traffic

Nov

2011

Five Minute Reviews – New WSO

Some time on Monday 14th, I’ll be releasing a new WSO and it’s the first of a couple of projects I’ve been working on with Martin Salter.

If you’ve been reading my recent emails then you’ll have already heard me mention Martin a few times.

He is AMAZING.

While people have often told me they’re impressed with the amount of products I put out (yeah I know I don’t always get it right), my output is piffling compared to what Martin can do. He can put together an entire product including videos, ebooks, sales page design and sales copy in 20 working hours (at a push).

I’m 99% certain that there are people reading this who have had Martin create a white label product for them. And I’m 100% certain that there are people reading this that have bought one of Martin’s products and not realised it was Martin who created it.

😉

So you know that when he gets stuck into a longer term project then it’s going to turn out something special.

This is the first of them that we’ve collaborated on and we think it’s pretty damn cool. We’ve both said that if we saw this when we were both starting out a few years ago we’d have snapped it up. But the nice thing is it’s not just for newbies either. Even though we’re the ones creating this, we’ll be using it on our own sites too.

It’s something we’ve both been doing for a few years now in an on-off fashion when it takes our fancy, so it’s nothing new in that respect. But it’s very new when it comes to how it affects you.

We’ve created an easy (for you) way of adding product reviews to your blogs in under 5 minutes per review.

The way it works is we create the reviews at an average 2-3 per month – very probably more than that – and you do a quick copy and paste of a shortcode with your affiliate links embedded inside and create a new WordPress post. This then creates a short pre-sell review on your web site which points to a fuller pre-sell on a completely unbranded white label site.

Pre-sells are a great way of introducing a potential buyer to a product.

All the white label site reviews appear with your name on them and your affiliate links – the method we’ve put in place effectively rebrands the site to appear as if it’s all yours. When a visitor clicks the link on ANY of the reviews on the rebranded site, you earn the commission.

What that means is that even if people don’t buy the product in the review they originally came to read and instead buy something else, you STILL earn the commission on that other product. (Martin and I don’t take any of the commissions – they’re all yours – we earn our money from membership subs.)

Now we know that there are some membership review sites out there already, and that they’re asking for $27+ / month – eventually we’ll be there too when we hit our targets.

But on the 14th we’re releasing a WSO for $7 membership which is a $5 discount on the official launch price. This is a monthly recurring subscription, and we think it’s so low and so easy to increase your income that it’s the proverbial no-brainer.

When you’ve registered and added your affiliate IDs, then it will take you about 5 minutes to add each new review to your blog. Mix that in with some regular blog content of your own and you’ll begin to build and fatten your personal cash cow.

Even if you consider yourself a complete newbie, then you can do this.

And once you have your reviews in place, then all you need to do is make forum and blog comments in order to see traffic clicking through to your blog. Where you could then also make them an offer to join your mailing list.

So not only do you easily build a pre-sell review blog, you also get to build a mailing list. 🙂

I hope you can see the potential in this simple to do method.

I’ll drop you a line on Monday the 14th when the WSO opens.

-Frank

Apr

2010

Fame And Traffic

For a long time now I’ve been saying that having a personal blog is a very good idea, but a lot of people still don’t get it.

People like to buy from people, not from busineses, and as an example of what I mean, the first thing I always do when considering purchasing a product is do a quick search for the product owners name.

If I find it, I take a quick look at the site just to see if there’s a real person behind it all and for peace of mind, and in most cases it’s a blog.

Usually if there’s a couple of other products they have for sale, I check them out too, and at any rate blogs are good place to see if there’s any special deals going on, like product bundles at a reduced price. I’ve managed to pick up a couple of those and been really pleased with the purchase.

Make sense so far?

But there’s also a traffic aspect to owning a blog too, which isn’t apparent until you stop to think about it.

My answer doesn’t vary…

You can buy traffic, or you can generate it yourself.

By buying traffic I mean any method that costs you money. Pay per click, banner ads, directory listings, affiliate traffic (you pay a commission), hiring content writers to write articles and submitting them and so on.

Generating it yourself is for all those people who have the time but not the money to buy it.

