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5 Most Effective Online Continuity Program Models

By Donna Gunter in Featured

Continuity programs are the “new” online business model that has recently escalated in popularity. No longer is it good enough to simply sell information products for a one-time sale or sell your services online. Instead, online business owners need to seriously think about changing their business model to include the concept of recurring revenue. This passive revenue model brings in regular recurring income on a weekly or monthly basis from the same customers. While there is still some work required to continue to market these programs, overall you will find it much more profitable to sell to one customer over and over again rather than having to go and find new customers repeatedly for a one-time information product sale.

Many companies have been offering continuity programs for years. Proactive does it with face cleanser. Leeza Gibbons does it with Sheer Cover makeup. Doubleday does it with books. Columbia House does it with DVDs. Each of these companies offers an option in which subscribers pay a set fee each month and receive something new in return (books, DVDs, etc.). I’ve belonged to all of these continuity programs at some point in my life, and chances are, you have, as well. How can you incorporate this recurring revenue model into your business?

How to Get Your Blog Published on Amazon’s Kindle

By Merle in Featured

When Oprah announced on her show that she “LOVES” Amazon’s Kindle, millions of people rushed out to get one. First introduced in 2007, the “Kindle” is Amazon’s electronic replacement for books. It’s a portable, wireless device that allows you to download books, magazines, newspapers, even blogs instantly and take them with you anywhere.

Since the Kindle can hold over 1,500 books, that’s like carrying around an entire library in the palm of your hand.

The wireless connection is built in and provided at no charge by Amazon. There’s also a built in browser for viewing websites and reading emails.

Amazon’s Kindle Store has over 230,000 ebooks to download, plus U.S. and International newspapers, magazines, even blogs. Almost all of the ebooks sell for $9.99 or less. The latest model is a larger more improved Kindle DX which was made available this year. Boosting a bigger screen and longer battery life, it can even read to you out loud. Now that makes for a nice bedtime story. It also holds over 3,500 books and sells for about $489.00.

The Kindle can also display PDF’s which you can transfer from your computer with a USB cable. The older versions of the Kindle could read PDF’s and Word documents, but they had to be emailed to Amazon first to convert them to a format readable by the Kindle. This option is still available as well.

So what does all this mean to you? Well, if you’re a blog publisher you can now publish your blogs in the Kindle Store where users can subscribe to them for a monthly fee. This is a great way to make some money and increase your subscriber base all at the same time.

First you’ll need to go to http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com to set up an account and submit your blogs for approval. Once approved your Blog “goes live” in the Kindle Store within 12 to 48 hours.

The Kindle gives the user full text and images from the blogs they are subscribed to, which unlike an RSS feed only gives you the headlines.

When submitting your blog for approval here’s the information you’ll need:

• Blog Title
• Blog Tagline
• Description
• Image from top of your blog (banner or masthead)
• Screenshot of your blog (optional)
• Posting Frequency

It’s really pretty simple to get your blogs listed.

So how does the payment process work? Good question, nice to see you’re paying attention. You’ll be paid 30% of the monthly blog subscription price. Amazon sets the price, not you. It’s priced on what they think is a “fair value” for their customers. For example, my two blogs were set at $0.99 a month.

All blog subscriptions are free for the first 14 days. Then they’re billed at the monthly subscription price. Blogs are wirelessly updated throughout the day.

You’ll be paid by check or EFT, your choice. Electronic Funds Transfer has no charge, but if you opt for a paper check and live in the U.S. you’ll have an $8.00 fee attached. Payments are sent once your earnings reach $50.00.

If you publish a blog I’d strongly encourage you to get it listed in Amazon’s Kindle Store. It won’t cost you a thing but a few minutes of your time and makes for great free exposure..

By Merle- The pay-per-click Authority when it comes to paid search engine advertising. With helpful articles, how-to’s and tips that will help you make the most from your advertising investment. Download a FREE “How To” ebook by subscribing to our ezine at http://www.PayPerClickResearch.com

How To Create An Article Writing Schedule

By Steve Shaw in Featured

The number one key to success when you’re undertaking an Article Marketing campaign is CONSISTENCY. So many times people start off with the best intentions and have high aspirations for their website’s success, but after a brief effort they lose focus and give up.

Article marketing is a great way to build links and increase traffic to a website, but in order to see the dramatic results you’re looking for you need to consistently submit articles for an extended period of time, ideally for the lifetime of your website.

If you submit a handful of articles for just a few months, you will not see much in the way of lasting results. But, if you submit a handful of articles every month for a year, you will see what a link building momentum can do for your site!

