» Blogging

The Pick-Up Artist Guide on How to Get More Subscribers

Andi Putra — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:15:00 +0000

Out of all the books that I’ve read in the past few years (and believe me, I’ve read quite a bit), The Game, the pick-up artist book by Neil Strauss, seems to be one of the few that leaves a lasting impression on me. I could relate to his character, a social retard who have not grown up and figure out how to deal with women yet. And, I was just excited to finally discover the ‘secrets’ to attracting women.

But, what’s even more interesting to me about his book is how this law of attraction is more universal than most of us like to think. Neil’s concept of attracting members of the opposite sex can also be used, with some modification, to help us attract and get more subscribers. Here’s how.

1. Select A Target

No, you can’t create something randomly and expect it to be successful anymore. In this highly competitive environment, you’ll need to differentiate yourself. Position your product, be it a blog or a course, as something new and fresh by first understanding who your market is. Male in their 40s? Or female in their 20s? Then, find out their needs and wants. The writing style and design of your squeeze page will be different depending on the demographic you’re going for.

2. Approach and Open

BAM! That’s what your headline should feel like. A punch on the face. You can’t ignore it and you have no choice but to react to it. Check out Blogussion article on the 5 major ways to write a punchy headline. People are pre-occupied most of the time; they are busy answering their emails, listening to music, or doing other stuffs while browsing. So, your job is to break their pre-occupation using your headlines.

3. Demonstrate Value

What’s In It For Me? Why should I read this? Why should I spend time on this squeeze page than this other one? This is why you’ll need an interesting and shocking first paragraph after your punchy headline. Your first paragraph needs to tell your readers what they’ll get by subscribing to your newsletter or email list, making them excited on what’s to come.

4. Isolate the Target

A quick and easy way to grab the attention of our primitive and most decisive part of our brain is to use the word ‘you’ often in your copy (of your squeeze page). The old brain is self-centred and focused on what is good for you, hence it’ll often unconsciously prefer what better emphasizes how You can benefit. So, rather than using ‘we’, personalize your writing with ‘you’.

5. Create an Emotional Connection

Unless you can build rapport and trust with your readers or prospects, you can’t get them to subscribe. You need to show your the visitors of your squeeze page that you’re genuine, honest, and real. Tell them how you can relate to their problems and how, by subscribing, they’ll be able to solve those problems. Videos will help tremendously to create this emotional connection, as the visitors can listen to your voice and probably see you (if you record yourself).

6. Pump Buying Temperature

The visitors might already be interested in subscribing to your blog/list, but they just can’t seem to get themselves to do it. Hell, we’re all inherently lazy after all. So, your job is to make that decision to subscribe as painless and as smooth as possible.

You do this, as many marketing gurus probably have told you, by bribing them excellent quality freebies (in the form of eBooks, video tutorials, etc). This will usually give them the much needed final push to take the action to subscribe.

7. Blast Last-Minute Resistance

Just like a woman who’s afraid that you’ll be that guy who leaves them early next morning after she has given herself to you, your visitors have the same fear about subscribing to your email list.

Spam emails that contain links to viruses or hacks have been a bad enough problem without them putting their names and email addresses on some random subscription forms. So, you need to promise them, in your privacy policy, that you will keep their email addresses private and will not send any spam emails to them. And, of course, keep this promise.

These are a couple of tips to get more subscribers to your blog or, if you’re launching a product, your list of prospects. One thing you have to remember is to manage your expectation. Not everyone who visits your squeeze page will subscribe. You can get subscription rate of 1% or 20%, depending on how well you’ve optimized it.

So, be sure to split-test and tweak your squeeze pages to get maximum conversion rate.

The Secret Formula to a Winning Blog

Andi Putra — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:17:00 +0000

Is there such a thing? A formula that you can use to turn your new blog into an A-list blog? This is the question that drives me to research on what recently successful blogs all have in common. One thing for sure, the quality of contents still play a huge role in their success. But what other factors contribute to the success of a new blog these days? What’s the winning formula?

