Though this chart looks somewhat complicated, it’s actually pretty straightforward to follow and get a good idea of how affiliate marketing works.
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Here’s an email I received on YouTube, and my response about how to get started online with YouTube videos:
My response: Hey DJ Shadez, Thank-you for your compliment on my videos! Unfortunately, my time is really limited… I have consulting clients paying for time, and as much as I’d like to help you in a really in-depth way, my time is really stretched. However, here are some quick recommendations for you…
Let me know when you’ve uploaded 5-10 videos, and I’ll come check out your channel and offer some additional tips at that point. Thanks DJ! Kind Regards, Submitting RSS Feeds Hello and welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! This is Jonathan Kraft and I am here today to talk to you about RSS Feeds! Wooohooo! Sounds real boring, right? RSS Feeds, XML Feeds, sounds really technical and boring? Well, here’s what’s really cool about RSS and XML feeds is it allows people to actually read the content of your website in whatever format they might want to read it in; which is really great for them and not so great for you in a lot of ways! However, what is really great is that it does give you access to an entirely new audience that you may have not been able to reach before. There are all kinds of things you can do with your RSS feeds. Today we’re going to talk about how to find your RSS feed, what is your XML/RSS feed and what do you do with it? How do you use it to get more traffic to your website? So, what you’re going to do to find your RSS feed; if you’re currently running a WordPress blog, what you’ll do to find your WordPress feed – actually there’s a bunch of different things you can do; but the default URL for a WordPress feed is yourwebsite.com/feed. You can usually find it there, if not, you can look at /feed/rss2. If you don’t find it there and you are using WordPress, you may need to get someone to help you to find that RSS feed. I’m going to show you a couple of examples here. We have our Carrie and Jonathan site, if we go to www.CarrieandJonathan.com – this is the website currently. If we go to www.CarrieandJonathan.com/index.xml that will actually take us to the XML feed. I’m going to show you that here real quick; this website is actually built in a Content Management System (CMS) called Movable Type. Movable Type works a little bit differently than WordPress. But if we go to the index.xml page, we can actually see that yes, it does take us to an XML feed of our website and gives us options for how we want to subscribe to this; do we want to subscribe using Outlook, Bloglines or My Yahoo or Google or Live Bookmarks? So it gives you these different options to subscribe to our feed for Carrie and Jonathan. However, our GreenJoyment store, we have a couple of different things going on at GreenJoyment, but our GreenJoyment store actually runs off of WordPress. So if we go to www.greenjoyment.com/feed/rss2, because this is running on WordPress, it should actually give us a feed for the GreenJoyment store. So I’m going to show you the GreenJoyment store here just what it looks like if you visit it. Here’s what it looks like if you just visit the main page of the GreenJoyment store. But if we go to that greenjoyment.com/feed/rss2 you can see that the store also has its own feed here and this is done at greenjoyment.com/store/feed. And again, people can subscribe using Live Bookmarks, Microsoft Office Outlook, Bloglines, My Yahoo or Google. Now, you may not be using feeds yet, you may not be using feed readers; but there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are using feed readers and they want access to be able to read your site using feeds. What this means is two things: number one, you should have a big “Subscribe to our Feed” on your website where someone can find it very easily and that’s something I’ve done a really poor job of actually. If you look at different sites that we have, I’ve really not done a good job of putting RSS feed links onto our sites. But you can see here on our IdentityTheftSecrets site that I do have all kinds of options on the right-hand side here for where people can subscribe to our RSS feeds. So you need to put that button on your website, this XML or RSS feed which actually links directly to your feed to let people sign up for that. If you visit some of the most popular websites online … let’s go to ProBlogger, you can see when you visit their website it’s one of the first things you see up here, “Subscribe to ProBlogger via RSS.” “What is RSS?” “Follow us on Twitter.” Those are the first three things that they really want you to see and do when you’re there. And their feed has an 118,000 plus readers! So that might be something good for you to have! So what you want to do then is take your RSS feed, once you figure out what it is, take your RSS feed and go to the Resource link right below the video right here and submit your RSS feed to the Top 244 RSS Aggregators. Yes! This will take you some time. But it will be very beneficial for you to submit your RSS feed to all these different websites! You can see here, this is the website that you’ll see when you click the Resource link; he talks about what RSS feeds are and how it works. As of right now, they have 245 RSS feed readers that you can submit your RSS feed to. It’s probably a really, really good idea for you to spend some time, probably take two to three hours one day to go through and actually submit to all of these different feeds. The way I would recommend doing it would be to open five or six of them in a new tab and have all of your information in a document somewhere that you can just copy and paste it over and then you can just put it into those forms. Alternatively, the way