I'm doing a bit of an experiment in blogging. (And I also wanted somewhere I could just write for pleasure, about me and mine.)
One of the things that marketers always want more of, is traffic. The idea is, the more traffic you have, the more sales you'll do. Hmm, yeah, okay, not always true, but a good general principle to adopt. (What you actually need is well targetted traffic, but even so, any traffic is good.)
I've always said you can get traffic just by writing, and that you also don't need to go out and get loads of backlinks either. The concept is, if you write about anything and everything, you'll start to get search engine traffic because some of what you write will end up on the first couple of pages of Google. (The power of WordPress and the pings it sends to the highly spidered global update servers.)
So I took out a new domain a couple of weeks ago using "Frank Haywood" with a .me extension. (Work it out, okay?)
I don't want to link to it just yet as I want to see how much search traffic it will get just by me doing nothing but writing about stuff that occurs to me, and that I want to write about there and then. (It's good practice for writing other stuff.)
This is proof of concept that just using a self-hosted WordPress blog and then writing every couple of days or so will start to pull search traffic. No backlinks, article marketing or ANY kind of marketing, just writing about stuff that happens to me or pops into my mind, with no thought for good taste or any of the marketing stuff.
As a result, I'll begin to see the kind of things that people are searching for, and I'll learn this almost randomly – it's based purely on what I decide to write on for pleasure.
There's absolutely no monetisation on the site whatsoever yet, and there are only links out to stuff that I find interesting, and NOT marketing related.
Okay?
So three weeks ago I took out the domain, and a week ago I got my first two visitors via Google search for a write up of a cheap camera I bought from Tesco on an impulse buy because of the price. (It's a good camera too – I'm pleased with it.) The camera itself is small enough to fit in my coat pocket, so it's great for taking with me wherever I go, and I can pretty much forget about it until I need it. It took me about an hour to do the write up.
Since then I've had another 7 visitors to the site, all from Google search, and all for that camera.
Now while I didn't write about the camera to make money from the review of it, I did write about it for pleasure and lo and behold, I started to get traffic. I could monetise it by sending people off to the Tesco site using my aff link, but I'm not going to bother as that's not what that site's about.
For now. 
But you tell me. How hard is it to get traffic?
Isn't this proof enough that if you pick a product that looks like it could be popular, and do a little research and a write up about it, that you will inevitably get visitors?
Now here's the thing. People agonise over how to get traffic and then more traffic. It's the one thing I get asked about more often than anything else.
I've proven to myself again that it isn't that hard to get traffic, and yet people still seem to have a difficult time getting the right traffic to their sites to match their topic. That's what I get told.
But maybe, and this is a message to everybody who's interested in earning a living online, you should be looking at it the other way round. Maybe you should instead be looking at what people are searching for, making sure there isn't too much competition, and then supply them useful content based on their interest, and then use your affiliate links to monetise it.
See the subtle difference?
Many people choose a topic that's either too broad or too competitive.
The learning point here is if you want to make money from blogging, then choose a more tightly focussed topic and make sure there's some interest, but also not much in the way of competition.
You'll then find if you write about the subject and because you're filling an empty content gap, Google etc will be interested and take notice of your site.
Okay?
I'll continue to write for pleasure (and to blow off steam every now and then) on that site, and maybe sooner or later I'll come across some niche or another that gets a lot of interest, purely by accident. Who knows what it might be, and when that might happen?
I won't lose any sleep over it because that's not what that site is for, but it's certainly an interesting experiment to do, don't you think?
-Frank Haywood
Filed under internet business, traffic by on Mar 10th, 2010. Comment. 
Or… How To Alienate 30% Of Your Subscribers
I just received an email from a well known marketer (I'm on a LOT of mailing lists) that referred to me as an "overseas person".
It struck me as disconnected and dumb. We all do daft things every now and then, often when we don't have our brains engaged, but this was just dumb, dumb, dumb. One of the dumbest things I've ever seen any marketer do, and an extreme case of being parochial without realising it.
