July 9, 2010

Hello, Graham here.

Sorry that getting this review has taken me so long (there is a short and interesting reason at the bottom of this review as to why I had been late.) Thank you for being so patient.

Here’s My personal Comprehensive Review of Ewen Chia’s Fast Track Cash.

Ewen Chia's "Fast Track" Cash course.

First of all, Exactly what IS Fast Track Cash?

Fast Track Cash is Ewen Chia’s Internet help make money formulation for utilizing affiliate marketing to generate sales and enjoy profits swiftly (therefore: Fast Cash!.)

At its center, the actual training course concentrates on a basic (but easily unnoticed) strategy to assure that you obtain greater affiliate checks, sooner. The course shows you where to discover affiliate programs which pay you instantly through PayPal, therefore there’s absolutely no need to wait around for your check to arrive from Clickbank.

I Have a Confession to Carry out:

As soon as I first received my preview copy of the e-book, I skimmed through the 98 pages and, at first glance, sensed that there was practically nothing new, it had been just a plain vanilla, affiliate marketing training course.

However on the 2nd reading of Fast Track Cash, i recognized that the course only felt simplistic, probably because it is so effortlessly written.

The course makes the complete process of affiliate marketing, (building your emailing list, acquiring traffic, choosing a merchandise niche, making a great effective and also successful squeeze page, converting prospects into sales, and also promoting follow up income) seem to be so simple and straight forward that this won't appear unique.

Super Affiliate Ewen Chia is similar to a wizard or a music performer or even a specialist who is so practiced at their work that the strategies just disappear and the presentation looks entirely effortless.

The training course will be properly illustrated along with videos of different methods.

Who Is This Training course Written For?

The course will be focused on individuals new to Internet marketing and also those who continue to struggle with affiliate marketing. Even seasoned affiliate marketers should really find at the very least a handful of valuable nuggets sprinkled throughout the training course to help make it worth it's $47 price tag.

At this point, after reading the ebook, i can see much more clearly exactly why i was to begin with, unsuccessful with affiliate marketing, and also a lot of that comes straight down to the truth that my personal endeavours lacked numerous influence techniques Ewen lays out in Fast Track Cash. Nonetheless, my early failure had been also brought on by my absence of focus, shortage of persistence, and my inclination to cut corners and leap from one strategy to yet another without pursuing through.

Several Facts about the Training course Material:

Through Fast Track Cash, you can discover the actual exact process you must follow to build effective, highly targeted, affiliate campaigns.

Here’s How the Training course Operates:

Your course is assorted into eighteen chapters.

Ewen Chia's guidelines enable you to be able to pick and decide on what interests you. That indicates you can be successful without doing everything he recommends. An example, if you don’t enjoy seo marketing, you can focus on social community marketing, PR development, and even Facebook. However of course the more you do (skillfully and thoroughly), the more good results you will achieve.

A example, inside the chapters on Building Traffic (acquire a flood of individuals to visit your internet site), Ewen covers the standard method of article marketing.

However right here are some of the secrets of effective article marketing Ewen explains to you within the training course:

The way to be able to make article marketing writing faster and also easier.

Best totally free press release submission solutions to use.

Smart ways to take full advantage of your initiatives in article writing.

What article submission services are greatest.

How to avoid the basic errors created by many article writers.

Recommendations to hide your affiliate links in your own articles.

More than 5 locations where you can find targeted suggestions for article topics.

The important element of your press release most marketers forget.

How and exactly where to discover other people to write your own articles.

Other areas of the training course are similarly in depth:

Tapping into Discussion boards and the finest place to put your link (hint): most get this wrong..

Proper way to be able to set up within merely a couple of hours link methods. Google won't punish you.

Suggested places to develop your feeder sites for backlinks.

Parts of the Course i didn't like:

Obviously Fast Track Cash was not ideal.

Fast Track Cash is thorough, capable, and detailed, generally there were couple locations where i had been baffled, or felt that the topic had been glossed.

There is actually quite a bit of information loaded within this course and beginners might encounter some information excess. However following the course 1 step at a time might make it manageable. Plus, Ewen states within the training course, you do not have to do this all at one time.

The Good Points:

Overall, i have got to point out that this training course is excellent. It’s properly structured as well as the chapters are separated nicely so that an individual can carry out just 1 thing at a time, and there are lots of beneficial drawings.

