Which would you rather do – spend two hours thinking of a great blog post idea, researching that idea, writing the post and finally editing the post… or dashing off a video post in less than half the time?
Heck, let’s be honest: If you’ve got a good idea and the ideas are flowing, you can dash off a video post in the same time it takes to make the recording. Post it to your blog, and you’re done.
No wonder why so many bloggers are turning to video.
Problem is, video is not the holy grail of blogging. In fact, if taken too far it can actually lead to the downfall of your blog (notice the crickets chirping, the tumbleweeds, err, tumbling, etc.)
Here are five tips for using video on your blog without totally alienating your readers or camouflaging yourself from the search engines. Or more specifically, five reasons NOT to use video exclusively.
Video is no substitute for the written word (sorry!) Users don’t just want video. Visitors want a clear idea of what they’re about to see before they hit that play button. Not to mention the fact that many of your viewers aren’t at their computer, they’re mobile users who may or may not have a speedy connection. If they can at least read your story and then decide if your video is worth downloading, you have a better shot at capturing and holding their attention.
Obvious solution? Incorporate video and writing into your blogpost, not just video.
The search engines don’t know what you’re talking about. The day has not yet arrived that search engines can figure out the words spoken in your video. Thus, if you have video only, or video and poor content from an SEO stand point, then you might as well have donned a cloak of invisibility as far as the search engines are concerned.
Instead, you want to couple good writing that incorporates your SEO terms with your video. The two paired together make a smashing team and work hand-in-hand to make your blog post even better.
Lousy videos are, well, lousy. Okay, if you’re breaking a story in front of a burning building, you’re going to use your cell phone to take the video because that’s what you happened to have handy at the time. But if you’re in your office doing “how-to” kinds of videos, PLEASE invest in an inexpensive HD camcorder. Please. Your viewers will thank you.
Also, ad-libbing is something few people can get by with. Before you begin recording, make an outline of all your major points and post it right next to the camera so you don’t get lost and you don’t forget anything. Notice I said outline – writing it out word for word and then READING it is a big (HUGE!) no-no and will make your audience fall asleep faster than two blinks of the eye.
Please be aware of camera positioning. I recently saw a video on a major marketing website that was positioned on a coffee table and afforded a perfect crotch shot for the entire duration. Ewww.
One last thing – forget the umms, errrs, and ahhhs. If you need to pause for a second to think of a word, then just PAUSE. You do not need to fill in every second with sound, especially when that sound (um er ah) makes you sound like a bonafide rank amateur.
Hiding your content underneath your videos is not cool. Look, you want people to spend as much time as possible on your page, right? Then begin your post with written content and place your video within the content – not ahead of it. Your headline and lead-in should capture their attention enough to get them reading, and within the first 2-4 paragraphs you can reference the video. If they’re engaged, odds are they’ll read the rest of your post and then watch the video.
On the other hand, if the video appears first, then they will either watch the video and leave (they’ve seen the video, why read your content?) Or they’ll just leave because they don’t want to watch a video without first having a clue why they should bother.
Don’t over use video – think of video as an hors d’oeuvre or side dish, not the main course. Videos should be short – under 2 minutes whenever possible, and certainly under 5 minutes unless your content is drop-dead riveting.
Bottom line: Video is an excellent supplement to your blog, but it shouldn’t be the only thing on there. Provide plenty of SEO friendly content that grabs readers’ attention and you’ll keep visitors on your website longer and visiting more frequently, as well.
There are only 5 ways to increase the money you’re earning in your online business. Every method you might think of falls into one of these five categories. And at least one of these methods can put more money in your pocket within the next week – can you guess which one(s)?
Get more traffic to your offer
Increase the profit you’re making on each sale
Sell more stuff to your current customers
Cut your expenses
Make more sales
If you do all five, obviously you’ll see more money. But some of these take more effort than others, so let’s review them one by one:
Get more traffic to your offer
This is much easier said than done. You can tweak your SEO to rank higher, you can solicit joint ventures and recruit affiliates, you can hit social media and even buy traffic. While all of these can be good, none of them tend to be quick or easy.
Increase the profit you’re making on each sale
You might do this by increasing the price of your products. Then again, increasing your prices might decrease your sales, so study the market before you do this.
If you’re providing a service rather than a product, it’s entirely possible you might earn more by charging more, since you can focus on gathering a few big (ie: well paying) clients rather than servicing a lot of low paying clients.
Sell more stuff to your current customers
This can be a really simple thing to do and it’s one of two that I recommend you work on this week. If you don’t have a one time offer, get one. Even if it’s not your product. Buy resale rights or strike a deal with another product owner.
Next, place links to offers on your download page and inside your products. Your download page is the first thing a customer sees after making a purchase, meaning they are still in a buying frame of mind and this is the perfect time to offer them something different but related. And the inside of your products is a great place to make recommendations for appropriate products and services.
Cut your expenses
Unless you have significant expenses to begin with, this won’t give you much return on your time. For example, if you switch hosting to a company that’s $3 cheaper a month, how much are you really saving? You’ll have to switch everything over, and if you’re happy with the service you have now you’re potentially switching to a less reliable service. Use caution with this one.
