Are You Looking For Membership Site Software?

You might notice the add on the right for Wishlist Member.  It is a WordPress Plugin for making WordPress into a membership site.

I tried many different membership site options before I finally got that membership site software solution.

If you are even mildly good at WordPress, the Wishlist Member Plugin makes it easy for you to set up a membership site and manage it.

Recently I started back up business networking.  You may find it odd that I ever stopped, and I did not completely.  However, any of you out there that have done networking for years probably knows the feeling of wanting to take a break and stop going to events for a little while.

In my case, I focues on the web and cut way back on person to person.

So I had my break, I love my new product and I am back out getting to know people and rub shoulders again.

I kind of need a refresher on what the whole thing is for, so I thought I would write one for myself.  Here are 10 business networking tips.

1. Don’t schedule things too close together.  You hate to cut conversations too short.
2. Followup.  Get the meeting.
3. Listen more than you talk – like no one has heard that before.
4. Be early, stay late – it is a lot easier to have detailed conversations during that time.
5. Know what your target market looks like – spend more time with those people and less time with people that are clearly not in your target market.
6. Don’t have a stain on your jacket. (Darn)
7. Smile and look people in the eye
8. Know who is going to be there in advance when possible.  Arrange to meet key people before or after the event.
9. Keep mints with you.
10. Take enough business cards.
11. Have fun

I know, really basic stuff.  Well, I was writing this as a refresher for me, not as an innovative blog post for you. 

Success is all about Barriers to Entry

Let me explain.

In business, we call an obstacle to entering a market a Barrier to Entry.

There are also barriers to entry for anything you are trying to do differently from what you currently do.

The barrier to entry may be as small as not having the time.

But usually the Barrier to Entry is one or more obstacles that pose a road block in your mind to get to the successful outcome you want.

Your success does not hinge on the 90% you can do. It hinges on overcoming the 10% you currently cannot do.

This is huge. One of the reasons successful people are such avid life long learners is that they are continuously learning new ways to overcome the hurdles – the barriers to entry for their goals.

For example, for many people the technology of setting up a blog is a barrier to entry. This seems ridiculous to me because I can set up a blog in about 30 seconds and it never requires technology. However, for someone that has not done it before, it is intimidating. And that intimidation is their barrier to entry.

The technology is not the barrier to entry. I promise you that YouTube is full of great videos about how to set up a wordpress blog. If you have not done it yet, it is because of a barrier to entry in your head. Not a real and tangible barrier that exists.

This was illustrated very well to me years ago. I’d tried numerous times to build a sales team, and it always failed. I was not hiring the right people with the right skills and desires was one of the problems.

In my mind, sales people just did not work for our business model because it had failed several times. Then I was talking to a business veteran and telling him my woes, and he just replied, “Well, you have to keep trying.”

That was great. As small as that seems, in my mind I had given up, sure that it would not work in our model. In reality, I needed to learn how to hire better sales people and build the team appropriately.

If you know me personally, you know that I sometimes say that small business owners are their own worst enemies. What I really mean to say with that is this: If you want things to get better for you, you must focus on identifying the barriers to entry for the success you want to achieve and get the education and tools to overcome them. Take a half day off. Take a pen and paper someplace away from work and family. Identify your barriers to entry and how you will eliminate them.

Let me give you another example.

Barrier to Entry #1- My Attitude

I had a good and respected friend approach me about a “Business Opportunity.” It is an MLM and as soon as I heard that, I was very dissapointed that he did not have more respect for me as a serious business person.

Barrier to Entry #2 – My Belief

He showed it to me an it turned out that iLearningGlobal was a pretty sweet product, even if you do not sell it. But I did not believe I could resell it because there was no way I would start selling family and friends.

Barrier to Entry #3 – Cost

While I knew I would enjoy it for a month or two, I might not keep using it and the $79 would be wasted money.

COMMENT: See how all these barriers to entry are my own road blocks? I am too good, I can’t sell it, I won’t keep using it….

Ultimately what you try to do will succeed or fail based on external factors. However, I am willing to bet that 99% of things people try or want to try never have a chance because they have internal barriers to entry that are going to stop them.

So what happened with iLearningGlobal?

After several months, I decided I would try it. However, I would only sell it to people I do not know via the web and if I did not at least break even after 6 months, I would stop. That was the set of rules I made for myself to get over my own barriers to entry. The end result is that is has become a very profitable endeavor for me, not only generating a small income on the product, but acting as an introduction into a great group of people, some of whom I am now doing work with. See my iLearningGlobal Website if you are moderately interested.

