I’ve done 2 presentations In the past to members of WordPress Goldmine and because they were quite small groups it didn’t really prepare me for a full on seminar like this which had over 120 attendees and 10 other speakers. Let me tell you this,  I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Being able to talk to people at different stages of Internet marketing, from people with multi million dollar income to people who have been in IM for a few months and haven’t made any money yet you get a real feel about what actually matters in IM and more importantly what matters to people.

I am very aware that this was generally a UK centric audience, we did have a few visitors from the US and Europe so maybe the feeling would be different in the US but the impression I got was that people are tired of being sold to all the time, they are fed up of the hype, they even don’t want to have to market like that themselves.  Overall I felt that majority of the people i talked to really would like to see more rounded Internet Marketing.

So what does more rounded Internet Marketing entail, in my personal view the balance between selling and education needs to be adjusted any selling should come on the back of educating your subscribers and readers. Rather than thinking what can I sell my subscribers today, think what can I teach my subscribers today, then you can look for products that will enhance that learning.

This post isn’t for everyone, just like my presentation wasn’t for everyone at the seminar.  Internet marketing is also like that.  For some people full on Marketing is a good fit, it’s suits their mentality and personality. For others like myself it really isn’t right for us,  we need to market in a different way.  I think this is maybe where people go wrong and give up online marketing,The see it sone one way and  they don’t feel comfortable doing it that way so they walk away from marketing.

There is another way.

Before going to London I thought that my “Anti-Marketing Marketing” style was something that not many people would be interested in I think I was wrong.  After my presentation I had lots of feedback from people who said that they would feel much more comfortable marketing if they could do it in a similar way.  You Can!  However you need to be aware that it is a far more long term strategy that can take a while to really pay off.

Even as you read this I am marketing to you,  I have my products listed in the sidebar, I have a link for a trial membership of my WPGoldmine Forum.. do you feel like I am selling to you?

More Importantly I don’t feel like I am selling to you and that suits me just fine.

Sometimes it seems like everyone Is selling something, be different & be original and stand out from the crowd, get potential customers to come to you then build a relationship then and only then point them in the direction of stuff that will help them achieve what they want.

One of the other presenters who has been in IM about the same time as me showed how he made $12,000 on the saturday while he was looking around art galleries, thats a great achievement and I take my hat off to him, he also mentioned his office, his staff, his telephone sales staff, the $10,000 a month he’s spending on coaching.  That’s really not for me.

My idea of a good day in IM is to sit in the bar after a game of golf, check my emails and find I’ve made 10 product sales and got a few new subscribers to WPGoldmine… Different Strokes for different folks.

Find the type of Marketing that suits you, that you are comfortable with and then just get out there and do it!

Thanks to all the great attendees and presenters I talked to in London, you guys gave me so many ideas and so much encouragement to continue on this slightly weird marketing path.  There also wasn’t 1 presentation where I didn’t have an AHA! moment.  I am 100% serious the seminar really was that good. Finally a big thanks to Paul Clifford and Justin for organizing it and inviting me to speak.  Now bring on the next one!

It really is Ok to fail if you know the reason you failed, and that is where most people go wrong. Once a site or a product fails then you need to analyse why it bombed it’s only then that you can learn from it.  Be like a pathologist investigating a death and find the cause of the failure, then next time you can make sure that you don’t have the same problems.

Over the time I was doing WSO’s I created 8 products,  their level of success can be measured as follows.

Success, Failure Failure Failure (at this point I nearly gave up, instead I looked at what was wrong) Success Success Success Success.

After the initial success I thought I’d made it , but I was wrong the following 3 failures nearly made me give up IM but instead of throwing in the towel I looked at what was wrong and it was obvious , I was just stupid for not realizing it earlier.

My target market were just not seeing the products, at that time WSO Plus didn’t exist so no one would promote a WSO for you, I refused to build a list for moral reasons (see told you I was stupid) so I couldn’t tell my previous buyers about my products It doesn’t matter if you have  the best products in the world if no one knows about them.

