This is a step by step and easy to follow guide that will help you setup your own blog from the start. This guide is not to motivate someone to start blogging. It is best suited for someone who already made the decision to start a blog and need some step by step direction of the whole process.
Who Should Use This Guide?
This guide is intended for anyone who is looking for an answer to any of the following questions:
how do I setup a blog?
how to start a blog and maintain it?
Now, starting a blog is easy but in order to be able to successfully monetize the blog, you need to establish the blog. In this guide, I have also covered the topics that help you establish your blog so you can monetize it.
There is a lot of good content to go through, so it is a good idea to bookmark this page so you can come back to it later and go over the content at your own pace.
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Internet Marketing Sales Funnel 101
This is a follow up article for the how do I start a blog and make money online series that we have been publishing on this site to help users get started and create a successful blog.
The majority of successful internet businesses rely on something known as a sales funnel to achieve their overall success. The best online businesses and internet marketers are almost all heavily reliant on sales funnels as a marketing tool.
What is a sales funnel?
In order to explain what a sales funnel is we will put it in the context of the various stages of the online marketing phases a lot of successful business employ when selling products.
The concept of the sales funnel begins at the very start of a marketing phase where you are trying to capture the interest of as many visitors and prospective customers as you can via techniques such as:
- Writing quality and targeted content and articles from your blog to bring “organic” visitors to your site via search engines
- Building a list via email signups through your blog by offering free downloads or gifts
- Using a landing and other sales pages to get people to take a specified call to action – ie, signup, buy etc
- Using social networks to signup people in order to be able to broadcast your special offers or the latest blog article releases
- ….and there are many other techniques you can use to generate more traffic and interest to your website, but hopefully you get the general idea.
Now from the aggregated group of visitors you receive via the techniques listed above, there will be a smaller group who will eventually become customers.
At this stage the effectiveness of the sales funnel will really start to shine because it will be instrumental in further engaging this smaller group of people who have already demonstrated an interest in your product and a propensity to purchase from you.
You might by now be recognising the reason for the “funnel” analogy.
That is, at the very beginning of your marketing efforts you will usually start with a larger group of visitors, and then a smaller number of these will become subscribers or regular readers of your blog, and then an even smaller number of these will become customers.
In other words during each stage of the marketing process people will drop off until you have a small minority who become your customers.
In essence, the sales funnel concept involves the filtering out of disinterested prospects by focusing on and further engaging your most responsive customers because of their demonstrable willingness to purchase from you.
Hence why we use the term sales funnel, because you are starting with a broad set of marketing techniques and visitors and progressively narrowing this down as the process continues by tightening your marketing with laser-like focus to a select group of very targeted customers.
Why are sales funnels necessary for the success of your business?
Marketers who have studied consumer behavior and psychology will tell you that people who have already shown an interest in your products (ie, existing customers) will by far be the most likely group to buy from you again.
Based on this fact, by spending a lot of your energy and marketing efforts focusing on this group of people means that you will get higher conversions because you are intelligently using your time and resources for maximum returns.
Below are some important qualities of sales funnels which demonstrate why they are a powerful concept to use in your internet business.
A sales funnel will help increase your conversions
As we’ve discussed earlier, during each phase of the sales funnel, the number of people will decrease but the number of likely prospects will increase.
By its very nature, a sales funnel will filter out non-prospective buyers and help build up as many targeted prospects as possible.
This is because as the funnel begins to narrow at each stage the marketing methods performed become increasingly more targeted.
Therefore the sales funnel will create a more fertile environment with extremely targeted prospects who will have already demonstrated an interest in your products or who have purchased previously from you.
You can then spend your marketing efforts appealing to the needs and wants of these people knowing that you have a higher than normal chance of converting.
An example of a crucial sales funnel component is the landing page. This is usually way down in the most narrow portion of the funnel where you are pitching your message to very targeted visitors.
Sales funnels can be used to accurately predict the number of sales you will make
The structure of the sales funnel mechanism means that at each stage of the marketing phases you can quantify the number of prospective customers and hence use this to predict the percentage who eventually become actual customers.
Remember earlier we said that as a prospect moves through each stage in the sales funnel they will be considered a more targeted visitor and hence the marketing which is presented to people as they move down the funnel will reflect this.
As a simple example, Fred Smith has been monitoring his website traffic for at least 6 months and he receives 5000 visitors per week to his website.
