wordpress

Sep

2009

Autoblogging, Bottle Sterilisers and Mankinis

Way back in February… no let’s go further than that. A couple of years ago, I began investigating autoblogging as a potential earner. In February I actually started doing something about it.

You might now be saying to yourself “what’s autoblogging?”

Autoblogging is a method of legitimately using other people’s content and building a niche specific blog which you then monetise in any way you see fit. AdSense, AdSpurt, Amazon, eBay and so on.

You can get as much content as you like for almost any niche you like just by going along to one of the many article directories out there and lifting the articles for your own use with the authors blessing. As long as you leave the authors link in place. That’s the deal.

Or of course you may have purchased some PLR articles which you can use without having to link to anywhere.

There are lots of methods of autoblogging, some quite expensive, some quite complicated, and some just a waste of time. I’ll give over some detail to all the various methods another time.

One nice and simple (and very effective) method is to let WordPress take most of the strain, and queue up a pile of posts by future dating them. It can take a while, but the trade off is you’re creating a niche specific content rich site, naturally and over time, that you can forget about.

When you’ve completed one and set it up to post articles for the next two to three years, you can move onto the next one.

Here’s the wonderful thing, thanks to WordPress. You get your pages indexed in the search engines wihout any additional effort other than posting, and then you get traffic.

In fact, you can’t stop the traffic once it starts, even if you stop posting articles to your blog.

This happens because you’re building a site with lots and lots of words – Google LOVES words and is as good as handcuffed to them and the search spiders just can’t help visiting to see the new words on your site.

This is because every time you make a post, WordPress sends a message out to the blogging community global update servers. The search engines are all over these servers constantly looking for content and sites that are being actively updated.

I’ve seen that within minutes of placing a post on one of my blogs, Google turns up, courtesy of WordPress and the global update servers.

And once Google knows about your site, the traffic is inevitable.

You may not get traffic for the *exact* search terms you’d like, but you certainly get enough related traffic to make your efforts worthwhile. And the surprising thing is, you never know what people are going to buy once they’ve clicked through to Amazon or eBay via your affiliate link.

Such as 50 Borat Mankinis or 20 Baby Bottle Sterilisers.

I’m not kidding. We’ve seen those exact products purchased via our link on Amazon, which gave us a bit of a chuckle here – so much so that we bought a Mankini for our eldest son as a joke. But that’s another story. 😉

Let’s just run over that again.

#1 – You choose a niche after doing a bit of market research and then set up a niche specific blog.
#2 – You fill it up with future dated posts using free articles from article directories.
#3 – You monetise your blog in any number of ways, including affiliate links off to Amazon and eBay. (Don’t overdo it.)
#4 – You forget about your niche blog as the job is now done.
#5 – Goto #1.

Now in this process, I’ve found that the most time consuming part of it is adding each article to your blog. It takes a couple of minutes for each one as you have to add the title, copy the content, and then *remember* to set the date and time into the future. While you’re doing this, you have to keep a record of the date so you don’t release too many posts around the same time and then none for several weeks.

While I think about it, you also have to have the “Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger” installed and active to stop WordPress from notifying the global update servers with a “ping” as you add each article. It’s either a WordPress bug or an oversight, but even with future dated posts, WordPress will still ping the servers multiple times even though the content isn’t due to appear on your blog for weeks, months, or even years ahead.

If that happens, your site will get banned for “ping spamming” and you may as well give up there and then. Smart Update Pinger fixes that bug and will prevent the pings taking place until the date and time that each post is released.

Problem solved.

Now let’s go back to the other problem of scheduling your posts.

What’s needed is an automated method of future dating the articles so that you don’t have to do it all manually.

Guess what?

I’ve finished testing out my WordPress plugin that will do the job for you, and will automatically schedule the posts for future release, and now I’m just about ready to release it.

What I’m going to do is release it in a nickel sale on Friday 25th September and then just like I did with WordPress Affiliate Pages, make it a 100% commission product. Money generated in the nickel sale will go towards enhancing the plugin to make it better.

The starting price of the nickel sale will be just $1.97, which means the first 20 people to buy will get it for under $3.

The eventual sales price will be $27, and this is a chance to get it at a fraction of that price for a short while. I’ll probably close the nickel sale after the weekend.

I’ll release more detail on Thursday 24th.