The run of relative successes came once I started to spread the word about the products I created, I knew that there was no point in creating a course or a series of videos if no one was going to see it so I started to make sure that I had a ready market for anything I produced.

Without analyzing that run of failures I would probably not be writing this and living where I live today.

If you are going to fail then fail quickly, learn your lessons and move on. Don’t get attached to sites or projects that aren’t going to make it. If you can’t make a project work dump it and move on don’t let it slowly drag you and your other projects down.

You will fail, but there is nothing wrong with failing if you know why. Failing is only bad if it makes you give up.

I wrote a post a few years back that talked about planning to be successful http://mjthompson.net/630/what-has-eating-an-airplane-got-to-do-with-im-success/ but you also need to plan to fail and to know why you failed.  It took the guy in that post 2 years to eat an aircraft. He didn’t sit down and say I’ll eat it all at once he did it one bit at a time and thats how you can be come successful at IM

My golfing & beer sampling buddy Andre Chaperon posted an image as a response to a comment earlier this week so I stole it and I’ll post it here as it sums up success perfectly.

Don’t let failure get you down, and don’t let it make you give up.

I deleted 24 websites from my server this week. Each one of those represented a failure.

I also got sent a payment of $3800 for a deal I made which allowed someone to sell one of my old products as an downsell to one of their products. I originally only sold less than 500 copies of that product… he sold 800.

Was that product a success or a failure?

It all depends on how I want to quantify it.

Watch out for Issue 3 of IM Manifesto later this week, I’ve got space for 1 more article if you’d like to write one but I need it before tomorrow. So if you want to get expose to over 1000 people then let me know and I’ll hold a space for you.

What did you do for your business last friday?

Every single day I do at least 1 thing that will (or should) help my business develop. Today I sent an email to a JV broker and hooked up with her via linked in. I now have a skype chat scheduled for later this week.

Nothing might come of it but something might.  I did something similar a few weeks back the result was about $12,000 in sales of one of my old products, plus a Joint Venture that should be profitable to both of us.

Normally the things I do for my business are practical things, I will write a blog post or do a video or offer to write a guest post. However 1 day a week  I try to build relationships with people,  those relationship sometimes prove to be beneficial to both of us and sometimes nothing comes from it.  But once in a while they can change everything.

One of these relationships in particular over the last few years has changed my perception of Internet marketing and made me a far better marketer. it’s probably made me a better person as well. That would never have happened if i didn’t deliberately set out to build 1 new relationship a week.

At first it wasn’t easy for me as I am naturally shy and like all of us I hate the thought of someone ignoring me or rejecting me. However  once you’ve done it a few times it becomes easier.

Building relationships can really work as a springboard for your Internet marketing career, we have a couple of members of WPG who teamed up as their skill sets were a really good fit and they’ve just launched their 2nd very successful product.

You should take every opportunity you can to network and to meet fellow marketers, look around at what seminars are happening near you, I know people who go to Affiliate Summit West in Vegas and never go and look at any of the stands and never go to the keynote speeches or lectures.They travel half way around the world to just meet fellow marketers and share ideas and tips.

So who fancies having a beer and a chat with me and a few friends in London next month?  Myself and Andre Chaperon planned to do one of these informal get togethers a year or so ago and unfortunately snow closed the airports in London so we couldn’t fly in. So we are going to try it again.

I am Speaking at the Warrior Gathering in London on May 12th and 13th so the night before I am going to arrange to meet as many people as I can in a bar in central London. There will be no cost and I don’t expect you to buy me a beer . Andre is going to invite some of his subscribers to join him and we’ll try to rope in a few special guests to come and join us. It should be a great night out.

So if you’d like to join us for a beer & a chat add your email address to the list below (it will only be used for this get together then deleted) and i’ll let you know the time and location once we know how many of you are going to turn up.

 

Email:

 

If you want to make a weekend of it check out the Warrior Gathering, even if i wasn’t scheduled to speak I’d still want to attend it, this opportunity to network shouldn’t be passed up.

