Blog Design Principles

So what are the key blog design principles? Content is KING, but a site that is busy with text, has 100s of links and colour that clashes can turn people off before they have had a chance to find out what amazing stuff you’re writing about, so an attractive well structured blog is important.  Website www.smashingmagazine.com provides some excellent examples of blog design – and states that blog design should include:

“…a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of site elements; it also has to be able to build some kind of a bridge between the content and its presentation. To do this, you need to think about precision, minimalism and sound use of illustration.”

For these and similar reasons many blog owners claim that having a good blog design is one of the most important pieces of the whole blogging success puzzle.  It is better to aim to follow some basic design principles rather that to try to please every potential visitor.  Some helpful research on the relationship between web visitors and web deign is reserach conducted by Dr Brent Coker.  An overview of Dr Coker’s work is highlighted below:

“As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence.”—Dr. Brent Coker

Dr. Brent Coker found that websites that are more attractive and include more trimmings create a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in consumers.  Furthermore Dr Coker’s work helpfully outlines some dimensions of website quality which include: website visual appeal, website trustworthiness, ease of use of website, website search quality, information quality, information relevancy and website load speed.  In summary Dr Coker states that:

“People are developing relationships with the internet the same way we develop relationships with other people. Compared to five years ago, we are more trusting of attractive websites, less tolerant of websites that have irrelevant information, and more likely to introduce ourselves to websites that are new.”

After all is said and done a website that is attractive and keeps a user on the site is not enough as website and blog owners also want visitors to take specific behaviours such as subscribing to an email list or buying a product or service so you will also need to have a call to action that clearly outlines what you want your visitors to do and some method to increase their trust in you such as social proof (e.g. testimonials or number of retweets or facebook fans etc) that your products and services will be of benefit to your customers.

In terms of the visual appeal of a blog this needs to be considered along with website usability in order to make the blog as easy and as user-friendly to navigate as possible.  One easy way to make a blog easier to read is to use font that is easy on the eye – check out this webpage for web designer’s thoughts on fonts for blogs .

This post is aimed at giving you a good feel for what blog design principles that you need to consider to get your blog up and running. But once you have installed your “theme” to your blog, then how do you make it look good? I can suggest three premium websites where you can buy themes: Elegant Themes, WooThemes (I have bought from here in the past) and Studiopress  (I selected my current Genesis theme from here).

However, if you don’t want to part with your hard earned cash, a quick Google search for ‘free WordPress themes’ will return a large number of search results which could meet your immediate needs if you’re on a budget. I used a WooTheme whilst I was developing my first blog. WordPress makes it easy to upgrade your themes without loosing any blog posts or pages (but always save your blog content using an FTP program like Filezila before you make any changes – check out my resources page for free FTP software and more).

Once you’ve found a theme you like, you need to install it before you can customise its appearance to make it work for you.

Well that’s it for now.

Check back here in few weeks when we look at other important aspects of setting up a blog.

To Your Success
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach

Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

There are several different website domain name extensions that you need to consider when buying a domain name

If you have not already used the Google Adwords keyword tool and the free Wordtracker keyword tool, then I fully recommend them both. Start by inputting the kinds of search terms you may use yourself in looking for sites related to your niche (for example, “healthy meals” if your blog is about healthy recipes). The results may give you name ideas and suggest some angles that you had not considered before. The real power is that you’ll get a feel for what people are actually searching for as both the keyword tools I have mentioned provide search statistics.

The next step is to see if that domain name that you have chosen is available. There are several popular registrars you can research and buy your domain through, such as Go Daddy, 123-reg, Namecheap.com or Domaintools.com . I have used JustHost.com as I have registered and hosted a number of sites through them and have found them to be good and relatively inexpensive. However, you’ll need to decide for yourself who you want to register your domain name with – it doesn’t have to be your hosting provider. However, consider whether your provider offers free “Whois” protection (you can’t see with whom the domain is registered).

Domainsuperstar.com  lists 25 rules to consider when choosing a domain name. This ranges from consideration of avoiding hyphens in the domain name as they make it harder for people to remember your URL and keeping your doamin name keyword rich. With regards to the domain name extension – the bit at the end – generally it is considered best to have the .com extension since it can give your site a credibility boost. However, I have decided to go for a .co.uk extension as I felt that this would be a good fit for the site and some services that I wanted to offer within the UK.  For information on this subject read an earlier post on this blog about how to choose a website or domain name

As well as a domain name for your blog, you will of course need software to run it – a “blogging platform” – where you’ll write your blog posts and publish them across the internet. There are many popular services such as WordPress, Typepad, and Blogger, which come with their own hosting (that is, the place on the internet where your site will be stored). You may want to consider what other platforms are available – for those who are interested I can recommend reading the 2012 Best Blog Software Comparisons and Reviews.

However, when you use the own hosted versions of the blogging platforms it can greatly restrict your control over advertising, design, and community interactions and as we’re building a blog to be monetised having complete control is best. Also, there may come a day when you may want to sell your blog – if we get things right it could happen sooner than you think! Having full control is best done by hosting your site yourself, with a service such as Hostgator.com, or like me you could use JustHost. You’ll then need to install a blogging platform to your website.

As this bit could bamboozle beginners, more details on the technical info of how to install WordPress using fantastico can be found in an earlier post –  it took me less than two minutes to do it unlike my very first blog which was more like a six hour stint of error messages and banging fists on my desk!  Here is video I shot to show you how easy it is:

To experience ease of installation make sure your web host’s cPanel has a software program called Fantastico which effortlessly installs WordPress to your domain. For information on how to start a website then please read my post how to start a website – the ultimate guide.

I hope that this post will help you to answer the question of how do I choose a domain name?  Next time, we’ll be focusing on the design of the blog, and finding and tweaking a “theme” for it.

To Your Success
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach

Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

There are many articles on personal development that highlight that the stuff that we love to spend time doing comes more naturally to us than the stuff that we are less engaged with. So when deciding what niche site ideas to develop a blog around start with the question: what do you love to spend time doing? Think about how you spend your down time and, the books or magazines that you read, your personal experiences or expertise, and what niche websites do you enjoy reading and engaging with.

