Driving Traffic | Take a Look Inside Your Reader’s Mind
Jul 09 2008
Posted by Blog Lady Dee as Driving Traffic
This is the second blogging tip about driving traffic with forum marketing. I’m not going to rant on about not spamming. That goes without saying. But how can a couple of posts bring you targeted traffic?
After you’ve done a little credibility building in the forum, you ask questions. They can just be low key questions, or….you can go for the controversial.
Many of you understand this concept already. Some of you go for the *out there* type of posts in your blog. Many bloggers regularly stir the opinion pot to boost participation. Forum posts can give you the same mileage.
If you ask smart questions, you can also set the scene for promoting your affiliate product or even your ebook. You can often get a large amount of high quality content generated by the forum readers from just one well thought out question . Your question is just the catalyst that stirs the debate. You can add in additional information as the discussion continues to keep it going.
Like your blog posts, forum content (or threads) is quickly indexed by the search engines. We’ve already mentioned that search engine listings last for a very long time. You’ll get highly targeted traffic, not only from the forum readers, but from organic searches also.
You can learn a lot about what matters to your readers in your niche from this strategy, as well as, reading the other threads in the forum. This gives clues for future product development. Remember the best products solve a problem or make an existing product better.
You can often find the problems that exist in your niche in forum posts. You can learn a great deal about a new niche by visiting a few forums…or even a few highly ranked blogs in your new niche and reading the threads or posts.
This may sound like it’s very time consuming…it can be. Forums can become a giant time sink. Some people just love them and the community aspect. Reading threads can swallow large chunks of time. But, in the end, it will save you time on the learning curve.
How so?
You can study and research to become a niche expert. You learn facts and statistics. But, the lessons you can learn from a forum are what your future readers think and feel about these facts…and the impact they have on them personally.
Of course, this gives you endless ideas for future posts. But more importantly, this type of knowledge is invaluable for positioning yourself to provide products and information to your new niche blog…
Driving Traffic | Don’t Forget about Forum Marketing
Jul 02 2008
Posted by Blog Lady Dee as Driving Traffic
A method of driving traffic to your new niche blog that you may not have considered or possibly have forgotten about is forum marketing. Most bloggers belong to at least one of the social blogging communities. But before these came into existence with Web 2.0, forums or even farther back message boards fulfilled the same function.
Many forums are still alive and well. You can find a forum in your niche by doing a search for your keyword+forum. Take a look– poke around. You’ll want to check out the post dates…if the posts are old, you may get a backlink, but it’s unlikely you’ll get a traffic boost. You want to find a forum with active members.
Forums are a different context. It’s a community. Hopefully, your readers feel something similar when they visit your blog. There is a sense of trust there among the readers…
However, when a new visitor comes from a search, this potential reader knows somewhere in the back of their mind they are probably going to be sold to. So, unconsciously their guard is up.
In a forum, the reader is there to get and share information. Your information and opinions are open to comment and criticism just like in your blog. The information and opinions aren’t always the best. You want to be the one to provide your high quality content.
Since a forum is a community, you’ll be the new kid on the block. Try to spend some time following the threads, before you jump in with both feet. Posting in a forum is similar to participating in a group on Facebook. If you spam or try to hard sell, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
This why you’ll take some time to get to know the dynamics of the forum. Most forums, like the article directories, allow you to have a link in your signature. You’ll want to use one of your best keywords in your title. This is basic linking strategy.
Next time, we’ll talk about posting strategies in a forum. How they can attract readers to your blog, and how you can use a forum as a research tool.
Today’s blogging tip is a logical extension of doing an offline affiliate venture in my last post. When you start a new niche blog, you’ll need to keep focused. In this case, you want to see the trees– not the forest. The same way that good keyword research can open your eyes to new niches– the details can be signposts that open opportunities for you.
Your competition is great for doing your market research for you. Check out the top blogs in your new niche. It’s likely you will find a myriad of offers on their pages. Smart business people (including you) don’t put all their eggs in one basket.
Adsense used to be an easy way to make money–Adwords was a breeze before the Google slap. Then, many people saw their businesses go poof overnight. Ideally, you want to take advantage of all the various ways to monetize your blog. This gives you a solid foundation.
If one product goes off the market or stops converting, you have other income streams in place. You can take clues from the top blogs’ ads, products, and affiliate offers–then, go out there and find them, or something similar.
It’s never too soon to begin making contacts in your new niche. If your competition has a opt in list, sign up for it. You can see their marketing strategy. You can look for holes in it that you can fill. Believe it or not, you can even get some copywriting strategies from these emails.