And doing it yourself (or seeming to) is a lot more effective in most cases than paying for it, as it’s the “Holy Grail” of traffic generation – highly targetted.

It’s certainly easy to do.

#1 – Write something interesting and useful for your target niche and post it on your blog.

#2 – Go hunting for similar blogs in your niche and leave valid and interesting comments. Can I EVER stress this enough? No “me too” comments EVER. Okay? If it’s a good enough comment, then REAL people will start to click through and find your site. When they do, capture their name and email address.

#3 – Sign up to a few forums in your niche, put a link back to your blog in your signature, and get involved in a few interesting threads. I’ll say it again, no “me too” comments. Be helpful, and don’t discuss stuff you don’t understand. If you see a thread that’s gone bad, such as a flame war or has gone over the top in some way, DO NOT COMMENT. If you join in, you will be seen as a jerk and won’t be taken seriously. Remember, you want to help and be interesting. REAL people will start to click through and find your site.

#4 – Goto #1.

If you have products for sale, then list them somewhere prominent on your blog, but not “in-your-face” prominent. The sidebar near the top after your sign up box is just fine. (Remind you of any blog you know?)

Traffic that comes through to your blog means people will find ALL your products. If you run affiliate schemes for your products (and you should be), then people signing up will drive even more traffic directly to your sites.

Wow! It’s as simple as that, it really is.

You may even want to pump it all up a bit… How?

Well, here’s a brilliant method I’ve just learned about that will bring in a torrent of traffic to your blog.

Yes it takes some work, yes you might find it a bit scary, but if you have the chutzpah and energy to do it, the rewards are incredible.

And… you don’t have to go at it as hard as this person did, you can also scale it down just to try it out. But definitely, definitely… Doing it will bring you in highly targetted traffic, guaranteed.

You can read more about it here:-

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

-Frank Haywood

Mar

2010

How To Easily Get Lots Of Backlinks

This is a simple enough method, and can be done fairly quickly and easily.

You register on a forum, go to your user control panel, and then enter just two backlinks in your sig (signature) section. You DON’T need to make a post, just register and add your backlinks in your sig using either HTML or bbcode depending on the forum.

The next time that search engines hit the site and crawl it, your backlinks will be found via the members directory.

Easy huh? And you can leave it at that if you want to.

You may be thinking that this is spam, but well… it’s borderline and I think it’s okay as nobody ever has to see the links, just the search engines.

However…

If you want to go a little further, and leave a couple of USEFUL comments too (I can’t stress this enough) on an existing post, then that’s fine. But for goodness sake, don’t make it a “me too” post. Make sure your comment actually adds to the thread and is helpful in some way, and is at least a couple of paragraphs. (The same goes for blog commenting.)

It won’t get deleted, and you help someone. The universe is happy with the trade and so is the forum owner.

The benefit is that there are some threads on posts that can end up getting decent PR (if you’re worried about such things), and the idea is your backlinks will carry more weight. But if you do decide to do this, you do have to take a little bit more care.

It’s usually a good idea to register, make your comments, wait a week, and then log back in and add your sig in the control panel. Most forum software will then auto-add the sig to all your posts.

It’s a good way of getting backlinks and is used by all marketers in the know.

But registering with forums can take a little time to fill in all the fields. Even if it only takes you a minute or two, wouldn’t it be better if you could shave that down to seconds? That’s where Roboform comes in.

Roboform will remember all your passwords and details against different identities you create, and then auto-fill fields in forms for you.

Click-click-done.

It takes seconds instead of minutes.

As I write this they’re currently having a “St. Patrick’s Day special” until the 17th and have knocked 20% off the regular price.

This is on top of another discount they’re currently running which expires TODAY and means you can get Roboform for $23.95 and also second and even third licences at an extra $7.95 each. You can also get a Roboform2Go licence for $15.95 instead of $39.95 which will work with a USB drive so you can carry it around with you. VERY useful.

It’s something I’ve been meaning to buy myself for ages, but never got around to. I’ve instead been relying on my browser to remember my passwords where security isn’t an issue, and keeping the rest in my head or in an encrypted text document for reference when I need it.

