What do I mean by this?

I mean simply that each of us by default is a social media expert. We each read, write, talk, text, email, twit, Facebook and the like with each other all of the time.

Let’s compare ourselves to 100 years ago. You could count the ways of communication on one hand. In person, telephone, the wire and print publications.

Now we have devises that can do all of that by themselves.

What’s it mean to be a social media expert? Nothing, because we all are.

If you need helping learning how to be social online, simply treat everyone like they are your largest customer.

Most people view social media experts as someone who makes money helping people tap the amazing powers of the Internet like it is some magical box.

The truth is, the difference between being a social media expert and just a social media user typically involves speeches, business cards and charging lots of money.

The best social media expert is the one who just teaches you how to listen to your customers online and talk to them like normal, everyday people, because they are.

Dog and pony shows are awesome, but the truth is we all know how to be social. It’s just time to learn how to do that with new tools.

Thankfully, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Youtube are built with a super shallow learning curve.

If you want to pay someone to set up a Twitter account for you or a Facebook Fan page, that’s great. Do it if it saves you money by saving you time. Or you could just ask your 15-year-old son.

Done.

Now take all of that money and time I just saved you and go and do something awesome!

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In the beginning I figured I would learn how to rank for keywords and then continue to do so. One of the first keywords I targeted was the term Unconventional Marketing. I thought the term was just what I was looking for as my starting point and target audience.

I eventually ranked for the term after trying for a couple of months and now I continue to hold the first spot in Google roughly two years later. For the record, I got most of my link love by changing the title on my site to the Unconventional Marketing Blog and then people continually linking to my site with that description. Pretty easy huh?

I recall when I showed up #1 for the first time. I wrote a post talking about being #1 for the term and how proud I was. Then a thoughtful commenter showed up and told me how my term sucked because according to all major sites, the term gets little or no traffic to speak of. Way to rain on my parade, right?

So I shuck it off and continued without much thought.

A few months later someone emailed through my site asking for me to develop a marketing plan and help them execute it for them. The deal turned out being a solid 5 figures and low and behold they found me through the term Unconventional Marketing. Crazy.

Not only was that one deal a success, but I have had 3 deals in the 5 figures result from that one search term… So much for no search traffic, huh?

What is the point of all of this rambling? Simple. Just because someone comes and rains on your parade about something you worked hard to get doesn’t mean that you should take what they say as fact or the law.

It also means keywords and search terms that get “little” or “no” traffic to speak of can result in large deals.

So many people get hung up on the numbers, how many people visit, how many page views, how many this, how many that and so on. Really the numbers are deceiving and can be manipulated pretty easily to give people what they want… more numbers. Instead, focus on what will help you reach your goal. Will 5 buyers get you closer to your goal? You bet. Can you find 5 buyers out of 10 visitors? You bet.

Before you think about keywords and how “little” traffic they get according to whatever source, realize that until you actually rank for the term, you’ll never know. I can tell you that people search and click on Unconventional Marketing about 3-4 times a day or 1,200 times a year. But out of those 1,200 visitors I’ve made a fair chunk of change. Get the point?

Try whatever you can and see the results for yourself. What if I had given up on the idea of unconventional marketing because some naysayers analyzed and determined I was wrong? What have you given up on because of others’ opinions? What do you think would be fun to try just for the sake of trying?

What is Unconventional Marketing?

Doing what the majority doesn’t and getting results…

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Click here to watch my video on How to double your income in under 6 months.

We all know a person who is extremely talented at doing something and they treat it almost like a hobby. Perhaps it is a hobby for them. But when you need help fixing your car or with a computer they are there and lend a hand for next to nothing. Perhaps they are a good friend or acquaintance but at the time you would have been willing to give your left arm to have whatever working again. Why do you think so many people pay tons of money to the Geek Squad?

What is your true value?

Your true value is what you think you are worth. You might lie to yourself and say, “I don’t know as much about SEO as So-and-So”. That doesn’t matter. If you think you are worth $10/hr, you are going to make $10/hr. We all know people who make a lot of money doing something they have no right doing because they are a complete, incompetent a-hole. But that doesn’t stop them now, does it?

Value is a frame of mind and the sooner you establish what your true value is, the quicker you can start making some real money. This will likely prompt you to make some drastic changes, but that is ok. In six months, I went from a 40 hour per week, 23k per year help desk technician to working 15-20 hours per week and making over 86k per year! I did that all by making a choice and so can you.

How do I find my true value?

You probably think the idea of simply asking for more money is crazy, but in essence that is what I did. The most important thing you can do for your emotional, financial or spiritual life is to simply ask for what you want. It’s not enough to ask for more money. You have to ask for specifically what you want. I want $50,000 per year and the flexibility to work from home.

There is one caveat to this asking for more business. You have to believe it is possible to reach what you are asking. Asking for a million dollars is nice but if you don’t truly believe that having a million dollars is possible you’ll have a very hard time reaching that goal. Aim for a goal that is substantially higher than what you are making now but within reach. Start with doubling your income first.

If you currently make $25k a year, make your goal $50k a year. Then take that $50k and figure out how much per day it takes to reach that goal. Figure the average workweek of 40 hours and 50 weeks per year minus vacation and you get ($50,000/50 weeks = $1,000 per week)($1,000/40 hours = $25 per hour or $200 per day). This could be as easy as setting up one Wordpress blog/business website per week, per client, granted you know how.

