Editor’s note: This guest post by N.G. Gordon of Dear Mishu's Dad is on a topic we don’t talk about much here at SPI Media: influencer marketing. But if you’re in the physical product space especially, influencer marketing can be a key component of your marketing toolkit. N.G. provides some handy advice for getting started finding and working with influencers—to which we'll add, make sure that whenever possible, you're building relationships with the SMIs you want to work with and prioritizing your audience's trust in you. Long-term relationships over short-term wins, always. Enjoy the article!

Now that marketing through social media influencers is maturing, it’s time to take a wiser, more experienced look at it. But first:

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of guerrilla marketing! And when we talk about marketing via social media influencers (SMI), we mean someone who:

1. Owns a social media account (minimum 50 followers) on platforms such as on TikTok, Instagram, Linkedin and YouTube, and—very importantly—
2. Uses it for amazing relationship building with their followers AND/OR content creation.

Our social media accounts are our brand business cards now. It’s obvious to the post-business-card generation that when one talks about “influencers” they mean social media influencers. And so, marketing via endorsements from bloggers, famous authors, whitepaper composers, or podcasters isn’t really considered to be influential nowadays unless they’re using social media to get their message across.

At the same time, the public and the media tend to hate what they think the word “influencer” stands for. So if you’d like, use other names to refer to them: creators, testimonial advertisers, online cheerleaders, advocates, social media impactors, etc. But whatever you call them, it is generally agreed that there are four types of SMIs, determined by their follower counts: 

1. Celebs/Mega-Influencers (those with over one million followers) 
2. Macro-Influencers (between 100,000 and one million followers) 
3. Micro-Influencers (10,00 to 100,000) 
4. Nano-Influencers (5,000 to 10,000)

Only Mega-Influencers are usually famous. That means that all others—and there are millions and millions of them—are unknown to the general public but are very well-known to the communities they’ve built through their social accounts. And, as a result, they can move mountains through those communities.

Why Would You Use Influencer Marketing?

You work hard designing, innovating, and creating. Whether it’s a new product, your new design services, a new menu, a new app, or a new Amazon product, it takes time and sweat to give birth to that baby. But when you are done, and the product is ready to be released to the world, alas, crickets… It’s hard to break through—and most people know how to bypass ads via ad-blocking software or emotional blockers! Unless you can find someone who already has the eyes, ears, and trust of your potential audience to recommend your creation. 

And that is where hiring an SMI can be a great shortcut to speed your marketing efforts. If done right, you can get exposure, and so much more, including:

1. Feedback. You can save/earn a lot of money and avoid unnecessary work when your audience tells you whether or not they’re interested in your new idea for a business/product. This kind of feedback can be accessed through SMIs and their communities, because if you pick the right ones, they will become your target audience. Here’s a real-world example from my DearMishu, where she found that there was an issue with package closure of a sample she received, reported it to the brand, and saved them a lot of money before they launched to a mass market:

2. Access to new communities. By creatively working with influencers, brands can reach communities they never would have considered targeting. I always like to give the example of a new tennis racquet entering the market that happens to come in orange. Imagine that the brand worked with an SMI who leads a community of people who love anything orange!

3. Recognition. SMI’s are recognized as experts, and they transfer that to you. An SMI can bring you what we marketers know as “positive bias.” As a result, your brand will be “stamped” into their followers’ subconscious, and when they need to make a buying decision, they will remember the SMI’s recommendation.
4. Virality. If the SMI you work with is skilled, your message will become viral through their communities.
5. Great, reusable content. You need to have content—photos, videos, audio, etc. Even if you already have someone (yourself?) creating the content, after some time it can become repetitive and less creative than when you started your business. Most SMIs are very talented at story-telling, and you can use that to your advantage. 
6. Great consultant. SMIs “live” in your marketplace. They know exactly what your audience members want and feel, how they’ll react, and so on. Ask them to share their experience and recommendations—they can be great consultants.

How to Do Influencer Marketing

You’ll be able to access all those benefits of working with influencers, but only if you do it right…. The secret is to find someone on the social media channel of your choice who is:

• Not a criminal or operating unethically (but know that most influencers are ethical!)
• Has built a community that is relevant to what you do 
• Dominates search results for your category on the platform
• Their followers care about them, and care about what you do. An unengaged audience is a waste of your time and money.

• And optional but good to have—someone who can create amazing content.

Search for these kinds of folks, and your success rate will be high.

How to Approach Influencers

Approaching an influencer doesn’t have to be complicated DM them and say something like:

“Hi Johnny, I would like to pay you for promoting my ____ product. Is that okay, and what would be your fee?”

