Ok-ok, sorry for playing with your fears. Every intelligent person (and I know you are, because you’re reading this blog) will have a really hard time when it comes to naming something, be it a product, a brand or a website.

In case you’re on the verge of launching a brand new blog, this article is something I encourage you to read.

Blog name & Domain name

I guess that’s pretty obvious, but still: your blog name and your domain name should be identical (not counting TLD of course).

I mean Tweet this! ▼►► ► if you’ve named your blog “Red Cats And Giant Kangaroos” your domain name should be “redcatsandgiantkangaroos.com” and nothing else.

Let’s refer a few well-known blogs for a proof:

Smashing Magazine – smashingmagazine.com
Web Designer Depot – webdesignerdepot.com
Convince And Convert – convinceandconvert.com
Social Media Examiner – socialmediaexaminer.com

So what does this all mean for you?

Your blog name (as well as your domain name) should be short!

People hate remembering long names just as much as they hate typing long domain names in their browser. Look at this list of 500 most popular websites by SEOmoz – all the domains are very short. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

The Science Of Picking A Domain Name

Would you argue with me if I say that some names stick in your brain easily and for long while others vanish the same second you hear them. Let’s see if there’s some science behind naming.

This cool image is taken from a post The Science of Naming Brands, From iPad to Ice Cream

Since we’re speaking about domain names specifically, I’d like to suggest three different approaches to picking a domain name:

1. Keyword rich domain

Back in the days using the exact keywords in your domain name helped a lot in getting to Google’s frontpage. But since the Google EMD update was rolled out I no longer see any SEO value in this method.

Yet, when I was thinking for a name for this blog and trying out different ideas at NameCheap to see if the domain was available I checked something like this:

• blogmarketingtactics.com
• blogpromotiontips.com
• blogpromotionstrategies.com (available atm)
• learnmarketingblog.com (available atm)

2. Abstract domain

Most startups today tend to invent some catchy abstract names: Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.

I think it works for them because they approach markets in a way suggested by Geoffrey A. Moore in his book “Crossing the Chasm”:

I guess there’s no way to “cross the chasm” with a poor name

Once a new product or service is being released it should aim for Innovators and Early Adopters instead of pitching itself to general public. And if these two categories of people will like your product everybody else will eventually catch up.

Where’s naming here? Well, I think some abstract new thing called “Twitter” not only sounds fresh, but contains a small puzzle in it. Once people will hear “Ashton Kutcher is using Twitter” – they won’t be able to resist checking out what Twitter is.

Compare this to “Ashton Kutcher is using QuickMessage” – who cares, right?

But again, this works for startups that are offering something never seen before. If your goal is to name a blog I don’t really recommend this method.

3. Descriptive domain

This one might give you just a hint of what the website is all about as opposed to containing exact keywords. I particularly love this one as it allows you to create a catchy name with a riddle in it, which will make people guess the meaning. Our brains hate loose ends, we aways demand a closure.

I loved the examples of names with riddles from the book “Unthinking” by Harry Beckwith:

Coldplay – how can “play” be “cold”?
50Cent – shouldn’t it be 50 cents?

It all sticks because it’s unusual.

A few more brain tricks from this book in case you’re interested (and I know you are):

• Our brains love surprises. Actually any good joke depends entirely on a surprise – if the ending is expected it’s not funny.
• Our brains love rhymes. That’s because rhymes work like riddles. Once we hear the first part we’re wondering “what would be the closure”?

Ok, that’s enough for a teaser :)

For my own blog (this one) I knew I wanted something descriptive but not-too-obvious to make people wondering what exactly is the meaning of my blog.

I knew I was going to write about the power of blogging and how blogs help in marketing products and services online. I decided that the word “blog” or “blogger” should definitely be present and for the other one I just browsed Thesaurus.

If you try to imagine what bloggerjet is I guess it will look like this

This is how bloggerjet.com was born.

I really like this name, I think it follows most of the naming rules and I like to think that it’s catchy and easy to remember.

Why did I register BloogerJET with .com TLD?

I honestly don’t know why everyone is so obsessed with .com TLDs. I think some SEO guy said that .com domains rank better in search engines. But again, if you look at Problogger.NET – I don’t think they have any problems with ranking. So just stick with what appeals to you, whether it is .com, .net or even .biz.

TIP: I’ve also heard on some SEO forums that if your domain is registered for a longer period than one year – that’s also a positive sign for Google and you might rank a little bit better.

Picking a Hosting Account

Back in the days when I was a student, I was working for a hosting company (for about 6 years). Yet when I see pages where different hosting features and specifications are listed – I feel really dumb, as it does not say me anything.

Luckily, WordPress blog is not too demanding when it comes to hosting requirements, so it practically runs everywhere.

If you’re looking for a decent hosting company and can’t make a decision – save yourself a few hours of researching time and just go with Bluehost WordPress Hosting. They have a very modest price and in the admin panel there’s literally all you need to launch a blog.

Originally I’ve started BloggerJet (and a handful of other projects) with Bluehost too but then moved to MediaTemple. I’d call them a Premium Hosting Provider and I really love their support. I was experimenting a lot with my projects so I had to ask them for help quite frequently and they always sorted my issues in no time. Great guys!

Installing WordPress

Well this topic was covered hundreds (if not thousands) of times. There’s no point for me to cover it here, really.

I’d rather embed a YouTube video that pretty much does it:

Afterword

Originally this article was named “Stage1: Domain Hosting WordPress All The Basics” and it was actually the very first article I’ve published here at BloggerJet 2 years ago. I mean there was nothing special about it, at all.

But right now I’m bringing BloggerJet back to life after taking a long break and I decided that every blatant article should be rewritten.

So this is how “scientific approach” appeared in the headline :)

I know some of you might argue about the science behind this article, but I really hope you’ve enjoyed the ideas and added a few items into your “must read” list.

Generating Blog Name Ideas & Launching A Blog. Scientific Approach. is a post from: BloggerJET

Since I’m a sort of an “SEO guy” I immediately went to play with it…

I was checking the sites I own/manage/consult and was satisfied with what I saw, but that’s until I’ve opened BloggerJET…

This basic graph I saw was showing me something totally unexpected:

Whoa! How come my Index suddenly became ten times bigger?

The only way to check that is to use my favorite advanced search operator “site:” (btw… in case you’re new to advanced search operators I suggest you check this post outlining some nice practical use).

There’s clearly a ton of junk in my index.

I clicked some of the search results to see what’s there and got something like this:

My very first thought was: “OMG, I got hacked!“.

But after a short panic attack I realized that some stupid code in my website was generating a separate page for each image I ever uploaded to my WordPress blog.

Why your Google Index matters?

I bet most of you know it already, yet I feel I have to explain it here to make this post kinda “complete”.

We’ve all heard how much Google hates seeing duplicate content. We’ve also heard about that Panda Update that’s fighting against “thin” content.

That’s a no-brainer, right?

Now look back at my “stuffed” index. Google doesn’t care that some stupid plugin is creating hundrends of empty pages that are not adding value to my readers, it just sees the fact that my website mainly consists of junk pages.

And besides, all the “link-juice” I get to BloggerJet from other websites is now being distributed among hundreds of junk pages, instead of only powering up the pages that I really care about.

I think I made my point: your Google Index should be clean and that’s a fact!

The Fix

So I asked my good friend to take a look at the issue and quite promptly he came up with the solution. I’m gonna share it here in case anyone else is having a similar issue.

