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Archives for November 2007

Performancing’s November WordPress Theme: Redbook

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Performancing is pleased to announce it’s latest monthly WordPress theme release entitled Redbook.

Designed by Brian Gardner, of Revolution fame, this theme uses a subtle mix of reds and greys to achieve a sleek, sophisticated and professional look. Redbook includes three columns, with the content column sandwiched between two equally sized sidebars. This layout maximizes your above-the-fold real estate and gives you three nicely-sized regions to capture the reader’s attention.

Redbook is perfect for professional websites but also has the simple flair necessary for edgier magazine style web publications.

The Redbook theme was made possible by Life Insurance Canada .

Download the Redbook Theme or…

Click here for a live preview

Performancing’s 2 Year Anniversary Treasure Hunt

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This week marks the 2nd anniversary of Performancing’s launch. To celebrate, we’re running a massive online treasure hunt and giving away lots of prizes (a growing list). We hope you can participate because this should be a lot of fun!

The basic idea is this. We’ve selected a phrase that’s essential for online success. This phrase has 6 words. The ultimate goal is to identify this phrase and be the first to notify Ryan of the correct answer in a private message.

The Details

A ‘jumbled phrase’ treasure hunt. One sentence, 6 words, no order given. Here’s how it works:

1) 1 word per day, starting Thursday November 8th (the 2 year anniversary date)

2) Every word has a clue attached to it. On each day, you’ll be given that clue (an uncommon sentence) on Performancing.com (8 am EST). During the day, you need to find blog posts that have used this clue.

3) That blog post will have an outgoing link (inside the post text) – that site’s first letter is one of the letters of that day’s word.

For example, let’s say that the clue for Saturday is ‘exploding dell laptops in Cambodia’. During the day, you’ll use various search engines and blog search engines to track this phrase and find out who has used it. Suppose that you find two blogs using this phrase, and both have single links going out to http://www.wisdump.com and http://www.ebay.com.

If you take the first letter of each url, you’d get ‘w’ and ‘e’. Now it’s easy to make a word out of that particular combination, but in the actual treasure hunt you’ll have longer words and it’ll be harder.

To prevent the chance of sabotage, you can send a private message to Ryan to confirm that you’ve found the correct URLs.

4) Once you’ve received all 6 clues, you should be able to decipher the words and piece them together to make the final phrase (there will be more than one possible variation, but we’ll be accepting just one of them).

5) The first one to send it in via PM to Ryan wins all of the prizes.

6) Everyone else who’s able to send the answer in within the allotted time period (November 15th, 11:59 PM Eastern) will be entered in a prize drawing for one of each prize.

Treasure Hunt Prizes

  1. 1 hour free consultation with Chris Garret (value $150)
  2. Free custom logo from Randa Clay (value $350)
  3. 1-year free Professional MegaEdition subscription to PMetrics (value $99)
  4. Professional linkbait service – 1 linkbait plus promotion (value $2,000)
  5. Blog Reboot – a step-by-step report on how to improve your blog (value $500)
  6. SEO Reboot – free keyword research report + SERPS analysis (value $350)
  7. Custom tweak / install of Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme (value $500)

Note: If you’d like to sponsor a prize, please leave a comment or contact me.

Bloggers Make Great Sales People

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Bloggers and selling. You probably don’t put those two words together, but I think they fit well.

Now I’m talking about established bloggers – bloggers with a good amount of traffic and steady stream of RSS subscribers. If you’re one of these bloggers, you can greatly increase your income by selling.

I’m not talking about selling advertising or text links. The problem with advertising is that you’re not selling to most of your readership. In most niches, only a very small percentage of your readers will be interested in buying advertising. These are readers with websites that want traffic or better search engine rankings.

But what about the rest of your readers? How will you monetize them? Sure, you can use AdSense and similar cost per click programs, but don’t neglect selling products to your readership. You can keep the AdSense while testing selling. Oftentimes you’ll find that selling products is more profitable than AdSense.

A Quick Disclaimer

Obviously selling is easier in product driven niches like real estate and travel. Travel is a good example. There is always something to sell in the travel niche. You can sell plane tickets, luggage, books, hotels reservations, cruises, and even travel insurance. However, with some creativity, you can create products in niches that are not product driven. These niches include entertainment, politics, sports, and spirituality. These niches are content driven. If you’re in these niches, don’t be afraid to charge for some of your content. People will pay for excellent content. Here are some ideas: create a membership program, record a video or audio product, or write an ebook.

