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Who is John Paul?

I am a Blogger and Internet Entrepreneur and a Kidney Transplant Recipient. I have been making money online for 6 years. This blog is a keep it simple, no BS, how-to on how I can help you become a Blogging Entrepreneur too... Read More

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  • Posted by John Paul on 25 Feb 2009

Using Social Marketing To reap BIG rewards!

Social marketing is an often misunderstood form of marketing that is reaping huge rewards for website owners who use it. Most webmasters who understand it, even while being very new to social marketing, are seeing results like:

1. Higher search engine rankings for their top keywords

2. More rankings of additional keywords or “long tail” keyword phrases

3. More link popularity from sites linking on their own accord

4. More link popularity from social media sites

5. More activity on their blogs, such as more commenting and interaction

6. Direct traffic from incoming links on social media sites (One good StumbleUpon.com submission can net thousands of visitors alone.)

7. Fast traffic increases and steady growth in unique visitors month after month

8. An increase in subscribers and sales. Social traffic, properly acquired, is very warm to your message and products.

The problem for most people when thinking about social marketing, after getting a taste of all the hundreds of sites there are to interact with, is becoming overwhelmed and paralyzed into inaction.

They assume established social marketers gained their “social authority” in a short period of time. This is simply not true. Although the opportunities for driving serious traffic and rankings from hundreds of social sites exists, it is an embarrassment of riches.

And it cannot be conquered over night. It is a gradual process you manage with all your other responsibilities and grow as time allows.

What I encourage my clients to do is set aside enough time each day to get one more link, participate in one more conversation, or sign up for one more account on a social site.

A little goes a long way and social marketing is not an “all or nothing” situation. After some time you will become established on the social sites you need to have a presence on. And you will have a schedule that allows you to keep up with your other work while adding this extremely powerful marketing method to the mix.

10 Steps For Starting a Social Marketing Campaign

1. Schedule a bit of time each day to do some new things. Don’t just say you are going to do them. Write the time into your day and follow through.

2. Sign up for the major social news sites: Digg.com, Propeller.com, Mixx.com. Don’t submit anything to these sites until you have filled out your profile completely and submitted news from elsewhere on the web to generate a real presence and avoid being labeled as a spammer.

In fact, BE a real presence and don’t try to push your own content onto the networks you belong to. It should feel and be natural and you will know what “natural is on each network by participating, commenting, voting and getting a general sense of what members think is good and bad content. Watch their comments and votes and you will know how to proceed with your own site’s content from there.

3. If you don’t have a blog, you must install one immediately. This is not an option. It is an absolute necessity on today’s web. Our company uses Wordpress and recommends it over any other blogging platform, and it can be installed easily by you or your webmaster. Wordpress download: http://wordpress.org/download/

Option #2: Check with your web host to see if they have Fantastico available to you and, if so, that it installs the latest version of Wordpress. If so you are very lucky because the software can be installed by you very easily in just a few steps with Fantastico.

4. Once you have your blog set up, join the following networks. (These are blog communities that will help you generate visitors, authority, and links and most bloggers belong to them.) MyBlogLog.com (install the widget on your Wordpress blog), and BlogCatalog.com. (they also have a widget to install)

5. Join groups, interact with other publishers, and make friends with the easy networking tools these sites provide. Especially the people who would be most likely to link to your blog and send you traffic who write about similar things or have an audience similar to yours who’d benefit by knowing you. You can even start your own group, promote it in the network, and send “shouts” to the group when you have announcements or need attention to a new post.

6. As soon as you establish yourself on the sites mentioned above, move on to other sites like them that might be more targeted directly to your niche and the market you work in. There are a lot of new “vertical” social sites popping up that focus on much more narrow markets and their membership is far warmer to your kind of information than on the bigger, more general networks above.

Add a new site to the mix as often as you can and repeat the steps for becoming established there as mentioned in Step 2 above.

7. Join a group dedicated to social marketing to pick up tips from other social marketers and find new places you can sign up with to continue building your social authority. New sites pop up every single day. Follow places like Go2Web20.net to find new opportunities to connect with your market.

