Review: Blog Writing Service - Water My Blog?
July 12, 2010 by Justin
This is a Sponsored Post written by me. All opinions are 100% mine.
So you have a business, your website is going strong, and you’re working on your SEO and other marketing to get more traffic to your site and take your business to the next level. You’ve heard that everyone needs to have a blog. You’ve heard about all the benefits of blogging, from delivering valuable content to your users, customers, subscribers, etc. to improving your search engine rankings. You’re sold on the benefits, but where are you going to find the time to crank out regular blog posts? After all, one of the things you’ve learned is that the key to blogging successfully is providing quality content on a consistent basis.
This is the dilemma for a lot of people. Blogging is a tremendous tool for your business, but it takes a focused effort and a lot of time that many of us just don’t have. Add to that the fact that many people just aren’t writers and have a hard time coming up with interesting topics much less presenting them in an effective way, and it can all seem very overwhelming. Well, fear not! There is a solution to all these challenges, and it’s an easy, affordable solution that you can implement immediately.
Introducing WaterMyBlog.com
WaterMyBlog is a blog writing service like no other. While it’s popular to hire virtual assistants, freelancers and ghost writers to fill blogging needs, all of those are missing a key element. They’ll provide regular content, and it might even be written very well, but what are the chances these sources are SEO experts? Pretty slim. That’s what makes WaterMyBlog.com different. This service provides quality blog posts based around your chosen key words, written in a way that serves to greatly enhance your SEO efforts.
How it works
Getting started with WaterMyBlog.com is easy. First, you’ll provide them with the key words (5-10) you want to optimize for. This is of course very important, because these words (topics) will end up being the focus of the blog posts they write. If you need help determining the best key words to rank for, they have SEO experts on staff to help you out. Next, they connect their software to your blog. It works with all the popular blogging platforms, so no worries there. This gives them the ability to directly upload your blog posts once they’re approved. Once their software is integrated, their researchers get busy using their news aggregators to create a plan that will ensure your blog is relevant to readers and to the search engines. After the research is done, all that’s left is writing your posts. The writers at WaterMyBlog.com are called Gardeners, and they will use the information they’ve learned from the news aggregators to create quality, SEO-relevant posts, which will be submitted to you for approval. If you want changes, you can edit the post yourself or ask for the changes you want. Once it’s done to your satisfaction, your post will automatically be posted to your site. It’s that easy! You’ve saved tons of time while reaping all the benefits of adding outstanding blog content to your site. And the pricing for all this is outstanding. You’ll pay no more than $13 per post! They also have some great promotions running right now, like a one-month free trial!
While they aren’t the solution I’d recommend for pro bloggers who make their living off their blog, WaterMyBlog.com is a great solution for anyone with a primary product or service looking to add a blogging component. So if you understand all the benefits of adding a blog to your site but haven’t had the time to do it, or if you’re already blogging but are looking for an inexpensive way to free up all the time it’s taking you, OR if you just want to make sure your blogging efforts are paying off with proper SEO, take a look at WaterMyBlog.com.
How to Stalk Your Customers Like a Pro
June 23, 2010 by Justin
Imagine going into your local electronics store, Joe’s Electronics, to look at a new flat-screen TV. You check out the various models, talk with a sales person, and decide to think it over. You’ve heard Best Buy has some good deals, and maybe you’ll head over there tomorrow to see what they’ve got. As you walk toward your car, you encounter a guy wearing a Joe’s Electronics t-shirt. You start your car and can’t help but be shocked by the coincidence as a Joe’s Electronics commercial comes on the radio. Driving a little ways down the road, you notice a Joe’s Electronics billboard, featuring the TV you were looking at, then another similar billboard on the next block. You get home to find a direct mail piece from Joe’s Electronics with your favorite TV highlighted, and when you flip on the TV (your old one), the first commercial you see is for - what else - Joe’s Electronics.
If this happened in real life you might be a little weirded out, but aside from that you’d probably pretty impressed with Joe’s. You’d think they must have one heck of an ad budget, first of all, and they would have accomplished getting their message in front of you the seven times that researchers say are necessary, on average, for a person to see it before they buy.
