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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Link to ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Blog

Posted: 28 Jun 2012 08:31 AM PDT

A couple months back two guys from Denver flew in to Lincoln to pick my brain for a few hours on this new product they were going to release

It’s called the High Traffic Academy and pretty impressive.

Once you sign up you get access to a 3 step easy to follow program that shows you how to get an incredible amount of traffic to your websites.

In many of their case studies people have used these exact techniques to get OVER 360,000 visitors in one day alone!

Within the 3 steps there is an enormous amount of content… I counted over 50 videos alone.

Here are the basic chapters:

The Fundamentals:

How to pick domain names, how to set up hosting,setting up landing
pages,putting together your auto responder and thank you pages

Traffic (the real eye opener for me):

Watch over the shoulder of these pro's as they setup live campaigns. Follow along with them and see your traffic sky! Cool part about all of these modules is you get to watch it live.

List control:

- “The President of the Internet” FRANK KERN walks you through 8
stages of controlling your list, you get to learn from a legend! If you remember Franks "List Control" product sold for $2,000 alone… and I can tell you from experience it revolutionized my email marketing.

This product is really geared for anyone. Whether you are just getting started and needing to setup a website to the most seasoned website owners and marketers.

Go here to check it out now

Why 2012 is a Sucky Year For Search Conference Attendees

Posted: 28 Jun 2012 06:28 AM PDT

Ah, the search engine conference. The way to mingle with Googlers, industry experts and bloggers, all while learning, tweeting, networking, and yes, gossiping about all things SEO over a few (okay, more than a few in many of your cases!) beers in the bar. In terms of the large search conferences, there are only three that matter - Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, and Pubcon. And this year, more so than any year previous, has seen a real shift in how each show is presenting itself, a big change from the cookie cutter format all three have been doing before – you know, the tried and true 4 speakers and a moderator on every panel, with a few token “solo presentations” thrown in once or twice for good measure.

And tried and true isn’t a bad thing, although I know those who run the conferences will argue about the value of shaking things up. But some of the ways conferences have been leaning recently just make me go WTF and really makes me wonder who is benefitting, because it is looking less and less like the attendees.

Search Marketing Expo has a lot of the same speakers speaking on multiple sessions. Search Engine Strategies is trending towards many more solo sessions or sessions with just two people. And PubCon, well with nine tracks (yes, you read that right, NINE tracks) is there anyone in the industry who can’t claim they have a speaking spot there if they want it? Even including those with dubious credibility in the industry.

Let’s start with Pubcon. Holy tracks. I am not even sure what to say about a conference that has nine tracks and how someone can even get value out of that, aside from the conference being able to boast it has the highest number of “experts” at any conference. It seems half the speakers this year are either unknowns or from speakers who you suspect will really be more pitchy than providing actionable information - after all, there are way more speakers here versus the number of people I would consider experts in the industry. But Pubcon is Pubcon and who can resist a booze filled week that can be written off as a business expense? So it does draw a crowd – and that crowd will include over 200 speakers alone, and since it is months away still, that number can be expected to grow (but notable exception? Matt Cutts is MIA from the lineup, although maybe PubCon hopes to slide him into one of the as-yet-unnamed keynote speaker slots).

Pubcon has always marketed itself saying that most of the good stuff happens at bars, but that is 140 sessions on the grid over 3 days, you can’t help but think that some of the sessions could be consolidated to give more value to both the speakers and the attendees. Once you take into account the lure of the casinos, the inevitable hangovers that will keep people in bed past noon, how many of those sessions will have just a handful of people in the room. However, while they are giving out nearly 200k in comp passes to speakers, I suspect many of those would have only sprung for the expo hall or networking pass only if they had to shell it out themselves, so there probably is a lot of value since some of those speakers will attend sessions and probably tweet or blog about .

And SMX is a repeat of the same old speakers – not that it is a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, mind you, just a lot of repetition. There are some really kick ass people who speak at SMX (and are most often at SES and/or PubCon too). But at SMX West, Rhea Drysdale (@rhea), from the always notable Outspoken Media, spoke on multiple panels and moderated a couple more. Brad Geddes (@bgtheory), who is THE AdWords expert, also racked up a few panels as well. As did Shari Thurow (@sharithurow), Christine Churchill (@keyrelevance) and probably some others I didn’t notice while looking at it recently when seeing what the SMX East speaker line up looked like (which wasn’t yet published).