The ‘Good Blog’ Formula

Let’s start by defining the old good blog formula,

Consistency + Great Content + Marketing 1.0

Basically, all you need to do is consistently put out great contents. Great contents are original. Not a copy-paste articles from somewhere. They’re informative, meaning they’re helpful for the people reading them, and entertaining. There’s no point writing a great article if no one’s reading it (because its too boring).

Then, after writing your good old posts, you’ll need to do SEO (search engine optimization) on them, which include on-page optimization and link building.

This is the ‘good blog’ formula.

Unfortunately, this formula is not working that good anymore. The number of competitions have increased exponentially in the last few years, and yet most new bloggers seem to ignore them. It’s not enough to be good, you’ll need to be great. So, these are some winning edge strategies to help you evolve your blog to the next level.

The Winning Edge

1. Personality

You can’t just publish plain content anymore. It’s not like the good old days where you’ll be one the two guys releasing a guide to search engine optimization or blogging. You’re competing with hundreds others to be heard now. So, differentiate yourself by instilling personality into every one of your posts. A blog with a strong personality will inevitably attract loyal readers.

A good example of this is Shoemoney.com. Jeremy Schoemaker always have such a strong opinion about anything that you just can’t ignore the guy, whether to agree or disagree with him.

2. Marketing 2.0

Your potential audience isn’t going to seek you out. That’s why you need to seek them out. If you don’t market your blog, your blog might as well be dead.

Unfortunately, the old marketing effort will not suffice in this extremely competitive age. You’ll need to mix your SEO efforts with social media marketing, forum marketing, Facebook advertising, and other advanced traffic driving strategies.

3. Multimedia

Written posts will not go away. But, in order to have an advantage over other blogs, you’ll need to start doing video and audio posts.

Audio and video posts play a big role in many recently successful blogs, especially in certain niches. There’s no denying that if you’re blogging in the entertainment and technology related niche, you must do video and audio posts. In the blogging and internet marketing niche, however, multimedia posts are not the norm yet. So, let’s start doing them right now so you can get a head start.

4. Networking

A few years ago, it’s enough to write a post and do some basic on-page SEO to it. Someone somewhere will find your blog and become your readers. Now, you definitely can’t do this anymore. If you don’t spend time building a good relationship with other bloggers in your niche, by commenting on their blogs or writing guest posts, your chance of success is slim to none.

The Winning Formula

So, the ‘secret formula’ to a winning blog is

Consistency + Great Content + Marketing 1.0 + [One of the winning edge]

It’s possible to excel at all of the winning edge strategies. But, in reality, not many blogs able to do that. Some blogs are successful because of the advanced marketing strategies they’ve implemented, while others because of their multimedia use and personalities.

Fortunately, just by excelling at one of the winning factors, you can have a potentially successful blog in your hand. Hope you enjoy this post and have a nice weekend, guys.

Video: How to Fix WordPress Fatal Error Problem

Andi Putra — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:07:02 +0000

I tried to install a plugin yesterday and encounter a huge problem, which caused fatal error messages appeared in my WordPress administrator page. It’s scary. But fortunately, I was able to fix it. This video is created to help those who might be experiencing the same problem and also to remind myself how to fix it (if it ever happened again ^-^).

Hope this helps and feel free to re-tweet this.

How to Beat the Top Blogs: A Contemplation

Andi Putra — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:14:00 +0000

If you watched the Academy Awards yesterday , you’ll agree with me in saying that it’s a shocker. When you thought Avatar, the best selling movie of all time, will win the most prestigious Best Picture award, it lost. I was really disappointed and upset with the result, mostly because I’ve put a huge bet on Avatar (which I’ll never do again), and secondly, because Avatar loses to a movie with a fraction of its budget, Hurt Locker.

So, in this post, I’ll analyse some of the things that Hurt Locker did right to win the Oscar and how you can apply them to your blogging.

1. Designed For Critics

Hurt Locker knows how to position itself in the competitive film market. The director and script writer focused their efforts on getting the best acting (actor’s performance), story progression, and cinematography, elements of a movie that the critics love. And this proven formula seemed to work once again as Hurt Locker wins the Oscar.

So, study your market. You’ve to know who reads your blog (or who you want to read your blog) and what they love, so that you can create contents that are tailored for them. If your audience can relate to your writing, they’ll come back again and again to your blog, despite there are other bigger blogs out there.