Of these, Fred usually gets around 3% (ie, total of 150 people per week) who sign up for his free weekly newsletter.
Then from the 150 people weekly who sign up to his list Fred ends up converting around 1.5% who become paid members or buy one of his products.
Therefore by using his knowledge of the number of prospects at each stage Fred can accurately predict the percentages of people who will sign up to his newsletter and those eventually buy his product.
By being privy to the traffic and conversion figures of the various stages of his marketing phases, Fred can use this to identify and improve areas needing attention (discussed more below).
You can use a sales funnel to identify marketing deficiencies or obstacles
By monitoring the traffic and statistics during each of the marketing phases you will be able to observe any down or up-trends during each stage of the funnel over time.
With this knowledge you can then make more informed decisions so that you can take the best possible corrective action or spend more time concentrating on a particular strategy if needed.
For instance you may spot trends that during the year where you might see a trend where there is drop in calls-to-actions for a certain month in your email campaign and you might decide to change your campaign content or increase the frequency of emails sent for the next few months.
Building a Sales Funnel
In order to convert marketing campaign into an optimized sales funnel there are a few essential things you will need to do.
You will need to have a product or service which you can sell
Before even considering the construction your sales funnel, you will need a product or service to offer to sell to your visitors.
Items which you can sell online can range from physical products to your own digital creations such as eBooks, videos or software and also things such as membership programs or consultation services.
If you don’t think you can create your own product there is also the option of affiliate programs such Clickbank, Amazon or affiliate programs available which you can use in conjunction with blogging from your website.
Ultimately it is very important that before choosing a product to sell that you try to identify a niche which people out there are demanding and then supply this need to them.
Keyword Research
Following from the above point, keyword research is an important task for determining who your prospective customers are what they are searching for.
Keyword research allows you to identify the words and phrases people are using when they are searching for answers to their needs and desires. The best free keyword research tool to is the Google keyword tool. (If you’ve never used it just Google the words Google keyword tool)
There are other keyword tools out there some of which cost money and you should do your own research to choose the best tool for you.
Once you have discovered the phrases and words people are using for their searching, you can then apply these words to strategic areas of your website such as titles, subheading, blog content, landing pages etc.
There are many techniques in how you write your content or copy and it is advised that you read up some good books about copy writing.
The front and back end of your sales funnel
The front door of your sales funnel is the broadest part and serves the purpose of attracting a large base of prospects. This is the initial capture point where you are employing broad range of marketing techniques to attract your visitors which will then be slowly guided further down the funnel.
Offering free or cheaper priced products and bonus items is usually a good way to get the people’s feet into your sales funnel’s front door.
Eventually some of your prospects will work their way into the more narrower parts of the funnel and a proportion will even make it to the back end.
The deeper parts of your sales funnel is where your more premium items are offered to the people that have demonstrated a specific need for these products or services.
At this stage your prospects are highly targeted and most likely to buy because this small percentage of people have already bought products from you.
Very specific email campaigns and product launches are a good way to keep engaged with these people because the engagement is the key to the success of your conversions.
Fine tuning your sales funnel
As we have already seen from above, a sales funnel is really a marketing framework which represents all of the stages from your initial leads to actual sales.
Optimizing your sales funnel can appear as being quite complex but is something which you may need to do as you go along.
For instance you should seek to identify all the possible ways that people can enter your funnel so you can establish their origination point.
Once yo have done that you should list all of the possible things that visitors to your site can do once the have arrived there. For example they might be able to read blog posts, watch free video content etc.
Then you need to analyse the page statistics such as the time spent on page, most clicked links, entry and exit paths etc. (Google analytics is a great tool for this)
And finally once you have done all of the above, you will be armed with the precious knowledge to determine how your funnel actually operates in reality and then you will be able to identify and correct weak points or exploit the strengths.
In summary, even though this article has barely touched the surface of the sales funnels, it will have hopefully provided you with an introduction to get you to see the big picture of the mechanics of online sales and marketing.
The 5 Fundamentals of Email Marketing
One of the most effective vehicles for marketing a product or service from your blog, is email. Email is a fantastic medium which you can use to offer your services to your target audience or potentially get your email subscribers to do the marketing for you by forwarding your emails to their friends or other like-minded people.
