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by davidmwood

How To Build Rapport By Feeding Your Subscribers

March 4, 2013 in Internet Marketing

How To Build Rapport

Most email marketers have no idea how to build rapport with their subscribers. They try and build relationships solely through email and it doesn’t work. Sure, you can build rapport through emails, but you can do it a lot better through CONTENT.

Content is the key to building rapport with subscribers. Over the years I’ve experimented with using various kinds of content. Overall I found that these 5 “species” of content work best:

  1. Blog Posts
  2. Videos
  3. Tutorials
  4. Free reports
  5. Webinars

Those 5 “species” of content are exactly what you can use to build a sold relationship & foundation with your subscribers. They are free to create and share, most importantly people love them. So let’s go through them:

1. Blog Posts

Honestly, I believe videos are the best way to connect with people and build relationships, but I tend to use blog posts a lot more frequently. For several reasons, number one being they are damn easy to create.

Basically, you need to write a powerful info-packed blog post. Once created, just share it with your email list and they’ll read it. If you know how to blog, it can become a more integral part of your marketing strategy.

You can use your blog to promote affiliate products, but more importantly; sell your own core products. For example, you might have a membership site. If you do have a membership site, a blog is an excellent way to promote it.

So every time you write a blog post, use it to promote your membership site. If you post a video on your blog, put a link to your membership site below the video. With that setup, keep pumping out quality content and sending your subscribers to it.

Your subscribers will eat up your blog content, and you’ll drive a lot of sales to your own products. Your blog should brand yourself/your company and ultimately your products/membership site.

2. Video

Videos really are the best way to interact with your list and build real relationships. People love videos, it’s effortless for them. What should you create videos about?

Anything that’s relevant and new. Whenever there’s industry news, create a video expressing your opinion on the subject.

It’s not rocket science; building rapport is all about sharing free content that genuinely helps your subscribers, and leveraging it to make sales. Videos are the best way of interacting with people online.

They show the real you, your voice is powerful! It lets people know you’re a real person. I always record my videos, use private hosting and stick them on their own page. The other option is combining blog posts with video. Whatever you do, just provide lots of value for free.

3. Tutorials

The third species of content as I like to call it is tutorials. Text, audio or video tutorials teaching your subscribers how to do something very specific. It could be tutorial on building backlinks, generating traffic, marketing on facebook, setting up a website or even an email list.

You can create tutorials via video or blog posts teaching just about anything. You can also use tutorials to sell tools and other products.

4. Free Reports

Again, people love free reports. A free report doesn’t have to be anything complex or even detailed. It’s just a word document you write and save as PDF format. People enjoy free reports and will be grateful when you send them one.

Since I’m mainly based in the Internet Marketing/Network Marketing niche, I write reports about stuff like list building, email marketing, search engine optimization, blogging, conversions and marketing. Anything related to your niche will do.

If you’re in the weight loss niche, you could write a free report on 10 foods that shed fat. Anything that will provide value to your subscribers and help them get to where they want to be.

When you send out free reports, make sure your subscribers know its killer information that is “about to be sold to the public soon”, but is temporarily free just for them.

Most people look at free reports as free products, low-value. It’s important that you tell them it’s about to be sold or was previously selling for X amount of dollars.

If you brand it as a free report you threw together then your subscribers won’t think it’s very valuable. However if you tell them it was previously selling or is about to be sold for X amount of dollars, they will download it, read it and rapport will be built.

Just remember: Free stuff doesn’t get much attention.

5. Webinars

Webinars are the latest content delivery mechanism. Webinars allow you to stream live video to your subscriber’s screens, in real time.

You can use them to teach just about anything. The cool thing about webinars is that you can always pitch a product/service at the end and throw in a ‘time sensitive offer’.

Because the webinar is live, it’s a live offer; which ignites a buying impulse within attendees. If you want to start using webinars, I recommend buying a course since it’s a complex strategy/subject. To create webinars you need a recording software like Camtasia, Power-point and a webinar software like Go To Webinar.

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more marketing tips, tricks and secrets.

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by David Wood

The Affect Effect: The Art Of Creating Self Fulfilling Prophecies

November 13, 2012 in abundance, David's Rants, Indirect Suggestion, NLP

A few years ago, I noticed that in creating rapport with my audience, I had to help people trust me in phases.

There are a lot of reasons for this, the main one, however, is that if I ask you to jump to a decision quickly, it can either create the desired result – or not.  For example, someone might not decide to trust you if you ask for a decision before they feel connected, and they feel that what you’re saying is true.  Today, I’m going to teach you how to create a special kind of trust, if you could remember – the kind of trust that you have, when you decide to buy, that’s what I’m going to help you create.

By the end of this article, you’ll feel more confident in your ability to persuade others to your way of thinking, and get people to buy stuff.