Pay attention to the subject lines, you can use those ideas yourself when you progress to the point you have your own list to email for an ezine or offers. The subject lines and the email text can also give you valuable insight into what content makes it through the spam filters.
One of the most important results of signing up to their list is you now have an additional connection to the blogger. When you contact them, you’re not just a competing blogger: you’re a member of their list. This fact can go a long way towards furthering your budding relationship.
Why would you want to build a relationship with your competition?
Because, as long as, you’re not covering exactly the same content in your niche, you have an opportunity to joint venture with this blogger after you’ve got a relationship going.
Puzzled?
Let’s say, you see the blogger has a product, but no bonuses. Hmmm….Remember how we talked about an ebook not being just an ebook?
It can be many, many things…like reports… audio… video. So, propose this: the blogger offers your teaser report…your audio or video as a bonus with their product. This has the effect of giving you an audience with their customers. Your quality content adds value to their offering, but it’s just a tease. For the full story, their readers need to come check out your blog. They might even buy your ebook as a result.
Basically, you can get the same opportunity when you have built a relationship to the point where you can be invited to do a guest post. This is a JV opportunity at it’s most basic level. Your content is provided to their *list* or in this case, their readers. The other blogger hopes that your readers will check out his/her blog. You hope their readers will be enticed by your high quality content to become a reader of your blog.
The relationship between you and your competition could even develop to the point where you create a joint product together. Is it going to work out this way every time? Of course not. You just have to keep working at it. If one says no, move on and ask another.
Now, imagine if you had two, three, or five of these relationships going on in several niches? Do you begin to see the possibilities in the details?
Your mindset plays a major role in whether your expanding blog empire succeeds or fails. If you begin another blog, you are diluting your focus from your original one. You will have remember to budget in the time for both.
How can we save some time here?
Look at things you see all the time in a different way. The cliche is think outside of the box. Look at the world online and even offline with an eye to what you can borrow for ways to monetize your blog. I have heard this called putting on your marketer’s hat and looking at the world with a marketer’s eyes.
Other blogs in your niche aren’t just your competition—each is a business model…you can borrow from. If you evaluate their blogs with this in mind, your competition has done 75% of your work for you. Just research and learn and borrow whatever appeals to you… Remember copy the model not the content.
Sometimes…even offline you can find gems. How about an affiliate venture with a local off line company in your niche or laterally in your niche?
For example, one of our Niche Friday Gifts was on a subniche of landscaping. Another of the keywords was hottub landscaping. Find a local hot tub contractor…and do an affiliate project with them once you’ve got traffic and page rank. I have found many offline business are very open to making the transition to the internet. Many times, they just don’t quite know how to go about it. Or, they’ve tried with limited success.
As an experienced blogger, you become the internet expert here. Is every offline business you approach going to say yes? No, but you find many will if you keep asking around.
Following the same idea, consider marketing to demographics. If you do your keyword research thoroughly, you can find many clues that can open up these possibilities. A while back we did another Niche Friday Gift on a subniche in baby adoption. We were asked how to monetize a niche that seems to doom you to only Adsense. When you come right down to it, this is about babies. Babies require a lot of stuff. There are even CPA offers for a lifetime supply of diapers.
Can you train yourself to ask what else might my readers (or even your list members) be interested in? Once you do, you will see more opportunities than you could ever put into practice.
Blogging Tips| Buy Time for the Future
Jun 19 2008
Posted by Blog Lady Dee as Blog Ladies Rants, Blogging Tips
We’ve been discussing a whole range of topics about starting a new niche blog and expanding your blog empire. Hopefully, you improve your bottom line in the process. This is a lot of work…
There is a new project in the works here. I’m being reminded just how much work starting a new project is. In the next few days, we’ll discuss some tips to make the process go more smoothly.
One thing that has helped me tremendously is to keep notes about the steps and the order I take them in. It may be 6 or 8 months before we pass this way again. Each time it should get easier to get the new niche blog up and running. But, if you’ve forgotten what you did and how you did it, or don’t have the URLs for templates or plugins, you can spend a lot of time searching. (Even if it’s just searching your own hard drive).
Searching for things when I’m trying to take action is usually a bad idea. One thing leads to another and another day is gone. For me, looking for a template, is something like searching an endless mall for a pair of shoes. Just when you think you’ve found the perfect pair….. you find another shoe store down the way. It can become a real time sink.
