traffic

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

Jul

2008

Terrific Traffic Tactics

Traffic.

The lifeblood of every website. Without traffic of some kind, your website is the loneliest place in the world. And you’re not going to make much money off it at all.

So how can you get people to your website?

Well, when you start looking into this question you’ll see that there are dozens of techniques, but mastering all of them will send your head spinning.

Let me talk to you about one technique which will not only bring you traffic, but it will also make you some money into the bargain.Â It’s called…Â Selling PLR.

Huh?

Sell some PLR material. You’ll make some money and you’ll get some traffic, too. This technique works with unrestricted PLR material, so make sure you have completely unrestricted rights before trying this.

Ok, let me put some flesh on the bones here because there’s more to it than just selling a bit of PLR. What you have to do is take note of a basic human habit. The habit is of doing as little as possible. It’s human nature the world over and it’s key to this traffic generation tactic.

You know that many people are basically lazy and don’t go out of their way to look for extra work. And you probably also know that PLR material is popular because it removes a lot of the effort required to get a product up and running. So you combine those two things with your own self-promotion.

In every PLR product you sell put a list of resources somewhere in each element of the package. In the readme.txt for articles, or the appendix of an ebook, for example. In the list of resources make sure you have valuable and useful links, such as for Winzip, or WinRAR, Adobe Acrobat Reader and so on. And then intersperse links for your own products, sites, or services.Â Don’t hype them up too much. Just put them in as part of the recommended resources.

By doing it that way you give more credibility to your own sites because they’re not shown as blatant plugs with a mini sales page. They’re shown as what they are, valuable resources.

For anyone with a bit of graphic ability you can go even further. You can edit the graphics you have in the PLR material to put a discreet mention of your url in the footer graphic of ready made websites, for example.

I can tell you right now that of the people who take any action with the PLR material you sell, the vast majority won’t take the time to go through it, edit it all, change the graphics, re-word articles and so on.

In fact many of them won’t even put their own name on any sales pages!

They’re far more likely to put it up as it is, or sell it on to others.Â That means that everyone who buys your PLR material is actively promoting you and your sites.

If they sell the material on to someone else, the whole cycle begins again.

You won’t get huge percentages of people turning into customers that way, but you will have a growing network of referral points that will build steadily over time for you. And if you choose something fairly timeless you could be seeing benefits for years to come.

The best part is that you make some money doing it.

Here’s a rough guide for how useful this is for you. Of every 100 people who read this post, maybe (just maybe) 1 or 2 will take some action on it.Â They will reap the benefits of the technique.

The other 99 out of every 100 will be the group that ends up doing the promoting for savvy marketers. And they’ll be paying those savvy marketers to do so.

One thing you should absolutely do is provide good value on the sites you promote this way. If you include worthless sites in the resources section you’ll find your credibility drops every time a new person sees them.

You only benefit if you genuinely offer something worth having so don’t be tempted to promote sites with no value to them.

Next time you get hold of an unrestricted PLR package, be one of the .5% that will actually do anything with it and add some suitable links of your own, before reselling rights to it.

And if you really want to turn it up a notch, why not include a list of places where your customers can sell it on easily?

Make it simple for everyone, beginners included, to make some money with your PLR package. They’ll be back for more before you know it and you’ll be getting your sites and services in front of new potential customers.

-Amin Motin

http://www.sublime-products.com/articles/

May

2008

More Twitterings

I’ve done a little more work with Twitter, you can now see my latest witterings in the side bar of this blog.

And because I’ve done that, I’ve also at long last realised why I like it so much.

It’s a teeny tiny little blog, and I like blogs and blogging, I think they’re a good idea.

As an aside, I just ran a little test, and purely by spending around 3 hours on Saturday finding and commenting on other people’s blogs (which I enjoyed doing), I added 24 new subscribers to my mailing list – 17 on Saturday and 7 on Sunday.

If you’re not doing this already, why the blimming heck not?Â It’s easy.Â People regularly say they can’t build a mailing list, but I find it’s a fairly straight forward thing to do.

My experience with Twitter (while I’ve been using an anonymous test account the last few weeks) is that it will work for me in much the same way as blogging and blog commenting.

If you make an interesting post, then you’ll certainly get people signing up to find out what else you have to say.Â And the great thing is, the effect is cumulative.

Just like your internet business…

The more you work on it, the better it all gets.Â Amazing isn’t it?

People will be finding my ever increasing blog posts for years to come while doing searches.Â Every time someone lands on my site, they get the chance to sign up.Â Lots do.

This is because just by the mere act of writing, I’m creating sets of key words, either purposely or accidentally that people will be searching for.

Twitter works in much the same way.Â Just by using it (which takes seconds), things get better.

