Easy Article Starters for Affiliate Marketers – It Just Got Easier

Have you ever had a good idea for a product and never did anything about it?

Yep, me too.

Have you ever took a good idea and when you started creating a product, found it wasn’t such a good idea after all?

Raising my hand here.

Have you ever had a good idea for a product, created it, put it in the marketplace and people loved it?

Yes.   And these home runs are what keep me in internet marketing.

One well-received product is Easy Article Starters.  It came about when I looked at problems many, many people were having with content…

“What do I blog about?”
“How do I write about it differently than everyone else?”
“I have writer’s block!”
“I need more content for my blog, article marketing, emails, ecourses, etc.”

and Easy Article Starters were born. People snatched them up and said very nice things about them. They were able to write faster, create original articles or posts, and come up with additional ideas for articles. One guy said he took an idea from one Starter and wrote an ebook!

So I wrote more Starters in different niches, not just internet marketing. So far there’s IM, Self-Improvement, Weight loss and Fitness, Family and Home, and Dogs. I’m working on more niches right now.

I love it when I can help people!

 

But I was thinking how I could improve upon the idea, and what else people were struggling with in regards to content, and I came up with Easy Article Starters for Affiliate Marketers and did a Mega pack.

These are so you can use them to promote affiliate products (although you don’t have to). The Mega pack contains 10 affiliate product promotion ideas and 5 Easy Article Starters for each topic. They’re not hard-sell, in your face, promo starters. But you can easily slip your affiliate links into all of them.

The Mega pack topics are:

• hosting (promote your favorite)
• domain names/registration (promote your favorite)
• autoresponder (promote your favorite)
• Earn 1K A Day (membership site)
• Nicheology (membership site)
• Amazon
• Easy Video Player
• Thesis WP Theme
• Keyword Scout (need to be a member of WSOPro to promote)
• Contest Burner (WP plugin)

So that’s 50 Article Starters you can use!

And here’s a sample one in case you’re confused:

As you can see, it’s not a whole finished piece. That’s what makes them great – you end up with a unique blog post, or whatever, all your own. Content is your real estate! You can use it strategically, repurpose and reuse it, and it will take you many places!

So that’s the path of this product so far. If it interests you, you can grab it from the discount page above or better yet, buy from one of my affiliates. Hopefully they’ll be visiting the comment section of this post and you can find them there.

• I’d like to hear what you would do if you could quickly and easily produce lots of content for your affiliate campaigns! Would you create an ecourse? Article marketing? A free report with affiliate links in it?

Week 3 of Internet Marketing Uber Production

Today marks the start of week 3 of this challenge Susanne Myers and I have going where we’re trying to see how much we can get done before the NAMS conference in Atlanta. While I’ve been getting a lot done and I’m quite happy with that, I’m sure getting tired. I think Susanne feels the same way. But it’s worth it in the long run!

Last week was all about product creation and launching a product. This week will be about marketing the product. I’ve learned that while I’d love to just spend my time creating, it’s all for naught if the finished product isn’t promoted extensively. If you’ve ever put your creation in the marketplace, you know what I mean.

I‘ve got some personal things that will be taking up about 1/3 of my week, but I’m going to work hard when I can.

So here’s this week’s agenda:

1. Finish up the chapter I’m doing for Connie Ragen Green’s next Kindle book.

2. Market my product. The best bang for the buck, by far, is to have my wonderful affiliates spread the word. So I’m going to have an affiliate contest! I’ll be working like a mad woman today creating material they can use and letting them know all the details. I LOVE doing affiliate contests because I get to see new marketers earn their first-ever commissions and I also get to watch how the super affiliates do it with style and craftsmanship. Everything in-between is wonderful too. If you’d like to join my affiliate program, you can sign up and I’ll be mailing out the details for the contest soon. This should be fun!

I will also be contacting marketers who might be interested in joining in because the fit is good, i.e. they have readers or a customer base that could benefit from the product.

3. Finish up the details for something the amazing Sheila Atwood is working on for me. When you’re weak in an area, you should surround yourself with people who are strong in that area! So that’s what I’m doing.

Now I’m going to hop over to Susanne’s blog and see what she has planned for the week. Join me?

For that matter, will you join us in this week’s production challenge? Comment below if you’re not afraid to be held publicly accountable!

 

 

Internet Marketing Deadines – End of Week 2

Well I was just over to Susanne Myers‘s blog and I can see she’s kicking me to the curb in this Getting Things Done challenge. I actually got everything done on my plate, but I think that means I didn’t set hard enough goals. Honestly though, I was trying a few new processes so I wasn’t sure how they’d go or how long they would take.