Make more sales
This might be the easiest of all, as well as the fastest to employ. You’re going to tweak your sales copy and even your sales process to increase your conversion rate. Think about this: You don’t have to drive any more traffic or even offer any more products to make more money with this. You simply need to increase the number of people who say yes.
Let’s say that right now your product sells for $47, it’s converting at 3%, and you’re getting 3,000 unique visitors to your sales page each month. If you increase your conversion rate by just 1%, you’ll make another $1,410 per month.
Best of all, you only need to tweak and test and improve once to reap these added sales for as long as you’ve got traffic going to that sales page.
Just a side note: What you’re about to discover here can also be used to help others squeeze more profits out of their online businesses, as well. In fact, you could build an entire business out of making other people’s businesses more profit using these simple methods.
Before you create new products and new profit streams, it makes good sense to maximize the earnings in your existing business.
To show you how this might be done, I’m going to use a membership site as an example. I love memberships because of the continuity of payments you receive. After all, why get paid just once on a sale if you can get paid every month for several months or longer, right?
Let’s say you (or your client) have a membership site. Naturally, the first thing you want to look at is increasing your conversions. First, you work on increasing conversions on your squeeze page, to get as many new (free) subscribers as possible. The more subscribers / prospects you have, the more of these you can turn into PAID subscribers.
Next, you’ll want to work on increasing conversions on your immediate upsell to the paid membership. And then you’ll want to work on increasing conversions with your autoresponder sequence as you follow up with prospects who haven’t yet subscribed to the paid membership.
Odds are you already know all about this. In fact, you’ve probably read numerous articles that tell you the exact same thing. The problem is, this is the point where those articles STOP, and also the point we will jump off from.
Now that you’ve maximized conversions on your funnel, what else can you do to increase revenue?
In fact, what can you do to DOUBLE the revenue you receive from paid subscriptions?
You can choose from several methods, ALL of which I highly recommend you implement.
First, offer your current paid subscribers a yearly payment option.
For example, if your membership is $25 per month, you might offer an annual membership for $175. This is a great deal, since it saves your subscribers $125.
“But won’t I be LOSING money if I do this?”
GREAT question. Your first step in deciding how much an annual membership costs is to find out how long your average subscribers stay with you.
In this example, if the average subscriber keeps their paid subscription for 5 months (5 x $25 = $125) then you are making an extra $50. If your average subscriber stays for 3 months, then you are making an extra $100.
You’ve got to know how many months your subscribers stay with you, multiply that number times the monthly subscription rate, and then charge an annual fee higher than that number, but lower than 12 times the monthly rate.
Confusing? It’s simple math, so just read the previous paragraph again and you’ll catch on.
Another example:
You charge $40 per month for your membership. Your average subscriber stays with you for 6 months (that’s really good at this price point, btw.) That’s $240 that you are currently making on the average subscriber.
You offer an annual membership for $320, which is $160 off of the normal rate. Your subscribers save $160, and you make an additional $80.
Your numbers will vary, but you get the idea. Adding this option can potentially bring in a very nice chunk of money very quickly.
You might want to offer the annual rate for one week only, so that subscribers don’t procrastinate.
And be sure to give new subscribers this option, too. New subscribers are generally the most excited, and thus the easiest to convert to an annual membership.
Second, you’ve got some prime real estate on your members page that’s most likely not being used right now.
Choose some hot affiliate offers your members are bound to like and add those to your member page.
You can do it in the form of banners or ‘personal recommendations.’ Switch these out every so often. This isn’t likely going to be a huge source of revenue but guaranteed, you will get some sales from this page.
An alternative is selling paid advertising on your members page. Basically, you are doing the same as before, except the banners or ads go to someone else’s offer instead of your affiliate links. You’ll find that fellow marketers would LOVE to offer something free to your members in exchange for their email address, and they will pay you nicely for the chance to get their offer on your member’s page for a month or two, or longer.
Third, create an entirely new page in your member’s area, and call it “Member Benefits.” Be sure to use that exact name – we’ve tested other names like Member’s Discounts and so forth, and “Member Benefits” out-pulled everything else we tested.
On this page, you’re going to place discount offers that you’ve negotiated with other marketers.
These might be discounts on products, free courses and books, free consultations, free coaching sessions and so forth.
Everything on this page benefits you. The courses and products with discounts earn you affiliate commissions. The free items cookie you in for commissions on anything purchased in the future, and so forth.
And again, you can place paid advertising on this page if you want to.
You might think this sounds like a lot of promotion, but we’ve found that almost no one complains. After all, what member is going to complain that you’ve found them a discount or something valuable for free? Occasionally someone will quip about banners, but it’s rare and nothing to worry about, as long as you don’t go crazy overboard with advertising.
Best of all, if you implement all three methods above, you’ll see a big cash boost from day one.
Your results will vary. And what if you don’t have a membership site? You do have a download page, correct? You can place ads for products there.
