The Smart Passive Income Blog

Quick Ways to Utilize These 4 Non-Google Search Engines

Pat — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:44:59 +0000

Non-Google search engines are a beautiful thing – and no, I’m not talking about Yahoo or Bing.

I’m talking about other search engines that you can use to discover a ton of valuable information about the niche you’re in.

I guarantee that you’ve heard of these search engines before, although you probably never thought of them primarily as search engines:

YouTube
Twitter
Facebook
iTunes

Let’s go one-by-one through each to discover how we can utilize these search engines to enhance our own websites, blogs and brands.

YouTube as a Search Engine

YouTube is a GIANT search engine, which just so happens to be owned by Google, but instead of websites, we get videos.

The first thing I like to do is just simply type in keywords related to my niches into YouTube’s search field, and see what comes up.

Right away, you’ll be able to notice a few things:

What people are talking about when it comes to your niche. This is especially useful if you’re just starting out, because you can immediately get inspiration and ideas for content.
Who else is in your niche. You might be able to find some major players that are using YouTube as their primary media outlet. If so, you may want to get to know them a little better, or even find a way to contact them for future collaboration. If they’ve got subscribers, you’ve got the potential to grab them for your own by posting video responses or comments to their videos, or possibly getting mentioned in a future upload.
What’s missing from your niche on YouTube. Websites are easy to create, but videos are another story. Many topics and subjects are only lightly touched upon in YouTube videos, so if you find a hole in your niche, fill it. When I first heard the term “Facebook Landing Page”, I immediately looked it up on YouTube to see if there were any good tutorial videos about how to make a Facebook Landing Page. There were none, so I created my own. My video about Facebook Landing Pages is my most popular, and it even shows up twice in the SERPS for “Facebook Landing Page” – the top spot, and another one below. This drives a ton of traffic back to SPI.

Tip: When you’re searching for various terms, you can change the “search options” after you get your results to view which ones are the most viewed, most recent and/or which ones have the highest rating, to help you explore your niche even further.

Twitter as a Search Engine

This microblogging platform is indeed a search engine, and what’s really cool about it is that you can search for things in real time. In other words, you can see how people are talking about the term you search for at the very moment you click search.

I don’t think Twitter even knew how powerful their platform would be for searching for this kind of real time information, because when they first launched the only search bar was in the sidebar of each profile. Now, the homepage of Twitter is a giant real-time search hub, with the hottest/latest tweets and trends right there next to a very obvious search bar.

Apparently, the show Jersey Shore is a trending topic today.

How wonderful.

Anyways, the obvious thing we can do is put in our primary keywords, and see what comes up. Because this is a general search for your term, you’ll get a number of different kinds of tweets from people. You’ll get people who are asking questions, giving answers, posting links and resources, ranting, raving, conversing, etc.

Some of that may be useful to you, but if you want to get some targeted real time information about your keyword, you can try adding additional terms such as:

“keyword” “need help” – to see what people need help with
“keyword” “what is” - to see what people are trying to find answers for
“keyword” “i hate” - to see what people hate about the keyword
“keyword” “i love” - to see what people love about the keyword
“keyword” “can’t” - to see what people can’t do related to your keyword
“keyword” “bit.ly” - to see what links people have been posting related to your keyword
“keyword” “twitpic.com” – to see what pictures people have been posting up related to your niche

…and the list goes on and on. I’m sure you can think of hundreds of additional terms to use to hone in on important information about your niche – and especially your target audience and exactly how they think.

Facebook as a Search Engine

Facebook. It’s where we hang out and play, and stalk people all day.

Joking aside, beyond a Business Page on Facebook for your website, we can utilize Facebook by using the search engine located at the top of the page.

Simply type in your keywords, and see what comes up. Actually, before you even press enter to perform the search, you’ll see a slew of pages, groups and activities that relate to your niche.

These are all fantastic places to meet new people, exchange ideas and get inspiration for content.

I’ve also used many of the groups and pages I’ve found on Facebook to help promote some of my LEED products. I usually include a special discount just for people from Facebook (using a unique coupon code), so I know exactly how many customers actually came from these postings of mine. To be honest with you, a lot of my customers came from Facebook.

iTunes as a Search Engine

Finally, we have Apple’s iTunes.

iTunes isn’t just for finding cool music or television. We can use it to find relevant podcasts that we should definitely be paying attention to. I’ve just discovered this world of podcasting, it’s potential, and just how massive some podcasters’ audiences are on iTunes, and how much influence and authority they’ve earned as well.

Some podcasts have tens of thousands of subscribers, so if you could somehow land a guest spot on a top show in your niche, or simply get mentioned – you could potentially drive a lot of direct traffic to your site. If not, you’d at least know who the top players are, and you can use them for inspiration for content creation, or even contact them through their website (listed in iTunes), or a message line and network with them or find a potential JV partner or new advertiser.

Additionally, you can find holes to fill if you’re up to starting a podcast yourself.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, just as much as I hope you enjoy your weekend!

Stay tuned for the 2nd Session of the Smart Passive Income Podcast this coming Monday.

Cheers!

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

Quick Ways to Utilize These 4 Non-Google Search Engines

Subscribers Magnet WordPress Plugin – Awesome?

Pat — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:53:37 +0000

Over the past week, I’ve received at least 15 emails from SPI readers asking me whether or not the new Subscribers Magnet WordPress Plugin by MaxBlogPress (makers of the popular WordPress Plugin, Ninja Affiliate) would be something worth investing in. To be honest with you, I hadn’t even heard about the plugin until some of you emailed me about it.

I built my online businesses with WordPress sites and never once paid for a single plugin, so I was a bit skeptical because I only know a handful of plugins that are worth paying for, such as WP-Wishlist. With so many people wanting my opinion about it, I decided to see what the big deal was.

Before I go on, I just wanted to say this to you up front: I don’t normally do posts about products like this here on SPI. I usually only promote products that I’m hardcore familiar with (i.e. Market Samurai), but I did do my best to get as familiar with the plugin as possible so I could leave you an honest assessment. There was apparently a ton of buzz about this plugin (which I somehow missed until recently), so my goal here is to give all of you my first-hand, educated opinion about it so that you can make your own educated decision whether you like it or not.

I will also disclose that the links in this post to Subscribers Magnet are affiliate links to the product, although I hope you can see based on what is written below that this post is primarily here to help you discover the plugin, not for me to make money from it. I was not asked to or paid to write this post by anyone. This is just me and my opinion about something that may or may not be useful for you and your online business or blog.

After emailing MaxBlogPress myself, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to test out a beta version of the plugin, so I could see how it worked first-hand. I had told them that I may or may not write about it on my blog, and if I do there’s no guarantee that it will be a good review. They were confident in their product (a good sign), and asked me to only be honest about it if I were to share it with you.

I tested the plugin and it’s capabilities over the past week.

What Does Subscribers Magnet Do?

The primary purpose of the Subscribers Magnet plugin is to make it really easy to drastically increase your email list conversion rates. In fact, they have a guarantee on the product that says if you use the plugin and do not at least double your subscription rate, you get 100% of your money back.

After its installed and synced with your email service provider, such as Aweber, the plugin gives any blog the ability to use a number of different methods to get new subscribers, some of which are actually pretty cool and very well thought out. What I really like is that it allows you to do this in a very unobtrusive, non-annoying way.

That is definitely right up my alley, because I hate to use (and see) pop-ups and lightboxes, and this plugin does so much more than that.

Opt-In Forms

First, using the settings menu that is provided, you can insert opt-in forms with a single click of a button almost anywhere on your blog that you’d like. For example:

1. Show an Opt-in Form At the Top of Your First Blog Post

It makes sense to place an opt-in form at the top of your first blog post because that is where most of the traffic to your homepage will go. And if you happen to show full blog posts on your blog’s homepage (unlike me, who just shows excerpts), then an opt-in form will be shown front and center to all visitors of your homepage.

Cool feature, but I would never use it. This goes against my belief for what the primary purpose of a blog post actually is, and that is to engage the reader through your content first, and then have them take some kind of action. This is why I like the next options better.

2. Show an Opt-in Form at the Bottom of Your Blog Posts

Placing an opt-in form at the bottom of your blog posts makes much more sense to me, because people who read your content will be more likely to subscribe to your email list if they like what you had to say.

If I didn’t have an opt-in form at the bottom of my posts already, then I would have definitely implemented this option using the plugin. My current opt-in form is hard-coded into my custom theme, something I had to pay someone to do.

3. Show an Opt-in Form in Your Sidebar

The information in the sidebar of a blog is almost always shown no matter what page a visitor lands on. This is why any blogger who wants to collect email addresses should, at a minimum, place an opt-in form in the sidebar of their blog.

Again, I already have an opt-in form in my sidebar that was hard-coded into my custom theme, but if I didn’t Subscribers Magnet would make it really simple to add one using a drag-and-drop widget.

So far…none of these options do anything for me, mainly because I have these already built into my site. I keep track of where all of my new subscribers come from, and I would say about 70% come from my sidebar, and 30% come from the form at the bottom of my posts.

4. Show an Opt-in Form in a Footer Ad

Subscribers Magnet also has an option to add what they call a “Footer Ad” to your blog. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

The transparent bar at the bottom is meant to be an unobtrusive way to immediately show an opt-in form to a visitor, one that will definitely catch people’s attention. It definitely does that, but personally I feel it’s almost like a popup. Even though it is transparent, doesn’t slide in or pop up out of nowhere and surprise you, it still breaks up the flow of site and forces me to take the time to click the x to close it.

As you can probably tell, I would never use this option myself. It may very well increase my conversion rates, but it may also get rid of some long time fans as well.

I may be too critical here, because MaxBlogPress does include an option to control the frequency of how often it is shown to each visitor, which is nice.

5. Embed an Opt-in Form Within the Comment Section

I’ve never seen this done anywhere before, but I think it’s awesome.

You can enable the plugin to insert an opt-in form into the comment section immediately after someone leaves a comment. Here is a sample of what it looks like when it’s enabled on my blog:

You can mess around with the copy, but the opportunity to grab a subscriber at the very moment they leave a comment is amazing.

What is also nice about this feature is that you can choose when and how often you’d like the form to appear for each visitor. If you don’t think it should be shown to first time commenters, then you can change the settings to have it show on people’s 2nd, 3rd comment, or 4th comment. That way, it’s still a one-time hit so it’s not obnoxious, but it’s shown at a more opportune moment when people are already vested in you and your site.

Although the forms above look plain, you can customize them if you choose to do so. The colors, fonts, borders and sizes are all customizable, and you can even add a background such as the one I made below (although I must admit it took a lot of trial and error to line everything up correctly):

I don’t think there’s an easy way to do rounded corners, which would go nicely with my blog’s theme, and you can’t put images on top or outside of the border, as I have on my customized opt-in form in my sidebar. Additionally, the “submit button” customization is currently limited. I really wish I could change the size of the button and font within – maybe in a later update.

Super Slick Form Auto Filler

If you go two pictures above, to the sample of the embedded opt-in form in the comment section, you’ll notice that the form is already filled out. This is the work behind the plugin’s Form Auto Filler, which automatically places the visitor’s name and email into the correct boxes, for all forms that you show on your blog.

This is sweet and super powerful because now all one has to do to subscribe to your email list is just click the submit button. That’s it.

How does it work?

Well, in order to pull that information from people, they will have had to at least leave one comment on your blog before. After that (and correct me if I’m wrong), it recognizes the ip address and simply fills in the information based on that. Very, very simple idea, that can have a major impact on your conversion rates.

Note: I had this featured enabled over the weekend and it was totally working, but I later found out that if a person is totally brand new to your site, the text fields will be blank. This is fine if you’re using the plugin, because the words “Name:” and “Email:” appear to the left of the blank text fields, but for SPI, I have the words “Name” and “Email” within the text fields, and they are supposed to automatically disappear when someone clicks inside those fields. When a new visitor came to my blog, they would just see blank fields with no instructions as to what goes where. Again, this is because of the way I designed my opt-in forms, which is meant to save space.

Just wanted to point that out just in case any of you came across the same issue.

Other Methods of Capturing Email Addresses

In addition to the opt-in forms, there are a couple of other methods that you can use to substantially grow your list using Subscribers Magnet.

Automatic / Silent Subscription

This method automatically subscribes commenters to your email list…without telling them that’s what they’re doing.

I was totally against this method and was actually wondering why this feature was included, since most of the other features were reader friendly and unobtrusive. However, MaxBlogPress describes it’s proper usage and it actually does make some sense.

First of all, you must have “double-opt in” enabled with your email service provider, which means that if someone attempts to subscribe to your list (in any method), they will first receive an email with a confirmation link, and they must click that confirmation link in order to actually be on your email list. Most providers won’t even let you do a single-opt in, especially using a silent subscription method.

Using this “silent subscription” method, a commenter leaves a comment and then immediately receives that confirmation email to confirm the subscription. But instead of saying the usual “please click the link below to confirm your subscription to the blah blah newsletter…”, MaxBlogPress suggests changing the copy to read something similar to:

“Thank you so much for your comment. I would like to offer you my eBook, (ebook name here) as a free gift. To receive your free eBook, simply subscribe to my newsletter by clicking the link below…”

That’s pretty sneaky, but because you’re still giving people a choice to subscribe, I also think it’s actually really smart.

I have not implemented or tested this method yet, because I’m still trying to decide how I feel about emailing first time commenters in the first place. I once had installed a plugin that just simply emailed first time commenters with a thank you message and a link to my Facebook Page, but I had no idea how people were reacting to those emails.

The smartest thing to do would be to test it out by setting up a separate newsletter list, and feeding new subscribers to it using this silent method, so there are some raw numbers to determine whether or not it works.

Subscribe Checkbox

This is the last feature of Subscribers Magnet that I’ll be going over today, but it’s actually my favorite. The plugin also gives you the ability to place a checkbox in the comment field that, if checked, will subscribe the commenter to your email list. So in essence, the comment fields for “Name” and “Email” double as the opt-in form for your list. The benefit is that it just takes one click to subscribe.

Here’s what it looks like:

If a person clicks the checkbox, then immediately after their comment is published an email will be sent to them to confirm their subscription to the newsletter, just as if they subscribed using one of the opt-in forms on the blog.

Again, this is yet another angle to get people to subscribe to your email list, and probably the most reader friendly one available. There is an option to have this checkbox automatically checked for people, but I like to think that everyone on my list subscribed because they wanted to, not because they accidentally overlooked a checkbox.

It’s up to you though…that’s just how I roll.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really like the plugin and the multiple angles and opportunities you can provide visitors to your blog to subscribe without it being irritating. You can implement all of these strategies at the same time, but I would recommend selecting just a few that work for you and your traffic.

