Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye » Wordpress

Blog Traffic Voodoo and YOU (Blogging To Your Central Demographic Model)

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:58:27 +0000

Blog Traffic Voodoo and YOU (Blogging To Your Central Demographic Model) is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 9 – 15 minutes

I’ll assume to start that like most people, you’re way, way more interested in yourself than what I’m doing.

Don’t feel bad – we’re all like that; largely interested in our own ends, our own stories.

But I’d like to tell you a little bit about my experiences with blogging and affiliate marketing on the internet. I don’t expect you’ll care about my experiences, but there are some lessons you’ll learn (if you’re open to learning).

These lessons in my little story will will help YOU:

Get More Traffic!

By Blogging!

PLUS!!!

It’s Easy For YOU To DO!

Now do I have your attention?

I came around to blogging slowly. At heart I’m a believer in proven direct response marketing methods and my early experiences marketing online validated those beliefs.

But the marketplace changed and the web became, well, more social. The same shtick that worked for content marketing when I started out doesn’t work today. That’s because the internet as a marketing environment has matured and the competition for “mindshare” is hotter than ever.

For years I focused almost entirely on list-building and then I would email newsletters and promotions to the list. I did do blogging, but the blog content was not my focus much at all. My emphasis as a free-content provider was to shower my lists with good stuff – but subscribers only got that content on the inside. It wasn’t out there for everybody to read on the blogs.

I still do list-building and it’s still valid. As far as my newsletters and content however, I’ve shifted into a more transparent mode of putting it out there in the blogosphere for anybody to read. I notify my email lists when I update the blog and I’ve shifted more into the mode of working to get RSS subscribers to the blog and get my writing syndicated and published widely.

This may seem pretty obvious to you, but you have to understand that when I started marketing online blogs were fairly primitive and not many people knew what RSS was. Many still don’t. I’ve had to let go of my old opinions about what good internet marketing was and adopt new methods to grow my income and influence.

If I were starting out today, I’d start as a blogger and work hard to be a darned good one. I would still market in other ways, but I would always try to put my best foot forward in my public blog and grow readership for the blog as a primary goal in my traffic strategy.

The lucky thing is, getting blog traffic isn’t hard at all.

That’s because blogs, by their nature, attract the search engines. Those search engines, including specialized blog-search engines like Technorati, are on the lookout for fresh content—and they know blogs provide it so they give blogs “love”.

Blogging for traffic

Blogging is a relatively easy way to get traffic. Some of the traffic you’ll get is better than others, but the way blogs are indexed pretty much guarantees you’ll get some traffic every time you blog.

To my way of thinking here are two or more ways to go about blogging:

1. The sloppy way. This is where you don’t have much care for quality blogging, but you can get traffic and build your list anyway. The problem with being a sloppy blogger is you’ll never establish a reputation and a genuine following and you’ll undermine an important part of the second half of my system, which is monetizing and leveraging your list to get more traffic.
2. The “Pro” way. The second approach is blogging as if you want to establish yourself as a preeminent expert in your field. If you use my system exactly as I teach, this will be related to internet marketing and making money online. but Within that range you could write about personal development, entrepreneurialism, hot marketing trends, affiliate marketing – there is really a very big range but trying to make a blog about raising chickens work to build an internet marketing would be an unrealistic stretch.

Step 1. Who Is Your Reader ?

Recently I gave some advice to a startup entrepreneur who had $50,000 to invest in promoting his website. He was wondering what sort of advertising would be a good investment. When I asked who his target users were his reply was:

“Anybody who uses Facebook, Ebay, or Craigslist. Our site is a cross between all three.”

Basically, he was saying his site was designed to appeal to everybody. Big mistake. You cannot please everybody in marketing anything. Some businesses get lucky after they have a base level of support from a specific group of targeted people. Facebook, for example, started as a college thing and attained core support only from a relatively small, but loyal, user group of students and alums from Ivy League schools. Ebay started as a site for auctioning off collectible PEZ containers and Craigslist just caught on in the San Francisco area for some reason and grew from there.