When you create trust with a leader, for example, you don’t just immediately decide to buy a product because you were told to – you go through several phases, that look something like this:

The 5 Steps To Creating Self Fulfilling Prophecies:

1.  Your attention is entirely captivated, in the moment, by something – it could be anything.  Maybe for a moment, you could forget the future, and remember a time in the past when your attention was totally captivated.  One time, I spoke at No Excuses Summit.  Everyone was serious, and I started my speech with this intro video. Keep in mind – every speaker but me wore a suit and a tie. After you watch the video, pay attention to what’s on your mind, I think you’ll find something interesting:

Notice how, when you saw that, your attention is totally captivated?

2.  You feel you like the person, and that you are like them, or can relate to them by some sort of connected experience.  People relate to you through archetypes (more on a future blog post) and through stories of struggle and victory.

Can you remember a time when you were broke?  I can.  I’ve probably been broker than you.  The cool thing, is that by applying these strategies, and deciding to take massive action now, in the moment – I went from absolute poverty to a $30,000 a month income in less than 90 days.  You can, too.

3.  You feel that what a leader is saying is valuable for some reason, or perhaps that there is something missing, that you don’t know – that they know.  Maybe you can remember a time, when your attention was captivated, and then you began to feel like what someone was saying had a unique kind of value, that if you listened, it would change your life.

Take a moment, right now – and remember a time, when you did that.

4.  Some kind of evidence based self fulfilling prophecy happens.  The leader tells you that something is going to happen, and it happens in the way that they said – or does it?

That’s where it gets confusing, I’ll get to the 5th thing a bit later.

Have you ever had someone tell you that something was going to happen, and it happened?  I remember a time, when I was talking to a leader, and he told me, as I listened, that I would get a particular kind of feeling, and that I should pay attention to that feeling.  He said that my gut would tell me to do the right thing, and that I would know the right thing to do.

As he spoke, it was maybe 5 minutes later, and I noticed that I started to feel a particular kind of feeling in my body, and I asked the question:

“Wow – is this my gut? telling me to make a decision?”

Was it?

:)

Learning To Utilize THAT PHENOMENON is called: The Affect Effect.

Read this blog post, too, and tell me your thoughts on creating self fulfilling prophecies.

-David Wood
“I punch wussies in the face“

P.S.  This is a picture of me, taking it in the ass with weanie, itsy bitsy commissions, before I learned the secret that you’re about to learn in this video:

P.S.  If you thought this was badass, leave your thoughts below.

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by David Wood

Adverbial Clauses – How To Use Indirect Suggestion Patterns To Create More Influence and Sales…

November 12, 2012 in abundance, Indirect Suggestion, NLP, Persuasion

While you get ready to master the principles of influence, you’ll discover that there are several ways of getting people to make a decision.  Here are two different ways you’ll find useful as you get others to take the action you want:

Direct Suggestion – Using Direct Commands:

A direct command is the most commonly used kind of call to action.  In my opinion, you probably don’t use them enough in your marketing, and if you did, you would immediately get better results.  Now, here are some examples:

As you’re reading this blog post, you’ll notice on the right side of the page – a convenient place to put your name and email address.  Go ahead and put your name and email in the form, hit the button that says ‘Get Instant Access’ and watch the video that appears on the next page.  As you do, make a mental note of how many times I command you to join, and how it creates the desire to buy now.

Go ahead, and put your name and email in the form on the right side of this blog post.  After you do that, hit the button – the blue one, that says ‘Get Instant Access’ – you’ll immediately get instant access to a video that has done nearly $20 million in product sales in the last 12 months.  That video will unlock the secret to creating the money that you want.  Go ahead, and put your name and email in the form – and hit the button now.

Here is a video that contains a massive amount of direct suggestions – watch it now, make notes of how many direct commands I make, and tell me in the comments below this post.  Here’s the video:

After you watch the video, you’ll find yourself having the desire to put your name and email in the form below this blog post, and you may even want to pull out a pen, and a piece of paper, and take notes on what you’re about to learn.  You may even find yourself having the desire to buy, and that’s ok – you can do that now, at the end of the video.

Indirect Suggestion Patterns – How To Use An Adverbial Clause Call To Action.

There are about 1,000 techniques that I’ve learned, and come up with to use indirect suggestion in my marketing.  The difference between direct, and indirect suggestion is that people don’t always accept direct calls to action.

The two kinds of people that are the best at creating mass influence through indirect suggestion are politicians, and religious leaders.  Most of them aren’t consciously aware of what they’re doing, and that’s ok.  You can do these things unconsciously, and it will still help you get the results that you want.

Lol.

An Adverbial Clause is one indirect call to action pattern.  Basically, you create a strong assumption through your words that whatever follows an event is going to happen.  You do it, however, in a way that doesn’t appear to be a direct command.

Let me give you several examples of an adverbial clause you can use now, to get more money.

After you read this, you’ll immediately feel more confident in your ability to get others to take action…

After you put your name and email in the form, you’ll see a video that will immediately give you power to get money like politicians do…

During the video that you’ll see when you hit the button that says “Get Instant Access” you’ll notice that you are drawn in to my words…

As your bank account starts filling up with direct, 100% commissions, you’ll laugh at how easy it really was…

Before you decide to join, you’ll notice that you always get a certain kind of feeling, and maybe you’re even feeling it now…

Those are just a few examples of adverbial clauses you can use in your marketing, spread out naturally, you’ll find that you become more powerful, persuasive, and that instantly, people like you start to join, automatically.