The Final Word:

With regard to those who are already Excellent Affiliates, (you’re most likely not reading this review,) you are unlikely to find much new within this training course.

Quite possibly, numerous expert Marketers will purchase the training course anyway. All things considered, professionals rarely pass up the chance to research the strategies of their competitors (particularly those, such as Ewen, who have mastered their craft so professionally.

Experts understand that uncovering just 1 easy technique or one brand new resource may assist them bring in thousands of dollars in earnings.

The Bottom line:

When you happen to be truly serious about producing money on the Internet and if you believe you may really consider action by pursuing the methods outlined,) then acquire the course.

Remember, the Fast Track Cash training course includes video tutorials and it comes with an eight week guarantee.

Go to the Official Fast Track Cash Website.

Cheers,

Graham

A Guest Post by Warren Davies from GenerallyThinking.com.

It’s pretty clear that if we want to be pro bloggers, we can’t relypurely on producing fantastic content. We have to optimise our pagesfor search engines, build backlinks from relevant sources, as well asputting our heart and soul into our content to make it as valuable aspossible for the reader.

But what if the reader gets what they want from the post and thenleaves? Well, that’s nice of us to solve their problem, but it’s notgoing to help us earn the money and freedom we want!

We need to entice first time visitors further into our blogs, exposethem to its different areas and articles, make them feel like a kid ina candy store when they see all the information inside!

One way we can do this is through a landing page analysis – to seewhich pages people are landing on, checking the metrics for thesepages, and then optimising them so that they are better placed toconvert first time visitors into regular readers. Here’s a 4 step plan.

Step 1 – Identify Problem Pages

This is easy to do with Google Analytics – just go to Content ->Top Landing Pages, and check the chart at the bottom of the page. Theseare the pages that visitors are most likely to enter your site through.Now check the column to the far right – Bounce Rate. This is thepercentage of visitors who leave your site without looking at anotherpage on your blog. They hit the landing page, get what they want (ornot) then leave.

If you have any high bounce rates in this section (80%+), you’remissing out on further page views from these first-time visitors. Thisis vital; pulling readers further into your site is essential toconverting visitors to subscribers and/or sales.

Step 2 – Analysis

Before we start optimising the page, we need to do some more research. Here are the two main things you can do:

Click on the name of each post, and look at the Time on Page. Is itsignificantly lower than the time it takes to read the article? If so,it’s likely that the reader is not finding the answer to the questionthey had when they clicked through.Ask them. Set up a Poll on the page, entitled “Help me improve thisarticle: What information were you asking for?” Give a few options, anddon’t forget to add ‘something else’ as an option. Alternatively, asimple “Did you find the information you were looking for?” can beuseful. Experiment with putting it at the top and bottom of the post,to see if people are reading the whole article before bouncing.Check the entrance sources for the post on Google Analytics. Arepeople mostly finding the article through Google images? This mightaccount for the high bounce rate.

Step 3 – Optimise

You should now have some ideas on how you might optimise thearticle. Perhaps there’s more information you want to add, maybe youwant to shorten it, or then again maybe you want to make it moreappealing and add more images. Then again, maybe the site design isunattractive, or there are too many ads or other annoying things on thepage. Whatever you do, don’t assume; test.

Also, do ensure that there are links and pathways to other contenton your site! This is essential. Maybe your related posts plug-in andcategory list are not effective – you might have to tell/coax yourreader into looking deeper.

If you have several ideas on how to optimise the page, you may wantto use Google Web Optimiser to run several new versions of the page.Each visitor will be randomly directed to one of your test pages, andyou can compare the metrics against each other at the end of the test.

Step 4 – Check Results

One week should be a good enough time frame to compare the beforeand after effects. Going back to Google Analytics, bring up the ContentDetail page for the entrance article you’ve been playing with. Set thedate for the week leading up to the day you edited the page (but notincluding that day). Copy and paste the stats into a text editor orExcel; the main ones you’re interested in are Time on Page, BounceRate, and Exit %. Then set the date for the seven days after youoptimsed the article. Again, copy and paste the results, and compare.

How did you do? If you were successful, you may have seen anincrease in the Time on Page – although maybe not – but certainly adecrease in the Bounce Rate and Exit %. This would indicate that morereaders are looking further into your site – congratulations!