Your Central Demographic Model

Anyway, the smart way to launch a project to get traffic these days is to decide who your ideal target market is on a fairly detailed level. One name for this is a “central demographic model”. This is like a voodoo doll of your target customer. Your model might be represented by a picture but behind the image the important thing is your understanding of the values of the person who looks that way.

For example: If you were to make a blog about video games you’d want to create a model of your reader in your mind: chances are he’s male and between 12 and 30 years of age. That’s still pretty vague, but it’s more specific (and more useful) than saying “my site is for anyone who plays video games”.

So you make a mental list, or write it down, of what your reader likes and doesn’t like. You try to imagine what his or her average day is like. The more defined your mental image of the person is, the more you’ll be able to reach the emotions of people within the demographic sweet spot you want to reach and the more easily the traffic will come.

Traffic Comes When You Blog About The Right Stuff For Your Market

It’s almost like magic how blogs attract traffic. It’s not at all, but as I said above, the search engines and specialized blog engines have a way of getting you traffic when you blog relevantly. How much traffic you get is a result of two factors primarily:

1. How much your blog is linked to by you (through self-promotion) and by other sites linking to you blog as a recommendation.

2. How effectively the titles and content of your blog posts enters into “the conversation” within the average head of the average person who fits your central demographic model.

Keyword Research

I dislike keyword research and I hate writing around keywords, but if you can do it without descending into idiot-level writing, more power to you. The search engines are getting better at sorting out what’s really relevant, so stuffing your blog posts with blatant “spider food” in the form of high-density use of keywords isn’t as necessary as it once was to get search engine rankings and traffic. The reason is the search engines now use a fancy-schmancy technology called LSI or “latent semantic indexing” which allows them to look at not only the specific keywords and phrases you use, but also use complex algorithms to rank your blog for the actual topic based on synonyms and context. You might actually rank rather well for keyphrases you don’t even use because the search engines discovered you’ve written relevantly about the topic with a different vocabulary.

If this seems all over your head, don’t worry. The upshot of LSI technology is that it allows you and me to just focus on creating good blog content. That said, some keyword research will be helpful to you. I don’t like doing it so I use Market Samurai as my tool of choice to help me save time doing the tedious business of researching keywords.

Starting Your Blog

I recommend you use WordPress and you self-host, which means you’ll have to spend five or ten bucks a month to run your blog. Self-hosting gives you freedom to write about whatever you please with no worries about having your blog arbitrarily deleted, which is known to happen to marketers who use free blogs like Blogger or free WordPress.org blogs. Free blogs have their uses, but I believe your main blog should be totally controlled by you.

Pinging

Pinging your blog every time you update it gets you traffic. When you post and ping frequently, the traffic comes. How much depends on your subject matter, your market niche, and how well established your blog is. But the traffic will come if you blog and ping and in fact a few years back some “gurus” were selling “how to make money online” products based on the same simple premise I’m showing you for free.

In your WordPress blog control panel there’s something called a “ping list”. Depending on how you have it set up, your blog will auto-ping one or several ping services. I like to install a plugin called “cbnet Ping optimizer“ which prevents your blog from auto-pinging too often. By default WordPress pings every time you make the slightest change to your blog content, which can run to a lot of pings and get your blog banned as a ping spammer. So I recommend you use the plugin. By default WordPress doesn’t ping many services (just one in fact I think). There are some ping lists that run over 100 ping services but I feel that’s overkill, so I’ve narrowed it down to about a dozen.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

I set the ping optimizer to ping at most once every 60 minutes. Often when I publish a blog post I read the post afterwards and I want to correct some dumb grammar error or add something. With the ping set to 60 minutes, I have an hour to make the post the way I want it without double-pinging being a problem.

I am not claiming, by the way, that getting traffic as a blogger is not work. All success takes work. Blogging well and blogging often will get you traffic and build you a following, but with that comes a commitment of your time. The most important thing is just to get started and then keep going.

P.S. you’ll also want to sign-up for an account with Technorati. When you do you create a profile and claim your blog. Then Technorati gives you some love as a registered member. All you do is embed a code in one of your blog posts (looks like: JMUMM7FSB8X5 ) and then Technorati helps you get some more traffic. Technorati isn’t the only free service that does this sort of thing, but it’s probably the most influential one.