Now I have the joy of working with a team of people and watching them struggle with their barriers to entry. These are the excuses I keep hearing:

• I cannot set up a blog
• I don’t have the money to pay for advertising
• You are already number one in Google, I cannot beat you so why try…
• I tried it for a week and no sales came in. It does not work for me.

A lot of things are getting easier and cheaper every day. Think about how hard it was to publish a book 10 years ago. Now, for no cost anyone can publish a book that is print on demand. ZERO COST – You are your only barrier to entry.

Think about how easy it is to set up a blog or website. 1,000′s of free tools are available and free videos that train you how to do it are also available. And there are places that host it for free with no advertising. You are the only barrier to entry.

I think it is worth repeating here.

You are your only barrier to entry.

Having a blog with little or no visitors at all? Seriously, it is not surprise to see that there are many blogs are read only by the owner’s friends and families. The Blogsphere, after all, is a crowded place that’s full with competition. In fact, there are more than 130 million blogs indexed by Technorati since year 2002 and the figure is still growing.

Apparently, it takes a lot more hard work to own a successful blog that stand out from the crowd. Besides creating valuable blog content, bloggers nowadays are required to learn more in Internet marketing as well as search engine optimization (SEO) as these are the basic methods to expand readership.

Nevertheless, not every blog needs an SEO expert. Most mom and pop blogs, in fact, can achieve huge improvement with some simple SEO efforts. For instance, here are 9 simple ways you can improve your blog SEO scores.

1. Be a big fish in a small pond

The first thing to do in SEO is always keyword research. Get to know what the users are searching in your niche, learn your competition, and come up with a list of targeted keywords.

Smart bloggers avoid direct search engine competition with big players. Instead, they go for long tail keywords with moderate search volume and low competition.

2. Pick a keyword-rich domain name

A domain name is where blog readers start to know you. It should memorable and contains your primary keyword.

There are lots of examples proving that a keyword-rich domain name helps a lot in term of SEO. Blog ranks high for certain keywords just because the words are in their domain.

3. Focus on one to two keywords on each page

It is almost impossible for a webpage to rank high for 15 – 20 different keywords. Hence, it’s wiser to create several posts/pages and optimize each of them for a small number of different keywords.

Say that you are running a financial blog and wish to rank high on a series of technical terms like MACD, EMA, and RSI chart. The best way to do so is to create a different page for each of these terms and build different incoming links to these pages.

4. Customize your title tags

Title tags are the most important on-page SEO factor but yet most blog platforms emphasize so little on the issue. Most blog platforms use post title as the title tag and that is certainly not good enough. Title tags should be handcrafted independently and it should be more than just your blogpost title.
I am not sure with other blog platform but in case you are using WordPress, there are a few plugins that allow you to customize your title tags. Stephan’s SEO Title Tag Plugin (http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/) for example, is a good one to go with.

5. Use heading tags wisely

Heading tags (<h1></h1>) is another tags that are misused by most bloggers. I am not sure why but most blog theme designers like to use heading tags for sidebar titles. These heading tags are used on irrelevant words like Categories, About, Archive which offer zero SEO value.

To make sure your blog do well in term of SEO, such heading tags must be alternated. You can modify your CSS and quit using heading tags at your sidebar; or you can insert targeted keywords into your sidebar.

6. Make your blog reachable

Don’t do silly mistakes on robots.txt, don’t fool around with your site navigation; always have a link to your achieved posts; make sure your blog has a XML sitemap. All in all, make sure your blog can be easily crawled by search engines.

We want the bots to index deep and wide on your blog content. So make sure you provide enough roadways for the spiders.

7. Proper optimized internal links

Interlinking your own blogposts is not enough. As you already know, search engines (Google especially!) pay a lot of attention to links and both of your internal and external links count.

You only have control over internal link thus that’s the least you can do with linking. Make sure your internal links are filled with descriptive keywords and avoid using anchor texts like “click here” and “read more” that are meaningless to search engines.

8. Be consistent

Posting consistently improve your blog creditability and expand readerships. More over, it increases the number of pages indexed in search engine’s database and in turn, increases the probability your blog to be found by searchers.

9. Build links

You need incoming links as much as possible. Trade, beg, buy, or even steal links from websites or blogs related to your blog. There are various ways how you can build links – writing guest post, directory submission, blogroll exchange, link trades, forum signatures, and text link ads are some of the common known methods – some of these methods contain risk of being filtered by search engines while some do not.

Guest Author Block
This guest post is brought to your by Jerry of Web Hosting Secret Revealed. Jerry inspects and reviews web hosting companies based on his own usage experience. Readers looking for honest hosting advice are recommended to read further at his blog.

Are you worried about Email List Unsubscribes?

Here is the trap you might fall into.

