I produced another video narration of one of my articles titled ” RSS - ABCs For Grown Ups“. Hope you enjoy it and learn something that benefits you.

To your success,
Chris

I have completed a video narration of an article I wrote titled Forum Etiquette - Know This Or Perish.

Hope you enjoy the video narration.

To your success,
Chris

Here are some nuggets / tidbits of advice when it comes to marketing in forums;

1. You have to become a frequent contributor and participant in the forums that you choose to participate in. It is a matter of becoming part of the community and contributing value before you try to focus on self-promotion. Ask questions and answer questions where you have knowledge to share.

2. Never just say “Nice post” in reply to another post. It creates internet trash, adds no value and infuriates mostly everyone as they have to scroll through that nonsense to find the good information.

3. It is okay to mention your website within your post if it is relevant to the topic at hand.
Otherwise leave your promotions to your forum signature

4. ALWAYS have a forum signature which promotes your website. Some forums allow you to promote more than one website so do so where possible. Signatures are known as promotions so nobody will be offended if your links are shown in your signature file.

5. Remember the 4 “H’s” when posting to the forums. Be heartfelt, human, helpful and add humor. This way you will be more relatable and you will build long-lasting relationships with the members who may become your customers or partners.

6. Be aware that you do not own the forum and if you do not follow the rules you can get kicked out and blocked from ever posting again so be sure to be considerate of others and the forum’s rules to avoid this happening.

In the end, forums are a fun, fast and easy way to direct free targeted traffic to your website and definitely should be included in your traffic arsenal. Good luck.

The first item on the list of recommended blogging tools & resources is WordPress which is actually the simplest blogging software to use to build your blog. You can download this software at Wordpress’s website. Just as a side note, the search engines love blogs and they also love WordPress blogs so this is another reason you will do well to make this your blogging software of choice.

Another useful tool you may want to use is a keyword research tool known as Wordtracker. At the time of writing this they have a 7 Day Free trial and you can find this resource at Wordtracker’s website. You want to have a main keyword that your blog is targeting and Wordtracker is an excellent tool to use for your research on keywords. There are also many free keyword research tools so you may want to do a search for this if you are on a tight budget.

When you get your WordPress blog setup, one of the most useful things with WordPress is the amount of plugins that are available. Plugins add functionality to your blog. For example, there are plugins that will update Twitter everytime you submit a post. There are others that allow you to put Social Bookmarking tools after your posts so that your readers can bookmark your posts which helps you to get backlinks to your blog which drives further traffic to your blog.

Since you will want to stay abreast of what your competitors are doing another recommended blogging tool you can make use of is Google’s blog search. Using this tool you can find all of your competitors and check out their traffic generation methods. You can also see what marketing methods they are using to attract and retain their readers.

You should do a Google search and look up blog directories as there are many that you should submit your blog to. One of the most important is Technorati so, at the very least make sure you submit your blog to Technorati and ping them with every post you make.

I hope you take these recommendations and make use of them to build yourself a successful blog.

Sometimes when just getting started you may wonder what on earth should you put into your auto-responder messages that will be sent out to your list. The last thing you want as you are building your list is to see people unsubscribing on the backend after you have done all of this hard work to get them onto your list in the first place.

If you do not yet have an autoresponder account I highly suggest you get one through Aweber.

So you need interesting, useful and helpful content to provide your subscribers with.
What you must remember is the topic that attracted your optin subscribers to join your list in the first place. Stay on topic with your auto-responder messages. The fastest way to lose your subscribers is to stray away from the main topic of your website that got them to sign up initially.
One of the simplest ways to provide value (being useful and helpful) is to create an e-course to send to your subscribers on the topic that your website focuses on. An example would be if your site is about Affiliate Marketing, you could do an e-course as follows;

1. Qualities of a successful Affiliate Marketer
2. Top Mistakes Most Affiliate Marketers Make
3. Useful Tools For Affiliate Marketers
4. How To Make Money As Affiliate
5. How To Choose Affiliate Products etc.

I’m sure you get the point about how that will work. It will also keep your readers looking out for more as with each message you will tell them to look out for another and so on.

Your readers don’t want to feel pressured so remember that while they expect you will be promoting either your own products or others, try not to over do the links in your emails. One or two links maximum per email is enough. Try to send them an occasional freebie as well. It will help you create goodwill with your followers.

To your success,
Chris

P.S. Here is that link again for you to go get setup with your autoresponder account at Aweber now.

The first item on the list of recommended blogging tools & resources is WordPress which is actually the simplest blogging software to use to build your blog. You can download this software at WordPress.org. Just as a side note, the search engines love blogs and they also love WordPress blogs so this is another reason you will do well to make this your blogging software of choice.

Another useful tool you may want to use is a keyword research tool known as Wordtracker. At the time of writing this they have a 7 Day Free trial and you can find this resource at Wordtracker.com . You want to have a main keyword that your blog is targeting and Wordtracker is an excellent tool to use for your research on keywords. There are also many free keyword research tools so you may want to do a search for this if you are on a tight budget.

When you get your WordPress blog setup, one of the most useful things with WordPress is the amount of plugins that are available. Plugins add functionality to your blog. For example, there are plugins that will update Twitter everytime you submit a post. There are others that allow you to put Social Bookmarking tools after your posts so that your readers can bookmark your posts which helps you to get backlinks to your blog which drives further traffic to your blog.

Since you will want to stay abreast of what your competitors are doing another recommended blogging tool you can make use of is Google’s blog search which you will find here Google Blog Search . Using this tool you can find all of your competitors and check out their traffic generation methods. You can also see what marketing methods they are using to attract and retain their readers.

You should do a Google search and look up blog directories as there are many that you should submit your blog to. One of the most important is Technorati so, at the very least make sure you submit your blog to Technorati and ping them with every post you make.

I hope you take these recommendations and make use of them to build yourself a successful blog.

One of the most successful bloggers today is Yaro Starak from Australia. You may want to check out Yaro’s program called Blog Mastermind for other useful tips, tools and resources to make money blogging.

Squidoo is a fast, easy way for anyone to get a website. Basically a Squidoo lens is a one page website hosted for free at Squidoo.com. Like with anything else there are right and wrong ways of doing things. The purpose of this article is to point out some of the pitfalls to avoid when setting up your Squidoo lens.

If you are planning to build a Squidoo lens to promote your business or drive traffic to your main website where you sell products or to an affiliate website, there are things to be aware of to do and not to do.

Here are 5 pitfalls or mistakes to avoid in building your Squidoo lens;

1.Squidoo allows you to use tags for your lens. Tags are great for optimizing SEO benefits. Google loves Squidoo lenses. You will find upon doing any Google search that most times on the first page there will be one or more Squdioo lenses for your search term. You should try to make the title of your Squidoo lens the main keyword you are targeting, if possible. If your main keyword is taken you can try using hyphens in the phrase. Eg. NaturalHealthSolutions is taken, try Natural-Health-Solutions instead. (Hint: Try to use your main keyword phrase as much as possible throughout your Squidoo lens in the titles and subtitles within the modules). Don’t overdo it as people will feel like your lens is too “salesy”.

2. Squidoo allows you to put links to your websites or affiliate product websites if you so choose. Take advantage of this. Weave your links into your text modules so that they are part of what you are writing and do not come across as a blatant ad. People much prefer to be presented with links in this manner rather than a blatant ad or banner on the lens. Especially in your Bio you should have a link to your blog or salespage or affiliate product. This is one of the main areas that people will read so you need to have your links in here.

3. Squidoo also offers you a community aspect in the way of Groups. You should definitely look into any groups that are related to your niche and join them. It isn’t enough just to join them you need to also participate and add value to your group(s). You will develop relationships with the people in your group and they will visit your lens and website and eventually become your customers. Another benefit of joining a group here is that you can get links back from the group to your lens.

4. Driving traffic to your lens is a must. Doing so will help it rise in the search engine rankings. There are many ways to drive traffic. I would suggest you use some of the social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.ic.ious, Stumbleupon to do this. You should put a link to your lens on your blog as well and post about it and ask people to visit your lens and rate it.

5. A Squidoo lens is always a work in progress, similar to a blog. You need to keep your lens updated with fresh content. As you update your lens on a regular basis your rankings within Squidoo rise, which eventually means more traffic for your lens.

Try to pay attention to these areas when developing your lens and continually check your lens statistics to see how you might improve your lens. Obviously we would all love our lens to be #1 and it’s possible by keeping the content fresh and interesting and avoiding the above mistakes.

Here is one of my Squidoo lenses, please visit and rate it when you have a chance;

Internet Marketing Tips For U

To Your Success,
Chris