If I told you that you could build a business that starts making you money this week, possibly even today – how appealing would that sound?
I’m not talking about some get-rich-quick scheme that leaves you with nothing in the end, I’m talking about a real, tangible business that has value. Something legitimate, that you can depend on, scale, and do great things with.
When I started blogging at age 14, I had lots of time and no money. I literally had to ask my grandmother for a few dollars to buy web hosting, and thankfully, I got it. It then took months to start building even a small amount of income, and because I made some critical blogging mistakes early on, I ended up having to scrap the site altogether.
So I created a new one, which also took months and months to build up.
While every business should utilize blogging, and building up a brand through content marketing is still my favorite overall strategy, some of us can’t wait that long. We need to do something that brings in money right away – at the very least, to scale our businesses.
Fortunately, I have a solution for you. It’s just not going to be a solution most people will like:
Freelance. Offer a service to somebody, and promote it on your website. Make your time the product.(more…)
One of the most valuable skills you can learn in life is how to sell – not only sell your products, but yourself and your ideas. Being able to persuade someone to take a given action is extremely powerful, and this should be a skill you are constantly looking to develop.
The truth is, you are selling yourself every day. When you talk to someone, you are selling your brand. When you give someone an opinion, you are selling that idea to them. Whether you know it or not, almost every interaction you have with other people is a sale in some way.
As bloggers and as entrepreneurs, there are certain things we can do to sell more effectively. This article is going to lay out 7 rules you must follow to build up your inner salesperson, make more money through your blog, and close more deals. (more…)
Freelancing is one of the greatest businesses to start in 2019, because it’s so straightforward. You do work, and you get paid.
That’s it.
However, it does require you to actually have a marketable skill in the first place. A skill that employers are actually looking for, that adds value to their business in some way.
In this article, we’re not just going to cover the most common freelance jobs available online, but we’ll also cover the most in demand freelance skills that employers are looking for.
By doing this, we ensure that any time spent developing these skills is well worth it, and you won’t have to spend too much time actually looking for work.
Let’s get to it! Here are the most profitable, high-income skills to learn if you want to make money as a freelancer. (more…)
It doesn’t take a large following to make a large amount of money.
There are people with 200 loyal readers doing better than those receiving 200,000 visitors / month.
Heck, we recently learned about an Instagram star with 2.6 million followers that couldn’t sell even 36 t-shirts. Not even one unit per 72,000 followers.
What gives? What’s the difference between the person with 200 followers that makes a full-time living, and the Instagram “influencer” that couldn’t sell even one shirt per 72,000 followers?
It’s simple – it comes down to truly understanding your audience, and using that to build a real, meaningful connection with them.
In this article, let’s go over how you can build a better connection with your following, foster further engagement, and of course – make more money from your existing audience!
1. Get Personable – Interact One-On-One
This one is perhaps the most obvious, but it’s also one of the most important.
Nothing builds connection better than actually interacting with someone one-on-one. Focusing all of your attention just on them, at least for a moment.
This means that you should be doing things such as…
Leave communication channels open – enable comments on your pages.
Encourage communication – ask your audience for their opinions or insights.
Actually respond to comments posted on your website and social pages.
Let people know that they can contact you. Answer emails promptly.
When somebody does something for you, acknowledge them and the action. They’ll appreciate the fact that you noticed!
Connection has to go both ways. You’re never going to achieve your goal if you have the audacity to think that people should only listen to what you have to say, while showing no willingness to hear what they have to say back.
It just doesn’t work.
Quit telling yourself that you don’t have time to interact with your followers one-to-one, or that you’re too good to do so. This kind of egotistical thinking will end up having the opposite effect – pushing people away, and causing them to wonder why they should bother with you when there are millions of other good people to follow on the internet.
One meaningful interaction could be all that’s needed to turn a freebie seeker into a paying customer.
One meaningful interaction could be all that’s needed to turn a freebie seeker into a paying customer. Click to Tweet
2. Utilize Audio And Video
I’m willing to bet that the entrepreneurs you know best, the marketers and public figures you feel like you know the best, aren’t just writers.
The written word is a powerful tool, and should be part of every marketer’s arsenal. However, it simply can’t compete with audio, or especially video when it comes to building connection in the vast majority of cases.