1. I don’t want to email the email list because some people might unsubscribe.
2. I don’t want to sell anything to my email list because some people might unsubscribe.
3. I cannot email my list more than once a month because they might unsubscribe.
4. I need to give incredible value in each email or my email list members will unsubscribe.

The reality is that people join a list fully knowing that you will also try to sell something.  They know that they can probably unsubscribe and they will if they get too many emails or get annoyed with your message.

However, would you rather have a email list of 100 people that buy things regularly for you, or an email list of 10,000 people that just delete your message.

I am not saying to be irresponsible with your email list.  But also do not be afraid to use it and do not take unsubscribes personally.

An affiliate program creates an arrangement wherein a merchant pays a site owner (an affiliate) a fee to send them traffic which turns into new business. The affiliate sites place links within their site to the merchant’s site. The affiliate site then gets paid for each click, or for each sale depending on the arrangement as a result of that link. Affiliate marketing thus allows site owners to monetize their traffic without the need to hold inventory, fulfill or deliver services to the end consumer.

In practice, there`s only so much money you can make with the odd affiliate link here and there. To truly capitalize on affiliate marketing, your need to ensure that you can drive high quality traffic to you site at a sensible economic rate and that the programmers you are promoting are those that will attract the greatest click-through ratios and achieve optimal conversion rates.

From a merchant perspective, it is essential that you understand what attracts and motivates affiliates in designing or managing an effective affiliate programme. Getting the right affiliates on board is not only a great way of selling products on the Internet but it`s also an excellent way of boosting your reputation.

In general terms, the most effective means by which to promote your programme generally lie in networking, the affiliate networks themselves and in making direct contact with some of the high traffic “super affiliates”.

Most affiliates are ultimately motivated by earnings per 1000 clicks or EPM as it is commonly called. The factors determining this will include your sector, products, consumer brand awareness, the level of competition and the quality of your own site, together with your pricing strategy. All of these factors need to be correctly aligned in attracting and perhaps more importantly retaining the right affiliates. Major brands may offer lower headline commission rates but will engender greater consumer confidence and thus higher click-through rates and conversion rates and potentially better earnings. 10 sales at £20 commission from a major brand will be more attractive the one potential sale at £300 from an unknown market entrant.

That isn’t to say that new market entrants are unwelcome. Quite the contrary. New innovative offerings in a competitive space can server to help to differentiate one affiliate from another and most experienced affiliates will spread their risk accordingly.

Headline commission rates aside, affiliates are looking for merchants with attractive, FAST, easy to use sites (still sadly a minority). It takes a great deal of effort, time and money to attract traffic to an affiliate site in 2009. Few affiliates will be prepared to see their hard-earned visitors click the back button in frustration at a poorly designed or badly constructed merchant site.

If yours is a commoditised product or you have a large range of products, make sure you provide the networks and your affiliates with a data feed. This is particularly vital for price comparison sites and a decent Google Base feed may also help drive free traffic from Google product search and from the new `One Box`, part of Google`s universal search strategy.

Make sure programme terms are fair and that any commission reversals can be fully explained and justified. Keep you affiliates` attention with well constructed offers and voucher codes and be sure that the validity period and conditions surrounding these are made abundantly clear so that your affiliates can stay within the latest IAB guidelines concerning the use of voucher codes.

Communication is essential: whether you are working directly with your affiliates or via the networks and their account management teams, make sure that communications are clear, timely and positive. So many merchants rattle their affiliates with micro complaints, negative communications and poorly designed promotions. No-one wants to promote a £0.0002p saving on a bottle of shampoo between 3pm and 5pm this afternoon “sorry we forgot to tell you earlier”. No-one wants to be told that “we are currently reviewing the validity of the affiliate channel in the context of our upcoming marketing plans”. Positive. Timely. Accurate. Those are they keys.

Ultimately, any UK affiliate marketing program will only succeed so far without the backing of the major affiliate publishers. Getting them on side is only the first part of the equation. Handle the programme well and it will mushroom.

ABOUT Guest

Lammo.net is one of the most popular Affiliate Marketing Blogs in the UK. With a reputation for “telling it like it is”, it has attracted a very loyal following amongst the Internet Marketing community as a whole. Lammo is updated several times a week with news, comment and opinion on the very latest topics to affect the Affiliate Marketing Industry.

WordPress MU 2.7 was just recently released.

I have really wanted to start using WordPress MU because I keep getting more and more WordPress Blogs, both for me and for my clients.  However, I did not want to start out learning WordPress MU in the older version because I knew the upgrade was coming.

Would you like to know how geeky Marketer/IT Guys spend their evenings after their kids go to sleep?

I will be digging into WordPress MU 2.7 and seeing how I can bend it to my goals.  So fun!