2. New Perspective

How many movies have been made about the war in Iraq? Yeah, I can already recall five from the top of my head and I’m sure there’re a whole lot more. And Hurt Locker, is unfortunately one of them. But, unlike other war in Iraq movies that focused on the actions and shootings, Hurt Locker focused on building characters and the relationship between each one of them. It’s an interesting take on such an overused setting.

Sure, blogging and SEO (search engine optimization) have been dissected from almost every imaginable ways. But, some bloggers can still find sub niches within these two huge topics. You can, for example, write about blog designs, pay per click marketing, or social media. Or, rather than doing written posts (like almost every other blogs out there), you might want to publish video or audio posts. People always wants something fresh. So, if you can give it to them, you win.

3. Proud to be Small

Hurt Locker isn’t shy to be a low budget movie. In fact, one of the producers are so proud of it that he sent a letter to the Academy Awards juries, asking them to let Hurt Locker wins because of its miniscule budget.

So, never be ashamed of the size of your blog (ehem…that sure sounds awkward). There are advantages of being a small blog. For instance, you can test new ideas quickly and easily on your blog without the fear of disappointing your loyal readers.

That’s all folks. Remember to always design your contents for your target audience, try to write from new perspective, and always be proud of your blog.

The #1 Trap when Making Money Online

Andi Putra — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:02:35 +0000

Guess. Guess. It’s not hidden or mysterious. Believe it or not, the ultimate trap of making money online that most of us have fallen into, at one time or another, is staring right at us. And yet, we can’t seem to notice it. So, what is it?

It’s information.

Information is a double-edged sword. We can’t dismiss it, as we need to know how to do something before we can actually do it. For example, we need to understand the concept of search engine optimization before we can optimize our site.

The Pleasurable Trap

And yet, when we are presented with too much information, we somehow lose the will to act. We convinced ourselves that by having the knowledge, we are superior. And to be even better, we need more knowledge and so we try to find more information. We read the blogging tutorials, watch the list building videos, buy the product launch training course, and so on.

We are trapped in, what I like to call, the destructive information cycle (D.I.C).

Contrary to the norm, it is pleasurable to be in this trap. We don’t take any actions or do any work, and yet we feel better about ourselves.

Dealing with D.I.C

But, if you are really serious about making money online, you’ll better get out of this destructive information cycle. And get out fast. As the longer you stay, the harder it is to succeed.

The first step to get out of the D.I.C is to realize that you are in one. Just like drug or alcohol addicts admitting their addiction, we first need to admit that we’re addicted to information.

Then, it’s time to take some radical actions.

First, unsubscribe to all the mailing lists you’ve joined before and only subscribe to those that provide real values (not sales pitches) to you.

Second, stop buying info products and learn from the ones you already have.

Third, limit your blog and forum reading time to an hour or two a day.

Fourth, take the first step. Be it writing your first blog post, creating your first video tutorial, or setting up your email auto-responder.

By doing the steps above, you should have more time and a less cluttered mind to start working toward your goals, be it making money online from blogging, affiliate marketing, or any other methods.

If you found these tips useful, you should probably subscribe to my blog via rss or email. Just so you’ll get easy updates on new articles about persuasion, influence and marketing. Cheers.

What Can Software Companies Teach You About Success?

Andi Putra — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:09:00 +0000

“Wait, blog’s not ready yet, I need to add this fancy plug-in to it. Another month, please.”

“Can’t start my list-building, I need to redesign my squeeze page and add follow-up emails to my auto responder. Another month, please.”

We are all too familiar when this happens. We tell ourselves that we are making things perfect and that it’s gonna be the best when it’s done. But deep inside, we know that’s not true. What we are doing is just…

Avoiding the possibility of Failure.

We’ve been brainwashed with the ‘boy wonder’ success stories, perpetrated by the media . You know, the typical tale of how a man/woman from a small town and without any [insert the field they excel at] background is able to be a champion in their chosen field. The media had used this storyline for Tiger Woods (when he won his first major championship at the age of 21), Steven Spielberg (when he made his first blockbuster movie), and so many other successful people that it’s hard to list them all.

And, we want to be this ‘boy wonder’.

