Archive for Pathway to Profits – Page 6

Content Marketing Profits: 10 Tips to Unlocking the Secret Key

Group-of-people How much time and effort do you devote to Outreach – connecting with others, leaving blog comments, responding on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn? This is an essential key to successful blogging, and essential to making your content marketing efforts profitable.

If you're like me, not enough, I'll bet. We (I mean me!) are so driven and task oriented that it's easy to forget to reach out to others.

I'm really writing this for myself, you see, but maybe you can relate. For example, I have a list of things to do, and I plow through those things, checking off as I go…and I'm pretty good about getting most things done.

But the one thing that often gets left til last is reaching out to others, finding out what they're doing, reading their blogs, commenting, and checking their tweets on Twitter.

I should take that back, it's not entirely true. I visit Twitter daily, sometimes 2-3 times. I get several emails a day from a service SocialOomph which gives me all the tweets in certain keywords I track.

Read More→

5 Things You Need to Know When You Blog
for Content Marketing Results

Question-mark-key-i How does content marketing with a blog turn into profits?

How do you turn readers into customers who buy or hire you?

How does participating in social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn get results in terms of new clients?

It's one thing to come up with fresh blog content that educates and entertains readers. It's another thing to sustain that energy that it takes to frequently post on your blog… especially if you're not seeing the money right away.

Stay on track with conversion goals by asking and answering these 5 questions each time you blog…

Read More→

Beware Boredom, the Road to Mediocrity Lies Ahead

My-tv By now you may have given up on setting New Year's resolutions… too many disappointed attempts at losing weight, or working out, or making big bucks… Broken promises to yourself can turn you off to goal setting, that's for sure.

Enough talk about woulda, coulda, shoulda, who cares? Don't worry, be happy! That's my advice.

And yet I can't help but take a peek at what worked last year, what didn't work, and make plans to more of the former and less of the latter. As it turns out, I had an excellent year, both financially, and in finding passionate fun in my work.

It's too easy to get caught up in work that pays the bills. I'm not saying you should only do what's fun…If you're not paying attention to where the passion lies, however, you may be on a fast track to mediocrity, boredom, and burnout.

In my opinion, we get bored when we have to do repetitive non-creative tasks that don't challenge us to think. But we can also get bored when we disengage from tasks because we don't like them, they're too hard, we aren't good at them… or we aren't seeing good results.

This is dangerous because if you're just blogging because you need to stick to a schedule, then you aren't blogging with a passionate message to deliver. You won't get good results. How could you?

Read More→

What Is a Content Marketing Information Funnel?

Pipeline-2 Are you building a content marketing information funnel? If not, you're leaving money on the table. Not only that, you're missing an opportunity to solidify the relationships your hard-earned content marketing efforts are creating.

It's odd that Wikipedia doesn't have a page written about this key internet marketing strategy. There's a page for purchasing funnel and one for sales funnel. And there are over 3 million results on Google for product funnel. Okay, don't go there now, here's what you need to know:

Content marketing works because you take a reader through the steps of getting to know you, like you, and trust you. This is the KLT factor. Here's how it works:

  1. Your blog should have cornerstone content pieces to communicate your core values and passion and business mission. These are stand-alone pages to highlight your core information.
  2. Your blog (or website) should have a well-crafted bio or About page, which tells your back story, who you are, and why you care.
  3. Your blog or website should have client stories, case studies and testimonials everywhere to tell your clients' experiences with working with you, your products and services.
  4. And next, you need continual, clear calls to action, so that readers can take the next steps.

Next Steps

Read More→

3 Success Factors of My Internet Buddies

Ist1_3612799-computer-cash Just about everyone of my colleagues who've started making serious money online in the last 2-3 years tell me the same story, or similar versions of these three key factors to their success:

  1. Coaching: One of my friends said she spent over $5,000 on a business coach and was seeing incredible results.
  2. Training: Another confided that she'd spent more on information products than rent last year, and it was paying off handsomely.
  3. Teaming: And just about everyone tells me that partnering with other entrepreneurs and splitting the profits helped them grow faster than ever before.

This is why I'm twittering and emailing everyone about a program you don't want to miss: Dave Navarro's More Buyer's Mastermind. It's a great way to learn what else you need to do if you want to take advantage of online content marketing to make money.

Read More→

4 Steps to Creating Massive Online Visibility

Person-in-spotlight-xl
Can your ideal clients easily find you when they go online to search for solutions to their challenges? Are you hard to find? Or do people tell you "You're everywhere on the Web!"

