The Money Is In Backends

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Michey

Backend4 The Money Is In BackendsYou hear many times that the money is in the list,  but this is a generic statement. We will get one level deeper today to back-end sells.

I read something very interesting in Darren Rose Pro Blogger, he said
“… RSS feeds did not kill email…”
and continue
“… On DPS I currently have a total of 340,784 subscribers: 223,081 of those subscribe via email – 117,703 of them subscribe via RSS. That’s a 2:1(ish) ratio…”

Yes, the list and a good relationship with the list are mandatory.  But it is more…

First definitions:

We call front-end on the blog: the ads and content.

We call back-end on the blog:

  • the opt-in list with freebies
  • the One Time Offers (OTO) attached to the freebies
  • and the list itself as we will send other offers in the futures to the list

The rule is that the back-end provides the real money, and it is more profitable vs. the front-end.

To John Chow rule is to reduce time spend on front end and increase time spend on back end, until we get 10% to 90%.

Well, this is a person who make $40,000 per month from blogging alone, so I am listen and learn from him.

I have to confess that my own percentages are probably around 30% to front-end vs. 70% to back-end and I don’t make $40,000 per month, so my own struggle is to work toward those percentages to turn them in a clear advantage for me because I know – it is possible.  The traffic on the test sites is better now, and I am working on

  • improving even more the traffic, this week we have had a launch with a brilliant new strategy for traffic, and I already have attached that new idea to my list to do on traffic (you find all about it in traffic module)
  • get more out of the existing traffic
  • enlarge the back-end activity

Now I want to elaborate more on OTOs – One Time Offers and other OTO alike techniques:

  • OTO
  • Continuity programs
  • Up-sells
  • Down-sells

One Time Offers (OTO):

Rule 1: The OTO must have real value and must be on the same niche as the freebies you offer. Make sense, as a prospect signs in for your freebie because he/she needs that topic, so if the OTO will offer more in deep knowledge related with same niche, the OTO will entice curiosity and you increase your chance for a sell.

In essence you offer a new product, the sale page starts with:
“Wait! You’re only going to see this offer once…”

At the bottom you create:

  • the option to purchase the offer – add a paying button
  • the option to decline and download the free item, you have something like “NO, thanks, I’ll pass on this offer…”

Continuity Programs:

Continuity Programs are passive monthly income which include:

  • Membership sites with many levels
  • Software sites which are life-line serviced which are needed: hosting, autoresponders

Force continuity is something I don’t endorse. Those are trials for $1, and at the end of the trial you automatically start billing monthly membership.

What I endorse is a free trial membership and at the end of the trial, or earlier, the potential customer must decide to upgrade to a different level of membership.

This way

  • It is an incentive for the owner to provide real  value
  • The value will influence the prospect to upgrade, and this doesn’t look intrusive to him
  • It is a great way to build trust
  • In time you have a less ratio of cancellations

Up-sell

The typical scenario is you offer a freebies but for a small amount of money you offer rights.

A different scenario is to offer a paid Digital Product and add more functionality (other DP, and/or membership, and/or software…) to a higher price.

Down-sell

Down-sell is the opposite of up-sell.  In up-sell you increase the initial price adding more functionality to the product.

In down-sell you cut a part of the functionality and make an offer less  then initial price amount.

This Model, which include all those flavors, is working because you cover all kind of potential customers and wallets.

Important Note: The success of this model is based on:

  • A very good planning ahead of all those flavors I just described: OTO, continuity, up-sell, down-sell
  • A very  good price strategy for each step
  • Increase back-ends

Success is not an accident!

Posted in blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Search Statistics – Take Action

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Michey

00cpan021 Search Statistics Take ActionI promise a post about the statistics you already have on your Host.  First you need a host with cPanel. The examples I give you in this post are about one of my forgotten sites which I decided to bring to life again and the results in July are the proof that I take actions in the right direction.

