15 Top Blog Marketing Tips

by: Chris Taylor

1. Place all your feeds on the following website and the directories listed on this page - http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com/blog_lists.html

2. For fast inclusion into yahoo, get yourself a "my yahoo" page - http://my.yahoo.com/ and place your rss feed on that page.

3. Have a link which allows other people to put your rss feed on their own "my yahoo" page. See "my yahoo" for details.

4. For fast inclusion to msn, also open a "my msn" account and add your rss feed to that page.

5. Place your blog on all the major search engines - http://www.thewebtrafficco.com/search_engine.html

6. Join this site and add your blog (free) - http://www.BlogExplosion.com

7. Ping your blog after every post at - http://pingomatic.com/

8. Place a "blogroll" on your blog using - www.blogrolling.com

9. Make a blog post at least every day or less. Why? - http://www.feedforall.com/why-use-rss.htm If you don't think you can write enough content on a daily basis, there are many free articles out there you can use.

10. Invite other editors/writers or webmasters to write on your blog as co-editors. Make sure you allow them to include their "resource box" at the bottom of each post and set up an "about our editors" page.

11. Place a link and description to your blog on all your websites, out going emails and any autoresponder courses you have set up.

12. Announce your blog at forums you currently use/participate in.

13. Place informative responses in the "comments" box of other highly trafficked blogs in your field of business.

14. Once you have 10 to 15 posts on your blog, announce it with a press release.

Do you have a long-term partner yet?

by: Chuck McCullough

By now most people have realized that the Internet is not just about trying to make a quick buck.

Most scams and get-rich-quick schemes have quickly faded and couldn't produce results if their life depended on it.

So you are now left with coming up with strategies that will keep your business around for the long-term.

If you are planning on having affiliate revenue be part, or all of your income, you need to find programs that you can hope will be around for a long time.

It can be quite painful when a company you've promoted for many months decides to close their affiliate program, or they decrease commissions so far down that it isn't worth your efforts to promote anymore.

When this happens you are left with starting over trying to find someone else that you can hope to earn a decent income from.

When searching for an affiliate program that you hope to make your long-term partner, here are some things to look for:


High-quality products or services - You can quickly destroy your reputation online by promoting shady companies with poor products. ALWAYS try to associate with companies that have great products.
Companies that have YOUR interests in mind - Unfortunately there are many companies out there that simply view their affiliate programs as a cheap advertising and branding vehicle. Seek companies that view their affiliates as partners. You can tell when you have found one by looking at how the program is structured and what they offer in the way of support for affiliates.

Programs paying commissions on multiple products - You will find that sometimes your visitors will purchase items that you had not recommended. Your income can build much faster when you get paid a commission for those sales as well as sales of products directly promoted by you.

Lifetime commission structure - It takes time, effort, and money to send visitors that actually become customers of the affiliate program. Lifetime commissions allow you to get rewarded for future purchases of your customers. This model is great and you should really consider promoting at least one program that offers it.

Article Writing: An Important Part Of Your Marketing Arsenal

by: Jez Lacey

Unless you are totally clueless about the internet and how it works, you must realise that everyone trawling the net is searching for one thing and that is information, i.e. CONTENT!

In fact there is not really any other business building tool that compares with writing articles when it comes to building your online business, read on to discover why.

Regularly adding keyword rich quality articles on your website will help boost your search engine ranking, as search engines are always looking for updated content to add to their index. Also, other site owners are much more likely to link to you if you provide something other than just one long sales letter.

A constantly updated website with quality content will not only attract more people to your site, it will keep them there longer and will cause them to come back more often. If for example you have a site about health and fitness, would you not check back if the site was constantly being updated with more articles about how to get yourself fitter?

When it comes to FREE ways of generating traffic to your site, there are few that can compare to submitting your articles to article directories and ezine publishers. Simply include a “resource box” at the end of your article and away you go.

A resource box is simply a 3-6 line biography about you and/or your web-site it should include a link to your site or maybe even instructions on how to subscribe to your newsletter. An important point to remember when writing your resource box is to specify clearly that each article is to be reprinted ‘as is’ within your attached resource box.

This method of traffic generation can and will bring you a lot of traffic. Let us say for example you have written a great article about your favourite hobby, and an ezine with a subscriber database of 30-50,000 picks it up. Many of those subscribers will read your article, and if it’s a good quality one may well be intrigued enough to click the URL included in your resource box. That is totally FREE traffic for very little effort; it does not get much better than that!

It is also a good idea if you are adding articles you have written for your website to include a resource box on those articles too. This means that people who visit your site will be enabled to use your ‘copy’ with their sites too, as long as they include your resource box.

Articles can be easily used for generating newsletter subscribers. Simply take a group of related articles and compile them into a ‘special report’ that you then give away as a bonus for subscribing. In the same vein, add articles to an autoresponder sequence and give it away as an ‘email course’. In both cases sprinkle affiliate links throughout the text and link it to an autoresponder to create an “automated income stream”.

You may be aware that having a mailing list is one of the most important ingredients for a successful online business. But, having a list is not enough; you need to build up trust with your list. This is often known as ‘cultivating’ your list.

By regularly sending quality articles to your list you will become viewed upon as an expert in your business field, and build up a level of trust with your subscribers over time. The effect will be that your subscribers will be keen to take up your special offers, promotions and other products and services. The key is NOT to offer your list a product too early in the relationship, just so you can make a quick buck. A list of people that trust you is as good as money in the bank, you should not squander it!

10 Powerful Ways To Grow Your Income

by: John Karnish

1. Don't forget to follow up with your customers. You could follow up with a related product, service or affiliate program. Follow up every month or so with a new product and watch your wallet grow.