Once you do that:

1. Treat the SMI as a business partner. Know that they work hard, days and nights (like you), they have bills to pay, and this is how they pay them. They take their job seriously—and you should do the same. Therefore, just hire them using the same process you do with SEO experts, graphic designers, and software coders.
2. Don’t ask them to bring you instant sales. What they do is marketing toward sales, not sales right from the first day. Let them help you get your message out first and build a social media presence, trust, etc., and then sales will come.
3. Ask them to do at least two oro three campaigns/projects per year for you. Why? If someone has nothing to say about your brand 364 days a year and then suddenly starts singing your praises—would you trust them? 
4. Sign a Brand-Influencer contract. (The one I use is available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084SP1R7G.)

1. Once the campaign is on, don’t forget to be there, actively engaging on the campaign posts and getting involved with the SMI’s followers. You want to show your commitment as a brand to the SMI and their followers. 

How Much Does Influencer Marketing Cost?

First, should you pay a SMI for their work? The answer is YES.

What would you do if someone asked you to work and didn't want to pay you? Not so good, right? It's the same with SMIs—they spend their working hours on you, they introduce what you do to a community it took them months if not years to build, they put their reputations on the line for you, etc. They are right to expect to make a living from their social media activities. Paying is the right way to go!

When calculating how much to pay an influencer, you can use one of five methods: 

1. Pay the SMI 4% of their number of followers. For example, if Sarah has 30,000 followers, then pay her $1,200.
2. Pay $120 per post for every 10,000 followers the SMI has (e.g., $360 for Sarah’s 30,000 followers).
3. Pay by the hour, when the rate can be from $25 to $950/Hour, usually based on the SMI’s talent at story-telling, design, and marketing performance.
4. Pay by project—as above, but an agreed amount per project. For example, a project may be defined as “Sarah creates 2 x 50-second YouTube videos recommending Brand X and posts them to her followers with 2 hashtags that Brand X provides. The work will be owned by Brand X. In return, Brand X will pay $900 upon contract signing and $1,400 after the posts go live on Sarah’s YouTube’s channel.”
5. Pay by KPIs, such as number of tags, comments, or reshares. This is a mix of results-based payment forms, for example: “When KPI X is reached, you’ll get $__, and when KPI Y is reached, you’ll get $__.”

Each method has its pros and cons. Some of them are easier to calculate and work off already existing business models (project contracting or pay by the hour, for example). However, just like with paying other contractors, there are flaws and room for suspicion sometimes, as you don’t know your new partner well. For example, what if the number of hours Sarah reports looks inflated by the brand that ordered her work? There are also issues with the accuracy of numbers—it’s difficult to measure KPIs scientifically, and platforms don’t give access to all of their data.

Also consider that many SMIs see themselves as real artists and creators. They may not have a huge number of followers, but they are still highly successful through their art and content creation and charge accordingly:

I charge based on my time & effort (& the time of year at some point). I leverage my fees on my metrics and my engagement rates based on the average in my bracket. I can also tell you there are a hell of a lot of others in my bracket who would laugh a brand into the river at $100 per 10k per post.

—Anonymous

Examples of Successful Influencer Marketing

Downsides of Influencer Marketing

There are several downsides to relying on influencer marketing. If you are aware of them, you will be able to deal with them more effectively.

Choosing the wrong SMI means choosing the wrong partner, which can cost your brand in reputation or in trouble with organizations such as FTC or with communities, and the ROI will be negative.

1. Measurement is a problem. Marketing, branding, and feedback are all hard to measure. ALso, social media platforms limit access to the data you need to measure performance (and that won’t change any time soon because of user privacy protections). 
2. It takes a few tries to find the right SMI.
3. It's easy to make a wrong decision—mistakes can include:
   • Looking for the most popular accounts instead of someone who cares and can influence or create content really well. 
   • Confusing a high follower count with big influence or big results.
   • Not allocating enough budget to hire the right SMI, and ending up with a “universal-do-all,” cheap ($5, anyone?) but horrible quality SMI who targets irrelevant markets and countries.

4. Competition with the SMI’s brand. Some SMIs offer their own products, which could be in direct competition with yours. 

Avoiding Influencer Marketing Mistakes

Luckily, most problems can be avoided if you prepare well. And there is nothing like a good interview to know if your candidates are the right pick or not. Here are some important questions to ask them: 

1. Do they like what you do? Why?
2. Have they promoted other competitive products recently? How did it go?
3. How much do they usually charge? Why?
4. For their past successful campaigns, what day or time were they posted?
5. Will they provide a 60-day snapshot of their social media insights? See how their engagement went (calculated as quantity of followers divided by likes and comments on posts—anything above 2% is great).
6. Can you keep and reuse the content they create for you?

