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assistant who is in tune with their coaching clients and customizes solutions based upon their individual needs and goals 2. differs from a general virtual assistant as they only partner with members of the coaching industry [syn: 
Archive for Marketing
Create an Outline for Your Info Products
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Creating an outline is an important step when writing an information product. If you just start writing without direction it can be difficult to format everything you want to say into one clear structure.
Here are a few steps to creating your information product outline:
You may want to take a legal pad or notebook and on one page just start jotting down ideas you would like to include in your product as they come to you. Don’t worry too much about structure at this point, you just want to get all your ideas out on paper. Anything you can think off which may be a good fit for your product, write it down.
You can also write questions down such as “who needs this product?” “why this product is necessary”, etc.
Once you’ve written all your thoughts, take a second sheet of paper and create an outline. You want to write things down in the actual order they will appear in the book. Your outline may include some of the following things:
- Introduction
- Copyright page
- Disclaimer page
- Body of the book
- Closing
- Recommended Resources
Now you want to take the body of the book and break that into main sections. For example one section may be called “Getting Started” while another may be called “Marketing your Business”. Of course, it will depend on your subject but this should give you a general structure idea.
Now for each section such as “Getting Started” write down each sub section that corresponds to “Getting Started”. Lets say you’re product is about starting a website design business then under getting started you may include – “Who Needs Web Design Services?” – “How Much Can a Web designer Expect to Earn?” and so on.
By the time you finish going through each section you have a rough outline. Now read through it. Does it all flow nicely? Would some of the information fit better in another section of the book? Did you leave something out or should you add something else? Edit and tweak it a little then leave it for at least 24 hours.
After a nice rest go back to it and look it over again with a fresh and open mind and make any necessary changes. Once you’re happy with your structure it’s time to start writing!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
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Affiliate marketing basically means selling other people’s products for a commission online. Affiliate marketing is similar to offline sales where sales people earn a commission for selling a product; the difference is that all selling is conducted online.
As an affiliate marketer you will research and find products to promote on your website. Each time you make a sale through your affiliate link you will earn a portion of that sale. The commissions can vary from as low as 7% to a generous 50%.
The sales are tracked through your unique affiliate ID which is assigned to you at the time you sign up for a specific affiliate program. Your unique affiliate ID is tracked and each time a sale is made through your link it is recorded. A good affiliate program will give you plenty of tools for promoting their products as well as a comprehensive member’s area where you can track your affiliate sales and commissions.
Affiliate marketing is a good way to get started online. You can be set up and ready to go within a few days and there is no need to spend any time creating your own products or purchasing inventory. You are simply promoting other people’s products, which means the vendor is actually responsible for order fulfilment, customer service and anything else related to the sale – you simply refer the sale to them and get paid for doing so.
For example if you have a love of cooking, you can create a website around cooking related topics and include tips, recipes, and reviews of all your favorite cooking gadgets. You can then find affiliate programs online and promote some of those products on your website. You can find programs by doing a search under your chosen topic such as “cooking” and adding the words “affiliate program” to that term.
You can also find affiliate programs at places like CJ.com.
Although affiliate marketing is an easy way to get started online, there is a little more to it than just throwing up a few links and banners and waiting for the affiliate check to arrive. A good affiliate marketer knows it takes time and effort to make sales.
A good way to do this is by providing quality information on your website and only linking to affiliate products where appropriate. Another good tip is to review the products you promote so that you can accurately describe all the features – good and bad. Your customers will appreciate honest feedback and will be more likely to buy from you if you give them good quality information and honest reviews.
Why Super Affiliates ROCK!
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Have you ever wondered what super affiliates do differently? How do they earn such high commissions? What tools and marketing tactics do they use that you can use as well? While there may be a number of things a super affiliate does successfully, chances are they’re also a super reviewer.
The Amazing Power of Reviews
A review is more than a valuable piece of content you can publish on your website, blog, or article directory. A review is perhaps one of the best ways to pre-sell a product or a service. If you sell products, you know that the best way to earn commissions is to pre-sell your information products.
