What they say:

• Search engine volume declining.
• Google dying out.
• Facebook and other social media sites are now the most valuable sites for marketing, including Viral and word of mouth marketing.
• No point of doing SEO
• No point of affiliate marketing via SEO

My answer to them:

Search engine volume declining:

Are you nuts? You are assuming here the search growth volume decline, but do you even know that almost every single person on the internet will use ‘search engine’ to search for something? Do you expect someone to go on facebook and search for ‘how to loose weight?’.  If you think SEO is dead, then you are just too much negative.

Google dying out?:

Do you know which sites get the most visitors per month? Yes its facebook, but do you know which sites make the most money per month? Oh wait you don’t . But they are not social media they are amazon, google, ebay, etc etc. Do you find facebook or twitter on those top earners list? Nope. So in simple words, most visited doesn’t make them most worth or most earning sites.

Facebook and other social media sites are now the most valuable sites for marketing, including Viral and word of mouth marketing:

We internet marketers don’t give a damn for ‘what site’ a user visits. We do SEO to rank on search engines, do you know the purpose of search engines? It is to ‘search’ for what the people are looking for on the world wide web. So if SEO is dead then all the websites on the internet are dead!

No point of doing SEO:

It is funny that some people assume, SEO IS DEAD and yet they say that ‘Facebook’ is the most searched keyword on any search engine. Now isn’t that contradicting. If google wasn’t there or any search engine for the matter of fact, will your average user be able to find anything??? ANYTHING AT ALL?? It is already shocking enough that they can’t find facebook without searching Google or yahoo. Does that mean SEO is dead? I don’t think so.

No point of affiliate marketing via SEO:

Another well known fact is that, 90% of searches on social media sites are of no monetary value. Social media sites are only for socializing or marketing a product which is ‘common’ like movies, etc. YOU CANNOT SELL medical products, or even anything that doesn’t make it ‘social enough’. If that was the case then why would millions[assuming] of internet marketers spend time on SEO and not just make friends on Facebook and social media sites & sell to them like ordinary sales men in real life? Well why should we, when we have Search engines. In fact search engines are killing the ‘real world’ market because more and more people go online and search for products, its reviews and information before buying them from markets or shopping malls. Why is that? Why can’t they  go and use facebook for such a purpose. Because Facebook or Social media isn’t for that purpose.

What they still keep saying:

• Facebook is most searched term on all major search engines
• Facebook and social media sites can over take Google and other search engines
• Facebook is democracy based, Google is authority based.
• Social media sites get more search volume then search engines.
• Viral marketing is the game changer.

What i think about that:

Facebook is most searched term on all major search engines:

If you think as mentioned above, then your common senses have failed you. An average user can’t find a single site without searching it on google and yahoo. And we expect social media to help us make money? yea right keep dreaming. The only way that i have seen people making money via facebook is by those stupid fan pages and cpa offers. FOOLING the avg user. Did you realize that the avg user searches for ‘facebook’ on the ‘search engines’? So facebook is perhaps alive because of search engines, but still it earns nothing compared to what google and yahoo earns. Why is that? Because facebook needs lots of resources to accommodate its ‘users’. It is not for business it is for socializing. So for us merchants we need to sell stuff, not meet people and talk to them for 8hrs and convince them to buy some products which they never wanted to even try. BUT via SEO we get those people directly to our sites and get them buying what they are looking for.

Facebook and social media sites can over take Google and other search engines:

If facebook and social media could have overtaken Google and other Search engine giants then it would have happened by now, but instead we get reports of these Search engine Giants offering to ‘buy’ sites like facebook and twitter. Who is making more money here now?

Facebook is democracy based, Google is authority based:

Regarding facebook being democracy based and Google being authority is pure rumors and utter BS. It is the users who search on google and it is us the ‘webmasters’ who make our sites capable and competitive to rank on google. So in my dictionary it is the other way around. If you provide good content and do hard work you will rank on google and be the authority, but elected by democracy of the searchers. But on facebook – do we ever search there?

Viral marketing is the game changer:

In some cases yes, but assuming only viral marketing can change the game then you are wrong, Viral marketing +SEO are the top game changers. They go hand in hand and the faster we realize this the better and easier Internet marketing is.  So no you can’t rely on viral marketing only. In fact some social media sites can just ban you for spamming.

Social media sites get more search volume then search engines:

Facebook is visited by the same people over and over again for socializing. TELL ME SOMETHING, can facebook send ‘ITS OWN USERS’ to your site? No it can’t, even if you try it might be considered spamming, unless you want to spend money there you got nothing. So in terms of value, google and search engines get more ‘worthy’ visitors. Why isn’t facebook earning as much as google if it has more users then it?

They still don’t stop:

• We can make more money via Social traffic then SEO traffic.
• Viral marketing without SEO yields better result in shorter time.
• SEO is not stable and will die and we will be better off with social media.
• Yahoo is closing its Publisher program because  SEO is dead.
• SEO doesn’t benefit the ordinary ‘webmaster’.

Neither do i:

We can make more money via Social traffic then SEO traffic:

So is SEO dead? Well let me tell you something about viral marketing. Viral marketing don’t last forever. Here you are for a month, next month someone better then you comes, down the dumpster you go. But with SEO you can maintain your positions on certain keywords. This gets you – TARGETED TRAFFIC, .ie organic traffic. Is that worth more then the UN-TARGETED traffic those merchants get from social media sites? YES.

Viral marketing without SEO yields better result in shorter time:

Here’s the thing -

Time spent on social media sites = time wasted [1]

Time needed for viral marketing = time spent on social media sites [2]

then from [1] and [2],

Time needed for viral marketing = time wasted

How is that? Let me put it this way, facebook has people who are addicted, they visit the site to chat with friends, they send mails , they log off. Spending huge time on facebook, But is that of any value to us the sellers? No.

Now on search engines – user searches something = he wants or is looking for something = he finds our sites = he gets what he is looking for = we earn $$. Can that happen on facebook?
NO!  Unless you pay for advertising.

SEO is not stable and will die and we will be better off with social media:

Now imagine, everyone stopped SEO, Google and all search engines died. What next? who will visit our sites? Will anyone ever know our sites exists? Won’t facebook ban us for posting links? Even if we did just to our friends – it will be un-targeted traffic = no value. Which makes Our sites = useless, we make no money. No money means  no income for facebook. No income for facebook and so much users with high maintenance means  facebook is dead. SEO is the backbone of the internet marketing scenario . IT WILL NEVER DIE.

