So I got back from the NAMS event in Atlanta on Monday. (If you’re not familar, that’s an event for people looking to increase revenue from their online efforts). Humbling as it is, I got to share the stage with Carrie Wilkerson, Susanne Meyers, and Jack Born among many others. Can you believe Elsom Eldridge, Daniel Hall and Erin Chase were some of the attendees? That event gets better every year.
As I do for my Weekly Notes subscribers (see sidebar) I thought I’d share a bit of what’s gone on this week:
What I Taught
For the 101 class we talked about prioritization of tasks once they got home. To really get your business moving you need to focus on 2 things:
- Opt-in List. If you’re going to go to all this effort to bring traffic to your website, don’t lose all your momentum by failing to collect e-mail addresses from your site visitors. Even 1 email address per day adds up over time. A lot of people choose to trade a newsletter for an email address in an opt-in box, but I would suggest you come up with a report, poster, free audio or some kind of download. You really are trading their email privacy for your information – so make it good.
- Content. There’s nothing more important than good content. That requires a good keyword tool (sorry, there aren’t free ones) and good information. The more you can write about your niche, the higher Google will think of you. But don’t totally get stymied by keyword research. There’s a reason bullet #2 is called content. Just get it out.
When you get both of those things rolling, that’s when good things start happening for you.
The second class I taught was how to make money on Pinterest. I recently created a video product on how to do that which we sell in this blog post. (Did you know you can sell things in a blog post?) If you’re looking to drive traffic, you can’t afford to miss out on the SEO benefits of Pinterest, alone.
What I Learned
- Public Domain Content: There is so much information in the public domain no one actually owns. It’s almost ridiculous. I was amazed at what information you can find and use on your site. And there’s so much of it you can find great stuff on just about any topic. I was blown away to see a guy who copied and pasted old maps from the public domain and put them together on one CD. He then put the CD on ebay and has sold over 4,800 copies for $14.95 each. It’s amazing what you can do online.
- The CamCard Phone App: Here’s an app that scans business cards with the phone’s camera. It recognizes every part of the card and then adds it to your contact list. (I didn’t have this so I was excited to have learned about it). I know this is trivial – but quite useful to me.
- Video Marketing: Two cool tidbits. IdeaMarketers.com is an article marketing style site that allows you to embed videos in articles. That’s awesome way to get some more views of your YouTube videos. And if you use Feedblitz.com as your email service, videos in your blog posts can be automatically accessible to the feed, rss or email subscribers. Great way to repurpose your YouTube videos.
- There are creative people everywhere. Just being around 350 website owners and hearing about the cool stuff they do for their audiences is overwhelming. There’s a guy using YouTube to generate leads for his roofing business. He gets so many, he now just sells the leads – he doesn’t even do roofs anymore. A pizza restaurant has a successful $50 membership club. A Sunday School ideas website has 30,000 members that pay $2.99/month. And there’s a recipe website owner that writes guest blogs posts to drive lots of traffic. Every business owner should attend: http://nams-workshop.com
What’s New For You
Our Mastermind Groups: We have a new group forming at the end of February. The group consists of 4 – 5 people who are interested in learning about internet marketing, and getting feedback on prioritizing their activities. We talk about the what, the how, the when and the why. It’s a great group. If you’re interested, contact me. We’ve got 1 spot on that group filled already.
The Marketing Calendar Blueprint: Our Marketing Calendar is live! I asked many of you to review it and have received glowing reviews in return. Particularly people are excited about the .pdf and how it was put together. Who knew a .pdf could have tabs and navigation like a website? One of our reviewers, Anita Hampl replied with this (I’m copying it directly from her email:)
[stextbox id=”info”]PURE GOLD:
“The key to this isn’t necessarily in the optimization but in the conversation that you can have with your audience. Optimizing will surely bring you more traffic. But you become a better friend to your audience when you’re talking about Movie Deals at the time they’re thinking about it most.” –This paragraph needs to be highlighted and enlarged and used in promotional materials. This is why ethical bloggers need your product.[/stextbox]
I’d love for you to check that out and come back to me if you have any questions. One of the bonuses we offer is a lesson on how brilliant the marketing is behind the show The Bachelor and how you can use that technique in your business. Awesome. I personally guarantee you’ll have a better run business when you’re done.
Our information page is located at MarketingCalendarBlueprint.com
Anyway, that’s what’s going on here. I’d love to hear more about how your business is going. Feel free to leave a comment below or hop on over to FreeWeeklyMastermind.com on Facebook and start a chat.