Nobody should have a problem trying to figure out how it is possible to make $1,000 per week. If you are having a problem figuring out how to make additional passive income, it is probably due to not having a specific enough goal. Try it once for one week and once you prove you can reach the $1,000 goal for one week I am sure you can find a way to repeat that.

What are people willing to pay?

The short answer is a lot.

People are willing to pay any amount granted the value is there. It is not their job to prove your value assessment right but your job to show their investment is worth the value you offer. This starts with you. Going back to how much you value yourself, your time and your skill set is key. If you don’t truly believe you are worth $25/hr then you wont make $25/hr. You will continually find yourself in low paying jobs constantly grinding away to make ends meet.

I had my wake up call when a family friend put me in my place. I learned from that experience (the one I describe in the video above) that making more money isn’t about the opportunities but about your mindset and your goals.

If you are in the business of solving people’s problems, you’ll find they’ll be willing to pay just about anything in order to make the pain of whatever go away. If you are in the business of providing additional value to their already successful business, you’ll need to show how and why they need to pay you to ensure they don’t end up in pain. The Internet is changing at an exponential rate. It used to be ok to just have a website, an online brochure, but now millions of people (customers) are hanging out in places like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and consume content by the bucket loads.

Tons of businesses are finding themselves behind the 8-ball when it comes to things outside their business. If you believe you are worth more and your value justifies, you’ll have no problem finding clients who are willing to pay that exact amount. You’ll find that you will begin to make deals that fall right in line with what you are asking for. Then you simply ask for more again.

Ideas on how do you increase your value to your clients?

Pain is the number one motivator for 99.99% of the human population. I am not saying to start threatening people with physical pain in order to gain their business but to show them how you can stop a certain type of pain for them. If their company is online and their sales have remained the same or tapered off, show them how you can gain them a larger audience.

You can begin by showing your client the number one business website in their field in comparison to theirs. Now show them how quickly their competition is adapting to the changing circumstances and how you can help them to avoid becoming irrelevant in the future. Relevancy and eyeballs equal more sales and profit. Then lay out a plan for them to regain what has been lost and then where it will go from there. You’ll have to rely on past experiences to make sure you aren’t promising a bill of goods you can’t deliver.

Another way would be for you to work for a small base pay and take a percentage of sales or start selling the leads you generate. In the end you can charge a lot more this route because you are taking on more of the burden or risk. This will vary with the amount of trust you have with your clients.

Ideas on how do you increase your value to your boss?

This can be a little trickier. This will depend a lot on your relationship with your boss coupled with some good negotiating skills.

Start by framing up exactly what your intentions are. Creating a solution for a common problem and/or a way to improve the way things currently are. This of course can raise lots of opposition, especially depending on where you are in the organization and whether or not your organization has people willing to change or adapt. For this very reason I decided to quit my full-time job and pursue the life of the self-employed. Others have stayed with their employers and succeeded massively.

For instance, my good friend has stuck with his corporate job and started heaping all of the value he could onto his back. This year he received twice the raise that all my old coworkers received and has positioned himself as an authority to significantly increase his income in the next two years. All of this amid a recession. He was able to position himself as a high commodity in the workspace. This can be done a number of ways.

Firstly, determine what you want and make a plan to reach it. The people who win wars don’t necessarily have better warriors but better plans for reaching their goal. Decide what your goal is and start your plan of reaching it. This will likely not happen overnight, so be patient. If you need to increase your value, then do so.

Secondly, by increasing your interaction within the workplace and with your company’s clientele you gain more leverage. If my friend above were to leave that job for another, chances are high that it would be for much more money due to the added value he could bring to the table. A more complete package. By positioning yourself within a company as an invaluable resource, you arrive to the table with much more bargaining power. This isn’t to say that anything is a sure thing but with the right goal and understood value you can drastically change your position.

Lastly, you can use your past experiences and successes as a bargaining chip for your new future boss. If your current employer doesn’t fully appreciate the value you bring to the table, another will if presented correctly. Know exactly what your goal is and if your current path is not leading to it, find another. That could possibly mean relocating your job.

Conclusion

The most important thing to know is where you want to be and by when. Answer those two questions and you’ll find a way to arrive on time.

I know I am not alone in finding ways to drastically increase my income in a short time-frame. Tell me about some different ways you have exploded your income.

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*disclaimer: some of the information in this post could be considered illegal activity depending on your country, state or city. This is meant for entertainment purposes only and not as a guide to do anything that violates any national, state or local laws.

How’s that for a setup? I bet you’re interested now. Lets roll the tape. Also I noticed the auto gets a little fuzzy in some places. I apologize.

I’m sure by now you have figured out this post is about developing a story around your product. Doing so effectively can make a huge difference in profits and brand loyalty. Why do you think iPod does so well? Its not because iPods are the best made product on the market, actually they fail a lot. But nobody cares because of the emotion that accompanies the product. Everyone knows you are cool when you listen to an iPod.

It’s amazing how people are willing to purchase a sub-par product just because of how the story makes them feel. But I am not advocating for you to go out and develop a story around a crummy product just for the sake of selling more.