You may even do that now, by clicking here – if you have the desire.

Assignment to get better at adverbial clauses:

1.  Go ahead, and put your name and email in the form on the right side of this blog post.

2.  Watch the video that you’ll see after you hit the button that says “Get Instant Access”

3.  Make a note of how many times I use an adverbial clause in the video.

4.  Buy this $25 blog, and write a blog post about what you learned.

After you follow those four steps, you’ll feel yourself having more confidence and power, and you’ll immediately start to become more persuasive and powerful… automatically.

-David Wood
“I punch wussies in the face” 

P.S.  Leave me your thoughts below, and tell me how many times I use an adverbial clause in the video, that you’re about to see… when you fill in the form now.

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by davidmwood

8 Ways To Get In The Mood For Writing

June 11, 2012 in Article Marketing, Blogging

How To Get In The Mood For Writing

Ninety percent of the time, I have set times for my daily tasks. I get along fine with near everything in my schedule, I can start and finish tasks without hesitation.

…Apart from writing. Writing is utterly different. It requires a part of our brain to suddenly activate when it hasn’t been used for sometimes days. The creative side.  Not only that, in order to produce high quality writing – we need:

  1. Creativity
  2. Focus
  3. Fast Thinking
  4. Patience

I used to really struggle with my writing, in fact as soon as I started writing I would become extremely restless. Writing good content whether it be a novel, article, column or blog post requires patience and focus. Patience and focus are the two key factors to producing high quality content.

In the beginning you always feel the need to get up or do another job; but if you work past those initial restless moments you’ll get into the zone of non-stop output. So here are 8 ways to get in the mood for writing.

1. Find A Writing Spot

You know how they advise people to seperate business from home life? Well, the same thing applies to writing. If you’re writing in the same place you do other work or even eat breakfast; you generally feel the need to do other work or eat breakfast whilst in those same places. The brain associates certain places with doing certain things.

The best thing you can do is have a designated writing spot in your home or even work place. As your brain gradually learns to associate the writing spot with actively writing and being creative; it will. You’ll find it much easier to slip into the writing state of mind and almost instantaneously produce good content.

2. Get Out The House

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try; you just need to get outside. You need to escape the office/writing spot shackles and burn some energy. If you find yourself needing to run or simply exercise; it’s because you’re not burning off enough steam.

The best way to burn off annoying energy is to go for a 10 minute run, lift some weights, hit the gym once a day or for some writers; smoke a cigarette (for some reason it works). Otherwise just step outside for a few minutes or take the dog for a walk. Going outside opens and clears the mind. The idea is to burn energy and take your mind off writing.

3. Plan Your Writing

This is the first thing teachers taught us back in middle school. How to plan your writing before you begin. Any great novelist will know how extraordinarily powerful a plan is.

By mapping out what you’re going to write before you write it; the brain easily fills in the gaps and is surprisingly faster at being creative.

4. Write Anything… Quickly

This is a strategy that I don’t really practice because once I get in the zone (which I do quickly), I can write for hours. One of the ways I first got over writer’s block was by writing anything, quickly. Literally just write whatever comes to mind.

It doesn’t even have to be anything to do with the subject you’re supposed to be writing about. The idea is to write about anything that comes to mind so your brains gets used to writing down your thoughts as they come to you.

5. Learn About The Subject

Back when I had a plan to write a blog post every day, I struggled the most. I had to write an article every single day about something new and completely different. A lot of the time my problem was that I just didn’t know enough about what I was writing about.

As soon as I started writing by reading a few similar articles by reputable writers or bloggers; the daily task became a whole lot easier. So that’s what you need to do. Before you write an article, blog post or whatever else; read a few similar articles. Most of the time you won’t need to do that much research. But even if you’re an expert on a subject, reading other writer’s opinions helps clarify things and really helps you structure your content a whole lot more effectively.

6. Read Past Work

This is a great way to get back into the writing zone. Simply by reading some of your past work. If you’re writing a novel or a really long article; always do this. Read the past few pages to jog your memory a little. Reading past work always helps you get in the mood for writing – especially when your writing is good.

7. Eliminate Distractions

This is a no brainer for obvious reasons. Eliminate all distractions.

  • Young kids running around the house? Lock them outside.
  • Aggressive dog barking? Throw the kids & the dog in a room and lock it (rid them both).
  • Television? Destroy it!
All jokes aside, get rid of all distractions and your head will feel a lot clearer.

8. Music

For some reason, music activates the pleasure center of our brains and makes us happy to some extent. And for some reason; music helps many of us write. It helps us concentrate and boosts productivity. As long as it’s not too loud, it generally helps us get in the mood for writing.

The trick is to make listening to music in your writing spot with all distractions off and everything else part of your writing process. All things you do when you write. The more you repeat the process, the more swiftly your brain will start being creative and write good content!

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions in the form below.