There’s a file called “attachment.php” in the folder of my WordPress theme. And basically all I needed to do is to change whatever was there to:

This little piece of code makes a 301 redirect from the page with image attachment to a parent post.

TA-DA! Problem solved!

However I had to wait quite a few months till all the junk pages were removed from my Google index:

So why don’t you go and check YOUR Google index right now? :)

When was the last time you’ve checked your Google index? is a post from: BloggerJET

No, seriously… go ask them: send them a few emails, message them on Facebook or maybe on Twitter. I’ll wait here.

OR… you can save your time and just believe me when I say that most (if not all) power bloggers rely on Google as their primary traffic source.

And so, if you are interested in maximizing your traffic from Google, I’m about to share an awesome tool that will help you with that. But first…

Did You Have This “A-Ha Moment” Already?

When you open your Google Analytics account and discover that there’s a certain phrase, sending you lots of search traffic.

And then you google for it just to see what pops up.

And there you have it. The “A-Ha Moment”: the more of your blog posts rank #1 in Google for their keywords – the more traffic your blog eventually gets.

It’s so simple and straightforward, yet lots of newbie bloggers never think about it. They just publish dozens of blog posts in a hope that one day their blog will get popular just by chance.

What do pro bloggers do? They optimize their posts for Google, track their rankings and build links to make them rank better.

Who’s Got The Power?

We all know that Google ranks pages depending on the amount of incoming links. But when you publish a new post it doesn’t have any incoming links, right? In this case Google will look at the “power” of your website as a whole to determine what would be the appropriate position for your new post in SERP.

This “power” often correlates with your website’s PageRank. So if you have a PageRank of 6 or bigger – most of your posts will pop in Google quite nicely right from the start.

But even with a solid PageRank you won’t be able to get to that precious #1 spot without some extra effort.

The question is: “How much effort exactly does a certain post need to rank #1?”

Unfortunately there’s no specific answer…

What does a Gardener and a Blogger have in common?

Let’s pretend you’ve decided to grow a nice garden in front of your house. You’ve outlined your garden spot and planted the sprouts. From now on your work is to look after the sprouts till they grow into a beautiful garden. You have to water them enough, give them enough light, fertilize them & do all sorts of other “garden stuff“.

The thing is – you can’t know for sure how much “garden stuff” each sprout will need to grow to the size you want it to be. You just do the “stuff” and watch what happens. And if you’re careful and observant enough, with time your garden will look like this:

Now back to blogging.

It’s obvious, right? Your blog is your garden spot, the sprouts are your posts and the “garden stuff” is all the “SEO stuff” that you have to do to rank well. But how do you actually “observe” your sprouts grow?

Here’s the Tool I’ve Told You About

Guys, meet Rank Tracker.

Rank Tracker, meet the guys.

click here to visit the official website

I use it myself for lots of projects I work on and I love it! Should I even say more?

It really saves me tons of time with my “garden stuff” routine: picking keywords for my posts and tracking how the posts perform in Google as I build links to them.

But, what’s more important, since I’m regularly tracking how all of my posts “grow“, I can tell from the start how much linkbuilding does a certain post need to rank well, depending on how it “reacts” to the “garden stuff” that I do to it.

Your move, buddy

So what do you think? Is it a good time for you to finally treat blogging like a PRO? All the smart bloggers have been obsessed with their Google rankings for ages.

And with the super handy tools like Rank Tracker it’s no longer a pain in the ass to track how 200 of your blog posts perform for 500 different keywords.

Give it a try and see yourself how cool it is. It actually has a free version which you can download here.

And as always, I’m looking forward to your questions in comments ;)

The Mystery Tool That Pro Bloggers Use To Milk Google For Traffic is a post from: BloggerJET

99% of your posts don’t get crazy viral.

Am-I-right?-Am-I-right?

We’ve all heard that “Content is King” but lately the majority of content that people procuce is more of a “bastard” at best.

I know there’s a ton of advice on “how to write great posts” but somehow none of them is worth bookmarking as a “one stop resource to refer noob writers to“.

So I decided to give it a shot and write the one of my own…

You might ask me:

“Tim, what makes you think Noobs are capable of creating compelling content, anyways?”

I have a great story to tell you :)

Once upon a time in a galaxy far-far away there was a noob who was just making his first baby steps online. He didn’t know much about online marketing, but he was very passionate about it. Day after day he was reading dozens of blogs and discovering lots of new stuff, that eventually led him to discovering even more new stuff.

Then, one day, by a fluke, he discovered a trendy new niche – “Facebook Marketing“. He tried to search for some information about it on his favorite online marketing resource – yet there was nothing.

And then he thought:

“Maybe I should write a guestpost about Facebook Marketing and submit it there? But how? I’m just a noob, I don’t have much experience in Facebook Marketing myself. And besides, I’ve never written a single guestpost in my life.”

Despite the overwhelming fear to fail, he decided to give it a try.

In fact, he was so afraid to fail that he decided he should go nap on it and work his ass out.

Did he eventually succeed? Oh yes, he did! Even more than he may have dreamed of…

His first ever guestpost was a sensation! It even got the award Top post of 2010 by the number of “Thumbs Up”, Unique Visits & Retweets that it received.

This was truly more than I could dream of at that time!

Yep, that’s my story. And I feel totally eligible now to claim that “Noobs can create killer content“!

One thing left to do is explain how:

Part 1: Picking a Topic for your future post

This is where it all starts.

In fact, there are only two approaches to generating topic ideas:

1. You already know what you want to write about;
2. The second one.

 
Noobs will always stick with the second option since they are not very familiar with any given niche. Nevertheless, all noobs are granted a personal “guardian angel” by the name St. Research.

Let’s see what you can do with his help:

#1. Dive deep into the niche

You can start from familiarizing yourself with the niche by exploring the blogs that represent it. In case you can’t name any of them, you should search Google for “list of INSERT_YOUR_NICHE_HERE blogs“.

*Alternatively you can try Google Blog Search and just feed it with your niche keywords. But if you ask me – I rarely use it. Can’t really explain why.*

Grab a spreadsheet and put all the blogs into one big list. What? Your list is not big enough? Well, you can always ask Google for some extra help.

“related:” is one of my favorite Google search operators. Put any website URL next to it and Google will return a nice list of sites that it considers to be relevant.

Now your list of blogs should get twice as big, and besides, as you start exploring those blogs I’m sure you’ll find a few dozens more, since relevant blogs tend to link to each other.

Eventually your list will get big enough to say you know the niche, but who are the leaders?

Here is the list of metrics you may want to add to your spreadsheet to outline A-listers:

• PageRank – do I really need to explain it? Just grab a handy extension for your Chrome and you’re all set.
• Alexa – very popular metric among bloggers. Alexa estimates (roughly) the traffic of any given website and ranks it compared to others. Google.com is ranked #1, which means it has the highest traffic in the world. Grab the Chrome extension here.
• “Subscribers” – quite often blogs will showcase the number of “subscribers” right on their front page, to show how big their audience is. Pay attention to these numbers. The most valuable are email subscribers, RSS subscribers are not THAT important to be honest, just like Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers.

#2. Find the germs

Your list of blogs is nice and clean and now you have a clear understanding of who are the leaders and who are the underdogs. It’s about time to explore what’s currently trending in the niche.

In case you’ve been using sites like Popurls, Alltop, Fark to keep up with the trends, I strongly encourage you to stop doing that.

These sites will only show you “who blogs about what right now” instead of showing you “what readers go crazy about right now“, while investigating the latter is actually a piece of cake.

Just explore the latest 10-15 posts on each of the blogs in your list and see how much comments, tweets, likes, plusones did they get. While doing that try to look for patterns. If a certain topic pops up on different blogs and consistently generates a nice amount of buzz – that’s exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Except for that, there’s always a number of “evergreen” topics that never seem to fade. Those like to hang out in a place called “Popular Articles” somewhere in the sidebar of the blog.

Picking one of these ALMOST guarantees you success.

Part 2: Generating Ideas

Until now my guide had a strong smell of plagiarism, but that’s not really so.

I believe you know this famous quotation by Pablo Picasso:

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Well, as for me, “steal” means “make it your own” which in its turn means “put lots of work into it“.

I’m just trying to say that I don’t encourage you to “copy” a post or a topic that proved to be popular on a few blogs. If you want to succeed you need to improve it! No matter how perfect the original piece of content is – you can always do better! There’s nothing that can’t be improved, as they say.

(In fact, what I’m doing in this very post is trying to outperform all existing articles on writing outstanding posts.)

How about I give you a few cheats on “stealing ideas”?

#1: Quick Cheats:

• Read all the comments – if there’s something unclear about the post, people will usually ask questions in comments. Your job is to adress all of them in your own article. But there’s more to it, actually! By reading comments you can get a clear understanding of which ideas “resonate” with the audience and use that knowledge later on to create that feeling that you’re on the same note with your readers – “Wow, this guy knows all the awesome tricks I love, he must be smart! Lets see what else he has to say…”.
• Talk to people – want some “great ideas”? Ask a few questions to “great guys”! In case you know some people in the industry a quick conversation over Skype can be ten times more valuable than hours of googling. You should always work on expanding your network of great guys to discuss ideas with.
• Know what they are searching for – this might seem more of an SEO tip, but still. Google Keyword Tool – is an amazing service that lets you explore what people around the world are searching for. In our case the most valuable feature would be the “Keyword Ideas“. Feed this tool with any phrase or keyword and it will generate you a large list of relevant phrases with estimated monthly search volume right next to them. What else do you need, ha?

• Read, read, read – read other blogs until you feel there’s not a single thing on the topic that you don’t already know. This is the only way to make sure your own ideas are unique and weren’t published anywhere else. In fact, we tend to come up with great ideas while reading ones by others or being under the influence from them.

Actually the last tip is probably the most important. You should really know a ton of stuff before you even open your text editor to write a single line of text.

Now onto some extra tips:

#2: For overly ambitious guys only

Want to put some extra work into it? Not a problem:

• Stalk ‘em on social networks – you’ve outlined the A-list blogs, right? Go find their owners and stalk them everywhere you can – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. All you have to do is spy on them! They will quite often share outstanding content that you might have missed. Or they may talk about ideas that weren’t decently covered anywhere yet.
• Dig deep into “public bookmarks” – Delicious, Diigo, Digg, Reddit, etc. You know these sites, right? Their awesome feature is that they will show you how many times a certain article was bookmarked, which is quite often an indicator of how much value it contains. With a few searches you’ll be able to find some killer articles to “steal” some ideas from.
• Forums and Q&A boards – if there’s a niche, there’s most likely a forum dedicated to it somewhere around the internet. Your job is to find it and see what people are talking about. You can also use sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers, Mahalo, etc. where people ask questions they need answered.
• “Alternative Content” – guys, this is really my power tip. I was hesitating whether to share it or not. But since I decided to do it, I really hope this will be at least a huge plus to my karma… :)
   
  What I oftentimes do when I’m writing a post is go to SlideShare and search for presentations on the topic… seriously guys, that’s a killer! People create AMAZING presentations with lots of visuals, statistics, quotes – all neatly packed waiting for you.

  Let’s see what we have on copywriting… How about this cool slide deck:

  Ten Tips For Better Copy

  View more presentations from School of Visual Concepts

  How many stuff you can “steal” here? Tell me guys? And besides, presentations is not the single type of the so-called “alternative content” – you can also check free ebooks, YouTube (and Vimeo) videos, podcasts, webinars. I mean, guys… we are SURROUNDED by tons of awesome information neatly packed for you – just reach out and grab it!

• Read Books – super-intuitive tip, right? Yet for those of you who don’t think that’s necessary – do you really think guys like Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Sonia Simone, John Morrow (…and others) are the original authors of all the ideas they advocate? Hell No! And in fact they will quite often disclose that a specific idea was taken from a book. Did you see how much does this book cost btw? Or this? I bet if you buy them and “steal” ideas for your own blog – you’ll become a “guru” real fast.

Part 2.1: How to look like an expert

The thing is – most of us are not even close to the title “Expert“. Nevertheless we can pretty much LOOK like experts if we research our topic well enough.

Here’s the way I like to do it:

1. Start with general Google searches

You should start your research with a couple general Google searches on your topic. Google will return you pages that it considers to be the most valuable. Oftentimes there will be some really good materials at the top, but I will often check the first 15-20 pages just to make sure I’m not missing anything:

Get creative with your searches. Don’t limit yourself to a single search term because this way you won’t dig much valuable information.

Pay attention to what Google Auto Suggest is offering you – this is what lots of people are actually searching for:

2. Laser-Target Your Searches

Once you’ve done with regular searches it’s crucial to check what the most reputable blogs in your niche have written on this topic.

Use the advanced search operator “site:” to limit your search to a specific website:

3. Searching For Specifics

Broad topic is not the only thing you should search for. Each topic has these little sub-topics that you will talk about. Well, you’ll have to research them as well.

In case of “responsive web design” we’re going to write about “media queries” – why not to research this further? Do the “google thing”!

4. Rinse and Repeat

You should repeat the aforementioned steps till you feel you have enough information to write a well researched post.

Copy & paste pieces of information into a separate document. Save the links to the posts and resources you’d like to reference. Save some pictures that you want to include in your post. Note your own thoughts and ideas.

You should end up with a document full of “copy-pasted information”, links to resources, images and, of course, your own thoughts.

Part 3: Define the structure

Once you’ve collected enough information it is suggested that you create a rough structure of your future post.

Sketch some ideas for your opener, define the logical parts, give them pilote subheadings. Check if the flow of information would be natural with this structure. People shouldn’t be lost in a pile of random tips. Everything should be at its own place.

Try to get an image or two for each logical part of your post; people love visual information, that’s a fact. And later on images may help your regular readers to navigate to a certain part of your post once they need it.

Defining the structure from the start is very important as this way you will be able to see which parts of your post are lacking information and which are overcrowded. This will lead to some further research till you get a perfect amount of detail for each part of your post.

Part 4: Writing a Headline for your post

This is actually an ongoing process and you should start thinking of possible headlines right when you start researching your topic.

But once the research is over and you have all the information structured neatly and ready to roll – it’s time to come up with a killer headline.

Headline is kinda a certain promise to your readers. And later on in your post you have to fulfill this promise. That’s why it’s crucial that you write your headline FIRST and address it later on in your post.

Headline of your post is OVERLY important! It can either motivate people to read your post or turn them down.

(If you ask me, I’ve toggled the title for this post four times before hitting “Publish”, and still I don’t think it’s perfect.)

I highly recommend you to read this invaluable ebook by Jon Morrow on writing viral headlines: “52 Headline Hacks: a cheat sheet for writing blog posts that go viral” – it really has all you need to know while you’re noob.

Part 5: Before you hit “Publish”

In this part I want to talk about some “blog post tuning” tips you should take into consideration before you put it online and it accelerates into the blogosphere.

• Short sentences – make sure your sentences are not too long. To be honest, most people hate reading! If there was a choice between reading and “importing” the information right into the brain with cable or WiFi – they’d prefer the latter. Don’t make their reading tedious, write in short simple sentences.
• Short Paragraphs – now this one is more of a psychological trick. When a huge chunk of text is broken down into small paragraphs (3-4 sentences) it really feels easier to read. This very post has about 100 paragraphs (I think) and it reads quite easily (I hope) – but imagine for a second that this post is a single chunk of text, would you ever read it?
• Subheadings, lists, quotes – those things are used for easier skimming. Lots of people (including myself) will quickly skim through a post before reading it. This way they will determine how big it is and what’s in it. By using subheadings, lists, quotes & stuff – you’re feeding these guys with little bits of information that should make them want to read the whole stuff.
• An “Opener” they can’t resist – once your post is done, scroll up and put some extra work into your opener. This is what people will see on the front page of your blog, this is what they will see in their RSS reader, this is the first thing they will see as they land from Twitter or Facebook. If you fail to grab their attention with the very first sentence of your post (see mine above for example) – there’s a good chance they won’t read your post. Ever!
• Now forget it! – you should NEVER publish a post the same day it was written! I can bet that the next morning as you re-read it you’ll find lots of stuff that needs to be improved. Or, as it usually happens, a killer idea will strike you right at the time the “Publish” button was clicked.

  I’m a big advocate of re-reading posts numerous times before publishing. In fact, even when the post is not finished yet, as I start writing a new paragraph I will usually go back to the beginning to read it from the start, just to see how it flows. And every single time I do it (really guys, EVERY time) I will improve a little thing here and there.

  At the end of it all the post really makes me sick! I can hardly make myself read it one more time. Now it looks totally awful, every paragraph, every sentence. And THIS is the time I hit “Publish”.

And then people will email me and say: “I wish I could write as good as you.”

You CAN!

And now You Know HOW!

So guys… tell me… how often do you put THAT much work into your writing? And what other tips can you add to it?

Big Fat Noob Guide To Writing A Solid Post (or “How To Steal Ideas”) is a post from: BloggerJET

I bet you’re thinking – “HELL NO!”

This is how most of us will react, yet there are hundeds (if not thousands) of sects around the globe – all because most people get there by being deceived!

It all starts with a friendly invite to attend some meeting or lecture on a topic that bothers you, which in reality is a point of no return.

For the most of us the word “Sect” has a negative meaning and is quite often associated with the word “BrainWash“. That’s because we know that the people standing behind any sect are brilliant psychologists and outstanding public speakers, they use all known NLP techniques to manipulate your conscious and subconscious minds and make you do exactly what they want.

Now what if I say… that the Internet gave a birth to a brand new type of sect.

It all happens online now. From the very first interaction being a blog post, a video, a webinar or even a tweet, you get sucked into a funnel with one single purpose – getting all your money.

Guys, I want you to meet The World’s Most Deceiving Online “Sect” being…

Internet Marketing:

I strongly encourage you to stop reading my post and watch this video from the beginning and to the end. And in case you have some extra time you might as well check a brilliant post associated with the video above (big as hell, but really worth reading).

This whole “Internet Marketing Sect” is nothing else, but carefully crafted MLM pyramid.

Multi-level marketing (MLM) is a marketing strategy in which the sales force is compensated not only for sales they personally generate, but also for the sales of others they recruit, creating a downline of distributors and a hierarchy of multiple levels of compensation.

In other words, joining the forces of some scammy internet marketer requires you to buy his products as well as help him distribute them among your own network. And if you’re lucky and persistent enough – you might even sell a couple copies of your own product – but you will never get a check as big as your “guru”. That’s because he’s somewhere at the top of the MLM pyramid and he’s not interested in letting you reach his level and split profits.

I won’t dissertate about the success you might or might not achieve with an MLM business of any kind, I just want you to understand that people want to bring you to MLM not because they want you to make money, but because they want you to buy their products and redistribute them. And then it’s up to you how close to the top you can climb, but that’s not even close to something that’s called “get rich quick“.

The Blogs With Price Tags

According to my theory the “price tag” is one of the many indicators that the blogger is trying to manipulate you. Let me break down all of them, so that you could either approve or criticize my theory:

Stolen Face

There’s no better way to improve the credibility of your words other than show your face right next to them (hint: take a look at the top of my sidebar). Which of the testimonials will sound more credible to you: a) un-signed paragraph of text; b) a paragraph of text signed with a name; c) a paragraph of text signed with a name and a photo; d) video testimonial.

You might vote for the video testimonial as it’s the hardest to fake. Yet, with people offering video testimonials for $5, the right answer would be: e) a testimonial by someone you’re 100% sure he actually exists.

The internet is flooded with bots, fake names & paid testimonials by random people. You cannot trust anyone unless you know he’s real.

By saying “real” – I mean that you should be able to track a person if that’s needed. For example you can find me on Foursquare and see where I hang out (even though my account is barely active). You can find me on Facebook and talk with my friends about me. You might even find my YouTube channel and discover my little hobby – spinning vinyl :)

What I mean is that every real person will leave a ton of “footprints” around the web and if you’re struggling to find them – there might be something wrong with this person. I think that the only reason someone might want to hide his identity is doing something dodgy or unethical.

Do a reverse image search on a persons photo and you’ll quickly find out if it was stolen.

Fake Personal Story

There’s nothing wrong with storytelling actually, thousands of bloggers tell their personal stories to build that rapport with their readers which helps a lot in delivering their message.

Yet you must consider one very important thing. While you’re reading all those personal stories, your brain treats them as if you were actually there when it happened, which makes you think you know this person, which in its turn makes you think you can predict his actions in certain situations. Which is very very wrong…

I’ve just finished reading a book by Richard Branson “Screw It, Let’s Do It”. The book is great and it made me feel that Richard Branson is a very kind and reasonable person and in fact I even feel some attraction to him (no gay). Yet if I ever be lucky enough to do business with Sir Richard I don’t think I’ll make desicions based solely on what I’ve read about him in this book. Cause in reality I have no clue of what kind of person he actually is, I’ve just read something he wrote about his own self!

But Sir Richard has a huge advantage over poky online people – one hell of a reputation that can be confirmed by thousands of people he had dealt with in his life.

Speaking of online marketers, a few Google searches like: “name scam”, “name rip off”, “name cheat” might really add to that shiny personal story that you’ve just read.

Crafty Cliffhangers

Again there’s nothing wrong with this tactic in general. Lots of bloggers will drop cliffhangers here and there to make you want to come back to their blog later and read that little thing that was elegantly seeded into your mind.

What if I use a cliffhanger right now and say that next week I will reveal how this very blog post helped my friend to escape the trap of buying a $10.000 training course from a scammer? Did that make you slightly shiver of impatience to read this story? Well that’s the Zeigarnik Effect in action:

The Zeigarnik Effect is the tendency to experience intrusive thoughts about an objective that was once pursued and left incomplete. The automatic system signals the conscious mind, which may be focused on new goals, that a previous activity was left incomplete. It seems to be human nature to finish what we start and, if it is not finished, we experience dissonance.

You were reading this post and suddenly I made it kind of incomplete by promising you to reveal a very relevant story. There’s a good chance it’ll stick into your mind and you’ll recall it sometime after. So what’s the problem with this tactic anyway?

Well, you see, in most cases a sequence of cliffhangers means that you are in a sales funnel. So get ready to be pitched some product at the end of it.

