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A Million Dollars From Blogging Or Just Another E-Book With Big Claims?

This is the third installment of Rob Benwell’s Blogging To The Bank book, which teaches his method for making money with blogs.

More details about the book are here -

www.bloggingtothebank.com

What’s compelling about Rob’s story is that he’s made over a million dollars using blogs and there’s very, very few people who can claim this. His book has massive appeal just because we all want to find out exactly what he does different - what’s his secret?

I reviewed Rob’s second version this book back in August of 2007, where one thing was quite clear - Rob uses blogs in a much different way to make money online to how I use blogs. You can read my original review by clicking here - Blogging To The Bank 2.0 Review.

Niche Marketing

The strategy Rob applies is about leveraging multiple blogs in multiple niches to make a lot of money. This is not about becoming a dominant player - an expert - in one niche subject area that you are passionate about, which is more the “Blog Mastermind school of blogging”.

Although the overall strategy might be quite different between what I teach and do and what Rob does, if you break things down, the fundamentals remain the same.

Rob’s system for profitable blogging still relies on the same principles to make it work, which are -

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This is a somewhat advanced email marketing tactic, although most serious email marketers having been doing it for years. For me though, this is something I’ve only recently been able to test because I haven’t had the technological resources to do so.

I recently upgraded my AWeber account to the “new” version. In case you missed the news about the new AWeber upgrades, the CEO Tom Kulzer and his team recently rolled out some nice advanced email marketing features.

The features let you create segmentations in your lists based on various elements, such as who opened your email and who clicked your links within the emails. There are other options as well, but for the purpose of this article let’s just focus on these two basic segmentations.

Before upgrading my account I was on the legacy version of AWeber, which is basically the same service, except I didn’t have as much power to segment my lists and consequently, beyond deciding which list I would broadcast too, I didn’t do much else. As a result, I generally hit all my newsletter with each message - a shotgun approach to email marketing.

Unfortunately (or really, fortunately) for me, my list is probably a bit larger than the average at AWeber, and with their new services came a new pricing structure, which meant I would pay more than five times per month than what I was previously, if I decided to upgrade. I eventually decided to bite the bullet because I know how good a service it is, how important my newsletter is to my business, and of course the primary reason - so I could test the new features.

Luckily for most of you reading this, if you are just starting out your email newsletter, the AWeber fee hasn’t really changed even for the new features. You’re still going to pay the very justified price of around the sub-$20 a month mark for a business-critical service. In my case, with some 40,000+ members of my newsletter, the fee is a little bit more.

In case you haven’t started your newsletter, here’s my review to help you decide whether AWeber is right for you - AWeber Email Autoresponder Review.

Now let me explain how I made use of the new features and how you can implement these advanced email marketing techniques…

The Problem With The Shotgun Approach

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I just won a 40in Sony LCD TV in an affiliate competition, and that wasn’t even first place. In another competition this month I won a Rolex watch. During this year I won a Apple iTouch and some other prizes.

In July when I reopened Blog Mastermind, I ran an affiliate competition for my partners, giving away top 10 prizes, including a Mac Air as a first place prize.

These competitions are common place for Internet marketing launches. The people who sell products related to how to make money online know how effective a prize competition is for motivating affiliates to promote. Strangely enough, it’s not the prizes the affiliates really want since they could easily buy the items - it’s the glory and beating their peers that matters most.

Regardless of the motivation, affiliate prize competitions work and help you make more sales, so why is it that marketers in other niches don’t make use of this technique?

Prize competitions could be considered a standard in Internet marketing launches so it’s not going to surprise anyone, but if you were to run a competition in a non-IM market, you are going to be doing something new, something different - and I’m pretty confident it’s going to work REALLY well at motivating your affiliates too.

New is Powerful

What creates buzz in any market is something new. “New” is powerful, and while the bar is rising very high in the Internet marketing niche for what can be considered innovative, it’s still relatively easy to be seen as an innovator in online marketing if you just take what the Internet marketing crowd are doing as a standard and apply it to your non-IM market.

This is why concepts such as the product launch formula work so well. Outside of the film and television industries and a few innovative companies like Apple, most companies market their products with stock standard - and let’s face it - boring styles of marketing like dry television, radio and newspaper campaigns.

While affiliate competitions and product launch formula style buzz campaigns won’t work for every type of product, chances are what you are selling online could benefit from a few innovative techniques that no one is doing in your industry.