What if there was no difference? Then go back to step 2. Conductfurther research on how you might improve the page. Ensure you havelinks to other content on your blog, and that the wording of yourarticle makes these links seem like essential further reading.

What’s a ‘good’ bounce rate?Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a one-size-fits-all figure toaim for. It depends on many factors. A bounce could mean the visitorliterally only wanted one piece of information, and left because theygot it. The ambiguity of the keyword you’re targeting will beimportant. If you’re getting a high bounce rate from an 8-wordkeyphrase, it’s probably a worse situation than the same bounce ratefor a 2-word keyphrase. Your domain name could play a role too –‘Problogger’ is pretty clear, but would an article on, say,‘marketingtips’ be specific to blogging, or to offline marketing? Maybeyou’d have to read it to find out.

Having said that, bounce rates over 80% generally mean there’s work to be done.

Landing Page Analysis – A Case StudyI performed a landing page analysis analysis onGenerallyThinking.com, my psychology blog. My top landing page by farwas my post on personal strengths and weaknesses.This article proved hugely successful with search engines, and accountsfor 25% of the overall traffic of the site! However, the bounce rateand time on page were dismal, as you can see below:

Time on Page – 00:01:35Bounce Rate – 86.67%Exit % – 82.98%I ran a WP-Poll asking what people were looking for at the bottom ofthe page, and got no results. I put it to the top of the page, and gota few replies, but still not many. Clearly, people weren’t reading tothe bottom – there was a need unfulfilled. The data I collected fromthe poll indicated that people wanted more information on strengthsthan I was offering – the article was too focused on weaknesses.

So, I ripped out the section on how to manage and work around yourweaknesses completely, and posted it as a new article. Then I re-wrotethe post as a portal, giving a basic overview of personal strengths andweaknesses, including how and why they could be identified – but notgiving too much away. I preferred to point to other articles on my sitethat cover these topics in depth.

I uploaded the new page, waited, and then tested the results as described above. Here they are:

Time on Page – 00:02:31Bounce Rate – 66.67%Exit % – 66.20%Fantastic! Time on Page increased by a minute, bounce rate reducedby 20% and Exit % reduced by nearly the same amount. A little moretweaking and playing with images might improve things further.

(By the way, if Darren will forgive the flagrant self-promotion thatarticle’s worth a read actually – what successful entrepreneur wouldsay personal development is not an important part of their craft?)

How much could you improve your site by performing an entranceanalysis? Remember – don’t make assumptions; test and measureeverything!

Warren Davies is a positive psychology student at the University of East London, who runs a psychology blog at GenerallyThinking.com

Blog Promotion, Featured Posts 138 comments

Two days back I explored the myth that all you need to do is write great content on a blog for it to get readers and introduced the idea of ?seeding? content rather than ?forcing? it upon readers.

Today I want to take the ?seeding? idea a step further and give a few examples of ways that you can do it - and in the process hopefully grow your readership beyond your immediate family (not that there?s anything wrong with Mom reading your blog).

I should say that while this post contains 9 ways to promote a blog post - that I rarely use all of them at once. Keep in mind that the idea of ?seeding? is not about forcing things but rather it is about getting things going and then letting something organic happen. You might need to put a little more effort into things somewhere along the way to keep momentum going (like ?watering the garden? helps a seed to grow) but the idea isn?t for force things.

So without further ado - let me share a few of the techniques that I use to ?seed? content:

1. Tweet it

I find that one of the most effective ways to get a link to a new blog post ?out there? is simply to tweet it. Tweeting a link is quick and easy to do - and if you do it well it can be quite effective at both driving direct traffic to a blog post but also in starting other little viral events on other sites.

The effectiveness of this does depend a little on the size of your follower group - but other factors you can have a little more control over include:

• timing your tweets to be during peak times when lots of people are on Twitter.
• doing a followup tweet to your original one (I only do this on important posts and usually try to change the wording so as not to annoy people too much)
• the wording of your tweet (give people a reason to click it)
• making your tweet ?ReTweetable? by not making it too long (I keep these seeding tweets to under 120 characters to leave room for people to retweet them).

I find that when something does well on Twitter (and not every post will) that it can often trigger a secondary event on a site like Delicious. This in turn can trigger blogs to link to my posts or other social bookmarking sites to pick up links.