Yeah daft in a way I know, but you get into these habits and they tend to stick.

So when I spotted this discount, I jumped in and grabbed myself a copy of Roboform, a couple of additional licences for staff, and also a copy of the USB memory stick version.

Now at last with Roboform I won’t have to worry again about passwords, registering on web sites, etc as all the fields will be retained and filled in for me.

I hope this has all been useful for you.

You can get Roboform from here:-

http://www.roboform.com/

-Frank Haywood

Mar

2010

Writing Experiment

I’m doing a bit of an experiment in blogging. (And I also wanted somewhere I could just write for pleasure, about me and mine.)

One of the things that marketers always want more of, is traffic. The idea is, the more traffic you have, the more sales you’ll do. Hmm, yeah, okay, not always true, but a good general principle to adopt. (What you actually need is well targetted traffic, but even so, any traffic is good.)

I’ve always said you can get traffic just by writing, and that you also don’t need to go out and get loads of backlinks either. The concept is, if you write about anything and everything, you’ll start to get search engine traffic because some of what you write will end up on the first couple of pages of Google. (The power of WordPress and the pings it sends to the highly spidered global update servers.)

So I took out a new domain a couple of weeks ago using “Frank Haywood” with a .me extension. (Work it out, okay?)

I don’t want to link to it just yet as I want to see how much search traffic it will get just by me doing nothing but writing about stuff that occurs to me, and that I want to write about there and then. (It’s good practice for writing other stuff.)

This is proof of concept that just using a self-hosted WordPress blog and then writing every couple of days or so will start to pull search traffic. No backlinks, article marketing or ANY kind of marketing, just writing about stuff that happens to me or pops into my mind, with no thought for good taste or any of the marketing stuff.

As a result, I’ll begin to see the kind of things that people are searching for, and I’ll learn this almost randomly – it’s based purely on what I decide to write on for pleasure.

There’s absolutely no monetisation on the site whatsoever yet, and there are only links out to stuff that I find interesting, and NOT marketing related.

Okay?

So three weeks ago I took out the domain, and a week ago I got my first two visitors via Google search for a write up of a cheap camera I bought from Tesco on an impulse buy because of the price. (It’s a good camera too – I’m pleased with it.) The camera itself is small enough to fit in my coat pocket, so it’s great for taking with me wherever I go, and I can pretty much forget about it until I need it. It took me about an hour to do the write up.

Since then I’ve had another 7 visitors to the site, all from Google search, and all for that camera.

Now while I didn’t write about the camera to make money from the review of it, I did write about it for pleasure and lo and behold, I started to get traffic. I could monetise it by sending people off to the Tesco site using my aff link, but I’m not going to bother as that’s not what that site’s about.

For now. 😉

But you tell me. How hard is it to get traffic?

Isn’t this proof enough that if you pick a product that looks like it could be popular, and do a little research and a write up about it, that you will inevitably get visitors?

Now here’s the thing. People agonise over how to get traffic and then more traffic. It’s the one thing I get asked about more often than anything else.

I’ve proven to myself again that it isn’t that hard to get traffic, and yet people still seem to have a difficult time getting the right traffic to their sites to match their topic. That’s what I get told.

But maybe, and this is a message to everybody who’s interested in earning a living online, you should be looking at it the other way round. Maybe you should instead be looking at what people are searching for, making sure there isn’t too much competition, and then supply them useful content based on their interest, and then use your affiliate links to monetise it.

See the subtle difference?

Many people choose a topic that’s either too broad or too competitive.

The learning point here is if you want to make money from blogging, then choose a more tightly focussed topic and make sure there’s some interest, but also not much in the way of competition.

You’ll then find if you write about the subject and because you’re filling an empty content gap, Google etc will be interested and take notice of your site.

Okay?

I’ll continue to write for pleasure (and to blow off steam every now and then) on that site, and maybe sooner or later I’ll come across some niche or another that gets a lot of interest, purely by accident. Who knows what it might be, and when that might happen?

I won’t lose any sleep over it because that’s not what that site is for, but it’s certainly an interesting experiment to do, don’t you think?

-Frank Haywood