SorenJordansen.comInternet Marketing Revealed, Reviewed & Discussed

You’ve probably been reading my list building article series here at the blog, and you might also have seen the squeeze page secrets videos, I have been sharing with your over the past week… Those videos were done by my good friend James Grandstaff, and today James has finally launched his new Instant MLM Squeeze Pages

Now that is something I can get excited about - Because what James if offering you, is a push button system, that basically follows my step-by-step articles to the letter. Here’s what you get:

1. Professionally designed squeeze pages
2. Rebrandable ebooks
3. Pre-written follow up series
4. And everything is hosted for you

Everything can be used to promote whatever you want (not limited to MLM), and you can be set up and ready go with a few mouse clicks.

=> Grab Your Risk Free $1 Trial Here, And See For Yourself!

Your might be wondering why I’m recommending a service called Instant MLM Squeeze Pages, after all I don’t really have anything to do with MLM… Fair enough, let me explain.

As I said these squeeze pages, reports etc. can be used to promote whatever you like - The key is that they follow the right formula, e.g. promoting a good squeeze page, giving away a great report in order to get people on your email list, and then following up with whatever you want to sell/promote.

I also believe that this is a much needed service in the internet marketing world. A lot of my readers have gone through my articles and realized that they needed to follow the steps - but unfortunately a lot of people are also being held back by lack of technical knowledge. By using a service like Instant MLM Squeeze Pages, everyone can follow my list building success plan.

Just to show you that this can be used to promote anything, here are (just) a few ideas:

1. If you are involved with an MLM company you can obviously use this system to help you promote it. Using these squeeze page will not only skyrocket your results, compared to promoting those generic company pages - It will also open up an additional residual income stream, from people joining Instant MLM Squeeze Pages under you. And don’t forget that you will also build an email list, potentially outstripping your MLM business as far as income goes.

2. If you are involved with an MLM business and you have a downline, you can contact them an invite them to try Instant MLM Squeeze Pages. They get a tool that will help them build your downline faster. And on top of the increased MLM income, you open up an additional income stream from your existing downline.

3. Here’s the route I’m taking… I know there are thousand of people out there who are struggling to promote their MLM businesses. By advertising my personal Instant MLM Squeeze Pages, I can give them the information and tools they need. At the same time I will be building my email list and I can use the follow up series and the rebrandable ebooks to promote whatever I want (in this case mainly Dragon Surf)

I’m excited about this new service, and I’ve got to praise James for coming up with such a great idea (and executing it in A+ style). I’m sure you can find ways to use this in your business and I highly recommend grabbing the trial offer (while it’s there), so you can give it a good spin.

=> Grab Your Risk Free $1 Trial Here, And See For Yourself!

Time for the 5th and final article in my step-by-step list building series. In the first 4 articles I have focused on setting up a full list building system, monetizing the sign up process, and putting up a great follow up series, featuring good affiliate programs (you will find links to the first 4 articles at the end of this post). Today we’re going to take what you’ve learned so far, and explore how you can take it to the next level.

So How Do You Get Filthy Rich On The Internet?

Following the steps in the first 4 articles is a very good start. Building your own list is extremely important if you want to be successful in internet marketing, and you can make a very decent income just from promoting affiliate products… But in order to take your internet marketing career to the next level (the filthy rich part), you really need to have your own products. As you are about to discover, setting up your own product isn’t that difficult. But first lets take a look at some of the benefits from having your own products.

Leverage Your Affiliate Program

If you have your own product, you can also have an affiliate program. By giving your affiliates an incentive (usually cash commissions) to promote your pages - you can move from just you promoting your squeeze pages, to having hundreds, even thousands, of people driving traffic to your site. Sure you give up a percentage of each sale, but the extra sales will outweigh that by far… Being able to run an affiliate program is one of the biggest reasons why you want to have your own products.

Leverage The Power Of Joint Ventures

With your own products you are also poised to do joint ventures with other marketers… You can promote their products to your list of customers/members, and they can return the favor. You can find products related to your service and add them to your auto responder follow up series. Not only will you earn commissions on any sales you make, but you can get your JV partners to turn around and add your product to their follow series. You can also do various other forms of integration marketing with your JV partners, including swapping thank you page ads, log in/log out ads, exit pop ups etc. Doing joint ventures like this is arguably the fastest and most profitable way to grow an internet business.