I did a short video about using Rapportive a few weeks ago, believe it or not that’s how I find people to reach out to. Their linkedin, facebook or google +  details appear next to their emails ,the rest takes just a few clicks. You can watch the video on the following post http://mjthompson.net/1458/how-to-generate-traffic-to-your-blog-video-series/

Reach out today!

Newsflash****  I just finished writing this and I discovered that another of the members at WordPress Goldmine have broke the $100 a day barrier. It’s posts like Mikes that make everything worthwhile…well done Mike .

You can read about his journey and hopefully be motivated by it at http://mikefrommaine.com/first-100-adsense-day/

Back to the post..

1. Create a List

People love lists so whenever you are stuck for something to write about then come up with a list of 3 , 5 or 7 things.  3 Ways to Unblock Your Toilet, 5 simple ways to Clear Acne in 48 Hours, 7 Spells That Will Have Your Ex Back.

Lists are generally quick and easy to write.

2. Schedule Posts 

I usually schedule posts for about 2 weeks ahead, I sit down and come up with a list of 6 topics , write them on my white board and let them sit there until it’s time to write them. Because I know whats coming I spend time thinking about what I can add to the post to bring value.  The reason I have 6 topics is that I try to write on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday and often I’ll try to theme the posts.  Monday I’ll give Tips , Wednesday a commentary about an aspect of the niche I am in and friday something to get people thinking over the weekend.

3. Recycle Old Posts

Look at posts you wrote a year or more ago and see how you can improve them, Most of your visitors won’t have read the content before, I’d be lucky if more than 20 of the people reading this post had read my 5 Truths About Internet Marketing Post from July 2010. Your audience constantly changes so feel free to update your old content and put a new spin on it.

4. Curate Content

Good old curation it can get help you smash through that writer block or should that be blogger block?

10. Comprehensive Pillar Posts

This one never gets old. If you’re looking to establish your presence online, one of the best things you can do to stand out is to start creating some epic blog posts.

A ‘pillar’ article is generally longer than the traditional blog post (1,000+ words). This sort of ‘flagship content’ is a comprehensive article dripping in value.
Source

I am sure Pat Flynn won’t mind me posting part of his great article on Blog post templates. Curation doesn’t mean that you copy the other persons complete post but take bit of it and add your views.  I am sure you know what the signal to noise ratio is when referring to radio signals.

Although not as prevalent today there used to be a time when you got a lot of hiss and crackle when listening to the radio and it was difficult to hear the radio signal.  Well what good curation does is remove the noise and just leave the signal. Just stick to the 3 golden rules .. Don’t copy all the content, Add value and add a link back to the source.

4. Interview Someone

People love to be interviewed, write out 5 simple questions and send it to people in the same niche as you.  So for example if you were in the fitness niche write 5 questions about fitness and send it to 5 separate personal trainers not only will you have great content and a regular article you can write you’ll also have content you can add to a book  give away to build a list.

Ask questions like:    Tell us about yourself? Why did you become a personal trainer?  Have you always been fit?  Whats the best success story you’ve been involved with,  do you have 1 Golden tip for our readers?  How can our readers find out more about you?

Do you think anyone in business could resist answering those questions especially if you always include the last question on that list.

5. Get a Guest Blogger In

Contact someone you know in the same niche and ask them if they’d like to write a guest post for you, If they are serious about blogging they will jump at the chance!

6.  Do a Review of a Product

Find a product related to your niche and review it, If you blog is established write to the manufacturer or publisher and ask them if you can have one to review. After you do a few you’ll wake up to find emails like this one in your inbox

Hello
We have a golf training aid which we would like you to evaluate. We would also like the contact details for the appropriate person so that we can submit press releases and news items to.
If you could also include a contact email, physical address and telephone number I’d be grateful.

7. Find an Infographic and Write About it!

Infographics are a great way of finding ideas for blog content.  Just like with content curation you can pick one or two items from the infographic and give your ideas or your views on it.

