I have been into personal development for over 15 years and sometimes there are moments that just hit you square in the face and scream ‘Pay attention to me’. No doubt you have gone through life and you get these moments, they’re called ‘A-ha moments’, when you just get it, whatever you’ve been trying to figure out.

There have been quite a few of these moments in my life but none more profound than than the one I’m about to share with you now.

The Key To Success Is Making

Others A Success

Now, you’d think that would be well known and everybody would say ‘Duh, I knew that already!’ but so few people know of this key or really grasp it’s importance.

In any field you happen to be in, if you go out of your way to help people better themselves you will become known as the person to go to.

Be the person to go to

At work I am known as the ‘Computer Man’, no matter what the problem is; Word documents, excel spreadsheets, trying to find a lost image file, undoing things etc. That’s because I love the computers and even though I don’t know most of the things on the computer I use the little tab that says ‘help’ and figure it out within a few minutes. Why do most people ignore this little ‘help’ button; probably because in every workplace there is always someone like me.

If you make yourself the person to go to at work you can make yourself the person to go to outside work and start a business or a part time venture whereby you become the person to go to in a small niche. You do this by giving away free information, give great advice and generally being a nice person. When you become quite well known for the person to go to, then that’s when your business really starts.

My friend, Dragos Roua, has become the guy to go to about blogging, within his circle of friends. And due to this he is now starting to do blogging seminars, why? because he’s helped people for free in the past, built up his knowledge while showing others what to do and generally being a nice guy. Now he has another income stream, all because he become the person to go to.

Helping others

When you help others become a success you undoubtedly will become a success yourself, however, you still need the business savvy and the business guts to put yourself out there.

Never call yourself an expert, let others call you the expert, but put it out there that you know what you’re talking about and help others achieve what they want to achieve.

I realised this a while ago but am only now beginning to put into motion the second stage of this and that is having the business guts to get out there.

What’s your story?

Have you realised this key already, if so what’s your story and how did it help yourself and others?

Due to a monumental screw up by BT Plc I have not had internet access for 10 days, So I am back again and just setting a schedule for posting.

I was supposed to get my telephone number changed with BT as I wanted on old number back and instead of changing the number they decided to cut my line off instead which cut BT broadband off and Cut off the BT Vision off as well.  So I called customer service, quite angry, and after being passed around 5 different departments  was advised that the line had been cut off, duh!.

When I asked what they were going to do about it, they advised they would get me back on in 7 days time.  By this time I was fuming so I asked to speak to a manager and got a  Miss R Nelson who apologised and all that and promised me my line would be on within a day but the broadband was going to be 1 week.  Again I complained.  Miss Nelson advised she would call me within a few hours.  5 hours later and I received a call from a customer service advisor saying miss Nelson was away for the day and advised me she could not put the order through that day as there was some kind of problem.  I was then promised a call back in the morning which did not come until the afternoon and was told the Broadband would be going on for the 17th June.

I waited another day for the line to go on and nothing.  So I called and spoke to someone from India who advised me the line would be activated on the 17th, I advised I was told that the line would be activated on the 10th June and wished to make another complaint to the telecoms body and wanted the telephone number I was then given a telephone number of 0800 800152 which I know to be the business department and certainly not complaints, when I queried this the girl from India assured me that this was the number for complaints and then promptly hung up on me.

BT, if you monitor the net to find out what people are saying about you then I have this to say:

“Your treatment of your customers is an absolute disgrace and I am appalled at the customer service I have been given over the last 10 days.  Instead of laying off 10,000 employees I suggest you get back to basics and make customer service a priority where people actually own the call and we do not get the ‘BT Shuffle’.

You have a fantastic product in BT vision, your Broadband is a mess with your capping of download rates, your phone lines are always reliable, but please invest in your own people and give customers what they want and need from you or your share price and your place in the market will disappear fast.”

This series will look at 5 ways to increase your business profits, quite dramatically.  This is the second in the series and looks at email marketing.

In the first part of this series we looked at Increasing your prices to increase your profits which is a great way to start increasing profits, even if you increase your prices by a small amount.  The next part we are going to look at is leveraging the prospective customers who walk through your door or visit your website and making them a lifetime customer.