Leverage Your First Product To Expand…

Launching a product, doesn’t matter if it’s a free or paid service, ultimately comes down to building a list of customers/members. Chances are that your original customers will be the people most likely to buy from you again. In other words you can leverage your original lists to launch new products and services. This particular strategy is very well covered in Robert Puddy’s Mastering The Membership Model ebook, you can download a free copy here.

Setting Up Your First Product…

… Is actually quite easy. In line with Robert’s ebook above, I highly recommend that you set up your first product as a free to join membership site. I use and recommend the full version of the Launch Formula Marketing Script. But if you purchase the one time offer at either Floating Action Button or TweetMyBlog you will actually get a free copy of the LFM Lite script, which is perfect for setting up your first product.

Creating a free product, that people want to sign up to get, is very similar to the process I described in How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page & Monetize The Sign Up Process. Here’s a rough battle plan for you.

1. Create a free product that has enough value to make people want to sign up at your membership site to get it.
2. When they sign up for the freebie you present them with a one time offer. This could be for an upgraded version of the product, some related products, rebrand rights to the ebook etc. This will of course generate some profit that you can reinvest, and thus grow you site faster. But the real purpose of the OTO is to generate commissions for your affiliates and JV partners - keep them happy and keep them building your list.
3. Then you have your follow up series for your new customers. With a free to join program you want to monetize it the same way as I explained in How To Write A Killer Follow Up Series That Converts Like Crazy. Of course now that you have your own product, with an affiliate program - you should put more effort into finding JV partners, so you can swap auto responder emails.
4. Use your new list of members (and affiliates) to launch new products and services.

Using something like Launch Formula Marketing, makes all of this very easy. It has an inbuilt affiliate program (every member is automatically an affiliate), it automatically integrates with your auto responder and it presents the one time offers to your new members.

Some Ideas For Your First (Free) Product

Write a short ebook on a topic people in your niche are interested in. If you don’t want to write your own ebook you can go to elance.com and hire a ghost writer. You can get a super quality ebook written for under $500. If you go the ebook route, it’s pretty simple to come up with a good one time offer - you can offer rebranding rights or maybe resale rights, plus some related bonuses.

Doesn’t have to been an ebook, you can give away software, scripts, plugins etc. TweetMyBlog is a good example of free to join site, giving away a free Wordpress plugin. Again you can go to a freelance site like elance and get a programmer to create something for you.

Another (very simple) option is to grab one of the many private label rights products out there, and put your own spin on it. New graphics, edit the sales letter a bit, maybe bundle a few products together. Resale Rocket is my favourite place to hunt for good PLR and resale rights products.

You should also consider making your first product an interview product. Get on the phone and interview some marketers on a topic your target market would be interested in. By interviewing successful marketers you get the benefit of becoming “famous by association” - and if they are willing to do the interviews in the first place, chances are that you can also get them to promote your product (instant high profile JV partners right there). I highly recommend that you grab a free copy of Bob Jenkins’ Teleseminar Formula - It will show you step by step how to get an interview product set up in 10 days or less.

I also recommend the Dominating Clickbank Videos. They will show you step by step how to take a resale rights product and turn it into your own successful product. I actually used Dominating Clickbank as the blueprint for one of my first product launches, and as you might have guessed, that turned out pretty well for me

We’re At The End Of The Series

I hope you have enjoyed these list building articles… And that following the steps, have gotten you started building a list and that you are starting to see some profits from your efforts. As I said the first 4 articles deal with laying down the foundation for internet marketing success, and it’s something I believe everyone should set up… before even starting on creating their own product. But as we have discussed here today, creating your own products is the key to taking it to the next level… and possibly getting filthy rich on the internet.

Here are the first 4 articles, in case you missed them:

1. How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page & Monetize The Sign Up Process
2. How To Write A Killer Follow Up Series That Converts Like Crazy
3. How To Drive Massive Amounts Of Traffic To Your Squeeze Page
4. How To Drive Even More Traffic To Your Squeeze Page

What About The Ebook?