If you have the resources then you can also create your own,  the upside of that is that you could  get lots of links back to your site as a result of the infographic.

Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

The results were quite interesting and very enlightening and were actually very useful and have resulted in me planning some changes to the way I do things around here.

First off I now have a much better understanding of my average user…or at least the average user who wanted to fill in the survey, Lets call him Joe as there is a 62 % chance he is a guy.

Joe is over 40 (70%) and self employed (25% full time IM and 38% self employed non IM). He currently earns under $50,000 per month (78%) but wants to earn over $500 per day online 50% (this is very revealing as the last time I did a survey a few years back he wanted to earn $200 a day). The biggest thing thats holding him back is lack of motivation and focus 34%, Joe considers Content Creation and Traffic Generation 23% & 22% to be the key skills he needs.

So Is that you? Are you my average reader?

I learned 2 things from the survey…

The main thing I learned from the survey is that the average person doesn’t like to do surveys

But the 2nd thing is the most important, I need to tailor some of the tips and advice I do so that it covers specific areas and to allow people to get tips and advice on areas that matter to them. i.e I need some sort of way to deliver personalized tips and advice so that will be my project for later in the month.

One of the things that people mentioned that they struggled to create content, it just so happens that 3 years ago (almost to the day) I did a blog post about how to write content in under 10 minutes.

You can find that post at: http://mjthompson.net/257/how-to-write-an-article-in-under-10-minutes/

Have a great easter and I’ll be back with a new post on Tuesday

The articles cover a wide variest of topics including

• 3 Ways To Break your Google Traffic Addiction
• Social media – Stop Shouting and Start Sharing
• 3 Offline Business lessons that can help you online
• Going with your passion to make money online
• Empathy Mapping – Do you know who you are talking to

You can grab your copy from the Magazine Download page.

If you would like to contribute and get your article seen by thousands of people then please contact me via the comments section below or the email address in the magazine.

Let me know what you think of the Magazine and if you have any questions for myself or the contributors feel free to post a comment below…. If you like it then Please Hit a Few of the  Sharing options below… It really does make a difference

Since google changed the algo last week (zzzz Booooring) there have been numerous posts about the death of SEO (Yes I know I wrote one myself!) and people stating half truths and complete rubbish as fact. Look, Google make changes all the time, I’ve lived through many minor changes and 4 or 5 major changes and my sites are still online and still making money.

They may take a hit for a while (or maybe they don’t get affected at all) but a few tweaks and they are back to where they were to start with. I learned long ago that you can game Google for a short while but they always catch up eventually so it’s better to stay as close to the rules as possible.

In a thread in the warrior forum this week I was called a Google fan boy because I made a similar point and said that I was actually pleased that google was trying to level the playing field. I had to laugh at that one, especially after I wrote 6 months ago that google hates us: http://mjthompson.net/1008/google-hates-you/  that post is worth another read especially in light of what has happened recently.

What I am trying to say is that wheter you like it or not when it comes to ranking in google it is nothing more that a  game , you can either try to play by the rules or you can try to bend them the choice is totally yours.  If you do bend them then expect to have to take some time in the sin bin, we’ve all been there!  If you  play by the rules you may still get sent there and penalized ,  as my father used to say ,”No one ever said life was fair!”  But by playing by the rules you stand a much better chance of staying on the playing field for longer.

My Final word on the recent google changes (until the next ones!) isn’t by me but by Ed Dale,  It is the most sensible thing I’ve read for a while (probbaly the most sensible thing Ed has said as well!! )

HOW MANY TIMES DO WE NEED TO SAY IT!

How many times does Google have to say it. Put great, relevant, content on your site and people will love it and spread it around, if they do, Google will reward the page with a decent ranking for phrases it deems relevant.

In the old days they would’ve said “link to the content” and this is Googles fundamental problem. No one “links” to anything any more, certainly not Joe and Jane Smith.

Joe and Jane Smith “like” stuff, they “tweet” stuff, they “Pin” stuff…

They don’t link stuff.”