This article has one section on autoresponder service. If you are not using an autoresponder service already then the what is an autoresponder and why use an autoresponder article should help you get up-to speed.
Below are 5 important things you should consider if you want to be effective with email marketing.
1. List building
Before we go on I want to define what list building means.
A list is a term that most Internet Marketers use to refer to the collection of email addresses which have been voluntarily obtained from subscribers. Therefore “list building” refers to the process of collecting email addresses from people visiting your blog.
There are a lot of products out there (some of which are quite expensive) which teach the art of list building as it applies to Internet Marketing. But in actuality, it simply boils down to getting traffic to your site and having some good content to offer your visitors.
If you’re not new to blogging or the Internet then you will be aware that getting traffic to your site can require a bit of effort and time and a discussion about the techniques of how to increase traffic to your site is out of the scope of this article.
A couple of suggestions for getting visitors to come to your site in order to build your list are:
- Use free traffic from google or social media
Free traffic is the organic traffic which usually comes from search engines such as Google. This normally requires some level of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or time and regular creation of good content.
Another effective method to get free traffic is to use guest posting as a catalyst to drive people to your site and eventually to your email list.
Social media such as Facebook, twitter, etc, is also a powerful medium to get visitors to your blog. Good content combined with social media is a great method to get “free” traffic. - Use Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic such as Adwords campaigns to build lists:
Send the people who click on your Adword ad to a landing page which has an opt-in form. Sending people to your blog homepage is not recommended because you really need to keep your message focused with a clear call to action.
The landing page should be personable and have something of value to offer to the visitor. For example you could be offering a free online email course via your landing page.
Tests done by online PPC marketing gurus such as Perry Marshall have shown that when comparing the conversion rate of traffic sent via PPC to an email “opt-in” page versus a straight out sales page with no opt-in, the opt-in method outperformed the non opt-in method by far.
Irrespective of the method you use to get people to your site, it is crucial that you have some level of free or openly shareable useful content to provide. This will whet the appetites of your readers and it will grab their attention. Then once you’ve got somebody’s attention, you can ask them: “Hey do you want more? Just give me your email address and I can send you more great material”.
2. Cookie content:
“Cookie content” is a term coined by some Internet Marketers to mean that your content is structured in a way that actually trains or guides your readers to do what you are asking them to do. (it’s sort of like training a young child or puppy).
In other words if your readers are used to getting material from you which they find useful, they will likely continue to read each of your email messages. In addition, they are also more likely to accept any offers you may give them regarding a paid product or service because they are already fans of your material.
For example you could deliver a free e-course which you drip feed to your subscribers in email installments. Alternatively if you don’t like writing then you can just as effectively deliver your content via video or audio which your readers can access via a link in your emails. Or, if you think you are not a talented writer, hire someone to write your content for you.
This method provides value but also builds trust. So when you eventually offer a paid product, you will at least not be perceived as pushing a sale onto somebody but instead your readers may very well be appreciative of the offer.
3. Autoresponders
Apart from automatically responding to an email, auto-responders are terrific at delivering follow-up messages which can be tailored to suit your needs.
For example you could program an auto-responder to deliver a series of say 10 emails in weekly installments which may be a 10 week e-course. The beauty of this is that the auto-responder will send each email in the correct order depending on when somebody joined your list.
Auto-responders also allow you to look after your subscribers even when you are away or on holiday.
You should choose an auto-responder service which is reputable and has a good relationship with the major email services and is fairly easy to use and reliable. Also always use a service that is robust and flexible and which will allow you to send at least 10 auto-responder messages.
There are several options when choosing an auto-responder but three of the best available currently are: Mailchimp, GetResponse and AWeber.
4. Give people the opportunity to do business with you when they’re ready
So when is the right time to give your subscribers the opportunity to buy something from you?
Well if you’re cool about it you can do it from the first message if you wish. For example, you might deliver some very useful free content to your subscribers via email such as an e-course, and at the very end of each lesson you could offer a paid service or product which complements what they’ve already received or provides further value. This keeps it low key and doesn’t force anything upon people.
Well if you’re cool about it you can do it from the first message if you wish. For example, you might deliver some very useful free content to your subscribers via email such as an e-course, and at the very end of each lesson you could offer a paid service or product which complements what they’ve already received or provides further value. This keeps it low key and doesn’t force anything upon people.
