Video: Brad demonstrates how to add an image to a WordPress blog post.
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Essentials of installing WordPress manually
Video: How to install WordPress manually if you don’t have cpanel
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The Fundamentals of List Building
To win big, you have to start out small, as Demosthenes suggests. Small opportunities will often lead you to great successes. The process of creating a list leads to the potential for greater success and wealth, regardless of the business you are in. In this section we’ll talk about some simple tools you can use to build your list. Let’s look at each method independently.
Sometimes it is best to rely on simple tools and small opportunities when you are just starting out in the industry. You will have much time to grow your business and expand your customer base if you follow the simple steps outlined in this guide. So let’s begin first by talking about subscriber leads.
Subscriber Leads
One easy way to build your list is by collecting subscriber leads. This is one of the best ways to expand your business. There are many ways to acquire leads, but the best way to collect leads is to gather them automatically, through email or by your website through various forms. In the next few sections of this book, we will go into greater detail about the ways you can grow your subscriber list and maintain your list over time.
You will find as you run your business that your subscriber leads prove vital to your businesses success and ability to grow and expand over time.
Opt-In Leads
Like subscriber leads, opt-in leads are a good tool for building your business. Opt-in leads are leads you get when you invite someone to enter their information into your database. When they do this, they are granting you permission to contact them in the future about new products or updates to your site.
For example, when you create your website, you can set it up so each person that visits has the choice to sign up for a newsletter or some other type of routine e-mailing. By signing up, visitors are “opting in” to your list. Setting your site up this way allows you to gain visitor’s email addresses. While you can never force someone to do what you want them to, this approach often works if you encourage people to sign up by describing all the benefits your site offers. You can then reap the benefits of gaining important subscriber leads.
Survey Leads
Another way to produce automatic subscriber leads is by conducting surveys on your website. This is a simple way to increase the number of subscribers to your list. You can place survey ads on your website so they pop up when a customer checks out.
How do you get someone to fill out a survey? It is not as hard as you think. For starters, some people enjoy filling out surveys. For those that don’t you can employ some simple tactics to encourage them to offer their information to you. For example, tell your customers what benefits they will reap from filling out your survey. Don’t assume your customer’s know what benefits they will gain by filling out a survey. You have to tell them. Maybe they will gain access to your website, which contains thousands of free articles on the topic they are researching. Maybe you will enter them into a contest to win a free gift. Giveaways are a great way to encourage people to sign up for just about anything.
It’s funny how quickly people are willing to give up their personal information, including their name, address and email for a gift. We’ll talk more about gifts later in this guide.
Make sure you offer them an irresistible reason to fill out your survey. Tell customers how they will profit by signing up. This is a very easy and successful tool marketers use to produce new leads. Most times visitors are willing to offer their email address for a survey.
Let’s talk now about the next simple tool you can use to build your subscriber list.
Affiliating
One way you can collect leads for your subscriber list is by affiliating. Affiliating means joining in or offering an affiliate program. When you take part in an affiliate program you immediately realize the benefits of getting leads that an affiliate will create and then forward to you.
For this process to work you need an opt-in program and an auto responder programmer. We will devote an entire section to auto responders later in this guide. Using these programs you can gather information and instantly send out confirmation emails to new subscribers on your list. Don’t worry about having people fill in their address fields or phone number. Most people are hesitant to provide this information, but very willing to provide their email address. There is much less pressure involved when you are collecting email addresses instead of personal information.
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Make Your Site Cool Using Web Page Keywords
Finding the right web page keywords so your website will show up on the first page of Google, and other search engines, is the main goal for internet marketers. The good news is that it really is not that hard to do, with a little patience and a little practice you can optimize your web pages and benefit from free traffic too.
It is really quite simple, if you do it the right way and you get that coveted first page ranking for your website, you will get a lot of traffic, quality targeted traffic, for free.
These are called organic searches. Someone will go to their web browser and type in a search term. Let’s say someone is looking for golf balls. If they search for that term and if you’ve optimized your web pages with those keywords your website can show up very high in the search results.
