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I’ll Take You to a $5000 Seminar July 20-22, in Las Vegas, for Free
I have never offered anything like this for free. In July I'm getting trained by a guy who has made 1 million dollars in 90 minutes, speaking at a seminar.
I want to take you as my guest to Armand Morin's "Persuasion X" speaker training seminar in Las Vegas, Neveda on July 20-22, 2010. That's a Tuesday through a Thursday.
I have spoken on stage four times. A couple of weeks ago, Lance and I presented on membership sites at a seminar in Minneapolis to a room of 50 people.
7 people had already bought our $997 package in the past, but we got 7 new people to pay us $999.
Think about that, $7000 bucks from a 90 minute presentation, that I would have done for free anyway.
If you ever want to speak from the stage, if you want to get better from with your webinars, or even just become more confident, then you should come to this very secret seminar.
All I want from you, is to tell me why I should take you as my free guest. But here's the thing:
1. It's up to you to drive or fly to Vegas on your own.
2. You are on your own, hotel and food-wise.
3. I don't want you sitting next to me at the event, go find your own friends... the room is full of proven five thousand dollar buyers
4. You will get to meet with me, and talk to me at the seminar
Like I said, this seminar literally costs $5000 but I want to take you as my free guest so you can find out:
- How to become an in-demand professional speaker
- Persusasive presentation
- Control and lead your audience
- Hypnotic speech patterns
- Structure your offer so it makes the most impact with your audience
- How to sell membership products from the stage
- Exact PowerPoint designs to increase your sales from the stage
- How to "work" the stage: where to stand and what to do with your body, plus the most POWERFUL closing sequence ever created
Go ahead, tell me why I should take you as my free $5000 guest. If you have the best answer, I'll buy your way into this $5000 seminar.
You Think Too Big And It Is Hurting Your Business: Why Gary Vaynerchuk Was Wrong
If you never had the chance yet to read Gary V's crush it book, I definitely recommend it. In fact, if you ask me privately I have tons of copies of it and I am willing to give you one for free.
Gary took his father's liquor store and turned it from a $4 million dollar business into a $50 million dollar business.
The biggest lesson I got out of his very quick read was this: When you are a self-employed entrepreneur you are going to work harder and you are going to work more hours than someone who has a day job. It doesn't matter, if you are going to be doing something that is fun that excites you to get out of bed in the morning.
Gary talks a lot about getting noticed by the big media companies on social media like twitter, facebook and you-tube. I think a lot of marketers take that advice too far, especially when pursuing the getting bought out model.
In case you weren't paying attention during the first dot com boom of the late 90's and early 2000's. The idea is that you mass tons and tons of users get tons of market penetration while breaking even or even losing money, in the hopes that some big company will buy you out for $100 million dollars.
You-tube lost money for years even after they were bought out by Google, until recently. Facebook lost money until it partnered with Microsoft and started displaying ads. MySpace lost money until it was bought out by Rupert Murdock, and the list goes on.
Chances Are: You Won't Get Bought Out By Someone Else!
You can't count on that payday. If you are already making millions of dollars a year and can afford to lose money for years and years, that's fine. Ignore my advice.
If you are trying to make a living, and build a business you need to make some kind of profit. It is NOT evil to make money! Although people like Gary V. have enough money to think big, you are still starting out and you need to think small.
When you pay $20 dollars for advertising, just try to get $20 dollars back. On a regular basis, I will post form offers or create pay per click campaigns for load to your products to make some of the money back, and to attract affiliates, and to get a few extra leads.
If I spend $20 dollars to promote a free offer, and I get 20 opt ins out of that promotion, I know I have made my money back. I know I get more than $1 dollar per subscriber on my list.
When I find affiliates, I have no problem giving them bulk of my profits. I pay 60% commission to my affiliates with lifetime tagging.
I know a lot of people who offer 100% commission on the front end, and 0% on the back end. What does this mean? It means that you might have a report selling for $20 dollars that up-sells people to a certain course for $100 dollars. You have a $20 dollar front end, $100 dollar back end.
