This Article was originally published on 27.01.06 as I attempted to crank up a gear with yet another Blogger.com blog. I was having difficulties getting my previous Webmaster to accept what I was trying to achieve with a blog that was to be attached to our main Driving School Site.It’s probably only been read by a handful of readers so am now unleashing on a new and hopefully receptive Audience.

Blog Post for NetNewbieprofits.blogspot.com 27.01.06

I am sure what I am about to tell you is common knowledge amongst seasoned Internet Marketers and Business Web Site Owners but it takes a lot of hard graft and several years of trial and error to get any business running profitably. During this start – up phase there will be many sleepless nights and not much in the way of free time. However the exponential growth of the Internet has turned traditional Marketing on its head and provided unheard of opportunities for those who have little start up capital.

Article Marketing And Blogging

One of the ways in which your message can reach a wide audience with breakneck speed is the ability to craft informative Articles covering your particular subject and areas of expertise and get them circulating.

A lot has been written about the importance of getting your articles published and circulating widely, in building confidence amongst your readers and subscribers and web site visitors. Establishing your reputation as a trusted expert in your particular field can be built over time with a constant stream of articles and dramatically enhanced when your work is published elsewhere on the Internet, beyond the boundaries of your own web site. Let’s have a brief look at how you would go about this and what sort of results you could reasonably expect.

With the flavour of the Month now firmly resting with the mighty army of Bloggers, it is worth a quick look at how this could impact on your Article writing career. Blogs have taken the Internet by storm because of the ease with which the every day aspiring writer and marketer can now, without any cost whatsoever, set up a Web-Log in half an hour or less!

I suppose the most popular Blogging Host is Blogger.com and provides a reasonable platform to get started. Many Web Hosting companies are providing alternative blogging software with the more traditionally named Word Press.

It is well worth trying out both these blogging platforms and seeing which suits you better. My own preference is for WordPress but I am using both for several blogs.

Instant Recognition with a Blog Post or an Article

In a nutshell, a blog enables the average person to be published instantly. If you are prepared to take the time to learn the tips and tricks you will soon be posting regularly and will then have the impetus to go a couple of clicks up the ladder to composing fully fledged Articles which will stand along side the best out there.

This was my chosen route during the last year and the transition from wondering would it work, to actually getting going, was the most difficult. Having heard about blogs and articles for quite a while during web research it still took the compelling words of a master marketer to light the fire.

It is not too difficult to keep that fire burning once you see some results, however small they may be initially. In my own case the first and very amateurish blog far outperformed the Web site with links in just two months. The Web site had been going for five years, admittedly with not a huge sum spent on its development, but nevertheless it showed what can be achieved with regular posts or mini articles in a very short time.

Around this time (June 2005) the first articles were published at www.ezinearticles.com including one that had sat on my hard drive for a year and it is the combination of these two separate strategies(Blog Posts &Articles) that works so well.

The key, I was told in the beginning, was to post every day if possible and at least three times a week for the first six months, before expecting any results! The results far outweighed the meagre expectations and continued to grow daily.

I am not going to tell tales of unimaginable riches at this point since it is very early days but I do believe that the combination of Blogging and Article circulation can make a huge difference to any ones’ web presence given plenty of action and hard work with the pen. Of course this is only one of the many avenues of making a viable business online or offline for that matter.

As a post script to this article… in June 2005 as I joined Ezine Articles .com there were under 8000 Authors . Today in December 2008 there are well over 100,000;  some with as many as 10,000 articles to their credit!

Does that give you a clue? I hope so!

The Money is in the List!

If you have been on line for any length of time and been looking through the Marketing sites and blogs you will have seen a recurring phrase “The Money is in the List”

If you haven’t been online for very long don’t fret because that’s what this Blog is all about…helping you to overcome the fear of dipping your toes in the water without it taking a decade or shortening your lifespan in the process!

What does this mean? The Money is in the List?

Well …do you want the Short answer? the Smart answer? or the Long answer ? We’ll go for something in the middle for starters I think!

The List is the Subscriber base you have built up, which enables you to contact your site visitors on a follow up basis…and heaven forbid “sell them stuff”. Ooooh no one said anything about selling or follow up…isn’t that really difficult?

Please relax and read on!

How do you build up your Subscriber base and create this “Magical Mystery List”?

It’s really quite simple actually. In real terms you have to persuade Site visitors to give you their E Mail address so that you (a) know who they are and (b) can contact them again and again and again…over time you understand!

Isn’t this sounding rather like a lot of hard work cranking out e mails to your subscribers? What if I have a hundred subscribers or even a thousand?

The Autoresponder Works its Magic

This is where Technology comes in and plays its trump card! With a suitable Autoresponder account, which is the second most important part of your marketing arsenal, you will be freed of the drudgery of replying or contacting all your subscribers individually.

An Autoresponder account which doesn’t cost the earth, will do all the contacting for you All you have to do is to create a sequence of suitable replies or recommendations and these will be sent automatically to your subscribers at whatever interval you deem appropriate.

There are several really good Autoresponder companies out here but the one with the best reputation and the one that we use along with most successful marketers is A Weber. They have great flexibility, great staff and as many features as you need for a successful operation.

We are not in the business of sending floods of email every day or even every other day. Some marketers do however and if you subscribe to too many lists (there we go again) you will regret it and probably become a little peeved in the process. So be warned! We will talk more about how many subscriptions are sufficient and how many is too many in another post.

Next question is how to you persuade visitors to part with their E Mail address?