Most offline businesses don’t even think about capturing the names, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers of the customers who walk through their door.

Why capturing a customers details is important

Imagine you have a brick and mortar business and you get 100 potential customers per day walking through your door.  So, per week, you are getting 600 potential customers to your shop per week, assuming you are closed on Sunday.  Say you have a conversion rate of 10 – 15%,  which  is typical for someone walking into your shop.  So you are getting 60 – 90 sales per week of your products, after all someone walking into your shop will know what they want and are more likely to buy if they know what they are looking for.

It’s great that you have 60 – 90 sales per week but what about the 510 – 540 potential customers that walked through your door or visited your website? Chances are you might never see them again.  However imagine capturing their details by offering them an incentive.  Typically if you offer someone a good incentive in exchange for their details you will get great conversion rates, anywhere from 50 – 70%.

So what!

Well, imagine you get 50% of the potential customers to sign up to an email list, it could be a physical mailing list as well or a mobile number for texting.  That means you would get 300 potential customers details every week which is 15,600 per year.

Now let’s say you want to get customers to your shop so you offer all 15,600 potential customers a 10% discount if they buy within 48 hours of you sending them the offer and you do this once a month.  You give them a code to quote when they want to buy from you, which means you can track how well your direct response campaigns are working.  Suppose you get 0.5% of the people you have sent a mailing to coming in to buy something from you at an average sale of £25 ($40) you will have an extra £1950 ($3120) per month, take away the 10% discount you were offering and you still have £1755 ($5055) extra per month just for capturing your potential customers details.

How to get your customers details

Simple answer – just ask!

The main way to get customers to give you their emails is to simple offer them something in return.  You could give them something simply for getting their details.  The customer is happy as they get something for nothing, you are happy as you have potentially made contact with another new future customer.  This is called the power of reciprocation which Robert Cialdini speaks about in his book ‘Influence’.

I remember buying a book from Borders and the salesman casually asked me if I would like to give my email address so I could be sent discount vouchers in the future, I go to Borders all the time so I happily gave my email address and use their vouchers all the time, I love it.  How many people do you think say no to being offered discount vouchers just for their email address? Not many!

How often should you send out emails?

This very much depends on the customer base and what you have to offer. Your success rate and sales from email marketing will be different if you are selling cars compared with someone selling golfing products.  If you have a rabid market like golfing you could make a lot of money through email marketing if you have good copywriting skills, if not you can always outsource it.

There are companies sending out emails every day to their customer list, which I think is a huge mistake as it quickly becomes boring to know you have yet another email from a company.  I would personally send out once per week however with a much larger customer list I maybe send out an email once every 3 days with free stuff and discounted products mixed and useful content or sales letter in the form of a story.

What you need to get started building a list

First of all you’re going to need an autoresponder which is a company that can handle your email campaigns online. There are two major ones out there www.aweber.com and www.GetResponse.com

Once you’ve signed up for one of these or any of the other autoresponders out there check out their videos and get to know the software, this is vital.  Take a few hours and get to know it well, it will be well worth it in the future.

Check out some of the case studies these sites have which will give you an idea of where you want to go with your campaigns.

Decide on why you want to collect email addresses in the first place.  Is it to get to know your customers better or is it purely for sales, this is of enormous importance.  Imagine you are getting 50 signups per day and all you want is sales, you can blast your customers with offer after offer in the hope some will bite, but be prepared to lose a lot of subscribers.  If you build a relationship and take time to build trust this will help you in the long run and help keep more of your custoemrs on your list.

Need help?

Post a question here and I will help out as much as I can.  Email marketing is a huge topic and there is a lot to learn but it is well worth it for any business whether online or offline.

Meantime here are a few articles to help you with more info.

Why should you use email marketing – Aweber.com

Email promos exposed – Michael Rasmussen

Takeaways from the email evolution – The retail email blog

Money in the email –InternetRetailer.com

Email marketing subject line length whitepaper – Epsilon

Open this email – Terry Dean

Most people will have heard of the ‘4 Hour Work Week’ by Timothy Ferris, about how we can work less and get paid more by working smarter. I have applied such thinking to my own online business and listened to other great internet marketers such as Rich Schefren, Howie Schwartz, Brian McCelroy, Dennis Becker and Rachel Rofe.