The problem is, by trying to be them (perfect), we are not avoiding the possibility of failure. On the other hand, we are sabotaging ourselves from the possibility of success. Who ever guess Google will be this profitable by providing ‘free’ search engine service for the masses? Who knows Facebook will get this big when there are tons of other social networking sites competing for the same market? NOBODY.

Learning From The Giants

Both Google and Facebook founders believe in their respective products, long before it was launched. So, they do what they do and succeed. But, does that mean it could have gone the other way and fail? Of course. But, that doesn’t stop them from trying.

One thing that I find very useful to overcome the fear of failure is to think like software companies. Remember how long Gmail is in the beta phase? Google, one of the largest online company in the world, released an imperfect(beta) product before releasing its full version a year later.

Microsoft, one of the largest software company in the world, also did this by releasing the beta version of Windows 7 before launching the full version a few months later. The success of Gmail and Windows 7 is the result of continuous testing and tweaking at the beta phase of each products.

Putting It Into Practice

To put this concept into a more practical sense, every time I get into the pattern of negative what-ifs, I always answered them with “So what?”. “What if this fail?”, “What if people don’t like it?”, “What if the conversion rate of this page is not high?”. “So what? So what? and So what?” I can tweak it later. I can reset the project. And I can modify it to fit my readers’ expectation.

So, what can software companies teach you about success? Start today. Start blogging today. Start driving people to your squeeze page today. Then, if you are not satisfied with the outcome, tweak and modify them. Never be afraid of failure because you’ll always get the chance to fix it.

No related posts.

Why You Can’t Make Money Online?

Andi Putra — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:07:46 +0000

We are all striving to make money online. But, whether you like it or not, only a few of us will succeed in doing so. And that’s not because that one guy is smarter than the rest of the pack. Or that he obtained the secret knowledge to internet wealth (I wonder if this mythical treasure actually exists…). What he have is patience, determination, and the correct understanding of what it takes to make money online.

Let Me Tell You A Story

I have a friend who has been blogging for over 2 years now. He had a fantastic amount of traffic coming to his blog and he also had a relatively good amount of RSS and email subscribers for it. The problem is, after 2 years in business, he haven’t managed to make a huge amount of money online. He had tried Adsense, promoting affiliate products, and even some sponsored links, but he can’t make more than a couple hundreds of dollars a month. So, he contacted me and asked me what’s wrong with his site and how he can fix it. But, there’s nothing wrong with his site. The problem lies with him.

It’s Not About the Traffic

One thing I noticed about him, whenever we talked about internet marketing stuff, is how he always boasts about how much traffic he can get using various methods and strategies that he learned from gurus or by himself. He spent hours everyday, trying to figure out what new traffic method he can use, rather than using the old, but reliable ones. And, there lies the problem.

Don’t get me wrong. Driving traffic to your site is important. But, it shouldn’t be the part that consume most of your time when making money online. Why? Because, traffic doesn’t necessarily makes you any money. Facebook is undeniably one of the largest site online right now, with hundred millions of users registered. Surely they have the traffic to make crazy amount of money, right? Wrong. They’re losing more money than they make as of 2008. Traffic eats up your bandwidth, slow down your site, and fill up your server. It costs you money, not making you more.

It’s Not About the List

Another problem that he had is that he focus on building his list without having any real purpose for it, other than promoting some affiliate products. Having a list is great. But, as I say again and again, the money is not in the list, it’s in the relationship you’ve built with the people in your list. So, if you have a list, but you never emailed them anything but affiliate product promotions, you only have yourself to blame for the bad sales.

Having a giant list is also useless if the people inside your list is not your target customers. That’s why you’ll never make a cent from a list of some 100,000 people from Africa or China. A huge list doesn’t mean anything if your prospects doesn’t buy from you. In order for them to do so, you need to spend as much effort (as your traffic and list building effort) on this last, and often ignored, part of making money online.

Everything Comes Down to…

Conversion and authority.

Conversion means transforming your prospects into buyers. You can apply this to your subscribers by converting your free list, meaning the people in the list haven’t bought anything from you yet, to a buyers list (list full of buyers), which he definitely hadn’t done. Let them make small purchases, like buying a $3 to $7 eBook. After they’re comfortable in making small commitments with you, you can start offering them higher prices affiliate products.