8. Remote blog. Join blogger.com and put content there that is good, just not good enough to go on your main blog. This serves two purposes: 1) you get to use more of the great content you find as you travel through all the social news sites and 2) it gives you another place to link back to your main site and pass on traffic and link popularity over time.

9. Track your progress diligently. If something you are trying on a social network isn’t working, you need to know that in order to save time and move on to something more fruitful. MyBlogLog.com (above) has a tracking system which will show you where your traffic is coming from so you can avoid time wasting efforts and focus more on the sites that are really pulling in good traffic for you.

10. Don’t freak out! This is only overwhelming if you act like someone at an all-you-can-eat buffet with no self control. You have other things to do and this needs to fit into, not dominate, your current business and marketing.

Social marketing can partially or completely replace other methods you are using to promote your site including paid advertising. Many people completely drop their paid advertising or PPC campaigns once they see the organic, natural traffic and search engine rankings pile up from social marketing.

Until then, just take it one step at a time and do some social marketing. A little goes a long way and before you know it, you will reach a point where a lot of traffic and lots of search engine rankings are piling up because you simply started doing something each day.

There’s a lot you can learn about social marketing. And not all of it can be found on free blogs.

To Your Online Success

John Paul



 
 

  • Posted by John Paul on 17 Feb 2009
Building your bank account with Email Marketing!

Viral email marketing is one of the most popular means of promoting your products or services. You can easily contact several thousands – or even millions – of individuals at one time and have them spreading your email message, promoting your business and generating income for you.

It is important that you understand the mechanics of viral email marketing to take advantage of its full potentials, and get the cash your business needs at a fraction of the usual time and effort.

What is Viral Email Marketing?

Viral marketing is one of the most efficient marketing tool innovated in the online industry. The term was coined after the idea of an information spreading quickly and effectively. In offline marketing industry, viral marketing is what is often referred to as “word-of-mouth” marketing strategy, which is considered by some marketing experts as the most effective type of marketing.

Viral email marketing is a branch of a variety of viral marketing tools and techniques that internet marketers can use these days. Although the benefits are quite appealing, there are certain techniques that online marketers need to follow closely in order to reap those benefits.

Since most people these days utilize their email to communicate on a daily basis, it is where viral email marketing is targeted. You can therefore appeal to every individual in your target market specifically, which when done correctly, have higher potential of generating sales.

If you were to recall the history of email marketing campaigns, it all started with Hotmail. They offered clients who availed of their service a free email account. For every online businessmen though, you can offer a variety of techniques to your prospects through their email that will enable you to utilize the power of this technology to spread the word about your marketing campaign.

Viral Email Marketing Techniques

The techniques you use in your viral email marketing campaign depends largely on your business goals. In most cases, the goals of an online marketer when sending out emails to the people in their mailing list is to inform them about a particular product or information. A subset to this goal is to compel them to forward the message or email to their friends in their email list, thus spreading the word about your line of products.

Why would your prospects forward the email they receive? The key here is to send them emails that are of some level of worth. If not, then it would probably take them a shorter amount of time to delete the email message than they would reading what the content of the mail is.

One effective way to increase readership is to carefully consider the information value or entertainment value you input in the content of your email message. Being informative does not necessarily mean your email message has to be dull. Learn how to infuse some creativity into it. With proper use of useful or amusing content, you will most likely compel people in your mailing list to read your emails and forward them to people who might benefit from them.

Prior to this stage though, you need to have had proper methods of building a large opt-in list. The methods you use must also be targeted, such that the people in your mailing list are most likely to respond to your viral email marketing campaign.

Subject Line of a Viral Email

Although this comes prior to the actual opening of your emails, this is incredibly important. The subject line is the first thing that a person sees whenever they open their inbox. There are only two options for them: to click on the mail you sent or not. Hence, it is important that you convince them to do the former. One technique is to keep your subject line interesting or provoke curiosity.

Using the “Open Me” or “Read Me” approach is fast becoming ineffective. Plus, it is a very lazy approach at convincing people to actually read the mail. Try to keep your subject line short but snappy for higher effectiveness.