Again, I’m not necessarily saying this is something bad, but if you add that to the other “scam indicators” you might not like the fact that some dodgy person is manipulating you.

“Expensive Free Stuff”

Those are the price tags I was referencing earlier. How many times have you seen messages like “download my FREE ebook, valued $97″, “attend my FREE webinar, normally sold for $197″, “sign up for my FREE email course, previously sold for $247″.

What irritates me a lot is that those products were never ever sold for the declared price even once. Their creators are simply exploiting a well known psychologic trick that people value things according to how big is the price.

Yet at the end of the day the only purpose of this “FREE $97 valued ebook” is simply to get you into that sales funnel with a sequence of cliffhangers nurturing you for the purchase of a product, which in its turn is nothing else, but another sales funnel for a more expensive product.

Enter The Mystery:

First of all, I’m not making any claims here, just sharing my observations.

Recently I’ve discovered a very nice IM blog called CopySean and I was blown away by the success story of the guy behind it. It was really inspiring and pleasure to read. I didn’t think long before I submitted my email address into one of his lead capture forms.

Yet something was bothering me about him. And so I decided to tell that to him directly:

Afterwards, we had a short conversation on Twitter where he assured me that he was a real person. I didn’t care that much anyway…

But sometime later I decided to learn more about Sean and searched for his social profiles. To my surprise I was not able to find any. So I did a reverse image search on a photo he had on his “About” page and discovered that it belonged to some other person.

At the moment of writing this post the photo was no longer there.

But it was still in Google cache, so I decided to record a video proof:

Spencer Finnley is someone who actually exits – at least I was able to find him on Facebook, unlike Sean King.

You might say that there’s nothing wrong with faking your online identity, using a pen name (I use one myself, actually) or even hiding your face behind fake photos. And I totally agree with you on that one (that’s why I had to add some X-Files music to my video – it creates drama LOL).

I’m not saying Sean King is a scammer or a bad person and something makes me think this post will help him a lot more than harm him, but in any case I’ll keep an eye on his blog and see where it all goes.

What the battle is for?

I’m an avid learner. Each and every day I will dig deep into the world wide web for some new information on internet marketing, productivity, business, management & stuff.

These days over 90% (my own estimate) of information is available for free, you just have to spend your time to find it and lean it. And I hate it when I get sucked in yet another sales funnel with a sequence of cliffhangers promising me an informational holy grail which at the end appears to be some paid product which I know I won’t purchase.

Instead I want to spend my time reading trusted resources that will provide real value in each and every post they publish. And THOSE guys actually have great chances of selling me something.

Will you join my forces?

How Bloggers Manipulate You and Why I No Longer Trust Blogs With Price Tags On Them is a post from: BloggerJET

No matter how much was I obsessed with that “Secret Weapon” thing, building it was just taking too long… way too long!

And after several failed attempts there was that “tipping point” when I decided that I can’t keep BloggerJET closed for God-knows-how-much-longer just to shoot my weapon.

I really enjoyed running this blog back in the days and I wanted to bring it back, even if it’ll cost me one nice idea.

Speaking of which…

In this post I’m going to share with you a detailed breakdown of that something I called “The Secret Weapon” and perhaps someone will pick the idea and use it for his own project.

Good Artists Create Great Artists Steal

Well I didn’t actually stole my idea, I was just trying to follow a general pattern. A pattern of making those dead simple yet viral projects.

To name a few:

• Million Dollar Homepage – I don’t remember exactly, but I think this was somewhere in mid 90s when some college student decided to create a web page one million pixels in size and sell all the space for $1 a pixel. Believe it or not, but he did! The whole internet was talking about him. This was a true sensation!
• One Red Paperclip – This was like almost 10 years ago. Some guy launched a Blogspot blog saying that he has a red paperclip and he’s willing to exchange it for something bigger or better. And eventually he said he wanted to end up with a million dollar house. Well you know what? He did it in only 14 exchanges! And again – he became a celebrity. I don’t remember if he made it to the Oprah Show, but he was featured on TV quite a few times.
• The World’s Most Exclusive Website – While the two ideas above were pretty decent, this one just stroke me with its simplicity. I don’t mean to hurt the guys behind it, but c’mon… Creating a set of hotel room pictures (which are quite good actually) and allowing access only to people with verified Twitter accounts… and that’s all you have to do to get featured on Mashable and a ton of other popular blogs? That’s just unfair.

I was obsessed with the idea to create something similar.

Once in a while I’d come up with something promising, but nothing too good to make me want to get up and do it.

That’s until…

Saddling The Social Madness

Ever since Facebook announced the release of their “Like” button everyone just gone wild. It didn’t take long for Twitter to catch up, then LinkedIn, then StumbleUpon, then Google+ – the list goes on.

Almost every online service that had some sort of “community features” felt obliged to release a social button of it’s own. Yet the website owners were only using 3-5 of the most popular buttons, neglecting the rest.

And that’s where my original idea came from:

The screenshot speaks for itself, right? Being under the influence of that “World’s Most Exclusive Website” I decided it was a good idea to create “The Most Shared Page On The Internet” – a page that has nothing but the buttons of all existing social media sites.

While I was deciding on the way that page should look, how to arrange all the buttons & stuff – I’ve closed BloggerJET for redesign… and that is when the idea came to repurpose my “Viral Page” into a “Secret Weapon”.

Building The Secret Weapon

I decided to use the idea of “The Most Shared Page On The Internet” to create a viral “Coming Soon” page for BloggerJET. But I was hesitating if a bunch of social buttons and the concept of “The Most Shared Page On The Internet” were enough for people to participate and actually make that page “Most Shared”.

I thought I need a better motivation and decided to create a sort of mechanism, that was kinda responsible for BloggerJET launch. It should have all those social buttons attached to it, and you had to click them in order to activate the mechanism and launch BloggerJET. The rough design looked like this:

Honestly I was totally unsatisfied with it. Maybe my idea was poor, maybe the designer didn’t do a good job, but I thought I should move forward.

I decided to forget my idea with “Most Shared” page and focus on the actual blog relaunch. By that time my new awesome design was 99% ready and I thought it was like a hundred times better than the old one (how do you like my new design btw? :) ).

So my idea transformed for the third time. I decided to create huge gates that were hiding my new blog from visitors. But you could force the gates to open using 4 mechanisms. And you could turn on each mechanism by clicking the “social button” that was attached to it. Here’s the first sketch:

I really liked this idea as those mechanisms could trigger natural human curiosity, like “What will happen if I click that button?“. And if designed well this page had good chances of getting featured on various blogs as an awesome case study of re-launching a site.

So yeah, I was pretty confident it would work and I asked the same guy who did my new blog design to create this page for me. But somehow the result was rather poor…

I think that you’ll easily agree with me that this is not the kind of design that makes you go “Oh My God! That Is So Awesome!“. So I had to find someone else to do it for me.

And I did find one girl with excellent design skills!

She liked my idea a lot and seemed to be very interested in bringing this project to life. In a few days she event sent me the first sketch:

Now THESE gates seemed very promising! Once in a week I was bugging her about drawing some mechanisms to proceed with the project but she never seemed to make this next step.

After more than two months of waiting I tried to find some other freelance designers for this job. I’ve spent a few weeks seeking for designers and then another few weeks interviewing them. To my disappointment they were either not skilled enough or asked about $800 for designing that page (which is a bit pricey for me, considering I also had to pay a programmer to make it work).

The Tipping Point

This whole story lasted for like 5 months. All that time BloggerJET was closed with the fancy new design (which costed me a buck as well). All that time I didn’t have a chance of sharing any of my thoughts and ideas with you guys – which was kinda painful.

I even did a few posts at the company blog of a startup I am currently consulting:

• How Do You Make Your Website Appear On Google?
• 5 Tips That Increased Our BuySellAds CTR by 500%
• The Secret To Super Effective Ads Or What BuySellAds Is Hiding From You!

And all that time I was receiving emails & tweets from you guys asking when will BloggerJET be reopened. Thanks to everyone for support, you guys were a huge part of my Tipping Point.

So yeah, after another question on why BloggerJET is still offline I decided to give up “the battle for making that awesome relaunch page” but continue “the war for being one of the coolest marketing blogs out there”!

The journey continues my friends, I’m really glad to be back and I promise you that your long wait was actually worth it!

More on my future plans and what this blog is going to be like in the next post. Make sure you won’t miss it, subscribe! :)

P.S: as for the whole “Secret Weapon” idea, I don’t mind if you’ll use it for your own projects. But please let me know how it performed :)

I Didn’t Shoot The Secret Weapon, You Go Grab It! [Giving Out My Idea] is a post from: BloggerJET

What if I say that you were loosing your money all the way from the start?

And it won’t return, I’m sorry…

There are hundreds of “proven” recipes to build a passive income online and you’ve decided to try Twitter. Why not? Sounds easy and fun!

While there are tons of information on what to do to succeed, what about the things you should avoid if you want to see the green bucks?

The path to monetizing a Twitter account is filled with decisions that can derail your project. What are those wrong decisions?

It all starts with…

Lots of followers + pay per click = $$$$

This was my rationale at the end of 2010 and it was wrong. I had been reading The 4 Hour Workweek and apart from using its learning for my PhD research, I decided to use it to generate some money on the side.

I was drunk of those fashionable ideas everybody was talking about: alternative passive income, autopilot money generation, social media, pay per click, amazon affiliates… you name it.

It seemed so easy to monetize twitter followers in autopilot, just collect thousands of followers, tweet some sponsored tweets and amazon affiliate links and cachink! Money will flow.

In a recent post by Tim – “How I Got $500 Worth of Tweets and Reached 900k People for Free” – there’s a guy who sells his tweets for $300 each! That’s where I wanted to be.

Work hard for 3 months, a bit of automation here and there and you can become the next lifestyle designer living in Phuket while earning big bucks.

Unfortunately it did not work as my followers were not “true fans” & I almost ended up becoming a social media douchebag.

In this post I will show you how in 3 months I went from 0 to 15k followers and how much money did that bring me.

Monetizing Twitter On Autopilot

I had everything studied to the detail. Focus was the key, so I decided to target men looking for cool gadgets. Needed a name, let’s look which Twitter and Gmail accounts were available … CoolStuff4Guys. Got it!

Next thing was to create a Facebook account, otherwise I would have looked like an amateur.

Next, a Posterous account to post articles on the gadgets (with an Amazon affiliate link, of course).

Automating Content

I needed to generate content to tweet about if I wanted to grow my follower base, but I didn’t feel like writing it all by myself.

What about reusing the content from famous blogs? I already knew some blogs that provided good content to tweet to my targeted male readers (Mashable.com, Coedmagazine.com, Wired Gadgets, Uncrate.com, among others).

What I wanted was to turn their RSS feeds into tweets. This piece of my workflow was implemented with TwitterFeed. This service automatically generates tweets from feed updates without your intervention. Autopilot World Domination was on its way!

Building relationships

It was not easy automate, so I skipped. I did not build relationships, no RT, no @replies, no DM, I did not allow them to know me. Why should I make the effort? I just wanted to have a transparent and automatic account.

Twitter is like an extension of human beings. Your presence in the twitterverse is determined by the interactions you have with other tweeps. If I would kill my account, nobody would care.

Mass Following

Unless you are like Charlie Sheen, you got to sweat to get followers, or pay. To start off, I paid 3 times 5$ someone on Fiverr to add each time 500 followers to my account.

Each increment lasted a week and effectively I got 500 new followers at the end. Unfortunately, some of these followers were from automatic accounts (even more automatic than the one I was setting up).

Tired of waiting a week each time I wanted more followers, I decided to find them and add them in a semi-automatic way. For this, I designed the following process.

From 0 to 15k Followers in 3 Months

• Step #1: Mass Follow People That Follow back

Following lots of people does not give you an equal amount of followers in return, just a fraction reciprocate. So I searched for tweeps that would almost automatically follow back.

Tweeps that had in their bio the #followback, #autofollow, #teamfollowback, and other variations, were my target. These guys would follow you back some days after you follow them. It was an easy way of acquiring new followers, at the expense of having enlarge the list of who I am following.

I also tweeted a lot using these tags myself to attract people practicing the same stuff.

I searched for people that had a similar number of followers than people they follow. This indicates that most of the times they reciprocate. I added only those that had several thousands of followers, to be sure it was not a coincidence. And it also gives you a nice amplification if they would have retweeted my stuff.

What about Facebook? Ay ay ay, this was real bad. I just added people randomly, I just wanted as many people as possible to notice my stuff. I did not take much care of the Facebook side, I must admit.

• Step #2: Automatically Follow Your Followers

This is a very tedious task to do, specially when you are getting hundreds of followers a week. I needed to automate this and therefore I used Socialoomph to auto follow whoever followed me, with the hope that they would stay for the long run.

Another thing that Socialoomph allows you to do (and that is as annoying as a kick in the crotch) is to auto DM when somebody follows you. It automatically sends a message, usually saying thanks for following, because we are in the “Thank You Economy”(aff link), right Gary Vaynerchuk? Allow me to disagree. If you want to thank me, just click and retweet my stuff.

• Step #3: Flush Who Doesn’t Follow Back

Tweepi and ManageFlitter are great sites that list which of your followers are not following you. I removed everyone who didn’t reciprocate for a long time. The same fate awaited for those that did not tweet often (you don’t want to follow inactive accounts).

• Step #4: Repeat Steps 1 and 3 Every Other Week

Since you want to grow your following base in an automatic, or semiautomatic way, you can redo steps 1 and 3 every other week (so Twitter doesn’t flag you as spam) or sooner, depending on your growth rate. Ideally you should groom your following list daily, in little amounts.

Here is where I partially lost focus. It was easy to see it as a game. Adding new followers was like a competition, everything was allowed, the more the better.

Do you remember the account was called CoolStuff4Guys? At this point I was adding followers that were not men, were not cool, and were not talking about manly stuff. Basically I followed everything that moved.

You see the 15k followers? And the 98 times listed? A ratio of “followers / listed” above 10 indicates a possible spammy account. My ratio was 150!!! (if this “ratio” is something new to you, why don’t you check Tim’s “Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing“?)

What about amplification? The only tweets that I got retweeted were the ones coming from well known websites, like Mashable.

Mistake 1: I had a loosely defined audience.

Getting Paid For Tweeting

Mylikes and SponsoredTweets pay you some cents for each click on the link you tweet (thousands of dollars just for a tweet if you are Kim Kardashian). It all boils down to the quality of your account. Ideally you want to have lots of followers and to follow very few people, this flags you as a leader, an opinion maker, influencer.

Guess what? I was not yet a leader. This meant little cents for each click plus having to promote things like stupid twitter bots, wannabe rapper videos, or close to spammy websites. Wasn’t I supposed to be promoting Nike??!!