Here are some tips about which SMI to never hire:

Good luck, heroes. You can do it! (And don’t forget to sign a brand-influencer contract with all the above precautions!)

About the Author

N.G. Gordon is the creator of Dear Mishu, a dog character that gives underdog advice to humans on social media. He originally built the account to learn about influencers and how they work. Over time, the account grew and Dear Mishu became a real social media influencer with a community of followers who ask her for advice. Gordon uses this experience, and his 20 years of B2B and B2C marketing experience, to help brands understand how to reach their goals through influencer marketing and social media branding.

The post Influencer Marketing 101: The What, Why, and How Not To Go Wrong (with Examples) appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

There’s a lot of noise out there, but luckily for us, there’s a lot of data as well to help us all cut through that noise and get noticed. Today’s guest post is an amazing one from Sarah Peterson, head of content marketing over at Sumo.com, where she helps bloggers and online entrepreneurs collect more emails and get more traffic. Through her team’s experience serving tens of thousands of websites with their plugin, you’ll learn five super effective tweaks that you can make to your website to convert a lot more traffic into leads and subscribers. Take it away, Sarah!

Want to hear something shocking?

1,045,855,000.

That’s how many websites there are as I write this. There are 102,000+ US-based ecommerce stores alone that are reaching a relative level of success, millions of blogs, and every single day over two million articles are published into the voids of the Internet.

And they’re all competing for your audience’s attention.

I’m not telling you this to scare you.

I’m telling you this to demonstrate that since there are over a billion websites online right now, chances are there are at least a couple hundred (or thousand) in your niche alone.

And with numbers like that, you need to make sure that your website is effective, and helping you reach your goals and capture the attention of your target audience.

In this article, I’ll give you five specific and actionable strategies to make your website more effective, so you can increase your conversion rate, collect more emails, and rise above the competition.

Because every single email subscriber you have is money in your pocket, you can (and should) boost your business big time by making a few small tweaks to your page.

And the best part is, all of these strategies are completely free.

Strategy #1: Stop Giving Your Visitors Decision Fatigue

Have you ever been to one of those ice cream shops that has like 120 flavors?

They’ve got curry cayenne, pear goat cheese, and peanut butter pickle flavors. This is my mecca.

And yet, despite all of these choices, you can’t make up your mind.

The funny thing about having a lot of choices is that even though we like the idea of it, in practice it tends to paralyze us—to the extent that we will choose to just not act. Studies prove it.

This phenomenon is called decision fatigue, and I’m telling you this because, chances are, you’re triggering decision fatigue for many of your visitors without even knowing it.

Let’s say you have six things in your website’s menu. You might have links to your:

• About page
• Store
• Contact page
• Blog
• Resources page
• “Seen In” page

Plus you have a search function so your visitors can find what they’re looking for.

And that’s just your menu! Maybe you even spent a ton of time and money to set your homepage up just right.

But I have bad news for you . . .

Every single link, image, piece of content, and element on your page is a call to action.

And unless each and every call to action you have above the fold on your website is contributing to your main goal—hopefully to build your email list—they’re distracting your visitors from that goal, and therefore detracting from that goal.

I’ll repeat that: distractions detract from your goal.

When I land on your webpage, I should know exactly what you want to achieve. What do you think we want you to do when you land on Sumo.com?

There’s no question. We want you to type your site URL into that box and press the “Try it Now” button.

What’s Pat trying to get you to do when you land on Smart Passive Income?

He wants you to press that shiny green “Get Started Here” button. Both Sumo and Pat have removed every link and call to action that doesn’t contribute to that goal.

Even if you don’t have a squeeze page, you can optimize your website to help you reach your goal. Take a look at the homepage of my personal blog:

There are eight calls to action (shown in blue).

Every single one of those calls to action helps me work toward my number one goal (to build my email list). The “Join,” “Podcast,” “About,” and “Start Here” pages all have plenty of opt-in opportunities. The feature box has my opt-in offer and the “Join” button is a click trigger that brings up a two-step opt-in popup.

It didn’t always look like this. In fact, it used to be cluttered with stuff nobody was clicking on.

But I went through and removed everything that wasn’t pulling its weight from my website.

So how do you know what to eliminate on your own website? Well, don’t just guess. I figured it out by starting with looking at my visitors behavior.

What was my audience taking action on, and what was taking up space? I used heat maps (Sumo has a free heat map app) to see how I was cluttering my users’ trajectory.

