matter what you’re planning on doing or selling on the internet, just like in brick and mortar life, you need a plan. This place looks really cool and appears to have everything you need for free. Startup Business School I myself have not used this site, but plan on going back and checking it out in more depth after I get done here. A great blog about planning and strategies is here written by the guy that started Palo Alto Software. Just be careful where you get your information. One site I went to offered free business plan templates, but you had to go thru all this sales BS, apply for 3 offers, etc. etc. You don’t want to go there. Another thing to expect is what ever you do online, any time you take an offer, you will have to supply your email address so they can add you to their "list". It doesn’t take much before your email is overflowing with "special offers". Most the time you can unsubscribe pretty easily.

You also need to think about what your goals are as you are writing your plan. You know the old saying "if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?"

Website, Blog or Neither?

You’ll probably see a lot of headlines about how you can make tons of money on the internet "an you don’t even need a website". Pretty basically it’s true that you don’t have to have a website. What you can do is "partner" with people, selling their stuff and using their webpages. These people are called "affiliates". They pay you a commission for selling their stuff. You need to

1. Keep track of what they owe you
2. You still need a way to capture everyone’s name and email address to build your own "list".
3. The tools for selling their stuff is usually the same thing a million other people are using to do the same thing.

The bottom line is you still really need to have a "home". So after the planning comes how you are going to take your place on the internet.

The Website

I had products that I sold offline that I wanted to move online, so I started with a website. (You can see it at Beamish’s Brass Tacks ). The thing about a website is it’s more work to update for fresh content, but it does give you a pretty permanent web presence. It’s also yours so no one can tell you what to put on it or how to run it.

The greatest place I’ve found for learning HTML code is The Hidden Vault. It’s very basic but has both video and writing and provides a great way to see exactly how code works. Every time you make a change you can see it. It’s really terrific for the most basic beginning.

After you get used to playing with that, then you can go on to more in-depth tutoring. One place to go is Build Website 4 You and another terrific site for learning to build your own website is the Website Wizard. His first step is to buy your domain name, etc. which I don’t agree with, but it is a pretty comprehensive step-by-step. I like to have a plan, the website ready to go so all I have to do is load it on whatever server I choose, and then get my webhost and domain name.

The Blog

The fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get up and running is by using a "blog" for your website. The platforms are free and you can change content every day if you wish. The one thing about a blog is that you do need to add fresh content often, so pick something you know a lot about, feel passionate about, and feel like you could write about forever. Just in case you are really a newbie, a blog is a web journal. It’s like a journal you would write in often, only online for the world to see.

The two most popular platforms are Blogger and Wordpress. I personally have never understood it, but for some reason Google likes Wordpress when it comes to rankings, even tho Blogger is a Google product. One thing I should warn you about Blogger, especially if you’re planning on selling anything is they do have a tendancy evidently to lock up your blog. I just read 2 bloggers yesterday that moved their blogs to Wordpress because Blogger had arbitrarily done that to them. You have to fight to get it back up, proving you followed their Terms Of Service, and it’s a big hassle. Eventually what you want to do is have your blog on your own domain. This too is easier to accomplish with Wordpress.org. To get started for free and fast tho, just go to whatever platform you choose and sign up. It’s that easy. Another up and coming platform is Live Journal.

The best resources I could recommend is a free report Easy Blogging. You can download it and have for referring back to at anytime. The best website to learn everything step by step in my opinion, is Problogger. He has a 31 day lesson plan for building your blog.

The Beginning Stages

As with anything new, the beginning stages are the hardest and take the longest on the learning curve. As you get going the things you do will take less time and my posts will get shorter. LOL. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them. Also if you find any resources you like, please feel free to share those also. I still have a lot to learn myself!