I wrote down a list of niche site ideas, one being “a diary of a music fan”. This appealed to me, but I had to consider what niche site ideas that I could actually talk about over a long period of time. I decided that it would be more interesting if it was focused on one music gig a day for a year – that would be awesome! However, it would be logistically challenging to pull off with a 7 month old and purely local gigs would make it less interesting and compelling for the audience. This dude here has got a similar idea around listening to one album a day http://onealbumaday.wordpress.com/ he’s up to his 521st album at the time of writing!

OK I’m sure that you get the gist of it. You can turn anything into a niche site or blog! The best tactic for picking a niche site idea isn’t just about deciding to write about ‘X’, but also looking at the same time at how you can to help people or fulfil a need. If you can help people then there will be a way to keep people motivated and engaged with the material. We can help people by making them laugh – check out http://theoatmeal.com/ – or do you want to teach people stuff like cookery for example http://www.goodlifeeats.com/ If you can just focus on how you want to help people, the process becomes easier and you’ll never be stuck wondering if a post you’re going to write fits your audience.

I decided a blog where I needed to do something every day to talk about is probably out of the question until Jake is a little older, but I won’t rule it out longer term. In fact something music based would really stoke my fires for sure. So at least I know that I want a blog that I won’t struggle to keep updated, and run it around my other life commitments. So next I revisited my niche site ideas, and worked out which one I not only had enthusiasm for, but could write about for years, and I specifically wrote down how and why it would help people. My blog will inspire others on something I’m passionate about – which you’ll see after the site has had a chance to establish itself. Your blog might, for example, teach art and design http://www.thisiscolossal.com/ .

I got 20 ideas and then I reduced them down to my top 3-5. Then I got on to my next task: niche site idea research. What blogs and niche sites are already out there? Who are the biggest “influencers” in my niche area? (These are people I’ll need to engage with in the future for my blog to grow.) And the important thing: could this blogging niche make me money?

In reality, if I’m able to attract traffic, I’ll be able to make money, but not all niches have the same income potential so it is worthwhile putting in upfront research to get an estimate of income potential. There are a number of different tactics that you can use to get a feel for how to find niche site ideas and identify what income is likely to be generated.

1. Typing in related keywords into Google this will give you a sense of the top 20-30 sites.

2. Using a blog search engine such as Technorati and finding out what popular blogs are in your niche area. You can determine the most influential by examining how many followers they have and how many comments they receive. I also evaluated how the blogs were earning an income. Was it through advertising such as banners? Did they sell products like eBooks? Did they have affiliate links eg, were they linking their readers to sales websites where they would make a commission?

3. Using Google Adwords keyword tool  here I get a good sense of the competitive nature of specific keyword phrases as the keyword tool shows you the total searches per month.

4. Check out http://www.magazines.com/ the idea here is if there is an entire magazine (or magazines) dedicated to a particular subject, you can bet there is demand – especially if the magazine is published monthly.  This is a useful way to find niche site ideas.

5. Amazon is the cat’s meow when it comes to finding hot and popular niche site ideas to build or buy websites around. As the largest ecommerce retailer in the world, you will be able to quickly and easily spot the best niches to pursue. First you want to visit the Amazon Best Sellers. And once you are there, you can browse the best sellers by category – enough said. Don’t ignore the Hot Sellers, Most Wished for, and Most Gifted sections either. All of these are indicators of what niches are popular.

6. eBay Pulse This is another old stand-by for niche research. You’ll see the most popular searches for all of eBay but then you can drill down by category. Not only will you discover popular niches, but you will find some great keywords as well;)

7. eBay Popular Products This is often an over-looked area on eBay when identifying niche site ideas in general but is one you definitely want to add to your list. You not only get the top products overall, but you also get at a glance the top products for each category. Then if you click to any of the categories, you get the top ten products for that category.

8. ClickBank.com No niche research would be complete without mentioning the ClickBank marketplace. If you are new identifying niche site ideas, I can promise you just about any ebook or course you buy on how to make money online will mention ClickBank. It’s the largest marketplace of info products. If you are building or buying websites based on providing information – as in an ebook – then you need to familiarize yourself with ClickBank.

In my case, I I’ve found enough related niche site ideas with very popular blogs apparently earning decent incomes. What I now need is my domain name – which we’ll be looking at next time.

For more detailed information on niche site ideas development and research, see my separate resource page.

To Your Success
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach

Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

and running in six months?  This is a question that quickly can become a barrier for people and ideas can easily remain dreams that never get fulfilled.

Whilst the focus of this series of blog posts is a little self referencing, I wanted to show you how I will be developing and launching my brand new website.  What better way to explain how a website is developed and launched than give you a step-by-step inside look at my latest online project.  In the future I hope to do more of these case studies with my readers and followers, but as I have a project that I’m working on now it makes sense to share this with you.

I have been inspired by so many people from entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and James Dyson to people like New Order who just got up of their back sides and made a difference in the music industry.   Around Internet businesses I have more recently come across a website by Al Carlton called http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/  This is a cool website for obvious reasons but also because it claims that it attracts more than 1m page views a month, with 100,000-plus email subscribers.  A slower month earns £10,000 – a good month can be five times that.  Those are great numbers and ones that I’d be rather pleased to replicate with my new venture.

In particular Carlton has found that his idea of sharing news on gadgets on a blog has attracted a large volume of traffic and he has found ways to convert some of that traffic into income.  What is impressive is that it is claimed that it took around a year for CG to generate a modest income.

I possess a whole wealth of knowledge through books and online articles that I have read and I have produced a volume of my own material which will put me in a good position to build an engaging, compelling new blog that will attract a large audience and in doing so will generate a healthy line of income.

Over the next six months, using the knowledge that I’ve learnt over the past five years, I’ll be creating a blog from scratch with the aim of developing a large enough audience of people who care about what I say, to earn a decent revenue from the site.  I’ll tell you a little bit more about what the blog is in future posts.

