Tag: Yaro Starak
Traffic Tips For Your Blog
by Hans Kristian Anderson on Dec.03, 2010, under Blogging, Yaro Starak
The day they first launch a new blog is a special day in every bloggers life. Chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you, unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your best friend, father, girlfriend and sister, father, girlfriend about your new blog. But when it comes to finding readers that’s about as far you went .
Traffic to your website Webinar.
Below are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling. The top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers.
It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.
Top 10 Tips
10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.
9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.
You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.
8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).
7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.
Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commenter and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.
6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.
This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.
5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.
4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.
To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.
3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!
2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.
How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.
1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.
I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.
To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:
John Assaraf , his incredible story and revolutionary Brain Training System!!
The leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.This article was written by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor.
Blog Tips Newsletter by Yaro Starak
by Hans Kristian Anderson on Jun.22, 2010, under Yaro Starak
This is another great tip from Yaro Starak’s Blog Tips Newsletter. The information that Yaro provides is always interesting and very informative.
By Yaro Starak Money Blog
This is a story from the very early days of my blog, when I
joined a “blog network”.
I think you will find this relevant if your blog is new…
Let’s get a definition out of the way before I go on to discuss the traffic virtues of being a member of a blog network.
For me, and for the purposes of this article, I’m going to define a blog network as any group of blogs that share links under the banner of a “network”.
The blogs in the network may overtly link to other blogs, for example writing a post directly discussing a post made at another blog in the network, or more covertly by including links in a blogroll, footer or header area.
The idea is that blogs in the network trade links with other blogs specifically because of their affiliation. There may be a central blog network homepage that links all the blogs together or a banner or icon that signifies the link.
It doesn’t matter the form, it’s the function (the purpose) – to get traffic moving between blogs and improve search engine rankings because of increased backlinks – that matters.
ALL BLOG NETWORKS ARE NOT THE SAME
Across the web you will find all kinds of different blog network formats. Some will be loose affiliations under a banner or title. Others have revenue sharing arrangements where the blogger splits advertising profits with the blog network owners, or where the blogger doesn’t own his or her blog and is considered an employee who is paid a regular salary in return for blogging.
If you are looking for examples of blog networks there are three major players you may be aware of that demonstrate the three different formats I just mentioned.
1. 9rules.com – no profit sharing and a loose affiliation under a banner and a “network ethos”
that all member blogs must adhere to.
2. B5media.com – A revenue sharing blog network.
3. WeblogsInc.com – Bloggers are paid to write.
There are many more blog networks out there and if you can’t find one suitable for you then starting your own network is a possibility as well.
I’m not going to recommend a specific network to you because which you join, if any, depends entirely on why you blog. What I can share with you is how joining a blog networked impacted my blog.
A TRAFFIC EXPLOSION
In mid 2005, after I had been blogging solidly for a few months, writing quite a few pillar articles and starting to earn some exposure for my blog I was emailed by Paul Scriven (aka scrivs, the owner of 9rules) and asked whether I wanted to join
9rules.com.
I had heard of 9rules before, but only briefly looked at the site. I confirmed with Paul that by joining 9rules I didn’t lose any control over my content or my revenues and agreed to join. I got access to the member forums, looked around, introduced myself, stuck the 9rules banner and link on my blog, made an announcement about my membership to my readers and then went back to blogging.
A week or so later my “new member” announcement went live on the 9rules blog and my traffic doubled overnight.
I thought it was a traffic spike. I was wrong.
A few weeks later, although my traffic had dropped somewhat I had effectively gained a permanent increase in my blog readership, including my RSS subscribers, of about 25%. I could only attribute it to joining 9rules.
And that was only the start…
ITS ALL ABOUT THE NETWORK EFFECTS
Months later I wrote a pillar article on my blog introducing the concept of Google’s PageRank and explaining how much attention we, as website owners, should pay to it.
This one article did more to bring in traffic to my blog than any article I had written previously. It wasn’t any better than my previous articles. It wasn’t necessarily covering a “hotter” topic. There was one reason why it did so well – One very prominent design blog linked to it.
