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Blogging Tips Archives

Why You’re Not Getting Sales On Your Blog

I’ve often wondered about this and I’ve even tried to compare blogs to real word businesses in order to find an answer. Let’s consider a couple of real world businesses to see where some differences may lie. The first one that comes to mind, probably because I’ve been associated with this type of business for most of my life, is the supermarket or corner deli. As long as their premises are neat, tidy and welcoming and their staffs attitude is professional and friendly they’re likely to convert almost every person that comes into their store into sales. The main reason for this is people who come into this type of store are looking for something that they need then and there.

Now lets look at a store that sells TV’s, Hi-Fi systems and the like. They may find it a little harder to convert because not everyone that walks into their store is ready to buy a product then and there. Many are window shopping or even looking for the right product at the right price. However, it is possible to convert these casual shoppers as long as you have the properly trained staff. Staff that are able to approach the prospects without scaring them off. Who are able to get out of the prospects what it is they are looking for and then convince them that they are not only able to offer the best deal but the best after sales service as well. Done correctly, even if the prospect leaves the store many will come back, especially if they do not receive the same service elsewhere, to complete the sale. I know this to be a fact because it’s happened many times while I was working in such a store.


Knowing Who Your Customers Are


In the above examples, as in other such businesses in the real world, they have the advantage in that people walking into their stores know what they’re selling and more importantly are probably wanting to buy something from them, if not now at a later date. This is generally not the case for our blog visitors, especially if the blogger has been using the wrong keywords to attract prospective customers.

Are You Using The Wrong Keywords?


This is something every good blogger must ask themselves. How often have you left in disgust because you landed on a site that had absolutely nothing to do with what you were searching for. While some may blame Google for it the problem usually lies with

Keywords are Important!

the site owner for using the wrong keywords. Their mistake was all they were interested in was traffic rather than getting a lower amount of targeted traffic which has more chance of converting. While traffic may be good for lowering your Alexa ranking its pretty useless unless the people who land on your site are actually looking for the products you have on offer. Traffic that isn’t targeted can be likened to customers who rush into a store just to get out of the rain. They may look around while there but they’re not likely to buy anything and once the rain stops they will continue their journey to the store which has what they’re looking for and are therefore more likely to make a sale.

I have to admit that before Market Samurai I never used to worry about keywords because it was all to hard and I know now what a great mistake that was. It’s better to do some keyword research than to not worry about it at all because otherwise you’re not getting the right traffic reducing any chance at converting traffic into sales.


Knowing Your Audience


An important question to ask yourself is who exactly is reading your blog. This is

Preaching to the wrong audience is like talking to the wind. It’s a waste of breath!

because if you know who your readers are then you have more of a chance at selecting the right products to sell to them. The real reason many bloggers are failing when it comes to marketing is because they’re pushing the wrong products to the wrong people.

Say for example you know that your audience consist mainly of teenagers then you would want to provide products that would interest them. This could be anything from ways of treating acne to the latest iPhone. Find the right products and then you’re finally on a winner.

Take this blog for example, it’s not a niche blog and yet it still provides me an income. Most of my readers are bloggers and therefore most of my money comes from selling blogging related products. My biggest seller to date has been the FlexSqueeze theme and other products include the plugins like CommentLuv Premium and even Andy’s latest IM Graphics plugin. The reason for my success with these two plugins is getting in early and being able to offer them at a discounted price. I’m sure that those who purchased the plugins from me in the early days also offered it to their readers thereby recouping their costs and perhaps even making a profit.

Just so you know those images you see in this post are all thanks to Andy’s latest updates to his IM Graphics plugin and if you act quickly you may still get it at the introductory price. My last post not only explains how it works it also shows you.

So, if you can find out who your audience is you will have a better idea at what products you can market to them Having a niche blog makes the job a lot easier but niche blogs can be boring resulting in poor posts and therefore poor conversions.

The question for many of us is how do you work out who your audience is? The obvious answer is by interacting with your commentators. I’m afraid that alone may not be enough and so I ask you, my loyal and knowledgable readers, how to we learn what category or people are reading our blogs so we can successfully market to them?

Continue your page here…

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

How To Prune Your List Using MailChimp

It’s been well over a month since I wrote the post about pruning my list to get rid of all the deadwood. By deadwood I’m referring to those subscribers who have never bothered, or hardly ever, to read my emails. Normally I’d just let them go to build up my list numbers except that I’m rewarding my list members by placing a link to their site from my List page and I figured it just wasn’t fair to reward them if they weren’t holding up their end.  :noway:

That post included a youtube video showing my readers how MailChimps star system highlighted the quality of your subscribers. This post has a video which shows how to use that star system to separate the good subscribers from the bad ones.

Pruning Your List With MailChimp

I have to admit I was surprised how simple the procedure was and I am really glad that I did it. I have to admit there were a few bloggers who were regulars and I struggled with the decision as to whether or not I should delete them with the general culling and in the end I decided it was the only fair thing to do.