I also tried to tweet some Amazon affiliate links to cool products. But again, my audience was not interested in my niche, so I ended up getting little clicks and selling nothing at all.

Mistake 2: I was promoting products that did not interest my audience.

Present Situation

I left the different accounts running on autopilot, which keeps my followers steady around 15k, but I do not use pay per click on my tweets anymore. Basically, I use CoolStuff4Guys to retweet and amplify my own website – juliopeironcely.com and my twitter account (@peyron).

My website is a display of my interests, namely science, social media, and lifestyle design. My hope is that visitors will keep coming because they are attracted by any of these three topics.

For @peyron account, now I hand pick who I follow, although I still have to flush some of them. No more tweets are pulled from a RSS feed, everything comes from my site or from sites that are interesting for me.

Organic growth allows me to build relationships with my followers. I get a kick of excitement when somebody RT my content, or they send me a message saying they found a post useful. Then everything makes sense.

I still use some automatic tools, mainly Bufferapp. This great web service + plugin allows me with just one click to buffer tweets and post them at the times that my followers are most active. Highly recommended tool.

And I lost money!

I’ve wasted lots of my time doing all above and all I got was $27. If only I could go back in time and put all these efforts into something else (less shady, perhaps) I’m sure I could’ve easily earned ten times more!

That’s where the money is lost…

Julio E. Peironcely is a Spanish PhD student living in The Netherlands. On his site juliopeironcely.com, apart from science and graduate advice, he blogs on social media and lifestyle design. He eats cookies and drinks Muscat and Malbec wines.

Warning: How Not To Monetize Twitter On Autopilot is a post from: BloggerJET

This post is nothing else but my monthly report of the progress with BloggerJET. (Here are the past ones: 1st week, 1st month, 2nd month.)

The third month is closed and half of the challenge is behind my back now. As I turn around to look at it I have to admit I could do so much better, but that’s a different story. Let’s look at the stats!

Traffic Overview: 3rd Month of Blogging

During this month I’ve only published 7 posts on BloggerJET, 2 of which were guest posts actually. I did not promote my posts the way I should and did not submit any guest posts to other bloggers, yet I managed to almost double the traffic of the previous month:

There are 3 “viral” spikes you can see on the graph and I’m sure you want to know what caused them:

• 1st Spike – “Steve Jobs’ Tribute” post went semi-viral on StumbleUpon;
• 2nd Spike – “Your Post Was Stolen?” disturbed the blogging community a bit and went semi-viral on Twitter (+ a bit of StubmleUpon as well);
• 3rd Spike – “Your Post Was Stolen?” got popular on StumbleUpon this time.

So basically, this month was a success mostly because of the traffic from StumbleUpon, and it’s not an accident actually. I think I’ve developed my very own (dead simple) StumbleUpon Ads strategy, where you can generate tons of traffic at miserable budgets. I’ll share it in my future posts. Subscribe and you won’t miss that.

Top Content This Month

I find it quite amusing that my “hottest” post this month was the one I’ve published a week before that. Again I attribute this “success” to the smart StumbleUpon Ads strategy I’ve mentioned earlier.

Must say I’m a bit disappointed that the “success story of PassivePanda” didn’t work so well – “Zero To Hero: How To Get 120K Unique Visitors In Just 8 Months [Infographic]“. The research took me quite a while and I even paid a designer to create the infographic, hoping that the post will get tons of attention. Yet it didn’t. Perhaps the “success story” that I’ve shared wasn’t outstanding enough. Or else…

Another post that I’ve expected to skyrocket was this one – “99 Dazzling Blogs Every Blogger Should Dream Of Guest Posting For“. Despite the countless hours I’ve spent on it and the trick with “pay with a tweet” button it didn’t generate enough tweets to satisfy me.

All I can say at this point is that producing viral posts like “50+ Amazing Steve Jobs Tribute Artworks” where people don’t even have to read is a hundred times easier than compiling the so-called “valuable” content and spreading the word about it.

Top 25 Traffic Sources This Month

If you compare this report to the one from the previous month you won’t find any new “secret sources” responsible for traffic growth:

The difference lies in the growth of each individual traffic source:

• StunbleUpon – 470.17% growth
• Direct – 20.35% growth
• Twitter – 25.48% growth
• Google – 220.88% growth

Finally my Google traffic is improving! Though I’m quite good at SEO I didn’t do anything special to improve my traffic from Google: didn’t optimize my texts or headlines for particular keywords, didn’t use any dodgy SEO plugins, didn’t build links, didn’t comment on dofollow blogs. This growth is 100% natural and I’m quite happy with it!

Similarly I didn’t do anything special to get such a high PageRank for a 3 months old blog.

What next?

After studying the success of James Clear with PassivePanda.com I no longer think that I have to grow my traffic each month to reach my goal of “100k visits on the 6th month“.

There’s a major traffic drop in the center of the graph and I can clearly see that guest posts is what made PassivePanda skyrocket “from zero to hero”.

That said, in the next 3 months I’m going to focus on hardcore guest posting and as usual I’ll be sharing all my wins and failures here at BloggerJET.

Other than that I have a crazy idea that should help me to reach my goal, but I’ll keep it a secret for now :) Stay tuned and you won’t miss it!

This is it for now! Wish me luck and feel free to email me if you need any advice on growing your blog – I’m ALWAYS happy to help!

PageRank 4, 80k Alexa and 20k Visits – All In 3 Months. Detailed Report. is a post from: BloggerJET

Influencers, a-listers, celebrities – doesn’t matter how you call them, what matters is they can make you famous with a single tweet.

“I know what to do! I will write a killer-post and just email them asking to tweet it. Or maybe mention them in my own tweet and I’ll get noticed”

- No! They get hundreds (if not thousands) of such emails daily, what’s the chance to stand out?

“Fine, I can pay for it!”

- and you head over to BuySellAds just to see that a tweet from @colourlovers (almost 700k followers) will cost you $300. Which makes you go “hmmm”.

I got that tweet for free! And I’m going to show you how you can do it too.

Can’t work on your post any longer? Good! Just a few more hours.

It all starts with your content. If it sucks, most of the bloggers won’t even accept any money to tweet it.

Jonathan Morrow (Associate Editor of Copyblogger) noticed that the number of hours he spends on his post is almost precisely equal to the number of hundreds of tweets this post gets afterwards.

Unfortunately most of the bloggers, in a quest for “daily updates”, tend to publish very short posts which they consider to be “good”. However there’s no such thing as “good” content – it’s either outstanding or mediocre – nothing in between.

Rule #1: Put lots of time and effort in your content, make it irresistible to tweet.

You can easily kill the world’s greatest post with a poor headline.

Your post may really be a masterpiece, yet it’s hidden behind your headline.

• Which part of the post is being tweeted?
• Which part of the post gets posted to Facebook and LinkedIn as people share it?
• Which part of the post is being displayed in RSS reader?

I’m sure you know the answer. Now think of the daily amount of tweets people see, the number of Facebook and Linkedin updates and the number of posts in RSS reader. Will your headline break through this clutter?

And besides, as you send an email request to an “influencer” you’ll only include the headline and the link. So is your headline good enough to make him want to click that link and read the post?

Rule #2: Your headline should make even the busiest person forget about everything and check your post right away.

Are you trying to sell boxing gloves to a ballet dancer?

It’s called relevance. If you’ve decided to ask someone for a tweet, make sure your content is relevant to them. What’s even more important – make sure it’s relevant to their followers.