Why Bloggers Make Great Sales People

Back to bloggers and selling. Why do established bloggers make great sales people? Here are two reasons.

First, these bloggers are trusted. They have a good reputation within their niche. Because of their trustworthy reputation, they can sell much more effectively. Internet users are more likely to buy from people they trust. It’s human nature.

Blogging is the personal medium, and I’ve found that as I keep up with bloggers for a couple of months, I feel like I know them even though I’ve never met them. If they recommend a product, I will check out the product and buy it if I need it. But with bloggers I don’t know about, I probably won’t check out their recommendations.

This works offline too. I have a friend who’s a car salesman. If I need a car, guess who I’m buying it from?

Second, bloggers are good at getting repeat visitors. RSS subscriptions and fresh, new, timely content drives visitors back to blogs. Also, some bloggers have email lists, which brings in even more repeat visitors. Repeat visitors is a key to getting sales. It usually takes a person a couple of exposures of a product before they buy it.

For example, let’s say you have a banner ad where you sell an affiliate product. A visitor clicks through and checks out the product. They probably won’t buy right away even if they’re interested. But if they like your content, they’ll keep coming back to your blog. And they’ll keep seeing the banner ad. Each time they see it, they’ll move closer to buying the product.

Here’s another example. I’ve been following Brian Clark’s Copyblogger for a couple of months. He’s written a lot of great content, so I trusted him. He recently started a membership site. I didn’t join right away. He posted about it multiple times. He didn’t spam. He just connected his membership site to his posts in a relevant way. Each mention made me consider joining. After a couple mentions, I joined.

Conclusion

Sell.

It may be hard for you to think of yourself as a sales person, but realize that bloggers make good sales people. They have great characteristics: they’re trusted and they get repeat visitors.

How-To Write E-Mails That Build Your Professional Network

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You want to build a personal network and you are doing this via the different social services like Facebook or StumbleUpon. You try to make people your friends and you are writing personal introductions.

Don’t hesitate to contact people but do it right!

The following example was in my Facebook inbox this morning. The mail is nice but it will not work as expected even if this guy is a friend of mine on Facebook already:

Hi Markus,

I am actively looking to meet new people at the moment. My business is my passion and I am now ready for market.

My business is media production – our company’s first project is centered on music and built around the artist Xyz. It is an incredibly exciting time to be in this business!

I am looking for introductions to people who do business in this area, particularly Europeans.

I would be delighted to reciprocate,

With very best wishes

N.
—————-
Now playing on iTunes:…

Let’s do a little text analysis and strip that mail down:

1st pararaph: I am, My business, my passion, I am
2nd paragraph: My business, our company, incredibly exciting
3rd paragraph: I am, particularly Europeans
4th paragraph: I would

What am I supposed to do? I am confused.

Is this guy talking to me???

How-To contact people you never met

A contact mail has to have an attractive story telling title. In this example the title was “N. Introduction…”. Make it personal and appeal to my curiosity.

  • Hi Markus, now that we are friends on Facebook…

Start with a personal message or a question which might be answered by the recipient with ‘Yes’. Repeat the title and give more information aimed at the recipient.

  • Hi Markus, being friends on Facebook now (Thanks for your confirmation!) I would like to give you some informations which you won’t find on my Facebook profile. Please tell me if this useful for you (or not!). Maybe you can help me in the future?

The 2nd paragraph should give some short (!) personal background info like age, family status, link to personal website and other network links (i.e. p.com blog). Always remember that you are talking to a stranger!

The 3rd paragraph can introduce your business activity. BUT you must explain why you think that your business activity is interesting for the recipient. If you can’t explain it then only add a link to your business site to make it easier for the recipient (!) to get more info about your business. Don’t be pushy! Better be patient and wait for future chances to introduce you business.

At the end it is a must to be personal. “I would be delighted to reciprocate, “. For what? To ‘reciprocate’ for what?

  • It was a great help for me to read your p.com article about building a nice Facebook profile. Let’s have some fun and exchange ideas. What do you think?

If you use a signature it is allowed to contain business information. Like a ‘PS:’ a signature can have very strong impact. Some direct marketing people say that the ‘PS:’ is the strongest signal at all. Don’t give that chance away!

A last tip: Using the internal messaging system is fine but if you have a personal email address use standard email and not the internal messaging system! Most recipients will have a personal workflow for their mail inbox but not for the different internal messaging services.

PS: Don’t emphasize on facts which can be seen on a first glance at your profile page.