You can also bundle products and offer a discount. If you create products on a very regular basis, you can sell ‘memberships’ to all of your forthcoming products for a certain period of time.
And you can create a ‘Subscriber Benefits’ for your email subscribers. Add to the page every week, and also send out a weekly reminder email, letting them know there are new goodies to go collect – goodies that are available for a short time only.
That last paragraph may have slipped by your attention almost undetected, so I’m going to recommend you read it again. Go ahead…
I hear from so many marketers that they have trouble monetizing their lists. But if they would simply create a ‘Subscriber Benefits’ page and keep it filled with interesting things that result in commissions and send their readers there each week to collect those benefits, they could earn a six-figure income from this one technique alone.
Bottom line: Take a good look at your current products, funnels and business. Get creative and find ways to squeeze more money out of what you’re already doing, and it’s entirely possible to double your income without creating any new products or businesses. Until you do, you’re probably leaving thousands of dollars on the table that could be yours.
How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story And Generate Tons of Media Coverage
There’s a book out with the above title, and I highly recommend you grab a copy. It’s only available as a digital download and it’s less than 6 bucks at Amazon. I’ll try to summarize here in my own words, but this is no substitute for getting the book, reading it and above all using it to generate free publicity for you and your business.
News breaks every second of every day, providing you with literally endless opportunities to get your business free publicity. And I don’t have to tell you that publicity is worth far, far more than advertising, and yet it costs you NOTHING.
If you’re in the U.S., does the Donald Trump presidential campaign ring any bells for you?
Look at it from a reporter’s point of view – they already have the who, what, when and where – what they need is the “why,” and that’s where you come in. Journalists need original content, and they need it fast. And if you play your cards right, you can be as high as the second paragraph of that breaking news story. Just think of what that can mean in terms of free exposure!
What is essential is SPEED. You’ve got to hit when the story is hot to have a shot at getting the publicity. Wait even a day and it may be too late.
Always use your good judgment. Your business is NOT a great fit for the majority of news stories, so be careful and only go with those that you can honestly, truly relate to your business.
Now then, how do you find news to “jack?” Keep your eyes and ears open, because you never know when the perfect story is going to slap you across the face. Monitor keywords, phrases and trending word clouds. Track journalists in your field and monitor media outlets. And perhaps the best tip of all – follow Twitter hashtags, since this will often be the very first reporting of any story.
When you hear of a story that’s a good fit for your business, immediately formulate your strategy. This is happening in real time and so you’ve got to act in real time, as in NOW and not tomorrow. Speed is crucial to your success in hijacking the news.
Ask yourself – how are you and / or your business related to the breaking news? What’s your angle or hook? Why should the media care?
When you’ve got your take on what’s happening – or your angle or hook – here are possible moves you can make next:
Blog about your take on the news
Tweet it using an established hashtag (this is not the time to start a new hashtag)
Send a real-time media alert (press release)
Talk about it in a speech, or make a video and post it online
Hold a live or a virtual news conference
Directly contact individual journalists who might be interested
Now if you’re thinking this article is just the tip of what you need to know, you’re right. It’s enough to get you started, but by all means grab the book so you can fill in the blanks.
And think about this: Linking yourself to one news story can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of free publicity, creating a boon for your business and perhaps even making you a mini-celebrity in the process.
The data is in – if you want people to pay attention to you online, you need to do the following two things:
Be your original self. Don’t be ordinary, be unusual. Be different.
Don’t talk about yourself much.
Here’s what we know: Tweets with uncommon words and phrasing get retweeted 4 to 5 times as much as common tweets. This means if you sound like everyone else and use the same words as everyone else, your message will get lost in the crowd of clones. The more original your style, the more likely people are to pay attention to your content and forward it. (And also remember your content, but we don’t have data on that.)
And it makes good sense. After all, if you’re saying the same things everyone else is saying, why would anyone retweet your stuff?
Now then, if you want more followers on Twitter, don’t talk about yourself so much. There’s a direct correlation to referencing yourself less and having higher follower counts. Not to mention the fact that your tweets are twice as likely to be retweeted if they’re not talking about you.
Bottom line? Be yourself, just don’t talk about yourself.
Believe it or not, in online marketing the pros (and we’re defining “pro” as six figures of annual income) use PLR all the time. They just don’t advertise it. (Would you?)
Private Label Rights (PLR) is content you can use as you own. You can use it just as it is or modify it. And you get to claim authorship – hence, the name ‘private’ label rights.
You’re already familiar with the “bad,” and that refers to the quality of some PLR. Obviously, it pays to buy well researched, well written PLR products. If you have to completely re-write the content, then you might as well have created it from scratch.
The good news is, most PLR these days is a higher quality than what we saw in the past. We can thank low sales of lousy PLR for this. Makers of PLR want to make sales, and they realize that the junk just wasn’t selling well – or worse yet, it sold well and then refunded like crazy.
Which brings up a good point – always check to see if there is a guarantee on PLR before you buy it. If the quality turns out to be lousy, you should be able to get a refund.