For the few days that I used this plugin (and again I couldn’t use a number of things because they were already hard-coded into my blog) I did see a slight increase in subscribers. However, I can’t say that it was solely because of the plugin because I did have a number of articles and features around the web that brought a large number of people to my site over the weekend, so I honestly cannot say for sure.

That being said, Daniel Scocco from DailyBlogTips.com uses Subscribers Magnet and has seen an nice increase in conversion rates, and other bloggers have seen an increase in conversion rates of up to 300%! A lot of other people are raving about it, so it seems like this could be one of those plugins that everyone ends up getting eventually down the road.

I definitely think it could be a worthy investment if growing your list is your primary goal.

MaxBlogPress is holding a very short introductory discount offer for Subscribers Magnet, which only lasts until Friday, July 30th. You can get Subscribers Magnet for 30% OFF the retail price by clicking here if your interested.

Thanks to those of you who emailed me about this plugin, and I hope I’ve been able to provide you with some helpful information. Thanks, and I wish you all the best.

Cheers!

Why Some Procrastinators Succeed and What We Can Learn From Them

Pat — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:00:22 +0000

When I was in Architecture school at Berkeley (Go Bears!), my classmates and I suffered long, hard nights at the studio drawing massive plans, building detailed models and drinking lots and lots of caffeine.

Some of our semester long projects required over 60 hours of work per week, in addition to our actual class time for both Architecture and general education courses. It was nuts, and because we had segments of the semester long project due about every 2 weeks, I often found myself pulling all-nighters, crashing on a nearby couch, or in a sleeping bag under my desk.

Most of my classmates were right there with me, pencils in hand – however there were a few select students who just seemed to never be around until the last couple of days before each deadline.

My studio mates and I always thought, “There’s no way these people are going to finish in time. We’ve been here for almost 2 weeks straight, and they come in with 2 days left before the deadline with nothing.”

Well – when the deadline came around and our graduate assistants and professors looked at our work, some of the “procrastinators” always seemed to get the better comments.

Truthfully, it bugged the crap out of the rest of us! As a result (sadly), those students were segmented from the rest of the group because we couldn’t stand how they could get so much good work done in such little time. It just didn’t seem fair. They weren’t in the studio much to talk to anyways.

Fortunately, I ended up becoming good friends with one of the “procrastinators” because we were both in the Marching Band together. I eventually ended up talking to her about why she comes in with only a few days left before a project was due, and this is what I remember she said:

“There are a few of reasons. First, I know if I spend all of my time in studio with you guys, we’ll chat all day and all night and probably get nothing done. I’m actually glad the rest of you feel this way about me, because then you won’t talk to me when I do come in and I can focus and get my work done.

“Secondly, it’s because the deadline works in my favor. It forces me to be extremely focused, because I have no other option but to be focused. Putting things off and not making decisions doesn’t become an option anymore, and I can get more done.

“Third, I have so many other things to do, and so many other things I’d much rather be doing than spending all my time in studio. No offense, Pat.”

Here is what I (and you, possibly) can take away from this kind of mindset and approach:

Just because you’re spending time doing something doesn’t actually mean you’re getting things done. Yes – I was basically living in the studio and doing “work”, but was I focused and doing work the entire time? No.
Minimize distractions to maximize efficiency.
Be smart about your time. Time is something we cannot get back, so being efficient and smart about what you do with your time matters a lot. Stay laser-focused.
Understand what makes you laser-focused. For my marching band friend, her came from the approaching deadline. For you, it may be something different. Force yourself to be focused when you want to get things done. This combines perfectly with #2.
What she said about “…not making decisions doesn’t become an option anymore” really struck a chord with me. Many times, we find ourselves working on projects, websites and businesses, and not following through because there’s something “just not right” about it, or it’s not perfect. Well, nothing good will happen until you launch, until you actually finish your project and make those decisions.
Understand what you want in life, set your priorities, and do what it takes to make it happen.

There are two types of procrastinators in the world: the lazy ones who waste time, and the smart ones that control time. Luckily, I met a smart one and learned a lot about how she utilized her time and forced herself to stay focused.

Should you be a procrastinator?

No.

Should you strive to be efficient, maximize your efforts and stop wasting time, so you can spend time doing other things that you love?

Absolutely.

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

Why Some Procrastinators Succeed and What We Can Learn From Them

A Typical Monthly Expense Report

Pat — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 07:17:36 +0000

This is something a little different…So far, I’ve published 20 monthly income reports, and 1 annual income report. However, I’ve never posted anything in detail about my expenses, until today.

I don’t know exactly why I have never included them in my reports. Maybe it’s because when I first started doing these reports there were virtually no expenses to take into account. That being said, I do know that many of you are curious to see what a typical month looks like, so here it is.

The following is my expense report for June of 2010.

Standard / Flat Monthly Fees For Doing Business Online

These are fees that I incur each and every month, independent of how much I actually earn, or how many items I sell.

Hosting & Domain Fees: about $20/month

Using the hosting and domain services from Bluehost, I have a couple of accounts under the $6.95/month plan, and a number of sub and add-on domains that don’t even work out to a buck a month ($10/year, or $0.83/month).

Email / Autoresponder Fees: $66.15/month

A 12-month package from Aweber costs me $193.80, which comes to about $16/month. An extra $50.00 a month is added on because I have email lists that total between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

Shopping Cart Fees: $35/month

These fees are flat monthly fees for the tools I use to make automatic transactions happen with my eBook at greenexamacademy.com. E-junkie costs me $5.00/month, and Paypal’s Website Payments Pro is $30/month.

Side note regarding Paypal’s Website Payments Pro: I do understand that I could instead use the standard paypal checkout method for absolutely free. That will allow me to accept credit cards as payment for my e-goods, however, there are two major problems with the standard checkout method:

When customers click on “Pay Now” or “Buy Now” (or whatever call to action you use), they are taken to Paypal’s website. Here, they can log into their Paypal account, or pay with a credit card. The thing is, the link to pay with a credit card is tiny and almost hidden, which forces a lot of people to think they need a Paypal account to purchase the product. Those who don’t have a Paypal account are more than likely to leave. Not cool.
Secondly, the transaction happens off of your site. The customer actually leaves your site and is taken to Paypal’s payment processor. E-junkie allows the transaction to stay ON your site and include a little bit of branding during the checkout process at the same time, which is very nice. The more you zig and zag your customer around to different sites, the more chances there are of that person leaving with an incomplete purchase. Not cool either.

Online Media Storage Fees: $12.00/month

I use Libsyn to host my media files online, such as my podcast, my webinar replay, and actually my eBook as well. This ensures that my blog server won’t crash if there’s a sudden rush to download certain pieces of media, which I hear often happens, especially when new podcast episodes or new videos are published on the blog.

I looked at Amazon S3 for an online storage solution, but I felt more comfortable dealing with the flat rate from Libsyn, then with fractions of a cent per gig of bandwith transfer with S3. it’s much easier to budget for.

TOTAL FLAT MONTHLY EXPENSES: $133.15

And just as an aside, if you’re just starting out, you don’t need all of these things right from the beginning. You can host your media files on your own site, and if you’re worried because you want to do a lot of videos, host them on YouTube instead. It’s free, and you can get search engine traffic off of YouTube as well.

Also, you don’t need the shopping cart fees either. Like I said, there is the option to go the free route with Paypal, and really if you’re just starting out, you should worry about your content and building an audience, rather than how to make a buck from an audience you don’t have yet.

All this being said, it only takes a couple of eBook sales, or just one affiliate commission on some certain products to make up the entire flat monthly expense.

Standard / Flat Fees For Business Improvement (In General)

The following fees are all fees associated with things that can help my business even further. You don’t have to spend money on any of these things, this is just what I do – which you’ll see why below.

Bookkeeping Fees: $50.00/month

When I started to make good money online, I hired a bookkeeper to help keep track of all of my monthly income and expenses, and input them into Quickbooks. This is probably the best $50.00 I spend every month for my business.

Why?

Because my bookkeeper makes my life SO much easier. All I have to do is send her my files from my business checking account, my business credit card, and my paypal and shopping cart – and she does the rest. I spend about 5 minutes a month doing this, and I have numbers every month I can look at in Quickbooks to see how my business is doing. Oh, and this makes tax season seem like a walk in the park.

Because I have a ton of different income streams, it would seriously drive me insane to try and do all of this myself.

Certified Public Accountant: about $35/month

My CPA helps me with all things financial, including where to put my money as well. I’ve saved a lot of money thanks to my CPA, so the cost of such a service is definitely made up in the savings.

Internet Business Mastery Academy: $97/month

I joined the IBM Academy nearly 2 years ago, and I continue to pay my dues because I still continue to learn from it.

Other Fees

I have other fees in addition to the services mentioned in the previous sections. These fees, however, vary each month, but I just wanted to list them here so you know what I could be paying for. The fees that you see next to the item was how much I spent in June of 2010.

The cost of hiring virtual assistants: $149.90
The cost of developing iPhone applications: $700.00
The cost of a piece of software for my business: $0.00
The cost of new equipment that I can use for my business: $0.00
The cost of memberships for something that I can use for my business: $103.00
The cost of utilities because I do business from home: $23.54
Paypal fees (they take a certain % of total cost of each product sold): $103.90
Google Checkout fees (same as Paypal): $8.65
Payouts to Affiliates: $450.00

I may have missed a few things, but I think I have most everything here.

In total, the expenses I incurred for June was about $1,853.24.

It’s kind of weird to look at my expenses, because $1,873.24 is a lot of money, and when I first started out I would never have fathomed spending that much on my own business in a single month. But, my experience over the past 2 years tells me that this is money well spent, and you can’t just look at the expenses alone without understanding why these expenses exist.

Also, you have to consider that I grossed about $13k in June and many of these expenses exist because I am making this kind of money. For example, the Paypal and Google Checkout fees, as well as the payouts to the affiliates – if I didn’t make any money, these fees would not exist.

Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of these expenses are not mandatory in order to run a successful online business, so don’t be scared of the total expense. I choose to pay developers to create new iPhone apps and I choose to pay for memberships that may help my business, because they are investments that will pay off for me in the future.

I hope you enjoyed this post and it helpful as you got an even closer look at what goes on in my businesses.

Lastly, if you haven’t already done so, please check out my podcast which is now live in iTunes! Ratings and reviews help the rankings, so thank you in advance!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Cheers!

How to Get Explosive & Targeted Traffic – An Alternative to Guest Posting

Pat — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:17:14 +0000

We all know that guest posting is one of the best ways to get highly targeted traffic to your website. Everyone makes it sound so easy too: write a killer post, deliver it to a fellow blogger in your niche, and then BAM…instant traffic, and some new subscribers to boot.

Although I wholeheartedly believe that guest posting is a tactic that delivers exactly the traffic that you need, and one that you should definitely attempt several times throughout the life of your growing site, the truth is that it’s not always as easy as it sounds.

Why?

Because the author of the blog you are targeting has the option to reject your guest post request. It could be for any number of reasons, many of which are beyond your control.

There is, however, a strategy that I’ve noticed being used on a number of blogs lately that is working wonders – driving large amount of traffic, earning tons of retweets and landing tons of new subscribers. It’s a strategy that I wish I knew when I was just starting out, and the best part is that it’s a post that you publish on your own blog, so there’s no need to worry about rejection.

The strategy?

A list post that features some of the top and up & coming players in your niche.

Call it what you want – a “shout out post”, a “tribute post”, or a “community post” (thanks to @5kmission, @PaulCunningham, @Scottshelden & @NicWirtz for the name suggestions!) – the strategy works.

It does take some extra effort to find the top and up & coming players in your niche, gather all of the relevant information and really put together a killer post, but the results can be quite fruitful for you and your blog.

Why Does this Work?

There are several reasons why this strategy works:

Everyone appreciates being featured on another blog. Some (not all) will actually spend time to actually read the post and leave a “thanks for the mention” comment as well. This is an easy and friendly way to connect & network with others.
Often times, the people you feature (especially the up & coming ones), love the free press so much that they want to share it with as many people as possible. This is why it’s important to make sharing easy on your blog by including all of the necessary retweet, like, stumbleupon, and digg buttons, etc.
These posts are actually very useful. Anyone who is interested in your niche would love to have a list of the top players and get to know everyone and their importance to the industry.

A fine example of this strategy being put to use recently can be seen on Jade Craven’s post at TheNetsetter.com, 50 Netsetters You Should Know About.

Take notice of how many comments were made, as well as how many of those comments were actually from people featured in that article. Also, although it doesn’t say on the blog itself, bit.ly tells me that this post has been retweeted 458 times (as of about 24 hours after it’s post). That’s a lot of reach, and I guarantee you that many of those retweets came from people featured in that post as well. Just imagine how many followers total those 50 people have on Twitter alone.

Taking it to the Next Level

As with most things in life, there’s the standard way of writing these posts, and then there’s the “next level” way.

The standard way is to simply create a list of people and write a short paragraph about each – or, if your post is about a particular subject matter within your niche, you may write about how each of the people you are featuring have made an impact in regards to that.

The “next level” way is wonderfully demonstrated by my friend Corbett Bar from ThinkTraffic.net. In his posts, 10 Blogs with Explosive Growth to Learn From and also 17 Traffic Building Tips From Some of the World’s Most Popular Bloggers, he not only includes a list of featured bloggers and a short paragraph about each, but he also includes an actual quote from each blogger as well. Having a quote from each of the people does a few extra things for Corbett:

It increases the social proof of the post.
It increases the chances of the article being shared to even more people. Because Corbett took the time to first contact each of the people, and then follow up after the post was written (I know he did this because The Smart Passive Income Blog had the honor of being included in these posts…thanks Corbett!), the authors are less likely to just pass over the post, and will most likely share it with others. If not through retweets and sharing on Facebook, then by posts such as the one I am writing now.
And most importantly, it takes the networking aspect of these posts to a whole new level. Corbett contacted me personally to ask for a quotation for both of these articles, and because of that I know exactly who he is, what his blog is about, and that it’s totally awesome. In the future, I’m sure Corbett and I could possibly work together on something, or exchange guest posts, or whatever – because of the trust I now have for him and his blog – all of which came from the initial contact and the quality of his post.

If you take a look at the archives on ThinkTraffic.net, you’ll see that each of the posts before the 17 Traffic Building Tips article average 2 to 4 comments, and the same amount of retweets. Well, after posting this post, he earned 69 comments, and 145 retweets.

It works.

Yes, you will have to work a little harder to first contact each of the people you’d like to feature, but usually they are happy to spend 2-3 minutes to contribute a quote for you. Not all will respond, but the ones that do will be great contacts to have in the future, ones that can possibly help add to the rapid growth and expansion of your site.

So if guest posting just isn’t working out for you (or even if it is), give this alternative traffic building method a shot.

Cheers!

p.s. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is now live on iTunes! You can subscribe to the iTunes feed by clicking here!

