Six Platform-Building Short Cuts

For years, platform has been a buzz word throughout the publishing community. Every agent and editor is looking for authors who have visibility or a platform in the marketplace. I've written a free ebook on the topic, Platform-Building Ideas for Every Author.

One of my key mentors in this process of building an online presence has been Internet Marketing Expert Jimmy D. Brown. Several years ago, it was through Jimmy I learned how to create a membership site like my Write A Book Proposal course. His insights and teaching has been incredible and helped me in many different areas. I continue to learn important lessons from him his information.

In the last week, Jimmy started giving away a series of six one-page documents that he calls Cheat Sheets. Each of these documents are packed with information for every author. In this article, I want to call to your attention each one of these resources and explain why author's need to study each Cheat Sheet. I've made these cheat sheets easy to download. Just click the link in each section and it will open to the resource.

List Building Insights

While there are many different ways to market your books, I believe every author should be building an email list where you are collecting names and emails of people who care about you and your work. Jimmy has created The 1-2-3 List-Building Cheat Sheet which helps you understand the steps and gives specific information about how to do it.

Product Creation

Besides selling books, as an author you can create other products to sell to your audience. I've got a series of ebooks and other products that sell all the time such as Blogging for Bucks or the Simple Membership System. I encourage every author to create such products and create their own income stream which is separate from their books and other aspects. You need to get The 24–Hour Product Creation Cheat Sheet and study this information, then take action in your writing life.

Turn Content Into Income

You may be a blogger or write magazine articles but how do you turn your content into money? The details are in The Content Into Cash Cheat Sheet. Yes the information is in brief but this resource will certainly get the idea wheels turning.

Get Others to Create for You

Most of us as writers operate alone. How do you find competent people to assist you and get more accomplished and make more income? Study The Hands-Free Outsourcing Cheat Sheet and you will begin learning these details.

Is Earning Six-Figures Possible?

Many writers are struggling financially yet The Simple Six-Figure Cheat Sheet provides the step-by-step insights for every author to achieve success. This resource gives five different models to reach the six-figure mark. Study this cheat sheet and take action then six-figures becomes do-able.

Drive Traffic to Your Content

Your website can look fantastic but if you don't learn traffic techniques to get people to see it, that beautiful website is worthless. You need The Traffic Master Cheat Sheet. Study the words on this page then apply them to your writing life.

While each of these cheat sheets contain seasoned guidance, there is no easy fix. You need to take daily action to achieve success. These pages contain rich knowledge and make it well worth saving to your hard drive, printing and study. Jimmy D. Brown's newest course is at Earn Income.com. He's a master of  marketing and every author can learn valuable insights from his teaching. I know I have learned a lot and continue to learn a lot from him.  

Let me know what you think of these cheat sheets in the comments. 

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Watch this free Rush Hour Traffic Video

If you have a website, then you need to continually learn how to generate traffic. What can you do in one 60–minute time period?

In an hour you can drive 70 miles on the Interstate (if you're obeying the traffic laws). Or you can get a manicure and haircut. Or you can watch a couple of reruns of Seinfeld.

Or you can learn some interesting things (several "contrary to popular belief" eye-openers) about generating free traffic to your website.

Your choice. :)

If you've got just under an hour (50 minutes) to watch a training video about free traffic, then I've got a link for you below.

Free Traffic expert "Jimmy D. Brown" (he's been getting free traffic to his website continually for the past TWELVE YEARS … since 2000!) has made available a very interesting video in which he answers questions about generating free traffic.

You can watch it today (at no cost) by visiting this link.

In the video Jimmy answers questions like…

1) What is THE best way to get free traffic?

2) How can I get quality "buyer" traffic and not "useless" traffic?

3) How does the "little man" get those with big lists to mail for them?

Plus seven more!

Watch the video now and here are just a few things you'll learn…

* 3 keys to using article marketing to get REAL results.

* 3 things you *MUST* do in order to get free traffic from ANY source.

* A couple of simple "tricks" for getting BUYERS instead of BROWSERS.

* The truth about viral marketing, SEO, backlinks and more.

* 3 case studies of "unknowns" (at the time) who got me to promote them - how they did it and how you can too.

Watch the video now at this link.