If your topic is something they frequently blog and tweet about – go ahead and email them, otherwise don’t even bother.

Alternatively there are cases when different topics overlap, allowing you to pitch your post to someone from other niche, but that doesn’t work so well.

Rule #3: Make sure your post is relevant to their followers.

Don’t ask! Help THEM or give them a reason to help YOU.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: popular bloggers get tons of emails each day where random people beg them for a tweet, a link, a guestpost, a feedback, whatever… How is your request different from the rest and why should they help you anyway?

Actually it is YOU who has to help them!

“Influencers” have tens of thousands of followers always hungry for fresh relevant content. That’s why they always appreciate if someone sends a few outstanding posts their way.

Pay attention to the word “outstanding”: this is something you create when following the rules # 1,2,3.

But if you can give them “a reason” to tweet your content – that’s even better!

In an outstanding book by Robert Cialdini called “Influence” (aff link) there was an amusing experiment, where a girl asked to cut in line to use a copy machine:

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” – this basic request made 60% of people say OK.

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” – 94% of people said OK to that, which clearly illustrates the power of “giving someone a reason”.

And now prepare to be amazed…

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?” – how stupid is that? And yet 93% of people said OK.

It seems like no matter what the reason is, but as long as there “IS” a reason – you get a much better chance of getting your post tweeted.

(Just don’t go nonsense with this tip, and even if you do – don’t tell anyone Tim Soulo taught you this.)

Rule #4: Try to help them or give them a reason why they should help you.

Be creative, as if you were explaining your girlfriend why you forgot about her birthday.

It’s really hard to give any advice on “how to be creative”, so I’ll put it my way:

“Ask them for a tweet the way they’ve never been asked before.”

I don’t care if you will take a picture of yourself naked holding “Plz RT” sign and attach it to your email, or maybe send them a video where you juggle four iPhones while pitching your idea  - anything might work. Just don’t be like the rest.

Rule #5: Make sure your tweet request will stand out, put all your creativity in it.

Make friends with the big guys.

Honestly, I wasn’t overwhelmingly original with all my tips and this one is not an exception.

“Relationships is the key to success” – if you can make friends with a-list bloggers, you’re just one step away from becoming one yourself.

Blogging paradise is when a tweet from Darren Rowse is just a matter of a short message on Skype.

Another thing that worked well for me all the way from the start is Triberr. With this service you don’t even have to build relationships with popular bloggers to have them tweet your stuff. Just make sure you’re cool enough to get into the tribe where they’re at.

Rule #6: Build relationships with power bloggers and leverage the power of Triberr.

This is how I got $500 worth of tweets and reached 900k people for free.

Here’s my story…

It was “All Hallows’ Eve” and I opened Twitter to see what’s going on. The next moment a cool phrase popped up in my head – “Trick or Tweet”! And that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do!

I had a cool post for the occasion: “Freddy Krueger’s Guide To Blog Redesign” – and I’ve decided to sent a few emails to pro bloggers with “Trick or Tweet” in the subject line.

The email was real short and to the point:

Hey mister XXX,
 
I’ve got a nice post to tweet on Halloween! :)
 
Freddy Krueger’s Guide To Blog Redesign
http://bloggerjet.com/freddy-kruegers-guide-to-blog-redesign/

 
I would really appreciate if you could tweet it at @XXX_twitter :)

 
Trick or TWEET! :)

 
Tim Soulo

http://bloggerjet.com

I pitched this idea to my friends on Skype and they said it was cute and might work out, so I went to BuySellAds to pick my victims.

Honestly most of the bloggers ignored my email, but a few people did tweet my post:

$300 – 693,693 followers

That’s the tweet I was talking about. I think this is one of the most expensive tweets on BSA, and I managed to get it for FREE! Other than that, Darius (Founder and CEO of Colourlovers) emailed me back asking if I was able to write them a guest post.

$75 + $15 – 48,958 + 6,988 followers

Not only I got a tweet from InspiredMag, but it also got noticed by my friend Jacques from CreativeOverflow and he retweeted it, even though I didn’t ask him to.

Here are some more tweets I got that day:

• Tweet by @Inspirationf – $27 – 80,837 followers
• Retweet from @olegnax – $50 – 23,113 followers
• Tweet by @buzzblogger – $?? – 12,220 followers
• Tweet by @kikolani – $?? – 24,907 ( tweeted other post from BloggerJET)

That’s it! The total cost of all those tweets is somewhere around $500 and the sum of followers is close to 900k – all for free!

Don’t get me wrong, this post is not about “cold calling” and by no means I encourage you to spam the hell out of pro bloggers.

My take is that you have to work hard, be creative and see the opportunity when it pops.

“Free tweets” is not the only thing you may get if applying the rules above. I think this way you can get lots of stuff for free.

You’ll pay with your time, effort and creativity :)

How I Got $500 Worth of Tweets and Reached 900k People for Free is a post from: BloggerJET

img by Anirudh Koul

What makes it even worse is that it is highly tempting to believe most misinformation. It is deliberately packaged to entice us. Get rich quick schemes are still prevalent because they claim enough victims to make them profitable endeavours.

And that is why so many among us have completely the wrong idea about what drives success. When we look at the stories of Darren Rowse and Pat Flynn, we see people that experienced exponential success in a relatively short period of time. But you only have to read Darren’s and Pat’s stories to know that they had no wild ambitions. However, what they did have were all of the qualities that are required for success.

1. Determination

img by Agnieszka Mazus

If you are to be successful, you must be determined. To put it simply, you must be unwilling to give up. Failure must not be an option. Not hitting your goals, rather than discouraging you, galvanizes you to work even harder.

Determination is perhaps the most difficult part of the puzzle. In order to be sufficiently determined, you must have a well-developed understanding of what you are striving for. The desire for what you strive for must overpower the temptation to not apply yourself fully.

2. Consistency

img by communiTEEZ

If success is a bread recipe, taking out consistency is like removing the yeast – your bread just won’t rise. You will go nowhere if you are always dipping in and out of your online efforts. You must apply yourself consistently, as it is momentum that drives success.

Think of success as a long car journey. If you are consistent, you do the journey without stopping. If you lack consistency, you stop for a break every 30 minutes. When you stop for a break, you are no longer getting any closer to your destination. Not only that, when you do head off again, it will take time to get back up to your previous speed.

3. Patience

img by Tabitha Russell

One of the biggest killers of potential is impatience. We read of wild overnight success and quickly get frustrated when it doesn’t happen for us. But we can’t all be overnight successes (and in reality, very few people are). Who you are not reading about are the majority of successful people, who toil away for months or years, and eventually experience success.

4. Time

img by Nad

Going back to our bread analogy, not allowing time to exert its power over your online efforts is like placing your bread mix in the oven, but not turning it on. There is no point in making the dough if you aren’t going to let it bake.

Time is our most valuable commodity, and is integral to success. If you gave a highly motivated person with a wonderful idea a week to succeed, and a less motivated person with an average idea a year, I know who my money would be on. Many incredible things can happen if you apply determination, consistency and patience over time.

Stop Reaching For Miracles

I am sorry if this comes as a shock to you, but the vast majority of us will not experience the success of those we read about. But one of the biggest reasons for that is because many of us do not apply the above four principles. Most of you who read this article will head away none the wiser, and go back to what you were doing before. It is the few amongst you that embrace the four unfashionable truths of online success that will be most likely to achieve your goals.

4 Honest Reasons You’ll Never Be A Pro Blogger is a post from: BloggerJET