Successful Blog

3 Mistakes and 3 Essentials of Blog Marketing

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By Pawel Reszka

Still think blogging is the exclusive territory of hipsters and chronic over-sharers? Think again! Blogging is a money-making powerhouse – that is, assuming you monetize your blog correctly in the first place. To understand the right ways – and the wrong ways – to monetize your blog, let’s look at some of the most common mistakes beginning bloggers make when it comes to cashing in.

Mistake #1 – Not Investing Time in Your Blog

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Blogging isn’t an “if you build it, they will come,” type of game. According to BlogPulse, there were nearly 156 million blogs online at the beginning of 2011 and that number continues to grow every day. Simply registering a domain name and installing WordPress isn’t enough to attract visitors and guarantee sales in this competitive marketplace.

So although this first mistake doesn’t specifically relate to the monetization models you implement on your blog, it’s worth remembering that it doesn’t matter how great your advertising strategy is if you don’t have any traffic coming to your site. Whether you decide to pursue guest blogging, blog commenting or a number of other traffic generation strategies, keep in mind that investing time in growing your blog and your audience is the first key to effective monetization.

Mistake #2 – Poorly Chosen Advertising Models

Of course, getting visitors to your site won’t guarantee sales – to do that, you need to choose the most effective monetization models for your blog.

One of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make is simply tossing up a few Adsense blocks and assuming that counts as a monetization strategy. It’s not that Adsense won’t earn you money, as there are certainly internet marketers out there earning six figures through this program. It’s that Adsense, in general, is the lowest possible form of income for most blogs. Here’s why…

First of all, it’s incredibly difficult to make Adsense ads look like they’re a part of your site and not just some tacky blocks of advertising scamming up your pages. Very few people manage to achieve this integration in a subtle, sophisticated way – for most bloggers, Adsense ads are always going to look like, well, ads. This detracts from your blog’s message and discourages people from returning to your site in the future.

Even more importantly, Adsense represents one of the lowest possible payouts in the blog monetization worlds. Assuming someone clicks through on one of your ads, you earn a few pennies – maybe a dollar or two, if you’re lucky. But then you’ve lost that visitor for good. There’s no way you can convert that visitor into a long-term, high-value customer since they’ve left your blog through the Adsense link. For these reasons, most bloggers would be well-advised to steer clear of Adsense entirely!

Simply placing affiliate banners indiscriminately throughout your site isn’t much more effective. If you decide to promote affiliate products, they should be integrated into your site in a holistic way. Maybe you recommend a particular product as a part of a tutorial, or maybe you demonstrate using a particular affiliate product in a video. By providing context for the sale, your visitor will be much more likely to purchase than if you simply paste a banner into the sidebar of your site.

Mistake #3 – Failing to Capture Visitors

But no matter how well you integrate affiliate promotions into your blog, they still aren’t the strongest way to monetize your site.

This is because Adsense ads and affiliate banners represent a “one off” relationship with your readers, where you’re essentially limiting the potential of each visitor to the value of one sale. For example, if you use Adsense banners on your site, you’re hoping to generate one clickthrough per visitor; or, if you place random affiliate advertisements throughout your blog, you’re hoping to generate one sale per person.

The secret to earning money through blogging is that the potential value of each visitor can be much, much higher if you take the time to set up your site as a complete sales funnel.

Rather than copy and paste the technical definitions of “sales funnel” and “back-end sales,” let me give you an example…

A visitor stops by your blog and likes what he sees. Your writing style is good and your free content is valuable, so he decides to subscribe to your email list. As a bonus, he receives a free report that you delivered as an incentive to sign up. Inside this bonus is an affiliate link or a sales message for your product or service, which results in the first sale for you.

But that isn’t the end of your relationship with this visitor. Because he’s now a part of your email list, he receives regular notifications about your newest blog posts, some of which promote other affiliate products or your own products/services.

He’s also notified whenever you launch a new product or service, and because you know he likes your work, he’s much more likely to buy your latest promotion (and their related upsells) than a cold lead who’s visiting your blog for the first time. Over time, this relationship can result in hundreds or thousands of dollars of product purchases and upsells.

Sure beats earning a few cents off of an Adsense clickthrough, doesn’t it?!

Of course, it’s one thing to say that a well-built sales funnel is the key to monetizing a blog correctly –it’s another thing entirely to actually do it! So let’s take a look at the most important features of a back-end sales funnel.