Blogging to the Bank

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

The Quick and Easy How To Get Your Website Online and Begin Making Money

Loren Woirhaye — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:39:16 +0000

The Quick and Easy How To Get Your Website Online and Begin Making Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes

If you’re new to online marketing and you are getting ready to launch your first real website, you need to know the following, very timely information about “web hosting”

In the next few minutes you’ll learn :

how to choose a sensible web-hosting plan and what to avoid
how to host multiple sites on one account
how to know the right time to upgrade to so-called reseller hosting
the best hosting control panel for internet marketers (in my opinion)
why a blogging platform may be your best way to get started and which platform to use

My first website was really lame and I had no clue what I was doing. I blundered through the process, wasting a lot of time but learning a bit in the process. Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot about webmastering. For me, web hosting and webmastering is a means to an end, not a career. Knowing how to manage my own web-hosting empowers me to try new things as a marketer and adapt rapidly to changes in the marketplace. I also save lots of money because I don’t have to pay someone to work on any of my sites. I am the one in control, and so will you when you manage your own websites.

These days it’s a lot easier to be your own “webmaster” than it was only a few years ago. The whole process of setting up and managing websites is much more user friendly today. With a little patience you can learn to put up eye-popping websites in record time. You’ll have the ability to get an idea for a new site and have it up and getting traffic within one hour. No kidding.

Control Panels Matter (especially if you’re a beginner)

One of the things that baffled me most of all was web-hosting. I was on a Plesk host when I first started. To this day I want nothing to do with Plesk. I found it dreadfully confusing.

When I discovered C-Panel hosting things got a LOT easier. C-panel has improved since I started using it too. Now it has tutorials embedded inside it that help you as you go along. I’ll recommend a reliable C-Panel host (the one I rely on) at the end of this lesson. You can save a few bucks by using non-c-panel hosts, but I don’t recommend cutting corners. When you choose a C-panel host you’re choosing a standard that has earned a preferred position of preeminence among internet marketers.

Basic Hosting

“Starting a Website” means different things to different people. If you work for a billion dollar company, your budget may be in the millions and there will be a small army of developers, writers, strategists and coders involved in the project (plus some management types there to take credit/shift blame and basically pee on the projcet to mark their territory).

But if you’re like “Joe Average who wants to make some money on the internet”, you can launch a website for less that the price of a night out - $20 or so.

To start your internet empire with just one website or blog (which is fine) you don’t need to invest much in hosting. Less than $10 per month gets a nice plan for one website.

Dedicated Hosting is probably more than you need. If you’re starting a site with heavy bandwidth requirements, dedicated hosting may be necessary, but often shared hosting, which is very cheap, is adequate and works fine. As your needs grow you might go from basic hosting to reseller hosting to dedicated hosting. If you think you need dedicated hosting or a private server for your websites, you’ll want to get some specific education that goes way beyond the scope of this article

Multi-Site Hosting

You can usually run more than one site on any hosting plan, but there’s an awkwardness to running more than one site on a basic hosting account. Basically, you would have to set up each site as a sub-domain. Thus you would have http://site1.yourdomain.com and “site2″ and so forth. You can also do it like this: http://yourdomain.com/site1, which is making your site a subfolder of your top-level domain.

I use domain sub-folders all the time, creating a sub-folder for each product I sell on a site, for example. It’s not a bad practice at all but things can get out confusing to manage once you have more than a few sites running as sub-domains or sub–folders.

As your empire-building progresses you’ll acquire numerous URLs, which are registered domain names you own. They generally cost about $10 a year so you can afford to have a few and owning more than one has advantages I’ll explain later.

When To Choose Reseller Hosting

The next step above basic hosting is to get a so-called “reseller” account. It’s called that because you can resell hosting space to anybody you like and set them up with their own control panel. Doing this is a cool way to make some money or cover your hosting costs, but unless you really want to get into the webmaster and support business (which isn’t a bad thing but could suck your energy away from a business you’d prefer) be selective about who you sell hosting space to.