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by davidmwood

An SEO Strategy For WordPress Blogs

February 13, 2012 in Blogging, SEO

SEO Strategy For WordPress BlogsMost newbies who start a WordPress blog don’t know much about search engine optimization. In fact, most of them don’t even know how they’re going to get any traffic. They just figure once they start posting content the people will come.

The sad truth is… they won’t. If you want lots of blog traffic, you need to drive it.

There’s social media, video marketing and a whole bunch of other strategies. However if you want a sure-fire strategy that’s guaranteed to generate long term traffic – SEO is the answer.

I’ve tried and tested many SEO strategies and if you’re running a WordPress blog, this strategy is for you:

1. Identify And Set Home Page Keywords

The first thing you should do is find a group of high competition keywords for your home page. Your home page will always have more authority than any other page on your blog. So therefore it can rank for the most competitive keywords that get the most searches.

Over time as you post content and build links to your internal pages, your home page will acquire authority. So the more authority it obtains the easier it will rank for high competition keywords. That’s why you should identify and set a group of 3-6 keywords for your blog’s home page.

If you have a blog about Acne, they could be “acne”, “acne cure” and “acne treatment”. Whatever high competition keywords you want, shoot for the stars as long term you will rank for them. Once you find your dream keywords, incorporate them into your blog’s homepage title and description.

2. Post 1-3 Times A Day Targeting Long Tail Keywords

This is where the fast traffic kicks in. You can use your blog posts to target long tail keywords that are easy to rank for and low in competition. By long tail I just mean keywords with low competition and little searches. For my blog posts I always target keywords with over 500 searches a month, but 300 searches are acceptable if they are highly targeted.

The best thing to do is to compile a list of 50 starter keywords. Then over the next month or so you can write 50 blog posts targeting each one. Now because the keywords will have little competition you’ll rank for them quickly and generate fast traffic. You’ll also build up a nice flow of “residual search engine traffic” as long as your rankings remain.

3. Syndicate Your Blog Posts

Syndicating your blog posts is the best way to announce them to world, drive a little traffic and get those rankings you need. By syndicating I mean taking your posts and sharing them on social networks, bookmarking and other social sites. The best way to do this is by using Ping.fm. Ping.fm is a completely free service that allows you to syndicate your blog posts onto 30+ different social networks.

You need to join, create accounts on all of the 30+ social networks and connect them. Once done you can go to the dashboard, enter the title and URL of your blog posts and syndicate them. It’s a really simple way of announcing your new posts, getting some initial backlinks and rankings.

4. Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is the easiest form of link building. You just have to find relevant blogs similar to your own, read their posts and leave comments. Nearly every blog allows their readers to comment and leave a link back to their own blogs.

You just have to find a few different blogs in your niche, read their new posts and comment dropping a link back to your blog. Blog comment backlinks are quite worthless but they are great initial links. Also when other readers see your comments they might be tempted to checkout your blog.

5. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the next step to promoting your blog, driving traffic and building super high quality backlinks. Guest blogging is just writing for other blogs in your niche. Usually you write a high quality post for their readers and in return get 1 or 2 links back to your blog.

Depending on what niche you’re in, you may or may not find other blogs that accept guest posts. If you can’t find relevant blogs in your niche that have a “guest post” or “write for us” page, just email them and make a proposal. Before you email anyone write your guest post.

Put a lot of effort into it as it can easily be rejected. Once you have a blog post you think will fit on your potential guest post blogs, email them. Just attach the post, explain who you are and that they can publish your post as long as you get a small author resource box with a link back to your blog.

It works very well. Guest blogging is the best way to get authority backlinks from your competitors and it’s also excellent for driving traffic.

6. Link Building

There are many other ways to build links, but the 1 strategy I recommend that’s highly effective post panda is using blog networks. Blog networks seem to currently be the most effective link building strategy. They involve writing, spinning and submitting articles to networks of blogs.

It’s really simple stuff and you can read about the top 3 free blog networks here.

7. Study Your Traffic Via Analytics

Step 7 is by far the more important. Pay close attention to your analytics account! Look at where your traffic is coming from and which keywords are sending you the most visitors. Once you identify the sites and keywords that are sending you most traffic, you can focus on them to maximize your promotional efforts.

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below! Also opt-in to the email list on the right of this page for more cool SEO tips, tricks and secrets.

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by davidmwood

5 Steps To Promoting Your Blog Posts Immediately After Publishing

January 31, 2012 in Blog, Blogging, Internet Marketing

Promoting Your Blog PostsEvery week I publish several blog posts. Some on here and some on other blogs, I have many.

Even though I follow the same set of rules for every post I publish, they all get different results. Some are more popular than others; it’s just the way it goes.

However, for the last couple of months I’ve had some VERY popular blog posts.

All because I’ve been following these 5 steps immediately after I hit the publish button.

1. Share On Facebook And Twitter

To get the word out about your new blog post, use social media! Start by sharing your post on Twitter. Very straightforward process, login to your blog’s Twitter account and share the post. Next head over to Facebook and share the post on your wall.

I’ve found sharing posts on my wall to be a slight waste of time. As the majority of my friends and family don’t give a crap about Internet/Network Marketing related stuff. So on top of your wall; share your new post on your Facebook page.