Sales Funnel Essential #1 – Email List

Although it’s possible to set up a simple funnel without an email list (in most cases, the sale of a product leads to one or more “one time offers” for higher priced products or services), maintaining a list of potential buyers and communicating with them regularly makes it easier to convert one-time blog visitors into buyers and to generate repeat sales from these customers.

Sales Funnel Essential #2 – Your Own Product

Generating affiliate sales can be a good way to earn money off your blog, but having your own product (whether that’s an ebook, video training course or coaching program) is where the real money lies. Yes, there are some greater administrative demands compared with simply promoting affiliate programs, but ultimately, you’ll earn more when you control the distribution of your product versus sending your visitors to someone else’s sales funnel.

Plus, considering how easy it is to outsource writing, video editing and other forms of product creation these days, there’s no excuse not to have your own product!

Sales Funnel Essential #3 – An Upsell

Once you’ve convinced someone to purchase your product, don’t drop the ball by ending the transaction there. You know that the buyer is interested in your products or services, so why not encourage them to spend more with a well-chosen, high-quality upsell?

If you sell an info product, consider offering a “premium” version of your product with more resources and tools. Or, if you sell a service, offer a package deal or complementary service to avoid leaving money on the table.

By taking the time to correctly build out your sales funnel, you ensure that the time you’ve invested into your blog hasn’t gone to waste. Just remember – you don’t have to implement all of these elements at once. You can add them over time, but the faster you complete your funnel, the faster you’ll start making more sales!

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Pawel Reszka is an internet marketer who runs Affhelper.com, a blog where he shares some valuable tips about affiliate marketing and making money online. Check out his site for super affiliate techniques and strategies.

Thanks, Pawel. Useful information on affiliate marketing is always valuable.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

How To Connect with Your Customers Where They Already Are

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A Guest Post by
Nisha Sandhu

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If you have an e-commerce business, many of the consumers who visit your website, regardless of the demographics, are participating in social media networks and sharing information on the internet. This means that the possibilities for marketing your products and services online are virtually endless, and there is a vast array of social networking channels for you to leverage, including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

With e-commerce, the most important factor in marketing via social media is selecting the best channels to reach potential customers. You can discover where your target audience likes to congregate by doing the following:

  • Polling those who visit your website or asking them to complete a formal survey to learn more about them.
  • Using Trackur, Social Mention or a similar free tool to get the information you need.
  • Leveraging relevant user information, which can be easily done with Facebook.
  • Studying the job postings, back links, keyword rankings and special announcements regularly to determine what they are doing in regard to e-commerce.

You should also conduct a “competitive audit” of your most serious competitors. Include the social networking sites where they participate, study the content they use, the number of hits they receive on every site, and the methods they employ to promote their products, services and special events on social networking sites.

In order to grow your business regardless of the social channels you use, attract consumers by offering them something they will never find anywhere else, such as promoting a contest. This should drive more traffic to your website and add to the number of your Facebook fans as well, if that applies in your case. You should also consider offering some incentive to those who follow you via social media, such as a discount coupon or free shipping, provide advance notice of a new product that will soon be available, or invite your customers to learn more “about us.”

  • Along with that, you might want to take the following steps as part of your online marketing strategy:
  • Share interesting news stories or messages that you gather from external sources.
  • Add a blog to your website and send the content to your e-commerce marketing accounts.
  • Ask for feedback from those who visit your website.
  • Include relevant videos and pictures to create interest in your company.
  • Make it easy for customers to buy the products you highlight by adding a link to the order page.

These are just a few ways to connect with customers where they already are.

Have you tried others?

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Nisha Sandhu is an Editor at merchantaccountforum.com, where she researches and writes online business advice for new and growing businesses.

Thank you, Nisha!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Beach Notes: Waiting for the Mullet

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

On a recent afternoon walk we saw the local fishers’ trucks and boats lined up and we stopped to talk. They were waiting for the mullet to come their way from the nearby estuary.

We’ve seen this team explode into action once the fish arrive, working the boats and nets and trucks with a huge expenditure of energy and fast, military-like precision. But right then they just had to sit and wait till the fish arrived. How would they know? Simple, the color of the sea would change. Simple for them.