Next time you are about ready to go and launch a new product, look at the story you are about to tell and see how you can tell it a little better. Start by telling people how life was before you made your widget and how you thought there could be a better way. So you set out to find that way that could help all of humanity. In your quest to do so you developed your widget. Then out of the kindness of your heart you decided to share that widget with the rest of the world so they would not have to go through the same troubles and termoils you had to endure. Do this in about 30 seconds and you have a winner. What do we give them, Johnny? A shiny new widget for $19.95.

Now see, that wasn’t so hard.

Tell me about products you have purchased that totally sucked but came with a good story…

If you were interested in the knife I was talking about you can find it here for $36. The brand name of the knife was Min Sheng. Not all countries allow such things, so make sure to double check before ordering.

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Watch the video: I’m In the Business of Helping Here

I know its been a while since you have seen my lovely face in video. I was just having so much fun lately torturing you all with super long winded posts. I am in the process of running a couple experiments that I will share with you in about a month or so.  Anyways, I kept both the post and video short for you all and hope that the New Years bring lots of things your way. After all, it time to reflect on all of that good stuff right?

Remember PASSION is infectious.  Who have you infected today? Yourself? A Friend? A Co-worker? Food for thought.

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First off, I am tried of people saying they can’t figure out how to make money by using Twitter. There are over 60 million people on the thing and you can’t figure out how to monetize Twitter off of that? Seriously?

I am not going to go over the wrongs or rights of the different Twitter marketing ideas presented here or how to play the Twitter game. To each their own.

I have been a part of these ideas at some point in order to bring you this list. I do not continue to use all of these Twitter marketing techniques. Some were purely for trial/error or experimentation.

Twitter is a communication tool

Twitter’s sole purpose is to help people communicate, period. If you are broadcasting on Twitter like an ad machine you’ll constantly need to add more and more Twitter followers to your list to sustain the click-thrus in order to make money. This is a waste of time and never ends.

Work on building relationships and stroking egos. A Twitter account with 200 loyal and dedicated followers will do more than an account with 100,000. I promise.

With Twitter’s open and easily accessible API there are a 1,000,001 programs enabling you to find people who would be interested in you, your product, site, business or whatever.

Gain Niche Traffic from Twitter

It used to be that you could create a Twitter account for the purpose of promoting your website and masses of people would flock to everything tweeted by everyone. This is not the case anymore.

People have begun to find a balance in the things they like to see and experience on Twitter and will drop over-promoting assholes in two seconds flat.

With that said, if you use Twitter and your account properly, you can find a goldmine of like-minded people for your niche site. As you establish relationships with these people they will in fact click-thru to your site.

Most of these click-thrus to your site will not click on ads, but they will click on affiliate links and reviews. If you are running a niche site about lawn and garden and promoting this site with Twitter, don’t expect to make any money from Adsense. If you are linking people to product review pages with some good bits of info and some Amazon affiliate links, you’ll do much better. If people click on the link in a Twitter stream, they are going there to read the content, not click on a Google ad.

Search.Twitter.com is a goldmine

The old fashioned way of searching for people on Twitter is still possible by running search queries through search.twitter.com and watch the stream. With the advent of Twitter programs, much of this can be done with many additional features allowing you to cover more ground at one time.

I use CoTweet a lot for my Twitter marketing and for managing my various Twitter accounts. Currently CoTweet is in beta and you’ll have to beg them to let you in. The best thing you can do with Twitter is find people who are like-minded for your website or community.

With websites like twellow.com/twellowhood and others you can find lists of people who have related interests. Tweepsearch.com will allow you to search people’s Twitter profiles/bios and so on. If you’re into lawn and gardening, search people’s Twitter bios for gardening and check them out. See if you have anything in common and begin a conversation.

Having your pulse on your Twitter community enables you to make decisions about topics, trending topics, possible products to review and much more. If you see some person talking about xyz widget very favorably and that widget has an affiliate program or is sold on amazon.com, imagine what you can write a review about…

Then go back to the thing you know best and rank that review in the serps for all the organic traffic for people to find and buy.

Review Products and Services

Information is key to determining what you can write about and make some money. If people who are not invested in a product or service are still interested and talking about it, that is a potentially good product to review.

Do your homework. Write a review of whatever and rank that for people to find. When you publish the article/review, it is natural to Tweet that out to your followers, and if you have the right followers, they will do the same to help promote you. This isn’t where the money is made, but it helps so don’t count it out.

The sure money is using the info gleamed from Twitter to determine what people want and have an appetite for.

Selling Ads on Twitter

There are dozens of ad companies that are jumping into the sponsored tweets game such as ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets and Twittad.  These companies are trying to help you make money from Twitter by tweeting ads to your followers. I prefer Sponsored Tweets and ad.ly as they seem the most legit and expanding their services super quickly in this new game. They also offer referral programs so as people below you make money, so do you without having to blast your own community with ads. It’s a wicked little circle.

Selling ads will make you money, but unless you have a high CTR from your followers your rates will drop fast. You might only make a few hundred before your good karma runs dry with your followers. So unless thousands of people can name you from Adam online this will be short lived. If you and your Twitter account are the go-to place online for a niche, you’d probably have better success selling ads.