If you don’t already have a dedicated fan page for your blog; just get one. Besides your wall and fan page, you can share your post on a couple of other groups/pages related to your niche. The more pages, groups and profiles you share your post on; the more Facebook likes it’s going to get and the more popular it will become (generally speaking).

2. Re-read Post

Why didn’t I put this one first? Well… because you need a few minutes to clear your mind. What I’ve found is that whenever I immediately re-read one of my blog posts I hardly spot anything wrong with it… But when I come back to it 10 or 15 minutes later, I end up correcting 5 or 10 errors. Maybe I structured a sentence badly; maybe I made a spelling or grammar mistake.

After training my mind to just write without looking back at what I’ve just written; it’s hard to immediately activate my “editing mind”. So take a few minutes for other tasks and then proof read your blog post for any mistakes.

3. Email List

This is always the second or third thing I do whenever I publish a blog post; email my list of subscribers. My subscribers are generally the people who like reading my stuff and hearing what I have to say. They’re my readers who happily comment, Facebook, Google Plus and Tweet my post. So obviously; to get the comments flowing and traffic pouring in, I email them.

Of course, you need to be building a list of subscribers to do this. If you aren’t already then I recommend using Aweber since it’s the industry standard. Just write a short email telling your subscribers to check out your new blog post. Most of them will read it, some will share it with their Facebook & Google plus friends, some will Tweet it. No matter what; traffic will dramatically increase and new visitors will appear.

4. Submit Via TribePro

If you don’t know, TribePro is this genius content syndication platform that allows you to get your content shared on hundreds of accounts at all of the top social networks and bookmarking sites. Its super effective for getting instant traffic, backlinks and search engine rankings for your new blog posts.

5. Share Via Ping.fm

Ping.fm is another cool little service that allows you to manage all of your social profiles from 1 dashboard. In simple terms; it allows you to submit any message/link to over 30 social networks/bookmarking sites/web2.0 sites. Really easy to do: just signup, login and connect all your social profiles (I recommend joining all of the sites listed and connecting them).

Once done you just need to login to the dashboard, input a line of text like your blog post title followed by the URL and hit submit. Ping.fm will then submit the message along with the link to all of the accounts (hopefully 30+) you have connected.

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below! Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more cool blogging tips, tricks and secrets.

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by davidmwood

The Ultimate Guide To Creating Excellent Blog Posts

December 30, 2011 in Blog, Blogging

Blog PostsAs an avid blogger, I spend a lot of time thinking of new ideas and creating blog posts. To begin with I really struggled to produce good content on a regular basis. It seemed after two months of writing I had run out of ideas. I had literally gone through everything on the subject of Network/Internet Marketing and I didn’t know what to do.

Even if you do have ideas… If you can’t properly structure them in an easy to read blog post then you’re wasting your time. So I decided to put together a simple guide to help you create your blog posts:

1. Planning

I would definitely say planning is the most important component of a great blog post. I think before you even open WordPress admin or whatever page you use to publish blog posts, create a plan. Honestly, the best thing to use is an old fashioned paper and pen. Planning is a simple process, over the period of 10 minutes, you need to write down:

  1. Post Title
  2. Description
  3. Intro
  4. Paragraphs/Structure/Style/Numbers/Bullet Points

First jot your ideas down on a piece of paper. Once you have a solid idea you think you could write about, think of a description. The description is really what the post is going to be about. Straight after that, you should write an intro. Lastly you should write up a template for the post. Structure it by writing sub headlines for the paragraphs or numbered bullet points for each point you want to make.

2. The Title

After you’ve fully planned out your post, think about your title again. Your title is usually what makes people click on your post. Since I started blogging I’ve been experimenting with hundreds of different titles. Whatever your title, it must match and briefly explain what your post is about. For me, numbered titles have always worked best. For example, “7 Ways To Drive More Traffic” or “Top 9 Traffic Generation Strategies”. Spend a little while on your title, make sure it briefly explains the post and is very attractive!

3. The Introduction

The introduction is what fully grabs people’s attention and sends them into an almost hypnotic trance of reading your blog post. Most Internet Users have an attention span of a few seconds. So you must capture then in your introduction. In your intro, you need to sum up your entire post and clearly explain why your readers should read it.

4. The Structure

The third thing I do whenever I write a blog post is structure the content. Structuring is essentially creating a blog post template. First you need to decide what kind of post you want to write. Whether it be just a load of paragraphs with sub headlines, bullet points or my favorite; numbered paragraphs. Out of everything I’ve tried numbered lists work best. For example “3 ways to” “4 strategies for” or “the top 10”.  It could be “The Top 10 Link Building Strategies”. In the example post you could list the top 10 link building strategies in numbered bullet points before you start. So…

  1. Article Marketing
  2. Web2.0’s
  3. Press Releases

You get the idea right? Just structure your post’s content so you know exactly what to write.

5. Spacing

Once you’ve structured the post you can start writing. As soon as you’ve finished you should proof read it and then do the spacing. The spacing is actually extremely important and if you get it wrong; you can end up losing a huge percentage of all visitors. The spacing (line breaks) really affect how long people read your paragraphs for.