Reviews get the job done because they offer unbiased information. They highlight the pros and cons of a product or service, summarize the benefits and then tell a reader where they can buy the product or service.
However, a super affiliate takes their reviews a bit further.
A Super Review is:
Benefit focused – It highlights what problem the product solves and stresses the benefits. It answers the question the reader really wants to know: “What’s in it for me?”
Personal – It shares examples or tells a story about how the reviewer benefited from the product or service. This turns the review almost into an endorsement. Personal experience is very persuasive.
Unbiased – It provides an honest look at both the pros and the cons of the product or service. If a review doesn’t list any flaws, then the reader is going to be suspicious and not trust the opinion of the reviewer. Nothing’s perfect.
Factual – It provides the raw data too. People make buying decisions based on their emotions. This is why it’s so important to stress the benefits and what problem the product or service solves. However, they reinforce their buying decision based on facts. These facts include price, features, and even where the product can be purchased.
Purposeful – It includes a call to action. While you may have a few links to the sales page throughout the review, a super review always ends with a call to action. For example, “Visit LINK to learn more now.”
To make more commissions and become a super affiliate, take steps to write reviews. Incorporate these ideas and steps to become a super reviewer and watch your profits soar.
Link Building Mistakes
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Link building is an important aspect of a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. The more quality links you have coming into your site, the better. It the sites linking to you are quality sites and contain your keywords, even better. However, on the path to the number one spot on the page rankings, many business owners make a few common link building mistakes.
Limiting the sites you target for backlinks – Yes, high page ranking websites and pages are lucrative opportunities. However, don’t neglect the smaller businesses either. Focus on getting a wide variety of links from relevant websites.
Not using keywords, anchor text, in your backlinks – Keywords are your bread and butter. Not only do they help motivate actual clicks, they help the search engines index properly. And they boost your search engine ranking, which is of course the ultimate goal. Skip using anchor text like <Click Here> or <Download Now>. Use your keywords!
Too many links on a page – Too many links on the page confuses not only the website visitor but also the search engines. It divides the power of your links and minimizes their effectiveness. Instead, choose your links wisely. Choose the ones that seem to carry the most weight.
Counting on social media to provide links – Social media links are not considered quality links. And most networking sites nofollow external links. (A nofollow is when a webmaster tells the search engines to essentially not pay any attention to links.) However, don’t neglect social media as a tool to generate awareness for your content and your website.
Placing backlinks only to your homepage – One rule of thumb is to identify key strategic pages and work to increase backlinks to those pages. Your landing page likely already receives an abundance of links.
There are of course other mistakes which it shouldn’t be necessary to mention. However, just to make sure we’re all on the same page and striving for success, these mistakes include linking to link farms or link exchanges. They also include avoiding any black hat or spammy behaviors. And no cloaking.
Link building is about creating great content, building relationships online with your associates, prospects and customers. It’s about planning and creating a strategy. The old “throw spaghetti to the way to see what sticks” approach won’t get you where you want to go. Avoid these mistakes, create a link-building plan, and regularly assess your success.
How to Get Writing Ideas for Your Blog
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Starting a blog is easy – keeping a blog interesting and fresh is a whole other matter. While many marketers have no trouble beginning a blog, the sheer number of abandoned blogs around the ‘net speaks to the fact that many marketers don’t know what to do to keep a blog going. According to blogging experts, the key to keeping a blog going is to post frequently. This means that you’re going to need a ever present stream of content coming into your blog.
You may be intimidated by the thought of having to come up with lots of topic ideas. Finding topics for your blog posts are easy if you use the following ideas.
1. Captions
Your blog should be timely and there’s no better way to attract attention on your blog than to tap into some ongoing news. No matter what your niche is you can find news stories and breaking information that will help fuel timely blog posts. Look for captions, or headlines, to stay on top of thing. Sign up for Google Alerts (it’s free) and set up alerts on important words in your niche. This way you’ll be able to see the news in your niche and blog about current topics.