I am using HostGator which has cPanel, a great set of additional tools, and I highly recommend.
In the above picture, is the log section where  you can see an array of tools which provide statistics.  I mark what I use from that list.

Awstats is the one I use the most, and this tool alone give me search information about:

Summary per current month
Monthly history: orange = unique visitors, yellow= number of visits, dark blue = pages, light blue = hits, green = bandwidth00cpan03 Search Statistics Take Action Days of month chart:00cpan05 Search Statistics Take Action

The best Days of Week: It is clear Friday is the great day for me,  also Tuesday and Wednesday00cpan06 Search Statistics Take Action
The best Hours: no surprises here it is what I expected, but is good to know at which hours is best to tweet, FB, e-mail broadcast etc00cpan07 Search Statistics Take Action
Countries: USA the most usage follow by GB
Hosts: give us IP addresses
Robots/Spiders visitors: it is interesting, this is the list in exactly this order: Yahoo Slurp, GoogleBot, MSNBot, Alexa

Visits duration: this is very useful, the majority of visitors are superficial, they don’t stay more then 30s, I really have to think about this, but the next big figure are people which visit for more then one hour  or 30 min to 1 hour, I have a percentage of 7.5 + 5.5 = 13.0 % of serious writers. My problem is the 80%, I have to do something to catch attention and make them curious…00cpan20 Search Statistics Take ActionFile type: the best results are for: PHP, html, css, images, actually if you add numbers for jpg, gif, and png we get 4644,  so the real order is: php, images, html, css Who said that images are not important?00cpan21 Search Statistics Take ActionViewed
Operating systems

Browsers origin (firefox in number one)

  • Referring search engines
  • Referring sites

Search, very useful as I can see the most used ketwords and ling tail keywords:

  • By key phrases
  • By keywords

Miscellaneous

All of those was just from awstats.

I am also looking to:

Latest Visitors, I know who is visiting my site, who don’t bother to comment, but silently is looking…

Bandwidth

Webalizer: This is a awesome summary and it is clear that July is the best month

00cpan11 Search Statistics Take ActionError log: really good news, the list of last 300 has only 8 items and all of them are refer to the same client (IP)  who was denied, so it is actually one item, and I know who it is…00cpan17 Search Statistics Take ActionWithout to give you images for all of them I hope I convince you that there is a ton of useful info you can interpret and work against to improve your sites. And is free on your Host, you will notice small changes from one host to another but in essence all hosts provide statistics.

Note: The problem is not the info, the real problem is you must follow and take actions to improve your sites, and look again, and go in circle until you are happy about your work.

There are other software you can use? Yes! the best from free category is Google package, and a lot of paid software as well, but you really don’t need paid packages.

My friends success is not an accident!

Posted in Free Tools | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Building A List Part 3

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Michey

00cpmc Building A List Part 3Week 6: Module 1: Capture the leads – continue.

Using 3 posts talking about capture market’s prospects, is my way to show you the importance of having a mailing list. Prospects are potential customers for us and in order to capture a prospect, we need to have the minimum information as first name and e-mail, to be able to communicate with them in the future.

You already have an example  of an opt-in form in this Blog on top right, and in this post you can see the second opt-in form I have created for a different test site:
http://michaelacernescu.com

Please notice the same technique: I offer again two free e-books, the first one is different, the second is the same, and after fill in the form the prospect receives an email to confirm his email. Only after confirmation the prospect is added to my list and he will receive a thank you page with the links to download the freebies.

In my two sites I offer e-books, but you can offer any other Digital Product: Videos, Audios, Webinars, Interviews, Reports, e-Courses, Free access at a membership site for the first level and so on. You can also offer 1$ trail to membership, personally I don’t like this as I consider a little too intrusive, for 1$ you have to take payment information which will make a lot of people uncomfortable.

Details about how you create the opt-in form you can find in 2 of my old posts:

http://monetize-blog.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/monetize-blog/list-building-on-blog-part1/

http://monetize-blog.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/monetize-blog/list-building-on-blog-part2/

Having a confirmed e-mail list this means that you actually have a targeted list, confirming the people show that they want to be on your list, they are interested in your topic. This is also aweber technique to keep us out of trouble with spamming.