Authority is a result of your popularity and positioning in a niche or market. You can positioned yourself to be the traffic guru, the super affiliate marketer, or the authoritative blogger. It doesn’t matter what you choose, as long as you emphasize it in whatever you’re involved in. Be it social media space, your videos or podcasts, or even in your blog posts. By having authority, you’ll have an easier time to sell your products because the people in your niche have known and accepted that you’re the expert in your field.

You need to understand that your final goal in this industry is to make money online. I say this because I saw many people seem to be missing the point. My friend is proud of how much traffic he can get. Or how many people is in his mailing list. But, it really doesn’t matter how much traffic you have or how many people are in your list. You’re here to make money, huge amount of money if possible. And until you do, you shouldn’t stop trying.

Feel free to leave comments below or tweet it if you like it.

7 Principles of Building High Ranking Squidoo Lenses

Andi Putra — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:07:37 +0000

I mentioned that I’ll talk about Squidoo in my previous post. So here it is. Squidoo is a web 2.0 site that acts as some sort of micro blogging platform. You can think of it as a simplified version of WordPress, as you don’t need your own web hosting account, do CPanel installation and FTP uploading, or any of the relatively complicated WordPress stuff. . All you have to do is register to Squidoo and start creating your lenses (small sites).

As an internet marketer and blogger, Squidoo is an almost indispensable traffic generation tool for me because it’s so easy and fast to create a new lens, compared to a new site. It’s also easier to rank higher in the search engine and thus useful for getting search traffic or back links. Finally, it lets you access Squidoo users for additional traffic, to complement the search traffic. But, to get all of these benefits, you need to have a high ranking Squidoo lens. So, these are the 7 principles of building high ranking Squidoo lenses.

1. Make It Keyword Rich

Have your chosen keywords included in the domain name of your Squidoo lens. Your URL address will look something like this: www.squidoo.com/your-keywords. The best is to choose popular topics. After you finished tinkering with your URL address, now it’s time to go into the title of your lens. Squidoo wants you to, especially with the Lens Intro Title, keep your titles and sub-titles relevant to the page content. Squidoo have human reviewers and filters to check all of the lenses, so make sure you do it right.

2. Do Your Keyword Research

First, do your typical keyword research with Google Keyword Tool, to find keywords with high search volumes. Then, do the Squidoo version of keyword research. Find Squidoo lens with a similar topic to yours that rank high on Squidoo. Then, click View > Source on your browser to see the tags they’re using. Copy those tags to your own lens. Now, you’re done.

3. Optimize Your Modules

Time to optimize your modules. Squidoo wants 8 modules or more with each of your lenses. These modules can be a ratio of approximately 4/8 text modules, 1/8 video modules, 1/8 feedback modules, and another 2/8 of Amazon recommendation modules or something. Remember to make your lens looks good and non-spammy (don’t sound like you’re selling anything). The whole purpose is to give your lens the ultimate 5 star rating.

4. Remember Outward Links

Remember, you’re not creating Squidoo lenses just to get traffic to those lenses. You’re trying to get people to your sites or affiliate sites so that you can earn real money (not some small Adense revenues)through affiliate sales or opt-ins. So, put links back to your site in your lens. You can do this aggressively, putting large banner links on top of your lens, or you can choose more subtle approaches, like putting it at the bottom of your lens.

5. Put Images

Squidoo encourages the use of images in your lens. So upload your images to Squidoo or other 3rd party image hosting services, like Flickr or Photo Bucket. Then, insert tags to the images using your chosen keywords to optimize them for SEO purposes. You will be rewarded. Also, make sure the images you use actually fit your texts and, if possible, the overall design of your page to make it your lens more appealing. I mean, when’s the last time you read an ugly lens?

6. Follow the Rules

Follow the Squidon’t guidelines. When they asked you not to have more than 9 outbound links, don’t create 10 links back to your website. It’s not worth to go against them. Squidoo have a team of people reading lenses, looking for spam. They have an automatic filter that blocks spam lenses. And if your lens is filtered, it’s automatically lock. People can also report your lens to the Squidoo admin if they find it to be misleading or spammy. So, just play by the rule, ok?

