Author Archive | James RANKIN

You’ve either got a blog already, or you’re just about to start one. Congratulations! You are one of only 500 million. Now then, knowing that your blog is (statistically speaking) less than a needle in a haystack, how are you going to get it NOTICED and read?

In one word, the answer is BRANDING. You can either throw together a blog and hope it somehow gets found, or you can carefully craft a brand that captures readers’ attention and keeps them coming back for more.

To throw one together, just do what 99.9% of other bloggers do – wing it. Fly by the seat of your pants and hope for the best. In six months (or sooner) you’ll likely be so discouraged you’ll give up.

Building a brand is obviously the way to go. Think Google, Coke, Apple and Nike to understand the huge potential branding holds for your blog. Brands stand for something, mean something and create loyalty in their customers. They stand apart and often far, far above the competition. And best of all, really good brands get remembered and are sought out by consumers.

Here then are 10 tips for building your blogging brand:

Who are you writing to? Exactly who is your blog meant for? Create a clear picture of your ideal reader, including age, profession, family, worries, problems, hobbies, etc. You’ll be writing to this one person rather than trying to talk to everyone. Remember, when you target everyone, you interest no one. But when a certain segment of the population believes you’re writing just for them, you’ll build a loyal following.

Why are you writing to your specific readers? What is your goal? It might be to educate, to persuade, to motivate, etc. Keep your goal in mind at all times.

What are you writing about? This is your topic. It might be physical fitness, marketing, dating, etc. Decide in advance what your message is going to be.

Choose a brandable name. If you’re creating a fitness blog, for example, then you might choose a one or two word brand name that people are likely to remember, rather than a keyword laden name.

HowToGetHealthyAndLoseWeight.com isn’t really brandable – it’s too generic and too keyword rich. Think in terms of “Google” – now that’s a brand. You might try things like FitMonkey.com or SkinnyCakes.com – those are brandable and memorable.

Create a snappy tagline. A name generally isn’t enough – you also want a tagline to help brand yourself, to clarify what you do and to make your blog more memorable. If your blog is on bacon recipes, your url might be DeadPiggy.com and your tagline might be “Bacon lover’s recipes for the non-chef.” See how the tagline not only defines that the site is about bacon recipes, but also narrows the niche to those who don’t consider themselves to be good cooks? This is a prime example of using a tagline to define what you do and WHO you do it for.

Get a logo. Can you picture the Apple logo? Nike? Coke? A logo is an integral part of your brand. Make it clean, simple, eye-catching and unique. It’s worth the extra money to get your logo just right.

Adapt your logo into a favicon. Again, this is an important part of branding your blog.

Use a website design that matches your topic. A header full of balloons and clowns on a website about grieving generally isn’t going to work. Dull colors on a children’s website or a lack of photos of gardens on a gardening website won’t work. Make sure all of the visual elements of your site correspond with your topic.

Choose a writing style and stick with it. Take a lesson from McDonald’s here and give your readers what they’ve come to expect from you. Maybe you’re writing to a technical crowd – then you might write like an engineer. Or perhaps you’re taking on a persona, like the Rich Jerk. Odds are you’re going to write like yourself, which is perhaps best of all because you won’t have any trouble maintaining that style. Consistency is key because if one day you’re writing like the guy next door and the next day you’re writing like an English professor, your readers are going to get confused and likely won’t return.

Promote your blog’s name through social media. Consistently use your blog’s name everywhere. Don’t use “Law Enforcement Weight Loss” on Twitter and “Muscle Cops” on Facebook – no one will realize it’s the same blog you’re referring to. Again, this is another reason to choose a unique, short, brandable name that no one else is using anywhere.

If your blog is going to stand apart from the crowd, then you’ve got to do a little extra work, but that work will likely pay off handsomely in the end.

Not only will you stand apart from the crowd, you’ll also discover that if you ever decide to sell your blog, you’ll be able to charge a great deal more because you took the time to brand it.