It is easier to transform prospects  in customers and having them on the list, in time they will become repeat customers and that is our ultimate goal. It is a mistake to look for a sale here and there, we must look for life time recurring profit.

My two opt-in forms are for a monthly newsletter, this is an effort to build a relationship with the people from my list, other freebies will come down the road, and I strive to build trust and respect for the quality of the services I provide.

I know that some people are afraid to make a commitment promising recurring information, but it is not that complicated as you think.

So, what I am doing now?  I created a new folder Ideas-newsletter in which I collect links and/or chunks of info from:

  • Tweets I am reading daily
  • Google alerts (I created 2 alerts for 2 different keywords I am interested in)
  • Advertising in Facebook I am reading daily (sure I am not going to collect Farmville, but I’ll collect webinars, digital products, stand alone ideas…)
  • There are daily bases launches of Digital Products, some are junk, some are mediocre, some are brilliant ideas. In a month there are 3-4 excellent products, I collect info about them, in majority of cases I buy and use them to be able to create a review as an expert not as a person who just read the sale page of the author. I become an affiliate for those products
  • I collect new trends usually searching Google, or discover them in Google alerts
  • Browsing twice per week  some authority websites I am found of: mashable.com, problogger.net, copyblogger.com, Johnchow.com, Ericstips.com and many more

Following this pattern, you will be amuse how much value info you will collect in a month. What is left is to isolate yourself from the outside world interruptions, and write with your own words about the info you consider important in that month.
Bum! You have a newsletter.  You must know some info about how you handle newsletter and how you transmit them to your list. It is not a topic for this Module but you will have enough info in Module 2.

Newsletters are just one idea about creating a relationship with your list but there are more ideas as well:

  • Relationship- building content is awesome if you use your own blogs, make them as conversational as you can, entice curiosity, be funny, human, knowledgeably, respond to the comments of your readers
  • The relationship with your list will help you to pre-sell your own products
  • Learn to make an irresistible offer
  • Recommend products which solve problems

Both creating a list and creating a positive relationship with your list are not over night processes, you need some time but it make a lot of sense to do it for a lasting productive business.

You will notice that some topics are so well related with others, or depends so much of others that it is hard to separate them, and treat them as stand alone subjects.

Let’s say you have a great product, a decent list, what is left. 80% of the people will respond traffic. It is correct you need traffic but you also need:

  • to monitor your traffic and the progress you make
  • take actions to improve your traffic and your marketing techniques

To do this 80% of the people will go after sophisticate software some free some paid and neglect what they already have in terms of statistical gathering info.
Tomorrow I want to give you an example.

By the way of traffic, I sign on my test site to  Attracta on my cPanel:00cpan01 Building A List Part 3I was accepted and in 3 days my traffic start to improve, I hope it will continue on this path.

My host is HostGator and I like them as:

  • they have a lot of tools which are great
  • a newsletter full of valuable info
  • super support team which in 3 years never let me down

Coming back to our topic, Module 1 is done, next week we will start with Module 2 – Extend Back-ends.

Until next time be informed

Posted in blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Building A List Part 2

Posted on July 23, 2010 by Michey

Week 5, Module 1: Capture The Leads Implementation

emails1 Building A List Part 2Last week I start implementing the capture the leads procedure.

If you look on this blog at top right sidebar you see a form with only First name and e-mail. It is an entire controversy about how long and “complete” must be the form. The general wisdom is less info is better, if you request: address, phone you start to discourage people to opt in.

I used aweber as autoresponder. I use the javascript HTML for the form,  which means that any change on the form at the aweber level will be automatically propagated on the Blog form, no need to do changes on the Blog.