Yahoo is closing its Publisher program because  SEO is dead:

Last but not the least, i believe yahoo died the time it sold itself to Microsoft, i.e Bing.
You might not know but people on facebook are ‘humans’ and so are they on all social media sites. They don’t know anything unless someone spams them, they ask questions and doubts to their friends via status – why can’t they just search facebook to find answers? because its not possible. And when someone asks such questions. Do you know what reply people give on social media sites = just ****ing google it. Oh and that reply is common everywhere, facebook, twitter, yahoo answers, etc etc. Its true there is immense power in social media but SEO is not dead. period.

YPN died out because they can’t compete with Google and have bad policies? and perhaps they don’t have enough publishers because they are not worldwide?

SEO doesn’t benefit the ordinary ‘webmaster’:

If that is the case and if SEO dies, then so does any other website on the internet that isn’t ‘advertised’ offline. Which means a total of estimated 10-50 million ‘ordinary’ merchants, webmasters, freelancers, sellers etc will run out of business and it also means the economy would fall to ‘WORST’ conditions ever.

Q. Can word of mouth i.e viral marketing alone save us without the use of SEO?

A:Not always. It will take a 100 years for you to sell a common product to every user on the internet. Because not everyone has same tastes, or is rich, or is located in a place where they can avail those items. But if you were to make a website, target a keyword and rank top on the keyword on any major search engine, you will sell your product to every single person who visits your site.

So does that mean Social Media and viral marketing is Dead?

Let me put it this way, if i wanted to rely on viral marketing to sell a product to 10 million people. Let that be the basic goal. Then, that would mean 10 million people should just buy my product by word of mouth. This is very unlikely. BUT if i were to do the same via SEO, Viral marketing together by Ranking with certain keywords. And then get 100% organic traffic and say get an average of 1 million people monthly.[which is possible on high traffic niches] then i can reach my goals in less then a year. How? because i will have ‘targeted’ customers. More over, even if i don’t sell on first try i can always build leads, follow up. Spread my product all around the internet. Using ‘Search engines’ we can get many affiliates interested in promoting us, and these affiliates will still in turn promote our product using ‘search engines’. Can you do all this via facebook or twitter? You might be able to, but it will take lots of spamming and hard work. And it might not be automated as well along with the fact that you will have to do it all alone and by yourself without help of any affiliates etc.

What did you learn? SEO is not dead, don’t give up if you don’t rank well on search engines. Because in the end search engines were still alive when myspace was popular, is still alive when facebook and twitter is and will still be when other social media sites evolve.

If you are looking for a proven article marketing plan, then you need to read this! This is a simple 5 step plan that will take your article marketing business to the next power level!

Step 1: Research Your Keywords

The first step is quite easy, find the right keywords you wish to target Make sure your chosen keywords are relevant, have decent searches and not so many competitor websites.

Step 2: Write Your Article

The first strategy is to insert long tail related keywords within your articles. For example, you should insert it in the title, first sentence, middle body, last sentence, and also the resource box.

Step 3: Create a Resource Box

Your resource box will have less words but should be powerful enough to make your readers take action. This means, you want to tell the reader exactly what to do after he reads your resource box. You should provide a link to your website. Then, the reader will most likely want to go to your website.

Step 4: Submitting The Article

Step number 4 in this article marketing strategy is to submit your article to various article directories. There are hundreds of article directories on the internet. So, search for an article directory and submit it to the most popular article directory. If the article directories have huge traffic then it can be a added bonus.

Step 5: Build Links To Your Article

The final step is to get websites and blogs to link to your article.The more the links pointing to your articles, the higher the article will rank on search engines.

You can also resubmit the article to various other directories. Buying an article submitting software can save you time, if you don’t want to waste your time doing it manually.

The last step is a tried and tested method. Make sure you implement the steps one by one to get your article marketing campaign going!

—

Would you like to contribute too? Send your article to me at sj@sameerjoad.com and get published. You can include a resource box and have dofollow links back to your site.

‘Word of mouth’ advertising simply means spreading the words about a site, product or anything via humans. In other words, it is the most easiest, super performing and cheapest forms of advertising and/or marketing method. In our daily life, word of mouth is everywhere. Remember when your friend suggests you a song? Or a favorite restaurant? Or which car to buy? Or did they show you a amazing website they just found? How about that weight-loss product they which they used?

All of these are ‘word of mouth’ free marketing. It is a good method as long as your website, blog or forums falls under ‘general’ categories such as entertainment, music etc

Consumer vs Seller

How can word of mouth marketing benefit consumers?

I am no marketing genius, but i can tell you this. If i am about to buy a new car, i would definitely take advices. If i am going on a movie we would definitely watch the one which everyone seems to be talking about. Won’t you? As a result ‘word of mouth’ advertising is very beneficial to the consumers. Because it gives the us, the consumers the knowledge we need, the reviews, the experience and information of the product or simply the recommendation of what/what not when we need something.

For a seller, word of mouth is viral. If people are talking about ‘it’[assume 'it' to be whatever you want] then that ‘it’ is a hot money maker.Period. Every form of business uses the ‘word of mouth’ advertising methods. Be it by creating stunning advertisements for there products or creating controversial stories or reviews. This form of advertising cannot be out-beaten by any other. People are tend to do, to buy or to see what there family members, friends and everyone else is.

however its useless if you trying to sell something, do affiliate marketing, make money via adsense or cpa. because you are making your own family members and friends to buy something which isn’t worth the time or efforts you put in.

How can ‘word of mouth’ help small business/sites?

Specially on the Internet? Does word of mouth just means telling about your creations to your family and friends?

word of mouth is not limited to just ‘you telling your friends & family’ but in a more simplified sense, if your site is amazing and worth the time for your visitor then those visitor [who ever they are, from any corner of the world] will definitely tell others about your site, that is the word of mouth.

like how we come to find about sites such as facebook, youtube, blogger, bing, etc etc most of them are via word of mouth, not advertisements that you come across. Always remember content is king, no matter what your niche is, if you want to dominate it then concentrate on quality. Put your self in the shoes of your visitors and think like them.

Here is what i do, when i create a website, or a blog post or anything online. I first test it out myself and ask my friends to test it too. Then ask yourself,

• do i like this website?
• will i buy this product?
• is this webpage worth my time?
• am i enjoying the sites design?
• is this site user friendly?
• are these posts and information valid and worthy?
• Will this benefit me?
• Is this the right price?
• Are these information relevant to the topic?
• Will i recommend these to my friends?

be honest to yourself because you are visiting the site as a visitor and do what you would do while surfing other websites on the Internet.

How can i start the next ‘word of mouth’ revolution??

Easy there. Don’t get carried away, its not easy to get people talking. Specially for us bloggers, no one actually reads blogs these days – thanks to the countless number of ‘unwanted’ and ‘repetative’ blogs out there. But there is still hope.