This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it is a great way to get a ton of very targeted traffic which is completely free.
By ranking so high it also gives your site a lot more credibility. The average internet web surfer does not really know that much about how it all works. For that reason, many people assume that the websites listed on the top of the results pages are the best.
And in a way they are, they are the best at optimizing their web pages so they can cash in on all that organic traffic.
So, how do you benefit from using these keywords to land on the first page of the search engines? Well, the first thing you have to do is compile a list of keywords. If you really want to benefit from a top ranking you need to target the keywords you use very carefully.
It’s easy to think that you should grab all the most searched for keywords in your niche, but that very rarely works because those keywords are just too competitive.
A much better, and more efficient, strategy is to find keywords that are made up of 3 – 4 words. These long tailed keywords won’t get the huge hundreds of thousands of searches, but they will get plenty of searches a month and they won’t be so competitive that you can’t rank for them anyway.
If you choose a dozen, or more, of these long tailed keywords and each one gets say around 1,500 searches a month, you stand a very good chance of ranking for several of them, not just one.
That will provide you with plenty of traffic and since the traffic you are getting is from people who are searching for the exact keyword (and item) that you have to sell, you will get a lot of sales.
It’s just not that hard to optimize your web pages for search engines. The better you get at adding the best
web page keywords, the more organic search results you will get. That is free traffic and you will make more sales and have a much higher rate of return on your investment of time. Other than time, it’s totally free.
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Securing Your Child’s Blogging Activities
I have strongly urged parents to allow their children to blog. I believe it can help develop their technological, social and writing skills. In a world that is becoming smaller everyday due to technology like the internet, it is important our children have a strong basis in it. That said, you have to be careful because blogging by children can be dangerous. Follow these four tips and you will make blogging a safe and fun activity for your children.
Make Rules: You need to sit down with your child and set up some rules. Whatever rules you decide on you should explain them clearly to your child and explain why they are important. Set some consequences as well, let them know what will happen if they break any of the rules. You don’t want to be lackadaisical when it comes to online rules. Stay firm and your children will understand.
Strong Passwords: Make sure that your children’s accounts are all protected by good passwords. “12345” is not a good password. You should use number, letters and symbols. It might be impossible for them to remember, but if it means you have to log on for them – even better.
Screen The Content: Encourage your child to create their blog posts on the computer before they go live. This way you can check them out and ensure they don’t give away any sensitive information, or have any objectionable content. Another bonus with this method is you can help your child get used to word processing software. You can also teach them about grammar and spelling with this method.
Monitor Blog: Check your child’s blog everyday and make sure they haven’t snuck any objectionable content on to it. Also make sure no one has been leaving weird comments. Even some spam comments can have dangerous links so make sure you have access to delete these. Install Akismet if you use WordPress and most of them should be caught. Also check out any links your child puts up, who knows where they could be linking to.
If you follow these four tips you will ensure that your child’s blog will be a great learning experience and not a potential danger. Commit to strong passwords, screening and monitoring and your child can benefit from blog ownership!
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Essentials of Making Your Blog Successful
Video: Brad discusses what a successful blog looks like. He shows the traffic numbers and how it is monetized.
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Things to Bear In Mind In Using Email Promotion
If you are trying to build a business online, then it’s a safe assumption that you would like that business to make you money. After all, anything else is just a hobby. The good news is that there are many ways to earn money online, and there are also many ways to advertise your business. One of the most popular methods is email promotion internet marketing. It’s inexpensive, and even more importantly, it’s effective. Here are some things to keep in mind.
1. Building a list is the key to success. If you have spent any amount of time looking into email promotion internet marketing, then you have probably heard people say, “the money is in the list.” The reason so many people say it is because it’s true. In fact, it’s so important that everything that follows revolves around this tip.
2. Opt in once, market forever. Sending traffic to your website takes a lot of resources. It’s necessary, but email marketing simplifies things. Here’s how: once people are at your site, you encourage them to share their email address with you. Then it doesn’t matter if they ever come back to your site or not. Instead, you can then market to them whenever the need arises.