I want to give you 5 ways that I have found to work which has doubled my business sales, tripled the bottom line and halved my advertising budget.

When I first started writing this article I expected it to be around 1200 words for the whole 5 ways of doubling your business sales, but when I got started I soon realised I had a lot more to say than 1200 words. So I have written about 1500 words for each part.

For regular readers you will know I own www.binaural-mind.com where I sell binaural beats to the public for better health and relaxation, I also do affiliate marketing which I won’t talk so much about as I don’t want to give away my niche.

Anyways, when I first started out I thought if I sell the downloads of the binaural beats cheap I will get loads of vistors to the site and loads of sales through word of mouth.  Well the first month of going live, and it was a soft beginning, which meant I didn’t really shout at all about the opening of the site, I made 6 sales at $29 for each download.  I then received a message from someone else who was selling downloadable binaural beats basically saying that I should not under price my product as there were others out there selling binaural beats for up to $1000 per set.  I thought about this for a bit and obviously I knew that my competition would not want me selling cheap for obvious reasons but I thought about the psychology of it, if a product seems to cheap then it can’t be any good which means a lot of people wouldn’t buy it purely for the fact that it seemed to cheap.

I then braced myself and doubled the price of my product and waited to see what would happen.  After two days, absolutely nothing, on the third day a few questions from prospective buyers, on the fourth day 2 sales at $69 each. I’d raised my prices by $40 and I was still getting sales.  I kept it at the new price and I am still getting sales and with over 90 sales I have only had 1 return which is not bad going for a clickbank product.

As you know I have been affiliate marketing for a few years and I have also started up an internet marketing arm of the business offering advice to offline businesses. I was speaking with one of my clients a few days ago about a making them a website and do internet marketing for a fixed fee and monthly fee thereafter.  We sat down and discussed her business which was a service she offered to the public.  I gave her five pieces of advice for free which will bring in an extra $10,000 – $30,000  per year.  This woman’s business was run on word of mouth alone and she had a great reputation for what she did which was to make custom made curtains and pelmets for clients.  She had made our curtains and pelmets for a great price.  After the job was done we had a word about her business and I asked a whole load of questions about her business and her marketing and she said she didn’t do any marketing, it was all word of mouth.  I asked if she would like more business and how much she could handle; the answer? Of course she would and could handle a lot more.

We sat down and went into more detail about her business and looked at her competition to find out what they were charging for their service.  It turns out she was one of the cheapest on the market in her area.  I gave her 5 pieces of advice which I know will increase her sales, triple her profits and half her workload.

5 Ways to double your sales and half your workload – Part 1

1. Increase your price

You might have guessed it already, the first piece of advice I would give to businesses offering a service of some kind would be to increase their price by at least 50%.  I can almost hear the screams of abuse at this piece of advice; we’re in a recession for goodness sake why on earth would I raise my prices? but hear me out, (and by the way we’re only in a recession because the media say we are).  If you are offering a service to people and you have taken the time to get qualifications in your area of expertise and are considered a professional then increasing your price should be a natural way to build your business but most business owners don’t think like this.

They start out in business offering a service cheaper than most to build the business and get a reputation.  However, once the business has been established and the reputation gained they keep the prices the same as before, why? They don’t want to rock the boat, they are fearful that if they put the prices up the buyers will leave.  This is not true.  If you have a great reputation and people trust you, they will happily pay you the extra 50%.  Yes, you will get customers who leave you but you will also gain new customers with smart marketing.

If you are a business owner who sells products you obviously can’t sell your products with a 50% increase? You can, depending on what you are selling.  One of my clients, a computer shop owner, put a new type of motherboard  in his custom built computers which greatly increased the performance of the computer.

His new motherboard was 50% more expensive to buy.  After talking about it we marketed the benefits of the new motherboard and he increased the price of that computer model with the new motherboard by 50% and it is now the bestselling computer in his shop.  Lets look at the numbers for the computer shop owner.

As you can see from the table above the main points are, The cost to build the computer was 19% more as the motherboard had gone up in price by 50% but the rest of the components of the computer stayed the same price.  So although it was more expensive to build we still increased the overall price of the computer by 50% and gained 111% increase in profit, amazing!