Twitter Referral Programs

Most programs online made for making money have affiliate programs attached to them to help spread the word and love around. You can find tons of these programs made just for Twitter that help you find and follow masses of people closely related to your interests. Buy the program, use the program, write a review, rank, make money and rinse/repeat.

Just about every day a new program comes out, so opportunities are plentiful for making money with referral programs. Just take a look at the program/software and see if it looks useful and well put together, then give it a try. Not all are good, but you should be at least be able to break even from the crappy ones so you don’t really lose anything while trying.

I have made great residual income from this, and for the time invested it is a no brainer.

Buy Ads

If you’d like to find targeted Twitter users for your website or product you can do so using the same companies listed above for selling ads on Twitter. But another overlooked idea is buying ads for product reviews.

If there is interest in a product you see on Twitter, quickly write a review of that product. Then you can post some Google Adword search ads pointing to your review and scrap a lot of affiliate commissions way before you rank for the product. Then, as you rank you can determine whether or not to discontinue the ads.

A lot of the software being offered online has high payouts, even $60 per lead. If the ad costs $.10 per click to run because it is you and two other people doing it, then how many clicks can you afford per one sale? Following me here… There is money for the taking just need to keep your eyes open to the opportunities.

Make Money Managing Others’ Twitter accounts

This is where things change in approach big time for users, branding, interactions and so forth. Most companies that would want you to manage their Twitter account will want results that help their brand. This is a no nonsense, person to person interaction for the purpose of getting more people through the door.

This is not simply setting up a Twitter account and then proceeding to blast anyone following you with specials and ad-like tweets. You’ll quickly lose their interest and they will begin to ignore anything you do.

This becomes about building relationships and reinforcing why this particular brand/company is worth spending money at. I have had great success with this form of interaction including a steady 60 clicks per tweet out of 2,000 followers. This does not seem high, but for Twitter and the number of followers this is good given that maybe 300 people out of that 2,000 probably see one tweet at any given time.

With services like bit.ly you are able to easily track clicks, find the best time of day to tweet different specials or promotions and much more. Simply take any bit.ly url you see and add a + to the end of it to see the stats of that tweet. I love when my tweet and 2,000 followers gets twice the clicks of our trust agent Chris Borgan, LMAO.

Unless you know some businesses that need this service, it is a tough sell. In fact, if they cringe at the sound of social media or Twitter, just move on and save yourself the time. The best way to get in the door is to prove yourself online with Twitter and talk to local/regional business owners at any kind of public setting. Offer up a challenge to them and if they bite, you just might have a new client.

Know what your demographic is and hunt them down on Twitter. Use Twitter search, use Twellowhood for people in specific areas, Tweapsearch for interests, look at patrons’ websites and followers and approach them as well. Finding people is the easy part, taking time to interact with them is a different story.

The most important thing with this type of promotion is to be real, honest and interact with everyone, even if it has nothing to do with your product/service. We all love when people remember us and make us laugh. Use their name, create experiences people will remember and have a good time. This will work.

Making Money With Twitter Conclusion

Like everything in the world, there are a 1,000 ways to skin a cat (no offense, Beamer.. ) and the same holds true for Twitter. Find what you know best and use Twitter as a tool to assist you on that path. Not all people are into Internet Marketing, so they could manage a Twitter account vs. writing reviews and ranking webpages and visa versa.

Here’s a good rule of thumb to follow: If you don’t like seeing it on Twitter, don’t do it and you’ll be safe. If you love getting auto Direct Messages, then feel free to do that. If you don’t, then DON’T. If you wonder how people will react to what you do on Twitter, just look at how you reacted to the same thing a few days before (honestly).

If you treat your followers like gold and worth $100 each, you’ll have high CTR, referral purchases, interactions, people through the door and so on. If you treat them like a penny on the ground, you attract the same, which won’t help you a bit. Use your head and you’ll do great.

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As most SEO type people know, all links/votes are not created equally. More work is usually required for getting better backlinks pointing towards your site.

Below is an exchange of email along with an attached guest post from probably the best guest post link builder I have ever seen. Instead of simply posting his guest post, I figured it would better serve my audience by highlighting the best points for those who are looking to use guest posts to build backlinks in the best way imaginable.

This is by no means a rip on Matthew, just simply too good to pass up. Look for my interjections beginning with Josh Here: Blah Blah

Step 1: Find your target

I have no doubt that Matthew took the time to find my site based on a set list of criteria. Is the site active? Does it fit my niche? Does it allow guest posting? What type of blog is it? What can I learn about this person via his about/contact/content and so on?

A little homework goes a long way. It would even help to go as far as making a few comments prior to proposing a guest post (didn’t happen in this case). But from what I have seen, Matthew looks like a well-educated, professional person who specializes in research. Only fitting, given the amount of detail he goes through to ensure the best possible links.

Step 2: Make contact

Below is the first email Matthew sent to me in order to make contact. You’ll notice a few things right off the bat where he uses my name and website in the subject line. This of course tips my interest because us humans love to hear our own name. Then this also serves a duel purpose of keeping track of responses from people after he has hit the send button. Now when I or someone else replies, he knows exactly where, who and what is being talked about.