3. Always provide value. One of the most common questions about email promotion internet marketing is how often to send sales messages, and how often to send informational messages. There is a myth that you shouldn’t send too many sales messages, but that’s not true. As long as you are providing value with what you are selling, then you are good to go.
4. Spend time crafting compelling subject lines. The subject is what the people will see in their email inbox. If they don’t like it, if it doesn’t make them want to see what’s inside, then they will simply delete it…without ever opening it. And that means no sales. However, if you can at least get them to open your email, then you’ll get a chance to present your message to them.
5. Don’t be tricky. Yes, there are some subject lines that will give you a much higher open rate, but you should never use them to trick people into opening the message. If you do, they will open your email, but once they realize that you have tricked them (read: lied to them), they will unsubscribe. A simple way to put it is to always make sure that the body of the email message delivers on any promises you make in the subject line.
These are only a few tips to help you with your email promotion internet marketing efforts. There are plenty of other things you can do, but these are a good start. The worst thing you can do is wait to build an email list. With all of the things it has going for it, every minute you wait is another minute you will be leaving money on the table.
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Create Screen Videos As An Affiliate Marketer
Since there are already lots of people getting into affiliate marketing, it is no wonder that the competition is getting stiff. The challenge is to try and outdo other affiliates and think of ways to be able to attain this.
There are also many tips and techniques being taught to these affiliate in order to best plan their strategy for their program to work effectively so that more earnings will be achieved.
What better way to wow your prospects and customers than to record and publish top notch, full motion and streaming screen-captured videos. Nothing like feeling your hard work getting paid by having your customers jumping up excitedly in great anticipation to buy your product right there and then.
This is Camtasia in action. It is a proven fact; giving your customers something they can actually see can explode your online sales instantly.
You do not need to have trainings and education to be able to know how this system can work for your affiliate program. Anyone can create stunning videos, from multimedia tutorials and step-by-step presentations available online. The process is like having your customers seated next to you and looking at your desktop, as you show them the things they need to see and hear. All this done step by step.
For those who does not know it yet, how does Camtasia works?
1. It can record your desktop activity in a single click. No need to have to save and compile all your files because it is recorded right there and then.
2. Can easily convert your videos into web pages. Once converted you can have your customers visiting that certain page. Videos are easier to understand and take in unlike reading texts which oftentimes is a trying thing to do.
3. Upload your pages. Publish them through blogs, RSS feed and podcasts. You may want your Camtasis videos to get around and reach out to other people that may be potential customers in the future. Nothing like being visible in many sites and pages to advertise yourself and get your message through.
There are other things you can do with your affiliate program using Camtasia. You can…
Create stunning multimedia presentations that are proven to increase sales because all the senses are engaged. This also has the tendency to reduce skepticism among hard-to-please customers.
Reduce refunds and other customer issues by demonstrating visually how to use your product and how to do it properly. Complaints will also be minimized because all the facts and the presentation are there for the customers to just see and hear about.
Promote affiliate products and services using visual presentations. This is an effective way of redirecting your viewers straight to your affiliate website after they are finished with the video. Make the most of the presentation by putting your site location in the end and make them go there directly if they want more information.
Multiple your online auction bids exponentially when you give your readers a feel of what you have to offer. Based from reports, auctions that includes pictures increases bidding percentage by 400%. Imagine how much higher it will be if it were videos.
Publish valuable infoproducts that you can sell for a much higher price. It will be all worth the price because of the full colored graphics menu and templates that you will be using.
Minimize miscommunication with your customers. Instantly showing them what you want they wanted in the first place is making them understand clearly the essence of your affiliate program. The good thing about multimedia is, nothing much can go wrong. It is there already.
These are just some of the things you can do with Camtasia that can be very helpful in your chosen affiliate program.
Note that the main purpose of using Camtasia is to boost the income that is generated from your affiliate program. Although it can be used for entertainment and enjoyment purposes, which is not really a valid reason why you choose to get all through that trouble.
Try to focus on the goal that you have set upon yourself to and achieve that with the use of the things that may be quite a lot of help in increasing your earnings.