Just submit articles consistently–sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?

It is incredibly easy if you’ve taken the time to plan and organize ahead of time. A little planning goes a long way–just complete the following steps and you’ll keep yourself on track for the rest of the year.

1) Determine how many articles you will submit each month.

I recommend submitting somewhere between 1 and 8 articles a month–choose a quantity that you can realistically write month in and month out. If you set your sights too high and fall short, that can be discouraging, so you may wish to start out towards the lower end of the spectrum and work your way up to 8 over a few months.

I think that submitting more than 8 articles a month is overkill. When you start submitting more articles than this the benefits go down compared to the effort you’re exerting, so I advise people to submit articles each month for an extended period of time, and submit up to 8 each month–there is no need to go overboard and submit dozens and dozens of articles a month.

2) Create a writing schedule.

After you’ve decided how many articles you’ll submit each month, take out your calendar and decide when you’ll write the articles. Write in your calendar exactly which days you will be writing and what times. Being specific like this will help you to not procrastinate (something we’re all prone to do!). If you schedule your writing on your calendar you’re more likely to actually do the work.

Some people like to write one article at a time, while others prefer to work in batches of several in a day. It’s just whatever works for you. I have done both, and I think I prefer writing in batches–that way I can take just a few days out of the month and meet all of my article writing goals in a short span of time.

I also have a special “Editorial Calendar”–basically this is a dry erase calendar board where I can mark down the days I will be writing. As I write each article, I erase it from the board. It’s motivating to see the progress on the board–I keep this calendar right beside my desk, so there’s no way I’ll be forgetful of the days I’m supposed to write.

3) Brainstorm next month’s article topics.

Have you ever known you needed to write an article, but you just weren’t sure what to write about? When this happens, you end up procrastinating and before you know it you’re behind in your writing.

I’ve found a cure for this by creating an article idea list ahead of time, before the month even starts. Just think of article topics that would be helpful to your target market. Remember, all of your articles will be on some aspect of your niche. Start writing down ideas and you’ll find that more ideas start to flow. It is much easier to think of 8 article ideas at one time than to think of one article idea on 8 separate occasions.

Develop your brainstorming list and pull it out when it’s time for you to write. No procrastinating, no agonizing, “Oh no, now what should I write about?”

All three of these steps are crucial when it comes to keeping an article marketing campaign on track. Remember–consistency is key. If you can submit articles consistently month in and month out, you can produce dramatic results for your website over the long term.

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It’s wise to invest in time saving systems that allow you to get more bang for your marketing buck, such as a trusted article distribution service. Steve Shaw created the web’s first ever 100% automated article distribution service, SubmitYOURArticle.com, which distributes your articles to hundreds of targeted publishers with the click of a button. For more information go to=> http://www.SubmitYOURArticle.com

How to Extract Doubt From Your Sales Copy

By Michel Fortin in Featured

A few years ago, something happened that provided incontrovertible proof of the importance of an infallible rule in copywriting. I knew it all along but never saw it proven to me in such a personal and direct way.

What am I talking about?

No, it’s not the headline. It’s not being emotional. It’s not benefits. And it’s not split-testing, either. In fact, my opening paragraph gave you a clue.

Sure, the headline, the benefits, and all those things are important. Very important. But the one element I’m referring to, the one element that can transform flimsy, “yeah-right” copy into a sales-inducing powerhouse, is…

How to Use Social Media for Personal Branding

By SEO Sapien in Featured

Creating social media website profiles aimed at strengthening your personal brand is an incredibly important aspect of building your online presence. Building a strong online reputation will help you score more gigs, media interviews, conference speaking pitches, and more.

Even if you are working with a company, your clients and potential clients are inevitably going to want to know who you are and where is the first place they will check you out? They will probably search for you on Google. The idea is to control the top ten search results for your name to ensure that they are relevant and most importantly, positive. The last thing you want is for a client to find search results on the front page of Google that say negative things about you.

The easiest way to control your top ten search results is through building your online presence via social media and blogging. Some of the most important online tools you can use are Twitter, LinkedIn, video websites and social networking sites like Facebook. If you have an unusual name, it will be easy for you to control the top search results for your name but if you have a very common name, try using your middle initial as way to distinguish yourself.

Blogging

One of the most powerful ways to build authority within your niche and boost your personal brand is via blogging. If you consistently provide great content and expert opinions, you can build a very successful personal brand through blogging. Make sure to link to a profile page with your bio and name on all of your blog posts to increase search rankings for your name. Write guest blog posts for other blogs in your niche to enhance your online reputation and reach a wider audience.