I like to do it is using a service called RoboForm – I’ve talked about RoboForm before; it really, really saves a lot of time, effort and energy because you push one button and it fills in the form for you so you don’t have to spend all day either copying and pasting or typing. I recommend three things: find out what your feed is and put a button on your site that links to your feed; very similar to what we saw on ProBlogger. Then take your RSS feed and submit it to all these different RSS feed readers and then third and finally, before you do that, make sure you go sign up for RoboForm. There’s a link below here that will give you a discount on RoboForm; one of the best time-saving tools I use and recommend highly and you can get a discount, a $6 discount on it, by clicking the link. That’s it! Those are your three steps out of this video! Be sure to come back and visit often as we’ve got lots of great information coming for you on really how to make money on the internet. Resource: Today we’re going to be talking about online video distribution. Here’s the concept I want you to remember, which is, if you can have as many different distribution points for your content as possible, that is all the better! There are a lot of people who are concerned about duplicate content penalties in Google and that kind of thing; my perspective on that is if I can get video or audio content, article content is different, but if I can get video or audio content in as many places as possible, that’s as good for me as it can be. Because not everyone uses YouTube, lots of people do, but not everyone does; and not everyone uses MySpace, or not everyone uses Facebook or not everyone uses Twitter. So if you can find a way to get your content out and get it out in as many different places as possible that will result in the most traffic actually coming back to your website. On your web site is where you can decide what users are actually going to do. Either building a list or sending them on to an affiliate offer or having them click on an AdSense ad, whatever. So I want to talk today about video distribution. My favorite, favorite tool for video distribution is TubeMogul.com. Basically the idea with TubeMogul is, you go and upload your video once and they take care of uploading it to all the other websites for you. Not “all the other,” but I think they have 15 or 20 in there now. What you have to do is go register at the various different websites that offer video; so you have like MySpace and YouTube and Break.com and Howcast.com. You have to go register and sign up at these various websites. Once you’ve gone and signed up at those, you give your username and password to TubeMogul – you sign up for TubeMogul and then you give that username and password to those various sites to TubeMogul and they handle uploading your video to all these different sites for you so that you don’t have to do that. There are other tools that will do this as well, it’s just that TubeMogul is free and I think it works very effectively and it does all kinds of tracking for you too. So I’m going to go show you how this works. I’m going to go ahead and log into my TubeMogul account here and once I’m logged in, they have all kinds of options for me, but the one I’m going to chose here is “Upload a Video.” I’ll go ahead and click “To Upload” and you choose which ever video you want to upload. So I’m going to go ahead and “Browse” and I just made a video today – we’re going to cover how to do video in a different how to do video and tips and tricks for video in a different Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday. But what I want to do here is just show you how this distribution works. Now I’m going to go ahead and upload it. Now while I’m uploading the video, I’ve got a really fast upload speed here which is really nice, you can describe your video. Well this one is about “Green Jobs: How to Create Green Jobs.” Here’s what I always do, when I’m writing the description for the video, I always put in http://www. and then whatever website I’m trying to drive traffic back to. Because this actually on YouTube and a couple of other video sites, this will turn into an active link. I’ll show you that here on one of the videos that I have on YouTube; here’s a video I made on YouTube about Grow Tomato Plants in Milk Jugs: Growing Apartment Tomatoes and this is how to grow tomatoes in milk jugs in your apartment. But because on the left I’ve got the description of the video and I put http://www. it turns into an active link from YouTube. So if I click this link here, it will actually open a new window and take me directly to my website, Green Joyment. So you want to make sure that when you are doing descriptions for the video inside of TubeMogul, you always include the web address. I always leave a space in here too – not always, but most of the time, I leave a space in here. That’s what the video covers, I also generally, depending on how long of a description I’ve written, I will copy the web address and put it at the bottom as well. And people might go, well, isn’t that spamming? I don’t know; it doesn’t seem to prevent any of these guys from accepting my video so I don’t really worry about it. “Green” … “go green” … “green jobs” … “jobs employment.” Now the video is already uploaded here. I’m going to go ahead and select a category; this is instructional, How to, DYI – we’ll go “Upload” (DYI is Do it Yourself, by the way if you didn’t know that). Here are my logins for these various websites, of course I’m not going to show you my password; but look, down at the bottom, all I do is click “Launch” and I haven’t added Twitter even, that’s new since the last time I was in here. But if I click “Launch” what it does is it goes ahead and takes this video and submits it out to all of these different websites: YouTube, DailyMotion, Yahoo, MySpace, MetaCafe, Blip.tv, Veoh, Break, eBaums World, StupidVideos and Howcast. So with one upload and one button push, my video is now being distributed to all of these different websites. I can go to those websites and change the description on those different websites of this video if I want to do that – I may do that with a video that starts getting a good amount of traffic; or a video that I know is going to get some good traffic because I’ve done the keyword research to find out. But this is easy! All you have to do is upload the video once and press submit; once you’ve got your setups for these different websites, once you’ve already signed up for these different sites, you give that info to TubeMogul and then it basically takes care of uploading and managing that connection for you so that your video goes in there and it’s just done on all of these different websites. So, your homework from this video; go sign up for all of these different sites. If you’ve already got a YouTube account, that’s great! Go sign up for DailyMotion, Yahoo Video, MySpace; you may have a MySpace account but you haven’t used in years because it’s the “ghetto” of the internet at the moment, but it’s still a great place to have your content because some people are still using it and it’s picking back up. I think MySpace is doing a lot of things to try and get traffic back in there. Just go sign up for all these different websites; come back and put your username and password in for those sites at TubeMogul here and that will let you submit your video once and then upload it to all these different video websites. Also, one great, great, great tool, and I’ve linked to it below the video here with a discount code for going and signing up for all these sites, is RoboForm. RoboForm costs $30; it’s the best $30 I spent in 2006 – hard to believe it’s been that long! But it saves me so much time – I guess it was 2007, it was 2007. It saves me so much time on a daily basis and I’ve got a discount code right below here and yes that is an affiliate link. Yes, I will make some money if you click through the link to go to RoboForm, but I highly recommend it. It has saved me so much time and effort and energy! And yes, I’ve tried the other free password form fillers and I still like RoboForm much better. Especially when I can get it at the discount rate of $24. So – your homework, go signup for these sites; use RoboForm to do it, it will save you a lot of time and look forward to seeing you back here next week for the next Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday! RoboForm Password Filler Welcome back to another edition of Traffic Tuesday with ThreeMoneyMethods.com! I wanted to show you today in this video something I learned from James Martell, he’s a friend and a very smart marketer. One of the things he talked about was taking the images that you use for all of these different social networking sites you are a part of and actually putting a web address in them. And I thought that’s kind of an interesting idea, never tried it before, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I changed out mine on my personal Facebook page, I changed it out so that it included the URL CarrieandJonathan.com which is our site where we do all of our travel stuff. It was fascinating! The day I changed it out I got four comments from people and our web traffic actually increased on CarrieandJonathan from people who had been friends in high school, people who were former students – I used to teach German and theater, you may not know that, but former students who said, “Hey, I’ve never seen your CarrieandJonathan site, that’s pretty cool!” It worked here so I went and changed out my Twitter profile too; Twitter only allows you to have smaller images, but you can look at this close enough to see our domain name in the image there. So what I wanted to do is show you real quick how we did this. There’s a bunch of different free image creators online; I think you can just Google “free image creator” and you’d find a bunch. What I’m going to do is actually do it inside of Photoshop because I’m familiar with Photoshop. But if you don’t have Photoshop, just Google “free image creator;” and you should be able to create a little avatar or a custom logo here for yourself in a few different sizes. What we’re going to do is actually create it in five different sizes. I’m going to go “create a new image” here and we’re going to start off with it in 250 by 250 (pixels); most of these sites have square avatar images. Some of them have rectangles but the vast majority of them are in square image sizes, so we’re going to make the width and the height equal. We’ll go ahead and click “ok” here. So I now have my image; unfortunately it’s not fitting up with the box here, but you kind of get the idea. What we’re going to do is – maybe I’ll make it really simple and I would just put some text in here. We’re going to make one today for Three Money Methods. So I’m going to go ahead and put some text in here. You can see it’s overflowing the image there, so I’m going to have to make it smaller; so I’m just getting my formatting here all squared away. We’re going to make this just a little bigger. This really isn’t intended to be a Photoshop class; if you aren’t good at this, you can just hire somebody on Elance to create this kind of stuff for you. But it is a good skill to have and if you don’t have this kind of software, at least you’ll know what to do to have someone do this kind of work for you. We’re just going to go ahead and make this image – so I’m going to spare you most of the details of me creating this image because you can learn to do this on your own; this is really about traffic. But basically the idea is you get an image setup that actually includes your web address. You want to make it really, really, really clear when it’s this big size because