Now, maybe you didn’t take notes the first time, it’s no big deal…try keeping them this time. Remember that sooner or later, you’ll want to expand again. I’ve found that you can’t just stop with just one blog. It will save you a lot of time in the future.
Ways to Monetize| When is an Ebook Not Just an Ebook?
May 29 2008
Posted by Blog Lady Dee as Ways To Monetize
Let’s say you’ve written your ebook, done the graphics, and it’s all ready to go. What are some of things you can do with your ebook to monetize your blog? Nearly everyone is familiar with simply selling an ebook. I going to go beyond that obvious step.
What are some of the other things you can do with it to not only promote your blog but attract targeted traffic? In other words…when is an ebook not just an ebook?
It can become an ecourse. You can post a chapter weekly to bring your readers back to your blog. If you watch your traffic figures, you’ll know which day is the slowest. So, pick that day to post your ecourse lesson. Your traffic will pick up on your slowest day of the week.
You can use it as a gift. Give it away in return for a opt-in list sign up. Building a list is very important. It is the cornerstone to building a long term income from your blog. I read a statistic that said: it usually takes seven views of your offer before the average customer buys.
If you don’t have a list, how are you going to have the ability to provide that many views of your offer? So, capturing your readers to your list gives you those seven chances to put your offers in front of your readers.
What else can you do with your eboook? When you wrote your ebook…you wrote a chapter at a time. Almost like making a double post a day to your blog. Once you’re finished, you might have a tendency to think of it just as The Book, as a whole. But, you can take a step backwards, and like the ecourse idea above, break your chapters into mini reports.
Each chapter can be recorded into a podcast or made into a video. Audio and video products have a higher perceived value than a PDF file. Many people prefer to listen or watch to learn about a topic.
Each chapter, podcast, or video can be quickly reworked into a general overview "article" focused on your chosen keyword. You can then submit them to article directories, iTunes, or UTube. Why general? You want to tease your traffic–entice the reader to click your signature link and actually visit your blog to get the details.
At that point, you can offer them a mini report with more detail in return for them signing up to your list. Or you can take the ecourse idea and offer the course through email once the visitor signs up. You would send a link in your autoresponder email to the lesson which is residing on your blog in a private area. Also, you can offer the entire book for sale, throwing in as many of the free reports, podcasts, or videos as you wish as bonuses.
I hope, you can see that an ebook really is a seed. If you tend it, and give it the proper attention, it can send out roots in many directions to entice new visitors to your blog. Giving you the opportunity to make more income from all the offers you have in place.
One of the ways to monetize your blog we’ve mentioned recently is creating your own products, specifically ebooks. I really hope that physical books never completely disappear. There’s nothing like curling up in a cozy spot with a good book that you can hold in your hands and enjoy the tactile pleasure of turning the pages. That said, the chances of you or I getting our own physical book published are slim.
Ebooks are a viable alternative. Yes, ebooks have something of a bad reputation in some people’s eyes. Sometimes, they deserve it. Since it is so easy and inexpensive to publish your ebook, you find as many bad ones with old rehashed information as you do great ones with new quality content (if not more).
If a physical book needs to be revised or updated, it means a second printing with all the time and expenses involved. If you’re updating your ebook, it’s a matter of a couple hours work in the original file, and it’s ready to offer your customers again. Conceivably, you could update your product several times a year with minimal time and money invested.
Have you ever gone to your local bookstore for a book and had to backorder it because it is out of stock? It’s frustrating to wait, and it means yet another trip to the bookstore. I don’t know about you, but with current rising price of gas, anything that requires a return trip annoys me greatly. Even if you order online and have it shipped, you still have that waiting time between the order and when you have the book in your hands.
With an ebook, you can instantly download it… even if you’re up in the middle of the night. You can read it right away. Or, it can remain on your harddrive for as long as you like. If you work daily from your computer, it can be there in an open window for you to reference in seconds. You can even print it out and take it with you in a physical form. You have a choice of a digital or a physical form with an ebook that isn’t available with a physical book.
Ebooks also have the ability to be interactive. Some are even crafted to allow you to search within the book. A boon to any researcher: just try that with a physical book! Anything you can put in your blog you can add to an ebook, audio, video, polls, and surveys. There are even video ebooks. You can add links to virtually any other site on the web you desire. Of course, if these links are to your blogs and websites, you have the roots of a viral product.
Tomorrow, I’ll show you that when you write your ebook, you’ve planted the seed which grows your marketing funnel.
Let’s continue with my new niche blog start-up blogging tips. We left off with a bunch of information gathered from the competing page one websites and blogs. This info can help you find places where your competition falls short. As I mentioned, the lack of quality in the content you find on some of these pages is surprising.