2. You can always upsell to your customers. When they reach your order page, let them know about a few extra related products that you sell. This is a great way to squeeze more profit from each customer.

3. Let your customers refer new customers for a full rebate of their purchase. This could easily turn one sale into three or four.

4. Let your customers know about your affiliate program. Work in how they only have to refer a few people in order to pay back their purchase price and make a profit.

5. Sell resell rights to your product or even sell a brandable version. You can include an ad for similar products and make money off of the sales and also make money selling the resell rights to your product as a back end.

6. Create a package with other people’s products. You could include a sample and offer the product owners a portion of the referral sales from the sample. This is an easy way of having other people sell your product for you.

7 Offer your customers a discount on a related product. Since they all ready have built a relationship with them, you could push a higher ticket product.


8. Send your customers offers for add-ons to your original products. You could easily offer upgrades, related services, software and so on. If they enjoyed the original product, they’ll buy the add-ons.

9. Sell gift certificates for your products. You'll make money from the sales of the gift certificates and you can follow up with related products in order to profit from future sales.

10. Send your customers freebies. You could place an ad for your website on bumper stickers, baseball hats, t-shirts and so forth. Through indirect exposure, people will visit your website and purchase.

Ten Ways To Make Your Affiliate Site More Profitable

by: Jude Wright

Is your affiliate website ready for business? You may have your content written and your affiliate products in place, but there are more things you can do to make your site more profitable.

1. Have a specific theme for your site and make sure your content, logo and other graphics are relevant to that theme. Don't add kitty graphics to a website about gaming.

2. Have as much original content - content that you have written yourself - on your site as you can. Your visitors don't want to read the same articles on a website that they have just seen on the one they were just at.

3. Create "printer friendly" pages for your important content. People are looking for information. Let them print it out. When they go back to read it later, they'll see your site's url at the bottom of the page.

4. Put your web pages into a logical order. Think like your visitors and group like content pages together. Make your site as "user friendly" as possible.

5. All links should be "clickable." Check and recheck the links to other pages and to your affiliate products.

6. Create a Frequently Asked Questions page - especially if you sell your own products. When someone asks a question, publish that question, with your answer, in your FAQs.

7. Have contact information available on each of your web pages. Create a link to a Contact Me form instead of using an email addres. This will cut down on the amount of spam that you receive.

8. Offer Freebies. Free reports, ebooks, autoresponder courses and newsletters give your visitors a reason to come back. Set up an autoresponder for each freebie to help build your subscriber list.

9. Continue to add more valuable content to your site. One way to do this is to add an article directory to your site. Allowing your website visitors to add their articles will create good content for other visitors and it will help get their article noticed. It's a win-win situation for all.

10. Add links to other sites. Make sure those links are to websites' themes are compatible to yours. This will ad interest as well as increasing your search engine ranking.

Using the above methods will increase visitors to your site. By adding fresh, valuable content regularly those visitors will return. The more people that come to your site (and return to it), the more profitable you website will be.

Slow Down Marketing (2)

by: Stephan Miller

I bet when you run into these, you think, " Do these people think I am stupid? Why do they really believe that I would rather use a system or get rote answers instead of talking to a real human?" Then why turn around and use the online equivalents in your own business.

I am not saying that there is not a use for automation. By all means use an autoresponder for your free courses. Definitely set up a FAQ page if you keep getting the same questions over and over. Automate as much as you can to make your job easier. But there is a limit.

Allow your customers to send your emails and write them back. If they ask a specific question, give them a specific answer. Have you ever walked into a store, looked down every aisle for a specific item, then ask an employee where it was only to get directions when you actually wanted him to lead you to the product. If you give a vague answer to an online customer just to get rid of him, you are doing the same thing.

About personalization gimmicks, I don't think they are necessary. Just write a newsletter like you are writing to one person. Make it subjective. Sprinkling a person's name randomly throughout a newsletter will not make them think you wrote it directly to them. Give your subscriber's some credit. If they have been online for a while, they know that even spam can be personalized if the spammer is good enough.

If you are just online to make cash and don't care how, by all means use every shotgun sales method available, but if you chose this because you like what you are writing or selling and there is nothing else you would rather do, put a little more effort in. Your customers are buying because they have the same interests you do. Treat them as friends. Look at your retail experiences and compare them to your online marketing methods. If you are alienating your customers, slow down. This is not a box that prints money. There are other humans out there.

Slow Down Marketing

by: Stephan Miller

I work in retail as my day job and meet over a hundred people a day. Interesting people, strange people, people I may like to know, people I know I would hate, people that I wished I would never had met, people with problems, people with solutions, people that don't seem to take the hint that I am paid to be there an help them, that I am finally thinking of becoming a monk.

Wait, did I say that. I know that this is not the correct way to think, but it hits me right away at work. Competition in the retail marketplace has forced many stores to cut costs to the bone so that they can cut prices, which, of course means that they must cut back on labor costs. And this leads to treating customers like cattle, whether you want to or not. Get them in, shake them down for as much money as you can and get them out. And how does the corporate office try to get employees to fake customer service? By using canned phone answering techniques, greeting the customers at the door, and basically creating a frontline of expendable, robotic employees. Why do I bring this up?

Because as a internet marketer, auction seller or retailer, you can take advantage of this. Slow down, keep your business small, and provide true customer service. Your customers will notice the difference. Wait I have to come up with a new word here. "Customer" has become a four letter word to me. Let use patron. Someone who furthers you work, supports you, and comes back to your site.

Take a little test. Which of following can you recognize right away?

- A telemarketer
- An ezine personalized with your name
- Would you like fries with that?
- Spam
- A memorized sales pitch from a salesman
- An autoresponder message
- Please press 1 for yes and 2 for no
- Microsofts help system