First Email Sent

Subject: Josh, I Enjoyed Visiting Your Site At JoshWhitford.com – I Have A Question!
From: Matthew Papaconstantinou <weightlosstriumph@gmail.com>
To: josh@joshwhitford.com
Date: Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Dear Josh,

I enjoyed visiting your blog at JoshWhitford.com and enjoyed reading some of your articles. Your tips and techniques provide solid and valuable information to people like me who want to promote their blog.

I am writing to you because I would like to offer you an article that I wrote for your site. The article talks about my niche (weight loss ) and explains how my blog has already started enjoying good rankings as a result of me following your marketing strategies.

The article is informative, unique (never published in another site) and I believe your visitors will enjoy reading.

I would love that the article (see attachment) could find a home at JoshWhitford.com!

Let me know if you accept the article (or need me to modify it) and where it can be located on your site.

Kind Regards
–
Matt Papa
Publisher, WeightLossTriumph.com

Matthew Papaconstantinou, PhD
Washington University Medical School
Department of Biochem. & Molec. Bioph.
660S. Euclid Ave. 63110, St Louis, MO

Josh Here: In the beginning, look at the pumps being primed. A little flattery goes a long way. He quickly and clearly states what he wants and what he is after, plus a little more flattery. He also knows that people will not put up with content that can be found with a simple google.com search and will not post it. As far as I know, all his articles are in fact technically unique with much of the same content idea or same topic, just different wording. He wraps up the email by letting me know that if I don’t like anything, he is willing to correct it along with keeping the dialogue open for the details of where/when things will happen.

Step 3: Take time to produce good, original content

Below is the article that came attached in the first email Matthew sent. I left it completely original so you can see the links he was going for, along with giving him a little do credit for being so damn good at what he does.

By Matt Papa

Internet marketing has become a massive trend for many reasons—not just because of the hard economic times and widespread layoffs, but also because people want to work at home and spend more time with their families, and maybe most of all because individuals with an independent entrepreneurial spirit seek the freedom and innovation they can achieve through this kind of business.

But it seems like many people start at a disadvantage because they are going about it the wrong way—they want to make money without having an idea, a project or a product that they truly, passionately believe in and understand. You don’t have to be the world’s expert or have something that no one else has – that’s actually unlikely or at least quite difficult at this point in the growth of the home-based online business world. But to attract and keep an audience, you have to bring something special to your idea or your project – some added value that you and only you offer.

Perhaps you do have a unique product. If so, that’s a big advantage. Even so, you are still going to need to find effective ways to reach your potential customers and build up their interest in your product. Selling is selling, whether it’s online or door-to-door.

Style without substance and substance without style are both incomplete packages. Neither one will get you far for long.

What you have to sell is yourself and your unique voice and perspective on the value of your product and the needs of your potential market. That’s one reason blogging has become an almost essential part of any online business.

My niche: the weight loss market

Personally, I didn’t have to go out looking for a niche or product to market, because I already had a dedicated interest–the problem of obesity and helping people overcome their weight problems and achieve better health. My research had already given me many ideas and a lot of practical and scientific information, and I really felt a call to share that with other people. Blogging and creating my own website were just natural outgrowths of my desire to inform and share my knowledge.

Because I already had a good background in my topic, I had a head start on many people trying to build businesses online. Not just because I knew things, but because my interest was strong enough and real enough that I was willing to put in a lot of time and energy to build my site, whether I was making money or not. It was a labor of love, which gave me the motivation to stick with it while I learned what worked and how I could make it financially profitable as well as personally satisfying.

A major advantage I had was the magnitude of my niche’s potential market (no pun intended). It is a niche, but a big one. The reality is that two out of three people in the US are overweight, and many of them would like to find a way to help themselves lose weight. So I had no doubt that there was a potential audience and a potential market for the information I wanted to share. I just needed to find the way to put it all together.

My product: The Medifast diet

I had learned about Medifast through my extensive research into successful weight loss programs. It’s a great product that has been around for 25 years and has been tested and recommended by more than 20,000 doctors.

I was aware that Medifast has a great reputation – Forbes business magazine recently named them one of America’s Best 200 Small Companies. When I learned that they also have an affiliate program for marketing their plan, I realized that this could be a great opportunity for me to draw more people to my website, provide them with information and products that would benefit them, and also start earning some return on my investment of time and energy in weightlosstriumph.com.

An affiliate program like Medifast’s works like this. Once you become an affiliate (at no cost to you), you build into your website a link or links that will guide interested readers to the sponsor’s own site—in this case the Medifast site. Each time one of your readers goes on to purchase one of their products, you receive a commission (for Medifast, 20 percent) on that sale. Medifast helps make their links particularly attractive by providing their affiliates with coupons to save your readers money—and make using your link even more inviting.

I could see that this was a perfect opportunity for me, and that I had a perfect website for Medifast. But I also knew that building a true internet marketing strategy would take a little more know-how than just plunking down a link onto my website.

If I could master the internet marketing skills I needed to transform my interest and my blog into a really valuable place that could help people make their weight loss dreams come true, I could also start to make good money online.

Niche + Product + Marketing — Putting it all together

Before people can start clicking on my Medifast links and thereby help my website earn money, first they have to find my website. So how did I go about increasing my visibility and building traffic for my blog? To make the most of my Meidfast affiliation, my website had to find its way to the top of Google’s search list for crucial keywords like “Medifast coupon code” and “Does Medifast work“. But there’s a lot of competition for these keywords.