 The Positives Of Pruning Your List

I know that there were a few comments in that first post where people thought I was crazy for pruning my list as they felt that the deadwood may actually come to life one day.  :lol_ee: Well, as far as I’m concerned deadwood is deadwood and you’re better off clearing them out of the way so you can concentrate on growing your live limbs.

There are also certain positives for pruning your list.

  • If you have a large list and are paying for the amount of emails you’re sending out pruning your list will reduce those costs.
  • Having a more dedicated list will also improve your open and click through rate which will give you a nice warm fuzzy  feeling when you check your campaign reports  :party:
  • In my situation I know I am only rewarding those subscribers who are actually interested in what I have to say which is as it should be.

I’ve also made sure that any new subscribers know what to expect when subscribing to my list, that I only want dedicated members, ones who actually read my emails occasionally and that I will be pruning my list on a regular basis.

What’s that, how many did I cull in the pruning process? Reckon you’ll have to watch the video to see that.  :hi_:

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

The Difference Between A Good Blog And A Bad Blog

As bloggers we all have one thing in common, we want people to come and read our posts. More than that we want them to enjoy it so much that they will leave a comment. Ah, who am I kidding? Reading and commenting is no where near enough. We also want them to promote the post using whatever social media their affiliated to and if we’re selling something we would also love for them to buy whatever we’re selling. At the very least we would love for Google to display the right ads, ones that would pique our visitors interest enough to click on one of them, Am I right?

Of course I’m right :smoke_tb:

What Makes For A Good Blog Post

This is a very important subject because it could mean the difference between a busy blog or one with no visitors. Sort of like sitting on a park bench all by yourself watching everybody rushing by on their way to the next blog.
empty blog

  • Your Audience: Before writing a post you need to work out who your general audience is and write accordingly. A potentially good post can turn bad if you wander off the topic and then fail to grab their attention again
  • Use The Right Keywords: By this I mean the keywords you choose have to be related to the subject you are writing about. There’s no point in using keywords such as money, sex, boobs or porn stars if your post is about a WordPress theme you’re trying to promote. Do that and the only thing that’ll happen is you’ll increase your bounce rate.While keywords play an important part in your post being noticed by the search engines its also possible that the Adsense ads displayed on your blog are related to those same keywords
  • Avoid Bad Grammar:This can be a real killer. You may have gotten people to your blog by using the right keywords and you’ve piqued their interest by having a captivating title but that’s all going to wasted if your post is full of bad grammar. Honestly taking the time to check your spelling, punctuation and utilising paragraphs and such is well worth the effort.
  • Avoid Confrontation: No matter what you do sooner or later you’re going to write a post where people will disagree with you. The worst thing you can do is to take those people on. Remain calm even if that means stepping away and having a cup of coffee or something. Once you’ve calmed down you can reply to them in a professional manner.I’ve seen many a good post where the bloggers credibility has been shot to hell all because the blogger lost it when someone criticised something he said or the product he was promoting.
  • Be Professional: The way you behave on your blog affects the way people relate to you so no matter what your post is about you should always keep in mind how that post will affect the way people see you. By this I mean rather than attacking a person via a post because you disagree with something they’ve said or done just leave them out of it and write about the subject in general, why you disagree with it and how you would have handled it.
  • Separate Business From Personal:The one thing I like about my blog is that it allows me to write about almost anything. If you have a business blog then your posts should relate to your business. You certainly don’t want to write about your personal opinions on your business blog because doing so can piss off some potential customers. If you have a lot of personal opinions then the best thing to do is to start a personal blog and rant away.
  • Interact With Your Commentator: I’m sure that a lot of people notice that many of the pro bloggers of this world rarely take the time to interact in the comment section giving them the impression that this is the norm. Honestly, if you’re just starting out the best thing you can do is show your readers / potential customers you care by interacting with them in the comment section.
  • Be Completely Honest: Never promote a product unless you know it’s all that it says it is. Forget about the commission because if you sell something that you’re not happy with it’s going to bite you in the arse. You’ll kill whatever credibility you’ve built up over the years and those poor people who got sucked in by your post will tell all their friends what an arse you are.
  • Be A Person, Not A Salesman: People don’t like being sold to but they do like to know the positives and negatives of a product. That’s why you’re more likely to get sales when you’re writing about a product you use and obviously love than one where the only thing you’re interested in is the commission fee.Bellagio Foyer

Of course there are a lot of other factors like the theme you use, having too many ads (guilty :lol_ee:), your posting frequency and even the font you’re using. Face it, if your font makes it hard for others to read they’re not likely to come back for seconds now are they? Getting it right is all the difference between that empty park bench and a foyer full of people talking about that awesome blog they’ve just left.

Naturally these are my personal opinions and alone they don’t hold much weight. What I want is your opinion. Do you agree with what I’ve said or not? If you do which factors to you believe to be important and if not why not. You may even want to add your own views as to what differentiates a good blog from a bad one.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

It looks like Andy Bailey has been at it again. For those of you who are new to blogging Andy Bailey is the wonder behind the Commentluv plugin, a plugin that is so popular hundreds of thousands of bloggers use it. Something else you may not know is that Andy recently released the CommentLuv Premium version. Being a premium version Andy has filled it with heaps of extras to make it worth the price.

