by the juice on May 1, 2009
Is it May already? Wow, what happened to April?
A lot has happened in the month of April. My only son turned 18 and has enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. I could not be more proud of his decision.
I have also launched a brand new blog called Babblefind.com that reviews everything from Twitter tools and Affiliate programs to Wordpress themes. Check it out and tell me what you think.
But, on to our winner. This month we were offering the eBook, “Desperate Buyers Only.” Our winner is Kecia (hand picked by my daughter’s raffle skills) I sincerely hope you enjoy it, Kecia and I hope this website is a constant source of learning and encouragement for you.
This book (which sells for over $70) will outline exactly what markets to target, how to plan your success strategy, and then a step by step way to implement your winning tactics.
Again, congratulations Kecia!
Announcements for what you will win in the month of May are coming soon…Stay tuned!
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by the juice on May 1, 2009
0 to 1000 Free Targeted Website Visitors In 30 Days – A How To Tutorial
In this post I’m going to outline a step by step plan for taking any site from zero to one thousand website visitors per month in 30 days time. Or, increasing your existing web traffic by a thousand visitors per month over the next 30 days.
This isn’t about how to simply generate a thousand visitors and stop there–your web traffic will continue to grow far past that point. This tutorial will show you how to get the ball rolling and your web traffic flowing in the smartest and most simple way possible.
Furthermore, it’s not about getting 1,000 unqualified website visitors. What we all want is high quality, targeted visitors. They are the most valuable to you as a website owner.
As for my step by step instructions, anyone can do this, but few people will. How effective it will be is completely up to you….
Before I get to the first step of the strategy I want to remind you of a very important principle. All web traffic is not necessarily good web traffic. Yes, I said it, and we all know it. All website visitors are not created equally.
One thousand website visitors coming to your blog or site from your twitter profile isn’t the same as 1,000 website visitors arriving from a traffic exchange, and neither of those are the same as 1,000 people coming to your site directly from a Google search.
There are a lot of different ways to generate web traffic and no one strategy should be used in isolation at the neglect of others. Real online business owners are open to testing everything and learning for themselves which methods will give them the best return on their investment.
With that said, few will argue that web traffic from highly relevant search keywords can’t be beaten in terms of monetary return per visitor. Sure, the traffic available through other sources (such as social media, link buying, and other forms of online advertising) can provide a larger volume of traffic than a search, but I’ve yet to find anyone who will say that traffic from these sources convert more highly than targeted, search engine obtained traffic. [click to continue…]
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by the juice on April 22, 2009
Personal Branding & Brand Naming
Formula for Success.
Do your homework first. Brand naming is extremely important. Many marketers are probably working with brands that already have existing names, but in case you are not, or in case you are starting a new business, blog, or website – here are your survival tools for choosing a business name.
- People only refer to a person or product using one, or at the most, two names. For instance, I am either Robin or Robin Hale. No one calls me Robin Marie Hale. It’s too hard to remember and simply unnecessary. Likewise, a car is either a Camry or a Toyota Camry. People say, “I drive a Ford” or “I drive a Ford Explorer.” Few say, “I drive a Ford Explorer EX.” People occasionally can remember three levels of names – but rarely more. Saturn is simple. Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue and Ford Mustang Mach III are not.
- Brand naming tactics that run into trouble are those that have multiple levels of names. For instance, Hallmark co-produced social expression software with Microsoft. Greetings Workshop was from Microsoft and Hallmark Connections (in some cases, this was a sub-set of another suite of products from Microsoft with additional brand names). What did the consumer remember? What did they ask for? Did each consumer use the same name? It might have been easier to call it “Hallmark Greetings Workshop (brought to you by Microsoft)” or “Microsoft Greetings Workshop (featuring Hallmark cards).”
- Coined names (such as Yahoo, Twinkie, Wii, Purina etc.) are preferred if you have sufficient resources to build the meaning of a brand name. Coined names are distinct and can be designed to be easy to read, write and pronounce. It is unlikely that any other brand name will be confused with yours if yours has a coined name. Because coined names require significant communication over time to build their meaning, they are best reserved for parent brands or other brands that are extremely important to the organization and that will be around for a long time.
- Many organizations opt for associative descriptive names, which may be partly descriptive and usually allude to what the product or company can do for you. Examples include Sir Speedy Printing, Photoshop, Lean Cuisine, Pop Tart, Die Hard Battery. These brand names tend to work quite well and deliver the added benefit of immediately alluding to the brand’s benefit. If you want to get into a product or business quickly with a name that helps reinforce the product’s or business’ primary benefit, while still maintaining some level of uniqueness, this is the preferred method of choosing a brand name or choosing a business name.
- Generic or overly descriptive brand or business names are least desirable. They are not distinctive in consumers’ minds and they can’t be protected legally. Interestingly, many online companies with generic names have gone out of business: Auctions.com, Business.com, Buy.com, Computer.com, eToys.com, Food.com, Furniture.com, Garden.com, Mall.com, Mortgage.com, Pets.com, Stamps.com, etc. (Source: The Wall Street Journal, April 2001) So much for all those once exorbitantly expensive URLs.