you’re going to size it down to where it’s very small so that people will actually be able to come back to your website here I paused the video – you can probably tell that – because it’s a different size here, a little bigger and also because we’re more zoomed in or more done with the image here. But basically we’ve created an avatar image, this one is 250×250 (pixels). So I’m going to go ahead and save this and I’m going to save it for me inside of Photoshop here and I’m going to save it as a 250×250 image/ I’m going to put it inside of my Three Money Methods folder here and we will call this “avatar-image-250-250.” I’m going to save this as a Photoshop file and then I’m going to save it again as a JPG because that’s the file type that most sites accept. Occasionally, you’ll run into somebody that accepts a GIF and not a JPG, a G-I-F file and not a J-P-G file, but for the most part, people just accept the JPG file more often. So we’re going to go ahead and save this as a JPG here – it doesn’t need to be ridiculously high quality, we’ll put it at 55 there and we’ll go ahead and save that. What I’m going to do is I’m going to resize this image; so instead of it being 250×250, it’s going to be 200×200. I just want to check it out and make sure everything is still pretty visible here – yes, looks good! So I’m going to go ahead and save this; by the way, this is the Facebook size, 200×200. So we’re going to save this as “avatar-image-200-200” and we’ll save it as a JPG. Then we’re going to go “image-image size” and I’m going to save it as 120×120, so we’ll have one that is that size. Now this is getting a little harder to see, but you can see it, so I’m not going to worry about changing the size of things here just yet, although we will as it gets smaller here. But we’ll go ahead and save this as “avatar-image-120-120” and we’ll save it as a JPG. The reason for all these different sizes is different websites will only accept different sizes of image avatars. For example, when I showed you Twitter over here, Twitter only accepts a relatively small file of 50×50; I think that’s the size that Twitter accepts. So in order to get yours down to that size and make it still visible, you have to make it 50×50 or 75×75 or 80×80; I’m not exactly sure what their avatar image size is. But we’ll go ahead and go “image-resize” – you just want a bunch of different sizes so that it works on a bunch of different websites for you. I’m going to go ahead and put this at 80×80 and now, it’s really too hard to see. Unfortunately, it’s just become too difficult to read really anything on here. So I’m going to try and clean it up a little bit so I can actually see the domain name down here for just this text. Just by turning off the drop shadow, it becomes much easier to read what it actually is, so I’m going to go ahead and click “ok.” That’s really good enough for me at this point, just for purposes of this video, we’re going to go ahead and say that that’s good enough. I’ll go ahead and go “file-save as” the 80×80 JPG. Then there is an option for a 50×50; I just don’t know, unless your domain name is like just 10 characters long or something how you get it to be readable in that size of an image. But we’re going to try here just for purposes of the video. I do, on the domain name, “3” Money Methods with a number 3 instead of a t-h-r-e-e; so that becomes easier to separate this out here and gives me a little more space, although it’s still going to be hard to read. So I’m going to go ahead and size this down so that it’s 50×50 and then we’ll see how we can make it more visible in that size range. So we’re going to go 50×50 and as you can see it becomes very difficult to see it at all; so we’re going to try to get it so we can see it, but I don’t really worry too much about it because with the 50×50 size there’s not much you can do to make it really legible. But you can see it just becomes really difficult to make it so it’s even legible at all at that size. So what I might do here is get rid of the “.com” on the end and that gives me a little more room to stretch this out, just a little bit; and I think that’s as good as its going to get. So we’ll just leave it like that: “3MoneyMethods.” And I’ll go ahead and do a “file-save as” and this will be our 50×50 image. The nice thing about doing this is that it’s just another way to bring traffic back to you because people actually see that image in your profile when they’re looking at your posts or your things that you’ve put on Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or wherever and you get another opportunity to “brand them” with your logo or your name in the actual image itself. We always have this saying, “A picture equals a thousand words;” well, here’s your picture! And now we have all these different files sizes that we can use. This is our original and then we’ve got this one that we made which is much smaller. We can post these now onto different profiles and get traffic that way having put an image with a URL in it. That’s just a quick little tip and again I got that from James Martell. There’s a link, if you’re on the Three Money Methods website, where you can go to actually learn more from James Martell. Just a great guy and a great affiliate marketer! You can definitely learn a lot from him. Welcome back to another edition of Traffic Tuesday with Three Money Methods. This is Jonathan Kraft and today I want to talk about Article Traffic. This should be a relatively quick video to talk about getting traffic to your site using articles. There are a whole bunch of different article websites out there; there is some article software that you can buy that will help you submit your content out to a lot of different sites. So I’m not going to go into this topic really in-depth, but I want to show you just really quick some results I’ve been able to get from