I knew that just as I wanted to be a go-to site for anyone who is looking for information about Medifast and other important weight-loss facts and opportunities, there are go-to sites experts…like Josh…for people like me who are looking to learn about creating a successful blog and website.

One thing Josh Whitford helped me grasp is the importance of building a community and creating effective backlinks for achieving these search engine rankings. As Josh explains in his helpful 5 easy ways to build backlinks for your blog ,“Everything about search ranking and page rank is based on the foundation of good backlinks and anchor text links. The more links you have pointing towards your blog on certain keywords, the higher you will rate for relevancy of those keywords.”

Josh also has some really great advice on creating and maintaining a blog that will be a magnet for your niche community. He has three great tips for making your blog successful, but in a way they all boil down to one common factor – commitment. You have to believe in your subject and be committed to it – to making sure that your content is sound and fresh and that you keep it that way by sticking with it. It’s all part of building a community of readers who can trust that will find something new and valuable each time they come to your site.

My site is growing and has a promising future – not only because it’s a great topic that I love, but also because marketing know-how like Josh’s has helped me raise my search engine rankings significantly.

I was lucky that I already had the passion and the enthusiasm for my own subject – best weight loss programs. But being part of Josh’s community has helped me key in on some of the practical things I need to know about and do to keep my blog alive and lively.

Josh Here: Now I don’t really believe that Matthew learned anything from my blog about marketing ideas or how to build backlinks. This guy knows his stuff. But like I mentioned above, a little flattery goes a long way. His article is original, one of a kind and serves as a well-written piece, but tying in weight loss to marketing doesn’t seem to be natural as I have no incoming links about weight loss or anything like that. Almost all my links are related around marketing, unconventional, ideas, josh, techniques and just about every combo of those.

But notice how he took the time to read through a few of my posts and to draw that content into the topic at hand. By doing so he is making his post about weight loss into a marketing post, along with adding link juice to some of my own pages. This makes you think this guy isn’t being selfish, he is just trying to add content to the community and enhance the reader and user experience (probably both, a little bit).

Step 4: The follow through

For the sake of keeping this a little shorter I won’t publish the emails my girlfriend Lindsay has exchanged with Matthew via her Dog Blog. But rest assured that he will go to whatever length possible to make sure that his posts meet your standards and gets published.

He makes sure to keep the dialogue going by following up with relevant emails regarding a new or interesting topic. He will go to length to lay on the flattery thick through the process, like telling my girlfriend how good she looks in her about page picture. Ha, silly Greeks. Be careful with that one, don’t want to accidently piss someone off. I just think it’s funny.

Step 5: When there is gold, dig

Now, I haven’t been this far with Matthew yet and might guess it doesn’t happen. But in any case, I would presume that following up with a blogger after he or she publishes your successful blog post would only be natural. This opens up the opportunity for future guest posts. I would give a good 2-3 months depending on how often the blog posts to follow up again and see how things are going and whether or not the blogger would be interested in another guest post about xyz.

As you can imagine, taking this approach could be a full-time job, and I have no idea when this guy finds time to sleep, but in the end it must be worth the effort via clients or affiliate programs to justify the time spent.

or

Instead of taking the cold calling approach to guest posting and building backlinks, you could develop relationships with people. Building a community would make this whole wine and dine experience much easier. I could simply pull up Skype and ask, hey can I write a post about blah blah blah to get a couple links? … Just another approach to the same end.

In conclusion

If you made it this far you have way too much time on your hands. Or, you are probably in the business of building backlinks for the purpose of ranking a website over another. The formula is as follows:

1. Find appropriate active niche blog
2. Research and produce good content
3. Make contact and use flattery
4. Follow up and correct anything needed
5. Rinse and repeat

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The Forum has been around a very long time and because of that it has seen the twilight years of journalism come and now go. Some of its most prized sources of revenue are drying up and even disappearing completely. I can’t blame the people who are shifting their advertising dollars away from newspapers into other sources. When you get better value elsewhere, it’s only natural to pursue it.

Issues facing newspapers

One of the newspaper’s bread and butter sections is the classified section. The problem is some guy named Craig came up with an idea of a free online classified website. It took a while but now people are using it, a lot, even in small towns.

My girlfriend runs a dog running business in Fargo and is a former employee of The Forum. In an attempt to drum up business and clients, she took out a classified ad in the paper and waited for the clients to roll in. It cost her $140 for a one-inch by one-inch ad. Nothing happened. People just don’t look through the paper for certain information anymore.

The natural progression was to post a free listing on Craigslist about her new service. Sure enough, she got multiple calls, emails and clients from this free website. Can you see a problem here?

This is a problem for all the newspapers that make money off classifieds and ads.

The good news for newspapers sales is that most are small and pretty local. This is a great opportunity from them to mimic the actions of Craigslist and others and get people to their own website by offering a similar service.

But how will they make money by offering this for free? Simply, they won’t, other than through paid ad placements on those listings. For example, businesses might be interested in newspaper advertising where related companies have posted free listings. A little competition, perhaps.

At the top of its site, The Forum boasts having 9,308,484 “pages” for November 2009. All of North Dakota has approximately 641,000 citizens, by the way. All that web traffic is great for The Forum, except anyone going to its web site for the first time is greeted with a wall garden (login form). If you’re not a member, you must become one in order to read the article. I simply hit the back button. What a shame.

