Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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How I Made 1 Million Dollars From A 99 Cent Ebook Posted: 18 Feb 2015 06:00 AM PST I have never talked about this publicly until yesterday when I presented on it at the Traffic and Conversion conference.  For most of the time it was out of selfish reasons as I didn’t want to “out” myself and burn down what I was doing… but that happened eventually cause I got a little greedy and pushed it too hard.  The good news is I have no doubt this would work for anyone for anything you’re doing. I would like to say I planned this all out but its something that I completely stumbled on. Before I publishing autobiography – “Nothing’s Changed But My Change – The ShoeMoney Story” I did some due diligence on how to “work” the system if you will… It just so happened that the Nebraska Book Company (the biggest buyers and sellers on all of Amazon) are only a couple blocks away from my office and they actually have some Amazon employees that work out of the office.   Long story short they shed the light on a lot of things but the biggest thing they told me was to put out a 2nd book,  a digital only book, when I launch.  They also recommended putting it in the KDP program (Kindle Direct Publishing lets you give away the book for free but Amazon reimburses you a percentage of the downloads). My book launch was less than a week away so I needed to put together something fast… really fast.  I year before that I had written a very comprehensive guide on Email Marketing.  Actually one of the best things I have ever written guide wise.  I decided to touch it up a bit, rebrand the water marks for my PAR Program company and not ShoeMoney and add a little bit about the PAR Program. Just to clarify a bit more about this guide it was a complete walk through on email marketing and has tons of stats from my experiences in permission based email marketing over the last decade.  In the end of my book I close with “If you have a graphics team,  copywriters, and a programmer you can do this yourself with all the information I have given you.  If you need help contact us at http://www.parprogram.com.  For the link I embedded a tracking url so I could track the visitors. And who knows… maybe I would get some new clients for PAR from them going to the site and getting a demo request. So I found a image I could use for commercial purposes and published the book the same day as my Autobiography. Yes it looked like crap… but time was of the essence so I went with it. So the books launched and my Autobiography sold well out of the gate keeping strong #1 in its category for the first 2 months.  Here is a rough graph of sales volume of the 2 books through 2013: So the interesting thing is that my Email Marketing Guide book – “The Ultimate Email Marketing Conversion Guide” sales started to surpass my autobiography book sales in august.  Why? Well a friend hit me up out of the blue and told me it was ranking for “email marketing” on the 2nd page of Yahoo!.  Well it made sense with Amazon’s domain authority but thats a pretty competitive term.  So I decided to track it using digitalpoint.com’s SERP tracker. Nothing crazy impressive… but I thought I would build some high quality backlinks to it… and by November it was starting to pop: It was at that time I was like I wonder how hard I can push this and bought a bunch of sketchy backlinks from seoclerks.  I mean what was Google going to do?  Ban Amazon ? BOOM!  Its rocking hard… But then guess what happened? Yup – completely nuked out of Google.  Unless you search specifically for the exact title of the book it doesn’t show up for any of the terms or long tail terms. Well it was VERY good while it lasted.  So lets look at the results from the Email Marketing Guide: 35,000 eBooks sold 17,500 Unique Visitors to http://www.parprogram.com 480 Form Submits 115 Demo Calls (prequalified from form fields) 16 New Clients 16 new clients doesn’t sound like much but the average price point for those 16 clients is at about $5500 per month which to date is well over a million dollars in revenue. Thats right… over a million dollars in revenue that traced back to a 99 cent ebook. I can’t tell you how simple this was to do.   For me I did it because Amazon suggested it.  I had no idea that it would be an incredible lead gen.  Yes I was launching a book but as you can see as time passed the ebook,  because of Amazon’s amazing domain authority, was getting a lot of sales.  This could work for anyone doing anything. Just some closing thoughts and to recap: Write a ebook about a niche you want to drive leads to.  Doesn’t have to be your own company could just be an affiliate offer.  My email marketing guide is only 38 pages so don’t think you have to write a novel. Make a very keyword rich book title. Build high quality backlinks over time to make it pop in search engines. Make sure to use trackable links.  I did it very easy but when I do it again I will use a UTM source with Google Analytics. There is no reason you can stop with one book.  You could do it for a variety of niches. The best part about it all… its 100% free to try it. I hope you found this post insightful and please feel free to forward it on or share on social networks.