Knowledge, experience, skill, the right tools ready, the team assembled, ready for action.

All good.

But sometimes you just have to wait.

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Guess What? Customers Really DO Respond to Online Ads

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A Guest Post by
Diana Pohly

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If you’ve been getting new customers by running online ads, here’s some good news for you. New research from Google (http://www.youtube.com/v/Xpay_ckRpIU?hl=en&fs=1) has shown that the online ads you place on websites really do work. In fact, they work better than most people imagined. You can see it in this YouTube video.

For its test, Google saturated specific test market areas with online ads for specific company products, then measured consumers buying in those regions against buying elsewhere. And the ads worked. Here are some highlights:

  • Online ads attract customers and sell more. In the Google study, a national retailer ran online ads in 59 target markets for products in one product category and saw a 2 percent increase in sales in that category, compared to sales in other markets where no ads were run.
  • Online ads create a “halo effect.” Companies that ran online ads achieved an across-the-board increase in spending for a range of products, not only for the products that they advertised online.
  • Online coupons deliver results too. Coupons improved sales 2.5% for the products they promoted and thanks to that “halo effect,” resulted in a 1.6% increase for all product sales.
  • Online advertising offers a significant return on investment. Companies that participated in the test earned as much as a $10.00 return for every dollar they spent advertising online.
  • Offer something that is attractive, desirable, and free in exchange for contact information. For example, let visitors enter their email addresses to get a discount coupon for one of your products, a free sample, a chance to win an iPad, a free yoga lesson in your studio, or a complimentary technology training session from one of your consultants. Be generous! Remember, you may never have a chance to win that customer again.

So let’s say that you are running those online ads and people are visiting your website to either buy or investigate.
How will you make the most of the fact that they are there?

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Diana Pohly is with StepbyStepMarketing and she’s happy to offer you high-performing strategy recommended in this free downloadable report

Thanks, Diana!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Bid for the Presidency…Tweeted? What Does that Mean to YOU?

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Guest Post
by Riley Kissel

On May 11th, House Speaker Newt Gingrich announced he’s running for President of the United States. According to CNN, he officially announced his intentions to run via the popular social networking site, Twitter.

Anyone who takes their online marketing seriously needs to pay attention to the 2012 election starting now. Political action at the national level was always executed with the intent to cast the biggest net possible, similar to business advertising, but those tactics are changing. In traditional politics the customers transcend all market “types”. There’s a particular focus put on the means to reach everybody all at once through television or radio, because votes can come from anyone, kind of like how money can leave anyone’s pocket and go into your business. But today’s political arena is focused on strike force access to niche markets through social media, with the expectation that these strikes will go viral and the effort will be more cost effective than alternative mass-media means. Your entrepreneurial arena is undoubtedly the same.

President Barack Obama is estimated to raise $1 billion dollars for his re-election campaign. This number is unprecedented in presidential politics, but it won’t be for long. President Obama’s comparatively enormous war chest is the result of his presidential efforts back in 2008. Obama was the first national politician in American history to utilize the power of social media and social networking effectively. Nearly half of that figure was attained through donations of $200 or below made online. It wasn’t that Obama pulled the right strings, it’s that his team saw the possibilities of these online marketing techniques when opponents hadn’t yet. Never again will a serious presidential contender not have Twitter and Facebook accounts.

What about You?

Consider then, what this says about the future of social media marketing as it applies to your business. I’m assuming you don’t have presidential ambitions, but you can still relate. If no competitor is Tweeting or updating a Facebook status, why aren’t you? If they are, you need to right away. It’s going to be hard to compete against someone who can instantly notify their customers of sales when all you have are weekend coupons. Find an online marketing consultant who can help you get started. Once you’re active in social media, it’s time to utilize it effectively. Big announcements need to be made on it. Subscribe to competition and do a little (perfectly legal) espionage. These are important tasks to achieve when you’re getting your social network foot in the door, and consultation will help.

Television was perhaps the most important communications invention of the last century. People often forget that it wasn’t until the Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960 that the world began to understand the potential of its power to influence and persuade. The Internet will no doubt be the most important piece of communications technology for at least the first half of this century. Don’t wait to let its power start working for you.

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Riley Kissel is a freelance writer who covers many industries with style. You can find out more about him at RileyKissel.com

Thanks, Riley, for simply showing how great thinking has built great success.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!