1. Finish up mega Easy Article Starters pack – check

2. Do up a sales page for the above, plus start a new optin list for the backend offer – check

3. Write the first month content for the backend 6 month offer – check

4. Do the sales page for that – check

5. Get the second backend offer set up – check

6. Load the products in DLGuard, create payment buttons, do thank you pages, etc. for the sales funnel – check

7. Work with my coaching clients – check

8. Get the outline for Connie Ragen Green‘s book chapter done and write a portion of it – half way done with the chapter

9. Get next guest post up – check

10. Email my list – check 

Launching a new product can be so time-consuming. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big or small launch, it’s exciting and frustrating and takes all your time. I’ll tell you about it on Tuesday.

~~~~

Susanne asked me a question on her blog and I’ll answer it now.

“We both love NAMS and keep coming back. What’s the biggest benefit you get from attending and what keeps you coming back?”

For me, I have two answers and I’m not sure that one takes top spot over the other. I love NAMS because I learn things I don’t know from people who do know. The teachers are people who have walked the walk, and that matters to me. Even though I’ve been around internet marketing for over 4 years, I like to keep on learning from the best – Terry Dean, Paul Evans, Lynn Terry, Connie Green, Nicole Dean, etc.

The other reason I go to NAMS is to meet people face-to-face that I’ve only had an online friendship or acquaintance with, or barely know by name. This is huge! It’s a chance to share ideas, brainstorm over dinner, talk about common interests, and maybe have some JV opportunities present themselves. When you get to know other online marketers in person, you don’t feel lonely even if you work at home by yourself all day.

Some people go to conferences just to build JV relationships and they skip the classes because they’re pitch-fests or don’t contain valuable information. I find that not to be the case at NAMS. You don’t see people hanging out in the halls during sessions, you see the rooms crammed full of people listening, asking questions, and taking notes.

Thanks for the question, Susanne, and that reminds me of a question I’ve been wanting to ask you about NAMS.

One day I’d like to speak at a conference like NAMS. How do I go about being considered? What steps do I need to take to get noticed by the conference presenters?

I’ll wrap it up now.

• How did y’all do this past week?
  
• Did you try anything you’ve never done before? How did it go?
  

photo credit: leonshishman

How I Use Posterous to Share Content and Save Time

This is a guest post from Sharyn Sheldon. She brought up Posterous in conversation and since I’d never heard of it, I asked her to explain it here…

 

How I Use Posterous to Share Content and Save Time
By Sharyn Sheldon

I’m always looking for ways to save time and make my life a little easier. Who isn’t? All this business of managing social media, blogs, link building, sharing ideas, posting videos, and so on and so forth. It’s exhausting just thinking about it, let alone figuring out how to get it done.

A couple of years ago I was introduced to a neat little site called Posterous that helps tremendously with some of the everyday tasks that I know I should be doing more of. I’m actually surprised that more people haven’t heard about it, considering all the things you can do and the features it contains.

What Is It?

Posterous, which is now called Posterous Spaces, looks a lot like a free blogging platform at first glance. In fact, a lot of people use it now as their primary blog. The beauty in it though is the ability to share and autopost to multiple sites, all via email.

All you have to do is set up a Posterous “Space”, which can be public or private. You get a domain name that is name.posterous.com, or you can use your own domain name and transfer it over. The settings are fairly straightforward with no complicated plugins, just the basics. The purpose of having a Posterous space is to share, not sell.

Once you have your space ready to go, which only takes a few minutes, you can start posting and sharing right on the site or via your registered email.

Email intelligence

For posting via email, you just put the title of the post as your Subject, and the content of the post as the body of your email. If you want to include images, video or audio, you just attach them to the email or insert the link in the body of the text. Posterous recognizes it and embeds the image, video or audio in the correct format right into your post. The actual media shows up, not simply a link. It’s kind of like uploading a media file to WordPress, but it’s all done automatically for you. Cool, right?

Share and share alike

The email feature isn’t the really amazing part though. What I adore is the autopost feature. You can set up specific accounts to “autopost” to when you send that email to Posterous. I can tell Posterous to post the same content to all of my accounts, or just to one or two depending on how I address the email.

The accounts will have links back to the post on Posterous while blogs will show the full post. For Facebook, it will even generate an image if I have one as part of that post.

Don’t abuse the system

A couple last words of caution. Don’t get overzealous and start using Posterous to spam 20 different accounts with the same information over and over. Also, I never use it to post content to my main blog and I don’t do all my sharing via Posterous. For Facebook and Twitter in particular, you should be right there interacting with followers, being sociable.

I’m sure I’ve only tapped into a portion of what you can do with Posterous. For instance, I know you can also share things to your Posterous space via Google Reader, which is great for doing content curation. But one can only absorb so much technology after all.

