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Fast Way to Make Money with WordPress

Rick Braddy — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 22:37:54 +0000

Hi,

First, there are a lot of people unemployed today, in desperate need of ways to make money from home. And most people are very good at something – usually one or two things (at least), that they’re passionate about. Blogging is a great way to get started making some money online, by serving up your knowledge and expertise and sharing that passion with others.

Second, there are even more of us with existing businesses who realize that the bigger our email lists and online audiences become, the more money we make. One common figure that’s thrown around a lot for small businesses and online entrepreneurs is that each subscriber on your email list is worth $1 per month (per subscriber). For large corporations, it’s undoubtedly orders of magnitude more.

Whatever the exact value per subscriber, it’s clearly important to build your email list and attract a quality audience by providing quality content.

But how do you go about building a list these days? Unless you’ve been hiding somewhere underneath a rock or lost in the woods for several years, you probably realize how WordPress is taking over the world as one of the leading blogging platforms.

And today, WordPress is also being used extremely effectively to build all kinds of websites, including Launch Micro Sites, portals and small business websites of every kind. Why? Because it’s free, it’s easy and there’s all kinds of “plug-in” extensions available. There are millions of WordPress blog and websites in use today.

Of course, this blog you’re now reading has been WordPress-based from the beginning in 2008. Since then, WordPress has grown into a rich content publishing and content management system (CMS). WordPress has also evolved into a great platform for building a subscriber base, building your email list bigger and faster and making money. In fact, there are many professional bloggers who make their living from publishing great content on their blogs.

So, how does one go about making money quickly and building a bigger email list using WordPress? It’s taken me several years to figure all this out. Today, I decided to share it with you here. I organized this into three main steps.

Start with a high-quality, premium WordPress theme
Get the right WordPress plug-ins that help you with list building
Decide what products and services to promote, then advertise them on your blog

Let’s take each one of these steps and go a bit deeper, shall we?

1. Start with a high-quality, premium WordPress theme

You need a flexible, quality WordPress theme to get started. There are many different free themes available, and some of them may be perfect for you; however, if you’re developing a site or blog for building your list and making money, you’ll want more flexibility to customize your site. That’s where “premium themes” come in…

I have used a lot of different themes over the years, for my own sites and blogs and with clients, including Thesis and Socrates, which are both excellent themes. However, in my opinion, the new kid on the block has them all beat hands down, in terms of flexibility, quality and value.

It’s called the Headway Theme.

In fact, I believe in this theme so strongly that I’m using it on client projects almost exclusively. At the time of this writing, this project is still underway, but get this. It only took me a couple of days to create this entire site from scratch over a weekend, including the graphics design and most of the content work. If you’ve ever developed your own websites, you realize how impressive (and cost-effective) this approach to website development is.

So, I highly-recommend starting with a premium theme.

2. Get the right WordPress plug-ins that help you with list building

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress as a platform is its extreme flexibility and adaptability to changing needs. A lot of its adaptability comes from the modular “plug-in” architecture, which enables a WordPress administrator to quickly and easily add new capabilities by simply installing and activating a WordPress plug-in.

To build your list effectively, you need the right plug-ins. Today, I use several dozen plug-ins to operate this blog; however, there are a couple of them which are crucial to building our email list and my blog’s subscriber base.

The main list-building plug-in is:

Subscribers Magnet – this is a premium plug-in that inserts opt-in forms on your blog, and integrates sign-ups with your favorite auto-responder software (e.g., AWeber, GetResponse, 1ShoppingCart, etc.).

Subscribers Magnet makes it easy to automatically insert opt-in forms in various strategic places within your blog, including:

Before or after certain posts or all posts
In the blog sidebar (the area to the right of this article, for example) as a WordPress “widget”
As a “checkbox” option to automatically subscribe a user who posts a Comment (very cool!)
As an overlay window at the bottom of the page (when user first arrives at the site)
Anywhere within a post or page

In addition to Subscriber’s Magnet, I also used regular Text widgets to insert HTML code directly into sidebar widgets (like the Launch Report you see at upper right currently).

