Blah, Blah, Blog

Kristie T hosts an annual Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day on February 9th.

Every year she celebrates the freedom that entrepreneurship provides and invites you to join in on the fun.

You can win all sorts of cool prizes (including a free PLR pack from Natural Mom PLR) and even use her free press release to your local paper to get free publicity for your business.

If you send in pictures of yourself working in your bathrobe she’ll post it and give you a juicy one way link back to your website.

Join the fun at Business In Your Bathrobe Day.

Hey, I didn’t say it.

She did.

Do you subscribe to Rosalind Gardner’s Net Profits Today newsletter?

I do.

If you don’t know Rosalind, she is considered one of the most successful affiliate marketers online, and has one of the most popular guides to affiliate marketing, called The Super Affiliate Handbook.

I read this book a year ago and agree that it is one of the best educations in affiliate marketing that you can get, and everyone who wants to succeed in affiliate marketing should read it.

Anyway, back to her newsletter.

The issue I got today was entitled: [NPT] Your best niche NOW…

Guess what Rosalind Gardner says is the hottest niche for 2009?

I’ll give you a hint.

(Get it?)

GREEN. Going green. It’s where it’s at in 2009.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should go changing directions in your business because that’s not smart.

Target market, and focus and all.

But.

Your website visitors, blog readers, podcast listeners, newsletter subscribers, etc…

They might be thinking green.

So how can you meet them where they’re at?

Here are a couple of ways.

Oh and what about

and may I also suggest?

Would any of this make it easier to earn in this hot niche?

There are a couple of things that could make your business soar this year. If you’re not doing them already, taking the steps to make one or both of these things happen could make your business unrecognizable next year.

They are:

Launch a Podcast and Start an Affiliate Program

Let’s talk about starting an affiliate program first.

I can’t tell you how often I come across a fantastic product that my target market would love, but then when I search around to find an affiliate program, I can’t find one!

Would it surprise you to hear me say that the internet needs MORE great products?

As an affiliate marketer, I don’t have ENOUGH high quality products to promote on my sites.

What’s holding you back from starting an affiliate program?

If you don’t understand the benefits of starting your own affiliate program, let’s talk about that for a moment.

Why launch your own affiliate program?

It’s pretty simple.

To make more sales! My affiliates make more sales of my products and services than I do. It’s just not possible for me to be everywhere marketing all the time. My affiliates are happy to send traffic and customers my way and I only have to pay them when they produce sales! (Far more cost effective than paying for advertising with no guaranteed results, or paying someone an hourly rate to market for you.)

The ladies at MomsTalkBiz have an excellent, easy to understand guide to starting your own affiliate program.

If you need any help with the technical aspects of starting or running your affiliate program, get this guide.

If you prefer one on one help and need someone to take your hand, hire me to coach you on setting up your affiliate program, recruiting affiliates and helping them succeed.

As an affiliate marketer and someone who also has her own affiliate program, I know what affiliates need to succeed in making money with affiliate programs.

So let’s talk about podcasting for a minute.

So how could podcasting help your business?

This week on WahmTalkRadio, I joined Kelly McCausey to talk about why podcasting has been so important to my business. Definitely go over there and have a listen.

In a nutshell I said that podcasting benefits my business because it:

- was the easiest way I had found to have high ranking, well trafficked, authority sites in my niche link to me for FREE (my podcast is huge linkbait!)

- a fantastic way to make myself unique among my “competitors” – some of whom are far more talented than me.

- provides another way to give my market unique, interesting content that they can consume

- is a HUGE lead generator that gets people talking about my site in message forums and elsewhere

- helps me create unique content almost effortlessly

Podcasting sounds intimidating but truly isn’t technically difficult. (Plus, you can hire someone to do some of the techy stuff if you like.)

I’m not a techy geeky kind of gal at all but I even do my own show editing, although when I started I didn’t.

Again – if you want some of these great benefits for your business that podcasting could offer, get some help to get that going!

Incidentally, you can have this Podcasting & Internet Radio guide for FREE if you hire me to coach you.