Ok thats it, you can have the last word, let me know what you think and … all together now.. If you Like it Share it!!!

Watch out for the Magazine coming out over the weekend, it’s a cracker  (if you are subscribed I’ll send you a link to it if not check back here and you’ll see the post)

Following last weeks actions by Google against blog networks I have decided to focus more on  attracting visitors by engaging with them and by using more of  Pat Flynn’s Be Everywhere strategy.

Building links naturally is what google wants and this is what I intend to do, by simply ensuring that as many people as possible see the blog and the content. I will encourage you the reader to share the content and I’ll share it myself via Linkedin, Facebook Twitter and Google +. On the flipside I’l also share good posts by other bloggers and I encourage you to do the same.

If we all got into the habit of sharing quality content then we wouldn’t need to worry about google deindexing our sites and where we ranked, visitors would find our sites naturally.

To do this it is important that I come up with a plan and system that is easy to implement and doesn’t take me more than 10-15 minutes for every blog post. It should also be something that can be used on any type of blog so you ,dear reader, can implement parts of this strategy yourself.

The strategy I’ve come up with is liable to change so what I’ve done is create a series of videos of what I am doing now, as things change or improve I can then replace or add to the videos rather than recording a whole new video.

Each video is going to be between 2 and  5 minutes long so you can pick and choose the ones you need to suit you rather than having to sit through lots of content thats not relevant.

You’ll find the first video below and the other videos I recorded are posted on a page inside the blog. To get access please click on the facebook like button below the video, the link to the remaining videos will then be revealed to you… sneaky!

There are currently 3 more Videos In this series If you would like to see them click on like and you’ll find the video list revealed.

Let me know what you think and what you’ll be doing to get your sites ranking, This strategy won’t be a quick fix it is a long term strategy that will build momentum over time, Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were top ranking sites. Persevere and stick with it. It will work.

Many people probably think that I sit down and just write a blog post in a single stream of consciousness. Well you’d be partly right.  Some of the posts here are like that,  I have an idea for a post and sit down and write it then post it. 45 minutes job done.

However if you want to write a blog post properly then you are going to have to set aside some time. A good original blog post takes time and effort to get right. I am talking 3 or 4 hours here. However the effort is worth it., a good blog post like that will rank well and draw visitors to your site.

I am not saying that every blog post needs to be like that but every 3 or 4 blog posts you should spend more time than normal creating it and make sure that you have everything right from the start.  It’s wednesday morning and i am writing this post knowing that I have up to friday morning to get it right.

This article is aimed mainly at those of you who have personal blogs but anyone can learn lessons from this post and hopefully apply them to all your blogs.

First Step – Back to Basics

Yep we are going to do some keyword research. So it’s off to the google keyword tool and lets see what we can find for the keyword “write a blog”

The first thing I do is to set up some filters

You can see that I’ve chosen Low Competition keywords  with between 5000 and 1,000,000 searches per month.

That returned 56 related keywords of which about 40 could have been used as the basis of an article.

However 2 stood out , I’ll tell you now those figures are probably not accurate but we need to use something so lets use them and monitor results for ourselves.

So Lets choose “How To Write a Blog Post” and see what we are going to be up against

If you go to google you’ll see blog posts by people like Darren Rowse of Problogger fame, and Seth Godin, that is enough to scare a lot of people off however our first target is to get onto the first page so we need to analyse all 10 front page results.

You can do this manually or with browser plugins or tools.  I look for a number of things mainly Onsite SEO, social signals and offsite SEO. We are only looking for 2 or 3 weak sites in the top 10 then we’ll know that we can get there ourselves.

I used the same tool I used in SEO Debunked to analyse the top 10 (serpiq) and lo and behold we have some weakness there, I also noticed that very few of the top 10 have the exact match keyword in the title.. a very good indicator. That means that the on page SEO is not very strong for most of the sites won’t be very good.

So lets go for it, lets target the keyword How To Write a Blog Post.