No matter how hard you try to prevent it, sooner or later you’ll have prospects land on your 404 error page. When they do, they have a choice – try to find what they were looking for or give up. Care to guess what happens more often? They leave in frustration.

So instead of the usual “Whoops! We’re sorry but what you’re looking for has moved” page, consider customizing your error pages to get these people to do something.

For example, you could give them an option to opt into your list with an offer that is different than your landing page. This can be highly effective. For example…

“Congrats! You just found our secret page where we give away ___. Just tell us where to send it and it’s yours.”

Or you might make them an offer they can’t refuse, such as a great deal on one of your most popular products, or a combination offer for a super low price. Like this…

“Oops! You just landed on our error page, but we’re going to make it up to you. Here’s $xx.xx off of our super hot selling ___.”

For one reason or another, if you have your own website online long enough, you’re going to start getting a stream of people who land on a page of your website that does not exist, and leads them to a 404 error. Plan in advance for this hidden opportunity and you can turn some of the strayed visitors into subscribers and customers.

I’ve seen three different marketers doing a variation of this business, all with the same result – they earn a bare minimum of $5,000/month and usually 2 to 3 times that much.

Two of them are completely unknown marketers who are quietly doing this in their spare time. The third marketer is a fairly big name, and odds are you’ve heard of him. He doesn’t do any of this work himself. He simply outsources the whole thing and brings in over $10,000 a month in profit doing it.

All three of them do this business in the online marketing niche. Essentially, they are helping new marketers to quickly have a money generating business of their own by building it for them. No doubt you’ve seen these ‘business in a box’ packages you can purchase that contain a product, a sales page and so forth, right? You put your own name on them, upload them to your site and start promoting.

There’s nothing wrong with these, and if you have your own list, you can often make good money with them. But these marketers have taken things a step further by creating a unique business in a box for each customer. These are genuinely one of a kind and even include a list.

Here’s how it works:

They start by creating a unique funnel complete with a squeeze page, high-value free gift and unique upsell product. The free gift is usually a plugin, because they have a higher perceived value than a report. You can find plugins with giveaway rights available all over the internet. Buying the rights is usually about $37-47 and then you are free to give it away to your heart’s content.

You can get a coder to rebrand, tweak and/or rename the plugin, usually for $100 or less. This is optional but again, it makes your package unique from anything else out there.

The upsell product is made from good PLR that’s then reworked and rebranded, complete with a new name, new graphics and so forth. It’s important here to use truly quality PLR – don’t skimp on this.

The cost of the content will be perhaps $150 if you rework it yourself, and twice that if you hire someone to do it for you. Since you’re going to price the upsell at around $47, you want the product to look and feel like it is worth at least that much if not more. In other words, make sure it doesn’t look like PLR.

Once the squeeze page and upsell are set up on a domain, it’s time to spend about $250 to purchase 1,000 solo ad clicks. Send them to your squeeze page.

Your goal here is three-fold:

→ Start building a list
→ Establish that the squeeze page and upsell convert
→ Make some money on the upsell

From 1,000 solo ad clicks you should hopefully get about 300 new subscribers. Maybe 10 of those will buy the upsell, bringing you about $470. That’s covered some of your costs right there.

Once you’ve done this, it’s time to cash in. You’re going to flip the entire funnel to one buyer. You can use Flippa, Warrior Forum or any of the site flipping websites out there.

You’re offering a proven funnel with a list, a proven squeeze page and a proven upsell page complete with the lead magnet and the product. This is VALUABLE because it’s proven and because it’s unique. Bonus points if you’ve chosen a great name for the URL, lead magnet and upsell.

Once you master how to do these things (and they’re not difficult) you can probably build 3 of these a month all by yourself and still have plenty of time to do other things, too.

And you can flip these packages for $2,500 to $7,500 each. Not bad for a part time business!

There’s a common theory that you’ve got to warm up your list for a few days, or even a few weeks before you try to sell them anything. But if someone came to your website looking for answers and opted into your list – then they are a hot prospect right NOW.

