Monday, February 2, 2009

Marketing Insight Recipe for Small Business - Republish and Montetize

(photo credit: dearbarbie)

Marketing Insight Recipe - Niche Republishing and Monetization

Things fell together today, so I thought to let you know how to make quite a bit more money from every blog post you do.

If you've been following this blog (or if you simply have been back-searching), you'll know that I've had a great deal to say about re-publishing any content you create over and over and over.

Now let's take this one further. I've covered (nearly two years ago!) about ecommerce basics which include using an autoresponder series to excite and harvest sales from your clients. (It's a long one, but meaty - so take time digest it thoroughly, and no swimming for at least an hour...)

Today, I saw a way to get this all to fall together in a sequence. This might get complicated, but hang in there with me:
  1. Start with your keyword research to find your niche, or to find niches for whatever product you already have. (The below mostly deals with info products, but can be extended to any physical product.)
  2. Then you find a product for that niche or convert your product to that niche.
  3. Get your product posted on a delivery line - like Lulu.com or your own ecommerce engine. Make sure you can deliver what you are about to promote.
  4. You are going to build your blog posts and autoresponder (A/R) course series at the same time. Layout a series of posts based on the keywords you've found for this niche. This is your publishing schedule.
  5. Create your A/R series and get the opt-in code. Set a page on your blog as the landing page for that A/R series - but you are also going to use that code either in your template or on each blog page itself. The landing page is to create a permalink you can use on your template.
  6. Take your first keyword for this series and research it to find the data for your lesson. Key Note: You are going to use this keyword in the title of all the republished posts below. (That's the power of how this works.)
  7. Now, write your first lesson for that A/R series as a blog post. Create an A/R message that gives the outline for that lesson and links to the blog post permalink. That blog post will have a little table on it toward the top so people can opt-in to this series. It dosn't contain the text of that lesson, only the outline or table of contents - that makes people come visit your blog for the data.
  8. Create a PDF file from that blog post (format it with product ads for your related products, plus links to your various profiles), upload it to your blog and link to your blog post. A/R message should also have the PDF link in it. That link should be on the blog page itself, not directly downloaded without visiting your blog. Simply create an anchor text for that point on your blog post - so they simply go right to it and don't have to wade through your whole blog post.
  9. Take that post and create an article from it - link back to your blog post. Post this on the top five article directories in variations. Take another variation and post to the bell-curve majority of article directories using an article submitter (works in the background).
  10. Record that article as a podcast and post to Archive.org - and note this permalink for later use. Link to your blog post.
  11. (Optional) Create a presentation/powerpoint from that lesson and post to Slideshare.net - combine with the podcast and create a slidecast from these. Link both to your blog post.
  12. (Optional) Take that presentation and podcast and combine them into a video - post to YouTube and any others you can. Link to your blog post.
  13. Now, your article on EzineArticles.com should have published by now. Take that permalink and all the permalinks from the blog, podcast, slidecast, video - and make a Squidoo lens for that set of course lessons (A/R Series). (Probably also could be done with a Hub-page, but I've still to do more research on these.) That Squidoo lens needs to have a plexo list on it, and also an opt-in form so people can get these lessons in their email.
  14. Go back to your blog and link in all these other media publications you've created above.
  15. Rinse and repeat steps 7-14 for as many lessons you are going to create in your A/R series. You'll simply update your Squidoo lens with each additional lesson as you go. In every A/R message, you include links to your ecommerce engine and your Lulu storefront.
  16. Once you get all the A/R lessons posted above, then social post your first blog lesson and your Squidoo lens - using something like OnlyWire or equivalent.
  17. Then write and post a press release about your niche, product, and lesson series.
The whole point of this is to give people various options on how they want to get this data. Some people like videos, some like blogs, some would rather have an offline copy (like PDF), some like podcasts, some prefer slideshare.net for their data.

And you post it on various social bookmarking and lifestream sites (Friendfeed, Twitter, etc.) to let people know about the set of tools you just posted.

Check your metrics since you started and see how you can improve your efficiency in content posting.

Then take your next best niche keyword phrase and start again by finding or customizing a product to fit it.

Why this works to improve your search engine rankings

I know for a fact that this gets you into the top rankings for that keyword right off the bat. And your blog will start ranking high for that keyword phrase once the bloom is off the (social) rose and other more immediate social media have replaced your video/podcast, etc. in the SERPs. The social media is also the search engine bait to sink that link-bait hook you just created.