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

How to Get Explosive & Targeted Traffic – An Alternative to Guest Posting

SPI 001 : Introduction | Show Formalities | What to Expect

Pat — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 07:05:31 +0000

It’s here! The first session of The Smart Passive Income Podcast!

You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, I will be submitting the podcast feed to iTunes soon, so you can subscribe there as well – but I’ll let you know when it’s up and ready to go.

Since this is our first session together, I spend a little bit of time introducing myself and how I define passive income and utilize it for my businesses and lifestyle. Also, I go over the formalities of the show and what to expect from future sessions.

Future shows will have a structured format, and several will include special guests.

Special information about the episode such as items mentioned during the session and action items will usually appear below, along with a transcript.

Right click here to download the MP3

Items Mentioned in This Session:

Action Items:

Once iTunes has approved the show, I’ll provide you with an iTunes feed for the podcast only. Additionally, you can also subscribe to the blog and get all of my material (blog posts and podcast) by clicking here.

Transcript:

SPI 001: Introduction | Show Formalities | What to Expect

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

SPI 001 : Introduction | Show Formalities | What to Expect

How Well Can You Describe Your Website in Just Three Words?

Pat — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:14:28 +0000

This is a short post – yes, but a powerful one. It involves a little bit of participation, so please don’t be shy...

A couple of weeks ago, I shared this little exercise on my Facebook Page.

I asked my followers to share a link to their website and describe it using only three words.

Any words, but only three.

After over 100 responses, I found that this simple sounding task was actually quite hard for some people, and in fact it made some rethink the entire concept of their websites and why it exists.

So today, I invite you to do the same. In the comment section, please only respond with three words that describe your site. Do not include a link in the comment section, because my spam filter might block you. Instead, put the link in the URL field under where your name goes.

3 words only. No URLs. Oh, and no hyphens either…sneaky people!

I won’t leave you with any more instructions, but here’s something to think about:

What three words will you choose that make you stand out from everyone else?

This is your “abridged elevator pitch”, so make it good.

Oh, and there will be something nice in store for the few that stand out to me the most. Be sure to leave your correct email address in the required field so I can contact you.

Lastly, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating the launch of The Smart Passive Income Podcast this coming Monday. I’ve been working hard setting everything up, but it’s finally here!

Cheers!

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

How Well Can You Describe Your Website in Just Three Words?

How to Hide a Page from Google

Pat — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:17:58 +0000

This is a short tutorial about how to hide or remove a page from Google.

Well actually, we’re not “hiding” anything from Google, we’re just telling Google not to index certain pages on our site so they don’t show up in the search engines.

Why would you want to do this?

There are some instances where you actually do not want content on your site to show up in the search engines. Let’s say, for example, you have a newsletter and it comes with a free eBook or a report. If you create a special page that has links to download your eBook, it will get picked up by search engine robots, show up on the results page for certain keywords, and people can potentially bypass your opt-in form to get the eBook that you’re giving away.

How do I know this?

Because it happened to me.

Two weeks ago, I typed in the name of my guide, eBooks the Smart Way, and the top result was the lead-in page with the opt-in form.

This is good.

However, the second resulting link was the actual page that had the links to download my eBook!

This is bad.

Although I’m not sure how many people downloaded my eBook by going straight to the download page, even if the number was zero, it’s just not good practice to have the ability to bypass the lead-in page and have access to a giveaway like this. This was definitely an act of carelessness on my part, and I should have known better.

And this is why I’m writing this post for you, so you don’t make the same mistake as me.

How to Hide a Page (or Post) From Google

Before You Publish

The best practice would be to not include the page that you don’t want to be included in the search engines from the very beginning.

In order to do this, you’re going to have to tell the search engine bots to “skip over” that page when going through your site. The easiest way to do this is to use a WordPress Plugin called Robots Meta.

This plugin has a lot of options as far as the metadata and backend stuff of your blog is concerned, but what’s nice is that on every new page and post that you create, you’ll see a little box on the side that looks like this:

If you select “noindex” the page will not be picked up by the search engines. The “follow” and “nofollow” stuff relates to the links that are on the page, which is a topic for another blog post.

If you don’t have WordPress, you can follow the more technical instructions on Online Tech Tips.

After You Publish

In my case, I had already published the page that I wanted to take out of the search engines. If you’re in a similar predicament, don’t fret – here’s what you have to do.

Note, you don’t need WordPress in order to do this.

Step 1: Follow the Steps for Before You Publish First

In order to remove the a URL from Google’s index, you must first “block” that page using the technique that I described above. If you’re on WordPress, use the Robots Meta plugin and make sure to change the setting to “noindex” and update the page.

Doing this alone will not change anything right away, so you’ll have to proceed with the following steps.

Step 2: Sign Up for Google Webmaster Tools and Verify Your Website

Go to Google Webmaster Tools and sign up for an account if you haven’t already. If you’re new, you’ll have to insert a short piece of code into the section of your site, before the , to verify that is indeed your site.

Step 3: Go to “Crawler Access”

Open the Site Configuration menu and click on Crawler Access:

Step 4: Click on “Remove URL” and then on “New Removal Request”

Step 5: Insert the URL (case-sensitive) that you want to remove.

Step 6: Set the “Reason” for the request to: Remove Page from Search Results and Cache and click the button for “blocked by noindex metatag” (this is what Step 1 was for). Then click “Submit Request”.

And there you have it. After that, you’ll see that the request to have that page removed was submitted, and after a day or two, you should see it in the “removed” column. Then, you can check to see if it’s in Google, and you won’t have any luck finding it.

Although you may not be able to use this tip right away, don’t forget about it in case you may have to use it in the future.

Whether you’re starting a brand new newsletter or creating some kind of online course – know that you can indeed control what get’s shown in Google.

If you have yet to grab your copy of my free eBook, eBooks the $mart Way (with over 5000 downloads!), I definitely recommend it. You won’t find it in the search engines anymore.

Cheers!

The Power of Social Proof and Putting Your Readers First

Pat — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:10:11 +0000

Last week, I posted a question asking all of you whether you prefer a full post or a partial post in your RSS feed.

The argument was that a full post is what most subscribers favor, but showing a full post keeps people off of your site. On the other hand, you could get more traffic coming to your site by showing a partial post or “teaser”, but then it would defeat the purpose of having an RSS feed in the first place.

The response was amazing. In fact, more than 60 individual people commented with their opinion – and almost all of them favored ‘full post’.

Although we can easily conclude that a full post is the way to go, I wanted to illustrate two principles that came about as a result of asking this simple question: social proof and putting your readers first.

Social Proof

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when people’s decisions are influenced by making the assumption that surrounding people know more about certain situations than you do.

In layman’s terms: groups of people have influence, and the larger the group, the more influence they have.

For example, if you’re at the mall and you see a huge crowd of people huddled around a store, you’re more than likely going to check it out, or at least acknowledge the crowd of people and wonder what the big deal is.

I decided to write last week’s post about the RSS feed as an “Ask the Reader” because I knew that what you all said as a whole would be more powerful than anything I could suggest or recommend. There is proof in the 60+ comments about what works and what doesn’t.

“The only recommendation better than the one given by somebody else is the one given by a group of somebody elses.”

We all know the power of “somebody else’s recommendation”. That’s exactly why products (both online and off) have testimonials! It’s one thing for a company to say their product is good, but it’s becomes more believable when it’s somebody else providing you that recommendation – especially when it’s a friend, and doubly especially when it’s a group of friends.

The comment section of your blog is a PERFECT place to showcase social proof. If you have something you’d like to prove, why not let your readers do it for you and make it a much more powerful statement.

If you read through the comments section of the post, you’ll actually notice a few people say they will change from a partial to a full post RSS feed. It’s not because of anything I said – I just asked a question.

That’s the power of the masses.

Putting Your Readers First

The second principle that came about from last week’s post deals with the idea of what happens when you put your readers’ best interests first.

As one commenter, Dexter from CashDoodle put it:

“[In a full post RSS feed...] If you are writing engaging content, posing contentious arguments, asking relevant questions and providing a call to action, people will head over to your blog to complete the transaction…”

He then followed up by saying:

“…we keep saying that writing a blog is about giving. Giving value to your readers. Forcing a reader back to your blog makes it about you, and what YOU want.”

It’s true – putting in a partial feed just to get clicks and traffic to your blog is a selfish thing to do, in my opinion. But the fact is that you can still get as much traffic from your RSS subscribers by providing your full post. Actually, you could get more traffic if, like Dexter said, you’re engaging your audience, asking relevant questions and including proper calls to action.

Putting my readers’ best interests first is something I always try to do here on SPI, and it has always come back around to reward me in one way or another.

Help others first, and they’ll be happy to help you out later. Karma…it’s out there.

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

The Power of Social Proof and Putting Your Readers First

Ask the Reader: Partial or Full Post in RSS Feed?

Pat — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:05:46 +0000

Recently, a number of people have been asking me for my opinion about how much of a post one should show in their RSS feed. On Feedburner (which I know has been on the fritz lately as far as numbers are concerned), you can choose to have either your entire post shown, or just a piece of it with a link to read more back on the site.

(To change your setting in Feedburner, login and click on the “Optimize” tab, and then click on “Summary Burner” at the bottom)

I have always shown the full post, but a number of people have made a good argument for only showing the beginning portion or a teaser.

On one hand, people subscribe to RSS feeds to conveniently read material off-site. So why would we want to make things inconvenient by having them come back to the blog to finish the post?

On the other hand, it’s evident that by showing the full RSS feed, we’re not maximizing the amount of traffic on our sites because the subscribers have all of the content they need off-site. Plus, don’t we want our readers to engage in the comment section and possibly click on other things on our site to stay on it as long as possible?

It’s a toss up, and I’m really interested in what you think.

Are you for a Full Post, or a Partial Post in the RSS feed? Which do you prefer, and why? Is there a “happy medium” you’d like to share?

7 Ways to Be Everywhere – Building a Brand Online

Pat — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:13:00 +0000

Last week, an SPI reader asked me the following question:

“Pat. You seem to be EVERYWHERE online. Everywhere I go, people are talking about you and your name always comes up. How do you do it?”

To be honest, I never believed I would become this successful online, especially with SPI – a blog in the “make money online” niche, which as you probably know is wildly over saturated. Although my success is partially accidental I know exactly why I’m here.

What it really comes down to is this:

If you want to become successful online, you must think about what you do as building a brand. In order to build a brand, you must do what you can to be everywhere.

A successful blogger is not just a blogger. True – it’s the blog where things get started. It’s where authority is constructed and content is published. But if you stick to just a blog, you’ll be just that – stuck to your blog.

Your blog or your website is only the beginning. It’s your hub, your homebase where people can go to find out more about who you are and what you do, but it’s also just one piece of the giant puzzle that is your brand – your omnipresent, influential and (if applicable), money making brand.

Below are 7 ways to simply be everywhere:

1. Step Out of Your Comfort Zone

Before I get into more specific, actionable items, you must first realize that “being everywhere” isn’t going to be a walk in the park. It’s going to be uncomfortable at times because you’re doing things that you aren’t used to or even scared to do.

With that said, let me tell you this: the only thing holding you back is you.

In The 4-Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss gives us some exercises to perform throughout the book to help train our entrepreneurial minds. One particular exercise was to enter a crowded area and lay yourself down flat on the floor, looking upwards.

What’s the point?

The point is that it will train you to do things that you wouldn’t normally do, to get you to not worry so much about what other people are thinking and just take action – no matter how silly or ridiculous an idea may be at the time.

When I first thought about writing my first eBook, it was something I honestly did not want to do. I was afraid of the process and I didn’t know if it would sell even one copy. Well, I’m glad I stepped out of my comfort zone and decided to write that eBook, because it turned into a six-figure online business.

2. Keep Your Brand Consistent

The goal is to be everywhere, but the trick is to make it as easy as possible for people to recognize that you are indeed everywhere. This means using the same graphics and the same logos where ever you are online.

This is important, because image recognition is the number one way that people make connections in their brain. Huge companies know this, and even babies know this when they recognize the face of their mother for comfort and food.

This is why I do my best to brand each of my pages online the same. My blog, my Twitter account, and even my Facebook Landing Page all look very similar. My gravatar (which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar – the image that shows up next to my comments on any site that I leave comments on) even uses the same exact picture as in these profiles.

3. Explore Other Forms of Media

So you have a blog.

Have you ever thought about expanding your brand onto other media types such videos? How about podcasting? Live streaming? Printed books?

Only only will this help you get more traffic by reaching people you wouldn’t normally reach with a blog alone, but it will definitely expand your brand as well.

Darren Rowse from Problogger.net was the first person I knew from online that was “everywhere”.

I knew about his blog, but then I went to Barnes and Noble and saw his printed book in person. Seeing that book really changed my view about who he was and made him (and his blog) even more of an authority in the blogging niche in my eyes. He has definitely done a great job expanding his brand because he also has videos, podcasts and has done some live streaming in the past, not to mention an additional printed book that he just recently published.

He’s at the top of his niche for a reason.

For myself, I’m getting there. I have a great following on YouTube and am about to launch a podcast as well.

4. Get Onto Social Networks

This one should be a given.

If you’re not utilizing Social Networks like Twitter or Facebook as an extension of your blog (not just to spy on your friends, but to network with your audience and actually provide good, relevant content on), then you’re not doing everything you can to be everywhere. The thing is: THIS is where everyone is!

Plus, the simple viral nature of these sites alone does wonders to help expand your brand and get noticed by people who would never have heard of you otherwise.

Luckily, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to setup a Twitter account (although it may take a bit more time to change the graphics and “brand it”), and I’ve laid out exactly how to setup your Facebook Page here.

5. Write Guest Posts on Other Blogs

This is huge.

HUGE!

Guest blogging is probably the easiest way to get a load of relevant traffic to your blog in the shortest amount of time. Beyond that, and even more important for your brand, you and your site’s url (and possibly your logo too) will be shown to tons of people who may have never heard of you or your website before. After getting published, you’ll be instantly known by that much more people when they come across the blog post live on the site or in the blog owner’s RSS feed.

There are several free guides about how to guest post online. My favorites are Glen Allsop’s Guest Blogging: The Ultimate Guide and Chris Guthrie’s Guest Posting [Ultimate Guide]. Yep – that’s two ultimate guides right there.

6. Over-deliver On Your Content

Okay, I have to mention by buddy Glen at Viperchill.com once again. He’s the master of over-delivering and a prime example of what can happen to a blog when you over-deliver on your content.

About 95% of the posts he writes on his blog are massive, tutorial-like blog posts that I’m sure take hours and hours of research and work. His posts are art in the form of words, and he goes into so much depth about everything that it literally makes me drool.