Okay you might think we were being a bit greedy here.  So lets just say you increase the price by 25% which is just over the amount it costs extra to build the computer.

You still increase your profit by 37%.  The above tables do not take into consideration the increased amount in sales for the new computer as they were marketed as having the latest new motherboard and we marketed all the benefits of the new motherboard, not to mention the increased business through word of mouth. So by adding an extra high end component we have increased the sales and increased the total profit by 111%.

Work out your numbers on your business and see if adding an extra 20-50% would make a difference.  I think you’ll be surprised at the numbers it throws out.

A lot of people who own a service-business are afraid to raise their prices for fear of losing customers.  You are always going to lose a few customers along the way no matter what you do so why not increase your price, increase your customer service and lose a few old customers and gain a few new ones.

I am on the lookout for a new Wordpress theme and have been looking around the net for a simple, exciting, easy to read and reader friendly theme.

I particulalry like www.zenhabits.net theme and am looking for something similar to this.  Then I got to thinking why not you, the reader, of this blog suggest a new theme for me.

So, I am looking for a simple, exciting design which is widget ready, WP 2.7 compatible with an easily customisable header as I will be making a new logo to brand for the blog.  It should have an RSS feed in the header, be a two column design and have a wide width.

Yes I could have one designed but I would rather throw it out there and find out if anyone can suggest a theme and be part of the redesign of the site.

So are you up for it can you suggest a theme for this blog and win yourself $50 in the process?  Just post one link per comment and affiliate ids will be allowed as long as it fits the spec.  You can post a link to a free theme or a premium theme.  Any comments with speculative or with link building in mind will be deleted.

Looking forward to seeing the wordpress themes which come up.

This is the third part of the series ‘5 amazing ways to drive traffic to your sites’. You can the other 2 parts in the series:

Part 1 – Article marketing

Part 2 – Social marketing

Today I am going to talk about video marketing as a way to drive sales to your sites.  This is something I have recently got into and am loving making the videos and I’m finding out better ways of improving my click through rate from the video site to my site.

What is video marketing?

Video marketing is about making a video with some software, which we will discuss later, and uploading it to the major video sharing sites, with the obvious one being youtube.  Here is a list of other video sharing sites:

This list was compiled by econsultant.com

The biggest and possibly the best for traffic generation is of course youtube.com and you can get hundreds of click throughs every month if you have a good video with good content.

How to make a video?

Some people might not be keen on making videos as they think it is too hard, let me tell you it’s easy after the learning curve of making your first one is over.  There is software out there which is great for making high quality videos such as Camtasia which is packed full of features, you can get a free trial here Camtasia free trial

There are also sites online which can help you make videos:

I have used Animoto from the above list and have to say it’s excellent for making videos from photographs or slideshows.

If you really get into making videos for driving traffic you will come across three different types of video:

The professional video

You will see the difference straight away with professional videos and you can tell theat money has been spent on the production of it.  However you need not spend a fortune and still get a high quality, professional looking video.  Here is one I made for around $200

To make a video like this you can get stock video clips from www.istockphoto.com use a program like camtasia put them altogether, add some music, add a vice narrative and you have a professional looking video.

The power-point video

Obviously the video above have lots of different clips put together, but you can use camtasia for presenting power point presentations with music in the background.  Here is an example of that

Recording yourself

You can also use videos of yourself speaking about various topics such as this one:

As you can see there are lots of video types you can use to upload to video sharing sites.  The quickest and easiest one to do is recording yourself and putting it up online.  If you are going to do this make sure you have a script and rehearse it a few times before making the video.

Video sharing tips

I hope this post has given you some ideas about the power of video marketing to drive traffic to your sites and to get you known as an expert in your field.  If you have any successes or any stories about video marketing please let us know by leaving a comment.

I have to apologise for not getting this article out sooner.  This article has been a labour of love over the last few weeks.  I have had a series of obstacles which have been put in the way of writing this such as moving house, having no internet connection for 5 days, a major infestation of viruses on my computer and a host of minor obstacles.  However I got there in the end and here is the second part of 5 Amazing ways to drive traffic to your sites .