Another good method which helps create an even more targeted audience from your email list is to offer an early-bird opt-in for a course which you will do in the future. This means that the people who are signing up to your future course will most likely be receptive to what you have to offer them. It is also a good way to gauge whether there is enough interest to make it worth your while spending time on the new course.
5. A good launch strategy
The email is the traditional campaign launch tool. There’s something about the immediacy of the inbox which makes a launch of a product or service or any campaign so much more effective than other methods.
To make your launch effective, you ideally want to create a compressed series or sequence of email messages which begins to educate your subscribers about why it is they want what you have to offer them.
For instance you could highlight the benefits of the service you’re offering in the lead up or give them case studies etc. This helps make people more receptive to your product.
You can also use the sense of urgency to whip up interest and action, eg, “act now because we have only 50 spots”, OR, “we’re closing this offer next week after which the price will go back up to $129”.
I hope the above has at least given you some food for thought regarding email marketing.
Developing an Article Marketing Strategy for Your Online Business
Developing an unbeatable article marketing strategy is one of the proven methods to increase traffic to your webiste. In this article I will review just a few article marketing strategies and tips which should help you achieve good outcome in less time.
Generally, bringing the proper article marketing strategy into a business is, for most people, a BIG struggle. Many don’t know how to do it or where to start. Let’s review the first strategy, which is very powerful if used accordingly and professionally. It doesn’t matter what your purpose of article marketing is; however, you must have a clear strategy that ultimately leads to results. It doesn’t matter if you are just aiming to get leads, present your business opportunity, sell a product, write reviews for products or are trying to get more visitors to your website, you first need a strategy.
You want to plan a series of articles for ezine, hubpages, squidoo or blogs in your niche. Theoretically, you can submit articles to all the sites during a series. Plan at least 30 – 60 days for a series where you will be creating 25 – 50 articles. You can write 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or whatever your goal is each day. Target keywords that are bringing you visitors from Google. Use Google’s free keyword tool to find appropriate and valuable keywords for your niche and topic. Pay close attention to your keyword selection; it is the most important factor when it comes to driving traffic to your website. Your writing skills and grammar can be excellent, but if you lack keyword research you won’t drive any visitors to your website through search engines. Make your own weekly and monthly plan for the subjects and to which sites you submit the articles. This way you can review your work and it will hold you accountable.
Second, you can write one article and submit it to many different article directories. In fact, this article marketing strategy is the key for SEO purposes and getting backlinks from sites. This technique is mostly used by marketers who are aiming to rank their main page, category page, or a post/page of a blog or website. You basically write one article and submit the same article to 10 + article directories. This is one of the most effective article marketing tips to help you gain backlinks fast. Just imagine, if you write two articles per day, submit them to 15 + directories, you will get 60 backlinks! Of course, you will probably get less than 60, because not all directories will accept your articles. But if you just get 2 – 3 links into the article body or the author resource box, you will build a lot of backlinks over time. These links are extremely valuable.
Third, you need to define your niche and passion. Because we are talking about an article marketing strategy which will continue for some weeks if not months or years, you need to be involved in a topic that you love. You want to write freely, openly, and provide value at all times. This is only possible by being present with what you write and HOW you write it.
Your favorite niche might be sports, fishing, or software development. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you have to define your niche. It is a good idea to spend some quality time doing research for your niche before you even start writing any articles. Once that is done and you are 100 % certain about the niche you want to commit yourself to, then it is time to start the content creation process.
If you are new to writing, you might find it difficult to write outside the box at first. Once you have acquired some practice with content creation, the words will flow naturally and you will find it easy to write a 500 word article for example. That’s why you need to choose a topic that you are motivated to write about, so that you find it easier to continue. Don’t write about dogs if you are passionate about horses. Make your decision based on your strengths, tendencies, wishes, desires, and goals.
The only way to be successful with any article marketing strategy is through constant application of new knowledge and development. So subscribe to blogs that publish good content on this topic and keep yourself up to date.
When you start your article marketing campaign try to keep the activity going. Stay focused and complete the task. If you should lack time for writing content yourself, you can try outsourcing some of your work by using an experienced article writing service. On the other hand, If you are a very good writer yourself and you enjoy writing then start your own article writing business and make some money on the side. If you are new to blogging then checkout the how do I start a blog and make money article series 
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