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Ways to Promote Your Blog

May 30, 2009 By 8 Comments

I just spent 10 hours straight doing the design for Easyonlinemoneymaking.com (still waiting for the dns to update for my Host Gator switch, I’ll post when the results are live).  I figured that since I spent such an extended period of time actually being productive I would make a post about some of the “time fillers” that you can do to promote your blog when you don’t feel like pumping out posts or articles.

When I have spare time I usually do some or all of the following, mixing them up every 5 minutes or so to keep myself interested.  I love internet marketing, but I don’t always have the attention span to keep churning out the content so it is fun to do moderately effective traffic driving techniques rather than the high power but highly boring techniques such as article creation/submission.

Here’s where my spare time goes:

  • Adding followers on Twitter and starting conversations with some of my followers when they have interesting status updates.  My twitter: James Spinosa
  • Adding contacts on MyBlogLog and joining communities.
  • Adding friends on BlogCatalog and joining groups, discussions, blogs, etc.
  • Posting on various forums that allow me to have a blog feed, this is mainly to build up name reputation but it doesn’t hurt to get some traffic.  Don’t just spam them, post useful content.
  • Commenting on a bunch of related niche blog posts.
  • Tinkering with my advertisements to find better converting programs so I can make some more money.
  • Creating link bait lists, such as “Top 100 dofollow blogs” so that I can get some free links from other bloggers.
  • Staring at the ClickBank marketplace trying to reverse engineer the success for some of the products that I have no idea why people buy them.

While these may seem like a waste of time I actually enjoy them, and they do yield results.  Most of these are designed to get a one time visitor, but about 10% of people that come to this site sign up to receive my blog posts, yielding long term traffic.

In terms of things like blog commenting and forum posting, this will yield permanent one way dofollow links, which will make me show up for more search results.  The other methods like adding twitter followers, friends, contacts, etc. make it so that I have another set of people that get updates each time I post.

If you have spare time, you might as well use it for something constructive.  There is always some way you can be promoting your blog even if it isn’t through the traditional methods.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , , ,

Switching from BlueHost to HostGator

May 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

I am not quite sure when I will switch over this blog, but my current plan for my websites is to migrate them all to a new HostGator account that I am opening later today.  As some of you may have seen in my post about a week ago I am going to be launching a ClickBank product and with this comes a need for a more expandable web hosting plan.  I fully intend to get 30,000+ unique visitors each month, and with this comes quite a bit of bandwidth requirements which a regular shared hosting account cannot support.

For now I will just be buying the “baby” plan because it more than fits my current usage needs, and at quite a good rate as well.  I am going to buy it for 3 years because their sales department told me that when I upgrade to a dedicated server the money in my account will rollover anyway, so I might as well get the hosting cheap until I hit that point.  There are two basic reasons why I am switching to HostGator, the first is that they provide a much faster shared hosting plan than BlueHost currently does in terms of webpage load speeds, and the second is that it is a scalable operation.  Once I use up too much resources for a shared account, I can simply upgrade to a dedicated server with no interruptions and continue on as if I was still on a hosting plan except with a much faster loading speed ;-) .

Normally I put a lot of time and effort into cutting my costs to a minimum, and since I have already paid for the next 6 months of BlueHost I would normally wait until it has expired.  This time around, I figure that I am making good money from my sites and a couple hundred dollars is really just a drop in the bucket, the only real loss would be about $30-40 and since there is currently a 20% off all initial orders coupon floating around I will be saving more than that by buying it ahead of time. I have called their sales department 3 times to see if I could skim out a better deal but this is as low as they are going, at least all of their support is U.S. based.

This will be my first time transferring my sites around to another webhost which doesn’t seem like a complicated process, if I have problems I’ll make a post begging for you guys to help me out ;)   This also works as a great motivator for me, if I want to get to the point where I literally need to own my own server to run my sites, then I would clearly be raking in quite a bit of cash.

Feel free to copy me, this HostGator link + the coupon “Spring” will get you 20% off your first order.  If I have any problems I’ll post them up :)

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , , , ,

10 Steps to Creating and Launching a ClickBank Product

May 19, 2009 By 7 Comments

Well college is done for the semester, and with that comes a load of free time for me to expand my business.  With this comes many different ideas for websites, but the biggest point of emphasis for me will be the book I am creating called Weekend Marketing.  It is going to be sold through ClickBank and depending on how ambitious I feel, it may also be sold in paperback.  I have created an e-book before, The Seven Day Millionaire, but that product was created only 7 months into my marketing career and while I had been making a lot of money, I didn’t realize the reasons why I had become successful so quickly.

I have seen many products come and go throughout the years on ClickBank, but I want to be one of the first to create a product with actual staying power.  I have planning this book for about a year already, and now I am going to start going through the marketing and production phases followed by actually writing it over the summer.  My plan is to create it and have a sales page done by August and to then go into full scale affiliate scouting and promotions for it.

You will hear all about it as time goes on, but for now I will just leave you with a list of the steps I plan to take to promote my book, so that you can replicate my plans for your own needs.

10 Steps to creating and launching  a product on ClickBank:

  1. Think of a product to create
  2. Do market research to make sure that the niche isn’t over saturated, and check to make sure there is market demand
  3. Think of a title, and register that domain
  4. Create the product – If you are creating an ebook write it in OpenOffice and use their PDF export option.
  5. Work with a graphic designer for the sales page (I’ll post a link to whichever designer I decide to go with, currently there is one that I want to hear back from) – This is my current step in the process.
  6. Begin building your credentials as an expert (posting articles, trying to get into trade magazines, newspapers, etc.)
  7. Start recruiting affiliates, they will be the primary engine of sales so do what you need to court them.  Many posts to come in the near future about how I plan to get affiliates.
  8. Begin promoting the product itself to drive up buzz (well before the actual launch)
  9. Capture affiliate and customer emails via opt-in lists on the sales page so you can have big support for the launch date
  10. Watch the ClickBank gravity system propel your product to the top as more affiliates jump on board as they sense a profitable product.

This is a very general outline, I will be going into detail on each section of the process as I go along.  I expect to be posting once every 2-3 days until November, and then I will slow down a bit as launch comes closer to happening.

Thank you to all my loyal readers, I’m sorry that I always do this to you but I am going to be back for a while this time.

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