You can read the first article here:

5 amazing ways to drive traffic to your sites – Part 1 – Article marketing

Social Marketing

There are many social marketing sites you can use to drive traffic to your main site.  I will go over a few and list some others that will get you started.

The 3 I am going to talk about is stumbleupon, Hub Pages, and Squiddo.

When you use all the sites I mention I feel it is important to have a strategy.

First of all you have to answer why you want to use social marketing sites, to get your name known, to drive more traffic to a site , to earn more money etc.

I wanted to use it to get earn more money however I have seen the huge benefits that these sites can bring and have started to incorporate them in other ways such as getting my name out there as an expert on a particular topic.

I will list a lot of these sites at the end of this article.  I would all the sites mentioned and link them to each other to maximise SEO and visability.

Stumbleupon, Squidoo and Hubpages

This has to be one of my favourite social media sites and it is responsible for over 30% of my 50,000  visitors per month.

What is stumbleupon?

Stumbleupon is a social media site which allows browsers to randomly click through sites based on specific tags they set up for themselves.  This is done through a toolbar which is installed into your browser, it’s quick and easy to set up.  When the reader reaches a site they have a chance to thumb it up, thumb it down or stumble to the next page.  The more a page gets a thumb up or commented on positively the more the page will be shown to other readers.

The social side of the site comes into play as readers can comment on and connect with other stumblers and share each others stumbles.  You can also befriend other stumblers and the more friends and connections you have the more your site will get seen by others.

As soon as you comment on a page, the page you commented on gets shown to all your friends on a front screen board on your stumble page.  This gives more exposure to your site the more friends you have.

How much traffic can you get?

On average I receive between 200 – 5000 visitors per day to my site depending on my activity with stumbleupon and the quality of my content.

How to get more traffic from Stumbleupon

There are some great sites out there which give more information on Stumbleupon, here are just a few:

www.stumbleupon.com

www.searchenginejournal.com/the-why-how-and-who-of-marketing-in-stumbleupon/4470/

www.seomoz.org/blog/stumbleupons-fantastic-ability-to-drive-traffic

http://website-marketing.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_use_stumbleupon_to_drive_web_traffic

http://www.dangrossman.info/2007/01/04/the-stumbleupon-experiment/

Seth Godin, the famous marketing genius, created a site called Squidoo to help people to talk about the things they knew about.  It is like a blog platform but a lot quicker and easier to set up.  You can set up a squidoo lens in around 15 minutes with no technical knowledge whatsoever.  Basically squidoo is a free space on the internet to use how you wish and talk about your hobbies, interests and start linking back to your main site.

The benefits of squidoo are:

Some other great sites talking about squidoo and how to build upyour lens ranking are:

Some tips on making a great squidoo lens

Questions on Lucid Dreaming?

Lucid Dreaming made easy!

The first one has an EMV score of 50% whilst the second headline has an EMV score of 75%.

What this means to you is that more people are likely to click on the second headline or read more if you have an article.

Some more squidoo resources

http://www.squidoo.com/lensbrainstorm

http://www.squidoo.com/easyboost

http://www.squidoo.com/advancedhtml

http://www.squidoo.com/advancedhtml

http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-lens-of-the-day

http://www.squidoo.com/basichtml

http://www.squidoo.com/first_lens

Hub Pages

Hub Pages is similar to Squidoo in it’s format and web 2.0 like feel but there are some differences.  The main one is that you do not create lenses but rather you create hubs and use them in a similar way to attract traffic, backlinks and you can also monetise your hub pages.  In a recent interview with the marketing manager of hub pages Jason Menayan, he defined hub pages a being different in the following ways:

1. We removed all adult content. This was tough since it accounted for about a third of our overall traffic.

2. We disallowed spam Hubs. We forced users posting aggressively promotional articles to create genuine informational value, and to tone down linking to sites they were promoting.

3. We unpublished purely personal articles (like blogs!), as these were less likely to be useful to readers or to attract traffic from search engines.

4. We checked all articles for copied content, and applied a score penalty to those with content already published on the Web (even if they had rights to republish that content). Those articles with very low scores were not shown to search engines.