2. Comments
The comments section in your blog can be a great source of writing inspiration. Let’s say you have a post on your marketing blog about keyword research. Within the comments section, a few people start asking about how to use keywords in articles for article marketing. Voila! You have your next blog post. Look through your comments section to identify topics that you can write about or questions you can answer in the form of a blog post.
3. Companions
Are there some websites or other resources that your niche needs to know about? Write a few resource list posts. Resource lists posts are very easy to write and they provide maximum value to your readers because they can get the information that they need easily. When you can’t think of anything else to write about you can pull together a helpful list for your readers.
4. Community
Keep your finger on the pulse of your niche. Watch other blogs in your niche and see what they are writing about. You can take a different angle on the same topic, or cover an area of the topic that the original author missed. If you disagree with the author, feel free to go ahead and express you opinion on your blog. Other bloggers can be a great source of information so be sure to get involved in the community.
5. Collection
Start collecting a list of quick tips you’d like to share with your niche. These can be inspired by your personal experience with the niche, from other blog posts you’ve read or from other products in your niche. When you find yourself stuck for blog post ideas, you can write a quick tips post.
These tips just scratch the surface of where you can find ideas for blog posts to populate your blog. Start keeping a notepad file with blog post ideas and you’ll never be at a loss for material.
Wikipedia vs Google Knol
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Which site is better: Wikipedia or Google Knol? Both have their advocates, and there are good and bad things about each. Google Knol is much newer than Wikipedia, as it’s only been around for two years.
What is Google Knol? It is a site that has articles by people on many different subjects. In other words, it’s very similar to Wikipedia. Many believe it’s really Google’s answer to Wikipedia.
However, while there are similarities, the sites are actually quite different. Here are the five main differences:
#1) Making changes
Anybody can make changes to a page on Wikipedia. This isn’t the case with Knol. The person who wrote the page can choose to only allow certain people to change it, or none at all. This can’t be done with Wikipedia.
#2) Number of articles on a topic
Wikipedia has just one article per topic, whereas Google Knol has many. Anybody can create a Knol on a topic, even if there already is one. Because of this, it is very similar to Squidoo or Hubpages.
Wikipedia also allows anybody to contribute. However, they can only change the existing page on the topic, and they can’t write a new one.
#3) Advertising
Wikipedia doesn’t allow any sort of advertising on the site. If anything you write seems like it’s promoting a particular product, you can no longer contribute.
On the other hand, Google Knol does allow advertising. They state in their terms of agreement that the users can promote their own products or services.
Why would they allow this?
One reason is that many users will put Google Adsense on their Knol page. This in turn will increase Google’s profits.
#4) Votes and comments
All the articles on Google Knol can be voted on, so the best ones will rise to the top. So even though there might be twenty-five pages on a particular topic, people will generally trust the one with the most votes.
This is a quick and easy way to tell which information you can trust. Also, comments can be left on Knol. This isn’t the case with Wikipedia.
#5) Use for other sites
Anybody can take an article from Wikipedia and use it on their own site. This is because everything on the site is part of the public domain. However, with a Knol the writer can specify whether they want to allow this or not.
The bottom line is, Google Knol and Wikipedia are very different. Both provide reliable sources of information, using different methods. Neither one is better than the other. Just experiment with both sites, and see which you prefer.
Recruiting Affiliates for Your Business
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There’s no doubt about it, having a team of affiliates working for you is a sure-fire way to grow your business. However, finding the right affiliates could mean the difference in profits and performance. Here’s how to recruit affiliates:
Market to your list. Your list is made up of people who are interested in you and your products or services already. They may be the ideal people to work as affiliates because they’re already familiar with your business. And presumably they like you – that helps. You can send out occasional “Promote our Products” type of email message and you can include an affiliate sign-up link in the footer of your email.
Make sure you have a link on your website. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. A simple “Partner with us” link that redirects them to an information page will do the trick.
Get listed in an affiliate directory. That way affiliate marketers who are looking for your type of product or service can find you easily.
Advertise on relevant websites, forums and blogs.