Recently, he just surpassed the 10,000 subscriber mark (although Feedburner is acting weird lately, but nonetheless), which means he earned about 9,000 subscribers in less than a year. That’s unheard of in the blogging world.

It didn’t happen because he writes blog posts consistently. He doesn’t – even though that’s “the rule” we’re all supposed to follow. It happened because his posts always over-deliver, and because they do, they spread like wildfire and his subscribership grows as a result.

When I’ve taken the time to write KILLER posts (and I mean posts that take days of research and just really have a ton of great content in it), I’ve seen all of my numbers grow as a result, including viral numbers like retweets and likes, which help expand my brand to people I’ve never reached before.

7. Create Raving Fans

It takes time, but if you continue to provide good content on your blog and build a nice community behind it, after a while you’ll eventually see that you and your blog may accumulate a number of “raving fans”. I like to think I have a few here on SPI, and I love each and everyone one of them to death.

Ravings fans should be treated like royalty, and you should go out of your way to make them happy. Do favors for them, or just spend time talking to them on Facebook or through email.

Why?

Because they are the ones who spread the word about you and your site. Some raving fans are more enthusiastic than others, but each one plays an important role in expanding your brand and influencing people who you alone cannot.

Let me say that again: your raving fans will influence people who you alone cannot.

This is why each and everyday I notice a huge influx of traffic from a few random websites that I’ve never been to before. My name and a link to my site show up on forums and blogs around the world not because of me, but because of my raving fans and their recommendations.

Thank you – you know who you are.

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

7 Ways to Be Everywhere – Building a Brand Online

My Monthly Report – June 2010

Pat — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:53:36 +0000

It’s the beginning of a new month, which means it’s time for a new monthly income report! Every month, I write out a detailed report showing exactly where my online earnings come from. Although I share all of my income down to the penny, it’s not really about the numbers – it’s more about what I’ve been up to that may have had an impact on my earnings and sharing that with you so you can learn from both my successes, and my failures.

Let’s get to it…

Important Going-Ons in June

Per usual, I’ve been doing a lot of work lately to, as I like to say, “expand my passive income portfolio”.

What I mean by that is I have a number of virtually automatic income streams working for me already, and because they are passive I can use my free time to create new avenues of income. As you’ll see in the income breakdown later in this post, some of the things I do online earn a lot, while other things I do earn only a little. Either way, they are all a part of my diversified passive income portfolio.

iPhone Apps

In May of 2010, the iPhone app company that I co-founded, LOLer Apps (itunes link), released a total of 6 new applications, yielding the highest amount of earnings we’ve ever had in a single month – almost $10k.

In June of 2010, we only managed to get 2 new applications approved. Others that we had planned to go live were rejected by Apple.

One rejected app in particular, named Sparkler – Multicolored Fireworks, we were quite upset about. The app is simple: press a button and it shows a sparkler burning on the screen, rotating between the colors red, white and blue. (A sparkler, for those of you who don’t know, is a type hand-held firework that burns slowly while emitting colored flames and sparks.)

We wanted this approved by mid-June so we could push a marketing effort for the 4th of July celebration here in the United States. Well – when we submitted the app to Apple, it was rejected one week later because:

“…we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.”

Hmm.

To us, this was a surprise. Why? Because there are thousands of applications that have the same (if not less) user functionality than ours.

So, we added a little bit more to the application, resubmitted it, and it was rejected once again. At this point, if we resubmitted it wouldn’t make the July 4th deadline, so we just dumped the project.

Now, we have several new applications on deck for July. Let’s hope these 5 or 6 get approved [crosses fingers while knocking on wood and rubbing a rabbit's foot].

Green Exam Academy

I’ve been working with my website design team from Blazer Six on a new campaign to help drive more sales to my study guides and practice exams on greenexamacademy.com.

Based on a suggestion from my totally awesome weekly mastermind group, I’ll be implementing a FREE practice test on the website. The practice test will take people through a small number of exam questions that are similar to the real exam, spit out a score, and then recommend my products as solutions to help improve their scores and be ready for the real thing.

If implemented correctly, I am absolutely positive that this will increase sales. Because potential customers are taking a practice exam on my site, they will be in the perfect mindset to think about improving their knowledge of the material immediately after they get their test results, and probably be more inclined to make a purchase.

Furthermore, because the exam is free and actually useful (it won’t just tell people what they got right or wrong, but also explain in detail why), it should drive more traffic as well. I could easily setup an ad campaign for this or spread the word in forums.

We’ll see how it goes, but I’m really excited to finally have some enthusiasm behind my top-earning site once again. It’s been on auto-pilot for so long that I forgot what it felt like to make improvements and expect results. I should always be improving, testing and optimizing. Unfortunately, I haven’t been doing so.

Don’t make that same mistake.

The Smart Passive Income Blog

A lot of good stuff happened for SPI in June.

My first webinar was a success. It wasn’t perfect, but I learned a lot about webinars and I definitely plan on doing more in the future. If you missed it, you can catch the free replay here. The transcript is available now as well.

Secondly, I was very fortunate to be featured in several places around the web:

My Video Interview with Tyrone Shum
Guest Post on Daily Blog Tips: 5 Reasons Why You Should Respond to Every Comment
Guest Post on Struggling Investor: Improving Your Market Conversions with PURLs
An article that was syndicated over hundreds of news sites: Shoestring Living: What is “Passive Income”?

Thirdly, I was really happy about the final series of posts that I wrote for the month of June. My YouTube Tricks for Bloggers 3 part series had a great response, and I plan on creating a small report or eBook that will be free of charge for you later on, much like how eBooks the Smart Way is. Is that something you’d be interested in getting?

Fourthly, I’ve been doing my best to implement some more on-site SEO strategies for this blog, mainly because I’ve been stuck on PR3 for the longest time, and it’s beginning to bother me a little.

Yes – I know. Page rank doesn’t really matter, and I should just focus on my content and what’s important, but it is an indicator that I may not be doing all I can to optimize my blog, which may result in less traffic than possible.

So, with the help of a sweet post about WordPress SEO from my good buddy Glen from Viperchill.com, I’ve made a few changes, and hope to see an increase in rankings in the future.

Niche Sites

This is new for me.

Actually, I’ve done “niche sites” before, but they all died because I didn’t have the passion to continue writing about something I wasn’t that interested in.

However, this time it’s a little different. This time, I’m using a supposedly proven system (yes, it sounds very skeptical already) to create niche sites that run more on auto-pilot. After a few pieces of setup, I could possibly earn an income for a long period of time.

I’m not going to get into detail here today, but the truth is that I’m going into this with an open-mind, and to see if this “system” really works. If it does, awesome. If not, then awesome because then I won’t wonder anymore.

Plus, I’m using Market Samurai in combination with finding these niche sites, so supposedly it could be like shooting fish in a barrel, or “easy as pie.”

I guess we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.

Time for the breakdown.

Income Breakdown

GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:

Ebook Only: $1018.30
Audio Only: $74.90
Ebook + Audio Package: $1078.80
Total: $2172.00
- Last Month: $1,741.54
- Difference: +430.46

eHow Earnings:
- Total: $256.48
  - Last Month: $219.01
  - Difference: +$37.47

Affiliate Earnings:
- Green Exam Academy: $2,460.13
- Bluehost.com: $715.00
- Amazon Associates: $8.04
- Aweber: $70.80
- Internet Business Mastery Academy: $715.35
- iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $505.74
- Market Samurai: $1,616.75
- Total: $6,091.81
  - Last Month: $4,777.86
  - Difference: +1,313.95

iPhone Applications:
- Paid Apps: $2486.00
- Free Apps: $1984.90
- Total: $4,470.90
  - Last Month: $9,598.09
  - Difference: -$5,127.19

Gross Total in June: $12,990.71
- Last Month: $16,336.50
- Difference: -$3,345.79

Although the month is about 3.5k less than in May, it’s still a stellar month of earnings. It’s great to see the list of income streams growing, and although some go up and some go down, having multiple income streams help to keep myself somewhat balanced.

Important Things I Learned in June

If I drew a chart of my iPhone app earnings, we’d see a huge spike in May (almost $10k) and then a huge drop in June (down to about 4.5k, although this is much higher than our average before May). When you see things like this, a huge spike and then a drop off, you have to ask yourself, “why did this happen?”. Figure it out, and you’ll have the recipe for turning that spike into a plateau, or better yet turning that spike into a mountain.

In my particular case the spike happened because we submitted more apps in a single month than ever before. We then stopped submitting apps, and we dropped and leveled off, albeit at a higher income level. So, the answer to our problem is to continue submitting apps (or submit better apps that earn at least the same amount of downloads). We plan to do so in July, and we hope to bring the iPhone income back to what it was in May, if not more.

You might say – “well building apps isn’t passive”. True, but that’s why we minimize the time we spend on it by feeding the experts our app ideas, and getting several things done at once.

Lastly, I’d like to talk about Market Samurai, my favorite SEO and Keyword tool. Over the last month, I did a number of things that involved the Market Samurai product, which helped to create this new line of income for me on my balance sheet through the form of an affiliate link.

Unlike what you see from other marketers online, I did not heavily push this product or become an aggressive salesman for it. In fact, I did just the opposite, and yet I was still able to earn a decent amount of income from promoting it. For example:

I used Market Samurai as a supplement to teaching Keyword Research and Search Engine Optimization. The content of the videos, blog post and webinar I did were all about the content. I simply recommended Market Samurai based on my personal experience to help.
I told people that there are actually ways to do everything you can do on Market Samurai for absolutely free, and even offered some tools and suggestions about how to do this.
I told people straight-up that the link I provided was indeed an affiliate link, and that if they tried the free trial and didn’t end up purchasing it, I would totally understand.
I showed people EXACTLY what it does and how to use it.

As one person wrote to me in an email after I literally asked the person why they took my recommendation:

There’s actually a couple of things that sold me:

You said you use this every day.
You recommended it, and I trust you.
You showed us how to use it.
You made it simple and easy to understand.
You made me believe that I needed this product
You didn’t push the product, and even showed us how to get the same info without it.

That was enough for me.

If you want a recipe for non-aggressive affiliate marketing on a blog, the type of affiliate marketing that will help you retain your readers and actually build more trust with them, the type of affiliate marketing that doesn’t make you feel like a weasel, then that’s it right there.

Earn trust by being honest and only recommend because the recommendation will help your audience, not because it will help you.

Audience first, you second, and you will see the rewards.

Here’s to a profitable and safe July for all of us. Cheers!

YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 3

Pat — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:19:55 +0000

This is the final installment of my YouTube marketing tactics series. In part 1, we covered how to approach video marketing, as well as what to include in your recordings for maximum impact. In part 2, we discussed the importance of optimizing the Title, Description and Tags of your video, and I included a few cool tricks to help you “snipe” traffic from other popular videos.

In part 3, we’re going to cover some tips and tricks that you can do with your video after it’s uploaded. Much like with blogging (and iPhone apps), the work should not stop once your content is live. There are a few things you should do before you can just let YouTube and the Internet do it’s thing and drive traffic to your videos and ultimately your blog automatically. Again, it’s about putting in the hard work now, so you can continuously reap the benefits later.

Place the Video on Your Blog

An easy way to increase traffic to your video is to show it to an audience that you already have! In addition, if your post Title matches the title of the video (and tags and urls as well), then you’re giving a nice boost in SEO to both your video and your blog post at the same time.

I used this technique in my keyword research experiment.

When you include a video on a blog post, be sure that you also include a link to the YouTube video as well.

Why?

Because many RSS feed readers will not play the video, but if you have the link in there as well (preferably with keyword anchor text), then you’ll be all good to go.

Blast it Onto Social Media Platforms

This is a given.

If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else on the web that has (targeted & relevant) people following you, then post links to your YouTube video.

Bonus Tip: Instead of just saying: “Check out my new YouTube video…”, why not post a tweet or a wall post that has a good reason for people to click on it to watch, for example:

Whoa! Lots of controversy on my latest video – check it out! (insert link)
I almost didn’t publish this video. You can see why. (insert link)
Doesn’t my hair look awesome in my latest video?! (insert link)
I need your opinion on my latest video. Too much powerpoint. What do you think? (insert link)
This may be the only video you every need to watch about [niche]. (insert link)

You get the idea. Put your copywriting skills to the test, and get more clicks to your video!

Utilize the Video Responses Option

If you haven’t noticed already, underneath most popular YouTube videos there is a section called Video Responses. These are videos that people have submitted as a response to the particular video that is loaded.

Many people strategically place their own videos as responses to popular, highly viewed videos so they can “ride the back” of the traffic of that particular video. It’s another easy way for you to get a lot of exposure on YouTube.

To post a video response to another video:

1. Find a popular, highly viewed video. The more relevant to your response video, the better.

2. Click inside the comment field immediately below the video, and then click on Attacha Video.

3. Here, you can either record a video response using a camera for your computer, or choose a video that you’ve already uploaded to YouTube.

Please understand, however, that your video responses will not post automatically. If they did, there would be spam everywhere. Your video must first be approved by the person who uploaded the original video in order for yours to be shown with it. In many cases, if your video is somewhat related, it will indeed be approved by the owner. If not, no worries – just try it again on another video later.

Annotations

Annotations are severely underutilized in the “blogger gone YouTube” world. I’ll admit that I don’t use them as much as I should either.

If you don’t know what an annotation is, it’s an ugly, small little popup that shows up on top of the video that has some text inside. It reminds me of “Pop-Up Videos” on VH1 from way back in the day.

Here’s how to make them for your uploaded video:

1. Go to your “videos” area to see all of the videos you’ve uploaded.

2. Find the video that you want to create annotations for, and click on Annotations at the bottom.

3. Use the timeline to create as many annotations as you want!

They are ugly, but that’s good.

Why?

Because you can’t miss ‘em – as you can see below:

You can change the shape the the annotation and select from a few different colors too, but what’s most important is what you put in them.

At the beginning and end of your videos, you should have an annotation that asks your viewers to either subscribe to your channel, leave a comment or a rating, or all of the above. You can add more in the middle if you think your video needs it.

Again, this is another simple way to provide a call to action to your viewers that may otherwise not be there.

The Video Thumbnail

The video thumbnail, or poster frame, is the picture that shows up when ever your video is shown around YouTube. The thumbnail itself can have a huge impact on your traffic because an eye-catching picture will get clicks, and a dull one will get lost in the sea of other dull thumbnails.

Fortunately, we can choose our thumbail (yay!). Unfortunately, we only have three choices that we do not really have control over (boo!).

Or do we?

We can actually strategically “place” optimized pictures within our recorded videos at the perfect time for YouTube to capture them as one of our 3 options. There is some math involved though.

Here’s how it works:

X = Video length (in sec.)
Y = X divided by 4 or X/4 (in sec.)

Y is the 1st thumbnail.