5. We identified and flagged articles linking out to questionable sites, like sites that potentially phish, or display obnoxious popup ads, or redirect visitors to a different site than they intended.

6. We set up a discussion forum on the site, so users could help each other out, share advice, and socialize beyond the scope of publishing articles.

7. We started paying users up-front for exceedingly high-quality articles. Their quality attracted significant traffic from search engines and created success stories, which, in turn, set a good example that users followed.

Hub pages is a little more restrictive than squidoo but it is fantastic for getting into google quickly and getting visitors to your sites.

Tips on better hub pages

Use the same tips as the squidoo lens tips and you will get high rankings for your hub pages.

Here are some top ranked hub pages for you to have a quick look at:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Christmas-Gifts-for-Mom

http://hubpages.com/hub/Different-Ways-To-Make-Money-Online

http://hubpages.com/hub/10-reasons-to-have-sex-toninght

http://hubpages.com/hub/Ten-Quick-Ways-to-Make-Money

http://hubpages.com/hub/Palm-Reading-Guide

As you can see from above the topics on the top hub pages is diverse so there is no need to limit yourself on hub pages.

Some other great sites to build up your traffic

I would use all of these sites and have similar articles on all of them and link them to each other to get the most traffic.  Yes it is hard work initially but it is worth it especially if you want more traffic and would like to earn more money.

www.wordpress.org – Having a blog is a must if you want to maximise your visibility on the web.  I would use a self hosted blog rather than a blog hosted by wordpress, having this allows you more flexibility.

www.blogger.com – Google owns blogger so they are already optimised for Google’s search engines so I would also see this as vital part of traffic generation.

www.wikidot.com – I love using this site.  It takes a little longer to get used to the coding but it’s very simple when you get to know it.

http://www.tripod.com – I use this as another link to my main site but it’s easy to use and you can build whole websites with this.

http://www.geocities.com – Another great site which gives you a lot of control over your content and layout, worth a try.

www.weebly.com – Similar to other sites but another useful one for backlinks.

www.wetpaint.com – I liked using this on a recent campaign, it’s quick, easy and you can have a site within 10minutes.

www.livejournal.com – another easy to use site similar to wordpress with plenty of templates and design choices.

I would also use the following:

www.googlepages.com -

blog.360.yahoo.com

www.xomba.com

www.zimbio.com

www.tumblr.com

www.twitter.com

Affiliate recommendations

One great ebook on this subject is Craig Beckta’s book: The Secret Affiliate Code 2 which is a must read for anybody wanting to know more about this strategy and looking to drive traffic and money to their sites.

If you have any sites which you would recommend like the ones above why not post them here.

The next article will be on video marketing to drive traffic to your site.

In this series I will look at 5 ways to get more traffic to your sites.  The first way is article marketing, now before you dismiss this have a read first, you might be surprised.

1. Article marketing

if you have a blog already you will be used to writing articles.  However I am talking about writing articles for syndication which means other people can use your articles. Without doubt the best place to submit articles to is a site called ezinearticles.com (EZA for short) In the early days of this blog I used to submit my articles to EZA and here are some of my stats:

You can see the number of views I got from this and the number of clicks.  These were articles I had already written for the blog so it didn’t take much time to put them on EZA and drive more traffic.  You will also notice the number of clicks I got through to the site, not great but it was free traffic.  The column headed EzinePublisher means other people who used my articles to put on their site. What this means is that people who used the article had to give my name and use my resource box, more about this later, which drove even more traffic to my blog.  This was back in 2006 when I was first starting and didn’t really have a clue about optimisation of article marketing.

Compare the above stats  with some recent article stats I have written:

You’ll notice the difference in the number of clickthroughs with the latest set of articles.  With EZA you can calculate the click through rate (CTR) with the following fomula:

ClickThroughs
Number of Views     X 100

For example the CTR for ‘How to reach meditative states within 8 minutes’ =

138
451  X 100   =  30.59%

This means that 30.59% of people who read the article clicked the link in the resource box to find out more information.

In the first set of stats I was getting about about a 2% CTR

In the second set of articles I am getting between 10 and 40% CTR which is a huge difference.  This is because I have optimised the articles as I have learned more about EZA.