Content of a Viral Email

You have three options in terms of how you build the content for your viral email marketing: sales letter, newsletter, or review format. Regardless of your choice of content format, you need to keep it brief yet ample in scope. Remember, people browsing the internet have short amount of patience and you need to feed them the information they need within the shortest time possible.

If you find that the message is too long but all parts are too relevant to omit, consider sending them in parts. This is also an effective way to rouse the reader’s interest.

Another way to convince them to click on the links you provided is by offering them a valuable and tangible object. It does not need to be a lucrative object but must be something of value or usefulness to them. This helps further an effective viral email marketing that produces real results.

Timing or Frequency in Sending Out Viral Emails

Here is another important component for an effective viral email marketing campaign. If you have set the schedule for the broadcast of your viral email messages using an autoresponder, make sure to limit the amount of emails you send the people in your mailing list.

Three times a week should be substantial to advance your viral email marketing, but there are always exceptions to the rule. The key is to be sensitive to the needs and desires of your audience, and to offer them the right amount of information at the right moments.

Overdoing it can result to annoyance on the part of your readers and cause them to opt-out of their subscription. Or worse, they could spread the word about their dissatisfaction, which could negatively affect your reputation.

After all, an effective viral email marketing campaign is built more around the powerful messages you send them, rather than the frequency of emails on their inbox.

The best Email Marketing System I use and highly recommend, and most top marketers use,  that is simple to use, easy to setup and run. Learn More

To Your Online Success

John Paul



 
 

  • Posted by John Paul on 15 Feb 2009

Making Money Online?

Are you sick and tired of having to deal with the tough financial times? Do you want to know how the ‘other guys’ do it? How do they make all that money online? Have you ever asked yourself:’How can I make money online quickly?’ Well, you can, and I can show you how, the Simple Way!

Imagine what it would be like to get up in the morning when you decide to, not when the alarm clock screams at you. What would it be like if your average ‘work day’ was only a couple of hours long? What would you do if you had plenty of money and plenty of time? These are questions most of us aren’t used to asking ourselves, but if you really want to know how to make money online quickly, and are ready to put what you learn to use, you had better learn to start thinking that way.

There are many ways to make money online quickly. I’ll list a few of the most common ways.

You could sell products on an auction site. This is probably what most people think of when you talk about an online business. This is a good way to make money, but there are some things you have to be aware of.

Selling on an auction site is by no means a sure thing. Your item may not sell and you won’t get back your listing fee if it doesn’t. You also need a source to provide a steady stream of products to sell.

Another very popular way to make money online quickly is with paid survey sites. There are several ways these sites work, one type involves you completing various offers. Some of the offers are free, some you will have to pay for. You can make money almost immediately on some of these sites.

The downside to survey sites, though, is that you probably won’t ever make a full time income. This is a better idea is you only want to make a few hundred dollars a month.

To really make money online quickly… a full time income, I recommend affiliate marketing. This is simply when you sell someone else’s products for a commission.

make money online, make money on the internet, how to make fast money, work from home

These are all good ways to make money online quickly. But no matter what method you choose there is one important factor you can’t forget: marketing.

No matter how great your product or service you need a steady stream of qualified customers or you won’t make any money. Even if you have the absolute best website in the world, you won’t make any money without customers who are eager to buy your products

I know this probably sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised by the number of people who think they can just put a website online and the customers will magically appear. Marketing online isn’t hard,  I will be sharing more tips with you in weeks to come, or Join My Newsletter Above and start recieving FREE tips in your email.

I hope this brief overview helped give you a better idea of how to make money online quickly. No matter what type of business you choose, don’t forget to take the time to educate yourself on Internet marketing. You need customers to make money and marketing is the way you’ll get them!

Learn more abou how we make money online at www.MailboxCashToday.com

To Your Online Success

John Paul



 
 

  • Posted by John Paul on 10 Feb 2009

How You Can Use Twitter For Your Business?