As I’ve said before, I’m going to take this article series and turn it into an ebook. However I have a bit of work to do before you get to see that. I want to add some more content, make the ebook rebrandable and add a killer affiliate program to it. In other words, you’ll have a to wait a bit, but I can promise you it will be well worth the wait.

Got Any Comments, Requests Or Rotten Eggs You Want To Throw?

Feel free to leave a blurb below if you have any questions or comments about todays article (or the series as a whole) - or maybe a few suggestions for what you would like to see in the final ebook - thanks

With the launch of my new Tweet My Blog, I have received a lot of questions from my readers and members. These question generally fall into two categories:

1) What is Twitter and why should I use it?
2) How can I use Twitter to promote my internet marketing business?

I have found a great video that explains the first question, you can watch it here:

And now for explaining the marketing bit…

First of all, as the video above states, Twitter is a place where you can let people know what you are doing, in between emails and blog posts. This will help your members, customers and prospects put a face on you as the marketer. They can relate to the things you are posting and feel like they are getting to know you.

Building a solid relationship with your readers will do wonders for you bottom line. Twitter is especially powerful if you engage in conversations with your followers. Make them feel like they are part of your community, like they are special - and you are on your way to getting customer loyalty for life.

Twitter is also a very powerful way to get noticed by leaders in your industry. You want to seek out people in your industry who are more successful than you are, and add them to the list of people your are following.

When they post at Twitter, you can reply to their tweets and they will be able to read it. Don’t spam them, you need to add to the conversation, offer your help on something, or post an intelligent question. If you do this the right way these “industry leaders” will start to notice you, and remember you - and trust me that’s a great thing

Also sometimes these “industry leaders” will reply to you, and that is where the fun begins… All their followers will see that they have found you worth talking to, and they now have the chance to go check out your Twitter page and start following you. You are in other words becoming “famous by association”, and you can really pick up a lot of new Twitter followers this way.

And then you can of course use Twitter to make announcements to your followers for example when you have put up a new post on your blog. That’s where Tweet My Blog enters the picture. It will automatically ping Twitter every time you post at your blog. And the Tweet My Blog widget will help grow your Twitter following on auto pilot.

Just to sum it up… you can use Twitter to direct traffic back to your blog or site and it can be very powerful for that, especially when you build a huge following. But you have to use Twitter as a networking tool. Don’t just spam your links to the world - engage in conversations, network, build relationships and post tweets that have some value. If you do that, chances are that a lot of people will click your links when you do post a “marketing tweet”.

If you grab a free copy of Tweet My Blog today, you will also get a free copy of a great Twitter marketing ebook called: “A Geek’s Guide To Promoting Yourself & Your Online Business In 140 Characters Or Less With Twitter”. Click the banner below to grab your copy now!

Pat Marcello shot a great video about my new Tweet My Blog plugin yesterday. It show you just how simple it is to install and use this Twitter plugin on your Wordpress blog. You can watch the video here:

Grab Your Free Copy Of Tweet My Blog Here!

Ever wondered how you could harness the power of Twitter to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blogs - and how to convert that traffic into cash?

Together with John Merrick I have just come up with the perfect solution for you… Our new product called Tweet My Blog.

It’s a Wordpress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the powers of Wordpress and Twitter - driving massive amounts of traffic to your blog.

And the best part… It’s 100% FREE!

TweetMyBlog will automatically…

1. Post a tweet whenever you update you blog. The tweet will link back to your blog, driving a ton of interested readers your way.
2. Highlight your latest Tweets on your blogs sidebar - increasing your Twitter following.
3. Promote your affiliate link on auto-pilot, whenever you use the plugin and sidebar widget. Earn commissions just for posting to your blog.

This is far more than just another Wordpress plugin - This is a fully fleshed out marketing plan that will put the power of Twitter at your finger tips.

And… Even though we are giving this plugin away for free, you should take a close look at the special offer we have in store for you when join. We are very proud of that one and we know it can skyrocket your marketing power when using Twitter and Wordpress.

Grab Your Free Copy Of Tweet My Blog Here!

In last week’s list building article I was discussing how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your squeeze page. Though very effective, the traffic sources I listed were also very beginner friendly. Today I’m going to take it to the next level and show you have to drive even more traffic, with some more advanced resources - note that these aren’t supposed to replace the resources in the last article, they are meant to be add-ons to your overall traffic strategy.