The owner of this blog just happened to be a 9rules member. His blog was very popular and had a significant audience. When he linked to my article it caused a viral effect, with many other smaller blogs linking to my article and so on and so on.
That one article brought in nearly 100 backlinks and tons of new traffic to my blog. The only reason I received the attention was because I joined a blog network exposing my blog to all the other bloggers in the network.
BLOGGING AWARENESS
The power of a blog network is not just the direct traffic you get when you first become a member. It’s also about the awareness you create in the blogosphere.
Other blogs are one of the most effective traffic building resources available to you and by joining a blog network you suddenly become a member of special bloggers club that share a passion and are eager to help each other grow their blogs.
Blog traffic building is about creating communication channels. Directly you control your own blog and your voice. You then want your voice – your words – to be heard (and listened to) in as many places as possible.
A blog network opens up hundreds of new communication channels for your blogging voice to travel on. You can’t control these channels because they are the voices of all the other bloggers in the network. But hopefully every now and then you will say something interesting enough that other bloggers will pass it on. This can only happen when someone is listening to you in the first place.
Here’s to your blogging success,
Yaro Starak
Click this link to receive Building a List
PS. The great thing about any kind of network is through participation you create awareness of what you are about and also of course, increase exposure of your blog too.
Blog Mastermind has a built in networking function because all students become instant members of the private community forums, full of like minded bloggers all working towards the same goal.
If you want to be part of my network, please consider taking my course -
Yaro Starak Free Guide to Launching a Membership Site
by Hans Kristian Anderson on Jun.18, 2010, under Yaro Starak
Step-By-Step Guide to Launching a Membership Site.
Yaro Starak has written one of the best reports I’ve ever read on how to profit by creating and then selling your own information product.
His report is called the Membership Site Masterplan and as you would guess, it is a step-by-step guide for launching a profitable online membership site.
You can download the report from here:
Yaro’s a great teacher and writer, and whenever he releases a report people always eagerly await what he has to say.
His gift is the ability to take complex subjects and make them very easy to understand. As you will see in this report, Yaro makes the process of setting up and profiting from a membership site so easy, anyone can do it, including you.
The Masterplan doesn’t disappoint, and once again Yaro has not held anything back. This is a report that is full of CONTENT, it’s not some hype-filled document just designed to sell a product and not really teach you anything.
In the Masterplan Yaro explains how he was able to make $250,000 from just one membership site and then goes on to lay out a plan so you can launch your own membership site and earn at least $100,000 within the next 12 months.
In the report Yaro takes you through the following process:
>
- How to find topics for a membership site
- How to develop preeminence, which means people choose to join your membership site over all the other options
- What sources of traffic Yaro uses to bring members to his site and build his list
- What technology Yaro uses to deliver content (this is so simple, anyone can do it)
- How to make money from a membership site BEFORE you create the content for it
- How to fill your membership site with hundreds of new members in a matter of days by conducting a powerful, yet simple, launch campaign
- and much more…
Download the Masterplan here:
This is by far the most comprehensive report I’ve ever seen on this topic and I can’t believe Yaro is willing to give it away.
Of course Yaro hasn’t put all this work into the report for nothing. He’s launching a training program next week and this report is designed to introduce you to his teachings.
That being said, this report is a complete document – no matter whether you decide to join Yaro’s program or not, you will benefit greatly from this report, I know I did.
If you’re thinking of selling something online, a membership site is definitely the top choice. A product that you sell once, yet continues to deliver income month after month, is by far the best business model.
But listen, I don’t need to convince you of this, read the Masterplan. Yaro has put together a very compelling story and followed it up with a very detailed plan so you can do it yourself.
Go get your copy now –
Good luck with your membership site!
Click this link to Building a List
P.S. You can download an audio MP3 version of the Masterplan too, again at no cost. If you prefer to listen in the car or on your ipod as you run about, you will appreciate this audio file.
You can go register for both versions here –
Yaro Starak Free Membership Site Report
by Hans Kristian Anderson on Jun.10, 2010, under Yaro Starak
This is the table of contents of the free report “The Membership Site Masterplan” How To Make $250,000 By Launching Your Own Membership Site By
Yaro Starak.