I bet that out of those 9 million “pages” viewed on The Forum, the number one page is its login page. How can that possibly help generate revenue? It doesn’t. One time I visited drudgereport.com and noticed an article about an Ozzy Osbourne concert in Fargo and how the local police used the concert to nab wanted criminals by offering them free concert tickets.

Drudge Report gets over 600 million hits a month! So, all of those people reading Drudge clicked to see The Forum’s story about Ozzy and instead they were greeted with a login screen! Epic FAIL! How many of those people do you think registered to read the article? I bet 1% did.

In fact, if you do manage to register, you were automatically re-directed back to the home page, requiring you to go back and find the original link to the article you wanted (I believed this has been fixed now). Most people aren’t that patient.

Newspapers’ sales are losing ground to other services that are free and widely available. This means that much more time and emphasis have been placed on newspaper marketing ideas. What we forget is where all of the newspaper customers originated from. Their rock solid demographic has changed dramatically. I can’t remember the last time I looked a phone number up in a phone book, and the same goes with newspapers. We rely on the Internet for all our information.

Newspapers once had the ability to call each and every one of the residents in their town through Newspaper Telemarketing. But as more and more people ditch their landlines for unlisted cell phone numbers, this has made it even more difficult for newspapers to reach the younger demographic.

I can think of a few ideas that would help newspapers to be able to compete and continue in the coming century:

Charge much more for printed copies of the paper.

Let’s face it. Newspapers have extremely high overhead with paper, gas, electricity to print, a big building and distribution centers to heat/cool. I would charge appropriately for the honor of having a printed version of the paper. As people quit paying the higher prices for the printed version, scale back the overhead to match.

Capitalize on the brand of the newspaper by focusing on local/regional news only.

The best thing newspapers have going for them is their local brand and recognition. They should leverage that by only providing local, relevant news that people in the surrounding area will highly appreciate. Local and hyperlocal blogs have been springing up in every town across the country for the simple fact that people love their local sports, travel, news, dining, nightlife and the like.

Why waste time with national or even regional news at all? Make the paper completely local with news no one else offers. Ditch the world news section.

Imagine the savings each paper would have by not paying the Associated Press and other sources for the use of articles from outside the area. I believe The Forum pays roughly 2-3 million a year for the honor of republishing AP articles in its daily newspaper. How many jobs and overhead could be eliminated by focusing on local news only?

People have the Internet and TV/Satellite for national and world news. It’s a fallacy that local newspapers have to republish national and world news. I can’t recall a national article I read in The Forum that I had not already heard two days before on Twitter and the day before on Drudge Report.

Open up the classified section

Make the classified section of your website open and free to the public like craigslist.com. Your newspaper already has the traffic and trust and most newspapers are in smaller towns and communities that don’t yet have a functioning Craigslist page. Right now, people in small towns have to look to the nearest mid to large city if they want to use Craigslist.

Allow people to post for free for x number of days and then charge them to post for longer periods of time or with featured preference like ebay.com listings. This way people with a coffee table can get rid of their goods and those who want more permanent exposure can have it at a cost. Locals and outsiders will use your brand to facilitate their transactions and bring traffic, recommendations and so on.

Open up contributions

People love to be heard and share their ideas with the world. Give them the ability to do so. Employ an editor to read over submitted pieces and publish them to the rest of the community. This will add more content to be searched by more people to increase overall exposure, relationships, drama and just about everything else you can name.

This process can be made easy by auto filters for submitted articles. Filter for correct content type, foul language, formatting and so on. Article submission sites use this software all the time to ensure a uniform format to articles and content being submitted. Then once the articles pass auto checking, a person reviews and either approves/rejects for correction.

This process allows for a community to have hundreds or thousands of extra articles written for their site every year. Meanwhile, you collect revenue from the ad placements, gain extra traffic, links, etc.

Employ successful local content producers

One of the smartest things AOL has done in the last couple years was to buy up and enable further already successful blog sites. It simply looked at sites that were already successful and poured in resources to help expand those sites’ growth and revenue. This can and should be done on a local level.

There are bloggers in the area of every newspaper who are operating a successful blog about any subject you can imagine. Pay these bloggers to do what they do under your umbrella. You gain their readers support, interaction, favor and can possibly send them much more traffic, increasing their/your revenue, traffic and the circle continues.

Pick up the top 10 bloggers and their sites in the area along with their readers and now your local papers is attracting attention from all over the world. Here is where local pays on the world stage.

Triple the opinion section

Another newspaper marketing idea would be to expand the treasure trove of free content and participation known as the opinion section. People love to voice their opinions, and people like to hear others complain. Why not publish every letter to the editor and every editorial that comes in rather than picking and choosing? There’s nothing unique to a community quite like the opinion section of its newspaper.

Newspaper marketing

Newspaper circulation has been in decline for the past two decades, and signs for the future are not looking good. In order to increase newspaper circulation, more emphasis should be placed on marketing. Newspaper marketing jobs might be the only newspaper jobs available! Still, other newspapers outsource their marketing to a newspaper marketing agency. Either way, newspapers need to make big changes.