But before we get started on that we need to take a close look at your conversion tracking…

Conversion Tracking & Split Testing

Hopefully you have set up your conversion tracking after reading last week’s article. As I mentioned there are a couple of reasons why you want to pay close attention to your conversion tracking stats, let’s take a close look at two of them…

1. With proper conversion tracking you know the exact cost of one new subscriber to your list. If you (on average) pay 25 cents per subscriber at source A, and 50 cents at source B - you of course want to focus your advertising budget on source A (all other thing being equal).

But since you have monetized your sign up process and have a good auto responder follow series - you also know roughly how much money you make from each new subscriber going through your follow up series.

So if you earn $1 per person going through your follow up series (that’s a very realistic number btw), and we take a look at the example above - you would of course keep purchasing as much traffic as you can from both source A and B, for as long as the conversion rates and earnings stays up.

And that’s the beauty of doing proper conversion tracking and knowing your numbers. You can pretty much automate (pay for) most of your traffic generation and still be in profit - and that leaves you with time for testing and tweaking your pages, emails etc. to improve your conversions and earning, and for developing new systems and products.

2. But just because you are in profit doesn’t mean you should be satisfied. You should use your conversion tracking to continuously improve your squeeze page. That way you can raise you conversion rates, decrease your cost per subscriber and in turn allow you to build your list faster, for bigger long term profits.

What you want to do is run some simple split tests on your squeeze pages. I’m not talking about advanced taguchi testing, although you can do some pretty advanced stuff with a free Google Analytics account - I’m talking about simple A/B split tests, here’s what you want to do:

1. Make two versions of your squeeze page (for each different traffic source). Rotate the two pages so each of them get 50% of the traffic. This is very easy to manage using Hitsconnect as they have both have conversion tracking and rotators.
2. You want to test simple changes, like a different headline, changing one of the bullet points, changing the font style or background colour etc. You ONLY want to split test one thing at a time, otherwise you won’t know what is causing the change in conversion rates.
3. When you have collected enough tracking stats to determine e.g. which headline is converting the best. You toss out the losing squeeze page and keep the winner.
4. Then you try to beat the winner by creating a new squeeze pages testing something else, like changing a bullet point.

This sort of split testing is an ongoing process, that will continue to improve your conversion rates and thus both speed up your list building and earn you more money.

If you want to know more about conversion tracking, I recommend that you download this free ebook “Tracking Your Way To Profits“.

And now it’s time to start generating even more traffic to your squeeze page…

Step 1: Using JV Giveaways

I have been using JV giveaways for years, and as a result I have added thousands of new subscribers to my lists. Contributing to a giveaway is one of the fastest and most effective list building techniques I know of.

Essentially a giveaway is a huge co-registration/list building JV… All the contributers upload a gift and then promote the event to their existing lists. The members, who sign up for the giveaway, can then browse all the gifts, and if they find something they like, they need to sign up for that particular contributors list to get the download link. As a general rule gifts will rank by the number of referrals contributors put in - and the higher your rank is, the more subscribers you will likely get from the event.

If you have followed the steps in the first two articles, it should be easy for you to get started using JV Giveaways. The squeeze page set up and follow up series are perfect for this - and as you build your list using the other traffic methods, you can leverage that list to rank well in the giveaways, and thus bring in even more subscribers.

Power Tip: You want to be on the first page of the giveaway, but you don’t want to put more of your own subscribers in there, than absolutely necessary to achieve it. I tend to use safelists and list builders a lot when promoting giveaways. That way I can still build my gift rank and get a lot of new subscribers, without having to share my existing list with all the other contributors.

Here are a couple of recommended JV Giveaway resources.

JV Giveaway Secrets an excellent free to join site with some good information on how to best use giveaways. But the main reason I’m recommending it, is that they will also keep you updated on new giveaway events that are worth contributing to.

My Giveaway Secrets a great ebook by my good friend Derrick VanDyke. It’s an excellent step-by-step guide for people who want to start using giveaways to build a profitable email list. You can read more about the book and Derrick’s affiliate program here “Giveaways, Paypal Payments & More“.