If there is no guarantee, then ask to see a sample before you purchase. If it’s good quality, they won’t mind showing you a few pages.
Now then, you already know you can repurpose PLR most any way you want (check your license) but what are some specific ideas for using PLR to grow your business and make money without a lot of hassle?
1: Create a PLR Folder
Designate a special place, such as a folder or even an external drive, to hold all of your PLR. This way, when you need content in a hurry, you know exactly where to find it. This tip alone has saved me countless times and kept me from wasting my PLR.
Before I had a PLR folder, I would buy PLR, forget about it for a few days or weeks, and then when I wanted to use it, I would spend time hunting for it. Or I would completely forget about it until months later, when I would run across it and wonder what it was.
It also eliminates confusion and a possible lawsuit. Let’s say you buy PLR and you buy products to use yourself. If you get confused and accidently use a product as your own – thinking it’s PLR when it’s not – you could get a very nasty cease and desist letter or possibly even a lawsuit.
Bottom line: Keep ALL of your PLR in its own folder or drive.
2: Take Inventory, Sort and Use
When you get a PLR package, take stock of what’s inside. Decide how you will use each package or each piece inside a package.
You are basically sorting your PLR into the following groups:
A: Premium – this is the PLR you’re going to sell. For example, you might sell an ebook as an initial offer, and the audio version as an upsell.
B: Lead Generation – as the name implies, this is content you use to generate leads.
For example, you have an article on traffic generation on your blog. Alongside that article, you place an offer for a free ebook on your best traffic generation tips in exchange for their email address. This lead magnet / freebie / free report is actually created from PLR, saving you time.
Imagine if you make a custom lead magnet for each blog post or article you place on your site. If they’re made from PLR, it won’t take you much time.
What’s the benefit to having all these different offers? Higher conversion rates.
If you offer every visitor the exact same lead magnet for joining your list, only those interested in that one particular topic will join your list. But if you offer a wide variety of lead magnets – each one tailored to the blogpost the visitor is reading – your email sign-up rate will improve dramatically.
You’re no longer offering “one size fits all.” Instead, you’re custom tailoring your lead magnets to your readers, based on their interest.
Obviously, if you did all of this by hand, it would take a great deal of time. But if you make your lead magnets from PLR, it won’t take much time at all and you’ll grow your email list that much faster.
C: Web Content – To get your name out there, you need to publish daily to Facebook, Instagram, your blog, Youtube and so forth. This is a lot of content to create.
But if you can use PLR for at least some of it, you’ll save a great deal of time and effort.
D: Bonuses – If you’re selling products – your own products or affiliate products – you might use PLR to create bonuses to make more sales.
And if you’re a coach, you might offer products made from PLR as bonuses or auxiliary material to your coaching services.
3: Add Pictures
This is so easy, yet most marketers never think to do it. Let’s say you purchase a license to a 5,000 word ebook. It might be about 25-30 pages long, give or take.
Let’s say you add one to two pictures per page – you’ve likely doubled the size of your book.
But more than that, you’ve made it into a much more entertaining read. Assuming you chose your pictures carefully to go with the accompanying text, readers are now much more likely to read the entire book. The pictures help to move them from one page to the next… plus each page has far less text, making it an easier read.
Yes, I know it’s the same amount of words, but breaking the content up with great pictures or graphics really does make it more interesting and fun for the consumer.
Why is this important? You want your prospects and customers to CONSUME your information. When they actually USE it, three things happen:
They remember you, making it much more likely they will buy again in the future.
They learn from the information, enabling them to put what they’ve learned to use and make a difference in their lives. This makes it (again) more likely they will continue to be your customer in the future.
They are less likely to refund. Because they are enjoying your content MORE and actually USING it and hopefully benefiting from it, they are less likely to ask for a refund.
And you get all of these benefits simply from adding some well-chosen pictures.
4: Record the Information
If you’ve purchased rights to written content, consider making an audio recording of the content. This way you can offer the audio version as a product upsell.
Some people like to read, but others like to listen to things as they drive to and from work, exercise and so forth. By offering an audio version, you’re making your customers happy and making more money, too.
You can record this audio version yourself or hire someone to make the recording for you. Of course, if your PLR comes with an audio version already, it is perfectly fine to offer that version as your upsell.
Some marketers think they have to rerecord it in their own voice, but that’s not true. Your customers generally won’t care that it’s not you doing the recording.
If you’re worried about it, tell them that a friend recorded for you, or that you hired a professional to do the audio.
5: Blog Posting with Far Less Work
Use PLR to add new posts to your blog. Ideally, you’d write your own posts. But if you don’t have the time, it’s far better to use PLR than to have a blog that looks dead.
Here’s a tip for using PLR in your blogs: Add your own introduction to each blog post, to make it more your own. While it might have taken you 1 to 3 hours to research and write a blogpost from scratch, simply writing your own introduction will likely take just a few minutes.
At a loss for what to write in your intro? Simply tell your own personal (and related) story that introduces the post. Everyone loves a good story, and people are much more likely to read your post if it begins with an engaging tale.
