by Nurul Chowdhury | Blogging Tips And Techniques, Internet Marketing Tip
What’s a Feed?
Feeds are a way of sharing content. When you make material from your website available for publishing on other sites, you provide them with a feed. Basically, it’s a code that lets them post your articles and blogs. There are different kinds of code—XML, RSS, Atom, etc.—but essentially they’re all just different ways of accessing a feed.
According to internet expert Sydney Johnston, “The great thing about a feed is everybody wins.” The article writer gains exposure, the reader learns about something of interest to them, and the online seller gets an endless source of pertinent content.
What Can a Feed Do for My Online Business?
Feeds are useful in a number of different ways:
• They Eliminate Spam-filters. They’re 100% opt-in, so readers can subscribe and unsubscribe at will. Feeds are delivered directly to your subscribers, so you don’t contend with filters knocking you out of their inboxes.
• They Provide Free Content. One of the best ways to differentiate your site is to supply readers with interesting material—educate them on topics relating to the product you’re selling. If you sell preschool toys, chances are you don’t want to study child development and write numerous articles on the subject—so find someone else who’s already done that and make their feed available to your customers. The constantly updating, applicable subject matter gives your visitors a reason to keep coming back.
• They Can Improve Your Search Engine Rankings. In the past, search engines were unable to read feeds, but software is now available to translate them into live links the engines can see. Search engines love fresh, dynamic content, so feeds are ideal. They provide relevant information that updates automatically. Not only do your customers get the facts they’re looking for, but the search engines like your site and give it better position.
• They’re an Alternative to Banners. You not only give your customer valuable knowledge, but if they click through and purchase something, you get credit. And unlike with banners, you don’t look like you’re putting up junk ads or spam.
• They Can Increase Your Traffic. Anything you write, you should make available as a feed. When other sites pick it up, it’s free advertising for you—all their traffic is able to click through the feed to your site. So you gain new potential customers you wouldn’t have otherwise.
Hope this article was helpful.
by Nurul Chowdhury | Blogging Tips And Techniques, Internet Marketing Tip, Making Money Opportunity
Is starting a Online Business difficult? Not really. With a computer and high speed Internet access, the potential for anyone to make money online is virtually limitless. In fact it depends on what type of income you really want to generate. There are many who are just looking for some extra income and while others would like to make it a full time employment from the comfort of their home. What makes it difficult for someone to take that step forward and start? Here are some questions people have asked me and these should not put you down from starting a home based business.
1. Do I have to be a salesperson?
No not at all. The time has changed and on the internet sales pitch work very rarely now-a-days. The business on the internet has taken a different turn now. People will buy from you if they KNOW, LIKE and TRUST you. This follows a principle of attraction marketing. People are attracted towards you because you provide them value and they start liking and trusting you. You prove yourself to be a leader in your field and that is what in the long run generates a potential residual income for you. You have to think of your business as a long term investment.
2. What value can I provide or?
Well, I presume you do possess some qualities. Look into yourself. I am sure you have achieved professional experience, you must have some hobbies that you can share and communicate to your readers. There is a vast variety of opportunities on the internet and things that you can promote or sell. For example, you love gardening, don’t you think you could position yourself as a leader in the field of gardening and give them your valuable knowledge in gardening. There are a lot of products you can get from places like clickbank, paydotcom which you can be an affiliate and earn money from it.
There are many network marketing companies who provide valuable products to sell. Do some research on the internet and you may find the product which is of your taste and for which you will be able to bring value to your customers.
3. How do I promote?
That question is tricky but not hard to achieve. There are hundreds of ways of promoting your products or your website and attract visitors and make tons of money online. Some apply free traffic generations techniques like article marketing, social marketing, forum marketing…, which is a bit slower but very effective if you apply consistently while others use paid traffic generation techniques which can bring you rapid results. But if you are new to the internet then free methods can bring you good results and I would advice you to avoid the paid techniques as a mistake could be very costly for you.