Of course in the offline world, advertising is somewhat of a shotgun approach, so to get the kind of coverage that any specific person would see this much would take many thousands of dollars. Online though, this kind of targeted marketing is becoming easier all the time. A relatively new trend in online advertising, retargeting, is taking off in a big way. Basically, the way retargeting works is that it allows you to present targeted ads to visitors to your site who don’t make a purchase. After the non-buyer leaves your site, these ads are presented all over the internet using a number of ad networks, via tracking cookies.
If you have an ecommerce site or sell anything at all online, there are a few providers of this service you’ll want to look at.
FetchBack - Using what their patent-pending FIDO technology, FetchBack claims to be the only company that offers retargeting specific analytics. This translates into saved time and strong ROI. On June 1st, FetchBack announced they had been acquired by GSI Commerce, which will allow them to bring even more value to customers, as GSI is a leading provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing solutions.
AdRoll - Founded in 2006, AdRoll believes online advertising should be easy for small to medium-sized businesses to implement and understand. AdRoll offers precise targeting through Google, OpenX, AdBrite, AdMeld and others, and their feature-rich retargeting product, RoundTrip, promises the best performing placements for site-targeted campaigns.
Specific Media - Located at Retargeting.com, Specific Media offers multiple levels of service depending on your advertising goals. Their Premium service is comprised of over 450 ‘Brand Name’ web publishers, such as, ABC, ABCNews, Gannett Newspaper Group, ESPN, FoxNews, FoxSports, Major League Baseball, NBC, NYTimes, The Weather Channel, CBS, CBSNews, Food Network, and others, whereas their Performance level product is a large aggregate of small to medium websites that are not known ‘Brands’ and typically wouldn’t attract the advertising budgets from large agencies or advertisers.
Google AdWords - You know when Google gets in the game the trend is usually here to stay, and they did just that in March of this year. They call the feature “remarketing” and you can easily set up and create a remarketing campaign through the new “Audiences” tab in AdWords.
Any of these services will allow you to retarget your customers (or would-be customers) by “stalking” them after they leave your site. If you, like many, are averse to tracking cookies and feel like this is, in some way, a violation of privacy, this technique probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if all that doesn’t bother you and you’re looking for an effective way to convert your visitors to buyers, retargeting might just be the answer you’ve been looking for. If you are using retargeting or have tried it, help out the community by sharing your experience in the comments bellow.
4 Easy Steps to Automate Your Online Sales Process
June 9, 2010 by Justin
So you’ve got your blog up and running, you’re starting to gain a following, and you want to capitalize on your growing popularity. One of the best ways to do that is by creating products around whatever your expertise is. Your followers obviously like what you have to offer, so whether it’s through e-books, audio programs, webinars, or video workshops, creating products to deliver what they want is a no-brainer. Once you’ve created products to offer on your site, one of the greatest things about the Internet comes into play: you can automate the entire process. Sure, you have to do the work upfront to create the products and the process, but once it’s in place, it takes very little attention beyond tracking your progress and making necessary adjustments. This is a great thing, because it frees you up to create more quality content, and more products. So, how do you automate your sales process? Here are four easy steps to make it happen:
1. Get ‘em on the list. The first step to the automated online sales process is to get your site’s visitors on your email list. Your list will become the biggest asset you have, so this step is critical to your success. To entice people to sign up for your emails, there are two critical factors you must nail down. First and foremost, your free content (your blog) must be high quality and compelling. If you’re not delivering value to your visitors, there’s no way they’ll sign up to hear more of what you have to say via email. Secondly, you’ll want to offer a valuable incentive for people who sign up for your emails. Value is the key. While you’re not going to give away the farm in a single swoop, the offer you create must have real, valuable content, or the subscribers you do get will promptly unsubscribe. The point is, you shouldn’t be trying to trick anyone into signing up. They’ll detect it immediately, and no one wins.