Also, you can schedule your blog posts ahead of time, scheduling them to appear each day or each week. In fact, your virtual assistant can do this for you.
6: Add Modules Within Larger Training Courses
Are you building higher ticket courses, live events and so forth? Or do you do coaching? You might want to use PLR to build certain chapters, modules or aspects of your course.
For example, if you have 10 modules to your course, some of those modules might be done with PLR.
A friend of mine is creating a course as I write this. One of his modules is on how to use AdWords, but he’s not an AdWords expert. So, what he did was search for the best and most up to date PLR course available that covered AdWords, and he bought the rights to give it to his students.
And he didn’t even pass it off as his own. Instead, he’s telling his students that he’s not an expert, which is why he bought the rights for them to be able to have the course.
I think his students are going to love this, since it’s a much more thorough training than he could give on the topic.
7: Creating and Updating Membership Sites
Would you like to make a sale once and get paid over and over again?
Start a membership site, and then keep your members happy with plenty of valuable, usable content.
The problem with this model, of course, is the continual need for more content.
But if you’re using high quality PLR, the problem practically takes care of itself.
You can even schedule content ahead of time and let it drip feed on a daily or weekly basis.
8: Establish Trust with Easy Videos
You’ve heard that people do business with people they know, like and trust. But how do you establish trust with your subscribers?
One way is to create short, simple videos they can watch online. Take a PLR article that contains some great info – for example, “3 easy ways to do ___”
Extract some bullet points or phrases from the article and make them into a slide deck.
Make a video reading the article and showing the appropriate slides as you go through.
For example, your slides might be:
Title
Tip #1
Tip #2
Tip #3
Conclusion
When you’re introducing the article, you show the “title” slide. When you’re talking about the first tip, you show that slide and so forth.
Once you’ve done this, create a short introductory type of video using your smartphone for “personal branding.” Simply introduce what the video is about and the benefit the viewer gets from watching. Add this intro to the beginning of your video.
Why go to the trouble of doing all this? Because then people get to SEE you. They get to HEAR you. And you’re delivering great content – content they can USE to get a RESULT.
If you do this correctly, they’re thinking… “If this is what s/he gives away for FREE, what’s in their paid products? They must be fantastic!”
They’re also getting to know you, at least a little bit. And you become memorable to them.
Imagine 10 different marketers are vying for the attention of the same customers through email.
ONE of those 10 marketers shows up in videos a couple of times a week with really helpful information. The subscribers get to see and hear this person.
The other 9 just send emails.
Who becomes the memorable, trusted authority? The one making and sharing the videos, of course.
And whose emails get opened and read the most often? Again, the one who’s making the videos.
You can publish these videos on your blog, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and so forth. People are going to associate your name and face with this great information, yet it only took you a few minutes to do this, thanks to using PLR.
This builds trust with prospects, regardless of whether you are selling products or services. For example, imagine if you’re selling coaching. Maybe this coaching costs $200 a month, or maybe it costs $2,000 a month. In either case you need to establish trust before you can make the sale.
So, here’s Mary, and Mary doesn’t know you at all. When you try to sell her on your $2,000 coaching, do you think Mary will jump at the chance to give you her money? Not likely.
But what if Mary had seen a couple dozen of your videos? What if something on 3 or 4 of those videos really struck her and stuck with her – things she could apply in her life?
You get on an introductory call with her, and she says, “I feel like I already know you, because I’ve watched so many of your videos.”
Do you think you can sell some coaching to Mary now? You bet you can.
9: Create Authority Posts
Most blog posts tend to be fairly short, such as “3 Tips to Accomplish XYZ.”
But sometimes, you find a blogpost that is so in-depth and comprehensive, it takes you by surprise and makes you wonder how it can even be free. That’s what you’re going for here, by creating an authority blog post.
Typically, writing an authority post can take days of research, writing and editing. But if you use PLR, you can do it in less than an hour. Here’s how:
Start with a core theme that includes multiple topics, and use PLR articles or ebooks to cover the content.
For example, if your core theme is how to drive traffic, then you might gather together every piece of PLR you can find on all the various methods of driving traffic and consolidate it into one big post.
Then create multiple content formats – adding audio and even video. Try to cover every facet of your topic.
If you’re using articles, you’ll need to write transitions and do some light editing to make it all flow into one big blog post.
Or you can simply have your authority post divided into sections, with each section being another facet of your main topic, and also another PLR article.
10: Make Your Subscribers Intensely Loyal
Imagine if your subscribers are LOOKING for YOUR emails – and if they don’t receive an email, or they fall off your list, they are emailing YOU to get back on your list.
Here’s how to do it:
Create a page each week where you give away something for free. It needs to be directly related to your niche, of course. And it needs to have some value. It could be a tip sheet, some insider information, a PDF, etc. It’s really going to depend on your niche.
Each week that you do this, create a new URL for the page. This way people MUST be subscribed to your list to find the page, and they must open your email every week to get the link.
Never use the same URL twice. And only leave each freebie up for 7 days before taking it down. This way someone can’t subscribe and then decide to pick up all the freebies two months down the road. They must open your emails to get the link.