It's not difficult to create massive visibility on the Internet. It's free or low-fee. It's relatively easy, few tech skills required. (I know what I'm talking about cuz I'm a recovering techno-twit who was unheard of less than 4 years ago.)

I'm not a genius or a smooth-talking networking virtuoso. I haven't had large sums of cash to spend, nor do I understand how things work on the Web. Blogs, social sites, email marketing, autoresponders and digital downloads all work without me knowing how.

True, I did team up with a great partner (Denise Wakeman, co-founder of The Blog Squad) who's savvy and sometimes has to explain things to me ;-). But here're the things we do that many of our peers don't bother doing (or at least not consistently):

Read More→

How to Master Storytelling for Better Selling

Stories sell. It’s not really a secret. Read the best sales and landing pages and you’ll be captured by personal stories. Ask any of the online copywriting gurus and they will tell you: Stories sell.

Our brains are hardwired to be receptive to stories. Once engaged, we find ways to relate, to trust, to enjoy the experience the storyteller is sharing with us. And it’s quite easy to sell something after that.

As a psychologist, I am tempted to explain the neural background for all this, but that’s not the story I want to share here with you today. This post will be short, because I’m going to simply tell you about a master of storytelling who will reveal how to use stories for selling. You can listen and learn from him for free this Thursday.

Craigvalentine
Craig Valentine is teaching these important concepts. Craig is the 1999 World Champion of Public Speaking and 3-time Mid-Atlantic Salesperson of the Year for Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. He knows a few things about storytelling and selling. Here are the details:

When:  Date: September 25, 2008  Time: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST (10:00 am – 11:00 am Pacific)

Read More→

Writing Survey Questions: 3 Things to Ask

Check_boxes
You need to survey your readers to find out what they want, what they need, and what their biggest challenges are. This is crucial information you need to know before promoting any event or teleseminar or informational product.

When we promoted our Law of Action 2.0 mentoring program, we used a survey to help us define what people wanted to learn the most when it comes to marketing their business online. We wanted to keep the survey short so people didn’t have to spend time filling out irrelevant information. We included 3 items:

  1. One broad question with 10 choices where they were asked to rate degree of severity on a scale
  2. One open ended question where they could write in anything they chose
  3. One demographic question to define the number of years using Internet marketing

Writing survey questions can be tricky. There’s a reason most graduate schools require you to take a year of statistics. Unless you understand the pitfalls of surveys, you risk getting answers that tell you nothing. Keep it simple and make your questions as clear and neutral as possible.

Read More→

Get Content, Get Customers – Get this book!

Getcontent2
I just got my copy of Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett’s content marketing book in the mail, and I’m happy as a pig!

Get Content, Get Customers is written exclusively to address a new style of marketing with content that is revolutionizing the way big and small companies attract clients on and off line.

This book has as it’s tag line: How to use content marketing to deliver relevant, valuable, and compelling information that turns prospects into buyers.

It is thanks to Pulizzi and Barrett that I embarked on re-purposing this blog. Finally I had a name for the kind of marketing I was helping our clients do: market themselves by providing useful and unique content to a targeted audience.

I realized I wasn’t just writing about ezines or blog writing. The big picture is content marketing, how to use content to attract customers and grow business.

Here are a few choice morsels from the book:

Read More→

Video Promo Clips: Content Marketing Comes Alive

Clapboard
People buy from people they know, like, and trust. Video clips will shortcut
the process of connecting with people quickly. Viewers can more easily
decide if they like and trust you when they can see and hear you.

How do you write a script for a video clip to promote a program or event? Posting video clips has become popular and easy to do. This is another promotional step you must include in order to boost your sales.

Video promotional clips are part of the various writing tasks necessary for making money online. It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting a teleseminar, publishing a book, or promoting a coaching or consulting program. You’ve got to get the word out to as many potential participants in many different ways, on Web landing pages, blog posts, email messages, ezines, and audio and video.

Marketing with content isn’t only about writing text. If you’re not using video yet, It’s fairly easy to get a Flip video camera and get started without any tech skills or expensive equipment. But be sure to write out a short script before recording so you don’t forget any essential details.

In the example we’re writing about here, Denise and I and Kathleen Gage promoted a free teleseminar on our blogs through posting a video each day, outlining each of The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing. Kathleen and I each wrote out a script for these, presenting 5 Traps and 5 Truths, and then the information for registering. Each script was 2-3 minutes long. Here is the outline we used:

Read More→