Word of mouth is a very hard advertising & Marketing form. But it is very well worth the time & efforts you put in aswell.

There are always ways to make your site popular by ‘word of mouth’, how?

1. Create topics that are short, simple and to the point. Give your visitors what they are looking for, don’t send them on a wild goose chase.

2. Write about controversial topics, this would definitely get you lots of criticism, but on the other hand it is a good way to give short term boost to your website traffic, this method works best in sites related to celebrities and current world issues, etc

3. Comparison – compare a subject, a product or website with others or with yours. Give your honest opinion about these. This will help the visitors make a better choice while you play the role of a middlemen

4. Write about hot and current topics. Share your view, after all this is the Internet and the only reason you are going to be successful is by being honest to yourself and giving your opinion, within limits of course.[make sure you don't go wild, it could do the opposite of what you want lol]

5. Don’t try to force your visitors or clients into doing ‘word of mouth’ advertising, this is mostly seen in the case of ‘e-mail this to your friend’ ‘share it with your friend’ ‘send this to your friend and get this/that free’ etc. Such tricks are short-lived, maybe to get something those visitors might do as you ask, but you are forcing them to do so. And its a proven fact that the others who receive those emails or any sort of info from friends are less likely to visit your site or even try it out. It will be somewhere in the spam/junk folders.

6. Be funny, creative and think out of the box. No one is going to talk about you, if you are like every other ordinary blogger/seller. Word of mouth works when there is something ‘unique’ or should i say ‘crazy’ to discuss. But remember, it could be also embarrassing and life destructing if you do something extreme foolish, like most of those youtube stars do nowadays.

7. Don’t create a hoax, never lie. Have you seen about the story on CNN recently about a 6 year old boy flying away in a hot air balloon? and later it turned out to be a hoax. This is a best example of ‘word of mouth’. Sure it created a story and made it a international news. But now that is turned out to be a hoax, it is going to be opposite of the parents might have expected. Long story short, don’t lie just to get fame or popularity. Specially in the online world, fame & popularity is useless because its only limited to your ‘user name’ or a particular site. Creating a hoax in order to be famous or get good ‘word of mouth’ visitors is going to be very harsh later on. The consequences can be fatal in some cases lol

8. 1 small trick for ‘freebies sites’ is to give freebies for ‘free’. Did that make sense? Well here’s the thing, nowadays 90% of the freebies sites on the ‘Internet’ are NOT free. The site owner obviously wants to make money, its either a CPA or some sort of obstruction the visitor has to face in order to get his freebie. If your freebies are ‘free’ it will definitely get you lots of ‘word of mouth’ visitors. But then again, how will you make money? The answer to that question is easy. You make money by giving freebies. Do a search on google, there are many CPA networks that have ‘freebies’ offers which you get ‘paid’ for to promote. So imagine if you are extremely popular in your niche, this 1 cpa offer can bring you big bucks without forcing your visitors to fill unwanted surveys, etc.

Last but not the least remember to go according to your long term plans. Word of mouth can also be achieved if you keep it simple, honest and don’t concentrate on just making money!

Good luck & i would like to apologies for my delayed posting – thank you for being patient everyone.

regards, SJ

We all know that every company, person and brand seeks reputation. Reputation, respect, popularity, domination all go hand in hand. Without reputation no company can get good clients or sell any of there products.

But in the online scenario this might be different a bit. No questioning the fact that online giants such as Google, Microsoft, yahoo,etc are all about reputation. Google won’t stand and watch if someone tries to hurt their reputation, they got a reputed search engine. And there competitors such as yahoo and bing wants to get a share of that online reputation. That is the reason why the have signed contract with each other, to bring down the giant. Its all about reputation in the industry!

However small companies and websites can’t be bothered much about reputation. Every company has some sort of reputation. Even hackers and scammers have a reputation to maintain, ironically they love the popularity and reputation they get. One such example is the a group of people who call themselves ‘RELOADED’, they got a reputation for hacking games and providing free versions and patches via torrents. No one is afraid since in the online world, you can hide your real identities quite easy.

I want money, one way or the other.

That is the mentality of most people in the ‘make money online’ niche. Actually not just this niche, but the entire www. Why do you think people and companies invest so much in online development and products? Because the web is easy to access and explore. And there are huge advantages to those who want to make money. In the online world, you can sit at home and be newton.

There are lots of people who wants to make money online. Some of them get lucky and earn a ton. Some fail miserably and quit. While some keep trying and become desperate! Most of the time they don’t make a single buck online, even after years of trying.

This creates a tendency among desperate people seeking income solutions. 60% of these are involved in the GPT [get paid to] industry. The rest run sites and sell duplicate, warez, stolen content to make money. There are many rings of sites and people that are involved in scamming. They don’t care for reputation, Only money. And they get them one way or the other.

Reputation does matter!

The path you chose decides the future. If you chose the path of making money the wrong way, then you will definitely get caught one day or the another. The risks are always high. Digital retailers and payment gateways are getting very serious regarding this. There are stiff rules and if you got bad reputation, then those companies will just kick you off. And yes i am talking about companies like clickbank, amazon,adsense, paypal,etc. Without those making money online is very hard and nearly impossible.

Yet there are some people who want to scam others, there reputation gets worse and worse. And what is worse about them is that they don’t regret what they do, take a look at the screen shot below. I receive such phishing mails from paypal[not really paypal] everyday and they ask me to register in those sites. If you are not cautious then you might get scammed! But thanks to the scam watching services who keep us up-to-date with the reputed scammers.

Here is the link to the phishing paypal site : http://mkbae.com/stageon/paypal.com/ [DON'T ENTER YOUR ACCOUNT DETAILS!] but if you got free time, give them some trouble by spamming the heck out of them!

Bloggers on the other hand can’t survive without reputation. And you earn reputation by your blog posts and reaction to your readers. Making money with blogging is impossible  unless you got good reputation. Because everyday there are thousands of blogs born, but still there are only a handful of them that make more then $1000 per month. These includes people such as jhon chow, carl ocab,etc. So if you are looking to make money by blogging then you need to build reputation.

How to build good reputation?

There are many ways you can build reputation.