Did you know?
Suggestive brand names assist with recall of brand benefits suggested by the names but inhibit recall of other advertised brand benefits. This may explain, for example, why the old ‘out of business’ Jack-in-the-Box restaurants found it impossible to establish a more adult, product-focused, healthy image, and Old Spice aftershave, Oldsmobile automobiles, and John Hancock financial services have struggled to create more youthful images that could lead to doubling or tripling their sales figures. What youth is going to choose Old Spice, with it’s 50-something imagery, over Axe, the hot girl magnet?
To sum things up–if you are choosing a business name, be creative, be suggestive, be memorable…Don’t be generic…Don’t be dumb.
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by the juice on April 20, 2009
Your web business probably receives product inquiries from potential 
customers all the time. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly.
But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?
If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.
When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp. This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products or services, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.
Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.
Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up? An Aweber email marketing campaign can help solve that issue for you. [click to continue…]
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by the juice on April 19, 2009
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just take you kids to the park right in the middle of the day, onl
y to come back and find that you made 3 sales while you were gone? That’s the beauty of passive income. Niche Blogging is an amazing way to get this passive income going for yourself!
Passive income literally changes lives. When you don’t have to rely on the economy, a boss that could fire you at any moment due to cutbacks, or live in the daily grind of 9-5, it is a beautiful thing. If you become ill, which happens from time to time, you don’t have to lose money because your blogs are still earning you income.
It’s a beautiful thing to get to set your blogs up and have them act as your 24 hour sales-people. That is what makes blogging perfect for stay at home moms or dads, retirees, individuals trying to leave the rat race or someone saving for a child’s education or family vacation. Passive income from blogging can help you pay off debt without filing bankruptcy and even help to save your home from foreclosure.
The beauty of blogging is that your blogs are always there. It doesn’t matter whether someone is searching for information in your niche at 2 in the morning, your blog will be there.
When they decide to buy a product through your link or click on some Adsense ads, it will be there earning you money at any hour of the day or night.
Now, you will need to work hard at first to get your blog up and running. When I started, I knew nothing about html, websites, WordPress, or themes. In fact, I still laugh today when I think back about my first WordPress blog. It was one of the free ones, hosted through WordPress. I downloaded a free template that was perfect for my site. After about six hours of work and head scratching, I realized that free themes can’t be added to free WordPress blogs. That’s how bad it was for me. So trust me, if I can learn this business, anyone can. This particular blog is only about four months old and as you can see, it’s already doing well.
Once your blog is up and running you’ll just need to do some light maintenance work to keep things going and add some posts a couple times per week. If you like to write as much as I do, that shouldn’t be a problem…
Once you’ve built two, three or ten blogs, you will have your own virtual empire!
So, why isn’t everyone succeeding with their blogs? That’s easy! Many people set up their blogs the wrong way and set themselves up for failure instead of success.
The majority of new blogs out there fail, in fact. But if you’re going to be different and actually have the winning edge right away, I cannot stress enough to go ahead and latch onto Amy Bass and her Niche Blogger training course. I’m using it and I am succeeding.
I know Amy personally and she is one of the sweetest and most helpful people out there in the blog-o-sphere. Besides that, she is smart as hell and has a sure-fire strategy to make sure you don’t give up on your blog before it really starts generating some income. This strategy requires a lot of work in the beginning, but once you are rolling just watch and see what happens. You can move onto the next blog and really start to build your online income to new levels.
Imagine this: A few years down the line you have 40 different blogs going. One of them has always been a nice little earner for you, and several of your posts are at the top of the search engines for the keywords you’ve targeted. [click to continue…]
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by the juice on April 18, 2009
One of the best ways to earn money online, hands down, is to blog. The secret is out and everyone knows that contrary to prior popular belief…Yes, Virginia you can make money blogging online.
In order to make money blogging there is one vital element your blog must have–the experts generically call it traffic. I like to call them my guests, visitors, regulars, friends, subscribers, or even co-addicts. Basically, it’s the family of followers and contributors a sincerely helpful and interesting blog will develop over time that will cause it to become successful.
So, how do you get to this point? Well, first let’s assume (which is a BIG assumption here) that you have a useful, engaging, intelligent blog that adds value to the world wide web. Okay, so that basically cancels out all of the autoblogs, black-hatters, cheaters, liars, and self serving get-rich-quickers…. All of you can exit the building. Okay, is there anyone left? Good….you guys are who I’m talking to. You actually have an awesome wit, a wonderful blog, and advice, service, or products to offer the world. So how do you stand out from the crowd of mindless, useless, rubbish that is out there?
You Promote Your Blog Like a MADMAN! That’s how. Yell from the rooftops until you are noticed. Once people see that you are serious about your blog, your business, and what you have to offer….the snowball effect will fall into place, but until that happens—Promote!
Steps to Mad Promotion:
- Social Bookmarking – Useful websites, such as SocialMarker are out there to help promote your site. Fill in the form with your blog post information and you’ll be able to hit a lot of social websites in one pop. This is a great time-saver for the mad promoter and will generate some healthy traffic (friends) for your blog.