A couple of other important plug-ins I use are:

Register Plus – this plug-in provides the ultimate in flexibility for registering your new users, allowing you to capture just about any kind of information you want, and use your own logo (instead of WordPress’ logo)
Subscribe2 - this plug-in emails your blog subscribers whenever you publish a new post. This is a great way to build your list locally within the blog itself (without using an auto-responder); incidentally, there are also now numerous auto-responder plug-ins that turn your WordPress site into an auto-responder! (I haven’t tried them yet)

So, as you can see, it’s fairly straightforward to build your email list and blog audience using the right plug-in tools.

Of course, you need traffic and visitors to your blog. Hey – write some useful content!! (that’s what attracts people to your blog, along with some well-chosen SEO-friendly keywords in your blog title and blog permalink URLs).

When I get more time, I’ll try to post some more detailed reviews of these plug-ins.

3. Decide what products and services to promote, then advertise them on your blog

Last, but certainly not least, is you need a way to “monetize” your WordPress site’s traffic and your email lists. Obviously, you need to give away lots of useful information, by posting it on your blog and emailing your list regularly, but what else can you do?

Advertise!

That’s right. Find some high-quality products that meet your audience’s needs (your own and other people’s products you can promote as an affiliate) – and then advertise them in a calm, clear, professional manner. Notice I use those qualifiers – calm, clear and professional – because if you go overboard with your advertising, you will turn people off and drive them away from your site!! (not a good thing )

So, how can we advertise things calmly, clearly and professionally on our WordPress site? It starts by thinking about advertising this way… if you were visiting your own site, how would you want to be advertised to? What would you consider to be useful, acceptable practices for finding and buying high-quality products? In other words, use the Golden Rule – treat others as you would like to be treated – it (almost) always works!

You might have guessed by now how we can make these advertisements visible on our WordPress site…

By picking the right plug-ins, of course!

Here’s the plug-ins I use and recommend for advertising on your blog:

Ninja Affiliate - this is one of the coolest plug-ins I’ve seen and used in a long time… it allows you to define what the author dubs “ninja links” – which are basically alias URLs on your site – that when clicked on, redirect to the user to a specific offer page. What’s most cool, though, is that you can define a list of keywords that will be automatically converted into hyper-links to your advertised offers. And if these are affiliate links, they can be “cloaked” easily. (you may notice certain keywords in this and other posts are now links – that’s the ninja at work)
DataFeedr Random Ads – this plug-in enables you to define groups of related ads that rotate on a random basis, so that multiple ads can be shown in a single sidebar location. So for example, the banner and text ads you see on this blog are served by this plug-in. You simply define an ad group, then define each ad (by giving it a name and inserting the HTML code you want served), then you place an ad widget in your sidebar – then your ads automatically rotate and show up.

There are many other plug-ins and mechanisms available for advertising on your WordPress site or blog, but these are a couple of my favorites.

Summarizing

So, if you want to build an email list bigger and faster, and generate a revenue stream from blogging and/or a WordPress-based website, now you know how to get started. Just install WordPress, install a quality theme, then start posting some great content.

Along the way, add the aforementioned plug-ins into the mix and start promoting some quality products that help your audience get their jobs done better, faster and easier. You’ll find plenty of great products to promote on ClickBank, Share-a-Sale, CommissionJunction and dozens of other CPA networks out there just teaming with products to promote. Of course, you might have your own products and services to sell, too, which is great.

As long as you’re serving up real value, you can’t really go wrong.

I hope this helps you build your lists and grow your online business profits.

Happy list building and monetizing!

P.S. Need help getting started or developing a WordPress-based website for your business? Contact me and let’s discuss how I can help.