If people spend too long reading the same block of text, their eyes will start to get lost and they’ll forget which line they’re on. As a minimum use 2-5 lines per paragraph. Only ever use 5 or more when needed.

6. Finishing Touches

At this point you should have your post complete; so all you have to do is add the finishing touches. The finishing touches are:

  1. Call To Action
  2. Images
  3. Links

First you need to finish your blog post with a strong call to action. Your call to action is essentially the reason you wrote your blog post. If you don’t have 1 clear objective; you’re never going to get anywhere. Your call to action could be to get your visitors on your email list, subscribed to your RSS feed or even to simply comment on your blog posts.

Whatever it is, have one! As without a clear call to action you’re just writing for the sake of writing which is pointless. Generally with every blog post I write, I have one very clear call to action. What’s important is that you actually state your call to action. You need to ask or tell your readers exactly what you want them to do\. Usually I’ll do it in my P.S. line or at the very bottom of my article.

A typical one is “P.S. Leave me your thoughts, questions and comments below. Also put your name and email address in the form on the right for more cool blogging tips, tricks and secrets”.

Besides that I’ll ask my readers to like me on Facebook, subscribe to my RSS feed or even just leave a comment. Next are the images. Most of the time I just use one main image at the top of my blog post. However if I’m writing a really important post or trying to get a clear message across; I’ll make the most of the images I have available.

Lastly is links, inserting links is the final step to creating a killer blog post. By links I mean external and internal. If you’re using an internal linking plugin like SEO smart links then you hardly need to screw around manually building links to your other pages. However it’s good for your SEO to link certain keywords you find pop up in your post to certain pages/posts on your blog.

Besides internal links, you need to actually link to other sites in order to make some money. You should link certain phrases to affiliate products, capture pages, sales funnels or even plain affiliate links. I know some of the biggest blogs on the Internet externally like out to Amazon like crazy. The point is, link to certain sites/pages/affiliate links where necessary.

Once done, you’re practically ready to press the big “Publish” button. You just need to preview your post in a new window, make sure everything is in the right size, proof read the content once more and that’s it. Once you’ve done all of the above, you can hit publish!

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions in the area below. Also put your name and email address in the form on the right for more cool blogging tips, tricks and secrets.

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by davidmwood

How To Exponentially Grow A Blog In Less Than 3 Months

December 28, 2011 in Blog, Blogging

Grow A BlogAs someone who runs countless blogs, I’m often asked how I promote them. Just about anyone can start a blog, it’s not difficult whatsoever. Yet hardly anyone knows how to promote their stuff and actually drive lots of traffic. As in reality, blogging is simple and so is traffic generation. BUT – hardly anyone knows how to exponentially grow a blog in a SHORT period of time.

Normally growing a successful blog takes at least 6 months to 2 years. That’s the normal time period when using traditional strategies. Publishing posts once or twice a week, using social media and stuff like article marketing. So I decided to break down a very simple strategy anyone can use to exponentially grow a blog in as little as 90 days.

1. Post Daily

There’s a lot to be said about post frequency. If you’d like to grow your blog as quickly as possible, you need to post on a daily basis. Generally the more content you post, the more traffic you’ll get. In the beginning when you’re growing your blog, quantity is key. As a rule you should post 1-3 posts per day.

2. SEO

The next step to exponentially grow a blog is good SEO. Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to promote your blog and generate long term traffic. It’s simple to do, very straightforward and the whole process can almost be automated. If you’re not familiar with SEO, it’s essentially optimizing your blog and its content to rank in the search engines for targeted keywords.

The first step to good SEO is targeting keywords in every blog post you publish. As a rule of thumb, you should target a keyword that gets over 300 searches a month. That’s a potential 10 visitors a day which is the bare minimum I go after. The process is simple; you find a keyword, optimize your content for the keyword and finish off by doing some off page optimization.

Off page optimization is just link building. Since link building is such a broad subject, you can read more on it here. Many blogs seriously lack SEO. The other day I was chatting to someone at a drinks party and she was telling me about her company’s website. She says her main job at the company is to run the website, promote it and make sure it gets lots of traffic.

For the money she’s getting paid, I was surprised to hear the site was only getting 4000 visitors per month. It turns out all that traffic came from social media and only about 300 visitors came from the search engines. The search engines should be your main source of traffic. Use SEO as much as you can. It’s the fastest way to promote your content and start driving long term traffic.

3. Social Media

Social media is powerful, it’s the ultimate way to build a community and rank quickly in the search engines. This year, Google thought it was a good idea to start incorporating social signals into its algorithm. Right now Google uses Facebook likes, Tweets, Retweets and G+1’s to influence search engine rankings. For some unknown reason, backlinks from social sites give you an instant boost in the search engines.

That’s why it’s so essential. To start with you need social sharing buttons on your blog posts. Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus buttons are all mandatory. So when people like one of your posts, they can easily share it with their friends on their favorite social networks. Besides social buttons, you need to do some actual promotion.