submitting articles at Ezine Articles and then offer you a tip about how to get traffic using articles on other people’s websites. What I’m going to do here is go ahead and sign-in to Ezine Articles. I’m now logged into my account here and you can see all kinds of stuff in here, but I’ve got some articles that are currently under review, I have some “problem” articles and then I’ve got a whole bunch of articles in here, couple of draft articles and then a bunch that have been published. I have 120 articles that have been published inside of here and these have been published over the last, I think, 3 years inside of Ezine Articles. If you look at the statistics on the left-hand side here, I’ve had 52,000 “article views;” meaning the articles I’ve posted in here have been read over 52,000 times! It’s pretty exciting; it’s a good start on getting a bunch of articles out there. Over 5,000 almost 6,000 people have viewed my profile. I have over 1,000 published articles inside of here and over 880 people have clicked on my URL links from the articles that I’ve posted. Now that’s not a huge amount in here; but if you think about 880 clicks just by taking the content that I was already writing anyway, sort of re-purposing it a little bit, rewriting it a tiny bit and putting it into my Ezine Articles account. Now, I’ve also got a writer that works for our business, her name is Lisa Carey, and she’s written some articles as well, a lot of articles actually and put them into here; she has access to my Ezine Articles account as well. But I want to show you, here is 880 clicks; I’m going to show you one of the sites that we’ve actually sent traffic to – it’s a site called IdentityTheftSecrets.com. This is the traffic from the last year inside of here; so July 9, 2008 through August 8, 2009. In that time, I have received from referring sites; I’ve received over 11,000 visits. Three hundred and eight of those have been from Ezine Articles. If we go into here, I can see that it’s been two different referral paths, it’s about 2-5 visitors every day and more so recently as we’ve got more articles in there. But it’s about 2-5 visits a day from people coming and checking out things after reading articles inside of Ezine Articles which is pretty neat! It’s pretty exciting that people actually come through to the site and all I’ve had to do is have someone actually go and post that content inside of my Ezine Articles account. Now before I had Lisa working with our business, I actually was going in and posting all this content myself and you may have to do the same thing. But it’s very interesting; the average time on the site is a minute and 33 seconds. I’ve got relatively low bounce-rate actually which means that people are actually viewing more than one page of the site when they come in and they’re staying on the site longer when they actually come having read an article from somewhere else. I also know the average visitor value to this site – I’m not going to go through all that – but the average visitor value to this site more than makes up for the time and the money that I spend on someone actually going and posting these articles inside of Ezine Articles. Again, you’ll probably have to do this yourself when you first get started, but sign up at Ezine Articles and just start posting some articles in there. There’s all sorts of helpful articles about what kind of content you should be putting inside of here; how you should write your articles to get people to come back to your website – you can go Google and find out all that stuff. But definitely sign up for Ezine Articles. I wanted to show you that just to show you that it does work and you do get results from it. The other thing I wanted to talk about is finding websites and blogs you can guest write for. Now you want to go identify – if you’ve already downloaded our marketing, if you’re in the marketing arena, if you’ve already downloaded the RSS feed for all of the different blogs in the marketing arena or in the green arena or the travel arena, you already know about all these blogs that are already publishing content in your arena. You should have a list and you should be following people in your arena, regardless of what it is; if it’s childcare or if it’s being a good parent or if its cell phones, whatever it is, you should have a list of blogs that you follow and comment on regularly. With some of those people, you should have started to build a relationship with and you know which ones bring the best traffic back to your website from your traffic logs inside of Google. So what you can do is actually send a letter and I’m going to give you the content of this letter, you just have to grab it from Three Money Methods and it basically says: “Dear Website/Blog Owner/Jim Smith, Do you need content written for JimSmithWebsite.com? Well, I’m a real person with real writing skills and would like to write an article or two for your website for free. Again, this is free content for you; all I ask for in return is that you let me have a bio box at the bottom of the article to link to my site.” And it kind of goes through the rest of it here, “this is unique content that I won’t be posting elsewhere online;” you are writing an article specifically for this person for their audience. “I can write an article on the topic of your choosing.” Yes, this is going to take you some time and yes it’s going to take some effort to actually write an article that fits their audience. However, it can result in significant volumes of traffic over time coming back to your website. So I’m going to give you this text right below the video here on the Three Money Methods website, if you’re doing this on YouTube or somewhere else, just come to ThreeMoneyMethods.com and put your name and email in on the website and in exchange, you’ll be getting all kinds of great stuff, but this is one of the