$1000 A Month: How I did it

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Yesterday Amy Derby gave us a peek into how she earns $1,000 a month on a blog receiving very little traffic. I sometimes earn that much on a blog receiving fairly decent traffic, but I don’t earn that much every month and I’m sure I can earn more. Still, for a writing blog it’s pretty good. You see, writing blogs are difficult to monetize.

Here’s how I do it:

Adsense – Adsense is still my biggest money maker. Though I’m still playing around with other forms of income, I have success with this and I’m not parting with it any time soon. For the end of October and beginning of November, my Adsense revenue is way down however, so I need to keep finding methods to monetize my biggest money-making blog.

Amazon – I have some luck selling books using Amazon but the bulk of my earnings with this affiliate is through the search box during the holidays. While I do earn a little using this throughout the year, during the holidays I can count on it for a few hundred bucks from people looking to do holiday shopping from home.

Kontera – I was hesitant to use Kontera at first, I’m not a big fan of context links ads but this was recommended and I’m so far pleased with the results. It’s good for a couple of hundred dollars each month.

Buy me a cup of coffee – This is something else I struggled with. A couple of years ago members of my community asked where they could make donations. I tried one of Paypal’s “donate” buttons and received a couple of dollars here and there. When I made the switch to WordPress I installed a “Buy Me a Cup of Coffee” plugin and couldn’t believe the amount of people who wanted to purchase my next White Chocolate Mocha. Actually most of my earnings for Freelance Writing Jobs is used pay the two people who help out – Jodee, who researches job leads for me and Ajay, who handles the techie stuff.

What didn’t work for me

I tried affiliate programs such as Commission Junction and so far no combination of affiliate ads or buttons have worked. I also had Auction Ads up for the better part of the year and while the beginning of the year wasn’t bad, the last few months have been a complete zero. I took auction ads out yesterday. I’m not saying these programs won’t work well for others, however.

Still Experimenting

I’m still experimenting with other affiliate programs for writers. I followed Amy’s advice and installed an Indeed ad box. I feel this program will be beneficial to my regulars. I’m also looking into affiliates for writing magazines and stores.

I think the lesson here is that you can’t just throw a few ads on your blog and forget about it. You’re constantly playing with new formulas and sources of revenue. I know a couple of people who have hinted that now that I have some help maintaining FWJ I can sort of sit back and collect profits. That’s far from the truth. Finding a way to keep the profits rolling in takes time and patience. I doubt I’ll ever get to the point where I’ll stop experimenting.

What formulas work for you?

Be An EatonWeb Category Editor and make $100/month

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EatonWeb is doing things the old fashioned way.

We’re looking for category editors of our blog directory and we’re willing to pay $100/month for the service.

Here are the requirements:

1. You should be familiar with the top 10-25 blogs in your category
2. You should be able to write 100 word reviews of each blog that gets submitted in your category
3. You should be interested in helping to make “a blog directory that matters” – not one that passes link juice;-)

Each editor will be required to submit 5 new blog submissions per month in exchange for $100. Submissions will be filtered by the EatonWeb editor for both quality writing and quality blog selection.

So let’s get started. To apply for a position, just PrivateMessage me via Performancing along with the category that you are interested in editing.

Optimizing for Search Users vs Optimizing for Search Engines

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While reading Stoney deGeyeter’s article – 10 Useless SEO Worries (his booboo on PageRank apart, I agree with the fellow on everything else) – I couldn’t help but notice this gem:

Is it smart to work on getting your site ranked on MSN, Yahoo, and Ask? Sure, absolutely. But never at the expense of your Google rankings. Never. While different algorithms are employed, they all tend to run off the same basic premise: a good site will rank well, regardless of the algorithm used to evaluate it.

Don’t think that you need to optimize a page for each search engine. It doesn’t work that way. Just do good optimization and all engines will rate you accordingly.

Stoney’s argument is rock-solid and financially sound, even though the thought of being partial to Google amounts to Google-worshipping and therefore leaves a bad taste in the mouths of some people.

Rebecca from SEOmoz talks about ‘whether you should optimize your site for each individual search engine or not’ (Rebecca says no, of course she’s right…). I’ll this a bit further and say that you should:

Optimize for search users, not search engines.

As Stoney and Rebecca say, it’s important to adhere to basic SEO principles that will allow your website to be picked up and index by search engines. And of course, you need to understand how search engines rank websites, because without that knowledge you’ll interpret fluctuations in your search rankings as magic. Good if you’re interested in delusions, but not helpful in marketing your business.