But this information can also aid you in other ways. Do the blogs have a newsletter? If so, sign up for it. Yes, I know, yuck!…more email messages in your inbox. But, this is going to be valuable research for you. First, you will find out if they even send their ezine. If they do, then you have an inside look at their marketing. What kind of products do they offer? Affiliate or their own? All of this gives you pointers and insights to what you can offer and how to go about doing it.
Remember, these are the page one websites and blogs. If they are monetizing and marketing in a certain way, you can be sure they are making money and are successfully selling these products and offers, or they just wouldn’t be doing it.
Now that you’re on their list, you can begin to establish a relationship with the blogger. Why would you want to do that? Well, your competition isn’t your enemy. In fact, in a minute, you will see how they could become an opportunity for both of you. You know about commenting and leaving your signature and hopefully attracting some of their readers to your own blog.
This is a logical extension of that idea. If you take the time to network with them…you could offer them articles for their ezine or offer to do a guest post on their blog. If you’ve built your relationship properly, they will know how valuable your content is. An article from you is free quality content for them and an asset because you’ve saved them a certain amount of time or money if they outsource their content creation.
You could eventually even do a joint venture with them. Of course, whatever product you offered would not be in competition with theirs. Ideally, it would compliment what they already offer. You, in turn, might offer one of their products or articles to your readers. Or, perhaps the two of you could put your heads together and come up with a product that grew out of your relationship.
The whole point of this post is to put yourself in the shoes of a customer first. Then, look at the information and figure out what you can do with it to help monetize your blog. Sometimes, when you look at a blog you don’t really see the structure of what is there. We see the forest– but not the trees.
You are surrounding yourself with your competition and absorbing their business models. Use your imagination and creativity to see if you can’t come up with a way to borrow their model and add in your own unique ideas and come up with something totally different. Your subconscious will do the rest when you least expect it.
Blogging Tips|How Would I Start Over in a Brand New Niche?
May 20 2008
Posted by Blog Lady Dee as Blogging Tips
To continue the thought process from the last post about building a blog empire, here are a few blogging tips on how I would go about starting up a new niche blog.
This may on the surface seem very basic information. Even the most experienced blogger can sometimes get something new (or be reminded of something) from these tips. I’m showing you how to get started so you avoid the analysis paralysis that sometimes accompanies a new venture.
I’m going to assume that you have done some keyword research beyond the ones you get from the Niche Friday Gifts. If not, read the article HERE about what a keyword is and about some of the free or paid software available to accomplish your research. Any niche will have at least a couple of hundred keywords. When you get more specific and more targeted, you can come up with thousands.
Now is the time you start investigating your competition. There are some *sneakier* software applications that even spy on the keywords in use on your competitor’s blogs or websites. I usually make up a word document for every niche I’m thinking of entering. All of this information I research is entered there for easy reference later.
Search your keywords in your search engine of choice. I search once for websites and again for blogs. For each of the major keywords I’m going looking to use, I look at how much Adsense appears on page one. I make note of what the offers are because this can often help you find affiliate programs to locate and join. Lots of Adsense is a good sign. It means that there is money to be made in the niche, you just have to get in there and get your piece of the pie.
I look at the number of results for the keyword. The numbers are sometimes daunting, but I’m going to show you how to figure out if the competition is really as stiff as the numbers say. Scroll down– at the bottom of the page are the following page numbers. If you hit the last number available a couple of times, the results number can often drop dramatically. When you do this, the search engine begins weeding out duplicate material, and you can see how much competition is real. Sometimes, it is quite a surprising drop.
Then, I take a look at each site appearing on page one. I make note of the URL on each one in my cheat sheet. Eventually, I will visit each one. I will look at what kind of ads they have. Is is all Adsense? Or do they have CPA offers and affiliate links? They’ve already found these offers…you know where to look now thanks to their earlier work. Yes, some sites have big name advertisers. Often, those sites have a single page devoted to the content of your niche.
Some of the ones I’ve seen the content and/or presentation is very poor. It would never rank that high unless the big site was behind it. I make notes on that too. It is quite surprising to find in most cases for each keyword there is at least one entry on page one that you can envision knocking out of that spot with your content rich blog.
After I’ve done all this busy work, ahem…I mean research. :) I try to evaluate what all my competitors are doing—or much more importantly not doing. What can I do that will make my blog unique and stand out? This is where I really begin think about how I can get in there and compete. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about other uses for this information we’ve gathered today.
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