To get your subscribers opening most every email you send to them, send out the freebie email on different days of the week so they never know which email it is.
This way they have to open and read them all to find the freebie.
Yes, it’s sneaky, and you may or may not want to do this. But if you use humor and let them know exactly why they never know which day it’s going to arrive, your subscribers will go along with the game. In fact, this game of hide and seek or find the Easter egg can make your subscribers’ day.
You can also ‘hide’ the links deep inside your emails, such as in the middle, near the end or in the P.S. Again, change it up so they never know.
This is one of the most effective ways I’ve seen to get people opening and reading your emails. It’s like a treasure hunt, and everyone can win once a week – or more often, if you sometimes post freebies twice a week.
It probably goes without saying but use PLR to create your freebies. After all, who has time to create them by hand?
11: Sell More Affiliate Products
This one is so simple, and yet it can be crazy effective. When you’re promoting an affiliate product, put together some bonuses created from PLR for everyone who purchases from your affiliate link.
This can not only help you make more sales, but also help you to win affiliate contests, too.
And you can use bonuses made from PLR to promote your own products, too.
12: Make an Autoresponder Series
You should be emailing your list either every day, or at least 5 to 6 days a week. But who has time to write 300+ emails every year?
Thank goodness for PLR. You pull out some great articles, news and so forth and you fashion the material into an autoresponder series. Or you choose an ebook and break it down into bite-sized pieces.
At the end of each email, make a product recommendation that makes sense for the email’s content. For example, you’re doing a series on marketing with social media, and you recommend a product on – you guessed it – marketing with social media.
Or you’re doing a series on how to be more confident and assertive, and you offer a product that teaches the same thing, only more in-depth.
Your emails don’t need to be long, they just need to deliver value. That value could be a piece of news, a method for getting a result, or even something that entertains.
Just make sure it’s on topics your readers want to hear about, and don’t forget to throw in your product recommendations.
Using PLR, you can create 365 autoresponder emails in just a few days and then be done with it.
12.5: Create Your Own Free or Paid Newsletter
I know plenty of people who earn a recurring income with a small monthly newsletter. And some of these folks don’t even write their own newsletters – they use PLR.
Imagine having a few hundred subscribers each paying you $10 a month for an electronically delivered newsletter that you can put together in one afternoon. Not a bad deal at all.
You choose the PLR content you want in your newsletter. Maybe change headlines, write short introductions or personalize it as you see fit.
Get a graphic artist (Fiverr is a great place to find one) who can turn your content into a colorful PDF with pictures, graphics and a great cover.
Offer subscribers a free version, upsell them to the paid version, and then rinse and repeat. Each month you get new subscribers and you put out a new newsletter. If you price your newsletter competitively and you provide great information, people will stick with you for months.
There’s something about a low price point that makes people not bother to unsubscribe, even if they forget to read your newsletter.
I once promoted a newsletter for a fairly famous marketer. It was only $10 a month, and I made a bunch of sales. The weird thing was, he stopped writing the newsletter, but he kept on billing people.
I expected to see everyone cancel, but some of them hung on for months before they finally did. I don’t know if that would happen today, but the point is that if you’re not charging a fortune, people will stick with you for months.
And if they love your stuff, they’ll stick with you for years. I’ve subscribed to the same newsletter for about 10 years now. It’s priced at $9.99 a month, and it’s about 8 pages of great content.
And that’s key – choose your best PLR for all of your paid content, whether it’s products or newsletters or whatever. Your customers will never know you didn’t write it yourself.
Hopefully you found some PLR ideas here that you hadn’t seen before.
There is some fantastic PLR being offered these days.
And when you know what you’re doing, you can use it to gain subscribers and make money quickly and easily, with very little work.
I’ve used this technique to create all sorts of things, from a free bonus I put together and gave away for an affiliate product, all the way up to $1,000 training programs.
Creating content and products is a huge obstacle for most marketers because it takes so much time and effort.
But what if you had a way to create products – such as expensive training programs – that you could finish in a week?
And better still, what if you got paid for them before they were even done?
The first key you need is a big, fat, public DEADLINE.
If your deadline is public, then you will move heaven and earth to get it done – or at least I hope you will.
If you don’t, you’re in for some major public ridicule and embarrassment, not to mention the fact that you are letting people down.
The second key here – and this goes hand in hand with the first – is you’re going to sell what you’re selling BEFORE it’s created.
You tell people what you’re creating, you tell them when it’s going to be done, and you sell it before you ever make it.
And in the case of a training program, you’re going to create your product LIVE and then continue to sell the recordings as a product after the event.
So, in a nutshell – decide what you’re selling. Tell the world what you’re selling and when it will take place, and take orders. Hold the live event, create the product and continue to sell it.
Here are the details:
This works best if you are already good at something. This way, you know the material and don’t need to do any research. If you need research, then you might need to add a day or two to this process or use this shortcut – bring in an expert.