Beyond the understanding bit though, it’s not about optimizing for specific search engines, it’s about optimizing for search users.

So…What Do Search Users Want?

In the absence of hard research at hand’s reach, I’ll posit a good-enough answer:

Search users want search engines to read their minds and automatically serve up what they need, even if the searcher himself doesn’t know exactly what that is.

Search engines perform this task – clumsily but with increasing adeptness – by using a variety of methods: personalised search, trust and authority (T & A), vertical search, geotargeting, etc (insert fancy term for time and date based SERPs customisation). It pays to understand each of these methods but what if you could understand this as part of a simpler, more unified theory of reaching your customers?

Think of search users as a subset of your potential customer base. There are multiple methods of reaching your target audience – offline marketing, viral emails, search, newletters, social media, online video – with all these options, it’s a safe bet that if you’re only focusing on search, you’re missing out on a significant portion of your potential audience (and thus moolah-spinning opportunities). If search can be classified as just one part of your marketing, we can easily use a more unified and simpler theory of marketing that will help us increase search referrals while improving our chances of … say … bringing in traffic from offline media as well.

Believe it or not, wondering about what search users want is exactly the trap you shouldn’t be getting stuck in. The more efficient way of doing this to think about your audience at large, what they want and figure out the best way to deliver that. At the same time, it’s important to figure out how to reach as much of your target audience as possible – and search users are just a subset of that audience.

If you can figure out what your audience wants, you already have a good idea of what search users in your niche want. Then it’s down to a) structuring that information properly on your website and b) promoting the hell out of it. If you can get people (i.e. your target audience) talking about your website online (where talking means discussing in blogs, forums, etc), and if you can keep that conversation going AND growing, your work is pretty much done.

To quantify this in real terms, let’s take a seo blog. You pay good money to hire a writer to write about the latest seo tactics (with a twist – no self-respecting seo blogger goes in the industry without a hook / angle anymore) and let’s also suppose that you succeed in getting many blogs talking about your site. Conversation equals links (and note that these links are from sites within your niche). Eventually, the conversation reaches a tipping point, where everyone seems to be talking about you, from top to bottom, helping you to reach a big, big part of your audience.

How do you think your search rankings are going to look at this point (assuming you’re doing this in a less competitive niche than SEO, I’d say quite good)? Is this a result of optimizing for a particular search engine, or even optimizing for search users? Yes and no. Yes because the strategies you’ve used cover both search engines and search users.

No because you’re not working on optimizing for either per se – you’re just marketing your website using methods that work through a variety of mediums.

If the question comes up, think of optimizing for search users, not search engines. But if you really want to be successful online, focus on your audience and your marketing strategies as a whole.

Also Read: Are Search Engines Evil?

Smacking $100 per day in the AdSense Ass: 7 Things I’ve Learned

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Raj’s article entitled Hitting $100/mth in AdSense: 7 Things I’ve Learned prompted me to write this article with the slightly more provocative title.

My first goal was to make $100/month. Then $10/day. Then $20/day. Then $50/day.

Then $100. That was the last goal I reached. Now I’m closing in on four figures in AdSense alone (well, not that close, but close enough;-) …

  1. Pick the Right Niche: I can’t overstate this. Traffic=Money. Your niche should be capable of driving a lot of traffic.
  2. Bait Like Hell: SERPS drive traffic and bait drives the SERPS.
  3. Be A Freak of Nature: Get up at 3am, start working and don’t stop until 10pm. If you don’t have enough to do, then either you’re not in the right niche, you’re lazy, or you need to educate yourself on how to…
  4. Build Your Footprint: Interact, interact, interact. With people and social media systems. Comment. Vote. You know the drill. Just don’t stop.
  5. Target Powerful Eyeballs: You know your niche and you know the important people in your niche. Make sure they know you. And don’t stop there. Make sure Fox News knows about you too.
  6. Link-Out Like A Loose Lemon: Just keep linking to other sites in your niche. They might or might not link back to you, but they can’t ignore you…12 months later…
  7. 12 Months Baby, 12 Months: Work like a horse for 12 months. If you make it, you can start to relax…cuz everyone’s coming to you now.

Bonus: Make a friend every day.

Those are the 7 things I’ve learned. Pick the right niche and put all your energy into it for 12 months. There are other important factors like outsourcing to free you up to do what you do best…but at the end of the day, it’s focused, freak of nature exertions of energy in the right direction that win the day….

…at least that’s how it’s worked for me.