And Search Engine Strategies is going in the complete opposite of what PubCon is doing, seeming to knock down their speaker numbers dramatically, according to an email many speaker pitchers received recently, stating that attendees want a more indepth look from one or two speakers rather than the tried but true method of 4 speakers per panel. It’s very true that attendees could get a better in depth look at some of the topics, but you have to wonder if that was influenced by poor or sales pitchy speakers.

And by dropping down the number of speakers so dramatically (most sessions for SES San Francisco only have 1-2 speakers, which is in line with the email received by those who pitched) attendees are also missing the draw that added industry known speakers bring to the table, namely the ability for attendees to hobknob with those they read and admire in the industry. Many speakers do not attend conferences they do not get a comp pass for, and it would be a definite loss to SES if those well known “industry celebrity” types were not there for attendees to get the opportunity to talk to. As a potential attendee picking a search conference to attend, it looks pretty slim pickings if I am wanting to network with those celebs, and networking in general is a huge benefit of attending a conference in person rather than just doing webinars or reading blogs and forums. It is an expensive conference, let alone if you remove a good percentage of the industry experts from the attendee pool. And from a brand new potential speaker perspective, then has the unfortunate side effect that up-and-coming experts will have to look at the less popular SES shows, or choose SMX or Pubcon instead.

What’s going to be the method that works? Well, I can’t see SMX ever switching from their “let’s put these same favorite people of ours on as many panels as we possibly can, then fill in whatever we can’t fill with those we love” that they have been doing since they launched. Because, as we all know, Danny is a celeb in the industry and has to keep those favorite people happy. And to be honest, PubCon could fill all their speaker slots with the entire collections of Smurfs and My Little Ponys because, well, people don’t attend to go to the sessions, they are there to talk to the experts. As for SES, I do think SES might be making a mistake on their new strategy, basing it on the newbies who are the few who actually fill out the speaker surveys (aside from those of you I know are giving yourself top scores for your own presentations!)

Looking for an SEO service that won’t get you banned?

“Get Started Selling Electronic Products on Your Blog” plus 1 more

Get Started Selling Electronic Products on Your Blog

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 01:02 PM PDT

Today I explained a bit about the strategy I use to sell electronic products through my blog at Digital Photography School.

I sell ebooks, but as technology evolves, bloggers face a growing array of product creation possibilities.

Just as many hop on board the product bandwagon, so many keep well away from it. But developing a blog product can have many benefits for your blog, so it’s definitely not a business model you should simply ignore.

Importantly, you need to know before you begin where products fit within your overall blog strategy. That will help you to avoid premature product launching, and ensure your product meets a real audience need.

Devising, creating, and launching a product is hard work, so you want to do it carefully, and in a way that rewards you for all the hard work you’ve put in—and the hurdles you’ve overcome.

There’s as much advice about product development and sales as there are blog products available on the internet. But here are a few of our favorite ProBlogger posts:

7 Reasons why $7 products rock, by Steve Martile
How my ebook paid for SXSW in just two months, by Ali Hale
A tale of two ebooks, a case study by Alexis Grant
Build blog products that sell, our product development series by Greg McFarlane.

Have you developed an electronic product strategy for your blog? Share your tips, advice, and resources with us in the comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Get Started Selling Electronic Products on Your Blog

Blog Business Model 3: Sell Electronic Products

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 07:09 AM PDT

This is the third post in our series on Blog Business Models.

On Digital Photography School, we currently sell nine ebooks on different aspects of photography. When you look at the blog now, it looks as if it was built to sell products, but it wasn't.

A couple of dPS ebooks

The site is five years old now. I remember brainstorming potential ways of monetizing early on, and I'm pretty sure that products were on the list. I didn't have specific ideas on what ebooks those might be, but I knew there was potential with an educational site to go in that direction. (Other niches might have been tougher to develop products for.)

My strategy for the first two years on dPS was to build the audience, and if I could cover my costs, which were very low, with some advertising, then that would be a bonus.

So I had advertising and affiliate marketing on the blog before I developed the products. I was mainly using AdSense on dPS, as an easy way to make money while I built the audience.

Preparing for products

From the beginning I knew I was building the blog as a platform for monetization—building audience and building community, which are such a big part of selling products. If you can get a community feel on your blog then your readers become advocates for you, both to each other, and beyond your blog.