There’s something different about actually being able to see and hear a person, as if they were in front of you. You get to really come to understand their style, their mannerisms, their delivery. It stands out much more in your mind, and becomes much more memorable as a result.
The big players are all utilizing video more and more – and that’s what consumers want.
I’m a huge advocate for blogging, and would never tell you to stop doing so. I would just encourage you to spend more time creating audio and video content heading into the future. In the long-term, it will pay off more for you.
After all, this is why I’ve been including an audio recording of each post I publish here. Those that choose to listen rather than read consume more of the article on average – allowing me to really deliver my full message.
Sometimes our most important pieces of information are in the details, which are skimmed over on a normal blog post. Audio and video content can’t be skimmed over quite as easily.
3. Collect Data To Tailor Your Content
If you’re not tailoring your content, you have a problem.
You’re wasting your audience’s time, and they’re not going to forgive you for it. Even if they don’t mean to, they’re going to unconsciously filter you out when their brain decides that you’re not relevant to their interests and needs.
In my email marketing course, I talk heavily about segmentation, and how to segment your lists for greater targeting. This is the act of breaking up your list into smaller chunks, so you can send out content that is not only more relevant, but promote more targeted offers to groups of people that are likely to want to take action.
An example at the most basic level would be separating out buyers from non-buyers. Why annoy your audience promoting a product they’ve already bought?
Many marketers handle their messaging poorly – sending the same thing out to every single person regardless of their relationship to you. In some areas, this is inevitable. You can’t write a unique blog post for every person that visits your site, of course.
However, in many other areas, personalization not only is possible, but should be expected.
This is why email is still the most powerful marketing channel, and works better for converting interested prospects into buyers. Social media doesn’t come close, because it can’t.
With a powerful email marketing system, you can collect more data about a specific subscriber than you’d know what to do with.
Their demographic information.
Their interests.
What products they’ve purchased.
What past messages resonated with them.
What pages they’ve visited on your site.
What time of day they’re most likely to check their email.
What psychological triggers they respond best to.
And so much more.
Not only that, but you can set up systems that send out messages automatically based on extremely specific combinations of this data. Then use all of this to improve your system over time.
Email is hands-down the most powerful way to build connection and trust on autopilot, and while it should never be the only thing you focus on, email is the one thing worth mastering.
Get it right, and you’d be surprised what percentage of your audience ends up doing business with you time and time again.
Don’t go another day without an email marketing system that works for you. Enroll in my email marketing course and you can have your autoresponder building connections for you by the time you go to bed tonight.
4. Frequency
Once you’ve built that initial connection with someone, I’m not sure quality is always better than quantity.
You don’t need to have the best content every single time. Quality content will certainly get people to pay attention to you, but once you’ve got their attention and somebody likes you, they’re not going to hold you to that same standard.
It’s better to produce something good and have it seen every day, then to create something great and have it seen only once a week.
The world is too busy, too cluttered with promotion to succeed if you’re rarely getting in front of your target customer.
Once somebody has discovered you, it’s your job to make sure they don’t forget who you are and what you stand for.
After all, repetition is a key part of branding. The word branding itself means to “mark in a way that cannot be removed or forgotten.”
That is exactly what you need to do in the visitor’s mind. Brand yourself. Your ideas. Your principals. Your core values.
The only way to do this is to get in front of the visitor over and over again. They should not be able to think about your industry without your company coming into their mind – whether they want it to or not.
This is why, despite how powerful email marketing can be, you still need to have a social strategy in place. You still need to do content marketing. You need to be active in your industry’s communities.
If you don’t show up, you will not be missed. You’ll just be forgotten.
Once somebody has discovered you, it’s your job to make sure they don’t forget who you are and what you stand for. If you don’t show up, you will not be missed. You’ll just be forgotten. Click to Tweet
5. Get Personal – But Only When The Time Is Right
Letting your audience see a deeper side of you can really help draw them in, and help them feel a connection to you or your company that goes far beyond just business.
That being said, there is a time and place to do so. You would not like it if somebody came up to you and spilled out their entire life story in their first interaction. That would just be weird, unprofessional, and a waste of time. People do not care about those details yet.
People are inherently self-centered the majority of the time, and care about their own lives – not yours. Getting personal can be extremely powerful, but it needs to be something that either…
Adds value in some way.
Is sought out by the audience member themselves.
Typically, #1 comes before #2.