When an affiliate promotes that $20 dollar product, if it makes a sale they get all the $20 dollars and none of the $100 dollars. What I do instead is give 60% of both. That means if they make a sale at $20 dollars, I will give them 60% or $12 dollars of the $20. When somebody then buys the $100 dollar product, I will give the affiliate $60 dollars of that as well.
Again, I don't mind giving away that high commission because I would not have made that sale without that affiliate.
Affiliate Sales Are Just "Extra!"
Even if you do want to get yourself bought out some day, you need to show some kind of earnings potential. You-tube, and facebook, and twitter can easily sell because they've massed millions of users. Just in case you don't make it to the millions of users, try to monetize the few number of people you have. That way you will find it easier to devote the time to a site that is making money versus a site that might make money sometime in the future.
I do agree with most of what Gary says. I don't want you to repeat the same mistakes made during the dot com bust, which was losing money for years in exchange for users. You don't have to give away everything for free. Your knowledge and your services are worth something. You are just going to have to trust me on this.
Do you agree or disagree with what I had to say today? Leave me a comment below right now giving me your quick and honest opinions.
WordPress 3.0, WordPress 3.1, and WordPress 4.0 Explained
But Here's the Big Question:
Should You Upgrade?
- YES, if you are running a free (open) blog such as RobertPlank.com, to get used to the new features and take advantage of themes that use the new functionality.
- NO, if you are running a mission-critical WordPress membership site, especially if it's hosted with Wishlist Member.
Three First impressions About WordPress 3.0
- Better looking Dashboard with a "notification" area (like Facebook)
- Batch updating of plugins (now if only the updater wouldn't stall on my server)
- New theme-dependent things like menus, featured image, and standardized way of changing your header graphic
Three Things You Might Not Have Noticed
- WordPress MU (MultiUser): so you can create a blog network if you change your config file
- author specific templates: if you know how to rename your theme files, you can give different users a different admin interface
- custom post types: you could create an e-commerce store or article directory in WordPress easily without "fudging it" using pages.
3 Things to Look Forward to in WordPress 3.1
(coming August 2010)
- newer HTML editor: local autosave, paste with formatting, and faster performance such as showing text while resizing
- prevent comment impersonation: if someone tries to leave a comment on your blog, and that email address belongs to a registered user, require them to login
- email authentication: users can login using their email address and no longer have to remember usernames, only passwords.
4 Things I Want to See Before WordPress 4.0
- better plugin updater: mine still times out, I at least want a progress indicator, and maybe even the ability to update a plugin WITHOUT going into maintenance mode or halting the entire thing
- official plugins: please build the All in One SEO Pack, Robots Meta, Google Sitemap, Subscribe to Comments, Twitter Tools, Get Recent Comments, List Category Posts, MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer, WPTouch, and Psychic Search plugins right into WP so I don't have to install them by hand on every single blog I setup
- automatic update: I really don't see this coming until WordPress 4.0, but I would like a Windows-like function to automatically check, and update, the blog, theme and plugins overnight
- big picture stats: when I login to the dashboard, I want to see the word count of my entire blog, the average word count of my posts, my top commenters, the average comment length, how many posts per month, how many comments per day, how many hits per day, and how many searches per day my blog is getting
What do you think about the new WordPress? Have you upgraded yet or are you waiting until a more stable and tested version?
New Apple iPhone 4
My new iPhone 4 showed up a day early (Wednesday)... some lucky people even got theirs on Tuesday!
I did have to wait a few minutes for it to activate with AT&T, and for it to sync my iTunes movies and songs... but once that was all done... well you check it out!
Check it out... ability to use FaceTime for video calls, you can choose the front or back camera when taking photos... it's thinner, lighter, faster, and better looking.
Apple already introduced multitasking to the old (3G and 3GS) phones on Monday, so I've already been able to stream music from a radio station via Pandora while checking email or browsing the web on my phone.