Let me ask you this - if you are currently selling in a non-make money online market right now, has anyone ever done an affiliate competition to motivate launch partners when a new product is released? Even the concept of affiliate marketing is not applied to a majority or products sold online.

This to me spells opportunity. All it takes is for you to put in a little extra effort and you could be seen as an innovator in your market - and best of all, a winner when it comes to your profits too.

Yaro Starak
Copy-and-Paste Marketer

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How To Create Recruitment Systems To Hire People Before You Need Them

I was recently asked how I hired quality editors when running my previous business BetterEdit. As I responded to the question I realized the information provided might well serve others, so I’m going to explain my system for staying on top of the recruitment process here in this blog post.

Before I begin, a brief caveat - this system as I implemented it only worked because I had a website that received a continuous stream of traffic from Google. It was by no means a huge amount of people, perhaps a few hundred daily unique visitors, but because the traffic was targeted and due to the supply and demand ratio for editors versus work, I was in a good position to make the following system work.

However, that doesn’t mean this can’t work for you if you don’t have consistent search engine traffic or if the dynamics of the employment market in your industry are not as favorable, you just have to work a little harder to find the good people and bring in the traffic. If your website already receives consistent search engine visitors then you are position to immediately benefit from this technique, so make sure you write this down on your to-do list after you finish reading.

Slow Companies Fail

If you read Rich Schefren’s recent report, the Uncertainty Syndrome, you may remember he talked about hiring solutions that bring good people to work for your company BEFORE you need them.

Due to the speed of today’s markets, those who are quick and stay ahead of the curve generally win. Your company is only as good as the people working for it. If you combine those two ideas, then it makes sense you need the best people working for your business and you need them yesterday.

Think about any time you learned something new that you just knew you could apply to your business and immediately benefit from it, yet you don’t personally have the time to do it (nor does it make sense that you do it - it’s not your core strength), none of your current staff are available to take on the role and of course hiring new staff is never quick if you start from scratch. By the time you have the right person you’ve missed the boat - the market has moved on to the next thing and your prospective customers have already been captured by faster-moving competitors.

An even more common problem in successful organizations is business growth. In order for your business to take the next step you need help. Perhaps you require someone to take on the extra administration responsibilities, new talent to deliver the services your company provides, added customer support, maybe a project manager or a new tech person to help handle increasing technology demands.

If you are hiring reactively, then every stage of growth is hindered significantly by each new hire you have to make. This can be such a huge problem that you have to turn down work, work that is your company’s core strength that you would love to take on, simply because you don’t have the capacity to deliver the results due to limited resources. That’s VERY frustrating for an entrepreneur.

Be Proactive

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This is a guest post by Blog Mastermind graduate student, Francis Wade, who you may recognize as the time management expert with the Jamaican accent from his testimonial video. You can read about Francis and find more of his time management tips at his blog - http://2time-sys.com.

Managing your time = Managing your money

This simple equation has driven entrepreneurs from one time management class to another in search of tips that will transform them into ultra-productive professionals.

Most courses on time management run for two days, where you learn a new system of habits developed by someone who has invented a way to be more productive. The new system works so well for the inventor that he/she decides to package the approach into a detailed prescription to be followed by everyone.

The problem is, why should a time management system that works for the “expert” in their New York corporate world work for your internet business run out of your bedroom in Hawaii? You live a different life, with a need for flexible hours (i.e. midnight shifts included), and you don’t have the luxury of a secretary, IT support and real vacations away from email.

Plus there’s that habit that you have of taking a mid-afternoon nap… which you are sure helps you…to say nothing of the difference between the culture of Honolulu and Wall Street!

Instead of telling you to “follow me,” why can’t they tell you how to do something similar to what they did, so that you can also invent a time management system of your own? Did they follow some kind of method that you could use, and is there a process to follow, or were they just very smart or extremely lucky? You are a different animal, and you know that your habits are different from theirs, so why should you be expected to be successful following their system?

The fact is that most people who take time management courses have a hard time implementing a whole bunch of new, foreign habits all at once. Habits are hard to break, and the 101 new habits and 66 new tips in the new system they are learning are just impossible to learn overnight.

But, you give it a good try and it works - for a while - until the first crisis hits and you do what we all do — go back to what’s familiar. We feel bad, and we wonder how something that seemed so easy in class could be so hard to do in reality.

But in the back of our minds, we still want to be more productive and need to find a way to harness the insights that exist in all the programs out there… but who has time to attend them all?

The Solution

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