To Your Success
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach
Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

Let us start first be defining behaviour as one of three responses – either cognition (thinking), affect (feeling) or behaviour (doing something that can be observed by others such as buying). The aim then of an advert is to create a response in the observer, whether it be a television commercial, magazine ad, newspaper ad, direct sales marketing or internet marketing copy writing. To illustrate how advertising can influence customer behaviour I have trawled through 100s of adverts and videos on YouTube and have selected the following.

How Emotive Advertising Can Influence Behaviour

These adverts are designed to make the ‘target observer’ experience strong emotional feelings. The key here is the ‘target observer’, as not every observer will be affected in the same way. As an example I’ve selected the UK John Lewis Christmas 2011 advert. Its target market is those with a middle-class aspiration, who value comfort and family values. Interestingly the advert is backed with a re-working of a Smiths track, ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ which kind of represents a dash of 1980s anti-establishment. Cleverly this ad was first aired during X factor – aiming straight at the hearts of millions of John Lewis’ target market!

The 60-second ad, reveals a story of a small boy getting increasingly impatient during the lead-up to Christmas before it turns out he was only desperate to give a present to his parents. In terms of the ad eliciting a response it certainly has done its job as many viewers confessed to being moved to tears. Another question is how did this actually impact John Lewis bottom line – will John Lewis be left laughing or crying with the rest of us? How does the advert affect you?

How Humorous Advertising Can Influence Behaviour

There is a large body of research that evaluates the link between humour and brand strength. In an intriguing journal article in the International Journal of Advertising (Vol. 30, No. 5, 2011, pp. 795-814) entitled, That was funny, but what was the brand again? (Paul van Kuilenburg, Menno D.T. de Jong and Thomas J.L. van Rompay) it was found that brand-related humour can lead to stronger brand linkage than unrelated humour. However, there are limitations as this link was only identified for complex or sophisticated humour. So it’s not enough to have a funny ad there has to be an element of intellect embodied in the humour to develop a stronger brand.

To illustrate this point I have selected an ad that is more clever than side-splittingly funny. It’s an ad that ran in 1981 by FedEx called “fast-paced world” and consistently appears in best ads lists. The ad focused in on an executive who speed-talks his way through his business day. Talking at more than 450 words per minute, the executive manages to conduct a board meeting, hire a new employee, complete a deal over the phone and eat his lunch. It finishes with a voiceover, which says: “In this fast-moving, high-pressure, get-it-done yesterday world… aren’t you glad there’s a company that can keep up with it all?” To this day I have a perception that FedEx are the fastest courier in the world – how much of my perception is down to the easily digestible brand-related humor of the ad that I watched as a kid back in the 1980s?

Amazing Advertising With a Wow Factor

There were many adverts that I viewed for this post that I thought were amazing. The more that I viewed different ads the more that I became aware that these types of ads elicit a cognitive response – they make you think! These ads were mainly car ads or ads that included a sporting element that looked simply amazing. This type of advertising works really well where you want to change people’s perception of a brand. The best example for me is the Skoda Fabia advert, before this ad Skoda was a slightly tired brand which few would class as desirable.

In the Skoda Fabia ad bakers are shown making an array of differently shaped and sized cakes and then assembling them into something. It becomes clear eventually that they are assembling an orange car, but it’s only when you see a Skoda badge being fixed with icing sugar to the front of the cake car that the brand is revealed. This is advertising on a big scale. It’s imaginative, ambitious, painstakingly crafted. It’s an instant classic. When you first view it you certainly don’t realise it’s a Skoda advert. When you do realise it is for a car, the first one that comes into your mind is a Honda or maybe a Ford. Such association is a fantastic result for Skoda.

Nostalgia In Advertising

We all have a soft spot for nostalgic advertising, but what is really going on at the heart of it is something quite clever. This type of advertising only works for brands that have been around for a few decades. The ad can work on a number of levels in that it works because you can point out that your brand was strong 10 years ago, 20 years ago and so on.  It also works because you can show how it has developed or has kept apace with new developments in technology or popular culture. This is done well in the UK with Hovis (bread baker), which recently ran an ad highlighting it’s enduring success across 122 years showing it’s resistance to the depression, two world wars, recessions etc. But for me Virgin Atlantic wins the day.

The Virgin Atlantic ad entitled “25 Years, still red hot!” is fabulous. During the ad there are many references to brands in the 1980s, but there are only three elements in the ad that stand out, the music, the girls and the Virgin’s resilience. The Ad reminds us how good Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s track “Relax” was – which still stands the test of time as being a top tune. Virgin by association are also subtly saying exactly the same thing about their airline – 25 years on and we’re still red hot on customer service and experience. But best of all though is Virgin’s tongue and cheek celebration of the fact that Virgin always had the most glamorous cabin crew of any airline. Some critics have labeled the ad as sexist, but for me it’s just bloody good fun, entertaining and innovative – exactly what Virgin wants us to think and feel! In short it works marvelously.

Intelligent Advertising

In a way it is unfair to have a separate category called intelligent advertising as all of the ads that I’ve selected are intelligent advertsing. However, there are some ads out there that are so clever that it takes a millisecond more processing for our brains to catch up. The type of ad that I’m referring to is one so clever that you’re left thinking, ‘god that’s clever’. This usually is not a complex ad – it’s usually a very simple ad which looks like it’s saying something else and then you find out that the element at the end of the ad  completes the loop and you see the whole picture. You could call it misdirection rather than intelligence, but either way they are a pleasure to view.

For me BMW have got the art of misdirection sown up. In 2009 BMW released a commercial where you see a jet car attempting a world speed record somewhere in a desert. See what happens in the commercial after the jet car releases its parachute to slow the car down.

Music Videos As Adverts

Music has always been associated as a key ingredient in some of the greatest ads. However, music itself is delivered to consumers through the medium of video adverts. The videos paint and imagine of the artist in the minds of the observer and all can elicit similar behaviours as seen in the ads above. Online today it is easier than ever to listen to your favourite tunes and if the artist gets it right it is easier than ever to get mass exposure of their material. Take for instance Lana Del Ray’s song, “Video games”. It was uploaded as a YouTube video in October 2011 and almost overnight has become a massive worldwide hit with over three million views!

Now over to you.  Tell me how adverts have changed your behaviour – either by way of affecting you emtionally, or by making you think or maybe even by making you want to purchase a product or service.