The other way I used the blog was to test product ideas. So after two years of writing, I had a fair suspicion of what might work. I knew my audience, what they were commenting on, and what questions they were asking.

The blog itself was almost a bit of a research tool, as was the social network that surrounded it. I used the social network to research things like what type of information did people read, and what formats did they use.

On the blog I did a little of research around pricing—I did a survey about what people were buying (books, magazines, and so on) and I got a sense from that as to what people were regularly spending their money on. A lot of photographers buy UK photography magazines which are about $15. That gave me a hint as to what sort of price I could expect for my ebooks.

And of course the blog and the social networks gave me ideas about products that actually would help people.

Challenges of a product strategy

I've faced a couple of pretty major hurdles in developing a product strategy on dPS.

Firstly, I'm not a pro photographer—I'm more of an enthusiastic amateur—so it's always a challenge to put together material at a level that's going to help people. While my knowledge might be beyond what a normal camera owner's is, I'm not confident about it as the basis for an ebook!

So the challenge has been to develop partnerships with pros to write the products. That whole process of partnerships is a challenge, as is finding a model that's a win-win between myself and the author. Then there's the task of maintaining that business, and managing the day-to-day logistics of that—profit sharing and so on.

The key for me is the team I've built around the product strategy. We outsource our design and editing, as well as the writing of the ebooks. So a lot of energy has gone into drawing that team together and getting them working together well.

One of the other big challenges is trying to build a platform to sell the products—choosing shopping carts and so on. I'm really not a technical person so I spent a lot of time researching the options for delivering the products and collecting payments.

If you don't have the skills yourself, it's important to find the right people—people who are passionate and can deliver the product content you need.

Building the business

The key to building a paying customer base around dPS has been email: we use the blog to get people on our email list.

If we were relying on people reading the blog posts, or subscribing via RSS and Twitter and so on, we'd be much smaller than we are—and significantly less effective in selling.

The vast majority of our sales come when we send an email, not from when we put up a blog post or Tweet or Facebook. It's the email address. We're more about email marketing than we are about anything else, so the email address is the big key.

Our email strategy is pretty straightforward—we send a weekly newsletter, which is like an RRS feed in an email. And when we launch a product, subscribers receive a series of weekly emails over four weeks. Each of those emails does a different type of thing—announces some aspect of the launch, reminds people of product features or special offers, and so on.

Really, though, the success of that strategy rests on the quality of our products.

Quality information is also really important. Our ebooks are longer and deeper than many of the other photography ebooks around. We do charge a little bit more for them, but we get a lot of feedback that the quality is really good. So we emphasize that.

We also take our time publishing them—each ebook takes four to six months to write and publish, which is significantly longer than what a lot of others are doing in this space.

Quality also plays into the design. We put a lot of emphasis on getting the design right—our ebooks are far beyond a Word document converted into a PDF. We really invest money into that, because we feel it's important.

The other aspect that's crucial to the growth of the site—and product sales—is the work we put into the launch process.

Our first launch was a ten-day launch; now we're doing four-week launches and thinking about how we can really build the momentum over that time.

How can we build the launch into an event? How can we tell the story of the ebook and showcase it in a way that's not "hypey" but builds anticipation and highlights what customer needs it will help with?

The creative process doesn't stop once we've written or designed the ebook. That's just the beginning: once you've got the product, it's about creative selling.

These days, for us, the marketing starts before we even write a word. We're always thinking, what need is this fulfilling? How would we sell it? And that informs how we work with the writers as well—we're always trying to get the authors thinking about selling the content, rather than just writing it.

In terms of new challenges that will help us grow the business, I'm now looking at new ways to keep the sales momentum going after an ebook's launch.

I'm thinking hard about the long-tail opportunities that surround products like educational ebooks, and how I can create a stronger, longer sales life for each product.

One thing I'm looking at is developing channels that will allow us to resell the materials we've already developed over a longer time period. Basically, I want to leverage the wealth of already-developed content by looking for new channels through which to sell it.

Just starting out?

If you're just starting out with a product model, I think it's critical that you know your readers and the needs that they have. Then, you can develop products that really are taking those felt needs and solving thproblems.

Some of the ebooks we've published have done better than others, and they're the ones that solved a really felt need. The ones that don't sell as well were products that we felt might be useful to people, but our readers didn't feel those needs.

So it's about getting to know your readers as much as possible.

Are you building a product strategy around your blog? How’s it going? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Blog Business Model 3: Sell Electronic Products