See how bright all the elements are? There’s a reason for that:

I went through and removed everything my visitors weren’t clicking on, so the valuable above-the-fold real estate began to pay dividends.

To make your website more effective, remove any call to action that isn’t helping you achieve your main goal.

You’ll inevitably reach your goal much faster (and your audience will appreciate fewer decisions and distractions, too).

Strategy #2: Capture Your Target Audience’s Attention

59 seconds.

That’s how long you have to capture the attention of your target audience and communicate why your business exists.

Since most people don’t even take a minute to assess whether your website is for them, you need to make sure your visitor knows EXACTLY what your website is about and who it’s for right when they land on your homepage.

Not sure if you’re doing this? Here are a few things you can do to find out.

• Do the five-second test. Have somebody who doesn’t know what you do navigate to your homepage, and ask them to describe what your website is about after spending just five seconds on your page. If they can’t do so accurately, you need to be more clear.
• Use a free user testing service. If you want an objective third party to review your website for free, you can make it happen! There are services like Peek’s User Testing where somebody will go through your website and record their impressions of your site.

If it turns out that your website is ambiguous, there are a few things you can do to communicate with the right people:

1. Use a tagline. Unless (or even if) your domain name is crystal clear, a tagline can clear up a lot of ambiguity. The few words to describe in your tagline don’t have to be innovative. Choose a short tagline that is clear rather than clever.
2. Replace generic language with specifics. It’s easy to be vague when we assume that people know what we’re talking about on our websites, but be as specific as possible. For example, if you have a landing page that offers a “30% discount on all new products,” replace that language to describe exactly what those new products are. If you sell leather handbags, say so.
3. Replace your images. Every single element of your website—especially your homepage—needs to have a purpose, and that includes the images you use. If you’re using generic stock photography just to pretty up your page, consider replacing those images with images that will communicate your core message.

If your website doesn’t immediately hook your target audience, you’re losing out on a ton of emails and leads, which means that you’re also losing out on a ton of money in your business.

Strategy #3: Prove You’re Worth Paying Attention To

I went to school with a guy named Dustin.

This guy was solidly average. He wasn’t exceptionally smart, he didn’t look like Zac Efron, and he wasn’t funny.

But overnight Dustin became super popular with the girls.

He didn’t go through a She’s All That transformation, or pull a Freaky Friday swap with Seth Rogen.

Nope, the only thing he did to whip up this new claim to fame as a ladies man was to start dating a popular girl. And as soon as he started to date that girl, other girls seemed to take notice.

Weird, right?

Well, actually it’s not. The ladies noticed Dustin because they saw that other girls liked him. The popular girl Dustin started dating acted as his social proof.

Wondering what this has to do with your website?

Well, you need to be like Dustin. But instead of using social proof to become desirable to the opposite sex, you’ll use it to show your target audience that you’re worth paying attention to.

Sumo has worked with Pat to build social proof for his audience (that’s you!) around our apps:

This is a Welcome Mat on the Sumo blog.

Pat uses it, too, by posting his earnings above the fold on his homepage:

Social proof is the psychological tendency to follow the crowd; to do what others are doing. We subconsciously assume that if other people are doing it, it must be worthwhile.

One simple, free way to make your website far more effective and start converting more of your visitors is to incorporate social proof.

There are several ways to build and display it, but to get you started, here are a few of the easiest ways:

1. Display customer or reader testimonials: Testimonials are a type of social proof that can increase conversions on your sales pages by as much as thirty-four percent. Check out how The Art of Charm uses testimonials:

Most of us have at least a few readers or customers we can get testimonials from. If you don’t already have testimonials or endorsements, don’t be afraid to ask for them!Include the ask in a survey, email, or even social media post. Just let your audience know that you’re looking for testimonials about how your blog or business has helped them. Request an image of them to add credibility to the testimonial.

2. Display quantities: Let’s say you don’t want to have to ask for testimonials, or want to display a different type of social proof. One great way to do this is to display the number of people who are engaging with you or your brand. Sumo does this twice on our homepage:

We display the number of websites that use our apps, and the amount of people who have shared our apps on social media using the Sumo Share app.

You don’t need to work with 489,000 websites or have 10,000 social shares to use quantities as social proof. Can you display how many email subscribers you have? Maybe you have worked with hundreds of clients, or you have a couple thousand Twitter or Instagram followers.

Displaying these numbers on your website provides that extra boost of social proof.

3. Show off your mentions: You’ve seen them around. Like on Paul Jarvis’s homepage:

Banners of logos, “featured in” sections, and links to media mentions from other websites. There’s a reason they’re so common: it’s because they work. They offer a sense of legitimacy through social proof.

