Today I got a comment on my blog post What Should I Title My Blog Posts for Maximum SEO? You’d think I’d be happy, right? Here’s the comment:
“The written skill is so good.” Well, sure, in comparison to your comment it absolutely is.
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Most of the people I talk to about web marketing are excited by its promise: increased visibility, traffic, and leads. What’s not to like?
A lot of them are also excited by the opportunity of sharing their expertise, helping people and growing their business.
So why do so many of them fail at it?
It’s been a question that’s plagued me for years. We build a site, set up a blog, and help someone get started on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. There’s an initial burst of activity, and then…nothing.
The excuses are varied.
What I finally realized was that a lot of people need a guide to help them succeed with web marketing and social media. (File under “duh.”)
What people need is a personal trainer for their web marketing.
Hey Bloggers! How to Package, Promote & Profit from Your ExpertiseOn Saturday, November 5th, Denise Wakeman and I will be presenting at Blogworld. We’ll be teaching bloggers–or people who want to blog–how to package, promote and profit from their expertise.
If you’re at Blogworld, or if you bought the virtual ticket, you can attend. But should you?
Our session is on the monetization track.
If you’re not into making money this might not be the right session for you. Of course, you could also take our session, create some information products and raise money for your favorite charity or change the world. I know a lot of people who do that.
Our session is geared for the non-web marketer.
Denise and I are both web marketers by trade. We love Internet marketing, we hang out with Internet marketers, we talk about Internet marketing. However, what we want to do in this session is teach every day folks–small business owners, entrepreneurs, professionals–who don’t consider themselves web marketers–how they can create products that will generate passive streams of income.
Our session is for people who are busy.
When we first started coming up with the idea for this session we were talking about doctors, lawyers, massage therapists, and other professionals who may have maxed out their hours–and their earning potential–with paying clients. We wondered if we could teach them how to think like an Internet marketer: to package their knowledge, to promote their information product, and to profit from the experience.
To create multiple streams of income that would help pay their bills, generate some ongoing income, and in general make their lives easier.
Maybe we could teach a dentist how to create an ebook on Everything You Need to Know About Teeth Whitening: What the Ads Don’t Tell You. Or maybe we could help an administrative assistant with a passion for cooking to create a Kindle book called The Gluten Free Kitchen: 100 Recipes for Your Family.
If you’ve got a blog–or are serious about starting one–and want to turn your passion into a profitable product, this session may be right for you. If you feel like you’ve got a product in you, and want to generate multiple, passive streams of income, we hope to see you at 12:15 in room 411.
Oh, and one more reason why you might want to attend: room 411 is a theater and has the most comfy seats at the LA Convention Center.
Just sayin’.
Ready to start generating some passive streams of income? So was Gloria, one of our web developers. Here’s what she learned.Today’s guest post comes from Gloria Maher, one of our web developers here at flyte.
The Goals: Learning, SEO and Social Media Experiment, (and possibly get some passive income without investing much money).
As a developer, I’ve probably built or worked on several hundred websites at my current job.
As the company has grown and our offices have become more spread out, the exposure to elements of a project that are not part of development has naturally narrowed. (I do sometimes miss our “one room schoolhouse” office). Flyte has been on the leading edge of Social Media and I’ve become a convert, but haven’t done a lot with it beyond my Twitter and Facebook pages.
I thought it might be fun and interesting to see what my learnings would be while working through a new project of my own.
One of the most common excuses I hear from people on why their blog hasn’t been updated in weeks, months or even years is, “I don’t know what to write about.” Same is true for email newsletters and videos, but those seem to hid it better when the idea well runs dry.
Even though I have over 1,400 blog posts under my belt, I sometimes suffer from a lack of content creation ideas. To that end, and so that no one can ever again say, “I have nothing to write about,” I set out to create an exhaustive list of ideas, resources and tools for creating an endless supply of blog posts, email newsletters, YouTube videos, tweets, Facebook updates, and just about every other method of sharing content with your audience.
Of course, no list is “exhaustive,” especially one that includes Internet resources. So I included a call to action at the bottom of this post where you can share your best tips for content creation…just go ahead and leave a comment. Like the penny jar at the candy store, leave an idea, take five…it’s all good.
Now, let’s get started…
1. Google Alerts: Use this free tool to get blog posts, news stories, and even tweets about your targeted keywords delivered to your inbox every day. With just this one resource you’ll never run out of content again.
2. Tweet Beep: Think Google Alerts, for tweets.
3. Social Mention: A social search engine that measures sentiment, top keywords, and most active users for a given phrase. The results come from a wide variety of social media platforms AND include audio and video results as well.
4. OpenBook: Often hilarious, always unedited, this site is to show off how little privacy we have on Facebook. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to see what your customers–or your customers’ customers–are saying.
