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.

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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.

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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

Internet Marketing Deadlines – Week 1 Reckoning

Susanne Myers and I started a little friendly competition to see how much we can get done before NAMS in February. This is the end of the first week. I’ve got to say, nothing beats a little public accountability!

 

Here’s what I meant to get done this week and how I did:

1. Work with my coaching clients – Accomplished.

2. Write 1 blog post – Did it if you count this post, otherwise a fail.

3. Get a new PLR pack ready to go and notify my list – Yep, done.

4. Write 3 more sections for my upcoming Easy Article Starters Mega pack for affiliates – Overachieved as I actually wrote 5.

5. Work out the details of the upsell – Feverishly hashed those out last night.

6. Outline my chapter for Connie Ragen Green’s book – Nope.

7. Blog commenting, tweeting, Facebook – Not much at all.

The one thing that took up a lot of my time that’s not on this weekly list, but is one of my To Do’s before NAMS, is to launch a new product with Alan Petersen. We launched it and it’s been quite an experience, with some good and bad, but way more of the good. I’ll talk about that, along with Susanne’s questions in my next post.

“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?”

Okay, that’s more than one question, but I’ll give it my best shot in the next post.

• Don’t forget to hop over to Susanne’s blog and see how she did! She also answered my question about guest posting. 
• And those of you who listed your plans for the week, don’t forget to let us know in the comments how you did!

photo credit: Zlc_C

Take Advantage Of Your Entrepreneurial ADD to Create New Streams Of Income in 2012

This is a guest post by Susanne Myers. I’d known of Susanne since I started online in 2007 and I finally got to meet  her in August at NAMS. Upon introduction, I think I threw her for a loop when I said, “Thank you for using one of my EzineArticles on your HillbillyHousewife website! It got me a ton of optins!”

You see, even though Susanne is known for her affiliate marketing expertise and I’m a PLR writer and marketer, we’d done business together previously via our niche sites.

 

Take Advantage Of Your Entrepreneurial ADD to Create New Streams Of Income in 2012
By Susanne Myers

I’ve talked to a lot of online entrepreneurs over the years and I’ve noticed that there’s one thing that all of us have in common. We are all a little ADD. And that’s a good thing. Sure, we have to force ourselves not to run after each “shiny new object” and set aside the never ending stream of new ideas. But when we consciously tap into our need to work on something new and build a new stream of income, it can pay off big.

What Am I Talking About?

I’ve spend some time during the first few days of the new year setting some goals for myself and my online business (you can read about them on my blog at AffiliateTreasureChest). One thing I’m focusing on this year is building several new small streams of income. They are little niche sites that can be built and set into motion in just a few days.

Here’s the basic step-by-step plan:

1)   Find a Hot and Profitable Niche.

2)   Set up a WordPress site adding some unique content as well as slightly rewritten PLR along with a few reprint articles from article directories.

I recommend doing a little keyword research and optimizing your content for the search engines.

3)   Set up an optin list for this new site and load up a few autoresponder messages that promote a handful of good affiliate products.

4)   Promote those same affiliate products within the content of your blog.

5)   Set up social media accounts for your site.

6)   Write a few articles and guest blog posts and submit them.

7)   Do whatever else you find effective to market your site and drive traffic.

Then sit back and wait. Add the occasional new blog post, spend a little time socializing on your social media accounts and write the occasional article or guest post here and there. That’s it.

Get It Started – Then Outsource The Rest

Of course one little niche site won’t do the trick. It may pay your phone bill, but it isn’t what I would call an online business. What does make it worthwhile is the fact that this system is very scalable.

Your main job is to come up with more niche site ideas. Ideally you want to focus on related niches that make it easy to cross promote. For example… if you have a low carb diet niche site, your next project could focus on walking workouts. From there you could go into other weight loss niches, various health topics etc.

Sooner or later though, you’ll get to the point where you can’t handle it all on your own anymore. You get tired of setting up new sites and there’s just no way to keep up with the marketing and adding new content here and there.