I’m not going to go through all of the plugin’s attributes because I’ve already listed them in my post CommentLuv Premium Adding To Revenue Stream. What’s that, how can it add to your revenue stream? Quite simple really as it is a lot easier to sell something to your reader if they see that you’re actually using the product yourself.

CommentLuv Now Improving Your Comments

The thing with Andy is that he is never satisfied with the end product and he is always tinkering with it to make it better. When developing the premium version of the plugin he wanted to ensure that it rewarded the blogger as well as the commentator. With his latest update Andy’s revamped the GASP portion of the plugin.

For those of you who don’t know GASP helps reduce your comment spam as it virtually kills off all robot spam. With this latest update it

now also helps to reduce the human spam. Here is the plugin’s extra feature;

You had some more options added to GASP to allow more advanced heuristics. You can now specify the minimum amount of words

required in a comment and the minimum time a user has to be on the page before leaving a comment. You can also set GASP to warn the user why their comment is not being accepted. You will also have to enter your username and password again to activate this new version (for security reasons). You can also show icons next to the last blog post link if the user clicked any of the social enticement buttons. See the changelog to see details (on the main page sidebar) (this message will be expire after 60 seconds)

Phew, lucky I managed to copy all that before it self destructed :lol_ee:
The CommentLuv Plugin

I know there are a lot of bloggers out there who do not use plugin because they’re afraid that it will attract too many spam comments to their blog as people try to get that extra link back to their sites. Well, that may be true for the original plugin, it’s definitely not true for the premium version, especially not now.

Think about it! What is the most common spam comment you get? It’s the nice post or some other generic comment that is quick and easy to leave and adds nothing of value to your post. I can now set the plugin so that they now have to sit and think about what they’re writing if they want their comment to be accepted.

The other common mistake that spammers make is not reading your post. They now have to spend a predetermined time on the post before their comment is accepted. Heck, if they have to do that they may as well read the post :wink_ee:

Of course there will be many who won’t want to take that extra time or put in the extra effort to leave a good comment and so they will just move on to the next blog, hopefully not a CommentLuv Premium blog :tongue2_tb:, but so what? You don’t want those sorts of comments and by moving on they’re just saving you the time of having to delete it or worse still, stressing over whether or not you should delete it.

So, there you have it, CommentLuv Premium can now improve the type of comments you get. :thumbup_tb:

 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

A Recap Of 2011 And Best Wishes For 2012

The year is almost up and I feel it’s time for a little reflection on all that has transpired over the last 365 days. I started the year with my post Are Your Goals For 2011 Achievable?, the first of 115 posts for the year. That particular post outlined why I believed so many people were failing in their objectives to making an online income and what they should do to maximize their online income potential.

The first money making post for the year goes to How To Make Money Off A Popular Post where I introduced you guys to MediaPass, a site that allows you to turn those popular posts into virtual income generating articles. I am happy to report that there are some who have signed up under me who are doing very well through it adding even more to my source of passive income and for that I must thank you and say keep up the good work :wink_ee:

WordPress Plugins Were Popular In 2011

I don’t think anyone would argue that one of the reasons WordPress is a popular blogging platform is because of all the hard work those remarkable guys put into developing plugins that not only make our life as bloggers easier but also help us to add to out blogging income.

WordPress Superman

OK, there were other plugins mentioned throughout the year, including several posts on CommentLuv Premium but I reckon those were the main ones. I also expect there to be more next year as I come across other interesting plugins. The problem I will come across then will be which plugins to let go.

How I Made Money In 2011

As my regulars know, I’m the type of blogger that loves to share with his readers my experiences, both good and bad, with online money making ventures.There have been several throughout the year of which these are just a few.

Naturally there was a lot of other posts, 114 to be exact, that I could link to but that would be a little over the top. Suffice it to say that they covered everything from jokes, poems, inspirational posts to ways of making money online. I’m sure that my topics are so varied that I have managed to secure a dedicated following as well as why my list membership continues to grow.

I’ve also produced more YouTube videos and I’m planning to utilise YouTube as another avenue for making money in 2012. Speaking of YouTube I would really appreciate if you could take the time to give this particular video a little plug, naturally only if you think it is worth it. :thumbup_tb:

All in all I am more than happy with the way things have gone this year, especially with my latest venture, Buy Online Lottery Tickets, and I look forward to 2012 as being a year that holds many possibilities. Of course things will be really different if I win one of the lotteries outlined in this post. I thought what better way to start off the new year than by winning some money which is why I purchased a ticket from a Brazilian, Spanish and Aussie lottery. The size of the jackpot didn’t interest me as much as the fact that they will all be drawn on December 31st.

As this will be the last post for the year I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and that all your wishes and plans for 2012 come to fruition.

Also, if you’re going to leave a comment I hope it has some content and is more than just good post or Happy New Year as these will just be deleted.

New Year 2010 Fireworks, Singapore

 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!
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