2. Facebook Status Updates (and other social media)

This is of course similar to Tweeting a link. I?ve not had as much success with Facebook as a promotional tool for my blogs but know of a few bloggers in different niches who find it to be more effective. Whether it sends loads of traffic or not it can be helpful in an overall strategy.

Similarly I sometimes also use other social media sites like LinkedIn?s status update if I feel that the content I?m promoting is better suited to other audiences. Again - it depends partly upon the size of your network on these sites but even a small but relevant network on these sites can trigger other bloggers to link up or secondary organic submissions on other social sites by those in your network. You never know what impact sharing a link in these sites can have until you do it.

3. Pitch it to another Blogger

Is the post you?re promoting relevant to the audience of another blog?

This is a question I?m always asking myself as I?m writing blog posts. As I write I jot down the names of other bloggers that have an audience that might find what I?m writing helpful. This means that when it comes time to promote the blog post I have a ready made list of people to shoot out an email to to let them know about my post.

I don?t send these emails out often, nor do I send them out to the same group of bloggers repeatedly - but if I genuinely think my post is of high quality and that the blogger will find it relevant I will.

Check out these suggestions on how to pitch other bloggers for some more tips on how to do this effectively.

4. Pitch it to another Twitter User

This is similar to pitching another blogger but can have a great impact as well. In fact I recently had a link from a blogger who both posted on his blog and tweeted the link and the Tweet converted much better for me in terms of traffic.

The key once again is to make sure that the link is relevant to the Tweeter and the type of thing that you?ve seen them sharing on twitter with others.

5. Share a Link in a ?Signature?

Many bloggers have links to the front page of their blogs in both email signatures and forum signatures - but what about directing people to an individual post? There are a variety of tools out there that highlight latest posts (feedburner has one) and they make a lot of sense to me because you?re sending people to standalone articles that you?ve written rather than a sometimes confusing front page of a blog.

6. Bookmark it

This is one that I don?t tend to do myself these days but I know many bloggers who do so I?ll include it. It entails submitting your post to a site like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious etc.

I don?t tend to do this any more as I find many of these sites have algorithms that penalize a site if it?s submitted by the same person over and over. What I do instead is occasionally shoot a link to another user of these sites in the hope that they?ll submit it for me. Having said this - I also find that as your traffic grows the submissions become more and more organic from regular readers so there?s less need for me personally to be involved in these types of ?seedings? in social bookmarkting sites.

7. Guest Posts

Another method that I?ve seen a number of bloggers using with real effect lately is to link to your important blog post in a guest post on someone else?s blog.

Most people who guest post on another blog tend to link back to the front page of their blog in the byline. This is a good general link to get but if you have an important post that you?ve written that relates to the guest post you?re writing you should find a way to incorporate a link to that post - either as the byline link or if the blogger allows it - within the blog post itself.

8. Give readers an easy way to share it

Hopefully with some of the above techniques you?ve got a few readers over to your blog - now you want them to share it with others.

There are many ways to make your blog post ?sharable?. I tend to use a combination of templated techniques as well as a few custom ones that I add to posts once on posts that I think will do well on social media sites.

• Templated techniques - there are many ways to build social media buttons into your blog. There are heaps of tools and plugins that will do this for you. The key in my experience is not to have too many buttons/options but to choose just a few that relate well to your audience.
• Custom techniques - if I notice that one of my posts is starting to do well on Twitter or Digg or some other social media site I generally will either add an extra button to a post or add a text link pointing people to where they can tweet or digg the post. I find that these more obvious little additions to a post can often tip it over the edge to a viral traffic event.

9. Newsletters

This is a way that I often ?tip? posts that are doing OK over the edge into a viral traffic event. It usually works like this:

A - I write a post that I think MIGHT do well as a viral post

B - I time the publishing of that post for a Thursday morning - an update goes out via RSS to my subscribers

C - I use some of the above techniques to get the post seeded (Twitter, Facebook etc)

D - I wait until the post is submitted to Digg and then add a Digg button to the post (or some other social bookmarking site)

E - I then send out a newsletter to my list including a prominent link to the post

What I find is that without the last step (sending a newsletter) the post can do quite well - but when I send the newsletter I quite often see a ?tipping point? with the post and it?ll go viral on multiple social media sites at once on the back of the extra traffic that I?ve been able to send to the traffic via the newsletter.