• Interact with your readers, visitors and customers.
• Build a network of loyal visitors, build forums to interact further.
• Reply to readers comments and encourage discussions.
• Giveaway freebies, everyone loves freebies.
• Don’t spam them, this includes spamming there emails, co-blogger,etc.
• Act as a authority of your niche, not just ‘act’ but ‘be’ the authority of your niche.
• Don’t talk about, promote or teach anything that you yourself don’t know much.
• Do not spam your blog with lots of advertising, pop ups, pop under, etc
• Write valid, up-to-date, interesting, thought provoking, controversial and informative posts.
• Warn readers of other scammers, illegal stuff, harmful affects of certain ‘illegal’ or ‘immorale’ subjects in your niche.
• Don’t start selling as soon as you see your first few positive visitors. You will make them run away too.
• Be patient, don’t push yourself. When the time comes you will see good results.
• Join other webmaster,make money online and blogging forums, or any forums related to your niche.
• Interact with other bloggers, comment on there blogs, follow them on twitter, etc.
• Advertise your blog and get traffic, try to convert each of those visitors into RSS subscribers.
• find out your own ways to earn better reputation among your niche. The possibilities to gain respect are endless but hard. Don’t quit trying.

It takes years to build reputation, but a mistake to kill it!

Yes it’s true. It takes years to build good reputation and a single mistake could kill everything!  So if you are building a good reputation i would advice you to stay clear of anything that is wrong.

This includes staying away from ‘bad sources’ and people affiliated with it. One small mistake and there goes the rep. Since things in the Internet spread like wildfire you won’t even know how far and quick rumours can travel!

That is why companies like horizon sue there own customers for tweeting things. But i doubt you will have the money to sue all badmouthers. So buckle up and stay focused on your goals.

Reputation = money

That is the secret of most brands. No matter how close the competitors are. Or how better there products and pricing are, if a brand has reputation. Then they can merely sell anything they want. There are lots of real life examples of this. And the same applies on Internet Marketing as well.

Which brings  us to our lesson. Reputation is money. Without reputation you can’t make money, well not legally at least. So before you start building money, build relationships and reputation. Get respect and become the athuroty in your niche. Before you know it, money will start coming your way.

Hope you understand the value of reputation and how it can change your buisness. Consider this scenario as a Game and reputation takes you a level higher. And bad reputation will drop your level. It’s up to you now, how you play the game and write your own story.

good day and happy rep building,

SJ

well yes you read it correct. Till now people keep talking about alexa ranking, alexa traffic ranks, etc etc but no one ever told you that there is actually a way to get traffic from alexa.

But before i come to that let me tell you a bit about alexa. Alexa is a ‘site monitoring’ service that monitors your site statistics, such as traffic, geo-analysis, page views, age group of traffic and many more things. It then ranks your website among all others based on your traffic in a particular month. This is called a alexa rank.

What is the use of traffic rank?

Alexa traffic rank is of no direct use to you. Unless you are a web analytic of course. However it does effect your sites popularity and income indirectly. When advertisers look for websites to advertise on then they consider few factors, alexa traffic rank is one of those factors.

Alexa is very popular among all webmasters, there is absolutely no webmaster that don’t use alexa to monitor his site and improve his rankings.

Tell the secret already!

ok alright, there is no big secret. Its a very simple thing which the smart savvy people have noticed and are taking extensive advantage of it. While others might not even know of such a feature.

You must be wondering what this feature is which you can use to get traffic ‘from’ alexa? Well let me explain you in easy words. Alexa has a feature called ‘reviewing’. Everyday thousands if not millions of people look up on sites such as google, yahoo, msn, twitter, youtube, facebook, amazon….. the list is too big. But you know what i am talking about, the big guys with the traffic rank 1-100 get lots of views on there profile pages.

Won’t alexa care?

That is the sad part unfortunately. Alexa as a big reputed company should be more considerate about its own site. I find many people writing ‘useless’ reviews on sites with good traffic rank. Sites such as google, yahoo, etc. Not only does they write useless reviews, they actually SPAM the hell out of them.

Take a look at the screen shot below on reviews for yahoo.com or go directly to this link. Make sure you go to the ‘review’ section though.

You see how people simply just spam like that? But worse off, there are others who actually pay a visit to those links. This has been tested in fact, if you go and write a review with a reference to your product then you get lots of targeted visitors. But your product must be relevant to the site you write a review for. That works even better.

Now wait! I am NOT asking you guys to spam there. Now that you know of a way to do so. But i told about this basically for everyone to know more about the services they use. Informational purposes only. I didn’t try yet but i wonder what effect it will have on my site in terms of traffic.

I also noticed some people write reviews multiple times and some do this on daily basis to try and keep their reviews on first page. This is hilarious and am rather disappointed in alexa. I mean don’t they have any maintenance? How can they allow so much spam on their reputed site? If that wasn’t enough, but these reviews also hurt the image and reputation of the sites about which they are written. For someone who is new to facebook and if he reads such Spam reviews about it on alexa, do you think that person is going to join facebook? I highly doubt that.

Is there another way?

In fact there is. There are 2 ways you can get traffic ‘from’ alexa, legally and spam free traffic. But how?

1. You can use the above method ‘without’ spamming, meaning giving your honest reviews with a link to your blog or site under your name. Such reviews won’t be considered spam and would actually get you traffic and people won’t even call you a spammer. So review writing on alexa is a new traffic generation method on my list.

2. You could do it like how the others do. Make your site popular, gain higher rankings. No don’t worry, rankings in top 100 or even top 100k is very hard. But you can aim for higher traffic ranking in a particular country or on a particular topic. I mean there are 190+ countries in the world [not sure how many total, damn i am not good at geography] and each country has its own ranking sites.

Once again please don’t spam and i do HOPE someone from alexa reads this message and actually employees someone to remove off those Spam comments and reviews. I had the notion that they do have staff who does that, but i guess they get too much spam reviews daily. In that case how about ‘moderating’ the reviews before publishing them?  That won’t be hard to implement i guess. Folks at wordpress might be helpful too. It will certainly reduce the spam.

And sorry for the late post guys, i was busy with lots of work. Take care and don’t spam. good luck in this new adventure, do it legally though.

Till then have a great day,

SJ

Seriously! Not kidding i did!

and for those of you who have a hard time digesting this, then here’s the screen shot of my AdSense account, that’s 97k in just 1 month – I am now officially the king of AdSense !

Now that i have your attention, want to know my secret?

Unlike all other gurus i am not going to make a ebook about this and sell, instead of doing that i am going to share those secrets which made me solid $97k within a month, so hang on with me till the end – believe me you don’t want to miss this!

Did you Got Ripped off ?? Ad Sense treasure? Make money with AdSense?

Well i did got ripped off many times with AdSense product and ebooks, i never made a single BUCK until i discovered this extremely ‘Top Secret’ which all AdSense gurus DON’T want YOU to know about! But i am going to expose the ‘top secret’ of all those ‘AdSense gurus’ today so you can too be a AdSense Guru.