If you’ve ever written a guest post for a popular blog, been featured on a well-known website, or have appeared in a news story, don’t be afraid to wear that badge proudly.

We all have the ability to display social proof on our websites to make it more effective and prove to your target audience that you’re worth paying attention to.

Strategy #4: Do A Full Website Audit

Your website can’t be effective if it’s annoying your audience.

And if your pages are loading slowly, your links are broken or your images are too big, you’re giving your audience no reason to stick around, let alone hand over their email addresses or buy something from you.

That’s why you should do a full website audit at least once per quarter.

Audit for a few different things that, when fixed, will inevitably create a far more powerful user experience:

Site Speed

Have you ever been to a website that takes forever to load?

You know it’s not your wifi and that little blue “loading” circle just keeps spinning . . .

You probably don’t wait long before giving up, right?

Well, your audience is no different. Humans now have an attention span equivalent to that of a goldfish, meaning that your visitors aren’t going to wait for your website to load, no matter how amazing the information you’re providing.

Not only does a slow website make for a poor user experience, but it can also affect the way your page ranks in search engines.

There are many factors that can slow down your website, including the coding, images that aren’t optimized, your plugins, and your server.

But there are two low hanging fruits that speed up your site for free:

1. Optimizing your images: The images you use in the content of your website need to be optimized. Otherwise, you risk not only making your audience wait as the images load, but also slowing down the rest of your website, too. You don’t have to manually resize or compress all of your images, though. Use a free plugin like WP Smush to reduce the file size of your images without giving up image quality.

2. Removing slow plugins: Most people don’t know that plugins can drastically affect the speed of a WordPress site. But how do you know which plugins are to blame for that extra bit of lag? There’s a plugin for that. P3 Plugin Performance Profiler was mentioned again and again as one of the best WordPress plugins in 2016. It scans the plugins you have installed on your website:

Providing a report on the effect they’re having on your load speed:

You can then deactivate the plugins that are slowing down your site the most, instantly improving your page load time (for free).

The speed at which your website loads has a huge impact on your user experience, and therefore your conversions. Don’t ignore it.

Broken Links

There’s nothing worse than going down a rabbit hole on a website that you’re really enjoying, and running into a 404 on a piece of content that piqued your interest.

It’s happened to all of us, and you don’t want it to happen on your website for your visitors.

After all, if your visitors hit a 404, chances are they’re leaving and not coming back (unless you optimize your 404 page).

They’re not going to dig for the content. They’ll just peace out.

The thing is, 404s are not always your fault. Sometimes pages change, URLs shift, or you made an error inputting the link. Often, you won’t even know about them.

Instead of letting this happen, thereby affecting your stats and conversions, perform regular broken link audits.

There are plenty of plugins that will help you find and fix broken links on your WordPress website, but WordPress Broken Link Checker is one of the most widely used plugins for this out there.

You can set it up to automatically check for broken links at intervals, saving you from having to remember to check.

You’ll then receive an email when you have broken links. Broken Link Checker will even suggest replacement links for the broken ones.

Where Your Audience Is Losing Interest

Have you ever clicked on an article from social media and realized it was insanely inconvenient to read?

Like those really annoying “articles” that make you click through from slide to slide to see all of the content:

What if your readers felt like that on your website?

Even if you don’t put content behind annoying slideshows, you may be losing your audience to poorly designed content or even just ineffective flow.

If your readers become frustrated, chances are they’ll just leave. And once they hit that “back” button, they probably won’t return.

That’s why you should audit regularly for exactly where you’re losing people so you can make minor tweaks and adjustments that will keep your visitors on your website for longer.

On the Sumo blog, we enabled Content Analytics to automatically record campaigns on all of our stories. Recently, when looking at the results for one of our articles, we noticed that only sixteen percent of the article was being read.

This was far below our average of around thirty-five percent, so we took a look at what was different about that article compared to others. It turns out it had a lot of images at the top of the post, which was unusual. We removed unnecessary images, and dispersed the rest throughout the article.

Just by making this small change, we saw an almost immediate boost. Within a couple of days, the average read rate of the article increased to thirty-three percent.

Where are you losing your audience?

Review your content to see where people are dropping off regularly. If you even improve by one percent during every audit, you’ll be in a much better position than you were before each time. If you don’t have time to audit every single piece of content you publish, keep an eye on your pillar content to maximize its potential and conversions.

Doing an audit of your website regularly will help you reach your goals. Don’t lose your visitors to a slow, frustrating, or ineffective website.