That’s why you should go ahead and make them an offer within the first 7 days. In fact, make them 2 or 3 offers.

Yes, you still need to provide some great content, whether it’s telling captivating stories or giving them hot tips. But at the end of each email be sure to make them an offer they can’t refuse. You may be surprised how many of your prospects become customers in that first week. And as you know, once they buy from you they are far more likely to buy again and again, as long as you continue to make them happy.

But we’re not done yet. In addition to making them offers via email in the first week, you also want to make them an offer IMMEDIATELY.

Let’s say they sign up to get your free report on 10 ways to banish acne. If you’re using single opt-in, they’re now on your list. So instead of sending them to a page that tells them to check their email for their free report, send them to a sales page that tells them the free report will be sent to their email shortly, and in the meantime to check out the one time fantastic offer you have for them.

Depending on your offer, there’s no reason why you can’t convert 10% or far more of these prospects into IMMEDIATE buyers with this simple technique. And best of all, it’s something you set up once and then you can forget about it, earning yourself a nice little additional income while you continue to grow your list.

I get a lot of questions about how to build a business online. Here’s some of the top questions and answers to help you get your own online business started and profitable.

Q. I keep hearing that I’ve got to get people to know me, like me and trust me before they’ll buy from me, but how do I do that?

A. You’ve got two choices, and I recommend you do both. First, position yourself as an expert in your field. If you’re not an expert, surround yourself with experts by interviewing them, letting them guest post to your blog and working with them. Second, be generous. Give away great content that instills confidence in your abilities and expertise that builds your reputation. Offer free tele-classes or podcasts, guest post on popular blogs with info-packed posts, and author a book or report.

The better your free content is, the more people will trust you and your content. As an added bonus they’ll also be more likely to share your content with others, thereby helping you to build your reputation and your following.

Q. Is there a way to reach a wider audience while simultaneously delivering more value to my current customers?

A. You might consider lining up some partnerships or joint ventures in your niche. First, make a list of the areas your customers are interested in. You’re not looking for direct competition here, but rather complimentary sub-niches. For example, if you teach how to do Forex with a certain method, your customers will likely be interested in how to trade on Forex with other methods, and even how to invest in other areas besides the Forex market.

Once you make your list of areas, choose an expert in each that you’d like to partner with. Go online to get their contact information and then approach them with a win-win-win reason of why they should partner with you. They should benefit, you should benefit and of course your customers need to benefit as well.

Do something together that you can offer to both your customers and your partner’s customers, whether it’s a free webinar with an offer at the end, or creating a series of videos together, or even creating a new membership with a free introductory period. This will add value to your customers and theirs, as well as expanding your reach to a wider audience.

Q. I’m just a newbie in my niche – how do I approach the “big dogs” and get their attention so they’ll partner with me?

A. Two words – help them. Comment on their posts, share their stuff through social media, ask if you can re-post their work to your blog, etc. Find a way to be of service to them so that you can get on their radar and start building a relationship for the long haul.

Note that the bigger the person you’re targeting (IE: The larger their following and the greater their influence in your market) the longer it’s going to take to attract their attention as someone they might want to work with. It’s recommended that you begin by targeting more accessible people and work your way up to the giants of your industry.

Also, consider writing a book, devoting one chapter to each “big dog” you are targeting. In this manner you can make friends with these players, and some of them will actually end up promoting your book to their audience.

Q. I keep hearing that I need to “have a story” to share with prospects. What does this mean?

A. In a marketing context, ‘your story’ is what led to you doing what you do today. For example, someone who teaches basketball techniques may have been a lousy basketball player themselves until they learned and mastered certain fundamentals and techniques that caused them to become an all star player. In a nutshell, that’s their story. Of course they’re going to want to embellish with details, such as how rotten they felt when they got laughed at for missing the easiest of shots.

The purpose of having your own story and sharing it with your readers is to make a connection. Someone having trouble making the junior varsity basketball team wants to know you went through some of the same trials and tribulations they are experiencing. This bonds them to you and causes them to be far more receptive to your message. Remember, “birds of a feather flock together.” Once they realize you’ve been through the same struggles they’re currently going through, and that you not only persevered but overcame, they’ll want to know exactly how you did it.

Q. But isn’t that manipulating them?

A. Not at all. You are showing that you have indeed walked in their shoes, experienced their problems and found a solution that works.

I heard a story once that illustrates this beautifully. Imagine you’re in a foreign country and you don’t speak the language. For days you’ve been struggling to understand and be understood. Then all of a sudden someone says hello to you in your language, and asks how you are. How would you react? No doubt you’d rush up to that person and start talking, feeling that you finally are making a connection with someone. Imagine the relief you would feel, finally being able to communicate, to understand and most of all to be understood.

Telling your story does the same thing – it creates a bonding connection that lets the prospect know that you understand what they’re going through because you’ve experienced the same problems they have.

Q. If I want to create a product or success system based upon my own personal experiences, how do I go about that?

A. If you’ve become really successful at something, you have a ready-made product you can sell to others who want to master that same skill. Here’s how to get it into product form: Recall where you were at the beginning of your success. What was the first thing you did? The second? Write down everything that you did and put it into step-by-step form.

Now you’ve got the ___ number of steps to accomplishing ___. Name it something appropriate, get the domain for that name and start marketing it. You could do it as an ebook or audio/video course, or you could offer it as a series of webinars or even one-on-one coaching. Each step will represent one chapter in your book, or one webinar, or one coaching session.

HOT TIP: You can use this exact same process to partner with anyone who’s mastered a skill others want to learn. Interview them extensively to discover exactly how they reached their success and then create the product based on the interviews. Split the profits with the expert and rinse and repeat with more experts or the same expert and different topics.

Q. I have a friend and fellow marketer who’s continually writing posts for other people’s blogs. I think she’s foolish because she’s giving away her valuable info on other blogs instead of using it on her own to boost her standing in the search engines. She says it’s worth it because she’s getting new prospects through her guest posts. Who’s right?

A. You both are correct, to a degree. While it’s true that placing her best content on her own blog may help to get her site ranking in the search engines, SEO is always a gamble. On the other hand, guest posting on popular blogs practically guarantees exposure to new prospects as well as new alliances with the blog owners.

When your friend guest posts, she’s hopefully targeting blogs that already receive plenty of traffic interested in her particular niche. This will help her to gain exposure to new audiences and get her endorsed by leaders in her field (the blog owners).

Q. I’ve contacted blog owners about being a guest blogger for them, but because I’m new in the niche I don’t get much response. What can I do?

A. Begin by posting repeatedly in their comments section. Join in the conversation, add relevant comments, ask good questions and answer other people’s questions. Hyperlink your name to your website to get new visitors (this is automatic when you fill out the comment form – just be sure to fill out the website URL box as well as your name, and your name will become a hyperlink to your URL.)

Use a catchy, memorable photo on all of your posts. Register your email address along with your photo at: en.gravatar.com

By taking part in the community, the blog owner will likely notice you and will be far more receptive next time you offer to do a blog post. In addition, visitors to the blog will also begin to recognize you and visit your blog as well.

Q. I write a newsletter, but lately I get the feeling that no one is reading it. What am I doing wrong?

A. You may need to get back in touch with your market to find out what it is they want to know. Go to forums and watch social media to find out what they’re talking about and especially what they’re asking. Ideally you should be answering their questions and helping to solve their problems, because when you do that they will read every word of your newsletter.

Q. I HATE writing headlines and subject lines, and I don’t like using headline templates. Any ideas?

A. Interestingly enough, your best headline is often buried inside your copy or your email. You already know all the best selling points about your product, how best to present it, who your target market is, and how to craft the best call to action. So forget the headline, write your copy or email, and then go back and reread what you just wrote. Oftentimes you’ll find your jewel of a headline right there inside your copy, just waiting for you to pluck it out and place it at the top.

You already know that a buyer is generally worth ten times more than a prospect who signs up for a free product. Here’s the best way to continually build a list of buyers without having to buy solo ads or place advertising.

Create a simple product that solves one pressing problem in your niche. This might be a video, audio or ebook – it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that it delivers on exactly what it promises.

Create a simple sales page for the product and price it in the $7 to $12 range, depending on prices in your market. This should be an impulse buy for customers, not something they have to think long and hard about.

Use a program such as Rapid Action Profits or JVZoo to manage affiliates and pay 100% commissions. That’s right, you’re going to pay 100% instant commissions to affiliates because you want to give them maximum incentive to send you traffic. Right now you’re looking to build a list of buyers, and by offering 100% commissions your affiliates are going to be happy to send them to you.

Advertise your affiliate program to your list and via social media.

If you like, add an upsell to the offer that pays you. This way you’ll not only be building a list of buyers – you’ll also be making profit from the start.

Market products to your list to make money, and market your affiliate program to your list to continue to bring in more affiliates. Also, advertise your affiliate program inside the product itself. Some of your best affiliates will first be your customers.

Rinse and repeat. Optimally you want 5 to 10 fairly new products that pay 100% instant commissions to affiliates so that your affiliates always have something they can promote.

Continue to build and nurture your list of affiliates – these are equally important as your customers. Give your affiliates your products for free as you create each one, so they can see what they’ll be offering their customers and continue to use social media to find new affiliates.

This strategy can be launched easily and scaled consistently to develop a 6 or 7 figure business online. You wouldn’t be the first and you won’t be the last to follow this model to build a thriving online business.

A hot online business model is to build a membership site and sell those memberships for $27 to $97 a month or more. It sounds like a great idea – theoretically just 100 members paying you $97 a month will gross $9,700 per month and $116,400 per year.

But it’s not as easy as it used to be to get someone to sign up for a hefty monthly payment. And if you do, a majority of members tend to cancel after 1-4 months.

So why do they cancel? Because in their minds you are not delivering enough value for the money. They see that their finances are tight and they look for ways to save some money. “I’ll cancel that monthly membership because I wasn’t really using it anyway.”

The only way to prevent this from happening is to be indispensable to their business or their lives. If, for example, your membership gives them the software or the content that enables them to run their business, they’re not going to cancel. Same way if you provide them with something they can immediately turn into profit, such as high quality PLR. But these things tend to take more time and resources than the average marketer has, at least in the beginning.

So how can you start a continuity program that people readily join and don’t quickly cancel? By offering an inexpensive newsletter on a topic they’re passionate about. If your newsletter is in the $5 to $12 a month range and if it’s providing value, they’re not likely to cancel. After all, what’s a few bucks to read something they really enjoy? It’s less than a pizza and it provides value. And it’s almost too much effort to bother to cancel – it’s easier to just let it continue.

But you might be wondering how it can be worth it to sell a newsletter for, say, a $9 a month subscription. After all, 100 subscribers is only $900 – is it worth your time? And how long will it take to get those 100 subscribers?

Frankly, it generally doesn’t happen overnight. You may only get a handful of subscribers the first month, and another handful the second. But if your subscribers are sticking around, then your income is steadily building month after month.

Better still, whether you have one subscriber or 10,000 subscribers, your work stays the same. This means you can continue to add subscribers to infinity and your workload never goes up but your income does.

Plus, it doesn’t have to take a tremendous amount of effort. If you’re already knowledgeable about your topic you can write about it in your spare time. If you’re not, you can interview others and transcribe the interviews, or get other experts to write articles for you. In fact, if you’re smart you won’t spend the majority of your time creating content because you’ll spend it growing your subscriber base. This way every month you’ll earn more than the month before and that’s a great feeling.

Plus, you can market additional related products and services to your newsletter subscribers, thereby further increasing your income. Remember, your newsletter is far more likely to be read than ordinary emails, articles and blog posts because people are paying to receive it. This means you can build a tremendous amount of rapport and power with your readers. And so long as you never steer them wrong, they are more likely to follow your suggestions.

Here are 16 tips to get your newsletter up and running and make it as successful as possible.

1. Choose a topic with a high perceived value for the market. Making or saving money is always good. So is any niche with fanatical followers, many health niches, hobbies and even dating and relationships. If you can find something that people are obsessed with you’ve got a winner. For example, bodybuilders are obsessed with finding better/faster ways to gain muscle and they’ll subscribe to numerous magazines and websites to find the latest techniques.

2. Write a bullet rich sales page with tons of teasers on what they’ll discover in the newsletter.

3. Write one monthly newsletter or break your newsletters up into weekly editions. To begin with, the monthly newsletter format is easier and feels less overwhelming to produce. Plus it can be more impressive looking when subscribers see one big newsletter instead of several small ones each month. However, if there’s a lot of news in your niche then you might want to go with 2 or more smaller newsletters, since you’ll be able to put the news out in a much more timely manner before it gets old.

4. The amount of content you put into each newsletter is going to depend on your preferences, the niche and what your readers want. Remember that quality is much more important than quantity. For example, if you write a newsletter about making money from home, one detailed method they can implement each month is worth more than 100 pages of generic information they can get anywhere.

5. You don’t have to limit yourself just to written content – you can also do podcasts and videos.

6. Use experts in your field to help you generate the content. If you rely just on yourself you’ll run out of info. But with a steady stream of experts you’ll always have something fresh to say. Do interviews, use guest authors and even hire people to write articles for you.

7. In addition to information, negotiate discounts on products and services they might need. Getting these “inside deals” can be an added benefit of being a subscriber to your newsletter. For example, if your newsletter is about how to best use WordPress, you might negotiate discounts on popular themes, plugins or hosting. If you’re good at negotiating these deals they could even pay for members’ subscriptions.

8. Use a $1 trial to bring in more new subscribers.

9. Convert your newsletter to PDF and deliver via autoresponder or download link.

10. Ask your subscribers to submit their own tips and advice and offer them a link in your newsletter or some other reward if you publish what they write. Do this in every issue and over time you won’t have to produce as much content yourself.

11. Survey your subscribers to find out what they would like to see covered in your newsletter.

12. Once you know the value of your subscribers, you can purchase advertising to bring in new subscriptions. For example, if you know that your average subscriber stays for 6 months and you charge $9 a month for your newsletter, that’s $54. If it costs you $15 in advertising to get that subscriber, you’ve made (on average) $39 for every new subscriber that advertising brings in, not including other sales you might make to them.

13. Have a back end. It should be something more expensive than your newsletter and it needs to fit your niche perfectly, but it doesn’t have to be your own product. You can offer an affiliate product – just be sure it’s something you really, truly believe in yourself.

14. Depending on your niche, you might offer a “fixed term” membership. This is generally used when teaching specific skills that don’t change much over time, such as how to run a membership site or how to survive a disaster. You wouldn’t want to use this model if the information were constantly changing – for example, investing.

If the fixed term membership model is applicable to your niche, it offers a double benefit: First, you write the content once and continue to get paid on it for a long time. Second, members see the end in sight and are even less likely to cancel. Weekly publication tends to work well for a fixed term membership.

15. Rinse and repeat. Once you get one newsletter off the ground and successful, you might consider doing a second newsletter. This might be directly related to your first niche or in an entirely new niche.

For example, if your first newsletter is on Commodity trading, you might start a second newsletter on Forex trading. Then you can offer a discount to your commodity subscribers when they subscribe to your Forex newsletter. This will give your new newsletter a financial jump start and also enable you to immediately begin paying for content if you’re having it outsourced.

16. Cash out. If there comes a day when you’re ready to move on, sell your newsletter. Keep in mind that having built in recurring income along with a list of paying members makes your business VALUABLE, so you should get a very good price for it.

Let’s face it – it’s getting a little harder these days to do offline marketing. There’s more competition than ever before as more and more marketers break into the field. There are also more potential services to sell, which just tends to confuse the heck out of both the business owners and the new offline marketers. And as more and more marketers are offering more services to business owners, the owners are often saying “no” before they even know what they’re turning down.