What are you going to do DIFFERENT this year to get better results from your internet business?

In my post about lessons I learned in 2008, I mentioned that when my stinky cheese website took a nosedive, I didn’t act quickly enough and my income tumbled down with it.

This past month I’ve been working hard to resurrect this dead site, and thought I would share some of the things I’m doing and the results with you.

Launch a blog – I had a blog installed on the domain and started blogging with regularity. While the topic is something I write about easily, I hired ghostwriters to write quick blog posts for me. This was more cost effective than hiring writers to create entire articles.

First I sent the ghostwriters lists of keywords to write about so they could quickly come up with content. I then expanded on what they wrote. This enabled me to add over a hundred blog posts to the blog very quickly.

Write articles – I created several new articles on the topic to direct traffic to the site. I submitted them to article directories and places like iSnare for distribution. Where appropriate, I published them on another site I own. I also wrote different versions of the article for use as guest blog posts.

Get incoming links – I did this in a number of ways. I paid for a couple of incoming links. Writing articles got me more links. I asked fellow website owners who had content in this niche to link to me (several of these were fellow Mom Masterminds members, who willingly did me a favor. One of the perks of membership!). I also made sure I linked to appropriate pages inside the site itself.

Google alerts – I signed up for Google alerts in the keyword I want to rank for for this particular site. This accomplished a couple of things. Each day I’m sent an email telling me where bloggers are talking about this keyword phrase, so I check out their blog and leave a comment if I can add something useful to the conversation, linking to my site. I also get ideas for new topics because I can see what’s going on in the news in this niche.

Twitter – Often after adding a new page to the site, I Twittered about it.

I’m pleased to say that after a month of this, the traffic for December has increased by 80% over November, and income has really jumped too. It’s not where it was back in March, but it’s quickly getting there. I feel confident that at the end of January it will be.

P.S. If you need some help breathing new life into a dead site of your own, how about a website review?

photo credit: lawmurray

If not, you should.

I’m going to try to convince you of some of the reasons why you should do product reviews on your website or blog.

First of all, the Internet is a great place for anyone to get information on just about anything. In particular, women in their 20s- 50s. And if you read this post (and got the free report) about marketing to moms, you know that this demographic is the most powerful, spending wise.

Useful quote:

“Of the nearly 1,000 moms surveyed, 89 percent use the internet at least twice per day, and 90 percent have been using it for more than seven years,” said Stuart Larkins, vice-president of search for DoubleClick Performics. “A whopping 86 percent of respondents said search engines are the most efficient way to find information.”
Source: Moms are super web surfers

And these smart shoppers go online to research products before buying.

Product reviews are highly sought after online. Whether a shopper is looking for information to use in buying offline or wants to make their purchase online, a product review can tell her what she needs to know. Sites that exclusively feature product reviews get lots and lots of traffic (think epinions.com!).

But can product reviews benefit you, an online marketer?

If you run a blog or, product reviews make for great content. They tend to attract lots of traffic, and that traffic can lead to profits. Product reviews get you ranked for some of those very specific, “long tail” keyword phrases.

If someone finds your site after searching for the phrase “Fiskars garden bucket caddy“, you think they will take some action once they get there? It’s pretty likely, yes. Maybe they’ll read the review and click on your affiliate link to purchase it. Maybe they’ll click on a Google AdSense ad. At the very least they’ll be impressed that your site met their needs, and are likely to stick around long enough to sign up for your newsletter, RSS feed or what have you.

In order to get the most out of product reviews, it’s important to have a niche and stick with it. This will ensure that the traffic that comes to your site is targeted. Even if your niche is fairly wide, such as “moms”, that will still make your marketing efforts easier and more effective. You probably don’t have the time or money to market yourself as the be all/end all of product review websites.

Once they’re on your site, you could make money by using affiliate links in the product reviews.

In fact this is one of the easiest, most effective ways to get your feet wet with affiliate marketing. Go around your home and make a list of all the products you use, hate, love, have an opinion about. And make it your aim to start reviewing these products on your blog or website.

If you can become an affiliate for the product you’re reviewing, that’s great. Almost anything in your home you can find on Amazon.com. Their affiliate program doesn’t pay the best commissions in the world, but it does convert well.

Be sure to give an honest opinion – this is especially true if you will gain from a sale.

This will help you gain the trust of your audience, and trust is essential in getting sales, even if they are through affiliate links.

Product reviews can have additional benefits. For instance, consider what happened to me when I posted a review of these all natural stuffed pretzels I purchased recently (and loved!).

The very next day the owners of the company emailed me to thank me for my nice review. They sent me two coupons for free boxes (worth $5 each) and they posted my review on their blog along with a link to my site in the sidebar.

Doing product reviews can make not just customers happy but also the product creator!

Product reviews are great for marketing. They provide useful information to the reader, bring targeted traffic to the website, and give the product and business exposure.

It’s a winning situation for everyone involved.

You can learn more about doing product reviews to earn money as an affiliate here: Affiliate Marketing Sweetie

It’s a Saturday morning.

The kids are watching a rare bit of morning cartoons (I say rare because they’re usually doing schoolwork at this time of day and we are NEVER home on a Saturday morning but I am sick with a cold today).

The potatoes are frying in butter on the stove for breakfast, and I have steaming hot coffee in my hand.

I’ve been contemplating a “year end” post that shares some sage bit of wisdom, and was coming up a bit dry.

Then I saw that Kelly McCausey blogged asking about regrets in 2008 and I felt compelled to share some of my own honest recollections about lessons I’ve learned this year.

Sometimes, when you feel discouraged about goals you’ve reached, it helps to look back at what your goals were one year ago. I accomplished several of those goals, including getting out of unsecured debt, establishing an emergency fund, moving out into a place of my own, and hitting certain income goals.

Looking back on that makes me feel great about what I can accomplish in a year’s time.

When I started my online business several years ago, it was fun extra money. I never would have thought I would be supporting a home with 4 children on my income.

One of the things I did right this year was realize EARLY on when I had overextended myself.

I made a couple of business decisions that turned out not to be right for me, taking on projects or memberships that weren’t really focused enough for my business or that would simply prove to be “too much”.

But instead of getting caught up in “What will they think if I quit? I’m not a flake/quitter/whatever!”, I just cut it out, which was wise.

At the same time, I made some mistakes. You see,

I didn’t notice that my cheese was getting stinky.

Those of you who have read Who Moved My Cheese? will get the reference.

I read this book a couple of years ago and thought it was fantastic, but I forgot to apply the main lesson to myself when circumstances started to change in my business.

You see, as a result of my ongoing efforts in 2008 to focus and make everything better in my business, I sold several websites. That was a good move. It made it far easier to not get overwhelmed.

I also increased focus on blogging – both here and at my Natural Moms Talk Radio blog. I blogged every day (or, wrote a few posts at a time and scheduled them to post daily).

While doing these things I didn’t take action when one of my sites, which was a major earner for me, started to dip in traffic. I could kick myself now for letting it happen. I’m not sure if it was a Google algorithm change or just because I wasn’t marketing it as much anymore, but for whatever reason, the traffic and income started to go down. The site went from earning me around $30 a day to just a couple of bucks, and at the end of the month that is a huge difference!

By November I was seriously feeling the drop in income on this particular site. Even though traffic to my other sites was climbing, and my affiliate income and ebook sales also going up, this site represented a significant part of my overall income.

I’ve been working on this site like mad for the last month and I know my efforts will pay off soon enough, but:

I should have monitored the state of my cheese and taken action immediately when it started to appear moldy.

As soon as I noticed traffic and income going down for this site, I should have ramped up my marketing efforts. Then it wouldn’t have taken so much effort to keep that result going.

So that’s my wisdom and my regret for 2008.

But you can bet I won’t let it happen again!

What about you? Any regrets, lessons or wisdom to share?

photo credit: functoruser