Strategy #5: Get Your Opt-In Opportunities In Front of More Targeted Leads

If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to increase your conversion rates to make your website more effective, it’s getting your calls to action in front of your target audience.

And look, I know you might be thinking that you already do that. That’s why you have opt-in forms, landing pages, and opt-in offers.

But when you’re offering a content upgrade, most of your readers aren’t even seeing them.

We analyzed 650,000 website visits by pulling data from Sumo’s Content Analytics app, and it showed that the average read percentage of an article was twenty-five percent.

Not only that, but only twenty percent of your readers actually finish your articles. So if you have your content upgrade way down there at the bottom of your article . . .

. . . a huge chunk of your audience will never see what you’re offering. They’ll never have the opportunity to opt-in to your email list on that call to action.

Instead of letting them slip away into the Internet abyss, capture their attention (and their email addresses) by putting a call to action above the average read rate of your articles:

Getting that opt-in opportunity in front of far more targeted leads.

Plug Those Traffic Leaks with These 6 Simple Strategies

A lot of bloggers and online business owners feel as if they need an expensive website design or a custom-developed homepage with all the bells and whistles to make their websites effective.

But that’s not true.

With a few simple and free tweaks, you can make your website work even harder for you.

And you can start converting that traffic into email subscribers, and those email subscribers into customers.

Thanks again Sarah for sharing your insight with the SPI community! The Sumo team has put together a checklist that their content marketing team uses to help customers increase their conversions by 200 percent, and you can get it for FREE by clicking here.

The post 5 Free Ways to Make Your Website More Effective NOW appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Now that we're two weeks after the launch of Will It Fly?, I'm stoked to be able to share even more details with you about how it was all put together. Coming in March, you're going to see a massive post with all of the ins and outs of every part of the process, but in this post, I wanted to do a couple of things for you:

1) Share the social media strategy we used, which played a critical role in helping to spread the word, and

2) Introduce you to someone new on my team. He's been helping me for a while, but you likely didn't know about him. His name is Non, and he's awesome. He helped to lead the social media push on Will It Fly. 

Because I was busy last week at the Traffic and Conversion Summit, he volunteered to write up this post, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to introduce him to you, and also share some massive value at the same time. 

So without further delay, take it away Non!

Hello!

My name is Non, which is pronounced like “known” and routinely described, by me, as being a product of hippie parents.

Pat Flynn, to my knowledge, is not a hippie. Pat is an inspiring, hard working, wholehearted human, and (as you probably know) the author of Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money, which was just released on  February 1!

Will It Fly?, as Pat says in its introduction, is a book that was written for you, the person with the neat business idea, “to help you build your wings, and visualize your flight path.”

I led the social media strategy for Pat’s book promotion and launch. As a team, we thought that you would enjoy a behind-the-scenes tour of our strategy so that you may be able to replicate some aspect(s) of it when you launch your next thing.

So that’s what this post is about—the social media strategy Team Flynn created to effectively support a coordinated, multi-platform social media effort to promote the Will It Fly? launch. I’m excited to share with you how we built our strategy, what worked, and how it worked.

Step 1: Determine Goals for the Will It Fly? Social Media Strategy

Determining our goals was the logical starting point for our social media strategy. We needed to know where we were headed, and we needed to have a solid understanding of the outcome when we got there. Without the goals, we would’ve been lost. Not like lost in the woods, starved, contemplating-eating-your-hiking-companion type of lost. But certainly lost enough to provide confusion, inefficiencies, redundant efforts, and a non-deadly snake bite or two.

Point being, we needed to be as clear about our social media strategy as we could be, being mindful of desired outcomes, and fully engaged with the most logical path to achieve those outcomes.

We focused on three key goals:

1. Nurture as large of a focused pre-launch audience as possible
2. Educate potential readers on the value proposition of Will It Fly?
3. Diversify the awareness of Will It Fly? to the greatest extent possible

United together like Voltron, defender of the universe, our three goals formed the singular force we needed to succeed. We had a cohesive fanbase that knew enough about Pat’s book and cared enough about its message to advocate for it across multiple social media channels in a coordinated movement so as to maximize launch momentum come publication day.

How do you bring these goals to life? With strategies that match the focus, tone, and desired outcome of the goals themselves. And in the land of strategies, more isn’t always better.

Step 2: Develop a Few Critical Strategies

In social media, there are countless strategies to choose from and adapt in some fashion. Thus, our challenge was to zero in on a critical few that aligned with our goals and, ultimately, the overall message of Will It Fly?