NOTE: I must warn you in advance that Jimmy shakes things up a bit when he talks about why he does NOT "waste time" on some of the most popular techniques being taught today. You will find some good stuff that you need to take to heart!

Cast a Big Vision

Editor’s Note: This article is the fifth in the Content into Consistent Income Series. Here are the links to the other articles: Use Your Content in a New Way, How to Keep Them Coming Back, Set It and Forget It and Be More Than a One-Hit Wonder.

If you’ve followed the Content into Consistent Income Series, then you already know that there’s a truckload of profits waiting for you on the backend of your site. That is, you can make extra money by offering more products and even more expensive complimentary products to your members.

Now, one option is to be an affiliate for related products and services. The better option is to create these products yourself. That way, you keep 100% of your profits.

Here’s what I suggest: While you’re planning your first membership site, you should also simultaneously plan what complimentary products you’ll sell on the backend. And one way to make money on the backend is by creating a family of related sites and linking them together.

Let me give you an example from my friend and mentor Jimmy D. Brown. He runs the following two membership sites:

• InfoProductPipeline.com – this site teaches to create an entire empire of information products that you can offer for $17, $47, $97, $997, $1,497 and even more.

• Traffic-Fuel.com – This site teaches how to get completely free traffic to any website.

You can see why linking these sites together (cross-selling them on the backend) works. Any marketer needs to learn how to create content, so they join Contentnaire™.

Every marketers – even if they create their own products – will want to drive free traffic to those products so they will join Traffic-Fuel to learn how to get bigger paychecks.

Tip: The advantage of creating a family of sites goes beyond merely having something to sell on the backend. A family of sites also helps you develop your brand and grow your brand recognition. And that means more sales, more customers and more profits.

Now let me give you a few examples of how you can create a family of membership sites around a related niche (or even around a singular topic):

• Let’s suppose you run a health site on the topic of lowering one’s blood pressure. You might also create sites around similar problems, such as lowering cholesterol levels and leading a heart-healthy lifestyle.

• Maybe you run a training site that teaches people how to housetrain their new puppy and teach him basic manners (sit, stay, etc). You might create another site focused on getting rid of problem behaviors such as jumping, biting, digging and similar. Your third site might be for those who want to teach their dogs tricks. You might even create another sites centered around dog agility.

• You run a homeschooling site that focuses on delivering lesson plans and ideas for math. You can create a family of sites on other topics such as science, English and history. Or, you can offer homeschooling lessons by grade (e.g., 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, etc).

When you’re building your first membership site, ask yourself: What ELSE do my customers want?

Do your market research to find out what other products they’re currently buying. Then create a family of sites around related topics. It’s the quick and easy way to tap into the backend profits… on autopilot!

Are you ready to get started? I wrote this series of articles to show you how to start your own membership site. I invite you to check out the details and start your own site through the Simple Membership System. You can have a big vision for your writing and it begins with one small action step.

10 Blog Traffic Tips

By Yaro Starak

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else's blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that's about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

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.

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Yaro Starak, a professional blogger wrote this article. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

A Free Traffic Building Tool

On a regular basis, I am asked how to build traffic for my newsletter or my blog or my website. If you read the material online, you will quickly realize there is no single way to accomplish this increase. In addition, the methods are constantly evolving with new ideas being constantly introduced into the marketplace.

I've read that one method to raise your visibility is to make meaningful comments on different blogs. If you include your website link in the comment, it makes sense that some people will follow those links and go to that particular place. There are millions of blog online and while it may be fun, how do you accomplish this method without wasting a great deal of time and energy?

In the last few days, I've been using a tool which may provide a partial answer to this need without taking hours out of your writing life. The key from my perspective is to do it efficiently and effectively in a short amount of time. It may sound like a pipe dream but I'd encourage you to consider this free tool called CommentKahuna.

First, notice the price--zero cost. Watch the video and see what you think about it. You have to download the software, and register to get it unlocked (using the same email for both functions). I like the simplicity of this tool and how it uses word searches for relevant blogs, then gives you a quick tool to make a relevant comment. Also the tool has a follow-up system so if the comments are moderated (which is common), you can return to your comment and see if it was posted on a particular blog.

I want you to know that I'm still experimenting with this tool and I haven't fully mastered it but I'm getting there. From what I've used it, I like CommentKahuna. Give it a whirl and see what happens to your web traffic.