To Your Success
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach

Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

2012 for me will be about establishing this blog as a go to place for small to medium sized businesses that want to enhance their exposure on the internet.  Whilst other markets are suffering the internet is well and truly coming of age.  If we get our positioning correct and get our messages in front of sufficient people, who want what we can offer, then the world is literally our oyster.  So here are my New Year goals for 2012:

• I want to get thecornerstones.net ranked in the top 100,000 of all internet sites (currently ranked by alexa.com as 966,525) by the 31^st December 2012
• I want to get thecornerstones.net ranked as the #1 site in my home town (Harrogate, UK) – (currently ranked by alexa.com as #86 in Harrogate) by 31^st December 2012
• I want to increase my web traffic from 7,000 visitors per month to 21,000 visitors per month by the 31^st December 2012
• I want to have attracted over 500 subscribers to my free e-course per month by 30^th July 2012
• I want to have coached at least 12 new coaching clients, who have all made significant measureable improvements in their online businesses by 31^st December 2012

In terms of my New Year goals for 2011 I did make some significant in-roads into achieving my goals.  I wanted to get thecornestones.net ranked by alexa.com in the top 500,000 sites worldwide.  I managed 966,525 from a position of about 3,000,000 a year earlier.  I managed to get over 60 subscribers in one week (using free marketing methods) and one blog post went viral making my first week in September 2011 one to remember for this site!  And lastly my aim for 2011 was to attract 100,000 visitors to my blog and I managed to attract almost 62,000 visitors.

So all in all a good year of building up traffic and building up my reputation as a credible internet marketing coach – who is willing to share his secrets!  Whilst I did not achieve my exact New Year goals for 2011 what I did manage to do was to set some goals, I monitored them on a weekly basis and at every step of the way I knew exactly how far away from achieving my goals.  I made sure that each of my goals were measurable goals that would help steer my internet marketing blog to the next level.

I have written several articles on goal setting for success and how to conquer nasty barriers to your goals so please feel free to delve deeper into this site.  I wish you all the best with achieving your New Year goals for 2012.

To Your Success in 2012!
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach

Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

So I think that you’ll be able to pick up that I strongly believe that the psychology of selling can be applied to the internet.  Before I continue I just want to point out that this post is not a long sales pitch where I up sell you just at the point where you want to know what happens next.  I won’t do that, but I will recommend signing up to my free ecourse where like 100s of other savvy entrepreneurs you can get premium material from a street wise business psychologist with over 15 years experience.  In my world if I can’t applied something no matter how great it sounds I ditch it – no exceptions!

I mentioned earlier about Robert Cialdini as he is one of the few people who write about the psychology of selling from an experimental perspective.  Robert Cialdini’s work is not full of theory and supposition – it is a result of observation and statistical significances.  Therefore pay close attention to his work if you want to either start selling or increase your online sales.  Robert Cialdini writes of six weapons of influence.  They all work to some degree.  Click here for more free content on Robert Cialdini and other authors who specialise in the psychology of selling.

Recently I came across the work of Natalie Sison who has written an article on the psychology of selling online.  I love her work as she speaks with a degree of honesty that I truly appreciate.  Natalie lays out the truth about the success of online entrepreneurs.  To enjoy success online she claims that it takes several years of failure and hard work before entrepreneurs make it big.  There is a kind of incubation period where time and money is spent on honing in on their skills.  Then after becoming highly skilled and knowledgeable in a chosen field they find a way to get into alignment with something that comes naturally to them.  Many other authors online today speak of this as being the ‘law of attraction’, I can’t knock them as I just don’t have evidence that such a law exists or not – it’s a bit like religion I guess.  However, I do love the way that Natalie describes the success of online entrepreneurs – “It was a culmination of continually honing their skills, creating better quality offerings, understanding their niche market needs, crafting their messaging and branding to resonate with the right people, and working out their pricing.”

Natalie also raises a very interesting point about a key element of the success of online businesses (especially data/info based industries) is to have a lean approach – in that you don’t produce anything before you market.  Instead you market a number of products that your market has indicated that they want and then produce the ones that people actually buy.  This eliminates guess work and removes huge amounts of waste from your business processes.  Of course this doesn’t work for more complex time consuming products, but for ebooks or MP3s or short low budget e-course where you have the majority of the research completed this is a good strategy.  But make sure you deliver promptly to those who have placed trust in your product or service – reputation takes years to build and can be lost in the flutter of an eye lid.

Dean Rieck has produced an article entitled 12 tips for the psychology of selling.  Here Dean raised a very interesting point in that You can’t force people to do anything that they don’t want to do. People do not buy from you because you hold some kind of mysterious magical power over them.  People will buy from you because you have a product or service that they actually want.  Therefore your job is to show your prospects and leads how what you’re offering meets there needs and will be of great value to them.

M.Farouk Radwan raises two interesting points in his article on the  psychology of selling that people are willing to follow others blindly and also that repetition is powerful method played out by multi-million dollar ad campaigns the world over.  These are actually two of Robert Cialdini’s weapons of influence.  In the first instance it has been shown by many studies that people will choose an incorrect decision, while knowing it is incorrect, just because they witnessed the majority choosing it.  This is one reason why many websites show the number of visitors, the number of retweets, facebook followers, the number of testimonials etc.  This all highlights that social proof is one of the strongest weapons of influence.  When it comes to the psychology of selling repetition can be the most powerful weapon.  Many people say it works because of product placement, familiarity, programming – just to name a few.  It doesn’t really matter why it works because at the end of the day repetition of a marketing message influences people to buy products which is why you see the same ads presented each day across multiple media channels.  But of course your marketing message will only be able to influence those who already have an interest in the type of product or service that you are offering.  For example I love continental lager (I’d go as far to say that some days I really want it!) and if I’m exposed to enough material about a new product that makes it look cool and exciting you can bet at some point I’m gonna try it, but those same ads would be unlikely to influence a scotch drinker to try the new lager.  The bottom line is that your marketing message will only be able to influence those who already want what you are offering.