- iBooks (book reader) is new, even though we already had the Kindle app
- Netflix app is coming so you can stream movies to your phone (like you already can with iPad)
- iMovie is coming out soon which will let you edit videos with all the features as the desktop version
- Farmville is coming to iPhone pretty soon as well
What phone do you have? (Come on Droid people, let me have it!) Are you getting this new phone?
Why Your Email Subscribers Hate You
The last time that you sent an email to your list, did you get less responses than you wanted? Did you get less sales than you wanted? I hope your answer to both of questions was yes. You should always be moving forward and growing. In order to take that next step, let's figure out what you are doing wrong in your email marketing.
You Don't Email Enough
When I explain list building and email marketing to most people their problem is that they don't contact their list enough. I know that this was my problem for years when I first built a list. I had no idea what to say to my list. I didn't know if people would even care what I had to say.
But guess what, they joined your list and the only way to find out if they like what you have to say, if they hate what you have to say, or even if they will unsubscribe is to email that list. You just won't know until you talk to them.
Please email at least once a week, if not more than once a week. Send them to your latest blog post. Cut, copy and paste your latest article in there. Buy a pack of private label-right articles and use those for follow up content. Pitch your latest offer and copy and paste chunks of the sales letter into your message.
You Email Too Much
The problem I see with those marketers who have built their list from a bad traffic source is that they email too much. People who have built their list from ad-swaps, JV giveaway, and even safe lists are dealing with such an unresponsive list. They have to email those people three or four times a day with different offers just to make any money at all.
The problem with this model is that it gets the gullible people to keep clicking and keep buying. But gets your real long-term buyers to leave your list. It is possible to hit your list too much, and too much is more than once per day.
The only exception to this is if I am launching a product and its launch day. For example, I am running a webinar, I will email three times a day. But on a regular basis, I will only email my list a maximum of one time per day.
You Email Crap
It is not enough to just email regularly or email just the right amount per week. You need to send people good emails. Do your emails blend your teaching and your pitching? If it is too much teaching or too much pitching, you are doing your subscribers a disservice.
Think about it, if all you are doing is pitching, then all you are saying is buy, buy, buy, buy. If all you are doing is teaching, you are giving them ideas, but you are not telling them how to take everything to the next level.
Your emails should be short and to the point. You should give people at least one thing to think about today, and then transition into some URL you want them to click on. That way, no one can complain.
Even if they don't like the offer you are giving them... they can at least read the email and not click the link at the end, so they will walk away with some free piece of advice.
It's Just Not A Good Fit
When people sign up for one of my free courses, or purchase one of my products. I let them know that they are getting on a list where they will receive updates from me about all my future products, not just the one they bought.
Some subscribers don't think that should be the case. That's okay, that's their opinion. What I know is that if there is someone online who I really like, whose products I like to buy, who I want to be like and emulate, I want to get regular emails from them. Because otherwise I will start thinking about and wondering what they are doing today and what their latest project is.
Your true fans want to know what you are up to, what you are launching, and how they can buy it so they can get more value out of it than the price they paid. Just like everything in life, it is not for everyone. That is why if someone wants to get off your list, it should be easy and permanent for them to leave.
Do you know now why some of your email subscribers hate you? Which of the four reasons above is the reason? What are you going to do differently in your email marketing now that you have this information?
Leave a comment below explaining yourself.
Build Up a Mailing List by Attracting Web Traffic
You send traffic to a squeeze page and people opt-in to a list. Then you send them more free info over time to build trust, and eventually start hitting them with offers related to that niche.
How the heck do you get traffic to that list?
Method 1: Join forums in that niche and post real content. Don't mention your site, don't try to sell people on anything, just participate in conversations and get people to recognize you. After you get 25 posts, edit your profile and place a link to that squeeze page in your forum signature.