Get noticed! Your blog and social networking interactions can drive traffic to your website. If you’re a force to be reckoned with, people will want to join you. They’ll want to become part of your success.
Network offline too. Attend seminars and workshops. Get out and make friends. Partnerships are often forged during the coffee breaks at seminars and conferences.
Make sure your affiliate offer is worth noticing. In addition to a nice chunk of the profits, make sure you’re giving your potential affiliates all the incentives they need to sign up. Bonus downloads, freebie marketing materials, and frequent pay outs are just a few perks.
Research your market. It’s often pretty easy to see what affiliate marketers are marketing to your industry. Once you’ve identified a few key affiliate marketers, contact them personally and make your pitch.
Be sure to promise a lot and then over-deliver. One of the best ways to recruit affiliates is to have other affiliates rave about you. Word of mouth is a great seller. The best way to accomplish that is to promise a lot and then to over-deliver.
Create the best products or services and deliver. One of the best ways to recruit great affiliates is to have a great product or service for them to promote. Good products and services are easy to promote and therefore easier to profit from. And they get to feel good about promoting you.
Affiliates can really take your business to the next level. If you’re ready to start an affiliate program, take the time to plan it well. Decide how you’re going to pay and reward your affiliates and then make it happen. Spread the word through all of your current marketing channels and don’t be afraid to try a few new ones.
How to Use Google Analytics
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Google Analytics is a handy tool you can add to your website pages to learn valuable information. This information can help you fine tune your website and your business. Let’s take a look at some of the information Google Analytics offers and how you can use this information to your advantage.
What Google Analytics Provides
A Google analytics report breaks down the information into a list of sections. They include:
Site Usage which includes:
- Visits – Total number of visits to your site
- Page views – Total number of pages visitors looked at
- Pages/visit – Average number of pages viewed per visit
- Bounce rate – The percentage of users who left after viewing only one page on your site. Aim for under 50%.
- Average time on site – How long a visitor stayed on your website
- New visits – The percentage of people who haven’t visited your site before.
Visitor Overview – this section breaks down the visitor information into more detail including the number of pages viewed overall and the average page view per visit. This information can be invaluable. However, it takes a bit of analysis to find the noteworthy information.
For example, if you notice that there are only three page views per visit that might make you worry. People aren’t spending much time on your website. However, if the majority of your visits are not new visitors, meaning people are coming back to your website for information. Then the number of page views may not be so concerning. It’s likely that the visitors are just reading your new content.
Traffic Source overview – This section tells where your traffic comes from. It lists how many came from search engine traffic, for example Google Organic, but how many came from direct traffic and from referring sites. You can use this information to fine tune your traffic generation strategies.
For example, if you find that 60% of your visitors are coming from Google Organic, that’s good. However, if only 15% are coming from referring sites, you may want to increase your link building strategy. And vice versa, if you find you have low Google organic numbers, you would then know it’s time to work on your keyword placement and optimizing your content and your site.
The traffic source overview also tells you what top keywords people used to find your content. This is of course extremely helpful when creating your content plan and learning what keywords people use and what they’re looking for on your website.
Content Overview – This section of the report lists the top content and the page views for each piece. This is ideal information for building and creating your content strategy. It’s more beneficial however, if you compare the information over time and look for trends. Is your top article always a tips sheet? Is it always on the same basic topic? Google Analytics compares your present week to the prior week. However it’s more advantageous to look at your content overview information over a longer period of time.
Google analytics provides valuable information for you to fine tune your keyword strategy. It helps you learn what content people prefer on your site. And it helps you learn where your visitors are coming from so you can adjust your traffic generation strategies as needed. It’s not a crystal ball that can put you inside the minds of your prospects and visitors. However, the information Google Analytics provides is extremely useful to build your business and your business website.
How to Build Trust With Your Clients
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Build Trust: Give Something Away for Free
Your relationship with your client is one of both necessity and pleasure. You need clients to stay in business. And hopefully, you enjoy connecting with your clients. To build a good rapport and maintain trust, it takes a plan and ongoing strategies for success. Here are a few ideas you can use to build and maintain a positive relationship with your clients.