It’s easy to share a bit more about who you are by tying it into a lesson. A perfect example of this would be using your own story to demonstrate a point that you are trying to get across.
Then, develop some separate platform where you can really shine through.
In my case, this is typically Instagram stories. I may show what’s going on in some of my other companies, share random thoughts on something notable that’s happened, or just ask a question and discuss my opinions.
A vlog or personal podcast can also be a great way to do this. All three of these choices help with the frequency issue mentioned previously.
When people know, like, and trust you, they buy from you. When they really feel connected with you, they become super fans – not just purchasers of your product, but those that spread your messages, adopt your values, and help you expand your brand.
Conclusion
Building a deeper connection with your following isn’t particularly challenging, but it does require a strategy.
You must find the balance between growing your audience, and nurturing the members who you already have. A large audience means nothing if nobody actually engages with you, or cares about what you have to say.
I hope that this article has given you some new ideas on how you can connect with your following on a deeper level. I promise that if you make this a priority, it will pay off dividends for years to come.
I’d love to hear more about the specific strategies you’re using to connect with your audience, because I’d like to get better at this as well. Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or reach out!
You’re not making anywhere near the level of course sales that you could be.
It doesn’t matter if you have the cheapest price point, or the largest number of lectures.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve hired a professional copywriter, and paid them tens of thousands of dollars to build your landing pages.
It doesn’t even matter that you have the absolute best course on the market right now.
You’re not making anywhere near the level of course sales that you could be.
And that’s okay. But I want to help you change that.
When you’ve put so much time and energy into creating an awesome product, it’s natural to want to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. However, almost all course creators make some common mistakes that severely hinder their ability to acquire new students.
In this article, let’s look over these mistakes in more detail, and discuss practical strategies you can use to begin increasing your sales right away. (more…)
You’ll think I’ve finally crossed over to the dark side.
But what actually happened was I finally put a real pop-up on my site. Yes, you read that right. I added a big giant box that pops up in your face and encourages you to sign up for my email newsletter.
And doing so was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while. I know it’s a controversial subject, so let’s decide. Should you actually use pop-up forms?
They say if you’re a jack of all trades, you’re a master of none.
I’m sure you likely know that are tons of different ways to make money online today. Blogging. CPA. eBooks. eCommerce. Freelance. YouTube. The list goes on and on.
Today, we have more opportunities available to us than ever before. Today, we’re no longer limited with our options – anyone can start chasing any tactic they wish. This is both a blessing and a curse.
Today, we are facing an ongoing issue called information overload. We have so much information available to us, we don’t know what to do with it. Our attention spans and our ability to focus is declining at a rapid rate. This is bad enough already, but it gets significantly worse when we combine information overload with our emotions.
We humans are emotional creatures. We like to feel. We get excited when we hear about new prospects that can make us money. As a result, some people end up chasing these prospects relentlessly. When they don’t work, they jump at the next opportunity that is presented to them without giving it much thought. This is a huge issue. Every time I see someone post an article covering a ton of different ways to make money online, I cringe. It’s good to introduce people to multiple opportunities. It’s a huge mistake to encourage people to attempt all of them.
The fact of the matter is, no one opportunity is going to pay off quickly. It takes time, effort, and dedication to succeed with any money making method. If you’re unwilling to focus long enough, you’ll give up long before the method becomes profitable. You’ll try a bunch of different tactics, make no money, and then claim making money online is a scam (yes, I see people say this often!)
The key is to choose the one money making method that’s most interesting to you, so long as it is profitable and scalable. Once you choose it, stick with it. If others are making money from it, there’s nothing stopping you from doing the same. The people that are making money are the ones who stuck with it for the long term. Not the ones that threw a bunch of different opportunities at the wall in hopes that one of them would stick. It doesn’t work that way.
Perfecting Your Craft – Then Move On To Another One
Even when you drill down to a specific method, you’ll still naturally be better in some areas than others. Let’s take blogging for example. There are several core aspects that make a successful blog, several of which being writing, marketing, and selling. The unfortunate reality is that you have to be decent at all three of these aspects if you want to have a blog that makes money. That being said, you should focus on your strengths first and build around that.