Step Two – Writing The Content

There should be 2 parts to your content. The Words and the Images you need to find a good image that will grab peoples attention when they are browsing. Many people use ipads and phones to read blog content, apps like Pulse news and Flipboard will use your images a good image draws people in.

There are many places to get images from I use photoxpress but you can also search for flickr images that have creation commons licenses a good source is Compfight.com which allows you to search flicker for photo’s with creative commons licenses.

When I start to write the content I first start by laying out section headers and adding the title to the top of the page,so for this post the first items to go on the page were:

How To Write a Blog Post

Introduction

Research

Writing

Promotion

Conclusion

That then give me the freedom to write sections out of order if I wish.

If you need inspiration or some further ideas now is the time to start doing some searches and reading blogs, note i said Inspiration not copy someone post verbatim!.

I usually start with a note pad next to me an write down ideas I get from other articles, I find that just writing 1 or 2 words is enough to allow me to be totally unique they act a bit like a car key, it will get the car started but I’ll then go on my own journey.. hope that makes sense.

Final Step – Promotion

Now you have your beautifully crafted blog post you need to promote it…sorry about that!  Start by posting it to your twitter account , google + and you facebook page.  Get it out there If you can also do a short video to go with it, get that on YouTube or Vimeo and link back to your site.

Thats phase one of promotion, next get out and do some comments linking back to your post, that will work 2 fold firstly you’ll get a link back to your post, and secondly you’ll get visitors who may become subscribers and life time readers.

If you have time then why not write a related post and offer it as a guest post to busy sites in your niche.

Be sure to get your post shared on twitter, facebook etc

Creating good quality blog posts and promoting them properly can be time consuming but I can guarantee if you do 1 high quality post a week or every 2 weeks on your blog and follow through with the promotion you’ll soon start to become regarded as the authority in your niche and when that happens you won’t need to promote your post your subscribers will do it for you!

If you enjoyed this post please share it and leave a comment…

The Video below show how I did the research for How to Write a Blog Post

When I first started all that you needed to get a site ranked well was a bit of link building and a few keywords in the header of your site. Those times are long gone as As we found out when we did the SEO Debunked case studies there is a lot more involved in getting your sites ranking high in google.

There are 3 main aspects that you need to focus on.

On Page SEO – Thats basically creating good quality content and making sure that you have good basic SEO, keywords H1 tags and a sensible keyword density (I look for 0.75% to 1% anything more can look like keyword stuffing and read badly)

Off Page SEO – Basically your backlinks . You don’t need hundeds of poor quality links. Try for good a handful of good quality links a week you’ll be surprised at how well they can help you rank.

Social Signals – Under estimate this at you peril.

As I said in the first line of this post times change, more and more weight is being put on social signales by google.  Put yourself in Googles shoes for a moment, they know that people have the ability to build links on an industrial basis. I can go and have 20,000 verified links by tomorrow to this post for $75 or 500,000 unverified for $39.95.  So why should google pay any attention to links?

What would you do in Googles position?  Look for some other indicators that you are connecting with your readers?   thats what i’d do.

They have several metrics they can use  Bounce rate & time on site to name just two BUT they can also track social signals.

How many tweets does a post have, how many times is it liked in Facebook, how many plus 1′s does it have , how many comments etc etc.

What I am trying to say here is you need to manage your social signals, just as much as you manage on page and off page seo.

Once you start to manage them you can start to ensure you get exactly  the social signals you need  For example  If you want to find out how I would get 500,000 links in a day (if I was stupid enough to try it click on the like button below and all will be revealed… literally!

To manage them you need to track them.  Watch the video below to see how I track them and how I’ll be ensuring that I manage all the social signals properly to help me rank higher.

If you like to know more about Social Metrics Pro  then just click here

If you like it and buy through my link 2 things will happen ..

1.  I might earn some commission from the sale.. thank you

2. If you send me your receipt via the helpdesk I’ll send you a free report I am creating about social signals and why they are important and how you can get them.

Finally don’t forget to send out some social signals by sharing this post and commenting… you know you want to!