If you’re using experts, then you can cover any topic. Or every topic. Because no matter what your topic is, there is someone out there that can do the actual teaching for you – you just split the profits with them.
For the rest of this article, we’ll assume you’re the one with the information.
Set a deadline, because with a deadline and a hundred or so people depending on you to get your work done, you will get the work done. It’s that simple. They’ve put their money on you, and they believe in you.
You will not let them down, which ensures the training course you’re making – which would normally be finished in a month or two – is completed in a week’s time.
Deadlines are magic this way, regardless of whether or not you naturally procrastinate. Without a deadline, your work expands to fill the time. This doesn’t necessarily mean a better product – it just means it takes longer to make.
You can be surprisingly nimble with this method, getting products out fast on hot topics and things people want right now.
Figure out what the big 5 to 7 things are that you want to cover. What are the big ideas? What are the giant take-aways?
Instead of writing a sales letter, write bullet points. Remember, you’re doing this FAST. Don’t write a giant sales letter, write the high points. Tell them what they’re going to discover and how it’s going to benefit them through bullet points. Use curiosity, too.
You’re going to do a webinar. Create a Powerpoint with an intro and all of the major points. Let people ask questions at the end, because some of your very best material will come from the questions, things you didn’t even think of.
Cut up your recording into parts and sell it as a course. You’ll have an intro, and each of the major points. You might also want to get it transcribed and then edit the transcription to give your customers a written copy, too.
Selling your course BEFORE you make it gives you a DEADLINE. You’re telling people when the live event will happen. You’re giving them a deadline, too, because they have to sign up before the deadline or they will miss the class.
Once you hold the class, upload the webinar into the members area and give access to everyone who bought. Some people will make it to the live event, some won’t, but they all get access to the recordings.
If there is something you feel you can do better, go ahead and record it again. Make a new recording of that section and replace it in the member’s section.
That’s the beauty of this system – you get it done fast, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. If you feel like it, you can go back and improve on it. And if you omitted something, make a new recording for that, too.
And what if you create a flop? That’s not even possible with this system. If you promote a product you’re going to create and no one buys, then you know not to waste your time making it.
Using this simple system, you get paid before you ever create your products, and you can crank products out faster than ever before. Plus, you can sell the recordings for a long time to come.
Just imagine if you create a new product every two weeks. In a year’s time you’ll have 26 new products you can continue to sell, repurpose, use as bonuses, sell the rights to and so forth. 26 new launches, 26 new products and 26 new revenue generators.
The kid who got straight A’s in school is probably the most successful person from that class, right? Actually, no. While good grades and a high I.Q. can be helpful, they not only don’t guarantee success – they sometimes hamper success.
After all, life is not school. And the skills it takes to get great grades don’t always transfer over into running a successful online business. Heck, I know people who struggled in high school and never made it to college who are pulling down 6 and 7 figure incomes online. How do they do it? By possessing the following traits…
They have the drive to succeed. How you define success will determine exactly what this means to you. Success for you might be making as much money as possible, it might be furthering a cause of yours, or it might be one of a hundred other things. Whatever it is, you’ve got to have a need to reach this success that you can feel in your bones. It should be your total focus so that your mind is constantly at work finding ways to make it happen.
They’re good at networking. Even online, or perhaps especially online, it’s important that you build relationships with your fellow marketers and your customers. And even if you’re not a born schmoozer, don’t worry – networking is a skill like any other that can be learned. Work on building yourself a large network of people you can turn to for advice, assistance and so forth, and always focus on what you can do for them.
They stay focused. Imagine you’re driving your car and you decide to go 5 different directions – at once. How far will you get? Or imagine chasing 5 different rabbits all at the same time – how many will you catch? Business is no different. Decide what you’re going to do and then do it, rather than falling for the flavor-of-the-week business idea.
They’re persistent. You’re not going to build a super-profitable business overnight. And if you’re looking at others thinking they became successful in a flash, know that in reality their success probably took years. Remember, nothing worth having comes easy, and persistence does conquer all.
They stand on their own two feet. I’ve seen people purchase a course on how to do something online, such as build a website or get more traffic. Then they bombard the author with a hundred different questions rather than figure anything out for themselves. Are they ever successful? I doubt it. Being an online marketer, or any type of entrepreneur, carries with it a certain autonomy. So don’t expect others to hold your hand.
They work first, they work hard and they play later. Sometimes MUCH later. You know those stories of working 2 hours a day and then laying on the beach? That’s for AFTER you make it big and you can hire somebody to oversee things for you. Maybe. Or even when you do make it big in online marketing, you may find that you still work hard. But either way, in the beginning you’ll be working long hours to get your business up and running. And yes, work does come before play if you want to be successful. If you want to play first, you might as well ditch the idea of being an online marketer and stick with a job.
Learn to outsource. There is only so much you can accomplish by yourself, even when you are working long hours. So yes, you’ve got to outsource. The first thing to outsource is anything you’re not good at, whether that’s website building, product creation, or whatever. Because if you’re not good at something, it makes more sense to bring in an expert than to spend weeks trying to master it yourself. Then as you begin earning more and more, you can also outsource more and more.