First, you need a dedicated Twitter account and Facebook fan page. Fan pages are incredibly powerful and can be used to attract thousands of monthly visitors. On top of a Fan page, you need a group. Once you have them all setup, you should automatically syndicate your new posts onto them. So whenever you publish a blog post, it automatically gets shared on your Facebook page, wall, group and Twitter account.

Doing so gives you an initial burst of backlinks and ranking power in the search engines. Using a tool called Hootsuite; you can automatically syndicate your new posts onto your Facebook network, Twitter account/s and many other social networks. Use it!

Guest Authors

Now this is the fourth step you can take to exponentially grow your blog. Before you get to this step, you need to promote the crap out of your content. That means some serious SEO and social media; I only scratched the surface in this post. Now let’s face it, posting a high quality blog post every day of the week is a little too time consuming.

Before I accepted guest authors, I struggled to publish 3 posts per week. In order to exponentially grow your blog and generate thousands of daily visitors, you need guest authors. You need to accept/pay for other people to write for your blog. You need to completely outsource your blog’s content. If you’re still going through the growing phase, no one’s going to write for you blog for free.

You’re going to have to spend $5-10 for a decent quality article. Once your blog is successful and has gained a following, others in the niche will happily give you free content in return for a link or two to their website/blog. But until then, you need to pay for content!

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Put your name and email in the form on the right for more cool blogging tips, tricks and secrets. Also leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below!

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by davidmwood

How To Build A Community And Increase Blog Traffic

December 16, 2011 in Blog, Blogging, Internet Marketing

Increase Blog Traffic

This is the second part of my post “How To Build A Community And Get More Blog Traffic
“. I didn’t want to bore anyone with a 2000 word blog post, so I thought I would break it down into 2 easy to read posts. Here’s the second part and if you haven’t already read part one, click here…

Building The Community

There are 2 strategies I use every day in my business to build my blog’s community. They are:

  • Email Marketing
  • Social Media

Let’s start with email marketing since it’s the first thing you should learn about when growing a community. What builds community is lots of the same people reading your blog posts, commenting and sharing them. The biggest blogs in this niche have 100,000+ people who read every other blog post they publish. With that staggering number of readers commenting and sharing their posts, their traffic generation is taken care of. That’s where social media comes into play for me; my community sharing my posts on their favorite social networks.

So to begin with; you need to use Aweber or another autoresponder to start building your list of blog subscribers. You can market your list as your “blog newsletter” or anything like that. Just stick an opt-in form in your blog’s sidebar and add a popup if you want to increase conversions. Once you have your opt-in form/s in place and the traffic is flowing, your list of subscribers should naturally start to grow.

Now all you have to do is email your list every time you publish a new blog post. Email them telling them about the post you just wrote, ask them to read it and leave their thoughts in the comments. Doing that is the first stage of building a community and growing your blog to new heights. Let’s say you get 200 visitors a day, you should get at least 10 subscribers/day out of the 200 people visiting your blog. That’s just 5% and with a good opt-in form not hard to achieve whatsoever.

So over the course of 3 months, you should have around 1000 or more subscribers. Let’s say you have 1000 email subscribers and you publish a new post. Straight after you email your list about it around 600 of them turn up to read your post. That’s 600 souls checking out your new post. Think how many of them will leave comments and share your posts after they’ve read a couple of them. Powerful stuff!

Next is social media. This isn’t normal social media blog promotion stuff; this is email marketing social media stuff. Completely different “stuff”. Hundreds of millions of people use Facebook and Twitter along with many other social networks. For the sake of this post, I’m only going to talk about Facebook and Twitter. To increase engagement and grow your blog community on a huge scale, connect with your subscribers on the two social networks!

The concept is simple. You’re tripling the chances of your subscribers reading your posts. You should already be sharing your blog posts on Facebook and Twitter. If you’re not then go ahead and start doing it. Whenever you do share your new blog posts on Facebook & Twitter, your friends/followers on the two social networks will see that you’ve shared the post.

Therefore many of them will click through and check it out. So by connecting with all of your email subscribers on the two most used social networks, you’re tripling your chances of them reading your latest stuff. Not only will they see your blog post in their inbox, but in their Twitter feed and on their Facebook wall. After seeing the same blog post title on the 3 sites they probably use most – they won’t be able to stop themselves from checking out your post.

Why do you think they play the same adverts over and over again on TV? It’s because large companies know it’s not just the volume of people who see their ad/s, but the frequency. In other words… The more times people see something, the more likely they are to check it out. Usually after the first or second time a person sees or hears something, they subliminally desire to learn more. Cool stuff I know!

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Put your name and email in the form on the right for more cool blogging tips, tricks and of course secrets! Also – leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below.

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by davidmwood

How To Promote Your Blog In 4 Simple Steps

December 15, 2011 in Blog, Blogging, Internet Marketing

How To Promote Your BlogEvery blogger dreams of having thousands of followers and daily blog visitors. For most people it’s just a dream, but for others it’s reality. So I wanted to talk about how anyone can promote their blog in 4 easy steps. When I first got started I didn’t do any of these steps and I struggled for a while, well over 6 months to be precise. But once I understood these concepts and started implementing the strategies I’m about to reveal; my blog took off!