This is the pattern:

  • you fill in name and e-mail and press the button
  • a screen will pop up telling you that you have to confirm the subscription, this mean that I created the form with opt-in confirmation ON, which will avoid spam
  • an e-mail is send to you and you must confirm clicking on a link from e-mail
  • After confirmation you get a “Thank you” screen with the 2 links for downloaded the 2 ebooks

At this point you are on my list I created for this specific blog and when I’ll send the newsletter you will get it in e-mail. To look professional the email will contain the link to the real newsletter which will be part of the blog. If you are not subscribing to this specific form you will not get the monthly newsletter.

I also Sign up for RSS Readers. I have to do other implementations as well, but I stop here and I’ll take one more week for “capture the leads”. Two weeks for Module 1 was too short, I’ll take  an extra week from module 2.

Creating any avenues possible to create a list is so important that adding one more week make a lot of sense.

Equally important is to create a good relationship with the list. I just did this from the start offering a very generous two ebook as freebies.  If you will subscribe to the list you will get a lot of other freebies very soon.

If you want to learn about creating a list you will get a lot of sources, personally I recommend to read Tellman Knutson story:
http://www.listbuildingblog.com/ or
http://www.listbuilding.com/thanks/

See you next week!

Posted in blogging | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Two Phases Of Ranking Google Caffeine

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Michey

0200 300x202 Two Phases Of Ranking Google CaffeineGoogle Caffeine New Algorithm – The Two Phases Of Ranking

The Google algorithm changes are going on as we speak. So being informed is mandatory right now. The Google new architecture called Google Caffeine started in 2009, completed, and got public on 8 June 2010. Did you noticed that some ranking have disappeared or diminished since June 2010? Then keep reading.

At the beginning was chaos! Then we got our beloved Microsoft, Internet, Yahoo, and Google. So people had some sense of stability and well being! Not for long time…

The first effort to create ranking rules were the LINKS, just LINKS inbound, outbound… if you had a lot of them from authority sites, your rank catapulted to the top.

The second step was CONTENT, did you remember “CONTENT is the KING”.  Actually this was a step in the right direction but didn’t completely eliminate the garbage and spam on the Net.

So, we are now on the last effort toward fairness, quality, and speed. The Google decided that both Content and Links are still good to have but they added in Caffeine architecture the third element: ACTIVITY.

What ACTIVITY means for us? Activity is referring at human Activities:

  • Comments
  • Frequent updates
  • RSS subscriptions
  • Organic traffic
  • Social media…. and more

I have no doubt in my mind that among other reasons, Google is fighting now against automation with “robots”, software which will add gazillion backlinks at your site, submit other gazillion to ezine. And, YES, Google is sophisticated enough to find out when somebody uses a robot – tool.

Also the Caffeine was  designed to return results faster and to keep up with rapidly updated information from services like Facebook and Twitter.

Google wants to see if you are an ethical human creature, working hard… but if you generate 1000 backlinks  per day, you are somehow a human spammer… and I agree with Google.

They also change the order of importance, which now is:

  1. Activity
  2. Content
  3. Links

It is amazing. We already know that the links are not the most important now, but the big surprise is to replace “the Content is the king” with Activities and slide Content on second position.

Note: the general wisdom is that you have to have all 3 of them but with emphasis on that order.

This is a simplistic way to look at algorithm parameters for determining the ranking of your pages. In reality there are over 200 different indicators. But those 3 are the most important and the entire list of parameters is a deep secret not for you and me, it is mainly for spammers and, as always on business, it is for competitors as well.

What is the big plus of Caffeine? Simple – with Content and Links we can produce temporary ranking but with Activity we can stay ranked. I think this is a huge advantage for us.

Now the second advantage is coming from understanding how Google determines, measures the “Activities”.

They are using their own free tools and other free tools as well:

  • FeedBurner a RSS aggregator which help on measuring human activity, show how many subscribers you got
  • Alexa even it is not 100% accurate, is still measuring pretty well human activity
  • Google Tool Bar because by default submits all your “usage stats” back to Google
  • Chrome browser

So all of those tools are at your disposal to use it, this really means that you can measure your own activity and employed the right technique to have the right activity which counts for Google algorithm.