Because of course…
He's overseas, not me. I'm at the centre of civilisation here in the UK, while he lives in what used to be one of our colonies in a country that didn't even exist as such a couple of hundred years ago. So of course he's the the one that's overseas, not me. Ahem. 
Hmm… Do you see how a simple but ill thought out comment can be misconstrued and instant defensive barriers put up? I've now unsubscribed from his mailing list.
Here's a simple tip as to how not to alienate or upset people. Unless your mailing list is specifically about one of the following topics and people are actively interested in receiving information about them, you should never mention any of these. I've unsubscribed from more than one mailing list because of it.
#1 – Sex.
#2 – Politics.
#3 – Religion.
I guarantee if you start talking about any of these taboo subjects, you will upset people.
For instance, you might criticise your government for their style, and instantly you've alienated about half your readers. Or you may say that Jedi is the only true religion, and you thereby manage to upset a HUGE chunk of people.
Nobody wants to hear what you have to say on these subjects unless they've joined your mailing list just so they can find out.
And almost equally, I didn't join that marketers mailing list just to hear myself pigeonholed as "overseas".
-Frank Haywood
Filed under Human Behaviour, internet business, list building by on Feb 22nd, 2010. Comment.
Yesterday evening my wife discovered by experimentation how to easily remove dates from WordPress posts without editing the theme files and without using a WordPress plugin. Otherwise known as dateless posts, it can sometimes be useful to create your blog without dates on any of the posts. Yes you could use pages exclusively, but sometimes that's just not what you want.
We'd first tried to do it with a plugin that was supposed to remove dates, but it was an old plugin and didn't work with the themes we were using, so I'd sort of resigned myself to editing the theme to remove them, but I only wanted to do that as a last resort because if the theme got updated, any customisation is usually lost.
So last night my wife sat quietly fiddling with one of her blogs and found the answer. Well, at least for the theme she was using – SemioLogic Pro – the same theme I use on this site. I've tried it with a couple of other themes and it didn't work, but that doesn't mean to say it won't work for you either now or in the future if the WordPress developers decide to change things a little.
What she did was perfectly logical and easily overlooked. Go to Settings-General and scroll down to Date Format. Select the Custom radio button and delete the contents of the box next to it – you may also have to do it with the time too – and click Save Changes.
Ta-daa!
No more dates on posts.
Not ideal if you want some posts to show dates and others not, and as I said it doesn't work with every theme, but I know that at least some people will find this useful. Hopefully someone will eventually write a plugin that does this properly with post level control, but until then we have to use workarounds like this.
-Frank Haywood
Filed under software by on Feb 21st, 2010. 1 Comment.
Human behaviour – the amount of people who read something but don't absorb the information that's there in black and white and instead choose to apply their own take, often wrong.
What's that all about? What's going on there?
I DO know that we all walk around with filters (prejudices) over our eyes and we see the world as we expect to see it based on those filters. But why would anybody read something, forget or distort vital parts of it, make a decision based on that distortion, and then whine it isn't what they thought it was?
Well no, of course it isn't.
It's quite often actually what it is, not what it was wanted to be.
Just the facts, just the truth.
If you already know what I'm talking about and see that behaviour in the people around you, you'll now be smiling quietly to yourself (or shouting "YES!" at your monitor). If you don't, then watch the world closely and one day you WILL see exactly what I'm talking about.
-Frank Haywood
Filed under Human Behaviour by on Feb 12th, 2010. 1 Comment.
Probably the best thing you can do for your online business is to build a mailing list.
It's always an eye opener for people when I say that the size of your business is a direct reflection of the size of your mailing list. Okay that's not 100% true as there are other variables which I'll talk about shortly, but it is a good indicator.
There are many ways to list build, and a favourite of many people is to offer a freebie in return for a name and email address.