2 Final Words of Advice

Let me finish with two words that I think are key to much of the above - persistence and relationships.

1. Persistence - There?s a real need for persistence in seeding content. Much of what I?ve described above are things that I?ve been doing for years and they?ve only become more effective the longer that I?ve done them.

My experience of finding readers is that it is all about momentum. In the early days to find just a handful of readers can be a real challenge - the above methods may not bring thousands of people through the door - however the 10 than they do bring in on your first day could lead to 100 next month which could lead to the thousands in the coming year.

You may get lucky and your seed may grow into something big in the early days of your blog - but even small results can grow slowly into big things over time. Each reader that you bring into your loyal readership is important because they have a network of their own that they could help spread word of your blog to.

2. Relationships - The other key to much of the above is to be as relational as possible. Much of the above relies upon people sharing your posts with others once you alert them to the existence of your posts. So put aside regular time to grow your network, to build a presence on sites like Twitter, to build trust and influence on other sites outside of your blog - this networking can pay off in a big way over the long term. Just do keep these other social networking sites in perspective - they?re not the main game themselves but should be used to build up your home base.

How to Create Reader Profiles/Personas to Inspire

Featured Posts, Miscellaneous Blog Tips 50 comments

One of the techniques that I?ve employed in my blogging over the last 6 months behind the scenes is to create Reader Profiles (or Personas).

The technique is simply - open up a word document and begin to describe a type of reader that you?re either attempting to write for or who is already reading your blog. I?ll show you some examples of reader profiles that I have created below - but in short the task is to describe who they are, what their interests are, why they might be reading your blog and what their needs are.

The idea is that you end up with a picture of who you?re writing for that you can then use to inspire and inform you in your blogging.

Before I talk about the benefits of doing this and give a few thoughts on how to do one for your own blog - let me show you one that I created a while back for my photography site (click to enlarge).

The profile above describes one of the types of readers that we have on DPS - people who largely use their cameras to photograph their kids.

The profile describes why she reads DPS, some of her dreams, the type of photography she?s into, how else she uses the web, a little about her demographics, the level she?s at etc.

Here?s another one from a different type of reader at DPS:

Again - I?ve described another type of reader in a similar way to the first.

In each of these cases the reader profile is based upon a reader group already within the community - however this same exercise could be done with potential readers - or the type of person you want to read your blog if you?re just starting up a blog and don?t yet have readers.

Why Do I Create Reader Profiles?

Hopefully you can already see some of the benefits of these kinds of reader profiles - but let me list a few of the things I?ve enjoyed about having done this exercise:

• It Personalises the blogging experience - I find that having a person (real or pretend) in mind as I write reminds me that there are real people on the other end of my posts. There are people with faces, names and needs - I find it inspiring to visualise them as they read what I?m writing - it also helps me to write in a more personal tone.
• It informs my writing - having these kinds of personas before me and in mind as I write reminds me of some of the needs, problems and questions that readers might have. As a result I tend to write more practical posts that are written with real reader needs in mind. Often as I write I visualise the questions and reactions that these different readers might have to my posts and then try to build answers into what I?m writing based upon these questions and reactions.
• It identifies opportunities - I remember writing the first profile above (Grace) and having the realisation that quite a few of my readers have mentioned that they have dreams of one day making some money from their photography. This triggered me to start a section in our forum on making money with photography which has been really popular.
• It can be helpful for recruiting advertisers - often when talking with potential advertisers the question you?re asked is ?what type of reader do you have?. Having these pre prepared personas can be really useful in answering that question. It also shows that you?ve thought about your readers and run a professional site.
• It identifies ways to connect with your readership - you?ll notice I?ve included details in the profiles on how the reader uses the web. It?s really useful to know what other sites your reader uses and what places of presence that they have as this can identify opportunities to identify places where people like the readers you already have (or those that you want) hang out.

How to Create a Reader Profile?

There are no real rules - you can see I?ve developed a certain style in my personas above. I added a picture to each of the type of person in the profile to further personalise it. I also tried to include information on these kinds of areas:

• Demographics
• Financial Situation
• Needs/Challenges
• How they use the Web
• Motivations for Reading DPS
• Experience with the topic - Level
• Dreams

I?m sure that others would include other types of information - if you?ve done this type of thing before please feel free to share your suggestions and tips in comments below.

Let me finish this post off with one last persona - again for DPS.

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