2 times Y or 2xY (in sec.) is the 2nd thumbnail (poster frame).
3 times Y or 3xY (in sec.) is the 3rd thumbnail.

For some, this may be too much. To be honest, I don’t strategically place pictures in my videos. But, I do make sure to go into the “edit” section of my YouTube videos to select the most eye-catching option. Which of these three do you think I use for my video?

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed my YouTube series for bloggers (and non-bloggers too!). Thanks for all of your support, and I wish you all the best! Please spread the word if you have the time by retweeting or sharing this article. Thank you!

Cheers!

YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 2

Pat — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:33:53 +0000

In part 1 of this mini series about video marketing on YouTube we discussed two important topics:

Your mindset as you begin to push videos onto YouTube for brand expansion and traffic generation; and
A number of things you can do to your video recording to optimize it.

In part 2 we’re going to cover some tips and tricks for what to do after your video is recorded with the title, description and tags.

Before that, I’d like to answer a couple of quick questions that some of you asked me after the previous post:

1. What’s the Maximum Length of a Video That You Can Upload to YouTube?

The answer is 10 minutes flat. People who got in early on YouTube before this 10 minute rule started are “grandfathered” the ability to upload longer videos, but that was within the first year only. If you search on the web, you can actually find people selling their old grandfathered accounts for a lot of cash because many people would love to have the ability to upload videos longer than 10 minutes in length. How legal is this?I can’t answer that, and I advise that you to use your best judgment.

That being said, 10 minutes or less is plenty of time to create a video with great content that can send masses of people to your site and expand your brand.

2. What Do I Do if I Have a Recording That’s Longer Than 10 Minutes?

You can either do your best to edit it so that is under 10 minutes, OR you can break it into two equal parts – and use either the description of the videos, annotations, or a video response to connect the two. More on this later in the series.

3. Is There an Easy Way to Check Video Statistics on YouTube?

Yes – indeed! YouTube has something called “Insight” that tells us a load of information about each of our videos, including incoming traffic, where they came from, and even what parts of our videos people are more interesting to the viewers – plus a lot more.

One thing I do is I added an “Insight Module” to my homepage of YouTube, so that after I sign in, I can immediately see what kind of traffic I’m receiving, and what my most popular videos are. In order to create an “Insight Module”, simply sign into your YouTube account, and click on the “Add/Remove Modules” button, and then select “Insight Chart”.

Okay – now back to our regularly scheduled program…

Today, we’re going to be talking about the Title, Description and Tags of your videos. All three are very important, yet are often overlooked as people get excited to see their videos finally live on YouTube.

The Title of Your Video

Treat the title of your video the same way that you would treat the title of any blog posts that you write. In other words, make sure they:

Contain targeted keywords that relate to your video; and
Are not generic – meaning they have some thought behind it that may catch people’s attention.

Having a keyword rich title is important because remember, YouTube is a search engine! And guess what…they are owned by Google (gasp!). Plus, many YouTube videos are picked up in Google Searches, so there’s a potential to get traffic not only from YouTube search, but Google search as well.

YouTube does not crawl through your video and listen to each and every word that you say to see what is the most relevant for a certain keyword. That would be crazy. So, what you say in your video doesn’t directly effect the search engine results, but it definitely matters – indirectly. Much of the rankings are based on views, competition, tags, related videos, and comments. I don’t know the exact algorithm (of course), but viewer action weighs in big time. That’s why it’s really important to include calls to action within your video to get more subscribers, and more comments as well, if possible.

COOL TRICK: You probably know some of the primary keywords you’d like to use in your videos before you even start. Type in those keywords into the YouTube Search field and see what comes up. You’ll get a quick glance at which videos are the most popular and get the most traffic. Here’s the tip: some similar titled videos will show up next to other videos in the “related videos ” area on the right. If your video shows up there, there is always a potential for people to click over and check out your video too. More exposure = more traffic.

The Description

The description is where you tell people what your video is about. Sounds simple enough, however there’s one all-important tip that I recommend you do:

Always start the description with the URL of your blog (or whatever website you’re promoting). As you can see in the screenshot above for my video on How to Make a Facebook Landing Page, the first thing that you see in my description below the actual video (see blue arrow) is my website address. Although it’s cut off a bit, it is still clickable, and I get traffic from these links every day. If you include a link in the middle or the bottom of your description, people will have to expand the window below to see it, which most people never do.

Again, start with your link and it will always be there for people to click on.

It’s also important to include a real description (after your link) that contain some relevant keywords to help the YouTube (and Google) search engines determine what your video is about.

Oh, and from what I understand, as of today, html does not work inside the description – so there’s no need to try and optimize with anchor text. Plus, the links from YouTube to your site are NoFollow anyways, which means they don’t really count in Google’s eye as a backlink. It’s still important to include a link though, to drive traffic from your video to your site.

Up Next

I hope you enjoyed these tips and tricks for the title, description and tag of your YouTube video. In part 3, we’ll cover what you can do after your video is uploaded and live on YouTube to maximize traffic to your videos and your own site.

Cheers!

YouTube Tips and Tricks For Bloggers – Part 1

Pat — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:58:04 +0000

YouTube.

It’s been around for over 5 years, yet for some reason most bloggers still haven’t explored the video sharing platform where millions of people around the world are watching over 2 billion videos a day.

I took the SPI brand onto YouTube on September 26th, 2009 for the same reason I do everything else I report on this blog – to see if it’s a worth while place to invest my time.

276 days later, I can truthfully say that I’m more than pleased with the results of my experiment with YouTube to expand the SPI brand and audience base. Here are some quick numbers from my account as of today:

15 Uploaded Videos
59,582 Total Views
720 Subscribers

That’s an average of about 1 new video every 2 to 3 weeks. Considering that the average length of my videos is about 6 minutes in length, you can get a feel for just how much time I’ve really dedicated to this “experiment” – 6 minutes every 3 weeks.

Not a huge amount of time invested, but you can see that I’ve earned a considerable number of views and a good amount of subscribers as a result, which has ultimately increased traffic to my blog as well as helped to earn a few affiliate sales here and there. Without much additional effort, my daily viewership continues to grow as you can see below:

By no means would I call myself a YouTube expert, but I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way that may help you expand your brand, increase your views and grab more subscribers if you do decide to expand onto YouTube, if you’re not on the platform already.

Mindset Stuff

1. Provide Good Content

This is not really a trick, and I’m sure it’s something you heard before, but I’m reiterating it here because it’s still the most important thing to understand before anything else. Much like with your blog or online business, if you don’t provide good content, then everything else you do doesn’t really matter.

2. Video Quality Does Matter

If you upload a blurry, crappy and laggy video, people won’t stick around to watch it – even if the content is good. Your video doesn’t have to be in High-Def or an Emmy Award Winning production, but it does have to be watchable. Use your common sense here.

I try to upload all of my videos in HD (1280 x 720 resolution), because it looks really good on the YouTube and any embedded players.

3. Stand Out From the Crowd

There are a TON of videos on every subject imaginable, so in order to get more views and get people’s attention, you’re going to have to do something different than the “other guys”. What it is really depends on what niche you’re in and what kinds of videos other people have uploaded, but just do your best to find something that’s uniquely “yours”.

For example, a lot of my videos comprise of my “electronic white board”. Many people enjoy watching these videos because no one else uses this technique, and it makes learning about internet business and blogging fun.

4. What’s the Worst That Can Happen?

Many bloggers don’t use YouTube because of the fact that it is video, and video means they’ll have to be on screen, or at least talking over some slides or a presentation.

Well, you can’t hide behind your blog forever if you want to get anywhere, and YouTube is the perfect place to “practice” stepping out of your comfort zone and publishing more than just typed text.

I was scared too, at first, but then I thought to myself, “What’s the Worst That Can Happen?”

Really, what is the worst that can happen? So you upload a video and it get’s no views. So what? You learned from your experience, and you can only do better from there. Plus, I doubt you’ll ever get zero views if you follow the tips later in this post/series.

Within Your Videos

5. Place a Watermark of your Blog’s URL on the Video.

A watermark throughout most or all of your video will give people an easy way to know exactly where this content is coming from, and where they can go to get more.

More importantly, if anyone chooses to embed the video on their own website, their audience will know it originates from you and your blog, which they can see the url for right in front of their faces – driving traffic and expanding your brand at the same time. The description of the video on YouTube doesn’t show up when embedded onto another site, so a watermark will at least include your url.

6. Begin with a Quick Overview

Your job as a publisher of a video on YouTube is to get people to watch your videos, and to continue watching your videos all the way through. The best and easiest way to do this is to simply begin your video with an overview of what you’re going to cover and approximately how long it will take.

Even though there’s a video title, a description and a timeline, just saying what your video is about will engage your viewers and increase the chances of them sticking around, especially if you can get them excited about what you’re about to talk about.

7. Don’t Forget Your Calls to Action

Many people shoot fantastic videos, but fail to leave out any calls to action. If you want the highest impact from your videos, you have to include at least one call to action at the end of your video, preferably telling them to visit your website. I’ve often included more than one, sometimes telling them to say hi to me on Twitter or on my Facebook Page as well.

Just think – if a viewer makes it to the end of your video, they’re going to be in the best state of mind to follow any calls to actions that you have to say.

8. Screen Sharing is Awesome

There’s a huge difference between just telling someone how something works (or even listing out the step-by-step instructions) and actually showing people exactly how to do it.

If you have an opportunity to teach your audience something by showing them how it works on your computer, do it. Screen recording and sharing is a fantastic way to engage your audience, as well as easily give them the steps needed to do whatever it is you want them to do.

You can use software such as Camtasia Studios (for PC) or Camtasia for Mac to get the job done quite nicely. There are cheaper options out there, such as Jing, Screencast or Screenflow (for Mac) that again make it easy to record your screen and then quickly upload to YouTube.

Most of my videos are done on Camtasia for Mac. It can record my screen easily in the 1280 x 720 HD format that I like, and also my face on my iMac camera at the same time. After a little bit of editing, I simply click share -> YouTube, and it’s up in no time.

Also, if you have the chance, utilize some of the cool features that come with the software to enhance the look of your video. Using things like fade in and fade out, zoom in and zoom out, or even adding titles and little notes to your video, which you can see me utilize on this YouTube video. (see the 40 sec. mark)

Again, not so many people do this, so it’s another way to make your videos stand out of the crowd.

9. Intro / Outro Screen and Music?

Putting intro or outro screen and music is debatable, and really depends on your style and what you like to do. If you already have a brand that has a recognizable tune (i.e. a podcast with intro music), then you may very well want to bring that music over to your YouTube videos for continuity.

I had intro music in my first few videos, along with a title screen for each, but I stopped doing that because they didn’t really serve any purpose. They just took up precious time (YouTube’s max video length is only 10 minutes), and for all I know hundreds of people who watched those videos exited right away because they didn’t like the music, even before they get to the content of the video.

In my later videos, I skipped the intro music entirely and went straight to an overview of what’s to come. If they still leave after that, then at least they are leaving for the right reasons.

It seems to be working out much better, and it’s less editing for me to do as well.

Up Next

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll be going over some tricks you can do with your video title, description and tags to get more YouTube search engine traffic. Also, I’ll be going over how to improve your channel as well.

Cheers!

10 Things I Learned From My First Webinar

Pat — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:58:06 +0000

This past Wednesday, I held my very first webinar. So far, the feedback has been excellent and apparently it was good enough that it taught both beginners and advanced some new things about keyword research and search engine optimization. A huge thank you to those of you who attended, and especially those of you who took extra time to email or message me with your appreciation.

A replay of the webinar will be available very shortly for those of you who missed it or who want to watch it again. Please make sure to follow me on Twitter, or join me on my Facebook Page (which just surpassed 2000 fans!) for a link when that becomes available. It was supposed to be available today, but there were some technical problems which I’ll talk in more detail about below.

Update: The Webinar Replay is now available!

It was definitely a fantastic learning experience. I was used to shooting videos and screencasts for YouTube, so it wasn’t a total “OMG what am I doing” type of thing, but the fact that there are people watching you LIVE makes it so much more interesting, and honestly a lot more fun too.

If you have an audience base (or even if you don’t, and you want to expand your audience base), I definitely recommend holding a webinar. I can imagine it being somewhat scary, especially for those of you who are shy and nameless behind your blogs and websites, but it’s like what Tim Ferriss preaches in the 4-Hour Work Week: you have to learn how to put yourself in uncomfortable situations if you want to get anywhere with your business, and in life. Or, as I like to say it – take bold actions.

Below are 10 things that I learned from my first webinar experience that you can use to be ahead of the game when you do your own.

1. GoToWebinar is Awesome

I did a lot of research on different webinar hosting services, and GoToWebinar (a branch of GoToMeeting.com) has everything you need. What’s nice is that they have a 30 day Free trial, so for your first one you can do absolutely free (or as many as you can do during the 30 day trial). That being said, you can only have a maximum of 100 attendees (not registrants) per webinar as long as you are in the free trial.

2. GoToWebinar isn’t as Awesome for MAC Users

As good as GoToWebinar was for the webinar hosting experience, it did lack 2 important features for me as a MAC user:

The ability to practice your webinar before it goes live. And by practice, I mean actually using the webinar hosting interface that you’d see when doing it live; and
The ability to record your webinar.

I did perform a couple of practice runs before the webinar went live (going through the content and what I was going to share on my screen), but I had no idea what the GoToWebinar interface would look like or how it would feel to host a webinar until it actually happened. Fortunately, it wasn’t too complicated to figure things out once it finally started.

Not having the ability to record the webinar sucked. I wanted to record it, obviously, so I could have it for a replay to show those of you who couldn’t catch it live, so I tried to be slick and use Camtasia for Mac to record the screen on my side.

Of course – it didn’t work. Camtasia only recorded the first 15 minutes and then nothing else. I was missing an entire hour of content!

So the following day, I re-recorded the entire webinar again as if it were live because I realize how important it was to have a replay to show. THAT is exactly why the replay is delayed a little bit, and I apologize for that.

3. Not All Registered Participants Will Actually Participate

I had about 160 people signed up for the webinar, but less than half actually showed up (70 total). Apparently, this is always the case with webinars, and you can’t really expect everyone to show up.

There are things you can do, however, to maximize the attendance of your webinars:

Make sure you use the GoToWebinar email settings to send notifications before the webinar starts to remind people that it’s coming up in a week, a day, in a few hours, etc. Some people will just simply forget and these emails will make sure that doesn’t happen.
In your emails, make sure to tell people to arrive early because space is limited. This will put a little extra reminder in their heads that will make sure that they not only remember when the webinar is, but also that they should show up early.
Make sure you are clear on when the webinar is. Always tell people the time zone and the time in other time zones as well, so there is no confusion as to when it starts.
Don’t publicize beforehand that there will be a replay. If it’s widely known that there’s a replay, then people won’t show up. Along the same lines, if you do announce there is a replay, you can tell people that there will be special content just for the live viewing that will not be available in the replay.