What’s In It for Me?

Simple …you have to make it worthwhile. You know the WIIFM adage. What’s in it for me? If you can satisfy this primeval desire with perhaps a newsletter subscription offer or better still a freebie of some kind you will be well on the way to your first 1000 subscribers.

We’ll talk about the kind of freebie that gets visitors clicking and parting with their e mail addresses in the next post. Read each part of the equation and understand it before moving on to the next.

In each section we will give you a link to a site we recommend that will, when all the parts are integrated, add up to your Marketing Information Start up Strategic Toolbox  or  MISST for short.

Now go get a Coffee …you deserve it!

P.S Here is another Boomer Site we recommend.

Go check out Rosie’s excellent:-

www.bloggingforboomers.com

P.P.S  getting an account on Twitter could be a very useful strategy as you start to build your Blog.Go take a look:-

http://www.twitter.com/RobinPiggott

We are just a couple of days into this Blog journey and as such are still formulating our infrastructure.

Basically that’s an excuse for saying we haven’t got our act together yet! Stick with it  or us and  you will learn from our mistakes I’m sure.

If you are a perfectionist (like I was!) then you should leave now because you might be disappointed until we get going!

I believe it’s important to get going, no matter how disjointed your blog might be because if you don’t, you will analyse yourself to extinction! That was me …but not anymore!

Get used to Your Desk and bring down your Coffee Maker!

One of the first essentials to getting going online is to get to know WordPress.

Let’s repeat…GET TO KNOW WORDPRESS. You don’t need any other platform. Forget  Blogger and their free Blogspot blogs.

Everyone and his Mother in Law and Pet Rabbit have a Blogspot Blog. We have them because it was a way to learn without spending money and it was a valuable easy way to go behind the scenes and get somewhat aquainted with HTML.

We’ll provide a Duffers Guide to Web Terminology in due course.

Very briefly:-

(1) Get familiar with WordPress.

(2) Decide on your Niche.

(3) Research and Register a Domain name. You could use Hostgator.com

(4) Get Web Hosting , preferably with the C Panel included. A good choice would be Hostgator.com

(5) C.Panel with Fantastico will enable you to get your blog Up and Running.

(6) Choose a Theme and upload and you are good to go.

(7) You may need help in getting a Header graphic installed to make your Blog unique.

Some of these points will need further explanation but see how you get on, on your own first . For each point you can go to Google and enter a search phrase and take it from there.

We will see you soon. Remember get started…it aint going to materialise of it’s own accord!

About Us and Why you Should Listen

Twitter. Com is a Microblogging platform which has taken Web 2.0 by storm and enables users to connect with like minded individuals or organisations via a short 140 character post.

A Twitter account which is simple to set up, can get your message out there and provide you with an instant reach to people interested in what you are doing currently. Its rather like an instant text message but distributed on a massive scale to your followers.

Followers sign up to your Tweets and everytime you post, your message will show up in their time line. Every time the people you follow make a post this will show up in your time line.

This is a very simplified explanation of the Twitterverse as it is known by all who lurk there. The best way to find out what it going on and to join in the communityactivity is to sign up for an account and spend some time checking it out.

We’ll give you some guidelines on protocols and do’s and don’t in the next post. In the meantime have fun! I can tell you that you will discover many interesting people to follow that you would never encounter any other way.

Here is the link to our own Twitter profile to get you started:-

http://www.twitter.com/RobinPiggott

There are probably as many secrets to effective writing as there are Days in the Year or Blogs on the Blogosphere. But a few key elements stand out and I would like to share a couple with you in this post.

First and foremost, since it’s difficult for most of us to even start to write anything at all then it’s essential that when you are in second gear and accelerating that you don’t pull into the nearest lay by for a coffee and a sandwich. Basically what you should do once underway is to keep going and forget the spell check, the punctuation, the grammar and paragraphs.

If you are going to be stopping and checking email every few minutes which some of us do when at the computer (coz it’s fun and you never know who will be writing to you) you sure ain’t going to get anything worthwhile completed.

Completion that is the key to any success in life; a half finished project is pretty much worthless, in fact it can give you nightmares for months. So no matter what the distractions you must finish your project and this type of laser focus will bear fruit.

Ok so you have kept writing and ideas keep flowing and flowing and flowing. The page looks a mess but you have the outline. Going for a spell check or even a visit to the bathroom can interrupt the flow and then when the phone or doorbell rings you will be sinking without a trace. How do I know this to be true? Well I wrote the book on the subject but never got round to publishing it! so there!

If like me your typing skills are a little last century, then the ideas will be coming faster than you can type so it’s vital to keep going at the keyboard. An alternative would be to record you r thoughts and then transcribe but for me the thought of having to clear the desk and get those microphone thingies all set up just creeps me out. Yes I wrote the book on being Technically Challenged but couldn’t fathom out either PDF or FTP (this is being looked at as I write!)

The first hurdle is achieved if you have 500 -750 words and garbled paragraphs on the page because now you have something to work with. As you format and spell check you will inevitably come up with new ideas which will be useful in the same or other articles so that writer’s block will never be a problem… I like to read out loud as I type and also when doing my sentence and grammatical structure

When you have done your first draft you’ll then have a much better idea of what is working and what needs modifying for your reader .You do have readers don’t you? After all this is the whole point of the exercise!

So that’s a quick how do you get started and how you prepare to finish what you have started. We’ll talk more about dealing with the second draft in the next post sometime somewhere but don’t wait up you’ll be disappointed!