Method 2: Create a blog. When news hits in your niche, write a blog entry about it, and add your link at the end. For example if a local news story about a cat massager business hits the news, talk about it and link to your squeeze page at the end. Locally hosted blogs like WordPress will "blog and ping" ... so your posts will hit the search engines in seconds. You can also get free accounts on services like Blogger.
Method 3: Article marketing. Write some articles and post them to those same article directories with a linkback to your squeeze page. If these get you lots of opt-ins, consider hiring freelance article writers to write these articles in bulk for you. Then guess what? You can post some of those articles to forums and post them to your own sites as blogs.
Method 4: Social networking. Join MySpace groups and post MySpace blog posts to your profiles with your articles. Get Camtasia Recorder, create PowerPoint presentations of your articles and record those videos. Then post them to video sites like YouTube and Revver, with your squeeze page URL watermarked right in and your URL in the video description.
Method 5: Create a free, lead-in product. Write your own articles and package them as a product, or hire someone to write articles and assemble those into a PDF yourself. Make sure the URL to that squeeze page is prominently displayed on every page. Then sell resale rights to a select number of people, or offer your product on giveaway sites.
Method 6: AdWords. That's probably the hardest method of them all, but what you can do is look at the ads that appear on the right hand side of Google searches that stay listed over time, and try to model those ads. Worried about paying too much per click? Look at the top 10 search results, choose to only show your ads in the content network, and say you only want your ads to appear on those top 10 pages.
If you don't know where to begin, I recommend you dedicate an entire week to doing nothing but method #1. Then dedicate the next week to method #2. All the way to method 5 (only try method 6 if you know what you're doing) and build up that mailing list.
11 Easy-to-Implement Ideas for Your Next Webinar to Ensure Maximum Attendance, Interest, and Profit
If you have not yet run your very first webinar, you are clearly missing out. Webinars are the fastest, easiest and most fun way to create video training and is also a great way to build a relationship, get the following and make some sales. I want you to pick one of the following 11 ideas and implement this on your next webinar.
Idea #11: Poll your audience before going in. The best webinars I've run are not ones where I've thought of the topic. It's where someone else gave me the topic to use. If you're going to be presenting a webinar about product creation, poll your list or your audience about what big problem they're having or what you should talk about. This way, the webinar will be about them instead of about you.
Idea #10: Ask the audience if they have heard of you. On every webinar I give, I ask the audience have they heard of me or have they been on a webinar with me. This lets me know where the traffic came from. Did this webinar – can this come from my list or from someone else's list.
This seems like a silly thing to do but it's very easy to add a poll to a webinar and I have been surprised by the results. On some webinars, I have only had 10% unknown people and on others, I have up to 80% of people who had never heard of me. In fact, one time when I gave a webinar for someone else's subscribers, more attendees on the call had heard of me as opposed to the list owner who got his subscribers on that exact same call.
Idea #9: Send extra reminders to attend. How many times have you signed up for someone's webinar and simply forgot about it until days or weeks later? I know I do all the time. For that reason, you need to send extra reminders for people to attend. I know that many webinar services such as GoToWebinar already send out reminders but those are cookie cutter emails that all look the same.
You're special. You're different. You can tell people what time webinar is in different time zones. You can tell people to set an alarm clock. You can give people extra reasons to attend and you can email them an hour or two before the webinar starts to make sure they are on right this second.
Idea #8: Start the webinar early with a countdown timer. Something that's kind of cheesy that I see on other people's webinars is if I join the webinar early, they might say something like, "Welcome to the webinar. We've got 6 minutes to go until we start." And then they repeat the same exact thing: "Welcome to the webinar. We've got 5 minutes to go until we start."
You sound like a robot! It is a good idea to start the webinar early because people might not be sure of the exact time or the exact time zone or they might just be joining to make sure they don't forget or that they're not late. What I like to do is show my screen of the webinar early and use a timer program such as Cool Timer to show a countdown clock right on the screen, so if people come half an hour or 10 minutes before, they can see how much time is left before we start and I don't sound like a robot.