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2009

Updated Blog Software

Just a quick post to say I’ve updated this blog using this theme and software:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/slp/

I’ve had my eye on it for quite a while now, but it seemed that development had stopped and the company was being sold, but not any more. Now development is full steam ahead with lots of point releases coming out all building up to a full version 6 release.

It’s relatively expensive, but you can get it at the lowest price for at least the next few days – the word is the price is going up when v6 is released.

It’s well worth every penny at any price, and I’m gradually upgrading all my niche blogs to this new platform.

When I’ve got to grips with the over 70 plugins that come with the theme I’ll do a proper review of it, but that could take some time as there’s so much in there.

In the meantime, the theme itself comes with 27 skins, and I’ve chosen one that is clean and simple and is very similar to the previous one, so it shouldn’t all come as too much of a shock to you. 🙄

Update: v6.0 RC1 has now been released, so if the price is going up when the full v6.0 is released, now would be a good time to get it.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2009

Automated List Building

How would you like to INCREASE the size of your current mailing list, or even just start building one if you’re new to all this?

For FREE (my favourite word).

Read on.

If you consider yourself a newbie, then you might be finding it difficult to get it all started and I understand that, I’ve been there too. If that’s the case I can tell you right now, the MOST worthwhile thing you can do for your business on a daily basis is to build a mailing list.

Even a few hundred subscribers can generate enough monthly income to enable you to buy a new car for instance, by enabling you to pay the monthly loan amount. Or maybe take a nice holiday somewhere, or get an extension on your house. The same principles apply, it doesn’t matter how you spend the money. 😉

You’d generate this income either by selling products you’ve created yourself, or by acting as an affiliate and promoting other people’s products and earning a commission from it. Many affiliate schemes in the internet marketing niche pay 50% or more, and some of them 100% paid instantly.

If this is really new to you, then you might wonder why anyone would offer 100% commissions on a product. That’s simple – they’re list building! You get the full payment for the product and they get a new subscriber courtesy of you.

I do that too, my latest product at WPAffiliatePages.com pays 100% and is one of my list builders. You email your own list or write a nice review, publish it on your blog and you get 100% commissions. I get new subscribers and we all win.

Don’t EVER worry about losing subscribers. Some people are a good “fit” for you and what you do, and some aren’t. If you’re telling them about truly useful products and also giving them good content too, then they likely won’t ever leave. Some will, but it’s never anything to get hung up about.

That aside, I know you’ll want to sign up to a new free service I’ve just found that will build a list for you on autopilot. I’m using it here on this blog now, and you may have already closed the box to read this. Refresh the page if you want to see it again – it will only show itself 5 times to you as long as you have cookies enabled in your browser.

But before I tell you about that, ask yourself if you have a useful product that you can offer to people to get them to sign up to your mailing list. You need a good bribe. 😉

You might also want to follow up with some useful content before you start promoting to your new subscribers. So think long and hard about that and jot down a plan right after you’ve signed up to this new service I’m telling you about – it’s what’s known as a co-registration service.

This kind of co-reg set up is used by many HUGE publishing companies so you’re in good company by doing this.

The way it works in this case is to present a javascript box on your web site that not only presents your own subscription offer, but also related and similar other mailing lists with a couple of them already ticked. All that your visitors have to do is enter their name and email address and not only do they sign up to your mailing list, they also sign up to any others they’ve selected too.

The GREAT thing about this is your own mailing list ads are showing up on other web sites too, so you’ll soon begin to pick up subscribers from other sites.

IF you’ve made a good enough offer.

Once you’ve set it up on your own site then your ads immediately become active on other peoples sites too.

I’ve just installed it on my own blog, and here’s a great tip and is the way I’ve implemented it myself. There’s a WordPress plugin called (strangely) “What Would Seth Godin Do?” and you can get it from here:-

http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do

What it’s supposed to do is to show a small RSS subscription box at the top of all your posts for a limited number of times per visitor (it’s fully configurable). So by default it shows the RSS message for 5 times when you activate it, and then disappears permanently for your regular visitors so it no longer annoys them by showing every time. Clever.

You can bend it to do other things too…

So rather than show a message, you can just paste the little bit of javascript into it which shows the co-reg box.

Aha!