5 Tips for optimising your articles for Ezine Articles:

Article length

Your article need not be long pieces of work.  In EZA you can write a minimum of 300 words for an article which can be done in no time once you are practiced.  I have seen me writing 4 articles in the space of an hour after I have done about 20 minutes research on a topic.  I generally write between 500 – 800 word articles which is my preference.  I like to give a lot of information in articles.

The heading

The heading is what draws people in.  For every single heading I write I do 5 minutes research using wordtracker  the free keyword research tool over at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and google search.

First I type in the basic phrase which my article is about.  So using the example above I would type in ‘meditation’ – I can see from wordtracker that ‘meditation’ gets searched around 1500 times per day and in Google It has around 36,000,000 pages with the search term ‘meditation’, which is far too much to get a high ranking on google and is too generic for EZA.  So I would narrow it down and use words that are similar.  Eventually I came up with ‘meditative’ which has around 10 searches per day according to wordtracker, and according to google has around 3,600,000 pages with the key word ‘meditative’ which is okay for a long tail keyword.

Now I have found the main keyword I need to find a hook for the EZA readers and build my heading around the main keyword.  After thinking about it for a few minutes I come up with a few.  Consider the follwing two headings:

Reaching a meditative state

How to reach a deep meditative state within 8 minutes

It’s pretty obvious which one most people would click on.  The second heading has some key psychological hooks in it e.g. ‘How to’ ‘Deep’&  ‘Within 8 minutes’ these are all little hooks that grab the readers attention.

You might think it’s hard work for a heading but it is well worth it and when you get used to writing articles you can do all this within a few minutes.

Keyword density

A lot of marketers pay a lot of attention to keyword density which is the number of times a keyword or key phrase is placed in an article.  Some say it’s good to have around 2% keyword density others say around 5%.  I have to say I don’t give this much credence but as a general rule I will use the keywords or phrases at the beginning, middle, end and sometimes in the resource box.  Keyword density is purely for Google as google will give it more attention if it thinks it is a relevant piece of work for a choosen keyword.

However,  EZA will not accept keyword stuffing so I would use the keywords and phrases conservatively and make sure they are at the beginning, middle and end.  Occassionally you can also have them in bold such as in headings or sub headings.

Break it up

If your article is going to be over 400 words consider using sub headings as a way to break the article up.

I know if I see a big block of text without any subheadings or bullet points I am put off straight away, the author would have to be one of the best for it to sway me to read.

Using subheadings and bullet points is easier on the eye and can allow your reader to scan the article first before diving head first into reading it.  Make sure you pay a much attention to your subheadings as you do your main headings.

You can also break a long article up into parts which will leave readers wanting more of the information you write and they might subscribe to your articles just to get the information they want.

The resource box

This is a biggie.  Your reseource box allows you to put links in them going to a website, blog or anywhere of your choice.  But, it has to be done in a certain way.

Once the reader has read your article you want to entice them into clicking the link to your site.  This can be done in a number of ways, here are two:

Using keywords in your resource box

When I put my link in the resource box I would use the keyword or keyphrase your are targeting and this is how to do it:

To find out more about Binaural beats and get a FREE binaural beat download visit <a target=”_new” href=”http://www.binaural-zen.com/zen”>www.Binaural-Zen.com</a>

With the above example I am targeting the name of my product, I could have gone for the keyphrase I was using earlier which was ‘deep meditative states’, but I want a link back to my site so I went with the first option.

Testing it out

I have given you a brief but powerful introduction to article marketing and the benefits it can bring.  If you fancy having a go at article marketing head on over to EZA and have a look around.

In part 2 I will be looking at social marketing to drive traffic to your sites.

If you have any questions about article marketing please feel free to leave a comment below.

This is the longest time ever I have gone without writing a post for the blog and I was starting to get that feeling of angst. It’s the kind of feeling when you know you should be doing something but you just can’t get round to it which stresses you out even more.  A few people have asked where I’ve been and what was happening.

Well I will still be posting quality articles as I have done for the last few years.  I have been busy building up the online business which is Binaural Mind. We now have a range of products in the Binaural Mind range and am working on more over the coming months.