Idea #7: Use proof. Whether your next webinar is a pitch webinar or a training webinar, why the heck should I listen to you if you don't know what you're talking about? That means if you're teaching me how to create a product, show me what some of your products are like or what some of your sale letters look like.
If you're explaining to me how would to find a niche or how to find a hook in that niche, go ahead and take the exact steps. Otherwise, it's not worth my time to attend your webinar.
Idea #6: Get a webinar partner to read and answer questions. I know that running webinar might be scary for you especially because there are so many controls to worry about and so many things that can go wrong. That's why it's a good idea to have a second person on the call with you to read the questions, to look at the question box and when it's an appropriate time, let you know what someone has typed for you to read and respond to.
There are also some questions people might type in the question box that are relevant just to them. For example, they might type in that they have just ordered but something has gone wrong with the order.
Instead of broadcasting your response by saying it loud, that webinar partner can privately type in a response just for that person while you train the entire group.
Idea #5: Have as much training as possible screenshoted out. Have you ever tried to demonstrate something, especially something technical or something on the internet to someone and it failed? We have all been there.
Murphy's Law tells us that if something can go wrong on your webinar, it probably will. That's why just as a back-up, it's a good idea to take screenshots of whatever you're going to show people and have it already placed in your Powerpoint presentation.
For example, if you are showing someone how to find a niche and how to write a report in that niche, do that before the webinar and take screenshots of you going to forums or thinking of an idea. That way, even if the forum you want to look at is not working, you can still flip through the Powerpoint presentation and you can make sure that the presentation does not go over time.
That leads me to...
Idea #4: Wrap it up and end with a bang. Movies and TV shows try to end in the most impactful way possible with something exciting, with a climax. Your webinars should be no different. It's a common problem to run a webinar for an hour only to see that it ends up running 3 hours or longer and it ends up losing the interest of many attendees.
I would rather you run a short 1-hour webinar that quickly delivers good value and has a solid pitch than one that has the same amount of content stretched out over 3 hours. You want to get in, make your point, and end with people learning something and ready to take some kind of action. End with a bang, not with a whimper.
Idea #3: Be honest. Running a webinar is a great way to personally connect with your subscribers because they can hear your voice, see your screen, and most importantly, you are live. But when you lie to them, it's counterproductive. That's why if you want to say how many people are on the call, either don't give an exact number or give the real number. If only 20 people are on your webinar, you can choose to just ignore that fact or say 20 people are on your webinar.
Don't lie and tell people that 100 or 300 people have attended when it's not true. Also, when you're taking questions, you don't have to think of your own questions or think of fake question-askers.
You don't have to say, “Joe from Mississippi asks, what's the fastest way to make a product?†Instead, anticipate questions. Tell people that the fastest way to make a product is in this fashion. Webinars are definitely not the place to fake it until you make it.
Idea #2: Blend content and pitch. The best sales letters in the world are the ones that educate while selling you at the same time. Your webinars should be no different. Give people on your webinar the first steps towards accomplishing some kind of tasks and lead them toward the ending, which is that your training is the best way to accomplish that. Make them aware of common problems or help them overcome common objections or give them some kind of process to get them started. That way, your pitch or your offer at the end is a logical next step after having taken your free training.
Idea #1: Give one single call-to-action at the end. At the end of every webinar, you should give people some direction as to what to do next. If you are running a webinar inside a paid training area, your call-to-action might be homework or a challenge.
People simply shouldn't be educated by you, you should tell them what to do now that they have this new information. If you're giving a free webinar, at the end you should tell people where to go to find out more about you or better yet buy from you. Don't give them 5 different URLs. Don't share with them your Twitter, your blog, and your LinkedIn profile.
Give them one single URL and repeat it a few times so that there is no confusion about where people are supposed to go next.
I hope that you picked one of those 11 easy-to-implement ideas and apply it on your next webinar. Which one was your favorite? Leave a comment below telling me right now.