But Wait till you find out how these so-called gurus rip you off without you suspecting a single thing. Before that let me tell you something about one so called program called Adsense Treasure [LINK REMOVED]

A guy named Abid says he made $40k dollars with AdSense using his super AdSense site, now to come to think of it – when someone boasts so much about their products then of course people want proof to believe it and this guy shows you PROOF as well,[screen shots of his AdSense account - which looks very real - almost like mine!]

Take a look at some interesting facts of what most AdSense gurus will sell, tell and earn!

1. The main Adsense treasure site is actually not the one which i showed you here, but this guy made it viral by introducing a affiliate program so indirectly he is making 100 other people to use his product and scam other innocent people, the picture you see on that site are not even real,if you were smart and Google those pictures on Google images for ‘AdSense treasure’ you will find them hosted over 100 sites and the exact same copies of these ‘AdSense treasure sites’ are everywhere on the net take a look at this one here. Does that ring a bell?

2. Most AdSense Gurus will sell you ‘articles’ or ‘article sites’ with a promise of get-set-forget but the hard truth is these articles they provide you are being used by 100+ other sites on the net, so if you even trusted this you will end up having duplicate content on your site which means you won’t make anything via AdSense as Google is going to penalize you!

3. Almost All AdSense gurus will sell you junk that is a ‘rewritten’ version of some old product which you never knew!

4. AdSense Gurus never show you a ‘live’ working site of their own using which they earn so much as they promise you!

5. AdSense Gurus earn more money selling their ‘AdSense products’ and via affiliate programs then they earn with that AdSense Program!

6. No AdSense guru will actually provide you with a valid ‘thank you’ letter from Google, but the truth is any AdSense or ad word member who performs excellently well is being thanked by Google or they have appreciation letter right form Google!

7. AdSense won’t make you money without a website or via ‘revenue sharing’ unless you work extremely hard!

8. Most Gurus will ask you to advertise via AdWords and then monetize your ‘advertised’ page via AdSense to make money, now that is Dumb! but people fell for it too

9. 80% of AdSense products are useless and the only way you earn money via it is through click bank!

10. AdSense is Google property, if you think you can trick and make money with AdSense like the gurus tell you to then you scammed a Internet Giant! Get used to it their are no shortcuts to making money with AdSense or tricks to earn overnight – the only fact is these are methods the gurus use to promote their products.

How they hypnotize you into buying and make you believe their products?

Its basically because the sales letters of such sites are too good to be true, just a few months back their was a site that promised you ‘free Google AdWords ads’ and everyone fell for it, without doing any research or being a well informed buyer – people JUST buy them!

And the biggest reason for that is the proofs they provide, those screen shots which are definitely not photoshop are too hard to part with, but now comes the interesting part you all been waiting for!

True AdSense money makers are those who are good in analytic and SEO along with lots of traffic. But wait their is still 1 way to make $97k+ with AdSense and that’s my way!

My secret to $97k+ a month!

remember the screen shot i showed you above?  No its not photoshop its real!

But the truth is i never earned $97k+ this month, i wish i did tho lol,bottom line that screen shot is fake!I had you believing me for a second dint i?

Here is the secret i promised – I used a ‘AdSense screen shot Generator’ to generate this image, its as easy as 1, 2, 3! and now imagine all those people who fell  for these scams and worse of all all those affiliates who promote these scams!

You want to know about the generator also? go here its one of those fake generators [please don't use it to scam others]

well i don’t know your intentions but my intention for that screen shot was to inform you about how easy it is for anyone to ‘label’ themselves are ‘AdSense gurus’ and rip you off, just like this guy abid and many others are doing online, i learned the lesson the hard way but i don’t want the same to happen to you guys! So watch out for these pesky AdSense gurus!

If you think you got scammed just like i did then give this article a digg or tweet and help spread the word!

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

Anything that is stolen and re-used without the permission of the original author/creator is plagiarism, you know when you use to steal information from Wikipedia for your school projects? or stealing your competitors content for your own clients? this is the first hand example of plagiarism, the Internet has made the entire world a very small village, and communication is so fast that it is possible for someone stealing your content within the next 10 minutes of it being published.

But the plagiarism that i am talking about here is about the the content[mostly articles, scripts,software,images] that you create and which get stolen. Plagiarism surely is very hot topic on the Internet world and their is no doubt 80% of what you see and what you get online from ‘any’ website or ‘any’ guru is actually a ‘remake’ of someone Else’s work, this is how it goes, you get a idea you sell it, the other uses that idea and adds some of his own to it and then sells its again its a whole new idea! But when it comes to articles and web content, specially for bloggers, then you don’t want thieves stealing your work!

Why? because plagiarism hits any webmaster very hard, although their might not be any advantage to the thief, but their surely are disadvantages for you! That is why your content must stay protected, because you have worked hard for it and if someone else is profiting on your hard work then that is simply unacceptable and not fair!

But the question arises, How can you detect, protect and punish plagiarism??

There are many smart webmasters and equally smart thieves, so it all depends on your knowledge on how you deal with it, because some times you might not even know that your content is being stolen and used elsewhere!

How to Detect plagiarism?

Many people don’t know that they are victims of plagiarism and as a webmaster its YOUR responsibility to keep checking on the Internet and find thieves so that you can defend your works. Their are many plagiarism detection tools, that can detect and inform you about stolen and dupe content. Below are the top 5 tools that i would recommend anyone to use.

1. Copyscape : Copyscape is the most widely used tool to detect plagiarism and dupe content, but its not free for life and after certain inquires you will have to pay for it or wait a month, but so far its the best one out their!

2. Doc Cop : Doc Cop is another free tool, but you need registration before using it, its performance is very similar to that of copyscape and would recommend it as an alternative

3. PlagiarismDetect : Yet another awesome site with more functionality but it requires registration too and the free version is limited.

4. RePrintWriters : This service checks your entire article to find and detect possible copies, excellent tool for article and content plagiarism detection

5. CopyRightSpot : More similar to copyscape and does not require registration

How to protect yourself from plagiarism?

Like they say ‘prevention is better then cure’ its better you protect your content from getting stolen then rather finding thieves. But how can you protect them? Their are many ways to protect yourself from plagiarism.

1. Most content thieves are those who are new to ‘blogging’ or newbies looking for articles to post on directories, squidoo, hubpages, paid to write etc, these people have absolutely no knowledge of what they are doing, but they like spamming, the most easiest way to keep such people away is by showing ‘Page protected by xxx’ signs, most of them won’t mind stealing.

2. The ‘not so newbs’ may not be scared easily by logos or signs you put on your pages[which looks very ugly for a website or blog, trust me] for such users the best option for you is by disabling the ‘right click’ feature, i know that you want to know how to disable that, but it will take lots of time if i explained that here, so i would suggest googling it, for wordpress their are plugins which do that automatically for you.