4. How much time do I have to spend to earn money?
Honestly, it depends totally on your time availability. You have to find time for your online business. You could spend 2 hours a day and earn a decent income on the internet but to do that you need to follow a system and be consistent on a daily basis. Think of your business as a business and not as a hobby. Don’t fall into the get rich quick scams. I am a believer in the slow and steady wins the race and if you keep trying I am sure you can succeed.
5. I am not Internet Savvy?
Everybody is a beginner. It is not hard there are many companies out there who teach you how to market and brand yourself on the internet. If you want to really succeed on the internet, then you need to have some fundamental training and for that you have to spend some money. Personal development is very important. Imagine how many years would a doctor, an engineer or an accountant, have to study before they can practice their profession. Online business is the same, you don’t have to spend years but you do need some basic training to get yourself up and running.
If you’re new to being an entrepreneur, you probably need training. Look for a company that offers the tools and training you need in order to succeed. The type of training you receive can encompass everything from weekly conference calls or webinars (Internet-based seminars), to one-on-one coaching from your upline, to training manuals and other written materials.
by Nurul Chowdhury | Blogging Tips And Techniques, Internet Marketing Tip, Making Money Opportunity
The hardest part of any business building is creating a huge email list. It is one of the fundamentals of Email Marketing Campaigns. Many marketers have failed to achieve success because they do not possess a proper mailing list. List building is an art which takes some time to master.
Here is a Story of a Super Affiliates. His name is Ewen Chia. He is well reputed for his techniques of list building. When it comes to list building no one can match his success online. And when he promotes a product he does not go searching for subscribers because it is a continual process. People just love his training course. One little email campaign loaded in his auto-responder and the sales just explode. So how does he build it. Well, he uses various techniques himself, three of which that I learned from him will be covered here below.
You finally realize that to promote your business as an affiliate marketer you have to build a solid base of subscribers. Hey! 100 or 200 subscribers will not bring you sales. Out of these 200 subscribers, may be 50 will read your email if it is interesting. And out of these 50, few may click on your affiliate link and 1 or 2 may actually buy through you. So what is your final score 1%.
Unless you have a high end product that brings you a huge commission, your email marketing campaign is not worth the effort you are putting. Imagine the time you would spend to write a good email that will force your readers to click on that affiliate link and VOILA! Here comes the profit.
I suppose you have read countless articles and sought expert advices and have read many success stories of people creating a small fortune with opt-in lists, you finally decide to have one of your own. Then it happens, you think you have known everything there is to know about opt-in lists and have followed their advices from A-Z and you still weren’t able to make a profit.
In fact, you may be losing money. You may be hiring writers to help you out, or there are some expenses incurred, even if you have a big list, but only a very small percentage actually buys from you, you’re still losing profit. You’ll realize that after a few months when you see your statistics and sales figures.
So what could have gone wrong? Why have others succeeded where you have failed? The most common mistake is that you jumped straight away on the occasion. You chose a topic where you think could be quite popular and would earn you money. It actually does not work like that. Just because you wrote to people from the list doesn’t mean they are going to buy instantly.
Here are some tips that will help you get better results for your list building strategies.
1. A Good Squeeze Page
You need a good lead capture page sometimes also called squeeze page. Not many are html savvy. It takes a lot of patience and time to get a good squeeze page up and running.
Here is a free membership site where you can create squeeze pages and use them. The advantage of this site is that you don’t have to buy a domain to use the squeeze page. You can create multiple capture pages with it.
Now it is your duty to promote this squeeze page to get leads. If you have a Twitter account then you can blast different messages with your opt-in page link.
Join forums based on your niche or product you are selling. Go to Google and do a search. Join the forums and join the discussions and add the link in your signature with a catchy sentence. Like say for example “Hey! Grab this latest report on Advanced SEO, Limited time only”
2. A Blog
Create a blog and post various articles related to your product or niche. Educate them and give them information relevant to your product. More they come and visit your blog, better will be the temptation of finally clicking on that link and seizing a sale. Second advantage, you get ranked by the search engines.
Writing articles will get traffic but your objective is to get these readers into your mailing list. Aha! So how do I do it. Well, create a catchy image with an offer to download a free report or product etc..