12 Can’t Miss Rules of Highly Effective Membership Sites
I don't care what niche your membership site is in, what software is running the membership site or even how big the membership is, you should be following all of these 12 rules of membership sites.
Rule #1: Autoresponder Reminders
Whether your membership site is filled with audio clips, videos, articles, or even PDFs or software, you simply cannot expect your members to always remember to log into your site everyday or every week. Set up some kind of autoresponder reminder system so that if someone has been in your membership site for 7 days, then on the 7th day of your autoresponder, it reminds them and tells them to come back to the membership site.
Rule #2: Drip Content
Don't give everything in your membership site away at once. You should be giving your members something new every week if they are charged on a recurring basis, but even if they are charged one single time, it can't hurt to record a couple of extra bonus videos that are dripped out throughout the refund period.
This will reduce your refunds and complaints and also keep people from cancelling and rejoining your membership site at a later date.
Rule #3: Offer Extended or Bonus Trickle Training
One of the best ways to get your customer to love you is with surprised bonuses. That means if you are offering extra training, either in a recurring or one-time membership site, don't announce every single thing you're offering them. Make at least a couple of the extra items be a pleasant surprise.
Rule #4: Stick to One Niche
I can't tell you how many membership sites I have joined that either ran out of ideas, go off-topic or just don't have anything interesting to say in their membership. Have a clear point to your membership site. Is your membership site about weight loss, real estate, copywriting? Whatever it is, make it totally clear what your members are buying into.
Rule #5: Cut Off Access For Non-Payment
If you joined a gym membership and didn't pay, you would no longer be allowed to access that gym's facilities, right? If you stopped paying your cable bill, you would no longer be able to watch TV. The same is true with your membership site. People are paying for access to your training and your content and if they are no longer paying, they should no longer have access.
Rule #6: Deliver Your Training Step By Step
You really do need to not only keep your training simple but offer a clear outcome. The easiest way to do this while also appearing as the best authority on your subject is to set up your training in a step-by-step fashion.
For example, if you are teaching a course about blogging, the first set of training should be about how to set up that blog and then should gradually go into how to create the content. That way, if someone is already somewhat experienced with blogging, they will get caught up, but the new members will not be left in the cold.
Rule #7: Remove The Word "Or" From Your Training
When your members are learning something new from you, no matter what the subject is, it's tough enough to figure it out just by following your step-by-step progress. Don't make it any more complicated than it has to be by sticking the word "or" in there. If you're teaching blogging, teach WordPress blogging, not WordPress or movable-type or pMachine. Whatever the subject is, remove as many choices as possible and teach people to do things the way you do them.
Rule #8: Create Multiple Levels of Your Membership Site
The great thing about membership site software is that you don't have to have a lot of different memberships set up. If you want to offer multiple products in the same site, you offer different membership levels.
People buy the beginner's blogger WordPress level and then later on, buy the advanced blogger WordPress level and be in the same membership site but get access to a new set of content. If you come out with advanced bloggers version 2.0, you can add those posts in layer and use the same membership site to host it all.
In addition, if you want to run a special promotion or give a certain group of people a bonus that only they can get, all you have to do is make a new membership level. You don't have to make a brand new membership site.
Rule #9: Set It Up Quickly
Way too many people spend 6 months or longer working on their content to try to make their membership the best it can possibly be, but the problem with this is that you are not spending your time on things that might make you money and your membership itself might not even be something people want. You need to set up your membership site as quickly as possible and then course-correct once people join.
That leads me to...
Rule #10: Only Be Ahead Of Your Last Subscriber
Like I said, you might be creating a bunch of content for nothing. It's also more important to have a lot of paying members in your site than to have a lot of content. You might have 6 months of content that nobody wants, but if you have one month of content that a lot of people want, you can justify the extra time you're spending and create more of that same content.
Rule #11: Avoid Lifetime Buyouts
You created your membership site, especially if it's a recurring one to get yourself a lot of easy automatic monthly income, right? Then why would you throw it all away by offering a lifetime buyout option?