I have never been the best writer. I’d love to write out a ton of posts each week, but that’s not where my skill lies. I’m improving each day, but writing isn’t my main focus. I make up for this by marketing the heck out of each and every post I write. I make up for my lack of posting by driving more traffic to the individual posts. I may rank better in search engines if I wrote more each week, but I make up for it with my marketing efforts. And it’s working for me!
Still, I wouldn’t have as great as a business without a blog, therefore it’s important I still work hard to ensure my writing doesn’t suck. Likewise, I make sure that my marketing efforts drive sales, and constantly aim to improve my ability to sell. This is after all, the reason I’m in business 🙂
Getting back to my original point, I can’t stress enough how important it is to stick with your work. While running an online business requires a multitude of skills, you can’t aim to be a jack of all trades. Online, it’s far better to be a master of one – that’s what’s going to separate you out from the fierce competition and end up providing your paycheck.
Despite the fact that it’s a lot of blogger’s top earners (including myself!), a lot of people don’t actually know what Affiliate marketing is, or how to get started with affiliate marketing on their blog. This comes as a great surprise to me, as it’s one of the most effective ways to make money off of a blog today, especially since we have plugins now like Adblock that prevent CPC ads such as Adsense being shown. Anyhow, for those you who are completely new to affiliate marketing, here is your place to start. (more…)
One question I commonly get from website owners – both bloggers as well as eCommerce store owners, is the value of Pinterest traffic.
Is Pinterest traffic worth anything? How does Pinterest traffic convert? Should I actively be focusing on my Pinterest strategy?
To be fair, I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Pinterest traffic.
On one hand, my baby product brand, which is a wonderful market for Pinterest in general, gets a ton of traffic from Pinterest. It was by far our biggest traffic source from social media, and for a long time was our biggest traffic source period.
At the same time, it was also our poorest converting traffic source – converting 7x worse than organic Google traffic over the course of a year.
Why is that, and is there anything you can do to make Pinterest traffic more valuable? I’ll cover both of these in just a moment.
The Problem With Pinterest Traffic
I have said for a very long time now that traffic on its own is a vanity metric.
Unless your entire business is built around ad revenue (which is a very bad idea) than traffic on its own really isn’t worth anything.
With a business, your goal is to move a buyer closer and closer to a sale. This starts by getting your brand in front of people that stand a shot at ever converting in the first place.
Here’s the thing about Pinterest – these viewers are about as ‘top of the funnel’ as you can possibly get.
They are not browsing Pinterest to buy. They are not shoppers.
In fact, the very nature of Pinterest is built around saving things for later.
Think about it – the whole nature of a Pinterest board is to collect things you like around a given topic. But how often do people actually go back and even view their boards, let alone take action on anything they’ve saved?
Very, very few.
Even those that click-through to your website likely have no intention of making an immediate purchase.
Pinterest users are looking for ideas, inspiration, and entertainment.
Pinterest Isn’t Entirely Bad, However
That being said, there is value to Pinterest traffic, and its power comes in numbers.
Pinterest can be incredibly valuable for sending very large volumes of traffic to your website, making it a great way to build general brand awareness and familiarity. Unlike most social media channels, pins may continue to drive traffic years into the future.
Seriously, I still have pins generating hundreds of visitors a month from over 3 years ago. That’s something you’ll never get from a tweet or a Facebook post.
And let me be clear – even though Pinterest is one of the worst performing channels when you compare numbers, it still converts. It converts less frequently, but conversions are there.
Therefore, over time, it’s still possible for it to become a powerful money maker.
You just need a strategy.
How To Increase Conversions With Pinterest Traffic
While I definitely wouldn’t consider myself to be a master of Pinterest – for leads or for sales, I have tried a few things that have worked well for maximizing the value of Pinterest traffic.
1. Use Pinterest Traffic To Build Your Facebook Pixel
Pinterest visitors may not convert the first time that they visit your store, but they may convert the 2nd or 3rd time.
Utilize Pinterest as a way to segment website visitors based on interest. For example, if you were a kitchenware company and a person clicked through to an article about baking chocolate cakes, you can infer that this person has an interest in baking desserts – cakes specifically.
Then, you could use this audience to retarget cake baking accessories to them on Facebook. The click on its own may not convert to a sale, but it does indicate a certain level of interest, which is valuable in itself.
