Robert Plank

In the past we've talked about creating an autoresponder sequence to automate relationship building with your prospects or even your existing customers.

If you had 10 autoresponder messages, you wouldn't set them up to use them up in 10 days. You'd space them out to give subscribers a chance to take in the information.

Remember, you aren't only concerned with readers. The bottom line is how much money does your blog make... if it makes nothing then what's the point?

I'm not saying it has to make money directly with ad space or AdSense. If your blog gets you some regular traffic, which leads to more autoresponder signups, which eventually makes you more sales, then your blog is a source of income.

• You want to keep your readers' interest, but at some point get them a little bit bored so they'll check out one of your other products that sells something.
• You want to give other blogs and sites a chance to mention a recent article of yours before it's taken off the front page.
• Don't forget that search engines penalize sites that toss up too many pages too quickly and don't grow at an average rate.

Like I said when I started this blog, I wrote 50 blog entries before I made the blog public. I could post one entry a day and burn it all up in two months, then be left with nothing else to write. Or I could post one entry per week and last a year. I could post 2 entries a week and last 6 months before I had to come up with any new content.

Here are my tips about not burning up a blog too fast, based on my experience with running membership sites and watching other peoples' blogs start out well but eventually fail miserably:

1. Have a reserve of emergency articles -- at least 6 months to a year's worth -- to continue populating your blog at a regular pace. This doesn't have to be a lot. If you intend on posting a minimum of one article per month, all you need are 6 to 12 articles.
2. Don't post more than twice a week. Daily is too much even for active subscribers to keep up with.
3. If your articles are 1000 words in length or longer, break them up into manageable 250-500 word pieces. You can perform a word count using Microsoft Word or any decent text editor.
4. Post replies to comments for two reasons: to let your readers know that you are reading what they say and encourage them to keep commenting, and keep your entries fresh, even if they are a few days or weeks old.

Comment below and tell me if you have a reserve of emergency articles for your blog or if you just wing it... and if so do you post on a regular basis or whenever you feel like it?

If you have spent even 3 weeks or less learning about Internet marketing, I'm sure you have heard about blogging, videos, squeeze pages, pop-ups, and autoresponders.

Everyone in internet marketing uses them. There's one problem with that: EVERYONE IN INTERNET MARKETING USES THEM. When you are in the internet marketing niche and use autoresponders, you are Superman and you are still stuck on the planet Krypton -- you're just like everyone else.

If you take all the internet marketing techniques you know into other niches, you become a guy who can fly around in the air while everyone else is stuck walking from place to place.

Say you are in the fly fishing niche. Everyone else is being non-imaginative and tossing up poorly made web pages with hundreds of articles and no call to action. Or placing AdSense on pages and not trying to make the site sticky with an autoresponder newsletter or with backend products or paid memberships

No one is making YouTube videos, displaying one time offers, or split testing. You will be the guy setting up joint ventures while everyone else is still trying webrings and link exchanges.

If you take what you know about internet marketing and apply it to a sleepy, underdeveloped niche, you will become Superman. You will kick ass.

Never sell to the "how to make money" niche. It is full of people with no money lying about how they made money, or people with no money wanting to make money.

If you have to do internet marketing, narrow it down. Internet marketing is too broad of a niche. That's like having "computers" or "computer programming" as your niche... it's too damn non-specific. Instead of internet marketing, focus on search engine optimization, or article marketing, or Web 2.0 promotion (Squidoo, StumbleUpon, MySpace) ... don't be the same as everyone else.

Don't be the same as ANYONE else, in fact.

Don't try to sell your niche stuff to internet marketers. If you are breaking into a new niche you have to start from scratch. The exception to this is if you want a jumpstart, create something that's NOT just an e-book -- a DVD or CD -- and sell resale rights to the internet marketers.

NEVER offer private label rights. In doing this you are creating more competition for yourself but you are getting your name out there.

Don't brag about or mention your extra-cirricular efforts to other internet marketers. If word gets around that your niche is lucrative and an easy target you could get some fellow Supermen trying to take away some of your action.

This is why some hardcore niche marketers will use a fake name, register a totally new business name and host their sites on a separate server with WHOIS protection to keep their real identity secret.

I don't do the fake name stuff with my PHP niche because I am just outside of the internet marketing niche. My niche is where PHP and internet marketing overlap. I teach site builders how to write PHP scripts. So I am not teaching something as advanced as the techie people who want to learn programming as a career, but slightly more advanced than people watching WordPress videos or learning Flash and HTML.

My competition consists either of rockstar programmers who know a lot but can't or won't teach it to dummies, and have more fun talking about XML processing or RAID arrays instead of the easy stuff I teach. I also have competition who are internet marketers but not rockstar programmers, who pass along little tips but don't understand PHP enough to write their own code. They only know how to pass along other peoples' stuff.

To sum breaking into virginal markets using your existing IM skills:

1. Be unique.
2. Get into a niche that you know like the back of your hand.
3. Stay away from the how to make money niche.
4. Use your internet marketing skills to outperform everyone else in non-IM niches.
5. Don't talk about your efforts with internet marketers.
6. Know exactly what kind of people you are selling to.
7. Know exactly who your competition is and what kinds products and web sites they have.