To be an online marketer, you don’t need to be the next Einstein. Your grades in school don’t matter a hill of beans. What DOES matter is what you do here and now. Adopt the above 7 traits and you are already halfway to growing an online business that can take care of you for the rest of your life.
If you’re not repurposing your content, you’re losing traffic.
Repurposing is a technique to change either the format of your content or change its target audience.
For example, you might convert a blogpost into a video and publish it on YouTube. Or you might turn that blogpost into a series of emails, a podcast or even an infographic.
A blogpost on your website will only attract people who are interested in reading content. But when you repurpose it, you reach a new target audience on different channels.
Imagine converting your blogpost into a Slideshare presentation, and then getting 50,000 views. It’s entirely possible to do this. And further imagine that at the end of your Slideshare, you had an appropriate and highly relevant offer to join your list.
Even if a tiny fraction of people who viewed your presentation joined your list, it could still be 1,000 or more new subscribers for you.
You can convert your existing content into:
Social Media Snippets
Infographics
Videos
Slideshows
Ebooks
Pdfs
Case Studies
Lead Magnets
Email Courses
Images
Podcasts
And more…
I’d recommend starting off with videos on YouTube, republishing on Medium, pulling out social media snippets, and creating a slideshow on SlideShare.
These are some of the best and proven ways to repurpose content that will send heaps of traffic your way.
I like to write. Heck, to be honest I LOVE to write. Yet sometimes I hate it as well – like when I HAVE to write another newsletter and I’m thinking I just don’t know what to say.
That’s why I like to find ideas that jog me into writing, and I share them with you here. Because I know if I sometimes have trouble writing, then those who aren’t that fond of putting words to paper must sometimes prefer to get a root canal than write another article or blog post. So take heart, here are 8 suggestions that should get your typing fingers flying and your blog readers happy they stopped by your site.
Be impulsive. If you write on a frequent basis, then there should be a part of your brain that’s always on the lookout for ideas, rants, complaints, laughs, etc. When inspiration strikes, WRITE. Yes, right then and there. If you can’t, then at least make lots of notes for later, and at the first available chance sit down and type it out. You can always polish it up later.
Some of my best writing has been where I feel possessed of spirit and the words simply fly into my head of their own accord. It’s almost like magic, but if I don’t immediately type them out then I lose both the spirit and the enthusiasm, and usually the post or article never does get written.
So be impulsive and write the moment the spirit strikes. You may not even know at first where it’s going, but that’s okay. Odds are you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Question everything. Question authority, rules, the way things are and the way things are done. Always be asking yourself “Why?” Why are things this way? Why do we do it this way? Is there a better way? And so forth. Even if you don’t have the answer, sometimes simply asking the questions can make for a terrific post. Break rules. Above, we’re questioning rules, and this goes one step further. Is your blog about weight loss? We all know there’s a rule that you be kind to everyone, regardless. But sometimes people need tough love, and maybe your next post should be how grossly obese people need to sit down and write their obituaries because odds are really good that they’re not going to live all that long.
And before you send me an email telling me that I should not have said what I just did, I recently read a news story in which a doctor, a DOCTOR, told his patient to write his obituary and it was exactly what the guy needed to lose 376 pounds. So yes, sometimes it’s more than okay to break the rules.
Combine unlikely things. This is the peanut butter and chocolate trick, or the apple pie and cheese trick. Take two ideas, concepts, or whatever that normally do NOT go together, combine them and see what happens.
For example, if your website is all about how to raise money for non-profits, find out what the greediest people in the world do to acquire their fortunes, and then see how that knowledge might be appropriately used to raise funds.
Just write. I know I’ve mentioned this one before, but it’s so good I’ve got to say it again – just sit down and start writing, even if you don’t have a single solitary clue what you’re going to write about. Odds are the first few paragraphs will throw away nonsense, but soon something will emerge from your subconscious that’s been dying to get out. I’ve used this technique many times, and it seldom fails me.
Make an outline. If you’ve got your topic and you have an idea of what you’re going to say, then by all means make an outline. Once you’ve got it, just fill it in. And no, you don’t have to write it in order – pick a section of the outline, write that section, pick another section and so forth. Making the outline first is a dynamite way to then write quickly and nearly effortlessly. Plus you’ll get to see early if your idea is worth writing about or not.
Be crazy. Okay, so this crazy idea popped into your head, and you just KNOW that it’s silly, but what if? That is, what if it’s not so silly after all? We tend to dismiss our crazy ideas too quickly sometimes rather than see them through. And here’s something worth remembering – every great achievement started out as someone’s “crazy idea.” So go ahead, follow through and see what happens.
Chunk it. Write non-stop for a certain length of time, such as 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and then take a 5 minute break. Knowing that you cannot stop writing for that period of time makes you focus and get to work, and knowing you have a break coming up soon makes it all tolerable, even on days when you especially don’t feel like writing.
There you have it… 8 ways to beat writer’s/blogger’s block. Now get to writing, will ya! 🙂