If you do sell hosting space on a small-time basis you’ll want clients with minimal support needs who just need a site that’s reliable – this way you get paid every month and don’t have to do much to earn it. You could also sell the hosting/support plan for top dollar with the value to the customer being in the support.

If you’re doing web-design or some sort of web-consulting work you might want to include hosting in the packages you offer to clients. Doing so may help clients put-off discontinuing your services because if they do they’ll have to cope with moving their hosting, which is no big deal but your clients won’t know that. Little “hooks” like this is good business strategy because they help you keep your customers in a buying cycle with you.

The Best Reason To Choose Reseller Hosting

Many website owners use reseller hosting for their own websites but don’t resell space at all.

When you choose reseller hosting you benefit because it simplifies the running of more than a couple of websites enormously. Because with reseller hosting you can create a new control panel for as many hosting accounts as you want, you’ll be able to put every domain you own on a separate account.

The first benefit is this makes site-management a cleaner process with fewer files on each hosting account, which saves time.

You’ve probably already know your time is your most precious resource in building an internet business. There are time-thieves everywhere trying to suck it away from you. Even if you are disciplined about not doing obvious time-wasters like watching a lot of YouTube videos of stupid pet tricks, your own working methods can be time-inefficient and when they are your progress will be slower.

The main reason I recommend using reseller hosting for a serious internet business is the separation of sites into invidual control panels… mostly because it saves lots of time.

If you’ve ever spent an hour combing your hard drive looking for a misplaced file, you know how frustrating it can be. Just as being organized with the files on your hard drive saves you time, using separate control panels for each domain you own does as well.

Other benefits become more obvious as you learn a little more about webmastering. Some php “scripts”, which are programs that run on a hosting account, can conflict with each other if they are on the same account but if put on separate control panels they don’t.

A Blog May Be Your Best Choice For Website #1 (and why it’s also the easiest)

When I got started I didn’t even know what a blog was. My first websites were very ugly things coded in plain HTML. Real ugly — and labor-intensive as well.

These days WordPress is perhaps the best platform to start most websites with for the serious beginner. In relation to it’s power and flexibility, WordPress is easy to learn.

With most C-panel hosting you get a feature called Fantastico which can be used to create a WordPress site in about two minutes. Fantastico won’t install the very latest version of WordPress, but since WordPress has an auto-upgrade feature you can install it from your C-panel using Fantastico and then login to your WordPress site as an administrator and just click the upgrade link to upgrade to the latest version. As of today the latest version of WordPress is 3.0.1 – version 3.0 was a watershed upgrade to WordPress that marked it’s real maturity and that’s part of why I’ve gone from being skeptical of WordPress to recommending it wholeheartedly.

WordPress is robust, flexible, and easy-to-learn. It isn’t the right system for every website, but it’s a powerful, widely used, amply supported tool that can grow with you.

Enhancing Your Site’s Core Functions

The WordPress core script is a blogging program. By adding other features, called “plugins”, you can modify it to do a huge variety of tricks. I am currently running about 20 plugins on the WordPress site I experiment with the most, and I’ve tried probably 40 or 60 and researched dozens more. In subsequent articles I’ll tell you about every single plugin I recommend and why, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’re ready to get started with WordPress, you’ll need to get a hosting account and a domain name. Domains registrars are all pretty similar (I use Godaddy mostly), but the hosting service I recommend you use is Hostgator. I’ve used them for years and the features are excellent, support is stellar and the value you get is superb.

SAVE on HOSTING: If you want to save some money on hosting you can use this coupon code to get a discount: JUSTINTIME

(of course I’ll be compensated if you sign up today through the link above)

Working With WordPress – Big Features and Easy-to-use, Powerful Plugins Enhance Usability for Bloggers and Marketers

Loren Woirhaye — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:24:36 +0000

Working With WordPress – Big Features and Easy-to-use, Powerful Plugins Enhance Usability for Bloggers and Marketers is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

I’ll admit, I was slow to jump into using WordPress for blogging. I had tried using it and always found Blogger much more intuitive.