3. Avoid using your self-written content on ‘other peoples’ sites, what this means is avoid hosting your content on sites like ‘paid to write’ example associated content, etc. Unless you know what your doing, you should always know that once you submit to those sites, your content is no longer yours. Its fine if your selling those articles but if you don’t want others to use them then avoid this.

4. Avoid using free sources, like ‘free blogs from wordpress.com or blogger, because their is no guarantee that the content is yours and anyone could easily steal those, other then that don’t use ‘tweaked content’ on your site as well, tweaked content are ‘remakes’ of someone Else’s articles, which can be easily done with soft wares, so if your doing this and if those articles are stolen then you are in no way going to be the original author of those articles!

Don’t use your articles multiple times, on multiple sites [same articles] and DON’T submit the articles you use on your site into ‘article directories’ for link building, because not only will you get rejected, but if you do get accepted you will lose your main sites page rank and Search engine rankings for ‘dupe content’ so avoid that. I rather write new articles exclusively for article directories.

5. Make your articles your domain/website related, make them so hardcore to edit that the editor will waste lots of time doing that or best of all, include links into your articles to your other articles or sources from your website. This way when they copy your content without editing then you get free ping backs and track backs this will not only inform you that someone stole your article, but it will tell Google that the article is yours and Google will credit you and ‘ban’ the other website for dupe content. [This has worked for me so far]

How to punish the thieves?

Even after all you do their are chances your content might get stolen, mostly by those ‘auto blogs’ that just hack into your RSS feeds and take everything away. So how can you punish thieves that had stolen your content?

1. Start nice and good, send the webmaster a nice email and ask him nicely to remove your content and explain him why its not good for him for keeping your content[don't threat] and what could happen to his search engine rankings and page rank. [THIS idea has worked for me 99% of the time]

2. Send a email to the ‘web hosting company’ of that website, you can find this information easily by checking the websites ‘whois’. Tell the web host your problem and show them information and everything they need to know, this would get the webmaster hosting account ‘banned’ for breaking copyright laws and plagiarism

3. Use services and forums of reputed companies, social groups and anti plagiarism services, complain or report the webmaster and i am sure you will get lots of help from their, i personally did the same a few times and found lots of help. If the website which had stolen your content is selling some products or services then you can write reviews about them and what they did to your content, even tho this sounds good but it will take time and i personally don’t think link building for some thieves is a good thing:)

4. Threats : They always work, in fact threatening to sue someone for stealing your information always works because the thief knows they stolen and directing them to few documents on the anti-plagiarism sites will show the thieves that they are punishable by law, one single sentence about ‘suing you for copyrights infringement’ is enough for them to remove your works. Their are some experts that even threat about harming the thief and actually that always works, they harm the thief’s website reputation and income, some of these involve banning the thief’s web accounts on this hosting or worse his AdSense account by click frauds![i don't recommend this]

5. If nothing works and if your so desperate, then you can actually sue them, this is costly but if you got the amounts and if you sue someone then you might actually make back the money if you win, best of all it will make other thieves aware of your seriousness. In fact one guy made his ‘content thief’ rank no 1 on Google for words such as ‘biggest content thief’ you can try that too, but its up to you to handle it, i rather use method 1,2,3 and maybe 4 and just make the world aware of the thief.

Like always when their are closed doors their are always other open doors or maybe windows too lol, so discover more and play safe, keep your content yours only – simply because you had worked for it!

Has it happened to you?

yes in fact it did, 4 of my articles where stolen by normal websites and bloggers and around 8 of them were ‘tweaked’ and used by auto-blog sites, i did what i told here in this article and i had 90% of them removed.I try keep my site user friendly so i don’t block right clicks or put 100 different logos, but if their is someone threatening my credibility i will fight back!

So what, their is nothing bad in copy pasting! really?

To all those who actually want to steal content or think their is nothing that is bad about it you must know that, Google will penalize your website, remove them from search engines, ban your web accounts like AdSense and drop your page rank to 0! ALL THAT for plagiarism, just 1 article and your doomed! so why risk it? their is no money making in stealing content and selling/using or doing whatever you want with it, because at current Internet age, users are becoming very web savvy, same goes for the Internet webmasters and buyers – so your not fooling anyone!

Anyways i think this is enough to get you hooked with your content and make you realize its value, if you want to know anything drop me a email or feel free to contact me.

Once again STOP PLAGIARISM!

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

For me twitter is very time consuming and after twitter made few updates a while ago, we are no longer able to see the ‘mutual’ or those people who we follow that do not follow us back and worse of all you can no longer remove them directly via twitter in bulk.

This made it very hectic for me recently and i slowly started losing followers, because people tend to take advantage of this and remove the people they follow because they know we might not be able to find out about that for a while.

And to make it worse, its impossible to manage multiple accounts and to analyze my twitter status, trend and followers.

Out of all these painful issues the most annoying one is the amount of spam direct messages that i receive from twitter followers and friends, most are automated, but imagine getting 500+ DM every day because that’s the amount i get and then deleting them all one by one takes a lot of time.

Due to all these problems i started searching for solutions and since twitter is exploding and their a app or script for almost anything in twitter, just like their are for facebook and iphone, twitter apps are amazing and can enhance your usage of twitter. I found few of them and used them for a while, and out of those all, i found 5 of them most useful.These apps,bots,scripts and services helped me save tonnes of my time on twitter. And i felt like sharing those for all of you guys who have similar problems.

1. Huitter (no longer works)

Huitter.com provides some very good twitter apps and scripts, one of those called ‘Mutuality’ is my favorite

Using Mutuality you can automatically ‘unfollow’ all the people who you follow and who are not following you back, their is also an ‘exclude list’ where you can add people who are important to you and you don’t want to unfollow them.

All this within a click of a button so you don’t want to miss this.

2. Friend or Follow

Friend or follow is a quick service which shows you how many of your friends are not following you back and how many of your followers your not following, its a good tool to find out the mutuality when you need it. An excellent tool for those who have lots of followers and friends.

3. Splitweet

Splitweet is a amazing tool for those who have multiple accounts on twitter. Its the ultimate solution to managing multiple accounts with ease, its also good tool to monitor your brand.

You can use it to tweet on multiple accounts at the same time and follow the tweets of your friends from all your accounts at the same time, all at one place! Check them out.

4. Useqwitter

Twitter always send you a message to your inbox whenever someone starts following you or sends you a direct Message, but does it send you a email when someone stops following you?

Useqwitter is one such service, it will send you email updates when someone stops following you, its a good tool to monitor your twitter account, but if you lose lots of people daily then you will gets lots of messages in your inbox!

5. DM doctor

For those of you who get tonnes of Direct messages and waste lots of time trying to delete them and empty your inbox, this is the solution for you!