Step 2: Using Article Marketing To Build Your List

Article marketing is a long term strategy that can build a consistent flow of traffic to your squeeze page. Here’s how it works:

You write some short 400-600 word articles on the same topic as your squeeze page, free gift and follow up series. Whatever you write about make sure it does not read as a sale letter, your articles should be purely informative. If you don’t want to write your own articles you can do like me, and go to somewhere like elance.com to find a ghost writer.

You then submit your articles to all the popular article directories, my two favourites are Ezine Articles and Isnare

When webmaster and ezine publishers look for free content to reprint on their websites and in their newsletters, they turn to the article directories. In exchange for the free content, the publishers agree to leave the article intact and include your resource box. This is where you get your traffic… Every time someone reprints one of your articles, your resource box is included, with a link to your website. Because the article directories often have a good search engine rank you are also likely to get some search traffic to your articles - provided that you write about a topic people actually search for (and use a headline + keywords that are optimized for the search engines).

The key to getting good results from article marketing is to write an awesome author resource/bio box. This is an incredibly crucial part of the system, that you need to spend some time on. Don’t waste the efforts of your article writing by slapping down an ineffective bio box like,

Joe Schmo is an expert in golf. Click
here to find out more info on golf
–> www.golfmastery.com

Consider the author resource box like an ultra-small salespage where your one goal is to get that reader to click on your link. You only have a few sentences to hook the reader with curiosity and then give him a powerful reason why he should click on your link.

In our example, I would probably use something similar to the following:

Joe Schmo is a golfing expert who recently developed an
eCourse that details a step by step process for adding greater
distance to your long drives. If you are interested in learning
more about his “5 Ways To Add Distance To Your Drives” eCourse
and shedding strokes of your game, please go here:
=> www.golfmastery.com

Power Tip - The 2 Part Strategy: Consider breaking your articles up into two parts. You can then post the first part to the article directories (include “Part 1″ in your headline) - in your resource box you then people to click the link to get part 2 of the article. If you articles are good, that will give your click trough rate a significant boost. You can either post part 2 on your blog (which would then have some form of lead capture on it) - or you can send them to a squeeze page where they opt-in to get part 2 (and probably another freebie to convince them to part with their contact details).

If you want to learn more about how to use article marketing effectively, I recommend that you download these two great free ebooks: Free Traffic Secrets and The 22 Step Plan

Step 3: Using Your Blog To Build Your List

Using a blog is the absolute easiest way to rank well in the search engines. Set up a Wordpress blog and start posting articles on the niche topic you are trying to build your list in. I’m not going to write a whole lot about how to set up your blog and get traffic to it - I’ve already covered that in this article: How To Setup A Profitable Blog

The key is to convert some of the search engine and web 2.0 traffic, your blog will be generating, into subscribers for your list. I know I’m a bit biased But the most effective way I know of, is to add a Floating Action Button with an optin form to your blog. You can see the FAB script in action over at Mike Paetzold’s blog

If you want to learn more about blogging I highly recommend these resources:

FirePow
Wordpress Made Easy
7 SEO Tips For Wordpress
15 Minute Blog Traffic

Step 4: Building Your List With PPC Advertising

I’ve saved Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for last, because it’s one of the hardest traffic generation methods to master - also I don’t use PPC very much, so I’m by no means an expert. But it deserves to be mentioned because it can, without a doubt, be one of the fastest and most cost effective ways to build a list. If you want to learn a bit more about PPC advertising I recommend that you download this free ebook: Adwords Made Easy

I’ve seen a lot of people waste a ton of money on Adwords, because they rushed into something they didn’t really understand. Here are a couple of warnings you need to pay attention to, before you start your first PPC campaign.

1. Remember that you pay for every click - it does not matter if people subscribe or not. Use the other traffic source to make sure you have a squeeze page with a decent conversion rate before you start running it in Adwords.
2. Figure out what you earn on average per subscriber going through your one time offers and follow up series. That number along with your conversion rate will determine the maximum you want to pay per click. For example, if you have a 50% conversion rate and you earn $1 per new sub you could afford to pay up to $0.50 per click and still break even.
3. Google will assign a quality score to your landing page - basically the better your quality score, the less you have to pay per click. The short squeeze page we have been using so far is not that good for PPC campaigns. What you can do is take that page and add an article beneath it (the article needs to relate to the keywords you use in your campaign)

If you really want to get into PPC advertising I highly recommend seeking out Perry Marshall, he is THE authority on PPC advertising.