Lastly I want to share with you a little gem of an interview with Noah Kagan, the Chief Sumo (CEO) of AppSumo entitled I am talking geek psychology This interview lasts for 30 minutes.  My key take away from listening to the interview was that there are no real magic bullets for finding the right product to market – it’s a case of 1. incremental refinements over time, 2. experimenting and not hoping, 3. being brave enough to make mistakes, and 4. optimising projects so they are measureable.

To Your Success
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach

Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

If you want to start a website you probably have a number of questions going through your head right now – like what you want to achieve, what to call it and where to host it. I’ve outlined below eight key areas to consider when thinking about how to start a website:

1. What do you want to accomplish? – Many businesses jump straight into operational mode and get a website up and running and don’t necessarily think about what they want to achieve from their online presence. Do you want to sell products or services or do you want to develop a blog? When you start a website you need to consider what type of web site you want. Helpfully the inc.com provide a useful guide – make a useful website for business – on the different types of websites that you can setup such as brochure sites, retail/e-commerce, content-drive, blogs, databases, comparison/review, forums etc.

2. Domain names – What’s in a name? I have read article after article about the importance of your web site’s name. I have heard of some people taking so long over choosing a name that they end up not taking their online idea forwards. Clearly a name has some importance, but for me this is only when people see your url in the searches – even here there are ways of making your website url more attractive to a searcher. For example making sure that your post or article is filed under the keyword phrase (or similar) that you are promoting. That aside the-best-web-hosting-service.com provide a very useful post about how to start a website which highlights that you don’t need to use the same company to host your website as the one that you purchased your domain name from as you can switch your Domain Name System (DNS) to any web host service that you wish. This gives you flexibility if you find out that the hosting company has too much down time or they don’t give you the support that you need.

3. Web hosting – As recommended by makeawebsiteguide.com use these two simple rules: 1. try to avoid cheap web hosts and 2. use established hosts. You can find many cheap hosting offers online with very enticing bundles thrown in. However, if the hosting provider has a lot of down time, which is something that people who buy cheap web hosting often experience, then it will not only effect your business for the period of down time but also it could impact on your rankings in the search engines. I don’t have content on this blog yet about web hosting but I can recommend the following web hosting review which corroborates with reviews that I have read elsewhere. At the time of writing Bluehost.com faired very well as a hosting supplier for blogs – I’m not using them yet but will seriously consider transferring to them in the near future.

4. Build your website – Once you have decided what type of web site you want and what domain name that you want to use the next step in how to start a web site is to create your pages. Jennifer Kyrnin has written a useful article on about.com entitled how to build a website  outlines web design, learning HTML, and web page editors. However, the one area that Jennifer does not appear to outline in her articles is the power of content management systems such as WordPress. The beauty of a program such as WordPress is that you can have WordPress installed on your blog in less than two minutes.

5. WordPress – is more than blogging software. For a good overview of WordPress check out Daniel Piechnick’s website at websitesetupguide.com he has some great content about the setup of a WordPress website. I use WordPress for my own website for the same reasons that Daniel mentions. It allows you to quickly design a professional looking website. It’s as easy to use as a software program like MS Word or Excel. You get a back office from where you can create fresh content either in the form of a blog post or a page depending on how you want to structure your site. Many web sites use WordPress for web site pages as well as their blogging pages. The great thing about WordPress is that it handles the technical site of your site so you don’t need to get your hands dirty with coding. However, if you want to be more adventurous with coding it also gives you the flexibility to bespoke your site by writing your own code or alternatively you can get a freelancer from elance.com to do bespoke coding for you. Also there are 1,000s of plug-ins to add to your WordPress site that will help you to make it run exactly how you want it to. What’s more the development of your site can be both a fun and an incredibly addictive process!

6. Testing your website – For those who read my posts more often you’ll be aware that I have a scientific background and that I hold testing and measurement at the forefront of a successful online enterprise. The testing stage must have its own set of pre-determine outputs – the things that you’d expect to see as a result of the efforts that you put in. For example, if you spent all day working on a blog post you’d expect in the first week for at least 500 people to have viewed it everyday or if you’d spent $150/£100 on a piece of copy you’d expect to have made a return on your investment of at least $100. Therefore to properly test you need to know what it is that you want to achieve and have a method to draw these metrics out. I have a background in business psychology / coaching and I set myself clear goals around what I want my website to achieve. I convert the key metrics into key performance indicators which I monitor on a weekly basis. However, we all come across barriers and obstacles and I have outlined in a post a number of ways you can conquer those nasty barriers to your goals.

7. Website cost – Start with deciding a budget and then stick to it. There are many temptations of beautifully web sites that are designed to impress your visitors. It is very easy to wrack up web site bills in excess of $7,500/£5,000. There are some very expensive websites out there that literally nobody ever goes to. Imagine them as expensive oil paintings that nobody knows exist. This is easily achieved as many web designers are not necessarily SEO or web site traffic experts. So be aware that you need to consider traffic as well as aesthetics. A well planned out web site strategy can quickly and easily get a web site the way that you want it for under $400/£250 per year including an email list building strategy. See the following article for more information on building an email list.

8. SEO and your site – You don’t need to put in place lots of time consuming strategies to make SEO work well for you. Like most things in life you need a plan and a system. I have executed a number of successful SEO campaigns which have resulted in excellent Google page ranking for the keywords that I’ve targeted. I have some very simple rules that I follow namely that I only target 1-2 keywords per blog post (even if it’s in excess of 1,000 words). I have a number of tips and tricks that I’ve outlined in my blog post five tips for an awesome SEO strategy this centers on the keyword research that I use, some simple HTML tricks and most importantly the central hinge pin of having excellent content that delivers value to the reader. Many people extend their SEO strategy with social media and before long become absolutely lost in the volume of different social media channels that are available to small businesses. In my article on social media I have outlined 3 simple strategies for those overwhelmed with social media which I promise are much easier to implement than you might think.

On finishing this post today I came across an excellent site built by Ed Fry using Site Built It, where he has some great tips on how to build a website here you will find more help content on how to start a website.