We collaborated a lot as a team to whittle down the options and arrive at the critical strategies we thought best for the campaign. Our choices didn’t only have the positive effect of focusing our operational plans; they also informed the type of content we published.

Our strategies were:

1. Publish engaging, value-add content that promotes the book’s message and reason for existence.

Keeping our goals in mind, we developed in-depth content engagement ideas. Specifically, we thought Twitter content could serve as a base of content generation. Once that content was crafted we could then extend it naturally to other social media platforms. This approach proved to be very effective because Twitter forced us to keep this simple at the start and then expand and enrich them for other channels like Facebook, Periscope, and Goodreads.

Our initial brainstorm of content ideas ended up like this:

• Will It Fly? book launch date
• Will It Fly? launch party webinar signup
• Behind the scenes of writing Will It Fly?
• Will It Fly? book trailer
• Snippets of advance reviews of book
• Images (the final book cover (in full, or only a piece of it as a teaser), the preliminary concepts, book covers that were inspirations, etc.)
• Thanks to advance reviewers
• Will It Fly? hashtag: #WillItFly
• Inspiring, single-line quotes from book
• Relevant application of book to the lives of your audience
• Guest blog posts on Will It Fly?
• Will It Fly? fun facts (e.g., number of hours spent writing the book, fun juxtaposition tweets about how the “it” will fly but elephants may not, etc.)
• “The Daily Update” about the book campaign/project
• Any other “exclusive” content that we may be able to drip out
• Retweets from fans about Will It Fly & from #WillItFly hashtag
• Live tweeting during launch day webinar
• Tweet to announce Periscope appearances

If you analogize these brainstorming ideas as elements on the Periodic Table, then putting them in action was an act of chemistry. (Science!) Different combinations of elements yielded different types of content that we could publish. Here are some examples that emerged from our lab of content chemistry:

Calls to action (CTAs) are very important in marketing. Social media marketing is no different. So, as we brewed up some awesome content in our lab, we had to remain disciplined to which action we wanted Pat’s fans to take once they enjoyed the content. To stay on target, we came up with corresponding primary and secondary desired CTAs:

1. Primary CTA of tweets: drive followers to book pre-order page
2. Secondary CTA of tweets: drive followers to book trailer, blog post, launch team signup

By creating these initial Twitter content ideas and their corresponding CTAs, we had a strong base to start writing the tweets and plugging them into our calendar well in advance of the book launch date of February 1. (Craving to learn more about our approach to a well-organized social media campaign calendar? Feel free to jump ahead to step 4.)

2. Publish content on multiple channels in unique ways.

As I foreshadowed above, we benefited from crafting engaging content for Twitter that could then be extended in unique ways for other social media channels. We kept Twitter limited to two or three Will It Fly?-related tweets per day. Next, we took advantage of the unique attributes of Facebook, Periscope, Goodreads, and Instagram. It was important for Pat to cover a wide variety of platforms, as not all people are on every platform. Let’s dig into our channel-specific strategies, starting with Facebook.

Facebook Strategy:

Frequency is an essential component in social media promotion and marketing. You don’t want to pummel your audience with too much promotional content, or post so infrequently that they aren’t aware of what you’re trying to promote. (Want to learn about our broader application of our strategy for social media frequency? Check out the “Be mindful of frequency” section below!)

When it applies to Facebook specifically, content frequency is crucial. Data suggests that by keeping Facebook posts to once per day or even once every other day, you may see a higher reach and impression rate on those posts. In other words, engagement, or likes and shares, begins to drop off dramatically once you start posting more than once per day. Take a gander at the excellent The Social Media Frequency Guide for a detailed explanation of this.

In addition to being cognizant of the frequency of our content, we also made sure to emphasize a wide variety of relevant content, including video. Similar to images, video often garners a lot of engagement on social media. Video is exciting, aesthetically intriguing, and a visual break from long, potentially less engaging blocks of text. Plus, video (or posts with visuals in general) drives more engagement. Gloria Rand does a great job explaining in the fascinating infographic, How Visual Content Drives Social Media Growth, and further detailed here:

So, one of the things Pat did was create a few videos related specifically to Will It Fly? First, he created a short teaser book trailer and posted that on Facebook with the goal of accumulating interest for the book, motivate people to pre-order, and of course engage with the post directly. Second, he released a longer video which provided a more in-depth preview into what Will It Fly? is all about and how it can help people who have a business idea that requires a kick in the tires.

One other key element of our Facebook strategy was the Facebook Group created for the amazing Book Launch Street Team. Thankfully, we had Daniel Decker, the man behind the Will It Fly? Book Launch Street Team (see Building a Book Launch Street Team + Pre-Order with Daniel Decker (SPI 198)). Daniel was integral in building a community of people just as excited as we were for Will It Fly?, before and after launch.