Make sure it is put in a place where it will be visible as soon as they come to your blog. That is the first thing that should catch their eyes on the site.
3) Participate in Joint Venture Free Giveaways.
This is a good way of getting free subscribers. So does this work? You may want to watch the video I made recently at Free List Building Strategy With Joint Venture GiveAways and the JV Event Page.
There are many ongoing Joint Venture Giveaways all year round. Basically, you participate as a Contributor and you add a product depending on the event.
You need to have three things.
- A squeeze page link
- A download page link
- The image of the product you are giving away.
If you do not know how to create an html page, there is no panic. Just go to Instant squeeze page creator. You can easily get a squeeze page done in 6 steps and it only takes 2 minutes. Make sure to save the image of the product you want to give away on your pc. As you will need it even for your blog.
Here is what I created in 2 minutes. This is the squeeze page link
(N.B. This is just an example to demonstrate how it works, the product download is not attached to this example).
I personally use Send Button profits. It is a paid membership site. This membership site is exceptional. It offers various services among which are opt-in templates. Not only I get 10-15 different pre-made opt-in templates in various niche markets but also the emails that go with it for selling affiliate products related to the squeeze page you are promoting. This saves me the headache of creating email campaigns to follow. Plus twitter messages and training videos. I can even download the products and put in my personal affiliate links for more sales.
Unfortunately, Send Button Profits is closed for new members but I would advise you to register your email address with them. If it re-opens to the public you could be the 1st ones to learn about it. It is one of those services you would not want to miss.
Well my friends, that’s it for today. More yet to come.. So be on the lookout for those hidden treasures.
by Nurul Chowdhury | Affiliate marketing, Article Marketing, Blogging Tips And Techniques
Participating in Affiliate Programs can bring in extra revenue. The key to increasing your income is to get your readers interested in your topics. Unlike traditional methods of earning revenue where you get paid per clicks or impressions, affiliates are paid only when a reader performs an action. For example a reader might purchase a product that you promote through your affiliate links or signing up for a newsletter. Just by merely promoting the offer, you will not get paid.
The art lies in driving curiosity and stimulating the reader to click on that affiliate link. Then only this action will turn out to be fruitful and who knows there may be a nice commission waiting for you on the other side.
Here are some things that you may want to do to create that stimulation.
Write what your audience wants?
The most successful way to use affiliate programs is to anticipate and meet the needs of your readers. This can be a very thought-provoking action to take from your part. Many a times I got stuck writing articles because I was trying to imagine what my readers were looking for when they came to my site.
The easiest way to start is to write articles on the products that you promote. It is important to keep in mind that while you are promoting your product you are considering on giving a solution to your audience and not just for the sake of earning an income stream from them. The product that you are promoting needs to add value to your readers.
Keep your products and advertisement on your website consistent with what your articles are about.
Say for example, if you are writing about affiliate marketing then distracting ads like “gardening products” will annoy your readers and they may never come back to your website.
But on the other hand, good content will make your readers want to subscribe to your newsletter and would tempt them to revisit your website.
Building Trust And Confidence
Many newbies have had a bad experience in promoting their affiliate programs. They kept on promoting product after product on their sites/blogs. Some blogs look like a market place with banners and ads all over the place. I am one of those examples when I first started blogging.
My impression was that by placing all these advertisements I am going to get rich. But hey! it really did not happen that way. When I looked at my stats, I hardly used to have a click on my ads although I had traffic coming to my blog on a regular basis.
The idea here is to create a long term relationship with your reader. Don’t expect that your reader will get excited with your product on the first visit. They would like to know you better and learn more about your product before they may decide to buy your product.
Readers are savvy. They know an affiliate link when they see one. If you break their trust by promoting a product you don’t believe in or take advantage of their visit with too many ads, they will leave and never come back.
It is your repeat visitors that will drive traffic. They are the ones who will give you linkbacks, spread the word, and recommend your site as the go-to place for valuable content. You need to build a relationship based on genuine content.