Desperate Buyers Only

Rick Braddy — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:28:36 +0000

Ever wish there was actually some secret formula or “system” to use for picking money-making opportunities to invest your time and money into, that are virtually guaranteed to yield a return on investment?

Actually there is, when you target the right type of buyer who’s “desperate” for a solution.

Today more than ever, it’s easier to sell to someone who is desperate for a solution to a problem they have in their business or personal life. And a few years ago, I ran across a tremendous resource called Desperate Buyers Only, one of the few tools that I recommend for marketers looking to find new product opportunities that will make them money. It’s the same way I approach choosing and validating opportunities.

This report provides a unique perspective on how to find opportunities where buyers are “hungry” for a solution and will gladly pay you for the solution.

This information was updated in 2009, taking into account the changes that the down economy have created.

Learn more about how to identify desperate buyers in your market or pick a new market opportunity that will make money.

Powerful Money Magnets

Rick Braddy — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:51:47 +0000

Money magnets do exactly what the name suggests – they attract people with money to your business and website. It’s easy to attract “freebie seekers” who will waste your time and never buy anything, but quite a different thing to attract the right kinds of people who will actually buy what you offer.

Everyone is very busy these days, and there are so many free videos, reports and other downloads available, who has the time to try them all? Certainly many of the people making the most money don’t – they’re too busy making more money! Of course, people with a job they need to get done will often spend the time to watch a brief video, read a quality report or go through a free trial.

So a good money magnet both attracts the right kinds of prospective buyers and qualifies them – at the same time. Let’s examine this further by way of a true story.

Several years ago, I was approached by a customer in one of my online businesses that had nothing to do with online marketing. He said he needed help with his business and saw what I was doing with my online business and thought I could probably help him out. At the time, I wasn’t providing any kind of online marketing or related consulting whatsoever (I was too busy with my day job and my own small business during off hours).

His name is Kevin, and on the Internet he’s known now as “Tiki Kev”. We finally spoke on the phone and Kevin told me about his plight and that he was virtually broke, was having to shut his shop down and sell all of his best tools, and didn’t know what to do… I could tell he was rather desperate and that if I didn’t reach out and help him, things were going to go from bad to really bad.

Kevin is a master builder, and had decided he wanted to specialize in Tiki Bars and Tiki Huts, something he’s very passionate about. Kevin builds the highest-quality Tiki bar and hut products. Click the link and have a look for yourself, if you’re curious.

Anyway, he told me these custom-built products sell from around $5,000 and up and that he wanted to sell them via his website. He showed me his website, which looked really nice (his wife is an excellent graphic artist). Right away, I realized there were several big show-stoppers standing between Kevin and success.

I told him, “Kevin, I hate to say this, but people just aren’t going to come visit your website and buy a $5,000 anything from you – no matter how good they look…” The old saying “Houston, we have a problem” came to mind. I told him I’d think about it and get back with him.

A few days later I called him back and told him I had an idea. I told him we needed to start smaller and build our way up to selling them the custom Tiki bars and Tiki huts. I told him we needed to write an e-book on how to build a Tiki bar. After I explained everything that would be involved, he agreed. I then offered to help him with some important website changes that would be required to make all this work.

Kevin’s a very hard worker and he knew exactly what to do. He went to his shop and started building one of his signature custom Tiki bars, and they took pictures of the entire process – start to finish. Kevin then wrote the first edition of “How To Build Your Own Tiki Bar”. I went to work on writing a sales page for the product.

A few weeks later, the whole project came together. We had the sales page in place, and posted his e-book for sale on ClickBank. It took several more weeks of driving Google AdWords pay-per-click traffic to the site and split-testing price points to find the magic price: $19.95.

Kevin was not happy at all about the final price. We both wanted the e-book to sell originally for $49.95, but it just didn’t sell at that price. At $19.95, it began selling great and we saw the volume rise to over a hundred e-books per month right away.