This is where members can, instead of paying a monthly fee, pay you one single fee and get the entire membership content at once, even if it's 6 months, a year or longer.
Not only does this kill your monthly income, it trains your subscribers not to pay you on a monthly basis, plus it is going to overwhelm them getting all the information at once.
And the final rule of setting up highly effective membership sites is..
Rule #12: Set An End Date
Unless you have tons of content, you won't necessarily be excited about your membership site in 6 months or a year from now. For that reason, why would you want to keep your membership site going forever and ever? Unless you are 100% sure you are still going to be excited about maintaining this membership site in 1, 2, or even 3 years, set at end-date for your membership sites.
I prefer 6 months (sometimes 8) because that gives me long enough time to say everything I want to say even at the advanced level but it doesn't give me too much to handle.
And I know that if I have even more to say, I can see how this first six-month membership site works out and then create a second membership site.
And those were the 12 can't miss rules of highly effective membership sites.
Which one did you like the best and how soon are you going to apply it to your existing or current membership site? Leave a comment below explaining yourself.
How To Get More Comments On Your Next Blog Post… And Every Single One After That
When you add new content to your blog, you need to have more social proof. You can't have one of those sad little blogs where most of the posts have zero comments. You need comments on your posts - and lots of them!
Why is it that I get way more comments than your blog does?
It is because I have experimented with different things that DON'T work, and things that DO work. But lucky for you, I am only going to share with you strategies that get you more comments on your blog with very little effort.
Comments On Other People's Blogs
What if once per day, before you did anything else that day, you spent just three minutes going to one person who has previously left a comment on your blog, clicking into their blog, and leaving a fast response under their most recent entry?
That means that just a few minutes of work every day equals seven people per week who feel obligated to leave comments on YOUR blog.
Just remember, you get what you give! If you leave a "Me too" comment on their blog, expect a "Me too" comment back. However, if you add a short and simple response that contributes and adds to the conversation, you can expect those people to do the same.
What's great about this strategy is you can keep returning the favor over and over, when other people leave you a blog comment, and phase out the people who don't.
The result is a very strong inner circle of people who you can count on to comment on your blog.
Email Your List Telling Them To Comment
Here is a much easier way to get traffic to your blog and get them to comment. Send an email message to your list, telling them to go right now and leave a comment.
This does not have to be a long email, and you don't have to copy and paste the blog post into that email. In fact it is better if you simply send a short message saying, "I left a blog post. Go here and comment right now." And link directly to your individual blog post.
Comment Record With The "Get Recent Comments" Plugin
With WordPress you can add different modules, or widgets, to your sidebar, including one that lists the recent comments. However, the built-in "Recent Comments" plugin for WordPress doesn't say much, it only makes a list of the recent names of people who have commented on your blog.
However, the "Get Recent Comments" plugin, which is an additional plugin for WordPress, will list everyone on your sidebar who has commented recently. It will show their name and the first part of their comment. That means if someone is returning to your blog, they can see what new comments have appeared since their last visit, and click directly on one and reply to it.
This makes it easy for people to remain in the conversation, especially people are leaving comments across multiple posts.
Comment Scarcity With The "Call To Action" Plugin
I have a special Call to Action plugin that will not only add a simple arrow underneath your blog post pointing to the comment forum, it will display a message telling people to comment.
And you can optionally close comments after a certain number of comments or quota has been met. You could say that you are only allowing ten comments per post. After that post has ten comments, it is now closed up and no longer accepting new blog comments.
Comment Follow-Up With "Subscribe To Comments"
One of my Top 5 all-time favorite WordPress plugins is the "Subscribe to Comments" plugin. What this plugin does is it adds a checkbox to the comment form. If someone leaves a comment and this box is checked, WordPress will send them an email every time a new comment has been placed on this post.
This means that if somebody leaves a comment on your blog on Monday and then someone comes back and comments on Wednesday, that original person can come back and respond because they received an email telling them there was a new comment.