things you’ll get and that’s basically it. If you’re not submitting articles out and getting traffic back into your website that way, you should be taking and sending your content out so that people will come back to your website. It’s a great way to get people to come back and view you. We haven’t even gone through submitting articles to magazines or all the different article websites; there’s thousands of article websites. There’s also “article randomizers” so that you write an article and then it takes your content and turns it into like 14 different articles that you can submit out so that you’ve got different content showing up in different places. There’s all kinds of different things you can do once you get started doing this. But the key is to get started! So I’ve shown you two simple ways today to get started getting website traffic using simple article content. I hope that’s helpful for you and we look forward to seeing you back here for another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays. Article traffic is a great way to get traffic to your website! Alright, so here is a quick video about how and why you want to do blog commenting. So basically, here’s the idea. Lots and lots of people have blogs, in whatever industry or arena you are working inside of. In this case, I’m going to show marketing blogs, but you could do whatever you wanted to do as far as whatever your industry is in going and commenting on other people’s blogs. So what I did was I actually hired somebody to go and to find blogs dealing with marketing. They went out and found all these different websites; they came back with a list of the Top 200 websites in terms of traffic and ranking for me and I loaded them into a Google Reader account. So I’m going to go in and log into my gmail account. If you don’t have a gmail account, you could set this up on your own, get a gmail account which is free. But basically all I did was … I went in and set up an account for our Three Money Methods site. If I click on “Reader” once I’m logged in here, by the way, don’t send email to ThreeMoneyMethods at gmail.com because I won’t get it – I just don’t check this account for anything. But if you click on Reader inside of here, I’ve loaded all of the blogs in here. I actually had somebody go in and add subscriptions to all of these blogs. So they just went through one by one and added subscriptions to the blogs. So I can click on “All Items” inside of here and I can read the most recent posts, today’s a Saturday, so there won’t be many that are too recent, but I can read the most recent posts about whatever people are talking about within the marketing arena. So, “Which CMS do you use?” Which Content Management System do you use? I’ll go ahead and open the link in a new tab and scroll down here; I’ve got a new tab opening at the moment; “Giving Affiliate Marketing another Go,” this is a guy who’s trying to do Affiliate Marketing, I’m opening that in a new tab, “AffMeter List of Supported Affiliate Networks Grows” … “Photos from my 27th Birthday” … ok, maybe we’ll post something in there … “Learning Specificity in Marketing.” Ok, I’ve got four tabs open now; you can see these here, “Which CMS?” “Giving Affiliate Marketing another Go.” So, I’m going to go ahead and go to the first one here, “Which CMS do you use?” Inside of here, “Which CMS do you use,” people use WordPress, blah, blah, blah. I’ve already commented on this site, so you can see that my information is already in here. “Hey, I use Movable Type and WordPress. I like Movable Type because it allows multiple websites from one installation, but I like WordPress because there are so many great tools for it that people have created.” Maybe you don’t know anything about Content Management Systems; so read the post and learn about it from whatever they’re saying here and then comment something that’s relevant to the discussion that’s going on. I just happen to know already the answer to the question, “What CMS do you use,” so I’m going to go ahead and post this comment. “Thanks for talking about your WordPress experience though. Good to know why other people choose the CMS that they do. Warmest, Jonathan.” Sometimes, if I’ve commented on a website before, I will put my web address actually in the comments if I know that it’s going to show up on the website. If I don’t know that it’s going to show up on the website, I won’t put my web address in here because I’ve already had the opportunity to put it in up here. I’m just going to shorten this down, MoneyMethods online and that’s it. “I use Movable Type and WordPress, blah, blah, blah.” I’m going to go ahead and “Submit Comment.” I’m going to do the same thing on this post, on this post, on this post and on as many other posts as I can, or want to, inside of here. Now again, you want to actually make comments that are relevant to what people are talking about. Number one, you’re building relationships with all the top people in your arena and number two; you are posting links to bring people back to your website. But first and foremost, you’re building relationships! So you want actually to post something that’s relevant to what they’re saying inside of their post. The reason I want to show you this here is if I go into my Google Analytics account, I can show you the difference between posting blog comments and not posting blog comments. So I’m going to go log-in to Google Analytics here and we’re looking at Three Money Methods inside of Google Analytics and this is just referring sites that referred people just to the front page of ThreeMoneyMethods.com. Inside of here, you can see, I’ve got pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic (laughs), pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic; all this no traffic, no traffic, no traffic. Hey, then one day it jumps to five and three and three, and look at