So here are just 4 easy steps you can use to promote your blog and grow a community of avid readers:

  1. Email Marketing

Email marketing is probably the most important thing one can do to grow a blog. The majority of new bloggers take a shot at making money with advertising, but the smart guys know building a list is far more profitable in the long run. Building an email list of your blog subscribers has countless benefits.

First you have an actual email list can sell stuff to. Promote affiliate offers and of course your own products. Also having an email list is like having a group of followers that listen to every word you say. It’s like having a massive group of fans you can send anywhere you like at any time you choose. Sure, you can make money with email marketing, but how do you use it to promote your blog?

Simple, you email your list every time you publish a new blog post! Yep – you can easily use Aweber to install a form in the sidebar of your blog. Maybe you’ll get just 10 subscribers per day. That’s 300 new subscribers per month. Let’s say after 3 months of doing it you have 1000 people subscribing to your blog newsletter/list. Whenever you publish a blog post, you can email the link to them and get around 500-900 of your 1000 subscribers reading your blog post minutes later.

After you send the same people to your new blog posts a couple of time, a community will start to build itself right in front of your eyes. Your subscribers will start commenting and sharing your posts on their favorite social networks! That’s the power of using email marketing to grow your blog.

2. Grow A Community (Connect With Followers)

Growing a community is the biggest thing you can do for your blog to make it an immense success. After all, a community is what every blogger wants right? People commenting, sharing and raving about their content etc. Anyway, there are a couple of ways to grow a community around your blog.

The first is to attract the RIGHT readers. Random visitors coming from the search engines are a lot harder to convert into loyal subscribers than from other sources. The best source of traffic for community building is guest blogging and blog commenting. As by blogging on elder established blogs in your niche, you can steal or borrow some of their community. The big blogs in most niches have a huge following.

So if you can put a great post in front of them which they like, they will checkout your blog and most likely subscribe. Then after doing the next few tricks you can grow a real community. Once you’re getting the right traffic and building a list, you need to make personal connections with every subscriber. You do this by adding them on Facebook; following them on Twitter and any other social networks they’re on. You can do it manually or hire someone to do this for you.

Basically, the more social networks you connect with them on the more exposure your blog will get. Why? Well because you’ll be syndicating your new posts onto Twitter, Facebook, other social networks and you’ll be emailing the posts to your subscribers. So by connecting with them on the social networks they’ll see your latest posts in their inbox, Facebook wall and in their Twitter feed. Those are the three main networks which make your subscribers 3 times more likely to read your posts.

3. Guest Authors

This is a huge step that can’t be taken very easily – but this is the only difficult one. When you get to the point where you’re getting tons of traffic and you have a nice community – the demand for your content will go up. One or two posts a week isn’t going to cut it, so you need guest authors!

It’s simple enough to do, you just create a page explaining how it works and the benefits people will receive from guest posting on your blog. Followed by your post guidelines and a submission box. Then just stick the page in your sidebar and if you are getting enough traffic – the guest authors will come. However you need a lot of traffic and authority to spark the interest of decent guest bloggers.

Your blog should be Page Rank 3 or above and you should be getting 500+ visitors a day. Once you get to that point or above you’ll have plenty of people begging to post their content on your blog. If you’re not quite there yet, work on link building to boost Page Rank and post more regularly. If you’re getting less traffic but have a nice Page Rank – you can email other blog owners asking if they’d like to guest post. You’d be surprised how many people will say yes.

By doing the above you’ll get far more high quality content on hopefully a daily basis. Therefore feeding the demand and growing your blog at an exponential rate!

4. Link Building

Link building is obviously a major step to blogging success. Without lots of backlinks, your great content will be nothing. No one will ever see or hear about your blog PERIOD. In the beginning when you’re gaining that authority status and making your blog popular – search engine traffic is key. It’s one of the best sources for fast and reliable traffic. There are two steps to start getting more search engine traffic:

In every blog post you write, target a keyword that’s getting searched at least 300 times per month. That’s a potential of 10 visitors a day, if you know a lot about SEO then aim for 500 or more. Then straight after you’ve published a blog post, syndicate it everywhere. This bit covers the social side of SEO and gets you those initial rankings. You can syndicate your posts onto Facebook, Twitter and 28 other social networks using Ping.fm which is free by the way.

On top of that you can create a video out of your post and distribute it to video sites linking back. Then spin the post and submit it to a few hundred+ article directories with the help of a tool like Article Marketing Robot. On top of that you can syndicate your posts onto web2.0 sites like Hubpages, WordPress, Squidoo, Wetpaint and Typepad. Web2.0’s are great for building backlinks, use them or install a plugin called WP Syndicator to automatically syndicate every post onto the top 10 web2.0 sites.

That’s about it for link building and everything else, follow these 4 steps and your blog will become ridiculously popular in the next 2-4 months!

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Put your name and email in the form on the right for more cool blogging tips, tricks and secrets. Also leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. :)

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