The DM Deleter is a script, you need to bookmark the script and go on your inbox and then select your options and click! And your messages will be deleted automatically. You can read more about it here.I deleted 1843 messages with it today, and it took me few minutes to do that and i wasted 30minutes + yesterday to delete around 200 messages manually :S wish i knew about it sooner.

Anyways hope these tools are useful and enhance your twitter experience, their are many more tools out their for twitter and i will be making a list of all of them very soon.

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

First let me introduce you to the concept of landing page, it can mean differently for different people.

For affiliates a landing page is the first visible page to the traffic that they send by promoting that particular product, for affiliates landing pages can be the deciding factor for sale or no sale. It is also the squeeze page from where you effectively build your list.

For Website owners, a landing page merely means the first page or the index page [also known as the home page] of their entire site, this is the page that gives the site its identity and provides visitors with an overview of what is inside the site, just like a index page does on books or the introduction in movies.

For Product owners, the landing page is where their affiliates send the traffic to, this is the most important page of any website because it is that page which will provide the user the information about the product and everything regarding it, its also that page which has to be good enough for the visitor that it converts him into a paying customer. But lets keep that aside for now.

The above mentioned are examples of how one can describe a landing page, but am not going to go deep into those topics, i will make detailed post about them later. But the Landing page which am going to talk about now is the one for a ‘list-builder’, this list builder can be anyone, a website owner, a affiliate, a product owner or simply a company doing research. Also known as a squeeze page. See my previous article for more information on list building.

Like i said, for a list-builder the ‘landing page’ means everything, because the ultimate goal of a list – builder is to convert the visitors to his site into subscribers to his list! And all list-builders depends on the landing page to do its magic.

Landing page is also known as squeeze pages or lead capture pages so don’t get confused when you hear those terms as they all mean the same.

First things first – The tools:

Before you start building the perfect landing or squeeze page make sure you have the right tools, because sometimes having the right tools reduces your work, saves a lot of time and money along with giving you great results. Here are the top tools i recommend.

1. WebHosting: HostGator (for hosting your pages – use code ‘SJRECOMMENDS’ for discounts)
2. Domain Names: Namecheap, Godaddy
3. WordPress Based Themes: Elegant Themes (for bloggers)
4. Products to promote or sell: Click Bank (once you build a list, click bank is basic you can find many other programs out there)
5. Get an Autoresponder : Aweber (the back bone of your email marketing campaign or alternatively you can use getresponse)
6. Exit pops & pop ups: Pop Up Domination (for bloggers – or else use an exit pop, search online you can find one for free)
7. Link Cloaking: PrettyLinkPro (wordpress plugin, use free version or get the pro with added features – useful if you have internal links or in your mailings or ebooks, etc very helpful since they are easy to edit anytime without changing the link and redirect it anywhere you wish)
8. Automatic Squeeze pages: Profits theme (for wordpress, build a squeeze or sales page with click of a button)
9. Outsourcing: Fiverr (for traffic, videos, voice overs, content, ebooks, anything you can think of!)
   

The landing page magic:

Ready to build a list yet? So how can we create that magic to get excellent conversion rates? follow these points to create the magic for your landing page.

• Stick to the topic: Your landing page should be product specific, niche targeted and to the point
• Give something free: Landing pages are more effective when your offering something for free
• Use my writing techniques from here to optimize your landing page
• background of your landing page should be white or the same color as that of your website,according to my research white backgrounds get most ‘time’ a visitor spends on the page
• Their should be images for any product that your giving away or offering trials for, these images should be placed in the left hand side for optimum results
• Use buttons to highlight important points, red buttons works the best – bullet points are the key here.
  
• Use ‘highlighting’ to mark important features of the offer, such as ‘free’, ‘limited’, etc.
  
• Remember that your building a list, not a membership site, so don’t force your visitors to fill invaluable forms or provide lots of details, most list subscription forms requires email and first name, stick to that because i have found that the more the information you ask for the lesser are your conversion rates.
• Stick to the title, if your offering free goodies or report, or a trial to your brand new product then stick to that don’t deviate from topic and start talking about things that are not needed, this is not a product page – your not necessarily selling something so there is no need to have a ‘story’.
  
• Keep your landing page as short as possible! Most affiliates and product owners tend to make their landing pages[which are also their sales letters] into incredible 10000 + words articles. Study shows that average visitors to your website are more likely to convert if you give them information about what they can expect in brief and since your landing page is meant to convert traffic to subscribers their is no point in writing a article about it, because no one will bother reading it.
• Promote your landing pages effectively, you may not promote your site at all, but you must promote your landing page because you need traffic to convert them into subscribers so promote them in all possible ways you can.
• Use points instead of paragraphs, because short points are much better to read then entire paragraphs with so many words
• Show the visitors the aim of your offer, don’t hide things, be open – or in other words, provide users the trust that your not going to spam their emails or sell them to others.
• Avoid lots of internal links to external sites on the landing page, links in landing page is like a leak in a pot, your valuable traffic may just run away from your page which is what you don’t want! So keep links limited unless important ones.
• Brand your page, don’t let it look dull and unimportant, give the professional look
• Do SEO even on the landing pages. yes some people argue about this but this is actually very helpful, because you get organic traffic to those pages and that traffic is very laser targeted and converts at very high rates!
• Be clear and write with the flow, don’t use hard words, make sure the reader understands what your trying to convey
• Provide your subscription forms more then 1 time! This is important and so is the location of the forms, your goal is to make sure at least one form is visible to the visitor at all time, so when he scrolls down to read till the end their should be 1 form visible to him at all times!
• Use google analytics and the tools provided by your email marketing solution, track your traffic and conversion rates and find out where you lack and where to improve.
• User drop down menu buttons instead of radio buttons, because the shorter a form looks the easier it is for visitors to fill it and the higher you convert
• Cause urgency, tell the visitor that the page will vanish after certain time or the offer won’t last long so that they take action the very moment they read it
• Talk to the user, about the user and for the user, no one actually cares about what you the list builder gets from it, everyone cares for themselves so instead of using words such as ‘we’ user words such as ‘you’
• Most visitors are likely to read the starting few lines and the last few lines, and the same goes for the paragraphs, make optimum use of it then they might read the middle portion, so you know the major ‘hot spots’ where a visitor gives most of his or her attention
• Don’t use too much flash work or pop ups, those things are irritating even for you, so the visitors to your site are also humans, avoid torcher!
• Test before trying and compare before starting, make sure your better then your competition or any other list builder, also visit their landing pages to find out how they are doing and take out the best portions of their tricks and apply to yours
• Make sure your page is fast loading, the slower it loads the lower it converts because no one is going to wait 2 mins for a page to load!
• Don’t use clip art or artworks[unless your promoting or offering art related items], instead provide images
• Location of the page, make it discoverable don’t hide it, in fact study shows landing pages with their own domain names convert a lot better then the ones hosted on sub-domains, but it all depends on what type of offer your giving to your visitors.
• Use a good simple design, but make sure the design is not too good also. Keep the major elements of your page visible while keeping the prospect into the ‘flow’ of your page, they should not feel or tempt to close the page, be creative!
• check your conversion rates, think of how much you convert and track the major sources of traffic that convert effectively.
• use exit pop ups, when a visitor is about to exit your page give pop ups with a even better offer to catch their attention again!