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2008

How To Increase Your Site Traffic

How would you like to increase your site traffic?

It’s easy. You can do it with blog comments – this is one of the worst kept “traffic secrets” online.

So let me put it another way…

How would you like to make your blog comments even MORE effective than they are now?

Traffic to your web site is the life blood of your internet business.

In terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you can get a reasonable amount of decent back links to your site every day just by commenting on other people’s blogs. They don’t even have to be high PR blogs, although that helps.

But just having more back links doesn’t necessarily bring you in more traffic directly. Sure, eventually you’ll build up enough links to make a difference to the search engines, but that can take quite a while.

What you want is a method of bringing in traffic quickly, while also getting the long term effect of the back links.

Before I tell you about the tool to help you do this, let me tell you the principle behind it.

You go to a blog, you read a post. You see 20+ comments. You read the first four or five, or maybe more if they’re short comments, and then you either skip to the end to make your own comment or you decide to leave. (Don’t ever do that, always leave a comment, it’s a free back link.)

But notice what I’ve just described.

You read the first few comments. You ignore the rest – most people do that. Some people (me included) will sometimes click through to see what else the comment writer has to say.

Aha! Catch that? If you’re in the first few comments, then you have a good chance of getting someone to click through to your site.

Free, fast traffic, plus the long term benefit of new back links.

To make this work for you, it’s vital that you make sure that it’s YOU that makes one of the first few comments, ideally the very first one. There’s a little bit more to it than that though. You need to not only make the first comment, you also need it to be something that people might want to click.

So your comments have to be both relevant and interesting enough to make people want to read more about what you have to say – I’ll cover how to do that in another post.

So how do you find out about blog posts as soon as they happen? Email isn’t fast enough… Well there’s a little tool you need to help you do this.

You install it (Windows only I’m afraid) and it sits in your system tray monitoring the blogs you tell it to, usually the popular ones in your niche. Every 5 minutes, it checks the blogs, and pops-up a little box if there’s been a new post.

You can then quickly read the post on the blog, spend a few minutes composing a suitable reply, and most likely be the first to make a comment on the new blog post.

Ta-daa!

When the blog owner notifies his mailing list by email a little while later, you’ll have already beaten everyone else to the punch, and they’ll be reading your comment when they arrive. If it’s good enough, they’ll be clicking through to see what you have to say, and you then get your chance to capture their name and email address.

Don’t you just love this method? 😉

You can get the tool by clicking here.

-Frank Haywood

Mar

2008

Easy Money, Guaranteed

I often get a comment left when someone unsubscribes from a mailing list. They fall into two main categories.

#1 – I’m cutting down all my subscriptions. Overload!
#2 – You loser, spammer, scammer, and worse.

But every so often, I’ll get someone say something like…

“I’ve been trying for 6 months now, and all that’s happened is I’ve spent a load of money.”

Well yes, that’s one way of going about business. Give it a half hearted attempt, spend a load of money thinking it’s going to make a difference, and then give up when the magic doesn’t happen.

I blame the marketers out there that promise things like “Try my ABC system and you’ll be able to give up your job in just 30 days from now!”

Oh really! Come on! If it were really that easy, you think anyone would tell you?

They’d just keep the method to themselves and scale it up.

They’d hire a load of employees and make them do all the work for a salary, keeping the lion’s share to themselves. That’s how real businesses do it and you already know it without me telling you.

So why do so many people fall for the “get rich quick” scams? And not just once, but over and over?

There are multiple reasons, but I’ll just cover the one here today.

It’s easier to buy a product and FEEL you’ve done something to build your internet business than it is to actually DO something to build your business.

I’m right aren’t I?

I know I am because that’s exactly what I’ve done in the past.

There’s nothing wrong with buying knowledge.

It’s how I make my living, and it’s also something I do myself on a regular basis. I spend a lot of money on my own education in the form of online courses, processes and procedures I’m unsure of, books which I get from either Play.com or Amazon.com, and so on.

But once I have the knowledge, I stop buying and I start doing.

Here today, I’m going to give you my condensed 7 step course in how to make money online…

#1 – Create a product.
#2 – Put up a sales page.
#3 – Drive traffic to it.
#4 – Build your mailing list.
#5 – Make some sales.
#6 – Automate it all.

and the vital last one…

#7 – Repeat.

There’s an even more condensed version up at the top of the home page of this blog.

Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business

It’s as simple as that.

No, it’s not easy. Real business isn’t. You already know that.

A real business is built from sustained effort. Not from buying stuff for 6 months and then giving up.

But what it is, is it’s GUARANTEED to work.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. The title of this post is a hat tip to someone who gets it so much he’s parodied it (hi Peter). Just Google it…