7. Have Updates & Follow Ups

Track your Squidoo lens to see if you’re improving in ranking. Your ranking will appear in the upper left-hand corner of your lens and should continue to improve. If that doesn’t happen, run Health Check from your Dashboard to ask Squidoo how to improve your ranking. Then, do as they suggested. Remember to send some social bookmarking back links to your lens as well, to have it helps in increasing your ranking.

Squidoo is a micro-blogging platform. So, you need to update the content inside to keep your lens fresh. Do as little as removing and adding a word or two to the articles inside your lens to real updates by adding new modules.

These are the rules that I follow whenever I’m building my new Squidoo lens. It has been proven to work well in any niche/market (excluding all Squidoo banned topics). So, try it out and feel free to leave comments below, before or after wards. You can also tweet it if you like it.

I Don’t Need to Build a List?

Andi Putra — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:57:51 +0000

In my previous post, 5 Questions to Ask Yourself After Starting Online, I mentioned the importance of having a long term plan. And list building is part of that long term plan. Every internet marketing gurus worth his salt always give the same advice, Build a list. The money’s in the list. Let me just play a devil’s advocate here by asking these questions. Do you really need to build a list? What if building a list do more bad than good in getting customers in your niche? Is that even possible? Our questions are set, now’s the time to find out the answers.

So, What’s a List?

Just to make sure we’re on the same page. The list that I’m talking about here is an email list. An email list itself contains a group of people who have subscribed to your blog or newsletter by opting in. You can use a very primitive but free service, like the one comes with your web hosting service, or you can use the paid version, like Aweber. Aweber boasts a lot of advanced features that the free email auto responder services don’t have, e.g. the ability to track the open-rate of your emails, blog broadcasts, and many more.

Why Do I Need to Build an Email List?

There are a couple of very strong reasons of why you need to build an email list.

First, building a list means that you have a list of possible repeat customers. Repeat customers are good for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you don’t need to spend additional money to acquire them. Secondly, they are the ones that will become your rabid fans and messengers, if you treat them right. They will tweet about your latest products, comment on your blogs, or even talk about you in their blogs.

Second, your business won’t rely solely on you finding new prospects. Imagine if one day PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing becomes too expensive to play with and SEO becomes a strenuous back links battleground. If that happens and your traffic is mostly search traffic, it’ll be very tough for you to make any money online. But, imagine if you already have a list of 10,000 subscribers at the time. It sure will ease your pain, won’t it?

Third, building a list means building your online business for the long term. You don’t rely on Google to send you prospects. You don’t rely on your Squidoo lenses or Hub Pages’ page that might get taken down. You don’t even rely on Twitter, just in case it went down (Don’t want the whale to drag you down with him, right?). You have complete control over your customers and prospects.

Why Don’t I Need an Email List?

Building a list is important, but there are some cases where list building is just a waste of time and resources.

First, you’re in the one-time buyers niche. Some examples of these niches are the hemorrhoid niche, the yeast infection niche, the sweat repellent niche, and many others. In these niches, your customers only need a one-time solution to their problem. If they found it, they won’t need you anymore. And if they tried your product and it’s doesn’t work, they’ll probably refund your recommended products and never trust your site anymore. So, there’s no reason to build a list whatsoever.

Second, you’re striving to be a news site. Some examples here are Tech Crunch, Mashable, Kotaku, etc. These blogs are synonymous to the magazines in the offline world. They have a huge monthly readership and RSS subscribers, and rely purely on ads (be it banner, video, or text) to make money. If you’re aspiring to be one of them, I don’t think it’s necessary to have an email list, RSS should have suffice.

Third, you don’t have time to write follow-up emails. The money is not really in the list, it’s in the relationship you built with your list. So, if you don’t have the time to write follow-up emails to your list, it really makes little sense to spend time collecting subscribers. They won’t be turned into eager buyers or fans anyway, since you never come in contact with them after they opted-in.

Conclusion…

Building a list is your first step towards building a long term business, not just a short lived one. But, there are a couple of cases where you don’t really need them (and might even be better off without them) as my arguments above have shown. Feel free to leave comments below or tweet it if you like it.