If your visitors don’t think you’re being honest, they won’t read anything else you have to say
by Nurul Chowdhury | Blogging Tips And Techniques, Ideas For A Business, Internet Marketing Tip, Making Money Opportunity
(Image courtesy of Flickr.com)
What is your experience in Blogging?
I hope you have not started like me. Having no knowledge about the virtual business, I ventured to find a share of the treasure which has made so many millionaires.
Blogging was a term totally new to me when I first started on the internet. My online career started with network marketing. Being a total newbie to network marketing, at that time, my upline told me that I should open up an account at free blogging site Blogger.com and promote my business. And that is what I did. Having no clue how to generate traffic or audience to my first page. I hardly got any instructions on how to build a blog page or how to post articles.
Yet with trial and error, I managed to get in my first post and anxiously waited for visitors to turn up. Well, to my disappointment I had been waiting and waiting and waiting.
So why on earth wasn’t I getting and traffic to my site?
What was never told to me was that I had to frequently update my blog. Although Google likes Blogger.com, you need to post articles regularly, that what makes Google page crawlers look for interesting stuff in your articles. As I told you I was a total newbie to the internet, all I knew was type something on the Google search box and VOILA the answer was there for me.
Terms like keywords, page rankings, search engine optimisation etc. were things like someone was talking to me in “Martian” language. My response Yeah! Yeah! I have heard about it. But honestly haven’t had a clue what it was. Neither was I courageous to ask someone what was it all about.
So those days have been quite painful for me struggling to make that 1st appearance on the internet.
I was disappointed, still looking for answers to my questions but no where to find it. Finally, my blog went to as “sleeping mode” like a dormant volcano for about six months.
I started surfing more on the internet and came across those wonderful websites (blogs) “that is what I thought they were at that time”. These blogs had a www.Mynamedomain.com on it. That is the guys were branding themselves. I kept asking myself. How are they doing it? Why is mine tagged to a name.blogspot.com and why can’t I have one like them.
Yeah, I am sure you are laughing at me and making fun of me but honestly, I hadn’t a clue. I was mad and furious still trying to figure out how actually it works.
The saddest thing is that I was a computer programmer about 15 years back but never surfed on the internet. Internet has been very recent to me say about 3 to 4 years ago. Yeah, of course I knew how emails worked and something called internet was there but I was too much pre-occupied with the real world to get actually involved with the virtual world.
Ok, I shall end part 1 here and give you something to cheer you up.
TIPS FOR THE DAY.
You have two ways of creating blogs either free or hosted (paid) blogs.
1. The good sites (free) that I have used so far are
a) Blogger.com
b) WordPress.com
I found blogger.com more handy in terms usability of the structure. I still have about 4 of them and I use them to bring traffic to this blog. It easy to add different affiliate programs to earn money. You can easily add Adsense program. It is very Google friendly.
My advice: don’t create just one post and subscribe to Adsense, Google will straight away refuse it. You need to have “keyword based” articles in order for Google to be able to place ads in your posts. I will be talking about this in the coming article posts.
2. Let us talk about Keywords.
To get good search engine ranking, you need to have good keywords in your article headline and also in the articles itself
There are various methods of analysing highly targeted keywords. You will never find one best way to do it. Every marketer has his/her own techniques. One simple technique for keyword search is googles https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal#
Type in the word you would like to find. Say for example Dog Training. The tool will give you plenty of keywords based on that search criteria.
The key thing here is to go for keywords that have volumes more than 500 and above but don’t go for high volume keywords as they would be hard to rank for in the search engines
Now copy/paste each keyword in the google search bar and place “” around the word say for example you are looking for Dog Training Tips what you would do is “Dog Training Tips”. This will give you the number of people that are competing for that keyword (people like you and me for earning money).
If the number is less than 100,000 then it is a very good keyword to use. Depending on the keyword rarity I sometimes go up to 200,000.
I will be talking more about all these. Did not want to bore you all at one go. The poisonous dose is going to be slow and painful.
So until next time my friends. By the way, if you liked my article you may want to post a comment and tweet it to your followers.