4. Make Sure Your Audio Is Working Correctly

During my live webinar, my volume was very low for the first 15 minutes of the session. Luckily, I had the right mind to check the chat room comments and saw that many people were commenting that my volume was low. I turned it up, and then it was better.

I guess this is the one good thing about having to re-record my webinar, because I could make sure the sound was perfect the second time around, but honestly that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Ask your audience in the beginning, or hold a practice session (if you’re on a PC) with a friend and have that person tell you if the volume is adjusted correctly.

5. Time Flies Like Crazy

I initially expected to have 45 minutes of content and 15 minutes for questions on the tail end of my webinar. Well – after an hour I hadn’t even finished my content, so I had to extend the webinar a few extra minutes.

I mentioned this in the video, but time really does fly by. I was actually very surprised and it made me re-think the length of the podcast episodes that I’ll be doing in the future.

If you can, run through your content beforehand to get an estimate of the time that is needed to get through it. I only skimmed through my practice runs and notecards, so my estimated time was a little off.

6. If You Get Nervous, Present To a Friend

I’ll admit that I was a little nervous at first. It’s human nature to feel that way when presenting to a group of people, no matter if it’s online or offline.

What made me feel comfortable was actually seeing a comment from a buddy of mine during the webinar, and then pretending to present to only him. After that, I got into a groove and felt really comfortable with what I was doing. I didn’t worry about messing up, and because of that, I didn’t mess up or fumble quite as much.

It’s easier to use this technique when hosting a webinar, because you can’t actually see an entire group of people in front of you. So, if you get nervous, present like you presenting to a friend, and you’ll be all good.

7. If You Can, Prepare a PDF Printout Ahead of Time

I did not do this, but after the webinar I was reading on tips to help improve my skills, and came upon this one here which I wanted to share with you.

Before the webinar begins, prepare a PDF file that is maybe just an outline of what you’re going to be talking about. It could just be a one-page outline itself, or a copy of some of the slides you’re going to show.

The PDF does a couple of cool things:

If you email it out before hand, people will print it out and have a tangible, physical reminder of when your webinar is. Obviously, you’ll want to include the name of your webinar, the time and date on the PDF.
During the webinar, people will pay more attention to what you have to say, as they follow along the outline or slides as you present. They can take notes, and will overall have a better learning experience as a result.

For my next webinar, I plan on having a PDF printout – for sure.

8. Get Your Audience Involved

Again, this is another tip I learned AFTER my webinar.

The trick is to get your audience involved, so that they’ll be more attentive and have a better learning experience too.

One way to do this is to simply ask questions and wait for people’s answers. Many people are happy to type in responses in the chat box in GoToWebinar. Read them off, and people get excited when they hear their answers read off live on the webinar.

Also, GoToWebinar has a polling feature. During the webinar, you can have people answer polls, which can be a cool way to present certain types of information to the audience as a whole, while getting them to participate and be a part of the data too.

9. Expect the Unexpected

A lot of my webinar consisted of going into the Market Samurai software and demonstrating some of what it can do related to Keyword Research and SEO. When doing my practice runs, the software ran smoothly, and all inquiries for keyword information happened at lightning speed.

Well of course, during the webinar, things were super slow! I mean like, a snail climbing a 60 degree incline with the wind blowing in it’s face kind of slow.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t THAT slow, but it seemed like it, especially with 60-70 people watching it live. This was unexpected, and I later found out that the reason this happened was because just being on the webinar itself was eating up bandwith and slowing everything else down.

That being said, although this wasn’t planned for, I wasn’t phased. I knew things like this happen all of the time, and you can’t get phased (especially live on a Webinar).Y ou just have to roll with the punches.

So, during the loading times, I’d take the opportunity to give people information about what was happening and what was coming up. Also, I filled people in on some of the questions they had, and read some of the comments in the chat as well.

Expect the unexpected.

10. Just Do It, and Have Fun!

If you’re thinking about doing a webinar, don’t think anymore – just do it. Go to GoToWebinar, get your free trial and get people on your first webinar. Expand your brand, build authority and show yourself as an expert in whatever niche you’re in. Like I mentioned earlier, progress doesn’t happen until bold actions are taken, so just do it.

And lastly, have fun with it! Don’t stress yourself out over the upcoming webinar that you have planned. Think of it as an opportunity to share your knowledge with others, and not as something that you just have to get over with.

I wish you the best of luck on your upcoming webinars. Please send me a registration link, and I’ll do my best to make it. More webinars to come from me, because practice makes perfect.

Again, be sure to follow me on Twitter or Facebook for the link for the replay when it finally goes live, or just to say hello too.

Thanks again for all of your support, and have a wonderful weekend! Cheers!

Are You Optimizing Your 404 Page? Yes, Your 404 Page.

Pat — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:25:15 +0000

When you visit a non-existent URL on a website, you’ll often come face to face with an error similar to the following:

“Oops! We couldn’t find what you were looking for.”

or…

“Page not found.”

What you’re actually seeing when you come across this error is the “404 Page”, which is a page that your browser goes to when the page you were looking for was – well – not found.

Common reasons for landing on a 404 page include:

A misplaced letter or misspelled word in the URL when typing manually into the browser’s address bar.
A misplaced letter or misspelled word in an existing link.
The link or URL is typed correctly, but the page just no longer exists (aka. broken link)
A redirection error.

Whatever the path may be, when people land on your 404 Page they will most likely exit your site.

It’s sad, but true. People are spoiled, especially when it comes to searching and surfing online, so when they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for – it’s on to the next thing like there’s no tomorrow.

However, there are things we can do as website owners, bloggers and internet entrepreneurs to decrease the chances of people leaving our sites when they do reach a 404 Page, which I’ll outline for you below.

How to Optimize Your 404 Page

Before anything, you should take all the necessary precautions to make sure your links are all typed in correctly and that you don’t have any broken links on your site. You can use a tool like Google Webmaster Tools to do help. Even after that, people can still land on your 404 page by mistyping a URL or clicking on a misspelled link from a site other than your own.

On your 404 Page Template itself, there are a number of things you can do:

Include friendly text that clearly mentions that the page they were looking for cannot be found, but that you’re also willing to help them find what they were looking for. Something other than “Page not Found” will really make a difference and get people to engage with you on your page, even though it wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. Then, you can keep them on your site reading content using the stuff below.
Include a search function for the content on your site. It’s always nice to give people an option to search, especially if they were looking for something specific and don’t know where else to go.
Insert your most popular posts. These posts are the most popular for a reason, so they’ll give you the best chance of keeping people on your site.
Insert your most recent posts.
Include the categories or tags of your blog.
Include an opt-in form for a newsletter.
Include an Advertisement or Promotional item – I wouldn’t recommend this, but it is an option. This might work because if the visitor was planning on leaving anyways (because they couldn’t find what they were looking for), you can try to get them to click on an ad or go somewhere else that may help you earn a little bit of cash. I want to keep readers on my site, so this technique is not for me, but I just wanted to throw it out there for you.

Also, it’s important to make sure you design your 404 page to have a similar style and structure as the rest of your website, so visitors won’t feel like they’ve been kicked off of your site.

Lastly, if you’re slick, you can include a form on your 404 page to report broken links to you.

How Do You Design an Optimized 404 Page?

The easiest and most hassle-free way to optimize your 404 Page would be to outsource it to your web designer, or find someone on Elance or Odesk to do it for you. Simply tell them what you want on the page, and boom – done in less than an hour, if they know what they’re doing.

But, since I know a lot of your are curious or just don’t want to deal with outsourcing, I’m happy to share with you exactly what the code on my own 404 Page template looks like.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, every theme (I believe) has a 404 Template that you can edit, which can be viewed in the Appearance > Editor area, and then looking under Templates on the right hand side:

Typically, it will have code that looks something like this:

This is your plain jane 404 code and it definitely needs an update.

Instead of pasting my own, I’ve attached it here in a text file (in rich text format) so you can download it and use it as you wish. Note that it may or may not work perfectly with yours, because you may have different plugins installed or a different version of WordPress which may affect the code somehow, but whatever you do, if you plan to make changes yourself, please save what you had in a separate text file just in case.

If you want to see my 404 Page live, just add some random text to the end of this post’s url in your browser and press enter.

I won’t mention any specific sites, but I went ahead and tried adding random text onto the ends of other popular sites’ urls, and was surprised to see that not all of the top bloggers and top websites that I visit actually implement this strategy. Many are still using the plain ol’ 404 Page template.

I hope you found this “not-so-common” tip useful! As always, thank you for your support.

If this is your first time visiting this blog, please subscribe to my RSS Feed. Cheers!

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

Are You Optimizing Your 404 Page? Yes, Your 404 Page.

The Blog Post Checklist: After You Publish Your Post

Pat — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:40:26 +0000

Last month, I read a great blog post on Daniel Scocco’s Daily Blog Tips entitled, The Blog Post Checklist: Use Before Hitting Publish. In it, he lists 13 different things you should do with each and every one of your blog posts before you take the article live. It’s a very thorough and well-written piece of content that I suggest you read if you haven’t already.

There are a lot of other resources on the web about what you should do before you publish your post, but there isn’t that much information about what to do after – at least not in an easy to read checklist format that you can use, until today.

Why is this important?

Because to me, 50% of a blog’s success comes from the actual posts on the blog itself. The other 50% comes from what happens after that content is published.

Unfortunately, many bloggers tend to work hardcore only on the first 50% (publish and done) and therefore only see 50% of their potential results. Growing a successful blog takes work, and the work doesn’t end with the content on your site. Follow through with your posts and you’ll see better results in less time.

Below, you’ll find a description of each check, but you can download a PDF version that you can print out if you’d like.

Immediately After Publishing

1. Did I read my published article and check for spelling & grammar errors?

Although we should check for spelling and grammatical errors before we publish our posts, we should also do it after as well. Seeing it published and live will make you more aware of the details and you may find some mistakes that you may have missed while proofreading.

If you do find errors, don’t worry. Just go back, edit and update.

2. Did I read my published article and check for formatting or spacing errors?

Luckily, WordPress gives us the ability to preview our posts before they go live, however, Murphy’s law often likes to make it’s way to our blog posts and screw up how things should look, even when we’ve done our best to make sure everything is perfect before we publish.

Our graphics aren’t aligned, line breaks aren’t where they should b, or some piece of code in your post made your entire blog lok screwy. Whatever the case, now is the time to fix it.

Thanks Murphy.

3. Did I tweet about my blog post?

You should definitely be tweeting about your published post to your followers.

Make sure you shorten the url to your post using a site like bit.ly, so you can keep track of the clicks to your article as well. Or, you can tweet using a third party software such as Tweetdeck to easily shorten the lengths for you, and keep track of who is retweeting your articles.

What you say in your 140 character limit really does matter. It’s your “ad copy” for your blog post, and the better copy you write, the more traffic and buzz you’re receive

Choose your characters wisely.

4. Did I share my blog post on Facebook?

If you don’t know why Facebook is so important for bloggers, then I suggest recommend demand that you read The Blogger’s Guide to Facebook.

Like Twitter, Facebook can be a major source of traffic for your blog. In fact, people are on Facebook more than any other site in the world, so you’d better take advantage of this by sharing your post and getting it in front of their eyes.

You might be wondering if it would be easier to use an automatic application or tool on Facebook that detects your new blog posts and pastes them onto your Facebook Page’s wall for you. Although this is easier, I’d recommend posting about each new blog post manually and separately. It will seem more personal, and you can add in your “ad copy” along with the link to optimize your click-through rates.

5. Did I share my blog post on all other social media platforms that I joined?

Twitter and Facebook aren’t the only social media platforms out there. If you’re a part of any other networks, make the most of them and share your post.

Tip: You may be able to use a site like ping.fm to easily do this across all social media platforms for you, in one shot.

6. Did I social bookmark my blog post?

Social bookmarking sites offer a fantastic way to drive traffic and get backlinks to your site too.

I would be cautious about bookmarking my own posts on the major bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious, since they crack down on self promoting bookmarks.

Other sites, however, are great for driving traffic and building authority for your post in the search engines. You can use the free tool at SocialMarker to easily bookmark your site across a number of social bookmarking websites.

Soon After Publishing

7. Have I responded to comments made on my post?

One of the best things you can do is come back to your post some time later and respond to the comments that other people have left. They took the time to leave you a comment, and the least you can do is spend a little bit of time to answer them back, especially if they have a question and are looking for answers.

This really helps with credibility and building trust with your readers. Also, it encourages more discussion because people are more likely to comment knowing that they are actually being read.

8. Have I thanked people on Twitter for Re-Tweeting my blog post?

If you tweeted your blog post (see #3), then chances are you will have a few people who re-tweet your tweet to their own followers. Take a moment to thank some of these people, because re-tweeting is totally voluntary and can lead to massive amounts of traffic. If you thank them, they will be more likely to re-tweet your tweets in the future.

9. Have I commented on a commenter’s blog post?

I’ve never shared this with anyone before, but I encourage you to do this too if you aren’t already.

On each of my blog posts, I’ll single out one commenter and click over to their own website. If the site is not a blog, then I look for another commenter’s site until I do land on a blog.

Then, I look for an interesting article, read it, and make sure to leave a comment.

Why do I do this?

It forces me to learn new things from other people.
It disciplines me to practice the “old art” of blog commenting, which can sometimes help with backlinking.
Many top bloggers seemed to have lost the motivation to leave comments on other blogs. So, when I do it myself, it really helps me stand out of the crowd and be even more personable than some of the more successful bloggers out there.
It slowly builds even more trust with my readers.

I try to pick out blogs from new commenters and bloggers, because you never know which of the newbies will end up going big someday. Maybe when they get big, they’ll remember my small gesture and hook it up in the future somehow.

Later After Publishing

10. If my post contained audio or video, have I begun getting a transcript made for it?

If you’ve got audio or video in your post, then you definitely need a transcript. If you’re good, then you’ll already have this completed before you publish your post, so you can insert it into the body of your content for people to read or download immediately after it goes live.

But, sometimes transcripts take time, so now it is good time to get started on it.

You can write it yourself, but I would suggest hiring a virtual assistant to do it for you. You’ll save a lot of time.

You can then publish this in a separate post (which is great for SEO purposes), or simply update your existing post and place the text or a download link to a PDF in it.

11. Have I re-written / summarized my post for article marketing distribution?

Many bloggers like to repurpose their content and syndicate it onto article marketing directories.

Never copy/paste your blog post word for word for article marketing. You should always re-write your content, and you can even put a little spin on it to give it a fresh look, while not having to spend so much time writing a totally brand new article from scratch.

You should also always include a link to your blog post from your article to optimize your search engine rankings.