The implementation of posting blog pages as A/R course lessons ties in email marketing with blogging - best of both worlds. You have reminders on every blog post page that there are special offers (like discount coupons for your ecommerce engine) only found in the email course.

And the beauty of this particular sequence is that you aren't limited to setting up everything ahead of time or creating a mini-site just for those lessons. You could create your blog post and A/R message, then write a review about the special product you are offering only through that email message - linking these back to your ecommerce engine. Write up other research that has come up while you were researching that post - and then go back and write another post for the next lesson.

The blog keeps track of every one of your posts in chronological order, while the A/R presents them in a logical sequence. So a person following your blog might have to hunt around for that next lesson.

Crosslinking is key to online success.

Oh - another point is to make sure any product review has a link to that opt-in form landing page (the one we created up there earlier).

As you are going to be creating several A/R series for the different keyword phrases, you can start creating and updating both a blog post (or page) and a Squidoo lens for all these courses you are creating.

Now, say you have quite a few products made available through your A/R message series. You can also make these available to anyone who wants to hunt them up on your ecommerce engine (and browse around for anything else they might find interesting). Just give them some sort of code which says what lesson they belong to. ("As featured on the [Keyword Phrase] Course Series - Lesson XX") Clients can search for [Keyword Phrase] and find all the special offers. Of course, your discount coupons are only delivered through the email course - and every product page lets them know that (and that's where your opt-in link comes in).

If you can, link to your opt-in page from every media description for the podcast/slidecast/video/ article, etc.

Exponential runaway inbound links -- well, mostly.

You see how this goes?

Write once, publish many ways. Monetize every link. Invite people to check out your blog and your ecommerce site (as well as your Lulu storefront) at every turn. And for the best experience, invite them to take the lessons by email as well.

Sure this is a lot of work. It's called promotion and marketing.

But let's take a look at how this will move you up in the niches and search engines (so people can find you).

One course has, say, 10 lessons about "small business viral marketing guide". That's 10 blog posts, 10 podcasts, 10 slidecasts, 10 videos, 5 articles, a Squidoo lens, and at least one press release sending people to your blog about that 5-word phrase - most of these incoming links from other sites. (Set your ecommerce engine up as a subdomain and then all those links count as well.) You can see that within that five-word phrase, we have several combinations of keywords.

Now take another keyword phrase: "small business viral marketing warnings" and do a course about it. Same amount of inbound links as above. Note that we now have twice as many sets of links coming into "small business viral marketing".

Take a third keyword phrase: "small business marketing tips and tricks" - see what we are doing here?

Now, of course you are working only from KEI and in a logical sequence based on competition/traffic ratio to get the most bang for your buck.

If you do one of these a week, you could take some keyword combination like "debt consolidation" and "credit card debt" - which right now has about 15 decent KEI keywords. So after 15 weeks, your blog/site is starting to rank an a trusted authority for "debt" as well as the others - you are setting up some monster number of inbound links all on the same niche.

And then expand your niche - and sales/profits

When you run out of that niche's profitable keywords - simply do some more research in a related niche ("debt reduction" might be related to "telemarketers") and start handling these keyword phrases.

And if you find yourself too busy or lose interest in that niche - then simply stick with just the blog posts and A/R series. If it starts to pick up, then you can always come back to create the podcasts/slidecasts/videos later.

But this points to doing real research from what your purpose is - and following your dream as you go. Then you'll get the most personal enjoyment out of telling everyone you can about how they can use your solution to improve their own lives (...for a discounted price of only ___ this week while they are still in stock!).

OK?

- - - -

Just wanted to get this out to you, with whatever links and whatnot I could throw in there so you could benefit from this sudden insight I had today. A lot of these links above are so you have examples of how I've done this myself in various stages.

Once I have a working example for this, I'll let you know. It was just too immediately applicable for me to keep to myself. Right now, I'm busy tweaking my ecommerce engine to work right. And then I've got a pile of stuff to let loose on the world, believe me.

If you've got a better way to apply this, or want to tell about your own success down this line, just login and comment below, would you?

Good Hunting!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi,
Fantastic post, wonderful breakdowns . Simply put ………. Very useful . Thanks heaps for sharing your experiences and knowledge.