So after 5 (or whatever) visits by your regulars, they will no longer see the co-reg box as by that time they’re either signed up or they’re never going to do it. Even if you decide not to sign up to the co-reg service, I’m sure this WordPress plugin will come in very handy for other things you might want to do on your blog.

The final bit of the puzzle is which autoresponder service to use with this free list building service, and that’s an easy one.

Even though there’s another autoresponder service surfaced recently, the smart money is on:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/imail/

There are some great benefits to using this autoresponder, and I’ve spoken to the owner (someone I’ve known for a while now) and he’s got even more great stuff coming – new development seems to be happening every day. I’m 100% confident that this service will replace Aweber and GetResponse for many people, me included.

The big deals for me with this new service are the built in API, and the choices available as to how you configure it – you’re not locked into doing things the way Aweber forces you to for instance. Importantly, I’ll be building support for this service into all my products as we bring out new versions, so if you’re in the market for a new (or your first) autoresponder, this is without doubt the one to go for. It’s so flexible I plan to do some videos showing how to get the best out of it, so watch out for those.

So, what have we got?

#1 – WordPress Plugin
http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do

#2 – New (and extremely cool) Autoresponder Service
http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/imail/

…and finally…

#3 – Co-reg List Building Service

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/lc/

That’s a 1-2-3 knockout. 😉

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2009

Offline Gold And WordPress Affiliate Pages

Just recently I’ve found myself going a little crazy. I’m trying to settle down to do TWO particular tasks.

#1 – Create another highly targetted automated list builder.
#2 – Sort out the free learning site.

In both cases, I know exactly what it is I need to do, and while #1 should only take me about 4 hours or less, and #2 several days to get up and running, I find myself unable to do either one.

And it’s driving me mad.

The last 3 days I’ve sat down in the morning fully intending to to do #1. But each day I’ve just had a “play” with another little project that’s taken my fancy. And each day it’s ended up turning into an all day session.

What is it that’s got me so distracted?

Simple. “Offline Gold.”

In case you don’t know what that is, it’s turning your marketing skills (you have some right?) away from the internet and instead targetting local niche businesses such as dentists and plumbers etc.

The more I’ve looked at this, the more I’ve realised there’s very little competition, far less than there is online. And the number of small businesses that don’t even have a website is ridiculous. It’s like they’re living in a time warp – at least that’s what I thought initially.

I’m now beginning to realise that most of them would probably like to be online, but don’t have a good reason to invest possibly thousands doing so.

From what I can tell, that seems to be the perception of the costs involved. Thousands.

Now I know that’s amazing to you and me, as it’s dead easy to create a WordPress blog and then choose one of the many free themes that are knocking about. Add some text and a few photos and you’re done. Hey presto! A niche website.

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

There are any number of sites that are selling “web designs” to small businesses, but sod all that are selling marketing to them.

The fact is, pretty designs don’t make a sale, it’s the words that do it. It’s the words that pull in search traffic and it’s the words that turn a prospect into a customer. Yes a nice looking site certainly helps, but I’d guess less than 5% from my experience online.

What does that mean to you?

Well. If you can take the time out to educate businesses local to you about the power of a website to convert visitors to prospects to customers, they’ll look up to you and you’ll become the local marketing authority.

Ray LaFoy said to me a couple of years ago “our internet marketing skills would make us gods offline” I took that comment for granted at the time, but looking at the HUGE potential around us, and the fact that it’s crunch time for many businesses given the economic climate, isn’t this the perfect time to be investigating selling a few simple services to businesses local to you?

For instance, it should be relatively easy to ask small local businesses such as dental practices for $50 month in return for registering a domain and building a web site with a sign up box, all centred around WordPress. The $50 would be for “maintenance and backups” and is zilch in terms of costs to a dental practice charging $500 for 30 minutes work.

But it’s funny how thoughts can differ on subjects like this.

Discussing this with Paul (the developer of SmartDD), he said “isn’t that a bit much?”

Discussing it with my wife, she said “that’s nowhere near enough!”

Paul takes his enviable technical skills for granted and so doesn’t see any great value in his abilities. We ALL do that. We ALL underestimate how valuable our particular skill is to other people that wouldn’t have a clue how to get started. You have to put yourself in the right mind set and imagine yourself as not knowing anything about the subject in question.