Updated June 2011:

Here are a few more pointers that i have learned since posting this:

• Use Videos: Videos are the new trend and video landing pages tend to convert much better.
• Show your self : either show your picture or record a video with your own voice, don’t be afraid or nervous. These are the ‘trust’ factor and would definitely get you more conversions.
• Use captions for images: If you use images then put captions underneath them, these little captions are very powerful and according to Ryan, people look at title, sub headings, images, captions and post script. So these must be the converting factors!
• One field tactic if your desperate: If your page doesn’t convert, simple remove the ‘name’ field and just ask for their email, that’s it! This one field tactic will take away the ‘personalization’ value form your list but will increase conversions.
• Offer a double bait: If you don’t get good conversions then here is another tactic, offer your ‘freebie’ that you are giving away or part of it to your visitors without them having to opt in, you can use this with exit pops and convert exit traffic efficiently. Simply put a link back to your opt in page inside the freebie or better split the freebie in 2 parts, give one for free and ask them to opt in for the 2nd.

I think this much information is enough for you to create the landing page magic, if you need any help feel free to ask me. I would also like to know the methods and tricks that you use to convert effectively so don’t hesitate to tell!

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad and like my fan page on facebook, till then have a great day,

SJ

I am sure you must have heard pretty much from every single guru, affiliate and successful online entrepreneur that the money is in the list, but what exactly is a list? How can you build one too? How can you convert huge traffic into your opt in subscribers and then later convert those subscribers into your paying customers?

These are the things to remember when building a list, but more importantly building a profitable list so you can really supercharge your ‘make money online‘ dreams:

What you will need in order to start building a list:

1. An Auto Responder: Building a list requires a few tools in order to get started. The first and the most important one is an auto responder. Auto responders are were you will store your list, build campaigns & send messages to your list. Auto responders are the backbone of your list building efforts & it’s important to get a auto responder that has good delivery rates, lots of features, good support and of course is within your budget. The industry leaders currently are Aweber & GetResponse, which are the most preferred auto responders used by internet marketers. However Aweber & GetResponse can be costly if you are just starting out with an average of $200 for 500 subscribers annually. For starters i would recommend Mail Chimp, another good auto responder but most importantly a great tool for building a list without a budget. Mail Chimp has a free for life plan where you can store up to 2000 subscribers & send up to 12,000 emails per month. That is good enough for now, so register at MailChimp if you are starting out or consider Aweber and GetResponse if you want more options.

2. A Landing Page or Blog: Now that you got a auto responder ready & fired up its time to start getting those subscribers. But of course where will you send your traffic? You will obviously need a site/blog or else a squeeze page (also known as landing page) to send your traffic to where your optin lead capture forms are (alongside your offers). If you don’t have one already then you will need a web host (i recommend Hostgator – use coupon code ‘SJRECOMMENDS’ to get 25% off) along with a domain (get them at Goddady or Namecheap). Once you got everything set up, all you need to do is set up your squeeze pages & plugin your opt-in forms.

3. Traffic: Its all about traffic when it comes to building a list. Once everything is set up you will need to start driving quality & targeted traffic to it. Start getting the word out, promote your page via social media, bookmarking, etc. Once you start building traffic then read my post on how to retain traffic to your site.

List Building Ethics:

Now that everything is set up its time to convert the traffic to subscribers & then the subscribers to paying customers.

1. Know what a mailing list is: A list is basically the collection of all the people [their emails and other optional information] who have opted to receive messages from you, always remember that manually entering a huge list of emails into your auto responder is not actually a list and their is definitely no money in that too, because what you will be doing that way is spamming those emails which could be very bad later on. So never spam your list or create a list without the permission of those people who are added into your list, make sure your list is 100% opt-in. On a site note it will be hard to find a good auto responder that will just simply allow you to add a list and send them mails. Another thing to take care of is that importing a large list can cost you a lot & migrating from one auto responder to another can result in loss of your subscribers.

2. Bribe your visitors: When it comes to building a list, most successful internet marketers actually ‘bribe’ their traffic into submission, they do this by giving attractive free offers which results in the traffic and the people to sign up for the list, those offers must be highly niche related, free and very tempting. If you obey this single rule you will convert more then 90% of your traffic if its highly targeted, so obey this golden rule, bribe them.

3. Write a good landing page copy: The landing page is the most important aspect of a list, its the page where the traffic comes to, this page should be able to convert that traffic into opt-in subscribers. So making your landing page as informative, short, tempting and attractive , the more will be the conversions. Read my post on how to make good landing pages for more help.

4. Don’t be a dictator, Respect Freedom: Give your list members the ability to unsubscribe, make sure they are able to contact you, so maintain a separate email for that activity. Give them valuable information but not all at once, keep them waiting so that they don’t run away, spoon feed them step by step, don’t be Hasty and don’t talk always about a product, i.e don’t always do promotions with your list, send emails that are worth reading and related to your niche, involve them in your work. Don’t annoy them by sending messages every single hour or day for that matter, maintain a gap and monitor your lists.

5. Engage & build a community: Once you have a list which is growing continuously, there are a few things to remember, now that the traffic to your landing page are your subscribers, its time to treat them as ‘humans’ and not ‘bots’ anymore, this is the most important step where everyone else fails. If you read point no.2 i told you to bribe them, but its actually that they are forced to join and after they get what your giving free, they are more likely to unsubscribe to maintain low spam in their in-boxes. This step is very important because once someone joins your list, your ultimate goal is to NOT let them unsubscribe, once you follow this the money will flow automatically, because you must win the trust of your subscribers and not make them feel as yet another group of email list which you keep spamming and try selling your products too.

Bonus Tip for bloggers: If you find some of your list members being inactive then consider deleting them from the list to free up space for other subscribers, this can help you save a lot of money. If you are building a list via your blog or website rather then a squeeze page then consider getting pop up domination, it is a very powerful tool that can help you get up to 300% conversion rates.

This should be enough for now for list building basics. Keep building that list, next time i would get more deep into the topic. Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