Twitter

Use Twitter to contribute valuable links and connect with others in your niche. If you build up a large following of relevant users and stay active in the Twitter community, you should expect your Twitter page to rank highly in the search results. If potential clients are looking for information about you and find your Twitter account full of relevant links and expert advice, it is going to go a long way in building your online reputation.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business social media networking site that allows you to share your career history with others. It is a great way to build work contacts and allows potential clients to learn more about your qualifications, educational background, and so on.

Video Websites

If you’ve spoken at a conference or have made an online video presentation, upload it to a site like Vimeo or YouTube. When someone searches for more information about you and finds a relevant video you made, your reputation will be enhanced in the eyes of the searcher. Make sure to use your name in the video headline so the video is optimized for your personal brand.

Social Networking Sites

Now that you have filled most of the front page Google results with positive listings, you can work on adding a few neutral listings such as profiles for social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr. Better yet, find a social networking site that is relevant to your niche (i.e. Sphinn for search marketers) and actively contribute to it so you can show clients that you keep up with the latest news and trends in your field.

Keep these tips in mind in order to dominate the Google search results for your name. If you have quite a few online personalities and would prefer that some of them were not visible to your clients and potential clients, make sure to use different screen names! Optimize anything work-related with your real name to ensure that the search listings that show up when people search for you are positive and help to boost your online reputation.

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About the Author: SEO Sapien is a SEO Company. We offer affordable and guaranteed search engine optimization services. You can visit our site at http://www.seosapien.com for more information and SEO Prices.

Twittering Away Time And Money

By Pat LaPointe in Featured

One of the most common questions I’m getting these days is “how should I measure the value of all the social marketing things we’re doing like Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook, etc.?”

My answer: WHY are you doing them in the first place? If you can’t answer that, you’re wasting your time and the company’s money.

Sounds simple I know, but I’m stunned at how unclear many marketers are about their intentions/expectations/hypotheses for how social media initiatives might actually help their business. In short, if you can’t describe in two sentences or less (no semi-colons) WHAT you hope to gain through use of social media, then WHY are you doing it? Measurement isn’t the problem. If you don’t know where you’re going, any measurement approach will work.

Here’s a framework for thinking about social measurement:

1. Fill in the blanks: “Adding or swapping-in social media initiatives will impact ____________ by __________ extent over _____________ timeframe. And when that happens, the added value for the business will be $_____________, which will give me an ROI of ______________. ” This forms your hypotheses about what you might achieve, and why the rest of the business should care.
2. Identify all the assumptions implicit in your hypotheses and “flex” each assumption up/down by 50% to 100% to see under which circumstances your assumptions become unprofitable.
3. Identify the most sensitive assumption variables — those that tend to dramatically change the hypothesized payback by the greatest degree based on small changes in the assumption. These are your key uncertainties.
4. Enhance your understanding of the sensitive assumptions through small-scale experiments constructed across broad ranges of the sensitive variables. Plan your experiments in ways you can safely FAIL, but mostly in ways to help you understand clearly what it would take to SUCCEED — even if that turns out to be unprofitable upon further analysis. That way, you will at least know what won’t work, and change your hypotheses in #1 above accordingly.
5. Repeat steps 1 thru 4 until you have a model that seems to work.
6. In the process, the drivers of program success will become very obvious. Those become your key metrics to monitor.

In short, measuring the payback on social media requires a sound initial business case that lays out all the assumptions and uncertainties, then methodically iterates through tests to find the model(s) that work best. Plan to fail in small scale, but most important, plan to LEARN quickly.

Measure social media as you should any other marketing investment: How did it perform versus your expectations of how it should have? If those expectations are rooted in principles of profit-generation, your measurement will be relevant and insightful.

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Pat LaPointe is Managing Partner at MarketingNPV — specialty consultants on marketing measurement and metrics, and publishers of MarketingNPV Journal, available online free at http://www.MarketingNPV.com

Sell on eBay – How To Write Profitable Listings

By Amanda OBrien in Featured

It is a simple fact that if you sell on eBay and receive only minimal views on your listings then the lower the bidding or amount of sales will be. It does not matter how detailed and professional your listings look, viewings are the key. And the key to increasing the number of viewings is research!

In order to research, you must first take a look at what other sellers, especially Powersellers of the same items, are doing. What keywords do they use? Which categories are they listing in? Do their listings trigger an emotional need so that the reader simply has to buy now? How many photographs do they have and what quality are these? Take a good hard look at how they sell on eBay to get ideas for your own listings.