Table of Contents
How I Earned $250,000 With Just One Membership Site. …………………………..4
What People Are Saying About Yaro’s Membership Site Training. ……………….. 5
Earnings Disclaimer and Other Legal Things ……………………………………………. 6
Would $100,000 A Year Change Your Life?. ………………………………………………7
Do You Need A Blog To Make This Work?. ………………………………………………10
Chapter 1: Build Your Preeminence. ……………………………………………………… 11
Demonstrate Proof. ………………………………………………………………………………11
Without Preeminence You Will Struggle. ………………………………………………… 12
How A Free Report Established My Preeminence. ……………………………………13
Chapter 2: Marketing Through Communication Channels. ………………………14
You Must Have An Email List. ……………………………………………………………….. 14
The Sales Funnel. ………………………………………………………………………………..16
Chapter 3: Technology. …………………………………………………………………………. 18
What Membership Site Software Should You Use? …………………………………..19
Today I Only Use WordPress. ………………………………………………………………. 21
How To Take Payments. ………………………………………………………………………. 22
Don’t Underestimate PayPal ………………………………………………………………….25
Include Audio, Video and Forums. ………………………………………………………….25
Affiliate Management. ………………………………………………………………………….. 27
Putting It All Together. ………………………………………………………………………….. 28
Chapter 4: Content and Pricing. ……………………………………………………………..29
Two Critical Questions: How and What?. ……………………………………………….. 29
What is Value?. ……………………………………………………………………………………32
How Important Is Pricing? ……………………………………………………………………..33
Chapter 5: Psychological Triggers. ……………………………………………………….. 35
How To Use Triggers To Influence Decision Making. …………………………………36
Trigger #1: Social Proof. ……………………………………………………………………. 36
Trigger #2: Proof. ………………………………………………………………………………37
Trigger #3: Reciprocity. ………………………………………………………………………38
Trigger #4: Risk Reversal ………………………………………………………………….. 38
Trigger #5: Urgency. …………………………………………………………………………. 39
Chapter 6: Prelaunch and Launch. ………………………………………………………… 41
Launch vs. Prelaunch – What is the Difference? ……………………………………….41
What Is A Prelaunch?. …………………………………………………………………………. 41
How Do Affiliates Fit In?. ……………………………………………………………………….43
How To Create Your Sales Page. ………………………………………………………….. 44
The Launch Phase ……………………………………………………………………………….46
It’s Time To Rock and Roll. …………………………………………………………………… 46
Keep Momentum Going ………………………………………………………………………..47
Don’t Forget Your New Customers. ……………………………………………………….. 48
Return To “Normal” Life. ………………………………………………………………………. 48
Chapter 7: How To Deal With Attrition. ……………………………………………………49
Monitor and Combat Attrition. ……………………………………………………………….. 49
How To Reduce Attrition. ……………………………………………………………………….50
72 FREE pages from Yaro Starak “The Membership Site Masterplan” How To Make $250,000 By Launching Your Own Membership Site By Yaro Starak.
Click this link to receive List Building information.
More Tips From Yaro Starak
by Hans Kristian Anderson on May.28, 2010, under Yaro Starak
This is another great blog tip form Yaro Starak. This tip is about spiders, pingbacks, trackbacks, traffic benefits, internal linking, I could keep going but I’m sure you’d like to get started.
Blog Tips Newsletter by Yaro Starak Membership Site
Your blog should be like spider’s web, with each article
linking to other articles in your blog.
This technique can deliver some nice traffic benefits. Here’s how
to do it…
Hi
Last issue of this newsletter I covered trackbacks and how to use them as a blog traffic building tool. This newsletter we’re going to start with the trackback’s distant cousin, the pingback and then move to an interesting technique for building traffic – interlinking.
WHAT IS A PINGBACK?
In some circles I’ve read there is no difference between a trackback and a pingback. Many people will use the term interchangeably and in fact I’ve been known to confuse the two myself.
Generally there is one main difference – a trackback is forced by a human blogger while a pingback occurs automatically by the blogging software.