- Sending Pings – To ping is to notify websites and search engines when you’ve submitted a new post. To make this work fast visit AutoPinger. It will do all the work for you.
- Submit to Blog Directories – There are directories which list blogs and actually work bring visitors your way. Here is a list of popular blog directories where you can submit your blog. Yes, you have to do this manually and it’s boring work, but will pay off in the long run! [click to continue…]
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by the juice on April 12, 2009
The desire to work at home in your PJs is something that doesn’t escape many people. 
Getting in your car early in the morning, ironing clothes, downing some coffee, and desperately trying to motivate yourself to complete work you don’t like to do is something that you’re probably desperate to eliminate from your life as soon as possible.
The good news is that you can make money at home online to supplement or even replace your income. It’s all made possible through blogging!
You probably read blogs all the time. There are literally millions of blogs out there on every conceivable topic.
However, you might not have considered yourself a blogger before. It’s important to get rid of the thoughts that may be telling you that you are not a blogger or that you can’t be a blogger, because blogging could be the very thing that changes the way you live your life.
Instead of sneaking a peek at some blogs at your 9-to-5 job, you can be the one sitting at home and writing these blogs that other people read.
You’ll not only be providing great content for your visitors, you’ll also be pulling in some great money that can literally change your life.
Getting rid of the doubt that you can do this is going to be an important first step. As long as you are able to compose and send an e-mail, you can be a blogger–trust me.
Your next step is to have an easy, step-by-step tutorial that will guide you (in 3rd grade fashion) how to do it. You need an all inclusive program that will instruct you how to come up with a blog idea, how to install and set it up your blog and EXACTLY what to do every day to get to the point of being free from punching a time clock and pulling in an awesome income . It’s also important to have motivation and encouragement during this process. The absolute best place to get this online is through The Niche Blogger.
This membership site is perfect for the newbie and intermediate marketer. In fact, many of the people who join the membership site are brand-new and know absolutely nothing about blogging.
[click to continue…]
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by the juice on April 10, 2009
If bloggers and webmasters want to monetize their websites, one way to do it is through the use of Google Adsense. There are plenty of webmasters struggling to realize solid earnings from their websites or blogs. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some of the strategic thinkers amongst us are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their sites. What makes these site owners different from the non-earning kind is nothing more than their ability to properly set up their blog, drive traffic to it, and strategically place their Adsense ads.
Here are 5 proven ways that will improve your Adsense earnings:
1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This format has the tendency to result in higher click-through rates (CTR). Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because this style of ad looks like a normal web link, and people (being creatures of habit) and already used to clicking on them, will continue to click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense ads, but as long as there are clicks then it will result in your financial advantage.
2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea in patterning the colors is to make the Adsense ads look like part of the web page. Again, this will result in more clicks from visitors to your site.
[click to continue…]
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by the juice on April 6, 2009
Social media optimization. I firmly believe it’s here to stay. For those who don’t understand exactly what it is, I’ll offer a simple explanation: Increasing your visibility and other’s awareness of who you are by leveraging the power of social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, forums and other online communities).
Along with SEO (search engine optimization – which is using keywords, linking, and other tactics to rank with the search engines) there is SMO (social media optimization) which goes hand in hand with SEO.
The basic principles of Social media optimization are really no-brainers, but as with anything that we think everyone should know–it’s best to list the simple things that are sometimes overlooked.
1. Increase Your Website or Blog’s Linkability: Many sites are “static” –meaning they are rarely updated and simply used as a storefront. Traffic figures aren’t growing and neither is the potential for other sites to link to yours. What would be the benefit? None. Who wants to swim in a stagnant pool? Your site, first and foremost, needs to be updated regularly with intelligent, useful information. If your last blog post was written in 2008, you’re in trouble.
2. Blog to the World by Using a Translator: If you are running your site with a WordPress Blog, there is an amazing plugin, WordPress Global Translator Plugin by Nothing2Hide that allows you to cross the language barriers that often divide us. We always say, “Doing business on the web is like having the entire world as your customer,” but if they can’t understand your site,what’s the point?
WordPress Global Translator is a stand alone WP Plugin (which means it doesn’t require any additional files to work). Just activate the Plugin and it puts a small table of international flags in the header of your blog which, when clicked, will translate your blog content into that flag’s language.
Currently, 10 languages are supported, providing cross translation between English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Arabic.
You can control the placement of the flags within your WordPress Theme. There are many options to controlling how the flags will look and be laid out on your page, as well. You can have them in a single row, two rows, etc.
3. Help Your Content Travel: Unlike SEO, which is mainly about making changes to your site, SMO is all about spreading yourself all around. When you have content that can be portable (PDFs, video and audio files) submit them to relevant sites. Your content will travel further, faster, and ultimately drive links right back to your own site.
Some individuals are very protective about their content, but in the long run, it’s better to spread yourself around. [click to continue…]
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Some people, unfortunately, still look at blogging and online freelance work as ‘not being a real job.’ I remember several months ago when my teenage daughter first asked me if I was ever going to go out and get a ‘real’ job. Funny, because at the time, she was ‘really’ spending my money. I think that kind of validates things.