If you want to read more look at:
Google Confirms Algorithm Change
New SEO practice for Google Caffeine

Important note: have the content generated by readers and users, not by an automated process with robots.

I sincerely think that Caffeine new architecture will contribute to improve the quality of web posts.  And “the two faces of ranking” are: create traffic for ranking, and maintain the ranking. There is no value on creating some traffic to produce good ranking, if we are not able to maintain the ranking. Activities will maintain our ranking.

To your success

Posted in Traffic Ranking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

Building A List Part 1

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Michey

Week 4, Module 1: Capture the leads with an opt-in form on your Blog and maximize the process.

0abc21 Building A List Part 1One of ideas which is repeating on all blogging techniques is the mantra, the money is on the list! So we not only need to capture leads but we have to stretch the e-mail techniques to the maximum, and we gave to employ all the avenues to do so.

It is funny that in the last post I was talking about the importance of having an Aha! moment in our learning curve to convince us which method/technique/experience has a real value on it. Yesterday I was scheduled to listen 2 webinars, not the right time as I have been so busy now, but I started anyway, as I like to keep up-to-date with the trends of my niche.

One webinar was a waist of time, and I gave up in the middle, the second one was fabulous… and really produce a new Aha! for me… which I cannot wait to experiment…  I like doing “experiments”. I think it is a great way to grow as a person and to learn more about yourself, and this can help our personal and/or business life.
So I spend some precious time going over the detailed plan to insert that test as well… it is related only with some enhancement to a method I use, so it will be transparent for you.

As you can see up till now, I don’t follow the common pattern: find a great niche and the right keyword list for it. There are volumes written to teach you how to do it, and I presume that if you are interested in monetizing Blogs you already are within a good niche and you have the best keywords for it.

Just in case you still need it, I’ll just point out the hot buttons of this research about  a great market:

  • Find a market in which people love to spend money. Hm! Where to look over:
    • Hobbies or Passion Market, look at:
      • Sports: soccer, tennis, or travel, or any other hobby
      • Children – anything related with them: schools, toys, clothes
      • Luxury items: air plains, traveling in exotic places, expensive everything: cars, houses and so on
    • The solution Market – people cure problems
  • Do research to find out where the money are. Don’t be afraid of competition, at this point on Internet marketing evolution, I wouldn’t trust any market in which competition doesn’t exist. So you better spend time:
    • Studying the competition
    • Find your unique proposition, and
    • See what you can do to be better then your competition

Coming back to building a list:

  • Capture the Leads in your blog, but use multiple ways to do it:
    • Use standard Newsletter Sign-up box
    • Aweber Light Box Hover
    • Use a script for footer add
    • Use a plug-in to engage people who make comments on your blog
    • Use your Blog RSS as a source of making readers to subscribe  (use a Feed Footer plug-in, maximizing his functionality)
    • Use subscriptions from FaceBook
  • Build a relation with your leads: freebies, e-courses, and more
  • More money are coming on back-end vs. front-end, so put your leads to the test through a sale funnel. For this point we will work in a different module but we can start thinking and maybe implementing some in Module 1 as well

By the way,  you have had more info in 2 posts I created on crabby’s beach about the list:

  • list-building-on-blog-part2/
  • list-building-on-blog-part1/

So, the next week on the same subject I’ll dedicate my work to implementation of this snippet of my detailed plan, I’ll comment the implementation and you will follow the progress in 3 of the test sites. The idea of using many ways to capture the leads in Blogs, not just standard Newsletter Sign-up box, is coming from John Chow and he is very successful on using almost all methods I mention.

Until next week be well.

Posted in blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Building Blocks of Monetizing Blog

Posted on July 10, 2010 by Michey

0Img051 300x225 Building Blocks of Monetizing BlogWeek 3:

I hardly strive to plan and prepare the building blocks of my model of monetizing a blog and I expose them in a nut shell in this post, this way the reader can decide if is interested and fit his/her needs.