Twitter is the current top “hot property” on the Web, but its popularity and how to use it has mystified many business owners. Many people think that they want to, or should be using Twitter, but simply do not understand the platform, its use, or its place in building web exposure. This article will demystify Twitter and help you to learn how to use it in the workplace and to promote your business.

To best use Twitter to benefit my own business,  you will need to downloaded TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a desktop application that allows you to review and post status updates on Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. I consider it a “must have” application for anyone who wants to make sense of Twitter. TweetDeck allows you to sort the people you follow on Twitter into groups, allows you to limit the number of Tweets (Twitter micro posts) to be shown at any one time, and also allows you to remove all Tweets you have seen with one click. Additionally, using TweetDeck, finally a Twitter search on a topic makes sense.

Since using TweetDeck, I have had a much better Twitter experience. As a Twitter newbie, visiting your own Twitter home page is intimidating; it consists of post after post from people who you are following, who you may not know much about, and it just seems like a huge volume of content. To get started effectively first group the people who actually have something interesting to say on TweetDeck and voila, you have a powerful tool that keeps you at the forefront of what is happening in your industry and on the Web.

So how do you get started with Twitter? Well the first thing is to start on Twitter yourself to understand what you like to read, who you like to follow, and to clearly identify what you like about Twitter. For me, it boils down to this: I like to follow people in my industry who say something of value, who provide a link to a new application or point me to an interesting new article, video, or blog site that I should review but may have never have found myself. Based on what I like, and the people who I find interesting to read, I now write my Twitter posts using this same formula to grow my own Twitter audience.

What I also like about Twitter is that the people who I follow also know how to show their true personality in their Tweets. Ye,s I do like to know what Danny Sullivan (famous search engine marketing guru) ate for lunch, but better yet is the link to the video he thought was funny. I love following Ashton Kutcher (movie star married to Demi Moore who just hit 1 million Twitter followers in April). Man, that guy is really funny and is having a ball with Twitter. His posts are great and he has just earned the status of the user with the most followers. This is why you can’t hire someone to “Ghost Twitter” for you. It’s about showing the real you – you can’t fake that!

So how can you use Twitter for business? Twitter is an excellent tool for linking and this is the real value for businesses. By using Twitter to point people to content on your website, articles you have written either on or off your website, or by linking to a service you want to highlight, you drive traffic. On top of that, Google actually indexes Twitter and so your Twitter page can appear in the organic search results so make sure your bio is well thought out. Don’t waste time using Twitter to point to blog posts, use TwitterFeed to post your blog posts directly onto Twitter. If you have a blog or website, you’ll get new Twitter followers by posting your TwitterFeed right onto your web pages. People who may not have known your Twitter ID can simply click the bottom “follow me link” and start following you on Twitter.

What’s important to be successful in using Twitter is to identify what you personally like about this new media and then deliver the same type of things that you like back to your own followers – work to provide value not drivel! So you’ve got to play with Twitter and learn how to use it first before you can really become successful with it for your business.

So how do you get followers? Well, I started by following everyone (who I found by doing a Twitter search) who had the last name McCord. Then I searched for web design, search engine optimization, and pay per click. Any site profile that looked good, I clicked to follow the writer. It was that easy. Many times people who you follow yourself will choose to follow you. That’s how you initially build up your Twitter base. Over time you will start to identify your “Twitter voice” and refine the type of Twitter presence you want to have by changing your content style and the things that you Tweet about. As you refine your presence, you will build a following.

Another cool Twitter use is that you can reply to any of your followers by simply putting an @ in front of their Twitter ID. For example to send something to my attention use @mccordweb at the very front of your Twitter posting and click enter. Just remember that this post is seen by all followers on my site and on your Twitter site. If you need a more private exchange, go to the direct message link on the Twitter.com site and select a follower by Twitter ID name and send your message from there. This note will be private. If you are using TweetDeck you can click on a follower’s Twitter ID icon and then select to send a direct message or @reply to them. TweetDeck will automatically insert the correct syntax for you in the Tweet.

