Devour The Web

The following video describes in great detail everything we did to build a huge list with a free offer.  The campaign started over 2 years ago and without any further promotion, still brings in 60-70 new, high-quality leads per day!

Watch the video to learn how you can do it yourself without a big JV list to help you promote it!

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Post from: Blogging To Make Money Online

List Building: 50,000+ Subscribers in One Campaign

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Sponsored Links

Rick Butts gave a stellar, well-received workshop on his new Stardust Factor.  It’s a very worthy listen. 

In Stardust Factor Workshop, Rick talks about:

• Creating a magnetic presence on the web and off
• Being a celebrity with all the trappings that come with such notoriety in your market
• Learning how much easier things come to those who are “Star Dusted”
• Going from nobody to somebody a lot faster than you might think
• Gaining followers who evangelize for you and send you business gladly

High quality training from a man who has spent his life mastering what he shares in this webinar.

Download Rick’s Stardust Factor Workshop Recordings

Post from: Blogging To Make Money Online

Speaking of high-value content…

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Bloggers are killing the web. Because of them, it is no longer easy to set up a site, write a sales page, and make a killing because of this stupid trend of giving information away and helping people for free.

Now everyone wants everything for free, and with the economy the way it is, some even require everything to be free or simply miss out.

All these damned bloggers are destroying business as usual with their best writing, best tactics, and insider info out in plain daylight for everyone to see, consume, and apply. It’s getting so a guy with a sales letter and a dream of unattainable riches can’t make a living anymore.

The problem with the wild assumptions, half-truths, and flat out misconceptions above is that a lot of people believe them. A lot of people, if they had a blog to rant on, would go public with these feelings. There’s deep resentment in certain circles that this new “free” web is somehow pulling back the curtain and revealing the greed, scams, over-priced and under-performing products and services.

Jack and Jim talk about Google Wave, Bing, Topsy, and Repeets. To find out what all these weird sounding goodies are about, listen click the play button below!

Check out Utility Poster and Video Utility Poster
Check ot Jim Stroud at ILiveOnline.net

Post from: Blogging To Make Money Online

Friday Traffic Report Radio

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What makes people almost buy? What makes them get most of the way there, then drop out of your shopping cart at the last second? What makes them stare at your landing page, wanting what you have to offer, and yet, ultimately, close the page and move on to something else?

It turns out there’s a hideous troll hiding under the bridge. Every time you get close to making a sale, the troll springs out and scares your prospect away. Get rid of the troll and your copy will start converting better than it ever has before.

The ugly, smelly, dirty, bad-mannered troll is prospect fear. And it’s sitting there right now, stinking up your landing page and scaring good customers away.

Fear of wasting money

Remember when you were a kid and you went to that rinky-dink carnival that came through town? After eating all the cotton candy you could manage, and throwing it all back up again on the Tilt-a-Whirl, you checked out something called the Midway.

Remember that persuasive fellow who convinced you to spend a whole months’ allowance throwing softballs at those damned milk cans?

I just got off the phone with someone representing the newly-launched Real Warriors effort, an initiative intended “to promote the processes of building resilience, facilitating recovery and supporting reintegration of returning service members, veterans and their families.” It’s a creation of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE), apparently a division of the U.S. Defense Department. Essentially, the campaign is a Web site providing information for active duty, families, and vets. There’s info on signs of stress, things to do before deployment, and treatment of psychological problems associated with military duty.

The contact there told me essentially there’s no ad budget for the campaign. The site is pretty much it. But the fact is it could help a lot more people if there was a search ad campaign promoting it, or if display ads were running on health/medical sites catering to people in the military.

The U.S. government invariably runs the most online display ads in the government vertical, according to several reports I’ve seen from Nielsen Online over the years. But I’ve always understood those to be PSAs. Couldn’t this campaign qualify for free ad space? What about a Google Grant?

I just checked out the video of Microsoft’s new search engine sequel to Live Search which is set to roll out over the next few days. PCWorld reports full usage next Wednesday.

I hate to say this, but I’m actually impressed with this Bing thing. It seems to have some very smart ways to help people find stuff better. This is not good news for Google, but let’s not jump the gun. The thing hasn’t even launched yet.

They boast a good local search platform, but it remains to be seen whether it is just scraped stuff from the web, which is hardly the best local information you can get, or if it really provides decent information. I’m not holding my breath for anything remotely like hyper local results.

Once we’re able to compare results with Google’s we’ll know much more about whether Bing will become a staple in search, or just another option which fails to pull serious traffic from the Goog.

Post from: Blogging To Make Money Online

Will Bing Bring Bling To Microsoft Search?

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Judging from the response to yesterday’s post, a lot of you are experiencing frustration with blogging. With over 250 responses, I don’t know how Jon is going to choose the 20-30 consultations he’ll do via telephone, but it’s likely some people will be disappointed.

The good news is, every stumbling block I saw posted yesterday in the comments can be overcome with a bit of guidance. So as an alternative, here are two resources that can help you ease your frustration and get you on the right path.

31 Days to a Better Blog

Darren Rowse is the guy who gave “problogging” its name. But he doesn’t just blog about blogging. He runs a hugely successful blog dedicated to digital photography, and co-founded the b5media blog network.

Darren knows what he’s talking about.

From looking at the frustrations expressed in yesterday’s post, I’d say just about every one of them can be solved by Darren’s new step-by-step workbook, 31 Days to a Better Blog. Designed to address and improve 31 significant blogging issues in 31 days, it can be worked through at your own pace (say one a week) or you can simply focus on the areas you need help with.

There’s paid media, there’s earned media, and there’s burned media. A controversial HBO campaign now running on Gawker Media sites somehow wrangled all three.

Here’s what happened in case you missed it: Gawker executed a custom sponsorship for the HBO series True Blood that involved a phony vampire blog that was passed off as a newly acquired site in the Gawker portfolio. That sleight of hand pulled the wool over the not-very-discerning eyes of New York tech blog Business Insider. ClickZ avoided initial coverage in part because it’s unseemly to dwell on the embarrassing mistakes of another publisher — hey, everyone’s entitled to a mistake — and in part because it’s a somewhat ham-fisted execution on Gawker’s part.

But the ensuing coverage — by Mediapost, Adweek, AgencySpy and others — have transformed it into a case study on the PR potential of micro-scandals. And Gawker has shown repeatedly that it can milk such scandals for all they’re worth.

Editor’s Note: Don’t miss the end of this post. This is the first time Copyblogger has ever done anything like this, and it may be the last.

It’s inevitable, you know.

One day, you pull up your blog and realize you did everything wrong. You picked the wrong topic. Your design looks amateurish. Your posts sound desperate for attention.

You didn’t do it intentionally, of course. You just didn’t know what you were doing when you started, and the mistakes have kind of piled up.

The question is, what are you going to do about it?

You might be tempted to just start changing things willy-nilly in an effort to cleanse your blog of all of those unsightly mistakes. But don’t. That’s what I used to do too, and I created as many problems as I got rid of. Several times, my “improvements” produced even worse results than I was getting before. I couldn’t believe it.

It took a while, but eventually I learned that just because you’re doing something different doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. If you want to turn your blog around, you can’t just change what you think is wrong. You have to base your improvements on evidence, timeless marketing wisdom, and advice from experts.