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ProBlogger: How to Create Your Guest Blogging Strategy [with a 5 step template]

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How to Create Your Guest Blogging Strategy [with a 5 step template] Posted: 17 Feb 2015 06:20 AM PST This is a guest contribution from My business partner Adam Franklin attended the ProBlogger Event on the Gold Coast in 2014, and returned fired up and with a whole heap of take-homes.  At the ProBlogger Event, Darren spoke of success being a matter of doing the ordinary things. Specifically, to start, put readers first, be useful, find your rhythm, create meaning, and persist! This has inspired me to share this recent guest blogging story. We're not talking about guest blogging that Google frowns upon, but high-value blogging via influencer outreach. Guest blogging is a hot topic we’ve been asked a ton of questions about lately and with good reason. If creating great content is the first step, then promoting your content is the crucial second step. Guest blogging is a powerful way to do just that as you get to write for a whole new audience! As well as helping you dodge some of the key mistakes, planning your guest blogging strategy will help you find, evaluate and target the best blogging opportunities. When I blogged for fellow Aussie blogger Jeff Bullas Jeff Bullas was ranked #11 on Forbes list of "Social Media Power Influencers" and he accepted my post called 6 Critical Types of Social Media You Must Plan For. Here are some of the exciting results: > Record Month This post helped us hit a record month in website traffic. > Landing page visits skyrocketed I had a call to action in the article and linked to our Negative Comments Response Template (for Social Media) landing page. Visits to this page skyrocketed and so too did email opt-ins. > 4000+ Social Shares Jeff's huge social media community, and particularly his Twitter following, meant that the post received a ton of social shares too: > 50 National Media Mentions It caught the attention of Fairfax Media.  Finally, when we sent this post to our Bluewire News subscribers, a journalist replied and asked if I was interested in writing an op-ed piece for Fairfax Media (one of the largest media companies in Australia). Of course I agreed!  So I wrote a more concise op-ed piece called "He's been questioned by police" and it was published on the Sydney Morning Herald homepage two days later, and syndicated across all 50 online Fairfax publications and three blogs: For the SEO geeks, these 50 backlinks were from news websites with domain authorities ranging from DA38 to DA92 and I was fortunate to have a follow backlink in my bio. Building backlinks, watching traffic spike and getting qualified subscribers are all exciting outcomes. I was genuinely surprised (and stoked of course!) that this article had struck a chord.  You can see why guest blogging can be a powerful tool. Why did we approach Jeff Bullas?  Aside from being a Forbes Social Media Power Influencer, there were a number of strategic reasons why we asked Jeff. In short, he has a hugely popular social media marketing blog, followers in excess of 250,000 and we had built a strong relationship with him over the years. We also knew he accepted high quality guest posts.  I'd aspired to write for Jeff's blog for a long time so I'll use it as an example as we go. How to create your Guest Blogging Strategy  For the rest of this post I'm going to take you step by step through the Guest Blogging Strategy Template. (If you're really keen you might like to download our free Guest Blogging Strategy Template and fill it out as you work your way through this post – if not, then just read on!).  1. Brainstorm Your Targets This doesn't need to be a long, drawn out process. Take 15 minutes to brainstorm and list some of the blogs you'd like to write for. An easy way is to simply google blogs in your niche; for example "social media blogs" or "gardening blogs". Large or small, seemingly impossible or really easy, just get them down. Sometimes this can feel like you have waaay too many options. That's ok – the next steps will help you prioritise your target blogs. 