To Your Success
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach
Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

1. Create an Email Marketing Strategy Using Outlook – Most articles about email marketing focus on using commercial marketing services such as Aweber or MailChimp, but in this post I wanted to also consider the use of tools that you may already be using. So let’s look at the possibility of using Outlook to set up lists of leads. To automatically collect leads we’d initially require having an email account added to Outlook such as Yahoo! or Gmail etc. Then we’d need to use this email account to collect leads online. Heinz Tschabitscher has written an article all about how to create an email list using Outlook express  I have tried to add my free Yahoo! account to Outlook and at the time of writing I wasn’t able to get POP3 access. According to a number of online forums this is currently a known problem with free Yahoo! accounts. This is a shame as I’m genuinely interested to know if a business could in theory run a decent home made lead capture system using Outlook, a free email account and basic email capture forms in WordPress. So at this stage I’ve got no idea to the extent that I’d be able to monitor the number of opened emails and know who has clicked on what links. But I’d imagine that there is a way of doing this using a free tracking program where you’d route all of your links through. Maybe a project for 2012! But for now I’d say this approach is both time consuming and probably paved with unknown pot holes and banana skins.

2. Create an Email Marketing Strategy in Gmail – Ok I’ve moved on from using Outlook and I wanted to know to what extent I could just take a free email account like Gmail and use that as my main marketing strategy. I got this idea from reviewing lifehacker.com and read an article that was focused on how to create an email list in Gmail with contact groups.  Whilst this is a similar strategy the outlook option there appears to be some support online for using Gmail as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool – see the following article on articlesnatch.com http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Free-Lead-Management–Turning-Google-s-Gmail-Into-Crm/590541 Here it is claimed that Gmail can be used as a CRM account. I’m now getting slightly frustrated with the whole idea of using a free email account as I’ve spent over an hour playing around with Gmail and I’ve not found any functionality for interrogating my data! Maybe I’m missing something. No disrespect to Google but to me Gmail is a pleasant web based tool and not necessarily meant to be used for anything more than single mail write and read or sending out group emails to either business associates or friends. So, a great tool for sending frequent emails to a handful of people. I will pursue this idea though as I’d like an alternative to commercial services to offer my readers and associates if there is a sensible way of doing this.

3. Commercial Email Marketing Strategy – There are many different email marketing services that you can use to create an email list. However, I have used Aweber now for the past 18 months and can fully recommend it. Whilst I’m always looking for other strategies at the moment Aweber meets my needs. What I like about Aweber in particular is that it is very easy to setup and quickly create an email list. Also there are many excellent widgets and plug-ins for WordPress that make it easy for the two platforms to speak to each other. The ease of interoperability with Aweber and other applications means that you can do most of the work of setting up a low budget lead capture system without needing to touch your web sites coding. Bonus!

How To Create An Email List: Key Considerations

I have outlined below what I consider to be the key considerations for creating an email list. These include information on how to incentivize your leads, where to put your opt-in form, the best pop-ups to use, using WordPress as a lead capture tool and how to gain trust from your audience.

4. Incentive to subscribe – I’ve mentioned the importance of incentivizing prospects to fill in your opt-in forms a number of times in my blog posts. As a basic overview you need something (a report, ebook, or special product) which your leads want and are willing to exchange their name and email address for. For information about read my ultimate guide to listing building

5. Multiple Sign-up Forms – Dr. Ralph F. Wilson has been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and we’d do well to pay attention to his advice. In an article that Ralph posted in 2007 he outlined 12 great tips on how to create an email list – The tip that stands out for me is putting multiple sign up forms across the breadth of your web site so that there is a signup form on every single page. Ralph widens this out to offline contacts too and recommends that we all take every opportunity to get telephone leads or people you work with face to face to subscribe to our newsletters or free product. My advice is to make your opt-in forms visible i.e. displayed above the fold of the page. The internet is a bit like real estate in that success is based on location, location, location! So make sure your visitors see your opt-in forms.

6. Use Popup Light Boxes To Attract Subscribers – Hey we all know the score. We go onto a web site that has information that we want. The site looks reasonably well produced and then bang only 30 seconds on the site and a popup lightbox appears. The offer is tantalizing and we consider for more than a moment to enter our details. Well folks products like Popup Domination actually do work. On my testing of my web site Popup Domination out performs all other lead capture strategies in terms of the number of leads generated through this single method. The Popup Dominationguys often bundle some good stuff with it too. However, it is worth considering how often you want to bug people. I’ve set my popup light box to activate once a day, but that could be too often for some people so I’m considering setting it to popup to first time visitors only. The great thing is that the program has a number of settings that you test in real time and adjust so that it works optimally with your own site. You could be missing a trick if you overlooked a product like Popup Domination

7. Create An Email List With WordPress for Free – Wpbeginner.com is a great resource that I’ve used throughout the development of my blog. You get good independent advice there. I’d recommend reading their article on how to create an email list with WordPress This post focuses how to market a product ahead of buying a more expensive service such as Aweber or MailChimp by using a WordPress plug-in called WP Email Capture It’s a two field, double opt-in form. The email addresses can be uploaded to an email marketing program at a later date. This is a good free option if you want analyse the likely amount of interest before making the investment to use Aweber or MailChimp etc.

8. How To Stay Subscribed – Peter J has written a useful article for famousbloggers.net which outlines how to create an email list where subscribers stay subscribed He sensibly highlights that sending out affiliate links week after week will have your subscribers reaching for the unsubscribe button faster than a Japanese Bullet train leaving Tokyo at high speed. Peter also reveals that a cool way to keep subscribers on your list is to work on a cycle of say one email a week, to offer good advice and offer subscribers the opportunity to be interviewed. These are great tips and I’ll certainly be thinking about interviewing my subscribers for featured emails / posts in the future.

9. Keep it Permission Based – Sitepoint.com is one of those sites that is worth visiting every once an a while to get a feel for good marketing practice. Alyssa Gregory points out in her article how to build an email marketing list that we need to keep your email list permission based. If you have a double opt-in email marketing program such as Aweber then this will be taken care of for you. However, if you plan to use your own methods of email lead capture then consider giving people a chance to opt-in first then offer an introduction to your offer/ business and provide a means for folk to unsubscribe. There is nothing worse than receiving emails that don’t offer the option to unsubscribe.