Bonus Tip: When running Promoted Pins or adding content to Pinterest yourself, add a UTM tag to the URL. This will allow you to populate your Facebook custom audiences specifically with people who originally came through Pinterest – allowing you to separately track retargeting ads that run to Pinterest visitors, vs retargeting ads that run to everybody else.
2. Prioritize Retention
You stand a much better shot at making an eventual sale if you manage to retain the visitor somehow, so you can market to them over and over again.
Create some sort of lead magnet to offer in exchange for an email address. Although you still won’t convert most visitors into subscribers, it ultimately makes the traffic much more valuable overall. Alternatively, encourage people to follow you on other social networks.
This is the next best thing if they do not buy. A visitor that is not retained in some way, and that you cannot bring back via a retargeting ad, is likely lost forever. If you prioritize retention, it doesn’t have to be that way.
3. Brand Your Pins
Although views of your brand name and logo do not hold a lot of inherent value on their own, these impressions are not completely worthless. They do hold some value.
This also gives you the added benefit of getting your brand in front of people who did not bother to click-through to your website – which let’s be honest, is most people that view your pin.
There’s a principal in psychology called the mere-exposure effect (often called the familiarity principle) that causes us to start to like and trust things that are familiar to us.
If your logo manages to get in front of people multiple times (and they actually see it), there’s a chance it could increase their likelihood of finally clicking through, or aid slightly with conversion when they ultimately choose to do so.
Conclusion
When utilizing Pinterest for business, it’s vital that you look beyond just the pure traffic numbers.
It’s exciting to see hundreds or thousands of visitors a day coming to your website from Pinterest, but unless that traffic is taking some further action to escalate their relationship with you (such as becoming a lead, or purchasing a product) than that traffic isn’t worth much.
That being said, if we have an active strategy in place for utilizing the Pinterest traffic, it can become a bit more powerful.
I’d love to hear about your experience with Pinterest, and how you’re utilizing it to build your business!
Note: This is a Q&A post. To have your question answered for free, send me an email!
Should you add your blog name to your post titles? This is an interesting question, with a relatively simple answer.
There are two types of titles that each blog articles has – the actual post title that appears on your website, and the title tag that appears in Google’s search engine results. Contrary to popular belief, these two things do not have to be the same. It is possible to have your article on your site titled differently than how it appears in Google search results.
To answer the question, it doesn’t normally make sense to include the name of your blog within the post title that appears on your website. Presumably, your blog post title will be near the top of your page – right by your logo or menu. People already know what website they’re on, especially if they are visiting it directly (and not from a search engine result page.)
However, there can be value in adding your blog name to your title tag, or the title that will appear in the search engine results pages. The primary two benefits are:
1. Branding
Even if people do not ultimately click on your article, there is still a tiny bit of value in having your brand name exposed to them. Over time, this will help your website appear as an authority figure in its niche.
There’s a principal in psychology known as the mere-exposure effect that causes people to like something more, simply because they are familiar with it. Therefore, getting your brand name in front of targeted people has some value, even if they do not click.
2. Memorability
If you’ve made a positive impression on a past visitor through your content, and they remember your name, they will look out for you in the search results pages again.
By having your blog name in the search results, you’re able to call out to these people. They may pick your blog even over others that rank higher than you, simply because they remember having a positive experience with your website in the past. This increase in click-through ratio may actually cause you to rank higher as a result.
Therefore, it certainly couldn’t hurt!
How To Add Your Blog Name To Search Results Titles
The easiest way to edit your page’s title tag if you’re on WordPress is to simply use a plugin like Yoast SEO.
As you can see, my blog name gets cut off on desktop, but I still consider this to be better than nothing.
Yoast SEO’s box will appear beneath each blog post, allowing you to make any adjustments to your SEO title or meta description. In my case, I have it set up to use this format automatically.
If you’re not using WordPress, you can define the title tag with the following code snippet:
<head><title>Example Title</title></head>
Note that in addition to displaying in the search engine result pages (SERPs), the title tag also affects what will be displayed in the visitor’s browser tab.
Conclusion
While it makes little sense to include your blog name within the post titles on your website, there can be numerous benefits to including them within your page’s title tag.
Plugins like Yoast SEO make this simple, so it’s worth doing for blogs of all sizes.
Finally, if you want to fast-track your blogging success, I highly recommend investing in my blogging course, which covers everything you need to know to build a successful blog through 60+ powerful video lectures.