For many businesses the ability for users to communicate with top management using Twitter is an invaluable resource. This one-to-one exchange allows a company principal to keep tabs on customer viewpoints, concerns, and interests. As a Twitter reply or direct mail does not use email and does not require a response, this is a great way to tap into social networking to test new ideas and to ask for user feedback. For example, if you have a new software product ask your Twitter followers for feedback on a specific feature, or provide a link to your beta version for their testing.

How you use Twitter is all about your personal business needs. The best advice that I can offer to you is that you need to use Twitter a bit yourself first to understand the medium and to find out what you like to read best using Twitter. Then, create your own Twitter network sharing information that you find interesting and have some fun.

Below are some of the Twitter applications that I like and use regularly for my business.

Twuffer – I love this one, it is a Twitter post scheduler. Some people feel that Twuffer defeats the immediacy of Twitter posts or Tweets, but I like it as I will schedule Tweets on days that I am not blogging to keep my followers advised of things I find important. It is easy to use, allows you to Tweet ahead, and lets you select a posting schedule by day and time. If you are pushing content on a service or product this is an excellent tool to use. Set your Tweets up one week or one month at a time and feed your content to readers in addition to your regular Tweets. Make sure to use www.TinyUrl.com to change any long URLs you point to in the Tweet to a Twitter-friendly short version to save space.

Twitter Grader – This one is a vanity application that allows you to see where you stack up against other Twitter users. Twitter Grader measures the power of a Twitter user based on followers, number of updates, and posting frequency.

TweetBeep – With this application, you can manage your online Twitter reputation. Alerts will be emailed to you whenever a Twitter user Tweets about your business, name, or domain. You select the alert criteria and what to watch for using TweetBeep. This is great for a business that is concerned about branding and online identity. PR professionals should make sure to use this tool to watch for comments about their clients.

Twitoria – Clean up your Twitter followers by finding out which people never use Twitter or post infrequently so you can delete them right from the Twitoria interface.

Qwitter – If you want to know when someone stops following you, sign up for this service. Actually, this can be an excellent tool to find out what a reader hated that you posted about and caused them to “chop” you, so you can fine tune your message. If you get a flood of drops after a Tweet, it allows you to learn that people don’t like a certain type of Tweet – instant feedback at an anonymous level!

One big thing about Twitter that I have not even mentioned yet but is actually one of Twitter’s best features is the ability to text-in Tweets from your mobile phone. Although you can’t easily link to great content typically on the fly like this, the ability to connect with others without being tethered to a computer is an opportunity to show the “real you”. Maybe your followers do want to know what you are eating for lunch or about a seminar you just attended, just be kind and don’t vomit out Twitter spam using your Blackberry on meaningless drivel.

You can easily set up the ability to receive text messages from your Twitter account to your cell or Blackberry, but be careful as you may be inundated if you have a large following. I would recommend receiving Twitter updates via text message to your cell only from a small group. For example if you have a project team, set up a Twitter account for each member to allow them to post just to this small unique circle of team members. The value to track and interact with each other at anytime and anywhere using Twitter by computer or by cell phone adds real value for work groups and teams – particularly team managers. Twitter even allows you to make this type of group private.

Another feature of Twitter is the ability to add hashtags in front of keywords in your Tweets to help with sorting to allow others to find your important content. For example if you wanted to Tweet about a recent earthquake in LA you would use #laearthquake in the front of your Tweet.  By using hashtags you enable Twitter to return your information for topic searches on newsworthy Tweets. You can visit Hashtags.org for more information on the current hot hashtags that are in use for today so you can follow, add to the topic, or create your own. For example in Twitter World, Fridays are the day you post with #followfriday and enter in the Twitter IDs you want to recommend to others.  You would be amazed at the cool new people you can follow and interact with from recommendations of the people you follow.

Twitter is one of the hottest new mediums to arrive on the Internet scene since Facebook. Although it is not exactly “new”, Twitter has just recently become very high profile. If you are in business, Twitter definitely warrants your attention. Not only is it a very smart new tool to use in your marketing arsenal, but I think that the more you use it you will grow to love it and find it fun to use.

To Your Online Success

John Paul



 
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