So Was That All The Traffic Sources

Nope… Not by a long shot. As I have said before there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to generate traffic to your squeeze page. What I have highlighted here, and in the last article, are the methods I use the most. As a list builder the key is to look at all the different traffic generation methods and think, “hmmm… how can I use this to build my list?” And again, I highly recommend that you also read the Free Traffic Secrets.

What You Have Now & What Is Coming…

We are approaching the end of this this article series. If you have been following my suggestion so far, you should now have a fully monetized squeeze page system, a great follow up series and a steady stream of traffic that converts into new subscribers. Your job is to keep that flow coming and to keep testing and tweaking, so you can keep increasing your conversion rates and earnings.

With a constantly growing list of subscribers you are well on your way to true internet marketing success - in the final article in this series, I’m going to discuss how you can leverage that list to get in on juicy JV deals, create your own products etc. This is where we start talking about getting “filthy rich” on the internet. Stay tuned for the next article

Got Any Questions Or Comments?

Please leave a blurb below if you have any questions about some of the traffic methods, a comment on the article - or maybe there is a particular aspect of JVs and product creation you want me to talk about in the next article? Thanks for reading - I hope you found the information useful.

Written by Andrew Hansen from FirePow

Step 1 - Niche Research

The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. In other words, I’m talking about the selection of your niche.

The group of people that your blog or mini site targets has to be a group of people who have problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have pain are the people who will want to buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing. You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re being helpful!

Anyhow moving on.

So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what alot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it’s not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition, but CRAPPY competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing better content and in a better way.

The final piece of the puzzle of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.

This is of course assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog - which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be. There are other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.

So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success. I hope you’ve found this valuable.

Step 2 - Site CreationOnce your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.

Blogs in particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketers because of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease in updating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally by nature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn’t, there is always a third party plugin to make it so.

There are many ways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflect an understanding of your target market. What we’ll look at here is an example of one such method, that focuses on the generation of free traffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.

The first thing you need to do is create a blog that’s visually or aesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just looking pretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create, by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attention to your affiliate program.

There are a few ways you want to do this:

1. Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and with black text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is the easiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire the eyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.

2. Choose a clean and neat theme. You don’t want too much going on. It should be very clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebar and navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewed and so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should know exactly where they have to click to get the information they want. Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other features on your blog.

3. There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page, and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, you want to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG Clean Archives plugin if you use Wordpress), so as not to have your archives taking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.

There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we’ll move on.

Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.

We’re going to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course the next step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one and the same) is to select a product that you’ll promote to the niche. This is where you’ll earn your cash.

So once you’ve got a product selected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is to create some content that the people in your niche will find valuable and use that content to drive your website’s visitors to the merchant’s page and earn an affiliate commission.

At this point, you should have your niche’s keywords researched - by that I mean you should have some idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from. Ideally you’d have some keyphrase related to your niche that are uncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in the search engines.

Where you’d ideally start your content creation is by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on your site and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you can develop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as you desire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtracker keyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.

Some factors we didn’t get to mention in this article are things like On page optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the search engines - and monetization - the art of getting the highest percentage of visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basic overview, I think we’ve done alright.

Step 3 - Traffic GenerationLets look at how to drive traffic to your blog or mini site - the element of online marketing that most people get stuck at.

Here we’ll look at the primary ways of driving quality traffic to your niche site. Keep in mind that the phrase QUALITY traffic is important - we only the want the visitors who might buy our products and make us money - we don’t want freebie seekers in this business model.

The first and best way to generate traffic is to do as I’ve described in the previous article, which is to produce content based on long tail keywords from your niche. After optimizing your page well for this term, and using the in built pinging fucntion to notify other websites of your new content - you can be ranking and getting traffic for uncompetitive terms within the first few days of your site’s existence.

After this, there are many ways to approach your traffic generation.