Meanwhile, I told Kevin that while his website looked good, it was too graphics-heavy and needed a lot more text, because the search engines only cared about text. A few more weeks of SEO work and we were good to go.

A few more weeks passed (it’s now been several months) and I noticed I wasn’t getting any emails from Kevin, so I decided to call him. I finally reached him over a weekend, and he sounded really tired. He said, “man, I’m working like 18 hours a day building bars for people, it looks like I’m going to have to hire some help – I can’t keep up with all the business that’s coming in”.

A few months later, I get a call from Kevin. He’s really excited and tells me “I’m gonna be on TV!. Extreme Home Makeover is having me and my crew on their show! Can you believe it?” Well, needless to say, I was very proud of what we had accomplished. They found Kevin’s site due to the SEO optimizations. In fact, go search on Google for keywords “tiki hut” or “tiki bar” – he’s still on page one today.

If you visit his site today, you can see for yourself what’s happened since then. More TV appearances and more e-books and sustained success for Kevin’s business.

In Kevin’s case, the $20 e-books turned into “money magnets” for his $5,000 custom-built bars and huts. Let’s examine this case study a little closer, because something very important happened here.

People who wanted a Tiki bar and wondered what it would take to build one themselves bought his $20 e-book and found out just how involved it actually is to do this and do it right. Some of these e-book customers went on to build their own very nice Tiki bars, using Kevin’s master plans.

Another percentage of them realized just how much work and effort goes into building a Tiki bar right, and suddenly had a great appreciation of the VALUE of having it done for them. And who do you suppose they wanted to build their Tiki bar? The guy in those pictures who showed them exactly how it’s done.

This is how you develop a money-magnet to sell something worth thousands of dollars over the Internet. You find something of interest to the prospects, you qualify them with a small purchase (of $7 to $19.95 – no higher), and then you give them all the information you can for how to do it themselves. Once they recognize the time, energy and effort involved, there’s a much greater appreciation for just buying the finished product.

Some percentage of the prospects will have the money to just buy the product instead of spending the time and effort to do it themselves.

Another quick example of a money magnet comes from one of my online businesses, which is in the Texas Hold’em poker training market, where we provide a monthly membership to poker players to watch training videos and learn to play winning poker.

In this case, I created an “upstream” site known as PokerTester.com. This site provides a free poker skills test, consisting of 25 questions in 8 different skills categories. To take the free skills test, users must register and join our mailing list.

After taking the test, the site provides the user with a “report card” on their skills, along with specific tips for improving their game. This process provides players with real, tangible value and an objective view of where they are falling short, along with instructions for what they need to do about it.

Then, we send a series of skills improvement tips via the email autoresponder, including some sample videos from our membership site. This site provides a steady stream of fresh leads that feeds the membership site, along with selling a number of other 3rd party affiliate products.

These are just two examples of money magnets that work like a charm. There are many other types of money magnets, including free trials, free software tools, results calculators, free reports and e-books, free videos, webinars, teleconferences and more.

The key is to figure out what you can use as “bait” to attract the kind of prospects who will turn into buyers, when the time is right, you’ve earned their trust and they’r ready to buy. It all starts with the right money magnets and getting the prospects on your list, so you have the opportunity to build a relationship with them, earn their trust and show them how you can help them get what they want.

Email Lists – The key to sustainable online profitability

Rick Braddy — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:15:40 +0000

In the traditional sales world, sales people used to use a Rolodex (remember those?), business cards and a call log – and of course, their telephone. Many still do today. Of course, modern CRM systems have automated this process nicely. The Rolodex was the “list” back then… today, CRM software has largely displaced the Rolodex.

In my last several blog posts, I stressed the importance of building a relationship with your list of subscribers. Don’t have a list of subscribers?

Oops! You probably aren’t turning a profit online if you aren’t building and nurturing your list – are you?