5. Quora: Search this popular Q&A site for questions asked around your area of interest.
I’ll be attending my 6th BlogWorld next week, and although I’ll miss the Vegas scene, I’m looking forward to connecting with remote friends and learning from the best and the brightest marketers out there.
I haven’t promoted my presentation there (more on that in a moment) because to be honest, I know LA is a long haul for most of you. Besides the cost of hotel, travel & food, there’s also all that time away from your business and family.
Even when I heard about the “Virtual Ticket“, it didn’t immediately grab my attention. I mean, many of these type of events are live streamed these days, so what makes BlogWorld’s Virtual Ticket any different?
But here’s why the BlogWorld Virtual Ticket totally rocks:
Are you ready to learn more and purchase your virtual ticket?
Here’s the deal: while I can’t vouch for the virtual ticket because I have never missed a BlogWorld I can vouch for the event itself. Of all the conferences and events I attend, this is the event where I learn the most, get the best information, and have the most valuable takeaways. Period.
If you’re looking to increase your online visibility, improve your search engine rank, and build your business, you owe it to yourself to check out the BlogWorld Virtual Ticket.
What’s the best RSS to Email option out there?Like jetpacks and flying cars before it, RSS still doesn’t have the market share we were promised.
For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, it stands for Real Simple Syndication.
For those of you who have no frickin’ clue what that means, you just need to understand that every time you update your blog, it updates a document with the new post. People can subscribe to your RSS feed and get an updated version of your blog post in their newsreader.
Unfortunately, that’s still confusing to most people. That’s why I created a blog post and how-to video called How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed. Still, you don’t need a how-to video to subscribe to an email newsletter, a magazine or to turn on your TV. RSS is too complicated and esoteric for the average Internet user.
But one nice thing about RSS is that it is extremely flexible. A few years back, some companies started offering automatic RSS to email conversions. This way, people who weren’t geeky enough to understand RSS could still subscribe to your blog via email.
Even though not everyone gets RSS, everyone gets email newsletters.
However, the functionality of most RSS to Email tools is lacking. In fact, it almost universally sucks.
I’m not suggesting this should be a free service. I’d happily pay for it. In fact, in a perfect world, it would all be offered by Constant Contact, who we run our regular email newsletters through as part of my monthly service fees.
Because they don’t (yet, I hope) offer RSS > Email I just dropped $200/yr on AWeber, because they come closest to offering everything on the list above. I’ll be switching this blog’s feed from Feedburner to AWeber in the next few weeks…unless Constant Contact is reading this and wants to make me happy and keep all my business. 
What did I leave off? What would you like to see in a world-class RSS to Email tool?
What would a personal ad from your company look like? What kind of customer are you looking for?Most of us say we want more leads, but in fact what we really want is better leads.
When you work with a customer who isn’t a good fit for you, you do a disservice to them, to your other clients (who suffer because your attention is on this customer who isn’t a good fit for you,) and to yourselves.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. In part because we’ve seen a surge in new leads coming in from our contact forms as well as being approached by a number of referral sources who want to send business our way.
Although having people refer business to you sounds great (and it is), our experience has been that our best clients are ones that we’ve organically attracted, not ones who are referred to us from someone who’s looking to collect a finder’s fee. Consider it the difference between meeting your soulmate and being involved in an arranged marriage.
This led me to wonder what the personal ads might look like if businesses went out in search for “true love.” So I sat down and wrote a personal ad to my ideal client:
We’re an entrepreneurial, 15-year-old web design and internet marketing company that’s goal oriented but doesn’t take itself too seriously. We’re adventurous, outgoing, and love to measure everything. Hobbies include blogging, content creation, and social networking.
You’re passionate about what you do, and understand it takes hard work to succeed. You’re open-minded and willing to try new things to achieve your dreams. You’re not looking for a one-night stand, but rather are searching for a long-term partner who is trustworthy, can keep a secret, and will always be there with a cup of coffee for you.
No drama queens, please.
So, what do you think? How would you write a personal ad to your ideal client? Would love to see you take a swing at it in the comments below!
Photo Credit: Jeremy Vandel
Need a web design or internet marketing tip? Just reach into the jar.At the Social Media FTW conference the other day flyte had a booth. On that booth was a tip jar. However, instead of asking attendees to leave loose change behind, we asked them to pull a web design or internet marketing tip out of the jar.
Despite the fact that there were loads of people at the conference, math tells us that many more couldn’t make it. Even those who did were not able to read all the tips.
So, to share the knowledge, here’s our list of web design and internet marketing tips that appeared in the jar.
Web Design Tips:
Web Marketing Tips:
Thanks to Ryan Goan for the web design tips, and Joan Crocker and Nicki Hicks for the web marketing tips.
Photo credit: Tina Burnell
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