2. Send out the emails. The next step in the process is to decide what you’ll send out once a person subscribes to your list. Obviously you’ll be sending a welcome email with a link to the free product you promised. But then what? One of the greatest tools in the email marketing toolbox is the sequential autoresponder. Whatever email marketing provider you sign up with, they should have the ability to set up sequential autoresponders to each new subscriber. These autoresponders might even serve as the free product offer the subscriber signed up for. For example, you might offer a “Free 7 Day E-Course on How to Make Money with Affiliate Links.” Then, each day for the next seven days, your subscriber will receive an email with another part of the course. If you follow this path, it’s a good idea to just provide the content without selling anything in these emails. Even if you’re giving value, that value is diminished when you turn it into a sales pitch. This brings up another good point: When setting up your sequential autoresponders, make sure you’re not selling in every one. People get a ton of email, and if they know they’re in for a sales pitch whenever they open one of your emails, they won’t be on your list for long. You want people to look forward to your communications, and then when you do present an offer, it’s far more likely to be acted upon.
3. Accept online payments. So someone has signed up on your list, they’ve received some great value from your emails, and now they want to buy the video course you just offered. This is the coolest part of selling on the Internet. It used to be that you had to be present to sell something to someone. Now, you can do it in your sleep! Whether you use a service like PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, or your own merchant account, it will be easy for you to sell your products on your site. The nice thing about the ready-made services (PayPal, Google, Amazon, etc.) is that you don’t have to purchase shopping cart software to use them. You’ll be able to create “buy now” buttons and easily incorporate those into your page. The down-side is that you pay a little more in fees, and you have less creative and functionality control. In either case, you’ll have access to comprehensive sales reports, so you can…
4. Track and measure. As your online sales get underway, and for as long as you sell online, you’ll want to know how you’re doing - not just in terms of sales, but with marketing and conversion rates as well. You want to know how many people are visiting your site, how many of those are signing up for your email list, and how many email subscribers are clicking back through to your site and/or ordering products. Using your site analytics, coupled with the stats provided by your email marketing company and your e-commerce provider, you’ll have easy access to all this information. These statistics are very important, because they will paint a picture of how your content and your marketing are working to convert browsers into customers. Using this information, you’ll be able to make necessary changes to improve your click-through and conversion rates. Of all the steps, this is probably the least “easy” but it’s really not hard once you get used to looking at the numbers. Then just make small adjustments and see what changes. There’s no fool-proof formula that works for everyone, so you get to build your own!
Bonus step! This isn’t as much a step as it is a suggestion. Provide outstanding service at every turn, and whatever products you create from your expertise, always offer a money-back, “risk-free” guarantee. Few people, if any, will take you up on it, and it just makes people feel better about spending money on your products. For those who do ask for their money back, don’t hesitate to return it, no-questions-asked. Then try to get some feedback, but don’t count on it. Sometimes you just have to move forward and focus on those who love you and your stuff!
The Internet has given us the ability to make money using automated systems, and we’d be crazy not to take full advantage of that. So follow the steps above and get your cash-flow on autopilot.
Affiliate Network Review: EWA Private Network
May 26, 2010 by Justin
Every now and then, a product, service or program comes along that really needs to be reviewed and promoted - not because it’s a paid review or affiliated site, but because it’s just outstanding. Even though this is a paid review, that’s definitely the case with EWA Private Network. EWA, which stands for Eagle Web Assets, is an affiliate network that has built a solid online reputation through ethical business practices, proving they really know what they’re doing, and taking great care of their affiliates and their advertisers.
EWA is made up of a small, hand-selected group of marketers, media buyers, SEM pros, and email marketers. The company is run by Ryan Eagle and Harrison Gevirtz, who lead a team of dedicated Network and Affiliate Managers 7 days a week to provide the kind of support not often found in an affiliate network. It is clear that their focus is on their affiliates and helping them to be successful in their affiliate marketing efforts. They promise to maintain personal connections with all their affiliates and work closely with each affiliate every step of the way to ensure success, and they have a reputation of backing up that promise.
If you’ve been an affiliate marketer or have researched the possibilities, you’ve most likely either experienced or read about issues with affiliates of various networks not being paid on time, as much as promised, or not at all. Not only does EWA pay out weekly, they pledge to beat any payout for the same program, and they pay everyone - on time. They truly understand that taking care of the people who count on them (affiliates and advertisers) pays off for them in big ways, which is reflected in their motto: Help more; Pay more; Get more.
Highlights:
- EWA will beat any payout you get from any network.
- They pay weekly - from day 1, with no threshold.
- They are available 7 days a week to help you make your campaigns bigger and more profitable.