Conclusion

Eyeballs matter. Get the eyeballs and you’ll have newspaper advertising dollars. Newspapers used to be the only source of news for an area, but that has changed. Newspaper sales show how much the industry has changed.

Newspapers now have to fight for their readers now against everyone nationally, locally and worldwide. Focus on what you know best – your local community – and you can’t go wrong. When you have a solid base, expand into other areas. Tap the local talent because those are the people who matter the most to you. Can your newspaper compete against Drudge Report for world/national news online? No, so compete where you can win and focus all your energy there.

It would serve newspapers wisely move to a method of advertising control and brokering verses relying solely on subscribers. If newspapers combined marketing magazines, billboards, and local niche website such as blogs all the way through mega sites like Facebook. They would better serve their advertising base, by increasing exposure and managing advertising dollars across all local platforms.

Journalism isn’t dead. Journalism has more opportunities than ever before, but the energy has to be focused where it can make the most impact. That’s survival!

*top image from http://andygreenhaw.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/newspapers1.jpg

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Having a community is like having the ultimate support group. Rarely do any of us go through life without the help of others. Building a community around you is vital to increasing your ROI and success with each new endeavor.

What do I mean by building a community? I mean giving your time, talent or treasure to help others. The secret to success is giving. The more you give the more successful you’ll become, I guarantee it. Now that we are approaching the Holiday Season, charity and giving are in the air and almost become second nature to most. This is the same feeling and approach you should have with building your community.

Going out of your way to help another person with an idea, link, promotion or an extra hand will eventually fill your community cup to overflowing. This can’t be faked. People know when you do something out of sincerity versus trying to gain something from them. Take the time out of each day to do something for someone else and see what happens. Pretty soon you’ll notice that people will be doing the same for you.

For example, a friend of mine just released a band new Beer Review Blog (bigbeerblog.com). The site barely has a half-dozen posts, but it is already racking up a dozen or so comments per post. Not bad for a band new site. The thing to notice here is the fact that Allyn has built/joined a community of like-minded individuals online. This has made the launch of his new site a success very quickly. A community can help your reach your goals much quicker.

Another example with community that I love is the ability to trade/barter with people you know. When starting a new business the best thing you can do is keep your cost down. I have had to worry about this with the launch of my new hotel booking site (whosgotroom.com). I was able to build the majority of the site in its current form for under a grand. This was only possible because of the community relationships I had built.

For all of these reasons I decided this week to set up a Facebook Fan Page called Friends of Griz and Vic. The community that has sprung up around these two Internet Marketers has been amazing. They have had tons of positive impact on many people’s lives. I for one quit my job and made a successful living practicing what these two preached.

I set up the Friends of Griz and Vic page to help others find each other and support each other for all of their latest needs or projects. The table is open for any ideas on better things we can do to enable one another in our own pursuits. Obviously, I don’t expect all of you to know who Griz or Vic are, but if you want to join a pretty awesome community online, here’s your chance.

So come, and build a community around yourself and give back to others. All it takes is a little time.

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The one thing that Tiger Woods can’t take back about the incident that happened is the forgone conclusion that people have reached about the actual event regardless of their factual accuracy. When people are left to their own devices they will conceive whatever they want based on the limited facts they know. Remember the story about people shooting up grain silos in the middle of the night after tuning in late to the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds?

An invisible line was crossed by Tiger that spoke loud and clear to everyone, that he is as human as we are and has skeletons in the closet. Those two revelations have shattered the trust and opinions people have formed about Tiger over the last decade or two. All of the branding and advertising that Tiger has taken part of by some of the biggest companies in the world have made his likeness to be that of a perfect and happy family man who is extremely gifted at golf. That foundation has been cracked.

I can almost say with certainty that Tiger or another family member called one of his lawyers and told them what happened that night. The lawyer probably determined that the best course of action would be to not talk to anyone, including the police (legally fine in Florida). This has some major problems from a branding perspective because 10 minutes after the event took place, everyone on Twitter already knew about it. Now the world knows about what happened that night, which is worse than knowing exactly what happened.

I have dealt first hand with Tiger’s lawyers regarding a domain dispute. The same course of action was taken with me, in a very lawyeristic form: don’t talk, just hit people over the head with legalese. I decided because of how Tiger’s lawyers went about the issue I would put up a fight as I was legally right and they had no real leg to stand on. Had they simply opened up dialogue with me and expressed what they wanted, I probably would have simply given them the domain.

What does all of this have to do with getting people to trust your product? Simple. With the advent of instant communication and the Internet, brands can not go about things the same way they used to. Listening to lawyers all the time can damage your brand just as much, if not more (even if they are legally right). I am sure Tiger’s lawyers were doing the right and correct thing from a legal standpoint, but now Tiger is losing endorsements and suffering for lack of transparency. The brand water has been tainted.

People who get a hold of information that is not resolved will want a resolution. If your brand has an issue, the best thing to do from a brand standpoint is to address that issue head on, hopefully via the same medium. All of the lawyers might cringe when this happens, but what is worth more, the brand’s integrity and future profitability or having that lawyer around?

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a post about how bad lawyers are. This is about the court of public opinion for which lawyers don’t hold degrees. When this type of problem arises with your brand, it is important to think about legal and social ramifications of the solution. Once done, some things can’t be undone.

*picture from http://pspinc.net/wordpress/?p=495

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