Day 10: Writing Articles and Other Boring stuff
Before we start off with our 10th day, I have a good news for you. I got few emails and I was glad to see positive response(with few questions) from my readers (though I think it’d be great, if you post your comments here).
I got questions quite a few questions on the topic of product creation(actually I was expecting more questions on market or keyword research, oh well). I answered everyone who asked for my advice.
To help readers of this blog, If you are reading this right now (of course you are), you can get a “FREE 10 Minute Product Idea Consultation” with me. This will be chat consultation. I’ll help you with product idea (or strategy) in 10 minutes. Don’t worry, 10 minutes are more than enough. All you need is to contact me at contact @ varunpratap.com (remove the spaces)
Writing Articles & Other Boring Stuff
I know quite a few of you don’t like writing articles(hate might be better word I think). Listen either you can outsource this kind of work or you can do it on your own. You should write an article daily and submit to ezinearticles.com
If you are doing it on your own, it isn’t that hard. Ok so here are few tips which you can read to get started.
How to create perfect blueprint for your articles: Read this article, it’ll help you generate ideas to create tons of articles (specially my response to Ellen on her question).
DIY : How to write articles even when you hate it?
I use these techniques when I am out of ideas or just too bored or lazy to write. I am going to discuss 2 main techniques.
1. List Article : The best kind of articles to write specially when you hate writing are list articles. example would be “10 seo tricks to get traffic to your blog” or “5 email writing tips to get more viewers” etc etc…
Now the trick in these articles is that it should be interesting. Steve Pavlina’s one of the blog post gives you “10 Reasons why you should never get a job”. It’s interesting and its one of the most read articles on his blog.
Here’s an Idea template for you : 10 Reasons why You should not _______________ (write about the most obvious thing in your market).
i.e 10 Reasons why you should not create adsense sites
10 reasons why you should not create blogs
10 reasons why you should not build email lists
Are you seeing a pattern here? It started from just one article.
2. Story Article : In one of my blog, I once wrote a story about my newphew (4 yr old), it was related to my topic and it was one of the highest read article on my blog.
Once I shared how my brother lost 20 pounds of fat (not weight) in 2 months. This was High readership article again.
Again, notice the pattern. I am sharing my own stories. In NLP it’d be called building rapport. I am trying to use commonalities to build trust, comfort and rapport. People want to know more stories about others succeeding/failing/ etc… some wants to be entertained, some wants sympathy and some are just plain weird, yet they all can be attracted by stories.
Now, if you tell me you can’t write an article, then you are just plain lazy… So go and do it now… it’ll not take you more than 15 minutes. Trust me… As you get good (after writing 10-15 articles), it’ll take you around 10 minutes.
Ezine articles has a word limit of 250. Writing 250 words article will like taking a walk in the park for you. So I hope you implement this advice
Why Affiliate Income is better than adsense – Day 9
Affiliate Income : This is something that has been my personal favorite. They are my personal favorite as I have complete control over the ads that shows up on my blog. Second thing is most affiliate products pays good money and it’s far better than few cents per click from adsense.
sidenote: I wrote this article for blogs but it doesn’t matter. They are applicable to websites too.
How to sell affiliate products with blog?
If your blog is more than just an article management system then you can sell loads of affiliate products. My main technique was to share loads of content and then share the resources. Here are few tips that you can apply to your blog.
-> With Affiliate it doesn’t matter as much as adsense to have ads in prominent position. But it doesn’t hurt either.
-> Create a subscriber list. Which is what exactly we are doing.
-> My Show & Tell Strategy: My favorite way was which I called “show and tell” strategy. What you do is just show and inform people how they can use widgets(or any products in your niche).
If people can see(read,feel or interact) it in action, they are more likely to buy from you.
Mind you this is one thing that not many people are doing it. Its so darn underused that its funny. Most of my content was purposely designed on this strategy.
-> Update your blogs/sites regularly: Basic idea is more competitive your niche, more frequent updation you need to do. Unless you use some uber geek fundas to generate loads of traffic. You need to follow this plan.