- They help you scale and optimize your campaigns and find traffic sources.
- EWA pledges to get any offer you are currently running at another network within 3 days and beat the payout!
- They have over 1500 offers for 60 countries on their network live and active.
So is there a downside to EWA? Well, not really a downside, but it is a private network. That means the only way in is usually through a referral. However there is an application on the site, and even though having a referral will help, if you meet their criteria, you can be accepted without it. For anyone who is accepted into their network, their “pickiness” is a very positive thing. They really want to work with serious marketers because they plan on investing in your success through one-on-one training and support.
What others are saying:
If you want to see what the buzz around the net is, check out these other reviews and comments:
Bottom line is this: If you’re a serious affiliate marketer looking for an affiliate network run by people who know what they’re doing and who will do everything they can to help you make lots of money off your affiliate marketing efforts, you’d be crazy not to check out EWA Private Network.
5 Tips to Finally Get Your Blog Making Money
May 18, 2010 by Justin
It seems everyone has a blog these days, and that is in no way a bad thing. After all, you need one. Whether it’s connected to your product or service business or your blog itself is your primary source of income, there isn’t anyone who can’t benefit from blogging. For those who are trying to make a living blogging, there are a lot of things you can do to get your blog making money. What we’re focusing on today aren’t sources of income, like affiliate programs or selling e-books. Instead, we’re presenting steps you can take to make sure those sources pay off for you. No matter what you’re doing to make money with your blog, these are five things you’d be wise to do to optimize those efforts:
1. Don’t quit. This is the first rule of success, and it’s the first rule for being successful with your blog. If you browse the web looking for interesting blogs, you’ll be amazed at the number of decent blogs with good design and solid content with no posts for the past six months or more. These are undoubtedly the blogs of people who had great intentions starting out and didn’t see results as quickly as they had hoped, so they quit. Chances are, these bloggers had unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to see results from a blog. Sure, there are sites out there telling you that it’s possible to make $100k a year starting next week, but the truth is it takes consistent, steady effort over a considerable period of time to really make a good living blogging. So if you aren’t willing to put in the work, don’t start. But if you are, then keep at it. The last thing you want to do is quit just before you hit the tipping point and your blog really takes off!
2. Collaborate. Trying to be a “one-man show” isn’t always a good idea. Chances are you’re really good at one or two things and not as good at others. So rather than having a blog with outstanding design and lame content, or great content that no one ever sees because you don’t know how to market, why not team up with one or more other bloggers? True, a collaborative effort means sharing the profits, but your profits will be many-fold greater if your blog is at its best. So consider collaborating and make your blog - and your bank account - all it can be!
3. Don’t get all weird. Creativity is great, and sometimes out-of-the-box thinking is commendable. But when it comes to optimizing your blog earnings, keep in mind what your readers are used to. No one wants to have to learn a new way of weeding through your information. For the most part, people want your logo in the top left, and your sidebar on the right, and when it comes to buying your product or supporting your sponsors, they want a smooth, easy, simple transaction. So keep it simple and as close to normal as possible, and save the creativity for your content. You’ll keep your readers happy and reap the rewards!
4. Market like it’s your job. When it comes to marketing, there’s no such thing as too much. To monetize your blog, you need traffic, and you won’t get that traffic without marketing. Utilize Twitter, Facebook, and other Social Media outlets, make sure your SEO is ship-shape, and spend as much as you can afford on PPC. A word of advice first though: Educate yourself on these tools! This is especially important for anything that’s costing you money. Losing money on a failed PPC campaign can lead to wanting to do what point #1 above warns against! Once you learn the right way to do it (and learn it fast so you don’t waste all your time learning and not doing), pretend marketing is your job. Treat it like your living depends on it. Because it does!
5. Begin! So many people say they want to start a blog and go on and on researching but never actually do it. Whatever’s holding you back, get over it and start your blog. If you’ve started but haven’t taken the steps to monetize, get off your butt and take those steps now. The very worst that can happen is you “fail” and end up learning in the process. Entrepreneurship, whether it’s a blog, a product or service site, or a brick and mortar business, is not without risk. But the rewards are so fantastic that they far outweigh any perceived risk. So in the words of Nike, “Just Do It!”