2. Research Your Numbers > Domain Authority: One of the fastest free ways to check domain authority is to use Moz's Open Site Explorer tool: Jeffbullas.com has a Domain Authority of 71/100 which is really strong. To put this in context, Google.com is 100/100, Forbes.com is 97/100, and Bluewiremedia.com.au is currently 46/100. From an SEO standpoint alone, a backlink from Jeff's website would be really valuable to us. The Mozbar plugin makes this step really easy by showing the Open Site Explorer info on any blog you visit: > Traffic Rank: For this use Alexa's free traffic rank analytics tool: Result: Jeff's website gets a ton of traffic which means that the article would be seen by lots of relevant people. > Number of email subscribers in their list: Jeff doesn't actually publish his email subscriber numbers, but many others do: Problogger: [or just look to right hand side of your screen :-) ] BufferApp: Convince and Convert: Email lists are a great indicator that the time you spend writing your content will be rewarded when it is seen by a large relevant audience. > Blog subscribers: Searching through Feedly will allow you to get blog subscriber numbers: > Twitter Followers: Twitter followers are easy to find for Jeff. He has 246,000! > Facebook fans: Facebook fan numbers are easy to find too: As you can see getting these numbers isn't a long process. In fact it could be a piece of research that you ask an assistant to help you with. 3. People and outreach As a part of your research, find out the contact person for each blog and their email address. > Strength of relationship Jeff has built an incredible audience, following and reputation. We've deliberately got to know him over the last few years by interviewing him in person and on our podcast, following his work on social media and inviting him to speak at our Social Media Down Under conference. Because we've known him for a long time and nurtured a relationship, Jeff was much more likely to trust our content and therefore to post it and share it with his audience. > Outreach Then it's outreach time.  I wrote him a short email: He accepted it, tweaked the title and posted it the next day. The point worth emphasising here is that Jeff is a high-value, power blogger so without our long 'getting to know you' process our chances of acceptance would've been much slimmer. You'll see it took years of proactively getting to know Jeff and this email was the final stage of following a deliberate process.  I've outlined all the steps in our Blogger Outreach Email Template.  If you do get knocked back, don't let it get you down, just read How to Handle Guest Post Rejection and get back on the horse. You can tweak the post and try again or submit it to a new blog. 4. Content and SEO > How interesting is your content going to be to their audience? Once you've determined that it's definitely an audience you'd like to reach, then it's crucial that you tailor your content for them.  I thought my article on handling social media comments had a very good chance of being interesting to Jeff's audience. Please note: Ultimately making your content interesting to their audience is the single biggest factor in the success of your guest blogging. Understanding the different angles of your story that will enable you to tell it to different audiences is a deal maker and breaker.  There are lots of ways you can craft your experiences and stories to fit different audiences. For example, I wrote for a cloud accounting software business called Saasu and aligned our marketing content with financial reviews to make it more relevant: How To Use Your Financial Reviews To Improve Your Marketing. And another one I wrote for outsourcing giant oDesk discussed managing remote marketing projects: 10 Minutes Can Transform Your Remote Projects. In order to make sure the post would be interesting to Jeff's audience, I also reviewed what other articles had been written on comment handling on his blog to make sure it would add to their points and not just rehash them. I found an earlier post and linked to it in my article to demonstrate that I had done my homework.  I also reviewed other guest blog posts to make sure my article would match the style. > SEO From an SEO standpoint, I made sure I had my bio linking back to our website, specifically where people can download our 33 free marketing templates and I had a call to action to download the Negative Comments Response Template.  I'd decided to target the keyword phrase 'negative comments handling' using the free Keyword Tool. 5. Activity Then it's a matter of getting in, writing the article, hitting your deadlines and making sure you give yourself the best chance of success. Hopefully this Guest Blogging Strategy Template can help you focus on the opportunities that will get you the best results, fastest. The little bit of research upfront will really prepare and help you to make the most of the effort you put into the guest blog post itself. Comments? What else do you look for when assessing guest blog opportunities? I'll see you in the comments and the most informative commenter wins a copy of my book! Toby Jenkins is an Olympic Water Polo player and co-author of Web Marketing That Works. You can download his 33 free marketing templates. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger How to Create Your Guest Blogging Strategy [with a 5 step template]

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