Be sure to read the terms and conditions of each of the article directories you choose to write on for where links are allowed to be put in the articles.

For Your Reference: Some of the top article marketing directories include: EzineArticles, GoArticles, Buzzle and ArticleDashboard, just to name a few.

12. Have I checked the stats on my page including traffic, click-throughs and sources?

After some time, it’s important to check the statistics of your post. Based on what you find, you can act accordingly.

For example, if you find that your post is bringing in more traffic than normal, you can find out why and go to the source to see what’s going on. There may be more opportunities to network with people or get even more traffic if you find out where it’s coming from.

Also, if you placed affiliate links in your blog post, you can check to see how they are converting. If you’re getting 100 clicks to a product a day, but no sales, then you may want to reinsert a different offer, or try a different landing page.

Have I Missed Anything? What would you like to add to this list?

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

The Blog Post Checklist: After You Publish Your Post

How One Little Minute Can Increase Your Email Open Rate

Pat — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:36:19 +0000

Have you ever had one of those moments when you thought to yourself, “It can’t be that easy…can it?”

Well, that’s what I thought after I learned this technique to increase the open rates of broadcast emails. Keep reading, and you just might think the same thing.

For those of you who don’t know, an “open rate” is the ratio of emails opened by the number of emails sent. Sadly (but truthfully), not everyone who you send an email to will open it. In fact, some say that an open rate of only 50% is actually quite high, but it all really depends on a number of factors, including:

The size of your list. Usually, the bigger the list, the smaller the open rate.
The quality of subscribers to your list.
The copy of your subject line. It’s wicked important to have an enticing and eye-catching subject line to grab your subscriber’s attention.

No matter what your initial open rate is, there is one thing you can do that will immediately increase your open rate, and it only takes a minute:

Re-send the email to everyone who did not open it.

Think about it – sometimes people accidentally overlook certain emails in their inbox, or they may plan to open an email but simply forget. Resending your email to these people almost guarantees an increased open rate.

Of course, you do run the slight risk of a spam complaint.

As mentioned on many email service websites: “[Company] does not recommend that you resend the same email to contacts who didn’t open it the first time. Resending an email may result in a spam complaint against you as the contact may see multiple copies of the same email in their account.”

There are a few things you can do in your re-send, however, that will decrease spam complaints:

Wait a Good Number of Days Before You Re-Send. I’d say 4 days minimum, just to be safe. That way, it gives people who receive the initial email time to open it before receiving a duplicate email from you. Plus, after 4 days, those who do not open it may truly have missed or forgotten about your initial send.
Change the Subject Line of the Re-Send email. By doing this, your subscribers cannot simply look at their inbox and see two of the exact same emails. They won’t know the body is the same, because, well, they didn’t open it the first time.
Be Honest and Mention the Re-Send. You can change the subject line and/or text within the email itself to mention that you are indeed resending this email. With copy such as, “In case you missed it the first time”, or “I had to make sure you read this because…”, you’ll decrease your chances of a spam complaint. I wouldn’t blatantly mention that you could tell they didn’t open your first email, because that may creep people out, especially those who aren’t tech savvy who may think you’re spying or up to some kind of voodoo.

It’s up to you whether or not you feel comfortable with this technique. I’ve used it several times in the past (not on the SPI newsletter, but on another newsletter that I manage), and it works every single time, sometimes increasing my open-rate 10-15% more. With a list of over 5000 subscribers, I have yet to hear any complaints.

Resending a Broadcast Email

I will be walking you through how to quickly resend an with Aweber, although I’m sure there are ways to do it on other email platforms as well.

1. Sign in and click on “Subscribers”

2. This will take you to the search subscribers area. In the “Select Field” drop down menu, select “Message Not Opened”

3. Click on the field on the immediate right and select he exact message that you want to resend.

4. Click on “Search”.

5. You will then see a segment of people who did not open the selected message. Name the segment and save it so you can recall it in the next step.

6. Now – copy/paste your original broadcast into a new one. Under the “send to segment” option, use the drop down menu to select the segment that you named in the previous step, which is again those people who did not open this email originally. This is the step where you can update the copy of the subject line and/or body of your email so that you can lessen the chances of spam complaints.

Theoretically, you could re-re-send your email to those who do not open your resend, although I definitely would not recommend it. If for whatever reason a person does not open your email after two tries, I would save your energy and just be happy with those who did open your email, and focus on your next campaign.

Ask The Readers

My question to you is:

Is this a good technique to practice? What are your thoughts about it? I’m interested in hearing from you, because I’ve heard both sides of the story before.

If you don’t have an email list yet, please check out The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Newsletter.

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

How One Little Minute Can Increase Your Email Open Rate

My FREE SEO and Keyword Research Webinar!

Pat — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:50:17 +0000

In Monday’s video post, I highlighted a tool that I use for search engine optimization and keyword research called Market Samurai.

Well, the response to that video was amazing! I received a ton of emails asking for more information about Market Samurai and how to use it. I thought more people had heard of it before, but I guess I was wrong.

Rather than use up several blog posts writing about different SEO and keyword research strategies for this one specific tool (which I know some of you already know how to use, or just aren’t that interested in), I decided that I would love to hold a free webinar for those of you who are interested in learning more.

This webinar wasn’t planned at all, but I’m honestly super stoked about doing this for you. I’m always really excited to teach people stuff, especially with stuff I know will help them succeed online with their blogs and businesses.

The webinar will cover a lot of the different aspects of Market Samuari that I just didn’t have time to go through in my last video. At the same time, I’ll be covering basic SEO and keyword research strategies to go along with it. So, even if you’re not interested in Market Samurai, but interested in learning more about SEO and keyword research, then you may want to come and watch the webinar too.

It will be held on Wednesday, June 23rd at 6:00pm PST (9:00pm EST). It will be 1 hour long, and I’ll do my best to cover as much as possible within that hour.

So, if you’ve picked up your Free Trial or downloaded it already and want to learn more about how Market Samurai can be utilized, or you’re thinking of trying it out but want to watch someone else go through it first, OR if you’re just looking to learn more about SEO and keyword research, please feel free to register for my webinar by clicking the link below:

Click Here to Register for Pat’s Market Samurai Webinar

There are a limited amount of spots available, so please register soon to get a space reserved first come, first serve. If you see that there are no more spots available, I’ll do my best to open up more spaces.

Thanks again for your support, and I hope to see you there!

Oh, and since this is my first webinar, you can be sure I’ll be documenting the entire process so I can share with you later exactly how you can do one too.

If you have any comments, questions, concerns, rants, or you just want to say hi – please feel free to leave a comment below. Cheers!

Click Here to Register for Pat’s Market Samurai Webinar

Mastering Keyword Research and SEO Competition

Pat — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 10:27:50 +0000

Today, I thought I’d mix it up a bit and publish a video post. I really enjoy doing them, especially when I get to use my “electronic whiteboard”, as you’ll see.

In this 10 minute video, I talk about how I do keyword research when it comes to the blog posts that I write, the articles that I submit to article sites, and selecting potential profitable niche sites. I also show you exactly how I do a bit of SEO “espionage” to scope out exactly what I have to do to out rank my competition.

I’ve included a rough transcription below the video for your convenience.

(Watch Mastering Keyword Research and SEO on YouTube)

Market Samurai Free Trial: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/market-samurai

Transcription:

[Intro]

Hey everybody! What’s up?! This is Pat Flynn from the Smart Passive Income Blog.

Today I’m going to be talking about something really important for your blog or online business, and that is keyword research.

Whether you’re doing keywords research on your own using tools like the Google Keyword tool from Adwords, or you’re hiring out someone else to do it for you, you have to understand what the number one goal is behind all keyword research, and that’s to rank on the first page of Google. That’s what really matters.

If you’re on the second page, you might as well be on the 30th page, because everything happens on the first page. It’s super, super, super important that you understand this, because that’s your goal. So, whenever you’re doing keyword research, which I’m going to show you how to do in certain ways in a second, you gotta analyze who is on the first page and know how to beat them.

Now this goes if you’re going to write blog posts, and you’re looking for keywords for your blog posts. Or, if you’re looking to get into new niches, for niche sites. And, if you’re doing articles like on eHow, or Infobarrel, or Squidoo, or Hubpages, or whatever…

You want to be on that first page. That’s where all the money is – that’s where the traffic is. If you’re on a blog, that’s where the subscribers are, your rss readers – everything.

So, if you’re doing any of these things (blog posts, niche sites or articles), you have to remember that you want to rank on the first page of Google.

So how do you do this? How do you properly do keyword research?

First you have to understand searches. How many people are searching and for what keywords.

Secondly, you have to understand everything about your competition. Backlinks, Page Ranks, Indexed pages, Domain Age – everything, so that you know what you have to do to beat them – then rank on the first page, and then be all good!

So, what tools can you use to do proper keyword research?

Well, there’s a number of free ones that you can use – the Google Adwords Keyword tool – that’s one that a lot of people are using.

But, there’s a paid one out there that I use every single day – when I’m writing blog posts, when I’m writing articles, and I’m about to do niche sites as well and it’s been helping me out tremendously to filter out all the crappy keywords out there that have no searches or are too competitive to rank for – and that’s Market Samurai.

[Market Samurai Segment]

[03:40] – In Market Samurai, I type in my primary keyword for smartpassiveincome.com (passive income)

[03:52] – Click on SEO Competition and click on Generate Results to get list of top 10 ranked sites in Google for the keyword. Each of the listings show relevant SEO data, including Domain Age, Page Ranking, Indexed Pages from Google, Page Back Links, Domain Back Links, Back Links from Educational and Government Sites, Directory Listings, Keyword in Title of the Page, Keyword in URL, Keyword in Description, and Keyword in Header.

[04:50] – I compare my site to the site above me, based on the above factors.

[05:30] – Market Samurai tells me that the reason I’m not ranking higher than some of the other sites is because my keyword is not in my header.

[06:15] – Page Rank Analysis – Market Samurai discovers all of the websites that backlink to my competitor’s website and their pageranks. Higher page ranks are worth more.

[06:45] – You can click on those backlinking websites and scope out where your competition is mentioned on those sites. On some sites, you can grab a link back to your own site as well. I go through a couple of examples – the first is a trackbank link, and the second is a comment on a dofollow blog.

[08:40] – You can use this technique to “catch-up” to your competition and eventually rank higher than them.

[09:15] – You can click on the link below to download your free trial of Market Samurai. If you don’t like it, no worries, but it’s a product that I highly, highly recommend that you try.

Market Samurai Free Trial: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/market-samurai

Thanks for your time everyone. Cheers!

What P90X Can Teach Us About Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur

Pat — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:46:10 +0000

Right now, I’m in the middle of one of the most intense home fitness workout programs available – P90X.

P90X is 90 straight days of gut-busting, iron-pumping, fat-trimming, muscle-building, endurance-enhancing, nutrition-mastering, life-changing hell…and so far – I love it.

Today I completed Day 4, which was the yoga disc. I’ve never sweated more in my entire life and I have newly found respect for anyone who does yoga on a regular basis. It’s no wonder why some of the world’s top athletes take yoga classes.

Anyways, this post isn’t about why I’m putting myself through this program, or even about how awesome their marketing campaign is. I will, however, keep you updated on my progress every thirty days. I’ll even include before and after pictures (once I have a less embarrassing after picture to show you in 30 days). Just as a forewarning…I will be shirtless in those photos (gasp!).

I’m doing this partly to keep myself accountable for staying focused and crushing it during each workout, and partly to motivate any of you who may be looking to make similar changes in your life as well.

P90X is about making extreme changes in your body and in your life, and many of the tools and philosophies behind the program are directly related to becoming a successful entrepreneur. I’d like to share these with you today.

Success Takes Time to Achieve

I invested in P90X because it seemed like the most realistic fitness product to me, being a 90 day workout program. That’s three entire months, which is a lot of time to invest, so it makes sense that if I stick with the program I will see drastic results.

The idea here is that it takes time to see results. It takes time to succeed.

As an entrepreneur, the same ideas apply. You won’t get rich overnight, and anything that claims to help you “get rich quick” is a scam in my opinion. True businesses grow from hard work and time.

Unfortunately, many people give up because they’re not seeing traffic, customers or sales right away – much like how some people give up on these workout programs because they don’t have a 6-pack after the first day.

Keeping Track of Numbers is Important

When training with P90X, it’s recommended to write down and record almost everything.

I’ve only been training for 4 days, and already I’ve recorded more numbers than I ever have about my body. I record my weight and body fat percentage each morning. I write down the number of reps and with what weight for each of the exercises I perform. I record everything I eat so that I know all of the nutritional facts about what’s going inside my body.

It may seem like a lot of “extra” work, but it’s vital because it can prove that we’re making progress (which is totally motivating), and also help determine what areas may need improvement.

In the online business world, it’s important to keep track of your stats and numbers for the very same reasons.

If we don’t know where we’re at, how do we know how to get to where we’re going?

It’s a Good Idea to Take Breaks

Although P90X is extreme fitness, they also understand that it’s important give our bodies and muscles a break sometimes. Short breaks are scattered throughout each of the workouts, and there’s even 1 day off from working out entirely each week.

Breaks are important because you don’t want to overwork yourself, and the same holds true for doing business, especially if you’re working from home where there’s always an easy opportunity to just keep working non-stop.

Take breaks. Schedule them if you have to, but do yourself a favor and give your mind a rest every once and a while. You will become much more productive.

Motivation from Others is Key

What I especially like about P90X is that they promote their message boards – a community where other people who are going through the workout can get together. I joined a particular thread a few days before I started, which comprises of people all starting the routine on the exact same day. We’re already over 200+ posts into it, and like I said we’re only on the 4th day of the program. We’re all keeping each other motivated, and in a way holding each other accountable too.

If you’ve read yesterday’s post about mastermind groups, you’d understand just how important it is to stay connected with other people for your business as well.

If you go for a goal all by yourself, it’s going to be that much tougher. That’s why people always say it’s much easier to go to the gym if you have a workout partner, or go on a diet if someone else is doing it too.

The same goes for your business – find your other half, and work together toward that common goal.

“Bring It”

Each day after I pop in a new DVD, before the workout begins the words “BRING IT” appear on the screen.

To me, these words are synonymous to “CRUSH IT“, which is the Title of Gary Vaynerchuk’s book about becoming successful by just going all out and doing what you have to do to achieve your goals.

The main point here is that no matter what you want to accomplish, no matter what it is – whether it’s having a body like Taylor Lautner (for you Twilight fans out there), or starting the next Apple, Inc., in order to do it you have to really want it and give it all you got.

100% 110% – everything you have.

Commitment

There are a number of other connections that could be made between working out and doing business online, but there’s one overall theme that encompasses everything I’ve already mentioned, and that’s commitment.