Today I had a nice discussion with a work at home mom about her attempts to make money online. She had invested around $5,000 in affiliate marketing and advertising based on some “make money” course she saw on TV… well, I’m always saddened to hear these kinds of stories, when good people are taken advantage of by scams or incomplete sales processes…

I explained to her that the only way to turn a consistent profit in an online business is with a list of customers, subscribers and prospects. The reasons for this is actually quite simple. It’s simple economics.

It costs too much to advertise and bring a visitor to your website. On the first visit to a website, 99% are probably not yet ready to buy whatever you’re selling. Well, it’s impossible to turn a profit when only 1% or fewer people buy from you, given the cost of bringing visitors to your site.

Instead, it’s a proven fact that in order to run an advertising-driven, profitable online business, you must build a list of subscribers – who you then can develop a relationship with over time and market to them on an ongoing basis.

It seems simple enough, yet I’m still amazed at how many small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t do this properly. There’s tons of great information freely available on how to develop landing pages that get visitors to register and there’s certainly no shortage of email auto-responders to choose from (arguably there’s too many of them to choose from today).

So what’s the issue? Why are so many companies and people starting out still missing this critical piece of the online profit puzzle?

Perhaps it’s because they lack the content – the so-called “money magnet” needed to attract the right kinds of people to register and subscribe in the first place. Money magnet is a term that’s been used in a variety of ways, but I first heard the term applied to online marketing by Frank Kern, a very experienced and successful Internet marketer.

A money-magnet is anything you can give away for free or nearly free that attracts the right kinds of prospective customers to register and become a subscriber. Now I realize this is online marketing 101 stuff, but like I said, there’s so many people who are skipping right past the basics to put a gorgeous looking website up and then wonder why it’s not making money, that apparently it needs to be stressed more.

I outlined the entire process for building a profitable online business in a post earlier this year called “A PROVEN ONLINE SUCCESS FORMULA“, where I go into quite a lot of detail on proper goal setting and putting the necessary online selling machinery in place.

Incidentally, all of this is spelled out in even greater detail in the Online Leadership Guide, which comes with some very cool free tools and a mini-course you should check out (it’s very affordable, at only $19.95). Incidentally, this is a decent example of a money magnet and landing page.

So if you’ve tried Google AdWords or other online advertising and are disappointed with the lack of sales results, if you weren’t using a proper landing page with an enticing money-magnet free offer for your visitors to register and learn more, go back and fix your front-end “lead generation” process and start building your list.

Several earlier posts discuss the importance of developing a relationship with your subscribers, giving them even more value for free, then eventually *some* of them will be ready to buy – and when they are ready, some will buy from you.

Done properly, your subscriber and customer list become your more valuable online business asset – much like that Rolodex was to a salesperson in the offline world. Invest in building your list and the relationship with those on your list, and I promise you’ll be amazed at how much it will help you.

If you’ve been in business for a while as a small business, chances are you already have a “list” of sorts – a mailing list in the making inside your Gmail contact manager, Outlook or other mail client. This is, in effect, your mailing list – all your contacts. If you’re like me, you have hundreds of business cards squirreled away in a desk drawer somewhere.

Getting these entered or scanned into your contact manager will begin to round out your business contacts. Keep in mind that these folks would probably accept a personal email from you, but would consider advertising or other forms of direct promotion as spam, so be careful how you use these resources.

If you are a more established medium to large corporation, then you most likely have a corporate CRM system, which is a primary list source for you. You also probably have lists scattered all over the place and you may need to do some list consolidation, de-duping and cleansing. It’s well worth the effort, as these lists are pure gold when used properly with a focused email marketing strategy.

Finally, keep in mind that one of your best sources for lists is leveraging lists of your partners through cooperative marketing campaigns, whereby your partners promote your offer to their lists, bringing lots of qualified traffic to your landing page and building your targeted list.

Ultimately, you’ll need to break out from your core contacts and build focused lists of prospects in each of your target markets. It does take time, but done properly, it is well worth the effort and investment.

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Fast Way to Make Money with WordPress

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