-> Don’t Diversify: Now this tip goes against many of your’s philosophy. But I’d recommend you to not diversify your revenue generation system on your blog.
What I meant to say is, make sure you stick to promoting one or two product/Affiliate system. For example If I am selling clickbank products I’d not sell products from any other affiliate network.
This make sure I don’t end up with few dollars in different accounts all over the place. And the feeling you get with fat account is really different.
With affiliate income you are not dependent on google or any specific company. If google make any changes you can lose big chunk of adsense income(it happened recently with google’s smart algo). But with affiliate income, all you need to do is change the program you are promoting.
Day 9 : How to get tons of traffic for free?
Today is day 9, and from today onwards I am going to discuss about the methods which you can use to get traffic to your website. Plus I am going to add comments on implementing different marketing tactics on your website.
Again we are going to solve the traffic puzzle in this article. If you haven’t read my earlier articles then please do. It’s important. I am going to discuss more of my Active way of promotion in this article to generate traffic.
Let’s recap the definition of Active Way : These are the methods that you need to apply in your blogs to get traffic. We discussed Social Networking, article marketing and Viral traffic. I suggested because if done right, they can bring you good amount of traffic in no time.
In fact I’d suggest you to promote your blogs on regular (daily if possible) basis. Anyways, here are some more methods of active promotion.
Blog Comments : You should always find other Bloggers in your niche and then comment on their blog. Remember this is not about spamming, if you do not have anything worthwhile to say, don’t comment. Make sure comment is related to their blogs.
Here are few tips for you:
1. Related comments : Always post on topics that are related to yours. It doesn’t make sense of promoting a sports car blog on diet blogs. You can always find other related topic to you, just don’t go too off topic.2. Comment on Controversial topics: If you know of topic which can become a controversy then make sure to leave comments on that specific post. In niche you’ll always find some topics that’ll generate controversy. Topics like Specific guru’s, methods always have potential to generate controversy.
3. Find topics with High comments : Comment on Topics with high comment counts. There is a reason why this post has lot of comments, and the reason is very simple. Its interesting and getting traffic. You should put your comment with your blog url in this post.
Forum Posting: Another fast tip to get good traffic is about forums. You can always find targeted traffic in 24 hrs just by posting to right forums. Most of the Tips related to blog comments will apply to this method.
Still there are few things you should remember. Find out at least 5-7 discussion forums and post there.
1. Don’t get into flame wars: I repeat don’t get into flame wars with other forum members. Try to avoid any kind of online verbal fights. They serve no purpose for your goals.
2. Search For High commented Threads : Find topics that generated High count of views & comments. You’ll use these topics to answer and introduce yourself. There is another use for these which you’ll learn in 3rd tip
3. Create new topics: Yup, pick up topics from tip no 2 and use them to create new topics. If these topics got viewers ship in past, then there is good chance it’ll generate now.
4. Post more frequently : Try to make sure you post on regular basis so that you can put your url in front of number of people.
5. Use Feed Burner: Feed burner provides a simple service which lets you post a simple code in your forum signature and it’ll show your recent blog posts. This way all you need to do is write blog posts and just keep conversation open in forums without blatantly promoting your blog in signature.
Yahoo Answers: Now all of today’s tip are almost on same idea. Interactivity with people online. Yahoo answers is another way to achieve this goal. If you go to answers.yahoo.com you’ll find thousands of people asking questions.
You can always chose your topics and search for open discussions. You try to answer these questions and try to get selected as Best Answer. If you get selected as best answer your answer will be highlighted along with question. This means more readership.
Here’s a crazy idea for you to get selected as best answer. If the question is not technical then try to answer something that user is expecting. You are just a voice to his opinion and then add your own view… They will surely get selected. Because they are not exactly looking for answers. They are looking for like minded people
If the question is technical, then provide answer in as simple way as possible.
Phew, Again, these methods will make sure you have a regular stream of visitors on your blog. It doesn’t take much time to implement them and overall in long term strategy they are pretty good.
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