Reports are a great way of getting people to contact you or add themselves to your email newsletter.
The report has to have enough information to be worthwhile without giving so much information away that the potential customer doesn’t need to use your services.
You may have heard about guest blogging:
It’s where you write some (good) content and another website owner allows you to put that content on their website, probably with a link back to your site somewhere in the article.
Which when taken at face value doesn’t sound like much a good deal. After all, why would you want to help build up someone else’s site rather than your own?
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One of the things I regret not doing sooner in my internet marketing career is list building.
I’d read about it and always procrastinated on it.
But eventually the penny dropped.
Lists are the way to get traffic and sales almost “on demand”.
The principle of list building is easy:
Web 2.0 sites can sound daunting at first.
Even the term is a bit weird. After all, aren’t we all on the same internet? If so, how can there be a second one?
Actually, web 2.0 is just a shorthand term like so many we use in many walks of life.
The main criteria is that people don’t just visit a web 2.0 site, they interact with it.
Most of the time when I suggest to someone that they write a report or even a book, I get a look of disbelief.
They think that you have to be someone special to be a published author.
The plus point is that this goes for most everyone – including your potential customers.
Writing a report or a book doesn’t have to be hard. You just have to be reasonably organised.
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Press releases have been around near enough as long as there have been newspapers to potentially publish your news.
Nowadays, a press release is as likely to be online as it is to be printed and sent (or faxed) to a journalist.
Directories of sites have been around near enough as long as the internet has.
Yahoo started life as a directory and still has one although it doesn’t promote it much nowadays. You can find it at here but personally I don’t think it’s worth the $299 annual fee.
The Open Directory is another directory. It’s free but the amount of time it takes to get accepted varies from soon-ish to never.
When you’re posting articles, some should go on your website to help attract search engine traffic and others should go on a variety of article directories to get you extra inbound links.
Some people will make articles do “double duty” by posting them on their own website as well as article directories. I tend not to do that but, if that’s a route you want to go down, make sure that your site includes the various tags so that Google knows you’re the author. If you’ve got a picture in your Google+ profile there’s even a chance that will show up in the search results next to the result, which is useful for drawing attention to you in the results.
Google indexes lots of different things – words, images, videos. It manages to do this very well with words and sort-of OK with images and videos.
The trouble with images and videos is that it hasn’t got the computational power to deal with that. The last figure I read said that YouTube gets 72 hours of video uploaded every minute. That’s 4,320 days worth of video uploaded every single day. That takes a lot of processing.
Product creation is something a lot of people fight shy of. But it can be as simple as creating a PDF report that your customers can download – maybe in exchange for their email address so that you can keep in touch with them – or it can be as complicated as you want. Or pretty much any point inbetween.