In order to become successful, you must commit. You must commit not only to what your doing and what your plans are (i.e. sticking with the program), but you must also commit to yourself. That means being confident in what you know, and committed to where you want to be.

Nothing can stop you.

---------------------
As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

What P90X Can Teach Us About Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur

How to Find a Mastermind Group

Pat — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:50:12 +0000

A mastermind group is mandatory to achieve online success.

I wholeheartedly believe this statement because I would not be where I’m at today if it weren’t for the mastermind groups that I’ve been a part of since I began doing business online.

Sure, you can make progress without one, but in order to quickly get to that next level in your business, where things can really begin to accelerate, you need to join a mastermind group.

If you’re serious about wanting to achieve high levels of success, you need to join a mastermind group.

What is a Mastermind Group?

For those of you who don’t know, a mastermind group is just a fancy term for a group of people with a common goal that meet (in person, on the phone, via Skype, chatrooms, meeting software, etc.) to share and learn to improve what they do. Think of it as a show and tell (and ask) for highly motivated individuals who want to get things done.

In these meetings, members of the group share their ideas, questions, triumphs and downfalls. Members with questions get immediate feedback from the others, while everyone learns from everyone else’s experience and wisdom.

Most mastermind group meetings are held in a very formal matter (as outlined below) probably because it’s the most effective structure for the sharing and learning process:

Beginning: Each person, one-by-one, talks briefly about their goals from the previous meeting.
Middle: A predetermined person in the “hot seat” shares, in detail, any number of issues, complications, questions and concerns about his or her own situation. The rest of the members then respond and contribute to the discussion by offering suggestions or comments based on their expert knowledge and/or experience.
End: Each person, one-by-one, talks briefly about the goals that they want to accomplish by the next meeting. Also, the next “hot seat” person is determined so he or she can be ready with questions for the group.

Depending on the mastermind group, the structure may be a little different, however the general idea is the same.

What’s really nice about this format is that because it is so formal, everyone gets to participate and learn from everyone else. I’ve been in non-formal business meetings before, and there’s always a few people who never speak up and don’t get anything out of it. I was one of those people.

The One Benefit We Can All Use

The primary benefits from participating in mastermind groups should be obvious:

You can get any questions you have about what you’re doing answered, or at least talk through how to solve any problems you may be encountering.
You can get a lot of new ideas that you may have never thought of to improve what you’re doing.
You get a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.) opinion about any decisions you make with your business. While doing business online, we often experience “tunnel vision”, where we think something is good because we’re so involved in it. But, we sometimes fail to step back and see how things really are, or that it should be approached in a different manner. Your mastermind group can help you step back and see what’s best for you.

Besides those three benefits, there is one extremely important benefit that is rarely mentioned about mastermind groups, and that is accountability.

When you talk to others about what you want to do or what your goals are, you are far more likely to achieve them. Just imagine sharing your goals with a group each week and how much more you would want to accomplish because of it. Maybe it’s because we don’t want to let others in the group down. Or, maybe it’s because we don’t want to seem lazy in front of them. It could even be a subconscious thing. Whatever it is, talking to others about what you want to do will help you achieve success.

How to Find a Mastermind Group

Below is a list of several different ways to find a mastermind group:

Start One Of Your Own: Surely you know others with common interests who also love to improve their businesses or blogs too. Why not get a few of them together on a weekly or monthly basis, and start your own mastermind group?
Ask Other People: Many people are a part of, or have been a part of mastermind groups that may be looking for new members. It never hurts to ask someone in your niche if they know of any that you could participate in. You might be surprised.
Meetup.com: Meetup.com is a fantastic site that connect like-minded people with a number of different interests, from scrapbooking to online business and blogging. You can easily search for groups that are already meeting in your area and when the next meeting is scheduled that you can attend. Some of the internet business meetup meetings I’ve been to have been a great learning experience (not to mention great for networking), while other meetings I’ve been to have been just okay.
Craigslist: Craigslist may have a number of people with similar goals as yours that you might be able to easily connect with.
Internet Business Mastery: I have to credit Sterling and Jay from Internet Business Mastery here because in their Academy, they have a section in their forum that is dedicated just for hooking people up locally for the specific goal of starting a mastermind group. I’ve met with people in San Diego from the Academy and have built long lasting business and personal relationships with these people which have directly helped my businesses. Crazy stuff.

All mastermind groups are different, and it make take a few trials in different groups to find the one that works for you. Good luck with your search, and I hope you find them as useful as I have.

If you have ever been a part of a mastermind group, please share your experience and whether or not you feel they are valuable. Also, do you have any tips to help others who may be looking to join a mastermind group find one?

Cheers!

My Monthly Report – May 2010

Pat — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:27:31 +0000

Each month, I write a detailed report about my online earnings from the previous month. This report isn’t just about the numbers though, it’s about what I did and what I learned that has had an impact on my earnings one way or another (both positive and negative). Furthermore, it is my hope that it also illustrates how anyone can be successful online. I am nobody special, and if I can do it – surely you can to.

The real purpose behind these reports, beyond helping me keep track of how my businesses are progressing each month, is to help you understand the kinds of things you could do (or shouldn’t do!) to achieve similar results.

I hope you enjoy this month’s report.

Important Going-Ons in May

Was it me, or did May just seem like a blur? Time really does fly.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with family this month – more than usual. Keoni, my 5 month old son, is going through a little fussy stage. It could be for a number of reasons, including teething, separation anxiety, or just being so curious, yet so immobile. I’ve been doing my best to provide a little more support for my wife during this stage, which luckily the work I do with passive income allows me to do. It really makes me respect those of you who work 9 to 5 jobs and have a family at home too – because I’m beginning to understand just how much work it takes just to be a parent. That being said, I wouldn’t trade being a father for anything in this world.

Anyways, let’s get down to business…

iPhone Apps

Once again, I’ve been doing a lot of work with the development of a number of new apps for my iPhone app business.

If you don’t already know, my business partner and I do not develop the applications ourselves. We think of the ideas and then outsource the development to people who specialize in programming iPhone apps. It’s great because not only do the apps come out better than if we did them ourselves, but we can use multiple developers to get more done at the same time.

Back in April, we released 5 new applications. In May, we came out with 6 more, and have a few more in development as we speak. On the date this post was published, we currently have a total of 16 live applications in iTunes.If you’re interested in getting into the iPhone or iPad (or both!) market, and you’re not a programmer, I definitely recommend this iPhone app guide, which has helped our business tremendously.

The app market is definitely a wild ride. Just within this past month, we’ve seen the following happen:

Earned $400+ in a single day total,
Earned about $35 in a single day total,
Seen one of our apps climb to the top #35 paid spot in the Utilities category,
Seen the same app drop to well past the top #100 spot within a week,
We had a competing developer “copycat” one of our apps, and…
The app store (desktop version) changed it’s interface, which has had an effect on some of our marketing strategies…

Phew!

About the “copycat” application, we basically ran into an application that was about 95% the same as one of ours, which we were initially pretty upset about, especially because we put some creativity behind it. I won’t get into the details, but there were a series of emails exchanged between our company and the copycat, but we finally worked things out. And there really wasn’t much we could do anyways. It’s a free market, and it’s all about competition.

I mean – type in the word “flashlight” in iTunes search and you come up with about 300 results.

Still though, the rollercoaster is fun to ride and it was beyond amazing to see some good numbers come in as a result of our hard work done in March and in April. Our free applications saw more than 1 million ad impressions, which is totally awesome!

We’ll keep churning out apps and see where it takes us.

GreenExamAcademy

It’s weird to think about this site now, because honestly I haven’t done much with it for the last 8 months, ever since a major site update. Still, it continues to drive sales and add to my earnings, even though I only spend time answering comments and responding to emails.

This month, however, in a mastermind group meeting I attended, I mentioned that I really wanted to get back on the horse with this site and see where it can take me, especially since I’ve noticed that sales are slowly decreasing each month.

Maybe I’m not giving it the best chance to earn the most money. Maybe I’m unaware of what could be, since I’m “okay” with earning a decent amount from it already. This dilemma is apparently one caveat about passive income that I’m beginning to experience for the first time. Things don’t last forever, as much as we sometimes hope they do. I know this, because it wasn’t too long ago that I thought I was going to be working 9 to 5 until I was 65.

My mastermind group gave me a number of excellent suggestions that I hope to implement within the next couple of months. With the changes and updates that I’ll be making, I hope to:

Drive more traffic to GreenExamAcademy.com via SEO and paid advertising. I have yet to spend a dollar on advertising for this site, but I guess now is the time. More traffic = more sales.
Increase sales conversion rates. I plan to use a number of different suggested strategies (which I plan to outline and report here on SPI when I do implement those strategies, so stay tuned!).
Add more products. More products = more $ spent per customer.

Again like I said, I’ll keep you posted on how things go. Hopefully I’ll have the time to do some of these things, or be smart enough to outsource them if I cannot.

A New Revenue Sharing Site

As many of you know, I used to write articles for eHow. Even though the writer’s compensation program (WCP) has ended (which means no one can contribute to eHow anymore, except through applying with Demand Media first), I actually continue to earn an income from a number of articles I wrote on eHow almost 2 years ago. This just shows the power of find the right platforms and techniques to work hard now, and reaping the benefits later (way later.)

In May, I was on the search for the “next eHow” – somewhere I could invest my time and articles that could potentially make me money down the road. I wrote a series of posts that followed my research:

You can read those articles if you’re interested, but I’ve landed on my decision, based on my own research (you should do your own if you’re up to it!) and went with InfoBarrel.

I spent a few days on the site, checking out the community and even posting an article just to see how it went. The process was relatively smooth, and although I think a lot of work could be done to improve the design, so far I’m diggin’ it. In just 2 days, the article I wrote was already on the third page of Google for a few of the keywords I was targeting.

Good sign.

If you’re not yet signed up, head on over to InfoBarrel and I’ll see you there!

Smart Passive Income

I’m still working on setting up the Podcast. It’s not as easy as pressing the record button and talking, because there’s a lot more involved for getting picked up by iTunes and all of that stuff. I’ve heard of a lot of people having problems with their feeds before, so I want to make sure I get it done right the first time, so all I have to worry about later is content.

Thanks for your patience!

Ok – I think it’s time for some numbers!

Income Breakdown

GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:

Ebook Only: $863.07
Audio Only: $114.32
Ebook + Audio Package: $764.15
Total: $1,741.54
- Last Month: $2,886.00
- Difference: -$1144.46

eHow Earnings:
- Total: $219.01
  - Last Month: $183.04
  - Difference: +$35.97

Affiliate Earnings:
- Green Exam Academy: $2,519.35
- Bluehost.com: $650.00
- Amazon Associates: $11.50
- Aweber: $26.70
- Internet Business Mastery Academy: $1,224.75
- iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $345.56
- Total: $4,777.86
  - Last Month: $5,256.89
  - Difference: -$479.03

iPhone Applications:
- Paid Apps: $5004.00
- Free Apps: $4594.09
- Total: $9,598.09
  - Last Month: $3,135.16
  - Difference: +$6,462.93

Gross Total in May: $16,336.50
- Last Month: $11,461.09
- Difference: +$4,875.41

It’s great to see the numbers climb back towards that $20k/month mark, which I saw way back when my LEED site was taking off before March of 2009. Obviously, the major portion of the earnings this month come from iPhone apps, which is awesome. It’s been a year and a half since we’ve been in business, but never have we seen numbers like this. No – we’re not making $20k a day like some of the top apps that you see, but we’re definitely happy with the results. It was only when we finally to create more product and researched some iPhone app marketing strategies that we finally started to see a breakthrough.

It’s like they say, nothing is going to happen unless you take action and do something! Remember, every day you don’t something online for sale is a day of potential profits lost.

Things I Learned in May

One thing I learned was the importance of having people to talk to you about what you do online. Namely, a mastermind group.

I’ve been part of an online mastermind “group”, the Internet Business Mastery Academy, for almost 2 years now, and they’ve been instrumental in my online success. The mastermind group I talked about earlier is a new one I joined that only has about 5 people, and we chat every Monday about our businesses, what we’ve learned, and what we need help on. Joining some kind of mastermind group is something you really have to do in order to get to where you want to go, faster.

Another thing I learned in May was the importance of simply asking. If you need to know something, the first thing you should think about doing is “asking”, instead of spending hours going in circles trying to find the answer yourself. For some reason, many of us are ashamed to ask for help, and feel like we have to do everything ourselves. It’s like us guys who are sometimes too prideful to stop and ask for directions, when you know that that is all you have to do.

I’m talking about this in regards to my upcoming podcast. In May, I asked many of you (plus my Twitter and Facebook followers) to answer a short, 3 question survey about what you’d like to hear on the show. The results from the survey (over 500 responses later) is now a complete roadmap of exactly what I should be doing. There’s no more guesswork involved, and I can give the listeners exactly what they’re looking for.

If you want to know something, just ask! What’s the worst that can happen? You don’t get a response…boo hoo.

And Finally…

I just wanted to thank you all once again for your undying support. I started this blog almost two years ago without ever thinking that it would get to this point, and now I’m here and it’s honestly one of the coolest things I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing. I hope you stick with me for the next couple of years and let’s just see how far we can climb together.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the blog, you can easily do so by clicking here!

Thanks everyone, and I wish you all the best. Cheers!

5 Great Reads From Around the Web

Pat — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:03:57 +0000

As much as I love to write blog posts and give away content here on SPI, I also enjoy reading other posts from a number of different websites around the blogosphere. There is so much great stuff out there, I know it’s impossible to catch it all, so hopefully I can help you out by sharing some of the things I’ve read lately.

The Secret to Growing Your Blog Twice as Fast with Half the Effort - My buddy Glen from Viperchill.com bring us yet another fantastic post where he shares a secret that I also use to help grow my blog.

How to Build Trust In A Skeptical Online World – Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs-Journey.com tells us how to build trust in a world where people usually lean towards thinking most things are scams. A very valuable post that anyone doing online business should read.

The Third Product: Build a Business Around Your Blog – James Tayo from Entrepreneur Blog’r writes a guest post on Paul Cunningham’s BloggingTeacher.com about what you can do to make money on your blog if you’re not into creating eBooks or membership websites.

Seven Friends That You Need in Life – Karen Ruby, a personal development writer for AMeaningfulExistence.com, outlines the types of friends that we need in our lives that help us live happily and help us reach our goals.

What It Means to Live the Internet Lifestyle – Rob, a really smart (and profitable) 16 year old blogger from RobsWebTips.com (man, I really wish I started doing this when I was 16!), who I recently befriended and had the chance to speak to a lot recently, gives us some thoughts about what it really means to live the internet lifestyle.

Thanks, as always, for your support for SPI and everything I do. Monday’s post will be my monthly income report for May – which has some interesting numbers I’m excited to share with you.

Until then. Cheers!