Comment Bribe With "Action Comments"
I have a plugin called "Action Comments" which adds an additional checkbox to your comment form which allows people to get onto your auto responder list.
Think about it: when somebody leaves a comment on your blog, they are already typing their name and email address in order to identify themselves in that comment. However, by checking this additional checkbox, you can also subscribe them to your list.
Why would anyone want to get subscribed to your list, you ask? You can notify them of future blog posts AND you can create an opt-in bribe, such as an audio or a report containing your Top 5 blog posts, in one convenient location.
People are leaving a comment and they see a checkbox that asks if they would like to have a free bonus. They comment, they get their free bonus, and now they are on your list and can unsubscribe at any time.
But the beauty of this is that next time you have a blog post, when you email your list, that person who subscribed to your blog from leaving a comment, will be directed to leave their next comment.
And those are 6 incredible ways to get more comments on your blog posts: Comment on other blogs, mailing your list, using the "Get Recent Comments" plugin, using the "Call to Action" plugin, the "Subscribe to Comments" plugin and the "Action Comments" plugin.
Are you using any of these methods on your own blog? Are you missing any of them? (Which ones?)
Please post a comment below with your response.
Are You Using Psychic Search Yet? 10 Seconds To Install And You Will Never Run Out Of Good Blogging Ideas Again
Why is it that I never run out of things to say on my blog, in my sales letters, in my reports, and in my daily auto responder emails, while so many other marketers are out of business or have simply stopped updating their blog?
You can't think of 100% of your ideas in a vacuum. You need a source of inspiration - and what better source of inspiration than the people who are already reading your blog? That way you can be sure that the things you are writing about are the things they want.
So How Do You Figure Out What People Want?
I am not very trusting about survey results because people will tell me the things they WANT to know, but not the things they need. Those can be two separate items.
I will give you an example. Many people say they want to know about article writing. But what they are really looking for is the end result of that: traffic. Therefore they might be searching through my blog about ways to get traffic, but if I asked them what they wanted, they would say, "Articles."
It would be a much better idea to write a blog post about articles, but position it in a way that they get more traffic with those articles.
I don't trust survey results because people lie or they just don't know what they want. It is a much better idea to monitor what they are doing. And that is exactly what the Psychic Search plugin does. To find it, just do a Google search for "Psychic Search."
This is a WordPress plugin that keeps a log of every search someone has looked through your site with. If somebody goes to that search box in your sidebar and types in the word, "Articles," Psychic Search is going to make a note of that. If ten people came to your site last month and searched for "Articles," It is going to make a note of that too.
That means it groups all the searches together and you can see what terms have been searched the most.
The next time you feel Writer's Block, go to that Psychic Search tab in your WordPress Admin Dashboard and look at that list to get ideas.
What's great about this plugin is if you took it one step further and also listed "Searches without any results." If someone typed in the word, "Articles" and found seven blog posts by you, then great - they have probably found the answer to their question. But if they typed it in and got zero results, wouldn't you like to know that?
Psychic Search will give you a second group of search results that were people who typed in one thing but got no blog posts.
That Way You Know What Holes To Plug With Your Training!
And the final feature of Psychic Search is that they will store the searches people typed into Yahoo, Google, and MSN in order to find your site. If somebody searched "Article marketing" in Google and clicked on a blog post from Google, the plugin makes a note of that and therefore gives you even more ideas about what to write.
If you find yourself getting fifty or one hundred page views per month from a specific search result, it is a good idea to write more about that subject because you will get ranked even higher in the search engines.
And that is why I like the FREE Psychic Search plugin - because I don't trust people's direct answers, I can see everything someone has typed into my search box on my blog, I can see which of those searches had no results AND I can see what searches comes from the search engines.
What is your best tip to overcoming Writer's Block and maintaining a fresh stockpile of blogging ideas so that you can always write something new?
Let me know in a comment below.