1. Article Marketing: This is essentially (though often misunderstood) the process of having articles you’ve written, published on websites other than your own, for the purpose of including a link back to your site and funneling traffic from their site to yours. You can do this with article directories or with other blogs and websites by contacting the site author. Either way, the extra exposure from these sites can drive through important relevant visitors to your pages.

2. Ongoing Keyword research and SEO: The reason I believe in having a big focus on SEO is that the people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution, tend to gravitate toward a search engine. Yes there are millions of web viewers who don’t go near a search engine but they can be harder to target and can represent not as high a quality traffic. In other words they don’t tend to make you as much money.

Continually finding new keywords that represent relevant traffic for your products, and continually creating content to target those visitors is about as smart as you can be with ongoing traffic generation.

3. Link Building: This is both for the purpose of boosting your search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your website. You have probably heard that links back to your site from relevant websites indicate your site is more trust worthy and worthy of better SE rankings. At the same time, a link on a relevant website, whether in a piece of content on a sidebar, can increase visitors to your website. You should make it a point to continually do activities that motivate similar sites in your niche to link to you - or even if not in your niche, site’s that could send you relevant visitors.

4. Using Social Networks: Using the myriad social networks like Digg, Mysapce, Facebook, Stumbleupon etc can be another great way to increase traffic to your website. Just by submitting all the posts you make to your blog to site’s like Digg and Stumbleupon, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, and the potential to have your content seen and then shared by new members of your target audience. As is becoming clear, almost EVERYONE online hangs out at some social network for some reason, and if you can find where your target market is hanging out and leverage that, your traffic can increase exponentially.

Finally, remember that when trying to generate traffic to your blog, you should consider your niche before deciding which methods to utilize. As I’ve said before, using a social network might be great, but certain niches might be too technically unadvanced to know about social networks, and they only use Google. Some niches might be more easily approached by use of visual media like video rather than article content. The bottom line of traffic generation is where are my target market hanging out, and how can I get my site in front of them in a way that contributes value to their lives.

I hope you’ve found this traffic generation article helpful. Next we’ll look at the management of a successful blog.

Step 4 - ManagementThe final step in the process of having a successful and profitable niche blog is the management of your site.

Here I’m talking about management in terms of keeping your site running, monitoring what’s working and what’s not, and monitoring the success of your site so you know how much effort to commit to it on a continual basis.

Here are some of the elements involved in the management area of a successful blog.

1. You need to manage and track your search engine statistics. Here I mean two things. 1. is the doings of your search competition and 2 is the rankings and traffic from various pages of your site.

In 1. You need to be always checking up on your search competition. Just by knowing what sites link to your competitor site can allow you a way to gain new backlinks. You contact the same people and get the same links PLUS keep doing all the good SEO you’re already doing, you can steal their spot.

in 2. You need to monitor your own search rankings to see what search terms are bringing you traffic. At this point you can either choose to focus more of your content on those terms, giving readers coming from those terms more to look at and more opportunities to get pushed to your affiliate link OR you can look harder at the monetization of those pages. This might include testing different affiliate link positionings, changing the text, and more.

Following on from that, something else that needs to be tracked on your blog, is how successful your content is at converting visitors to sales.

This has traditionally been tough on a blogs because the way they are set doesn’t generally allow for any form of split testing. However, a new blogging software called Firepow has made this possible. What you can do is test which content your audience responds best to. You can use variations of two different posts, have them alternate for each new user to the blog, and see which version of the post generated the most affiliate link clicks.

Optimizing your content like this may be the easiest way to increase your bottom line. After all think about this: If you want to double your profits from a site, you can either double your site traffic, or you can double your conversion rate… what’s easier? In a lot of cases, it’s doubling your conversion rate.

Finally, something that needs to be managed on your blog is the updating of your content. The most successful blogs and mini sites always have something new for their readers all the time, and when you’re running more than one blog, this can be an ongoing challenge. The best thing you can do here is get yourself the help of some software like the above mentioned Firepow, which can help you manage a number of blog’s content from one control panel. Something like this will give you the ability to post content on schedules, get notified of when a blog needs updating, and offer you options of how to get relevant content on to your site without your effort.

Combined with all the elements we’ve talked about in previous articles, managing your blog will put the profit icing on your blogging/mini site cake. I trust that you’ve found this series informative and helpful.