That’s when it’s time to start thinking about outsourcing some of this. Hire a VA to help you add content, do some social bookmarking, post on your social media sites etc. Buy some more PLR for your niches and have someone tweak it and add it for you.

Where you take it from here is up to you. You can continue to grow your little niche site empire and turn it into several large networks of related sites. Or just sit back, maintain and enjoy a few hundred or thousand dollars in affiliate income.

One of the beauties of this system is that you will get to a point where the niche sites have gained enough momentum of their own that you don’t have to go back and add new content or drive more traffic on a regular basis. I have sites I haven’t touched in years that still generate income. Occasionally I’ll go back and improve on some of that Virtual Real Estate, but that’s entirely optional.

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If you’d like to see what Susanne does on a daily basis to grow these Affiliate Niche sites, I invite you to join her at Daily Affiliate Tasks. Each week she shares a short instructional report and a weekly task list with you. Spend about 30 minutes a day completing these tasks and watch your niche sites grow.

 

Internet Marketing Deadlines, and a Challenge

Sometimes you have deadlines because you’re a service provider and you’ve made promises to your clients about when you will complete their projects. Those are HAVE TO deadlines.

We’ve had those throughout life:

• give mommy some quiet time until the big hand is on the one (or was that just me?)
• complete that homework assignment by tomorrow
• pay the rent by the end of each month

Then there are the self-imposed deadlines, the WANT TO. This is where I love to operate, and honestly it’s crucial that I do because I work online full-time and if I don’t get things done, I don’t make any money. But I find the WANT TO deadlines challenging and fun. That’s why I work for myself!

So in the spirit of these self-imposed deadlines and as a friendly competition, Susanne Myers, and I are going to see just how much we can get done before NAMS7, which is February 10-12th. I think this makes a nice deadline. It’s one month from now, plus we can start the conference feeling like we’ve accomplished things and we’re on fire. When you feel accomplished, excited, and confident at an affiliate marketing conference it tends to rub off on other people.

How great it that? Getting other people jazzed about their businesses and helping new marketers see the possibilities!

 Susanne asked me what I hope to accomplish before NAMS7 and what I’ll be working on this week…

Well there are 5 areas I want to work on. I’m looking at them as 5 different businesses in that they’re all separate sites, but they all tie together under my big umbrella and there are specific things I want to get done before the big deadline:

• AllstarPLR – 3 new packs, update the blog on that site, send helpful free info to that list, help affiliates.
• EasyArticleStarters – finish the mega-pack that’s halfway through, flesh out the details of the upsell and get that in place, load up some more affiliate tools.
• PeggyBaron.com blog (that’s right here) – 7 blog posts
• CoachPLR – work with my 3 clients and add a waiting list form to the sales page.
• Professional PLR Provider – Simply plan out what’s next now that I’ve done a year’s worth of newsletters.

Maybe that doesn’t sound too exciting to you, but these 5 areas bring me income.

2 more things that don’t fit in those categories but are on my plate before the trip to Atlanta:

• Launch a new product with Alan Petersen
• Write a chapter to be included in Connie Ragen Green’s next physical book.

This week’s agenda:

I plan to work with my coaching clients, write 1 blog post, get a PLR pack ready to sell and notify that list, write 3 more sections of the EasyArticleStarters mega-pack and work out the details of that upsell, and outline my chapter for Connie’s book. Of course I’ll also be blog commenting, marketing, tweeting, answering email questions, learning, building relationships, and not playing too much Spider Solitaire.

This little challenge has got me uber motivated! Let’s see if I can go go go! And not get shown up by Susanne. And not get unfocused and off-course.

Now I encourage you to jump over to Susanne’s blog and see what she has planned to get done before NAMS. Holey moley!
Here’s my question to Susanne:

“Susanne, how do you target WHO you want to write guest posts for? What’s your criteria for deciding which blogs?”

Signing off and getting busy.
What do you want to accomplish this week? Join us in the comment section!

photo credit: HikingArtist.com

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