But it’s still true that offline marketing can be hugely lucrative for anyone who makes a serious attempt at it, especially if they find a way to stand apart from the crowd. Imagine the edge you could enjoy over every other offline marketer if you offered business owners just one thing – the thing they want the most – more customers.

Very few marketers are doing this, yet it’s probably the easiest service of all to sell to a business owner.

You could practically pick and choose which clients you work with, because what business owner is going to say ‘no’ to new customers? None in their right mind. Especially when they only pay you for leads or for actual customers. If you don’t deliver, they don’t get paid. Thus there is absolutely no risk to them. And with no risk, there is no reason for them to say no.

So how do you go about getting these leads and new customers for your clients? First, you’re going to think locally, not globally. You’re getting leads for a specific type of local business that serves a specific geographic area, such as a city or region.

Second, you’re going to build a website and then you’re going to drive traffic to that website. You do want to use good SEO, but you don’t want to rely just on search engine traffic. After all, your site could rise or fall on the whim of the search engines. That’s why you’ll want a paid traffic source you can rely on such as Google Ads.

You’ll be choosing niches that can pay you high referral fees so you can afford to spend money to get those leads and still pocket plenty of profit. For example, let’s say it takes you $50 in Google Ads to get a new patient for a dentist. If you’re charging the dentist $100 per new patient then you can do this all day long.

You’ll want to retain ownership of your websites for two reasons. First, if your client ever stops working with you, you’ll be able to sell your leads to a similar client in the same area. For example, if you’re getting leads for a contractor in Austin, Texas, and one day that contractor decides for whatever reason to stop using your leads, you can simply begin selling your leads to one of their competitors.

The second reason to retain ownership of your lead generating websites is so that you can make changes on the fly. Let’s say your site is ranking high but one day it falls to page 3. You can immediately make changes in your SEO without having to get them approved by the business.

As you can see, this business model is fairly simple and the competition is still relatively low. The field is wide open and getting clients can be as easy as asking if they can handle more business.

Here are a few questions you might have:

Q. What type of website should I build?

A. A small WordPress site targeting the best buyer keywords works well. Figure 5 to 10 pages, 10 to 25 keywords to start if you’re optimizing for SEO. Each website should target one niche in one town. For example, dentists in Tacoma or chiropractors in Atlanta.

Q. How do I find the keywords? Can you give keyword examples?

A. Use the Google Keyword Planner to find out which terms are commonly searched for in a particular industry. Then add those keywords to the location to form your keyword phrases. For example, Tacoma Washington dentist. Use singular and plural, and also add appropriate “buying” keywords, such as buy, rent, lease, hire, etc. Lastly, add descriptive keywords such as best, cheap, fast, etc.

Q. What domain should I use for my site?

A. First, don’t buy a domain that uses the actual business name. For example, if your client is Bob Smith, dentist, Tacoma Washington, don’t buy BobSmithTacomaDentist.com because if he ever stops using your services you won’t be able to use that domain. Second, choose something generic with your best keywords in a .com, .org or .net. For example, TacomaWashingtonDentist.com or DentistTacomaWashington.com. (These may or may not already be real sites.)

Q. What should I have on my website?

A. – A toll-free number prominently displayed.

– A contact form above the fold. (70-80% of people will call, 20-30% of people will fill out the contact form.)

– Images – either use images from your client or buy your own images.

– Lots of headings and paragraphs to break up the content.

– Great content with a clear call to action. Don’t use PLR for this – either write your content yourself or outsource it. If you need ideas, check similar websites but do not copy. Above all, make your copy engaging.

– Proof – real customer testimonials are good for this, as well as industry backed facts quoted with sources (IE: “People using a lawyer for their personal injury claim receive on average $42,000 more per claim than those going through the process without legal representation.” – The American Bar Assoc.) btw, I just made that up – DO NOT use it.