The problem with only using this method is you get what are called "tyre kickers" on your lists. Now that's not a bad thing as over time you can educate your tyre kickers into becoming buyers, but generally speaking if you're building a list, you want to build a list of buyers rather than tyre kickers.
I've found that if you have say 10,000 people on your mailing list that there's a small core of a few hundred people who tend to take notice of what you say.
(If you're reading this then you're probably one of those people, and to you I say Thank You!)
If you think about it, this is one of the variables I mentioned above. It's entirely possible to run a successful business online with just those few hundred people. It's not always size that counts! It's the responsiveness of the people on your mailing list that really makes the difference, and that's obvious when you stop to think about it.
So ideally you want to build lists of a mix of freebie seekers that you can educate over the long term, and more importantly buyers.
I've already mentioned the most common way of building a freebie seekers list – you just give stuff away in return for a name and email address. You might now be thinking to yourself, "Okay so I have to sell stuff in order to build a list of buyers, and that's harder than it sounds."
True.
And one of the reasons it's so hard to build a buyers list is you don't get enough proven buyers visiting the site where you're selling your products. Just increasing your search engine traffic isn't enough, as you could just end up with a pile of freebie seekers at your site who have no intention of buying anything.
So how do you increase the number of proven buyers to your site?
Here it comes. The answer is in four parts.
#1 – You create a low cost product, usually under $17, under $12 is better, and $7 is the magic number.
#2 – You run an affiliate scheme, and let affiliates and joint venture partners send you traffic that consists of people who listen to them. These people are already warm and there's a better than average chance they'll buy.
#3 – You pay 100% commission directly to the affiliate and straight into their PayPal account. Affiliates love this and are always eager to promote.
#4 – On your download page you get them to join your mailing list. There's a simple technique you can use that will turn almost 95% of buyers into subscribers. I'll tell you about that next time.
What happens is as you pick up buyers they immediately turn into affiliates who are all willing to promote your product. Think – they were impressed enough to buy it and so why wouldn't they be impressed enough to also promote it and make back the money they spent buying it?
So you end up with a constant stream of buyers and affiliates, all busy buying and then promoting your product, and ultimately building you a list of buyers which is exactly what you want.
You don't make any money from this product, but you can later sell something else to your list of buyers, or even promote someone elses product, maybe another 100% commission item.
There's also another option where you even upsell directly during the sales process, and take a cut of that sale rather than the front end one.
There are even more variants on this entire process.
You could put a squeeze page on the front of your site, and get a name and email address in return for a freebie, and then offer the full price item as an upsell, and maybe even do another upsell to something else. The full price item could be 100% commission and the second upsell 50%.
Or you could use a DHTML popover on your regular sales page to capture the name and email address instead.
Using either of those you build a list of freebie seekers and a list of buyers at the same time.
It's up to you really how you do it, but I'm sure you can see the benefit? Doesn't all this make perfect sense?
The question you might have now is how you can do it. You need a script that will handle the sales process.
Well first up, both the free and paid for versions of SmartDD will allow you to run a 100% affiliate scheme and also run one time offers at a different percentage commission. Or the Nickel Script will also allow you to run fixed price sales at 100% commission too, but no upsells.
However, probably the simplest method is to use a script that's specially designed to handle the exact scenarios I've mentioned above.
Now the thing is, I thought everyone knew about this script, but I just shouldn't take things like that for granted as I've had several people tell me recently that they'd never heard of it.
What you actually buy is an ebook that describes in detail the advantages of using the above method and exactly how to do it. And what comes with it is the script that will allow you to use this method and pay your affiliates instantly and automatically directly into their PayPal account.
Better still is that there are no databases to set up – the whole thing runs off flat text files just like the Nickel Script does.
But the icing on the cake is the price.
Just $7.
You can get it from here:-
http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/7ds/
-Frank Haywood
Filed under internet business, list building, software by on Feb 9th, 2010. Comment.
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