I read a description online which I think is a good way to discern the difference however I don’t agree 100% with the distinction presented. It does offer a simple way to get your head around the semantics of using the two techniques –
Where trackback is “Here’s what I think of that” a pingback is more simply “I’m using that”.
Trackbacks are intentional attention grabbers that give an opinion of another blogger’s work. A pingback merely informs another blog that you are referencing their writing.
INTERNAL PINGBACKS
I experience pingbacks when I reference to my own blog posts within my blog. I use the blogging system WordPress which automatically sends pingbacks if I link to one of my previous articles, creating a link between the two blog entries.
Linking between your own articles is a good thing, and certainly pingbacking your own entries helps make the process efficient because it’s automatic, but there is a lot more you can do proactively to create links between your own blog posts. As with most things in blogging, there is a “smarter way”.
WHAT IS INTERLINKING?
Interlinking means when you link one of your own pages to another internally within a website.
Since you control your site you can control your blog’s entire internal linking structure. This is important for traffic because of how search engines work.
If you want the search engines to rank every single page of your blog you need to make sure they can find every page.
Search engines use little software programs called “spiders” or “bots” that trawl around the web following links and “indexing” all the content of web pages.
If your site is internally linked well together then you make it easy for the little spiders to
index every page of your blog.
SITEMAPS
I will briefly mention sitemaps because they are a convenient way to tell the search engines where all your pages are. Most search engines do a pretty good job of finding pages but sometimes they have trouble indexing your entire site, especially if your site is new.
I’m not going to cover sitemaps in-depth because it is a whole topic on its own, however I do recommend you have one as the first step to create a good internal linking structure for your blog.
Here are some resources for building and learning more about sitemaps:
GOOGLE LOOKS AT WEB PAGES, NOT WEB SITES
Google ranks pages based on how many other pages link to it. That’s PAGES, not SITES, which means when you link one blog entry to another you are helping each blog article earn better search engine rankings so it will bring in more search traffic.
Simply linking to all your blog posts in every new blog post you make is not going to do much for your traffic and will turn away your readers (not a good strategy!), however a few well placed internal linking patterns can be very helpful over the long term.
During the first few months I blogged I wrote definition articles for many key terms in my industry, including RSS, PageRank and other Internet business and blogging topics.
I regularly link back to those articles when I mention the terms in a new blog post so that beginner readers can read my definition article to get a grasp of the concepts. Not only is this great for usability it helps my blog search rankings too.
GET YOUR KEYWORDS AND PHRASES RIGHT
The most important thing when you link your blog entries together is to choose the right keywords.
The keywords you use in the anchor text (the text your readers see as underlined links) help to define what search terms that article will rank well for.
Lets say your blog topic is “share trading” and you wrote a definition of the PE ratio (the price-to-earnings ratio).
Every chance you get you should reference back to it in new blog posts. Each time you do this you would use anchor text along the lines of “what is the PE ratio”, but be certain to mix it up with variations.
This helps that page rank higher for search phrases like “what is the PE ratio”.
INCREASE YOUR PAGEVIEWS
Even if I’ve totally confused you with all this talk about search engine rankings there is one very good plain and simple reason to interlink your blog articles as often as you can – to increase your pageviews.
Pageviews are how many individual pages each visitor to your blog reads. Obviously you want to increase the number of pageviews because that means your readers stay longer at your blog and read more of your content.
By interlinking your articles well, and that means placing links between your own articles in a logical manner, you create a nice pathway for a reader to navigate through your blog.
COVER THE BASICS
Some of the topics I covered may be too technical for beginner bloggers. If there is one piece of advice you should take away from this newsletter and implement on your blog it is to link back to your previous blog posts regularly.
Use logical anchor text links and don’t worry too much about keywords. If you label your links well for humans you generally label well for search engines too. It’s easy to get caught up with keywords so don’t spend too much energy worrying about how you link to your articles, just do it.
Whenever you write a new article think whether it would be appropriate to link to another article that includes relevant content.
It takes two seconds and can provide fantastic benefits in search engine rankings, pageview numbers and increases the length of time each visitor stays at your blog.
Here’s to your blogging success,
Yaro Starak
Click this link to receive Building a List
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