The products we have so far are:

www.binaural-zen.com

www.binaural-sleep.com

www.binaural-chakras.com

www.binaural-heaven.com

and a forum to ask questions about binaural beats and anything related to the binaural mind products, the forum is at www.binaural-mind.com/forum

There is still a long way to go until this becomes a fully fledged business as I just don’t have the time to do a full time job and run the business online, but I am extremely happy with the products and the feedback on all the binaural beats I have created so far.

My next project is a program of downloads for releasing energy and am working with a French musician who is creating the music and I will interlace it with binaural beats, and it’s going to be amazing.

I have also been working with Rachel Rofe and Brian McElroy and the Mastermind program to keep me on my toes as I run through the venture that is Binaural Mind and I appreciate the group they have gathered together to make it an invaluable part of Binaural Mind.

So, if you have been missing new material for the last few weeks, that is what I have been doing and I can only apologise.

New Forum

I am also setting up a new forum for stevenaitchison.co.uk which will be up and running before Christmas.  I’ve been trying to do this for ages but just couldn’t find the time and I am hoping to recruit some of my loyal readers to become moderators, if you’re interested drop me a line at enquiries at stevenaitchison dot co dot uk

What about you?

Enough about me, what have you been doing the last few weeks.  Drop me a message below to let us know what you’ve been doing, are you changing the world, are you changing your life, are you coping?

A lot of people on the internet, and offline, dream of creating a business and finally give up that dreary old day job.  I am definitely in that category and have been trying for two years to make money online with internet marketing.  Recently I had a mindset change which has changed things for me in a dramatic way.

As most of my regular readers will know I have been making money with affiliate marketing and producing my own ebooks, writing for other blogs and selling them via adwords, article marketing and banner ads etc.  In 2007 I made around $1000 profit, this year I have made around $5000 profit so far.  However in the last 3 weeks I have produced another product for clickbank which will be the start of a new business venture for me and it has already brought in around $500 on top of earnings of $1000 for other products I promote and writing I do for other blogs.

Me at the centre

The trouble I had in starting a business was that I was doing every single thing myself which included designing web pages, sales pages, opt in pages, graphics for banners, learning about and installing scripts on websites, videos, adwords, affiliate promotion, writing articles, writing sales materials, copywriting, answering emails, troubleshooting, every single little thing you could think of in a business and I was doing it.  This is on top of a full time job and spending as much time with my family as possible.  I wasn’t the business owner,  I was the business!  without me nothing would happen, if I fell ill nothing would get done and the money would start drying up pretty quickly.   So, in effect I was creating another job for myself and not a business.

Now my mindset has changed from creating a new job for myself to becoming a business owner where I have other people helping me do the most time consuming jobs.  Yes, I have to pay them but it frees up a lot of my time to concentrate on producing my own products.  This has only happened in the last few weeks and I can see a difference already.  No longer am I worrying about all the things I need to get done and ultimately falling behind schedule as I have other people around the world helping me produce web pages, sales pages, my writing etc.  I can concentrate on building a business up rather than being the business.

I have started to outsource a lot of the work using a service at www.elance.com for my sales page design and for my writing.  In the next few months I hope to pass most of my work to people I come to trust from elance this will include, graphics, writing, adwords management, cd production, email screening etc.    don’t get me wrong it will take some time to find people to trust and who can work well with my work philosophy but it is a start and will make a huge difference.

I am already seeing a difference in my energy levels.  I still get up at 5am to wok a few hours before getting the children ready for school and then going to work and still work in the evenings but I work on producing more products rather than dealing with other more time consuming issues like sales page design and writing emails for autoresponders ad all the other little jobs that are so time consuming.

Mastermind group

I have even created time to join a mastermind group with Brian McElroy and Rachel Rofe to drive the business forward.  This will last for 10 weeks and I will report back here with progress, it’s the first mastermind group I have joined and am really looking forward to it. I am hoping the lessons i learn and the contacts I make will more than outweigh the initial investment.

The reason for this change in mindset from creating a job for myself to becoming a business owner was down to a video I watched a few weeks ago from Rich Schefren.  I have  posted the video below so you can watch it.  It’s 90 minutes long but if you are looking to create a business online or offline it will be 90 minutes of pure gold.