~~~~~~~

Sharyn Sheldon is the owner of Business Content PLR, which provides professionally written articles on a variety of business topics – all designed to be easy to rewrite and make unique. An instructional designer in her pre-internet days, Sharyn’s focus is on learning to grow your business while making your life easier and more fun at the same time.  

Getting Lots Done – Week 2 Goals

It’s week two of our Get Lots Done in Internet Marketing challenge where Susanne Myers and I are pushing each other, and YOU, to get as much done as we can before we meet up at the NAMS conference in February. By the way, if you want to join us, it’s not too late to reserve your spot – it’s February 10-12th in Atlanta.

I’ve got to admit I was exhausted this weekend, but I woke up really early (TOO early) this morning because I was excited to start the new week. I’ll tell you what I have planned, which is more like the details of what goes into preparing a product for launch and the sales funnel. Then I’ll answer Susanne’s questions about WSOs.

1. Finish up mega Easy Article Starters pack – It’s got 50 article starters and I’m so close to finishing it I can taste it (and it tastes good ). A few more to write and then I need to proofread and edit the whole thing.

2. Do up a sales page for the above, plus start a new optin list for the backend offer.

3. Write the first month content for the backend offer, which will be a 6 month drip-feed of more of this particular type of Easy Article Starters.

4. Do the sales page for that.

5. Get the second backend offer set up.

6. Load the products in DLGuard, create the payment buttons, do the thank you pages and any other page I need to in order to make the sales process and funnel work.

7. Work with my coaching clients.

8. Leftover/not done, from last week – get the outline for Connie Ragen Green‘s book chapter done and write a portion of it – I know what it’s going to be about and I’ve written and spoken about this topic before so it shouldn’t be too hard.

9. Get next guest post up.

10. Email my list about happenings.

I’m feeling very excited and a little stressed. I have the house totally to myself until 4pm so I plan to get a huge amount done today.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now to answer Susanne’s questions about WSOs:

“I have a question for you, Peggy. I’m still a bit baffled by WSOs. How do you decide what to offer there? Are there certain offers that perform well? What do you do to make sure your WSO is a big hit? And as a follow up question, does offering WSOs help you grow your overall customer base?” 

As far as deciding what to offer for a WSO, I think it’s got to be a combination of what you’re an expert at, or can become an expert at, and what people want. In other words, you might be an expert at cooking and can put together a report on cooking tips, but that’s not what people on the Warrior Forum are looking for. It’s got to be something internet marketers want that can help them be successful.

To know what they want, look at the questions they ask on the forum. Many are looking for the easy button, true, but others are happy to learn about your successful business model and want a step-by-step so they can do what you do.

Are there tons of questions asking about how to set up a Facebook fan page, how to monetize their Facebook page, how to get tons of Likes, how to put an optin form on their FB page…. ? Sounds like something you could create a product around and it would be well-received.

Honestly, I can’t always see the rhyme or reason as to why some Warrior Special Offers do better than others. Factors that seem to matter are price point, how much perceived value the customer will get for his money, how good the sales page is, and the product creator’s reputation, among others.

You can’t always ensure your WSO will be a big hit. Sometimes they’ll bomb and it can be for any reason – some bigger name put out a product at the very same time, the market wasn’t as hungry for this as you thought, your subject line wasn’t compelling, you don’t get many comments and therefore there’s no buzz, you listed it on a holiday, you listed it at a time when a zillion others were newly listed.

On the other hand, if customers leave some really positive comments, your product sales go up, a buzz is created, it multiplies, more sales, and you’re one happy marketer.  I love it when that happens!

Yes, WSOs help you grow your customer base. Think of it this way – even though it’s competitive, where else can you find 2000–5000 internet marketers viewing the marketplace where your product is listed, at any given time? You get eyeballs, customers, and people hopping on your list.

With the WSO I have going currently with Alan Petersen (which he did most of the work on) we’re using WSOPro, which is basically an affiliate program. As you know, having affiliates can really make a big difference to your bottom line, and this has certainly been the case here for us. The difference is you don’t have to go and find affiliates, with WSOPro they come aknockin’ at your door requesting to promote.

Okay, now I want to ask Susanne a question, or two…

Susanne, I know you just started using Cinch. Could you tell me more about it? I’d like to know how you decide what topics to talk about and record, and what you think the best ways are to have your recordings heard by the masses and maybe go viral?

I’m looking forward to the answers, but I’m not going to sit here and wait, I’ve got a lot to get started on!

• How about you, what are you hoping to accomplish this week?
• Don’t forget to hop over to Susanne’s blog and see what she’s up to this week.

photo credit: alexmcc1986

Next Page »