When a potential buyer reads your listings, they are looking for good value. So, you must add value to your products. Adding value does not always mean giving something extra free or doing something to the actual product! You just need to achieve a perceived added value which will catch the reader’s attention when they look at your description. So added value could be something as simple as offering a no quibble 30 day money back guarantee. If your competitors who sell on eBay are not offering this then you have added value to your product. The same goes for your listing description – photographs add value, as do the benefits of the product.

Make sure that you write your description well and always include photographs – people like to see exactly what they are buying! It is important to remember when you to write your description in a friendly, informative manner, as though you are talking personally to the reader as this will encourage them to continue reading and arouse their interest.

If your product has lots of features and especially benefits, then make sure you include them in your listing. Do not drone on and on, but be clear and concise and tell the potential buyer exactly why they must buy your item right now.

To sell on eBay effectively, you need to invest some time into creating that added value as ultimately your listings will attract more views and sales. Bearing this in mind, there is nothing more off putting to a potential buyer than seeing a confusing listing before them! Not everyone is a technical whiz so where possible use simple layman’s terms in your description. Show all your Payment, Shipping and Dispatch Times so that they can be easily seen and understood so that buyers can work out total costs and approximate delivery dates at a glance.

If people feel at ease with your auction listing, then they are much more likely to bid or buy. So it is important when you sell on eBay that you are completely honest. If there happens to be a fault with a product, tell buyers what it is as this will show that you are not trying to mislead anyone. Really, the simple rule is to think about what you would like to know about the item if you were buying it, and then add all these thoughts to your description. Don’t miss bits out because if all the information is there in front of the potential bidder or buyer then they are more likely to bid or buy right now.

As your views and sales grow, you must encourage your bidders and buyers to look at your other listings because a big part of your eBay sales strategy is to get bidders to purchase more items from you. So, if you are selling a supplementary or complimentary item let your buyers know and highlight the fact that you offer combined postage if they purchase both items!

When you sell on eBay, your listings should be regarded as an opportunity to establish relationships with buyers. You then need to look after these buyers so that they come back to you time and again. Never think in one-off transactions, even if they do end up as a one-off, because your ebay income depends on customers to guarantee you success!

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Amanda O’Brien is a successful eBay Powerseller and author of The 2,500 Per Week eBay Powerseller Secrets. Want to learn more about starting an eBay business or simply want to improve your eBay sales? Claim your free report and free sample chapter from The 2,500 Per Week eBay Powersellers Secrets at Profit With eBay Check out Amanda’s Blog at any time for tips, techniques and eBay updates.

Google PageRank Sculpting is Dead

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

For those of you using advanced SEO techniques such as PageRank sculpting, you might want to listen up.

Head of Google’s crime spam fighting team, Matt Cutts, put the cat amongst the pigeons last month when he answered an audience question at the SMX Advanced conference about the value of using rel=”no follow” for PageRank sculpting purposes. When asked if it was a good idea to use nofollow when linking around within your site, Matt said no.

NoFollow is a method to annotate a link to say to search engines “I don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank.

According to Matt, more than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that links WITHOUT nofollow would flow lesser points of PageRank than before and that links WITH the nofollow attribute would count toward how PageRank is divided up amongst all links on a page.

Seems SEOs and webmasters were getting a little bit trigger happy with their use of rel=”no follow” for Google crawl prioritization and were accidently blocking Googlebot from indexing important parts of their site.

Matt later clarified the issue with his blog post PageRank Sculpting:

“[We] noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums)… I wouldn’t recommend [PageRank sculpting], because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike. For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. “

Danny Sullivan has a great follow up post that goes into more detail here.

So the short story is this: PageRank sculpting is no longer effective as a SEO technique (if it ever was). For the most part, the more links on a page, the less PageRank each link gets. Keep that in mind whenever you’re optimizing your site and when you build new pages.

Should You Fire Your SEO Company?

By admin in Featured

Search engines algorithms are shrouded in total secrecy. So what works in SEO and what does not is merely the result of an analysis of sites that make it to page #1. Some times the keywords show up sooner than expected, at times they do not. It’s very difficult to measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign because the time frame for results is prolonged. With the mushrooming of SEO companies and the vagueness of operations finding the right company can be an issue.

True, SEO is no science, but it can have a scientific approach. The results are not instantaneous like PPC but results should be visible after 3 months onto a program. Okay… give and take a few months for the vagaries of Search Engines who like to alter their algorithms just when your site is all set to take off!

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