Q. What shouldn’t I have on my website?

A. Anything that is on the client’s own website. Assuming they have their own site, you’ll want to use all fresh and unique content. If you need to post their address, do so as an image so Google doesn’t see it as duplicating. And don’t use PLR. Ever.

Q. How do I charge?

A. It’s up to you and the client, but here are some suggestions:

Get paid for the leads you generate, rather than the sales you make. You’ll get paid less per lead of course, but you’ll get paid for every lead regardless of whether or not they become a customer. It’s important to note that clients may be more reluctant to do it this way if they are not confident in their ability to close leads. You can overcome their resistance by giving the first leads to them for free so that they can test the quality of the leads before agreeing to pay for your services.

Establish a flat rate for each sale you generate. Your client might offer many different services at different prices, in which case you can establish a different flat rate for each service. With a flat rate you typically get paid right away.

Take a certain percentage of each sale. If your client bills far into the future rather than upfront, you might not get paid for a while using this method. Commissions over the lifetime of the client/customer relationship. For example, if your client is a landscaper and they service the client weekly for months or years, you could get paid a small amount of money for a long time, which adds up.

Q. Are there any clients I should avoid?

A. Yes. Any business in direct competition with one of your existing clients. For example, you can work with one dentist in each geographical area, but not two dentists in the same small to mid-sized town (2 dentists in a large city would almost certainly be alright, but after that look for other locations or other professions.)

Also avoid any business that does not either make a large sale up front or offer a long term ongoing service. For example, a bakery wouldn’t be a good business since each sale is probably $5 to $20. But a doctor, lawyer, accountant, contractor, swimming pool sales, realtor, insurance agent, mortgage broker, etc., would all make for good clients. So would someone who provides an ongoing service such as the landscaping and lawn care we mentioned earlier, or a maid service, high paid personal trainer, etc.

Q. How do I know which businesses to approach?

A. Look for those that are already spending money on trying to get business. This might be in the Yellow Pages, Google Ads, newspaper advertising, etc. These are businesses looking for more customers and ready to spend money to get those customers.

Q. How do I track leads?

A. The opt-in form makes tracking of those leads easy. You can even offer an incentive such as a relevant report to encourage their opt-ins, and then follow up to encourage them to use your client’s services.

For the phone number, you can use a virtual reception service to take down the name and number of each caller before forwarding them to the business.

Local affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative if you’re willing to put some time into it. You’ll need to build websites, optimize them and run Google Ads campaigns. But once you get everything set up, you can continue to make money for months or years to come with very little additional effort.

Hopefully you are the exception to these mistakes. If you’re not, take heart: 9 out of 10 online marketers make these very same mistakes. Here’s how to rise above your competition and increase your bottom line simply by NOT making these 5 mistakes…

Spamming on social media. You opened your X account with the best of intentions to Tweet valuable content and answer questions, but now nearly every tweet you send out is a link promoting a product. If this is you, then it’s time for a change. Promotion is fine as long as it makes up only 20-30% of your tweets at MOST. The rest should be content rich and helpful to your followers. And this goes for every social media network, not just X.

Not testing. You create a new squeeze page but you don’t test one headline against another. Result? Every day that goes by, you are losing money. Test everything and eventually the exact same effort will yield 1.5, 2 or even 3 times the results.

Not asking for the sale. Whether you’re looking for an opt-in, a share or a sale, tell them exactly what you want them to do. If you don’t make your call-to-action clear, you will get less than stellar results every time.

Ignoring your current customers. Are you so busy looking for new business that you forget to pay attention to your most important asset – your current customers? These are the people who already trust you enough to have purchased at least one of your products. That’s why your current customers are actually your best future prospects in the world – treat them like gold.

Talking about you, you and YOU. Do you know who your customers care about? Themselves. They don’t care about you, only about what you can do for them. This sounds harsh, but it’s true. Yes, you can tell them an anecdote about what happened to you last weekend, but it better have something in it for them. Your customers don’t want you or your products. They want solutions to their problems. Remember this and you can’t go wrong.