this! Thirteen visits and the vast majority of this is coming from blog commenting! All I did was go post some comments on other people’s well-trafficked websites, to actually add some conversation to the discussion and become part of what’s going on in the community. I posted this day, I posted this day, posted blog comments. I don’t even think I posted any on this day and I didn’t post any on this day. But hey, look! I posted a bunch this day and I brought in 20 visitors basically to my website that day. I didn’t post any Thursday and I didn’t post any on Friday, but I’m still picking up residual traffic from the work I did on Wednesday! All you have to do to bring people to your website is go and post comments on other people’s websites that are already getting traffic! Become part of the conversation of what’s going on in your industry and your arena and you can actually bring traffic back to your website to get them to do whatever you want them to do on your website! Now the only thing you can do on Three Money Methods, when people come to this page, the only thing they can do is actually put their name and email in; they either go away or they put their name and email in; now I’ve done that on purpose. But whatever goal it is that you have for your website, you can use blog commenting just to bring people to the website. So here’s the deal; I have three different lists that I have put together – the top 200 blogs. I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “green,” I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “travel” and I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “marketing.” If you will come to ThreeMoneyMethods.com and put your name and email in, I will give you what’s called an OPML feed to just upload automatically into your Google Reader; so you don’t have to go through the process of hiring somebody to find the top 200-250 blogs and then put them into your Google Reader, all you have to do is download one file from Three Money Methods website after you put your name and email in, just download this file and then upload it into your Google Reader and you’ll have all of those blogs already sitting in your Google Reader for free, from me just in exchange for putting your name and email in here at ThreeMoneyMethods.com. Go ahead and come to the website – I hope this tip has been very helpful for you. Posting comments on other people’s blogs is a great way to find out what’s going on in your industry and your arena and it’s also a great way to get people back to your website to do whatever you want them to do once they’ve actually come to you to find out more information about what it is that you do. So, I hope this has been very helpful — definitely come visit us at Three Money Methods for more great tips about how to do online marketing! Thank you very much for taking the time to watch this video. |
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Blog Commenting: Video 2
Hello and welcome back to Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday! This is Jonathan Kraft and today we’re going to be doing a follow-up on last week’s conversation about blog commenting.
I got some feedback from the video and I love that feedback – it’s so great to get some feedback from people as far as things I can do better and ways I can help you better. So definitely keep the feedback coming in!
I wanted to make this follow-up video for the things that people have wanted and requested. So here’s what we’re going to do; one of the things somebody said is, “I don’t really understand what you did with that whole Google Reader thing. How does that work exactly?”
Ok! Well here is my gmail account. Let’s say you had logged in and this is our ThreeMoneyMethods [AT} gmail. By the way, don’t send us email here – I will not get the email if you send it here. By chance I might pick it up, but chances are not good! So don’t send us email here; if you want to send us an email, use the email that came to you with this content.
If you want to log in, so what we’re going to do here is we’re actually just going to log out of this gmail account – well, I’m logged in. I’ll take it that you can figure out how to go to www.gmail.com or go to www.Google.com/mail. Once you’re logged in there, you’ll see that there’s a place you can click on up top that has a little thing that says, “Reader.” Alright?
Inside of Reader here, you can go into Google Reader; this is all of my items from last week in Google Reader. If I click on Settings in here, this is where you are going to upload the OPML feed that I gave you last week with all of these blogs; it’s about 260 marketing-related blogs that you can just upload right in this import/export tab. What you’ll do is you’ll click “upload” and you’ll find the OPML file, it’s an XML file that you downloaded from me. You’ll upload it right into here –you’ll click “browse, you’ll find it on your computer and then you will upload it clicking this button.
Once you do that, you’ll go back to your Google Reader and you’ll see inside of Google Reader that you now have all of the exact same blogs that I have that I’m posting comments on. These are some of the top marketing blogs on the internet.
You can also add your own Google Reader items by adding a subscription. You’ll just type in www.”whatever”.com – whatever the web address is and Google Reader is going to go out and try and find a feed at that website.
You don’t have to know all that stuff; feeds and how does RSS work – you don’t have to know all of that. Just take the OPML feed, upload it and start commenting on other people’s sites.
I love the feedback from people going, “Hey, I’ve been commenting on other people’s websites and I’ve been getting some traffic to my site – it’s cool! I love it! Thanks so much!” Love that feedback! It’s really cool that people are actually taking action on the information.