Communicate with them often. Now maybe you already do this. Maybe your customers receive regular emails from you. However, what you say in these emails is important. If each and every email you send is a promotion or asking for a sale then they’re going to stop reading your emails pretty darn quickly. They’re going to lose trust in you.
On the other hand, if your email communications are chock full of valuable information, value, and benefit then you’re building trust. Customers will look forward to our information.
The same goes for social networking. You can communicate with your customers on a regular basis. Instead of posting promo link after promo link, post real, human interactions.
Prove you’re worth trusting. If you are a service provider then it’s imperative to post samples of your work on your website. And if you’re a service provider, retailer or even an information marketer or affiliate marketer you can provide case studies to demonstrate the value of your products or services. This provides credibility and it makes it easier to trust you as a provider and business owner.
Give away things for free. Free can be used as a marketing and relationship building tactic on many levels. For new prospects you build trust by providing valuable information and free downloadable information. For current customers, they love freebies too. You can give away reports, videos, and ebooks . You can even take it a step further and give current customers a coupon or freebie.
For example, current customers can be offered a free report as a loyalty thank you. You can even start a loyalty program that awards customers with points or dollars they can use toward future purchases.
Be Transparent. Transparency is a word that’s thrown around a lot lately. It essentially means that you don’t hide any of your polices or procedures. You’re 100% up front about who you are and what you’re about. This may mean making sure you have a double opt in for your email signup, a privacy statement that’s easy to find, contact information and even a FAQ page. Transparency helps customers and clients trust you.
Show gratitude. Depending on the size of your client base and the nature of your business, ending clients and customers a personal message is a great way to build rapport. Send cards and gifts during the holidays if it fits your budget. Or just send a note now and again with some helpful information.
There are many ways to build rapport and trust with your clients. Begin by taking a look at y our clients and what you can do for them. Then set about to create an ongoing plan to connect and build trust. A little planning and action can go a long way to creating a business that is successful today and ten years from now.
Using The Thesis Theme for WordPress
Posted by: | CommentsThe WordPress Thesis Theme is one of the favorites among site owners with minimal technical knowledge. Basically, it makes it easier to change your site without knowing PHP or even HTML.
There are many themes to choose from. Here are five reasons you might want to use the thesis theme:
Ease of use
This is a great platform that allows you to have a good-looking site with minimal technical know-how. It is easy to change, no matter how little knowledge you have.
It contains a panel on the side that enables you to alter the theme without the need to change the code. If you want to make more advanced alterations, you might need to know some PHP and HTML. However, for most changes this isn’t necessary. It’s much more customizable than the free themes.
And even more complex jobs are relatively simple. You might have to change the code a little, but when compared with other themes, it’s not hard.
Just be cautious. You still have to know what you are doing. While this theme is simple to use, like any theme it’s possible to mess things up if you get reckless. For this reason, take time and read online instructions about working with thesis theme before you start experimenting.
Inexpensive
The thesis theme will run you $87 dollars to use it on a single site, and $164 for multiple sites. Considering how easy it is to use, this is very reasonable. It’s certainly pricier than some themes out there, but the quality more than makes up for it.
Support
The main site has a responsive support forum. Should you run into any difficulties, your question will be answered very quickly. The main developer, Chris Pearson, even answers the questions himself on occasion. This is one of the main selling points of this theme.
Instructions
As mentioned before, there are sites online that have in-depth instructions on how to use it. This isn’t the case with a lot of themes. This makes using it much simpler than one of the lesser-known themes.
SEO friendly
One of the big benefits of this theme is that it is easily optimized for SEO. The code is not complex, which means the site is much more likely to get ranked than other themes. Uncluttered code is always well liked by the search engines.
Some bloggers have reported an increase in traffic largely from using this theme. It’s not magic, so you can’t expect to just install it and see instant results. However, it certainly won’t hurt your efforts, like some of the free themes.
The bottom line is, the WordPress Thesis Theme is one of the better ones out there. if you are looking for an easy to use theme that is relatively affordable, look no further.