My wife thought that $50 wasn’t enough for acting as a marketing consultant to small business, but that wasn’t my intention at this price point, and a quick and heated discussion sorted that out.

I think $50 per month is just right for a “foot in the door” product.

For $50 recurring each month you could afford to put aside 8 hours to put together a WordPress blog fully loaded with the plugins required and the content supplied by your client.

I won’t break down my thoughts behind those costs in this post, but 8 hours or less seems to me to be a reasonable amount of time to do the necessary work once the client has supplied all the content.

If you rate your time at a paltry $20 hour, then you’re losing money on the deal for the first 3 months. From month 4 and beyond you’re in the black.

But the REAL benefit is that you have a client who trusts you and sees you provide excellent value for money. From their perspective they’re paying you a pittance in return for a good looking website that they can go and add content to themselves.

If they want YOU to add the content, then as part of the deal you’ve already told them up front that you normally bill at $50 hour, including phone calls and other hand-holding tasks. My guess is that at least half of them will do it that way, but I could be grossly underestimating that and it might well be all of them.

That then becomes easy money for the skills involved.

Anything is easy if you know how to do it. For instance, if you’re a dentist and you know how to fill teeth or fit crowns, it’s not hard to do, but it IS worth a lot of money.

What I’m saying is, don’t underestimate your individual skills worth to other people.

Once you get past that additional money earner, then the next bit is to educate your clients about marketing and SEO. THIS is where the real money comes in.

When you have their interest you can start to give them quotes for additional “on page” optimising of their web sites. Then you can offer them backlink packages, for example you could offer an “ongoing SEO campaign” and add 10 incoming links per month (easy), and just add it to their existing payments.

Most small businesses will start to see results almost straight away from even the smallest link campaign as it’s very targetted – think “[your town] dentists” and you won’t go far wrong.

And as you educate them more and more about marketing, you can offer more and more such as setting up an autoresponder sequence. Once you’ve emphasised the money angle to them and the fact that a good sequence builds trust, it’s as good as sold.

And I have a few ideas about how you can do that to prove what you’re telling them is true.

Next, sell them on the concept of a sales page on their blog (completely unheard of by small businesses and will blow their minds) and add in my WordPress Affiliate Pages method and you have a winner on your hands.

The upshot of all this is I’ve clearly had my inquisitiveness “gland” tickled and I’ve been doing homework on the whole offline gold thing.

So what do think? Is this something you’d like to see me pursue and put together a product for?

It’s certainly something I’m up for, and I’m trying this out locally whether you say yay or nay. The difference is, should I put a bundle together for you to try out for yourself?

I’m very confident I know exactly where to go with this, and what kind of bundle would be useful to you as I’m running into my own issues already.

Yes. I’ve started building a site to launch this new venture from.

I couldn’t help it. I can spot a good money spinner a mile away, and I know this is one of them.

Multiple Income Streams.

That’s VERY important, just remember that phrase.

Comments please.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2009

Zero Blog Comment Spam With Clickcha

I thought I’d tell you about a plugin I installed a week or so ago that has completely removed all automated comment spam from this blog.

It’s called Clickcha and what it does is present a small random clickable image with instructions on where to click such as “click the smallest number” or “click the biggest square”.

The beauty of this is only a human would know where to click. So all those spammers using tools that automatically leave spam comments on blogs are out of luck.

Interestingly, it seems that ALL comment spam has stopped. In fact, even those comments I used to get that were what I would call borderline spam have stopped too. I used to deal with those by looking at the URL, and if it was anything to do with herbal remedies or gambling etc, I’d mark it as spam and let Akismet deal with it for other blog owners.

So just stopping to think about that one for a moment, it seems to be true that there’s a lot more automated blog comment spam must be going on than you’d think.

In fact Akismet hasn’t had to deal with one item of spam since I installed Clickcha.

That’s pretty cool and is definitely a plugin worth getting.

Update: I’ve had a couple of problems getting Clickcha to work properly on another site and I had to edit the comments.php in order for it to work. I’ve also had a subscriber (hi Larry) tell me that he clicked the smallest number and it deleted his comment from this blog. I’ve also just found a load of comment spam in Akismet, so Clickcha doesn’t quite seem to be doing what it’s supposed to at the moment and I’ve now deactivated it. The concept is good though, so lets keep our eye on that one.

-Frank Haywood