10 Why Should A Prospect Trust You? – Matt Mansfield correctly points out that trust is the cornerstone of email marketing success. Matt goes on to share in his article how to create an email list without sacrificing trust some wisdom around the dangers of over eagerness in building a list too fast. I totally agree with Matt’s position here. For instance, if you have a good business, then I’d imagine that you’ll have great products and services. Right, otherwise why are you in business? So relax – even with mediocre marketing it’s just a matter of time before your business will take off – providing you have great products or services. Obviously you’ll need to get your message out there, but better to concentrate on quality low frequency contact with your email list rather than bombarding your list with un-thought through, untargeted messages. Building trust is a case of getting your prospects/leads to appreciate that you are a person of quality and a person of integrity.

11. The Money is in the List – Onibalusi knows their stuff in this article how to build an email list that makes money they have pretty much summed up my free online marketing e-course. To get to the money there are a number of steps that you’ll need to take. You’ll need to consider who your target audience is, need to design an offer that is in alignment to what they want, you’ll need to consider how to capture your leads and then how to communicate with them. For more details either read Onibalusi’ article or like many people have already done subscribe to my free ecourse on list building.

OK that just about does it for today’s round up on how to create an email list. I have produced a number of other posts that you may be interested on around 19 list building mistakes to avoid and the definitive guide to email list building, which mentions many things not covered in this post.

To Your Success,
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach

Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z

19 List Building Mistakes:

1. Buying An Email List – To any new marketer this sounds great in principle. It is sold to you so well and it can easily become the most attractive solution to a new marketer’s problems – the problem of finding 1,000s of targeted leads. The trouble is that the leads don’t know you, they often didn’t get double opted into the database that they’re stored on and the leads are old and unresponsive. There is no quick fix in attracting subscribers. Building your list needs to be a deliberate thing and you need to have a controlled method of building your list. For more on this read an article on Aweber’s site buying email lists the ugly truth.

2. Adding People To Your Email List Without Their Permission – Time and time again this happens to me. I have a brief exchange of messages on a social media site and before I know it I’ve been added to an email list or a business newsletter. What’s worse are those companies that simply collect my email address from an online directory (or my website) and randomly add me to their list. What on earth makes people think that this is a smart way to grow their email list? Like me you probably take one action – unsubscribe! It’s a waste of time, does nothing for your reputation or credibility and it is the worst of the list building mistakes. Get over taking any short cuts – growing an email list is part science and part art and takes months of testing and retesting to tweak, but when you get it right you will be unstoppable.

3. Using An Opt-in Form That You Think Will Work – Ok we all have to start somewhere right. As far as list building mistakes go I have been as guilty as anyone for this. You see a great opt-in form on someone else’s site. They claim it works like gang busters and so you design a similar form on your site. You persist with it because you ‘know’ it will work – after all it worked on the other site didn’t it? The simple truth is we know nothing until we have tested and retested and tested again. I recommend this article on AB split testing it was written in 2005 but is still relevant today.

You can track the success of your marketing by signing up for a free account at:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

You’ll hear many people tell you this and at first you’ll probably ignore them because it’s too much like hard work but you should only, “change one element on your opt-in form at a time”. So don’t go changing the header, the image and bullet points all at once because you’re frustrated at low opt-ins – slow down and take a more scientific approach to your marketing. As a minimum you should be aiming for an opt-in rate of 3%, but with targeted traffic and a free incentive you should be able to tweak it to >10%. I’m aware of some site’s that claim to get over 50% opt-ins. But I guess we’ll never know for sure if this is the whole truth until we try it out ourselves.

4. Single Opt-in – Aside from whether or not you’re breaking some internet law or not, a single opt-in doesn’t make sense for most businesses. For me I’m fascinated in internet behaviour. From my studying of psychologist I know that an action that takes less commitment is less likely to be replicated in the future. In other words if a lead has the commitment to double opt-in to your email list then they are interested enough to take twice the action of someone who opted-in to a single opt-in email list. The more action a lead takes the more likely they will be to take similar actions in the future – e.g. read your material and buy your products or services. I’d rather a smaller list of committed leads than a larger list of unresponsive leads, but I know that others will strongly disagree with this point – it has something to do with list ego! Unlike the other list building mistakes this is more of a decision of whether your country requires double opt-in by law and whether you want a committed list.

5. Content That Readers Don’t Want To Read – Out of all the list building mistakes this is the greatest single reason why someone would unsubscribe from your list. This list building mistake shows a lack of understanding of your customers’ needs. Many people try to focus on themselves – on what they have to offer and what services they can offer – rather than connecting with the interests of their customers. Matt Bacak claims in his article the top 10 list building mistakes that poor content is one of the top 10 list building mistakes and he should know as he was internet marketer of the year for 2010. It is estimated that less than 25% of people probably are reading opted-in emails (which is the average readership of online newsletters according to MailChimp.com). To check on the success of your email campaign use html emails, add links to key content in your message and track who is taking action and on what emails. You might be surprised by your findings.

6. Frequency Of Emails – Strangely this is probably more frequently than you think. Your subscribers have asked to be sent an email from you. Whilst there are no precise statistics on this, it is considered a list building mistake to email less often than once every month. Less than once a month and your subscribers will wonder who it is that is contacting them and hit the dreaded unsubscribe link. On the other hand some marketers send emails every day. You know the ones that offer no value other than the affiliate percentage that goes in their back pocket. There needs to be a balance between the two with value at the heart of the system. Vance Sova claims in his article 3 email list building mistakes you want to avoid that you need to build a relationship with your audience rather than sending pitching emails too frequently.

7. Email Is Dead! – No, just kidding. But many people marketing their sites have a perception that email is dead. This perception probably comes from the high usage of social media sites – and it’s probably true that people spend less time reading emails than they did in the past. But it’s one of the most foolish of the list building mistakes as I bet that your email box is still the 1st, 2nd or 3rd destination when you log on and it will be for your customers too. An interesting survey was conducted by Aweber on what teens really think of email. The good news is that over 44% think that email will live on. There are other surveys that indicate similar findings. This suggests that email will remain a significant communication tool in the future and lends support for focusing time and effort on email list building.