Did happen to you to hear things, ideas, and just contemplate them instead of jumping with enthusiasm in the middle of action taking?  You are not alone! You usually need an Aha… event to make you take action, and information overflow is making this process even harder instead to make it better, easier.

When I start studying blogs and blogging phenomenon, I realize that it is impossible to read everything and listen to everybody, I choose 4 top bloggers to study, and I promise to extent this area only if I need, only if I don‘t get all my questions answered.

So, I have started reading: John Chow, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Shoemaker, Yaro Starak (this is just alphabetical order), I have made notes, and have crossed lines in my “find out” list. I also have opened a new list “Things I don’t follow now”. Did you notice the word “now”? This really means that they can be good techniques as well but not for this moment in history.

After a while I have seen:

  • Similar patterns in all of them, and this has been my first Aha! If all of those giant bloggers employed the same technique, it must be a value in it
  • Some techniques cannot apply to beginners, so I put them in “don’t follow now” list
  • There was a difference on approach and scope: “Do I want Readers, tons of them, or Income”
  • The general wisdom is telling you that it is the same thing,  you have traffic = you make money.  This is true only for small quantity of money, if you want a fortune, to be financial independent the rest of your life, you need different methods to be employed. This has been my second Aha!
  • I have needed more details on some areas

This was the beauty, I was watching to see who gave me enough details, or at least who was getting me to the point that I could myself filling the dots…  It was a car race going on.

Idea # 1:  To do only RSS and/or Social Media it is not enough, you need to use new tools and overlooked old tools to mastermind blogging

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that RSS and Social Media don’t have a big role, those are tools which are mandatory for all of us, what I am saying is that it is not enough.
RSS:

  • Pros:
    • You will definitely improve your SEO
    • The really techs will love you
    • It is easy to get it
  • Cons:
    • Some people will never read the blogs they put on their feeds.

So RSS is good, but it is not alpha and omega of Blooging Monetizing process.

Idea # 2: We need traffic. We increase the traffic as much as we can, but also we need to increase the amount of money we make from the existing traffic.

It is a limit of how much free traffic we can drive with Social Media, we know that, but John Chow’s idea to increase the amount of money we make from the traffic we already have, and don’t get crazy about more traffic..  is brilliant. And this is how he mastermind blogging and he gets now $40,000 per month just from blogging.

This points me to the next idea.

Idea # 3: The money is in the back-end, which is more profitable vs. front-end. So the technique is to spend 10-20% of your time on front-end, and 90-80% of your time on back-end

Now this is easy to say and not as easy to implement, you need an old tool to use correctly, effectively, consistently, and which automate the process for you. And that tool is the autoresponder, which points me to the next idea.

Idea #4:  Capture the leads on your blog, but also stretch e-mailing techniques to the maximum. This mean employ multiple ways to capture the leads coming to your blog, just an opt-in form is not enough.

This was my third Aha!

So this will be the flow of events we will follow in the next couple of weeks. We will implements the ideas backwords starting with the opt-in list, follow by building back-ends, and traffic. Some elements of RSS and Social Media are already on place and we will enhance Social Media in traffic module.

I’ll add to the flow 2 more modules creating your own products, and be an affiliate. Please note that I let those to the end and the order is the opposite of what is guruing about it. It is a reason for this revers approach which I’ll explain at the proper time.

Within the modules I will add 2 more items: a newsletter and a membership site, based on the time available. I hope at list one of them will be added.

00agr1 Building Blocks of Monetizing Blog00agr21 Building Blocks of Monetizing Blog00agr3 Building Blocks of Monetizing Blog00agr4 Building Blocks of Monetizing Blog00agr5 Building Blocks of Monetizing BlogSo those are our building blocks for monetizing a blog, each module will be work out in one ore more weeks, each module will be tested in the test sites I decided up front.

Until next time be well.

Posted in blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments