129 New Posts Today

[Patrick Vesperman]

Marketing has changed. No longer is it the days when you could phone sell all day and get sales. No longer do email blasts bring in tons of traffic. No longer can you spend fat stacks of and be guaranteed revenue like you could not so long ago.

The good news is, understanding HOW to market is quite simple. It's doing it that takes work. I'm going to give you the HOW and I'll expect you to do the work….and it is work…but it works!

There are two simple steps for online marketing today.
1. Create Content
Find what it is that you know, are passionate about, love to do and start pumping out the content. From blog posts, articles, and videos to power point slides, pictures and graphics. Create content around a topic and create it regularly.

Biggest tip I can give you here is think hard about the title of your content. The title is what gets people to click/view the content. If you have a crappy title, few will bother to read - even if the actual content is amazing.
On the flip side, a killer title with OK content will get opened, read, shared, etc. Spend time on a clever, catchy title!

2. Optimize Your Content
Optimize your content for two groups: Google and Social Media.
First, optimizing for Google is SEO. It's a hot topic in affiliate marketing and many of you know the basics. Use keywords effectively, H1 tags, title tags, meta data, and link building.

Second, optimize your content for social media. Make it easy and compelling to share. This means install easy-to-use plugins on your blog that allow readers to tweet, G+, Stumble, LinkedIn, FB share your content. Also, make sure you can define how your content is being shared via those tools. Define a title for your content so that when someone tweets it, the text is already filled in.
Apart from making it easy to share, you have to compel people to share it. Speak to your audience (fans, subscribers, followers) so that they feel the content was for them!
Lastly - encourage your audience to share. ASK THEM. "Please RT!" Did you know one of the most commonly retweeted posts contain the phrase "please RT"?!? (source: Dan Zarrella) Send newsletters with your recently created content so it is in front of your audience so they know what to share.

I'll also leave you with one more step. An added bonus just for reading this far...
Step 3: REMOVE SOME BANNER ADS
So many affiliate sites are jam packed with banner ads because they think that is how they get clicks and sale. Banner ad CTRs super low because they are everywhere and they aren't usually relevant to the content the user is on your site to consume. Reclaim some of that ad space on your site and fill it with content or ways to share content. Plus, read my post about how Google views too many ads...