One of the things I always suggest that people do to promote themselves and their website is to write articles. Preferably quality articles that have some substance and that actually offer readers good quality information.
Admittedly, that kind of article does take time to write but it needn’t take forever if you follow these simple tips.
You might be wondering what that title has to do with business or anything else in your life.
After all, a vacuum is quite a rare thing – even outer space isn’t a pure vacuum.
But we can get close enough in areas of our lives. And when we do, great things start to happen as if by magic.
Almost every successful business in the world is a mixture of people,
It’s rare that just one person is running the whole business, even if there is an obvious figurehead like Steve Jobs did this at Apple or Michael O’Leary does at RyanAir.
Even apparent loners don’t normally work alone. They have a team of people around them. Which is something we could all use but we can’t necessarily afford tens or hundreds of people to surround us and help us out.
Which is where the idea of a business mentor comes in…
Once you’ve built your website, the next question on your mind will almost certainly be how to get traffic to it.
After all, if no-one except you looks at your website, there wasn’t really much point in making it (unless you’re a vanity publisher obviously).
So, how can you get traffic to your site?
This question gets asked all the time.
The usual advice is to come up with something that’s popular and in high demand.
But that isn’t necessarily good advice…
Email marketing is something every internet marketer is “supposed” to do.
There’s an assumption that because everyone else is doing it, you should too.
If you’d like to know more about this, listen to this overview now!
Once you’ve listened to it, think about buying the complete series of 8 detailed audios that explore every nook and cranny of email marketing and will leave you with more knowledge than near enough any of your competitors.
If you haven’t got an autoresponder yet, I recommend Aweber.
Audio 1: Why use email marketing?
It’s far too easy to assume that just because everyone else is email marketing, you should be.
It depends on the market you’re targeting.
For instance, if you’re selling big ticket items as an Amazon affiliate, do you really need a 30 day email campaign?
But if you’re selling a course or something that leads on to other purchases, yes, you probably do need an email campaign.
Audio 2: Which provider to use?
Should you host an autoresponder yourself? Or will your internet host freak out and shut down your site once you get more than a handful of subscribers?
If you go for a “hosted elsewhere” solution, should it be free like Mailchimp or should you pay a service like Aweber or Get Response?
And what happens if you outgrow your chosen solution?
Audio 3: How can you get subscribers?
In olden days, people had to send a blank email to the address you gave them.
This quickly progressed to filling out forms. That definitely ask for an email address, often ask for a name and sometimes ask for other details.
Sometimes the forms pop up (and most users instinctively hit the ‘X’ button to close them), other times they’re on every page of your site, other times they’re on a squeeze page.
Which works best?
Which should you use?
And should you give something away as an incentive to sign up or not?
Audio 4: Should you use double or single opt-in?
Aweber, etc encourage you to use double opt-in.
But with the new tabs that Google have forced on Gmail users (without bothering to ask, because Google knows best apparently) double opt-in has become even trickier.
Does it really matter if you “only” use single opt-in?
Audio 5: What should you send in your emails?
I’m going to hazard a guess that not every single one of your subscribers reads every single one of your emails.
And the good news is that you’re not alone in that happening.
But what can you do to improve the number of emails that your subscribers read?
Audio 6: Dealing with spam filters
Spam is a fact of life.
There’s way too much of it.
Obviously your emails aren’t spam (or at least I hope they aren’t) but computers don’t always know that.
This audio deals with how you can greatly reduce the chance of your emails being relegated to the spam folder, never to be seen.
Audio 7: How often should you email your list?
Yikes!
No-one really knows the answer to this and the answer definitely isn’t the same for everyone.
So I could have explained this in one word: “Test”.
But instead, I’m going to give you guidelines to help you decide.
And the answer isn’t constant over time either.
Someone who subscribed yesterday or today probably really is eagerly awaiting your next email or at least somewhere close to that state.
Someone who signed up a few weeks, months or years ago may barely be able to remember your name.
They need to be treated differently!
Audio 8: What if people aren’t opening your emails?
The open rate for emails is often quoted.
And it’s always wrong.
Because you can’t guarantee that people will download the images in your email.
In fact, you can probably guarantee that most of them won’t, because that’s the default setting for almost every single email reader.
And since open rates rely on a (small) image being downloaded, your open rate figures will be wrong.
But should you care? You’l find out more in this audio!
You can get all this instantly here:
At the time of writing, I’m nearing the end of creating a complete Law of Attraction product and showing the “behind the scenes” processes that make up the project.
The project had been sitting on my to-do list for about 2 months but – apart from buying a domain name – I’d never quite got round to starting it.
And there have been quite a few times in the last two weeks where I’d have happily put off doing something towards getting the project nearer to completion.
Which is where going public with my intention to complete the project comes into play…
Back when I was at school, one of the subjects I studied was Economics. And one of the concepts it used was called “perfect competition”.
It was hard to comprehend – we’re talking well before the days of the internet here.
The idea was that consumers had “perfect knowledge” of what things cost to produce and that the supply of people selling products would drive the cost down to near enough exactly the cost of production.
Skip forward from my school days in the 70’s and we’re pretty close.
Off site SEO involves anything that isn’t located on your own website.
In essence, that means links pointing back to your website.
Those links can take many forms and can be in many different places – we’ll take a look at the more common ones here plus some caveats (yes, there are always exceptions!)
SEO isn’t rocket science. Whilst there are reckoned to be over 200 different factors that Google pays attention to, truth be told there are only a handful that make much difference.
SEO obeys the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) where most of the results come from doing a handful of things well.
But what are those things and how can you get your website to stand out (come high in the search results)?