Once you've got that site setup, use:

• The 5 Minute Article method to get an infoproduct developed quickly in a couple of hours.
• Fast Food Copywriting to put together sales letters quickly.
• PaySensor to handle PayPal payments and deliver products to customers via email.
• Action PopUp to gather leads and stick them into a mailing list like ListMail or Aweber.
• JV Plus along with a system like Clickbank to turn competitors into your affiliates.
• Sales Page Tactics to increase your conversion rates even more.

My question to you is:

What is your best tip to establish yourself in a new niche?

Once you get in the habit of setting up a list for every product you create, the way to get people to remember you is by showing your personality.

I build relationships through forum marketing.

• You could post special offers every now and then by giving visitors of a certain forum a huge discount compared to the general public. I do this with WSOs.
• You could add video responses to posts every now and then and send traffic there so people see your face instead of the words you type. I did this with a YouTube video but I'm not sure if I'm going to post to YouTube on a regular basis because I felt like I was talking about myself too much.
• You could do a low tech link exchange. If someone posts a comment on your blog with their URL, visit their blog and leave a thoughtful comment with your URL.

Use your real name. Any time you join a forum, use your real first and last name. If you plan on pumping out lots of small products you are going to have lots of small web sites and almost never one big web site. The exception could be if you register YourName.com and stick a blog on there with a link to all your products.

Find a forum in your niche that ranks high on the search engines, and make that the only forum you visit for a month. I don't care if there is some forum you are addicted to and have to check every 5 minutes. Take a vacation from that forum and build a reputation on that forum.

I want you to make 50 posts over time on this new forum. They need to be real quality replies that use your expertise on the subject. They need to be answers that could only have come from you.

Never make a "me too" post. Never mention your web site in any reply. Don't start any new topics, just reply to existing ones. Many forums have a link to find posts with no responses... you can reply to these but stay away from any more than a month old.

Once you have these 50 posts, edit your forum profile and add a signature with a link to your web site. Many message boards will require a certain number of posts before you can add a signature anyway.

Only put one link there. Make the text on the link a headline, not just the name of your site. Don't make the text any fancy size or colors, just center if it possible.

Then leave the forum and forget about it. Search engines like Google will pick it up. Now if someone is looking for the solution to one of those specific problems you solved on the forum, they'll find that thread and if you were helpful, might click your signature link and end up on your site. This is in addition to all the members of the forum who visit it on a regular basis.

I have done this with nearly a dozen message boards in my niche. What got me started doing this was checking my referrer logs. Your referrer logs in your control panel will tell you what sites send traffic your way. So someone might ask for help in getting a freebie script of mine customized, or ask if a product I offer is really legit. I register on the forum using my real name, answer the question, then poke around a little while after.

I have even signed up to a $60/month private forum to build relationships based on my referrer logs... but that's just because I'm crazy.

I consider using referrer logs to decide which forums to hit a better indicator than Google search results, because you're already certain traffic is going to flow in your direction.

Any time you offer anything, you need to create a sublist for it.  If you have a paid product, create a sublist to put customers into.

If you offer a freebie report, create a sublist for it and require your visitors to opt-in so you can send the download link via e-mail. Don't ask for an e-mail address after they get the product, this works about as poorly as if you sold someone a book and then asked them to pay for it after they're done reading it.

These all need to go to the SAME autoresponder (so you can broadcast a product launch to everyone) but have segmented sublists so you can deliver updates only to some existing buyers, or offer special deals to certain lists.

Do you want to know everything I know about list building?

• Turning existing customers into subscribers gathers the most responsive subscribers.
• Requiring an opt-in in exchange for a free product gathers much less responsive subscribers.
• Trading free information (a newsletter) for an e-mail address gathers even less responsive subscribers.
• Getting subscribers from pay-per-click traffic, co-ops and traffic exchanges gathers subscribers not worth marketing to.

Here is how I broke into the PHP niche: I created a newsletter and offered a free 30-page PDF report in exchange for signing up. This is my "main" sublist. I found some old articles of mine and filled up an autoresponder series with 6 months of follow-ups (1 or 2 messages per week). Most of the time -- especially at the beginning -- I would offer lots of free advice and information. A few weeks into the seriesI mention some of my freebie products to get them on more of my lists. Then I mention some more of my paid products.

Notice how I say "mention." I don't say I switch from articles to promoting my products. I talk about something and then say, "Here is how you solve that problem: (my URL)" or, "If you are interested in that topic, here is more information about it: (my URL)."

Blend content with sales. Too many people try to sell too early or try a hard sell after piling on lots of free info.

About filling up an autoresponder, I tend to do one per week for six months for the main newsletter. For the product sublists, I will space out messages at about one per month.

• First I would ask what they thought of the product, and sent them to a feedback form so I could actually get their response.
• In the next message I would offer a surprise bonus for being a loyal subscriber.
• At some point I would send them to a feedback form again asking for a testimonial and telling them to make sure to include their name and web site URL so they could get some free promotion from my site. (It's always about what's in it for them.)

You don't need to fill up every sublist with an autoresponder sequence because you're going to be pushing your product launches to all sublists every now and then. You also need to remember that many people will be subscribed to more than one of your sublists -- and who wants 5 e-mails a day from the same person? Not me.

You do need people to remember who you are and that's what we'll deal with next: relationship building.