8. Not Giving Your Email Leads Anything – I can’t tell you how many blogs I’ve seen where there is a newsletter opt-in form which does little to entice people. There is no offer proposed in exchange for an email address and no reason to opt-in. The opt-in forms do not stand out. To get email leads you need to have a free gift tailored to your market. The opt-in form needs to stand out by saying subscribe to my Newsletter and receive an eBook or video series, or access to a membership site. Here’s an example of an opt-in form that really stands out – I dare you not to subscribe to it http://bloggingcasestudy.com/ Did you subscribe? If you didn’t I bet you considered it. As an alternative check out Cathy Sucker’s home page http://www.sellingbooks.com/ this is a more subtle style of marketing, but I bet it works well for her list building.

9. Preformatted Opt-in Forms – You can tell these list building mistakes a mile away. Someone makes the good decision to go with a premium autoresponder company and then chooses to use their preformatted Opt-in forms. On their own they look pretty but often they don’t match a websites theme. They stick out like a sore thumb. An opt-in form is the doorway to your email marketing system and is worth spending some time, money and effort on. You want people who come to your site to have great value, but also you want them to take one action – subscribe to your email list. So make sure your opt-in form is prominent and matches your overall website theme.

10. Not Selling The Giveaway – David Risley in his article The 3 Big List Building Mistakes Bloggers Make (And How To Fix Them)  discusses the mistake of not selling the giveaway. The best way to sell a give away is to present it well in the title, to show it to your audience e.g. thumbnail of video or picture of ebook. Many people use a give away so you’ll need to tap into the mystery of specific problem/solution. To overcome these list building mistakes you’ll need to over power skepticism as it takes more and more each year for people to give up an email address.

11. Doing Everything Yourself – OMG this was my greatest list building problem. It was not the money for me – it was more that I’d have an idea at 8pm after my dinner and I’d want to execute it by 9pm. So I’d get to work on it and find out that it takes way longer than an hour. The end product wasn’t that bad but I could have outsourced it and been working on creating something of value for my email list. Many of my earlier list building mistakes could have been put right if I had paid between $30-$35 to get someone else to create a ebook cover or design a landing page.

12. Neglecting Your Email List – Letting The List Run Cold! – This is one of the most interesting list building mistakes. Many people get excited when they finally start to make progress with their list building. But when they start to get a good number of subscribers they start to over think things. They worry about whether the content of an email is offering value and worry that too many emails will lead to people unsubscribing. We all have to move past these feelings and focus on nurturing our lists. Think about it this way these people subscribed to you in the first place because they wanted what you have to offer! So keep on delivering value and you’ll find that a hard core of fans will remain whilst others will unsubscribe because they have changed their mind or are not convinced that you have the answers to their problems or they simply are not in the same position as when they first joined your list.

13. Not Using A Professional Autoresponder – I’ve spoken about this in many of my previous posts. I’ll not say much other than a professional autoresponder service such as Aweber will make a huge difference to your list building campaigns. It will increase deliverability of your emails and will assist you in segmenting your list so that you can identify the beginners in a topic from those who are more advance or separate those who click on money links from those who do not – your tracking capabilities are endless. As list building mistakes go, this one is more about not being willing to invest your money in the right place! It is claimed by www.affordable-internet-marketing.com in their article Six List Building Mistakes and How To Turn Them Around that smart marketers are those who build a list using a professional autoresponder

14. You Don’t Partner To Build Your List – Point 7 of Robert Middleton’s 7 Deadly List Building Mistakes  is a mistake that all new marketers make. Robert talks of avoiding many of the list building mistakes mentioned here. However, building his subscriber base over the years, he missed an important strategy that have may have been the most powerful one of all and that would have added thousands of new subscribers to his list.

That strategy is called co-promoting with a partner. What you do is find a partner who is also list building and who also has a high quality product. You send an email to your list offering their product and they send an email to their list offering your product. Easy to do and very effective. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. At the beginning, when you don’t have a huge list, you’ll be partnering with those who also have smaller lists. But as time goes on and as your list grows, you’ll partner with people with larger lists.

15. Not Having A Sales Funnel – It is a mistake ni to have a sales funnel, because at the end of the day money will motivate you. It’s OK not to ask for money straight away and to be frank most ethical and wise marketers know that you need to develop a relationship first before you sell. But at some point in your system you need to get over your fears and identify something of value that you can sell to your list. If not your own product or service then a product in your niche that you love and can get a commission for selling. If you don’t understand what a sales funnel is then you’re not alone as most new marketers don’t understand the sales funnel or how they would monetize their online business. I can recommend Seth Godin’s blog post on the sales funnel

16. Being Too Broad – This is one of the list building mistakes that many people find themselves in if they have not sufficiently focused in on what they want to communicate to their audience. Lynn Terry of Clicknewz.com on http://www.nicoleonthenet.com says that the best thing you can do when building a list is get specific. Know exactly who you want to subscribe to that list, and why, and know exactly what you are going to send them.

17. You’ve Set No Goals! – I have saved my favorite out of all the list building mistakes to last. Now if there is any secret to this list building malarkey then it is this – having no list building goal will lead to lack of action and poor results. If you set goals and monitor them on a daily basis then you will end up focusing on them most of the time. The things in you’re life that you focus on most of the time end up being the things that you make the greatest progress with. Of course along the way you will experience barriers but these can be overcome – check my post on conquer those nasty barriers to your goals.

In addition, to the above I have just found out from Shawn Casey’s article on the top 3 Newbie List Building Mistakes You Should Avoid  is that too much advertising can be a reason why people do not subscribe to your list.

OK this is another mammoth post and if you have made it this far then well done!  I know that you are sufficiently motivated to succeed and avoid these list building mistakes. If want further tips on how to build an email list then check my ultimate guide on that.

I’m sure that you have made your own list building mistakes when you started growing your list and I’d encourage you to share your own experiences with my readers.

To Your Success,
Howard Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach

Author of How You Can Generate 50-100 Leads Per Day
http://tinyurl.com/3okcd9z