As WordPress matured however more marketers were using it and by a year ago many marketers were so enthused about it they moved all their existing sites over to WordPress, claiming WordPress sites rank better in search engines and get a better “quality score” with Google Adwords.

Thus, the theory is that with WordPress you’ll get more traffic, cheaper.

I’ll make some comments from personal experience about WordPress. There are a lot of people out there who know a lot more about WordPress than I, so if you’re confused, use Google to find an answer. Chances are somebody has had the same problem figuring out WordPress you’re having and it’s been answered somewhere online by a real expert.

WordPress, being free and open-source, is also very cheap to get started with. I still use value XsitePro, and there are many things that are far easier to do with HTML editors than WordPress.

Where WordPress shines for those who are design-challenged. The availability of thousands of good-looking “themes” makes it easy to find a theme that meets your needs. Themes are the graphics and code that make WordPress sites look good. With very little trouble, you can change the theme your WordPress blog runs with, too. If you’re addicted to playing with your site’s layout and appearance you’ll probably find WordPress lots of fun.

In addition to the very cool theme features, WordPress has an absolutely jaw-dropping range of add-on modules available, mostly at no charge though many developers accept donations.

WordPress also featured integrated RSS feeds, which means your blog can be syndicated and shared around the web very easily. If your blogging is crap, nobody except search engines and content-scrapers will read it, but if you are a serious, funny, informative, origninal or just interesting writer, RSS feeds give you many opportunities to expand your readership.

Why you want people reading your stuff and watching your blathering head on videos has to do with this bizarre notion of “thought leadership” – which I’ll write more about later. In short, people follow, hire, and buy from people they perceive as having a clue. Thus, if you want to have money in the “information economy” – it helps to self-publish. A printed book in nationwide-plus distribution is ideal, but takes a lot more discipline to create than a blog.

So, in order to conquer the universe with your viewpoint, start with a blog.

WordPress works real good for blogs.

So give it a try.

You can download WordPress at http://www.wordpress.org

Recommended Plugins:

I haven’t even tried dozens of plugins, but I’ve come up with a short list of ones I’ve used on on most WordPress sites I’ve set up. I like to keep things fairly simple so I can focus on writing and marketing, not tweaking WordPress. These are all pretty easy to install and configure so don’t be intimidated.

Permalink redirect – I actually don’t remember exactly why I started using this, but at the time some research into SEO and link structures indicated this plugin would be a good thing to use in conjuction with the SEO plugins and the “Canonical URLs feature”. http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/
A lot of folks use and recommend the All-in-1-SEO-Pack. It gives you a lot of features common to HTML sites but absent from “stock” WordPress installations, like Meta-keywords and Meta-descriptions tags. I recently started using the Platinum SEO pack which shares many features with the All-in-1. Both are good. I think Platinum SEO makes the above mentioned permalink plugin unnecessary as the permalink redirect feature is integrated in Platinum SEO. http://techblissonline.com/platinum-seo-pack/
Tag clouds are those funny bunches of big-and-little words you see on the sidebars of blogs sometimes. Some people hate ‘em. I use ‘em though. In a stock WordPress installation you can use tags, but the search engines don’t read them as keywords for your posts, which is lame. This plugin fixes that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-tag-cloud
This last is weird, even by my standards. It reads you blog in a robot voice. This could be cool for visually-challenged people, but realistically they probably have screen-reader software anyway. The real reason I use it is because it creates a new RSS feed of audio content for my blogs with almost zero additional work on my part. Cool beans. Check it out and see if it makes sense to you. http://www.odiogo.com/listen_button.php
This blog runs on the Atahualpa theme – which has integrated SEO features, but I’m not using them here. By default they are enabled in Atahualpa, which is a very rich and full-featured theme. You can only use one SEO plugin at a time, so if you use Atahualpa, choose to use either the “stock” SEO features or turn them off and use another SEO plugin. You can get Atahualpa here: Get Atahualpa Theme

Feel free to comment here about your own experiences and plugin preferences. I like to learn new stuff so if you’ve found a WordPress plugin you think rocks, I’d love to know about it.