The other comment I got from people is, “Hey, you know Jonathan, this sounds great, but I don’t have 30 minutes a day to go and post to these websites. Isn’t there someway that I can have someone else do that work for me?” Well, two things to be aware of: yes, is the answer to that question; the other thing is what you’re doing when you go out to these other websites is you’re building relationships. If you’re comfortable with someone else building relationships on behalf of your business, then yes, absolutely you can have somebody else go and post comments. You could pay them or here’s what I figured out, you can actually just hire an intern. There are a lot of people looking for internships in the internet marketing space. So what I’ve done is created a job description for someone who wants to go and post on blogs. What I want to do is find someone who is a Marketing Blog Commenter and I will give you this text too actually – just because I’m a nice guy.
This is actually the text that I wrote to go find somebody and you’ll have to pay to find somebody; yes, you’ll have to post an ad on Craig’s List which at least in my big city here in Denver, is $25. But if you find somebody good, isn’t that worth it — all the time you could save? So Marketing Blog Commenter … here’s what the ad says:
“First 30 days unpaid intern needed. If you enjoy reading and learning about marketing, especially internet-related marketing, this may be the internship for you. I need someone to go and read marketing and business material at a variety of blogs and news sources online ….”
You get the idea. Here’s the deal, in here I’ve posted “you must be wicked smart, detail-oriented, a great communicator, trustworthy, hardworking, adaptable, insightful, native English speaker.” Look, I want to weed people out. I don’t want to have someone coming through my business saying, “hey, ya know, ummm, yeah, this was a great blog comment …”
No! I want somebody who rocks! I want somebody who will go and actually post really creative, really unique comments. I’ve posted up at the top, “first 30 days unpaid, I need an intern – somebody who’s going to work for 30 days for free.” Then, if that person’s good:
“the first 30-45 days this work will be an unpaid internship at which time, if there’s a mutual fit and the work you’ve done has been done in a quality fashion, we will negotiate an hourly rate not to exceed $9 an hour.”
There are so many people in the world who would love to be paid $9 an hour just to go and read and post comments. There are so many people who would love to do that. And where do you find those people? Well, one great place is Craig’s List! You just go log-in to Craig’s List, create an account at Craig’s List, post a new ad; you’ll see it’s very easy. I’m posting a new ad in Denver because that’s close by to where I live, but you can post an ad anywhere. I’m “Offering a Job” …. “Denver” …. and I’m looking for an internet internship … let’s go “Marketing/Advertising/PR” … there’s my current total, it’s going to cost me $25. Then I’m just going to post the ad right inside … post it or paste it. Compensation: I could just copy and paste from here.. “First 30 days unpaid; $9 an hour after that … up to $9 an hour. Contact From – I don’t know Contact From is … I’ve never seen that before, that’s new to me. Telecommuting is fine; part time is good; it’s contract-type work; it’s an internship and that’s fine.
I will go ahead and click Continue here and there’s my post: “If you enjoy reading about marketing, blah, blah, blah. Wicked smart, detailed-oriented, funny is a plus, if you’re not familiar with RSS/Google Reader,” all my apostrophes turned into funny characters which stinks because then I need to go back and edit it, but otherwise this is my job posting and this is where we’ll find somebody, on Craig’s List. Craig’s List will then send me emails when people respond to this ad. I’ll get emails from people who are interested in the ad.
So that’s really all you have to do to find somebody to do this kind of work for you. And you will get responses from posting this job posting if you post it in a busy market where people are actually looking for this kind of work.
You’re going, “well I don’t want to spend that kind of money.” You have to spend some money to get someone’s time or you have to use your own time to get the money! Those are your two options.
At any rate, here’s what I’m giving you: this whole job description is yours at ThreeMoneyMethods.com. If you’re not reading this on the blog, then you are not seeing this text; but you can come to ThreeMoneyMethods.com and put your name and email in and I’ll be happy to give you this text in exchange for you having come to the website, and putting your name in here. You can also learn a little more about me and my background and what we’ve been able to do because of our internet businesses. But what you’ll do is just come to the website and put your name and email in here. Then you’ll get that OPML feed for free that I mentioned and you’ll also get the text for this job posting via Three Money Methods.
So I hope that makes sense, but seriously, by doing this blog commenting, you can drive so much traffic! I had a day in the last week where I had 50-plus visits just from going and commenting on other people’s blogs. It’s just not that hard and it just doesn’t take that much time.
By the way, yes I am interested – if you’re a person who wants to be paid $9 an hour and is willing to work for the first 30 days for free to go and post comments on behalf of Three Money Methods and they’re good comments, I would love to talk with you further to see if this would be a mutual fit for us.
Thank you for watching the video and be sure to come back – next week, we’re going to have another great video from Three Money Methods about how to really drive traffic to your website and how to start generating revenue from the traffic that you’re bringing in.