For those individuals who signed up in advance of the book’s publication to be a part of the Launch Team (you guys are awesome, by the way!), you were part of a group of passionate people connecting with each other, making friendships, interacting on Facebook, and even sharing some of your favorite Will It Fly? quotes. It just goes to show that Facebook Groups can be a powerful tool to help foster community and excitement around a shared interest. Now, in addition to the content Team Flynn was producing, Daniel had fostered an amazing team who added to the promotional Will It Fly? content by tweeting their anticipation for the book launch or sharing their thoughts about the book after reading.

Periscope Strategy:

Periscope is a great way to engage with people in real-time. It served as a platform where Pat could share—genuinely and from his heart—exciting parts of the pre- and post-book launch journey. He answered questions as they came in, read parts of the book before it launched, and shared the book cover. It’s just a really fun way to engage with an excited group of people and react together in the moment. As for the frequency, Pat is pretty spontaneous with Periscope and he used it when it made sense to share his highs and lows. On Periscope? Connect with Pat!

Pat also used Periscope to leverage social proof by sharing Will It Fly? pre-order numbers and Amazon rankings. In doing so, Pat’s audience latched onto his excitement and anticipation, which can be very compelling if you are experiencing his energy live.

Goodreads Strategy:

If you’re not familiar with Goodreads, it’s basically a social media platform for book lovers—so of course we had to use it to promote Pat’s new book! We listed Will It Fly? about four weeks before launch day and made sure it was connected to Pat’s author page. We also made sure Pat’s author profile was updated with his website, bio, photo, and favorite books on his “Read/Want to Read” lists. We then asked the Street Team to post early reviews, and used the built-in blog feature to announce when the pre-order was ready, our launch day party, and when the book was officially live. Goodreads also has features for advertising and running giveaways, which we plan to take advantage of with future promotions of Will It Fly?

Instagram and Snapchat Strategy:

Remember, not everyone is on every social media channel, so we needed to promote on a variety of different platforms, and Instagram and Snapchat are places where Pat could be a little more personal and less scripted. For example, he shared a fun side-by-side image of Will It Fly? in its reveal next to an image of the A Match Made in Space book reveal in Back to the Future. He shared first on Instagram and then cross-promoted on Facebook.

Always, always, always be real. People aren’t interested in perfection. They want to see the nitty gritty, the flaws, the toiling. They want to see your humanity. Pat used Instagram and Snapchat to share openly about the book launch journey, including both the ups and the downs. He embraced the realness by staying true to himself and engaging with his community on a human level. Check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s Community Management: Why Betting on the Human Side Works for an impressive, in-depth look into the importance of embracing the realness.

3. Be mindful of frequency.

Frequency is also a key component to any social media strategy. You want to be consistent, but not overwhelming. More human, less spam. If you know Pat, you know that there isn’t a disingenuous bone in his body. Which is to say that the content you create should be reflective of who you are, not of Spammy McTurbo Salesington. Content should be real, show your genuine self, and be inclusive of both your successes and struggles along the journey (more on this later).

So we developed a basic game plan for frequency of book launch-related content, which was then applied to our other social media efforts on Facebook and Periscope. The frequency of content took a number of things into account, including, but not limited to:

• Timing of advance book reviews
• Book cover completion
• Consistency of content
• Analytics on best times to tweet according to data from Followerwonk
• Guest appearances on podcasts
• Book launch party timing

While Twitter was our main focus, as mentioned, Pat did some essential stuff on social media platforms Facebook and Periscope, as well as some Instagram fun and advance reviews from the Book Launch Street Team on the literary wonderland that is Goodreads.

4. Drive CTAs to a single landing page that evolves to support the needs of the campaign without undermining the singular focus of the CTAs.

Each of our CTAs were driven to a single landing page: willitflybook.com. From pre-launch to post-launch social media strategy, we made sure that the content, and the CTAs that supported the content, was unique and fresh. In addition, as the content evolved, so did the landing page. Willitflybook.com transitioned from an informational page where interested people could sign up to be the first to hear about Will It Fly? to a robust pre-order page with engaging graphics to the Amazon page where you can purchase the book directly (currently the Kindle version is #1 and the print version is #2!)

Step 3: Executing on the Strategies

After all of our strategizing and planning, it was finally time for execution—the actual writing and scheduling of posts. Here’s a look at our execution process.

1. Creating social media content specific to Twitter, Facebook, Periscope, and Goodreads.

With our initial content ideas and social media platform-specific strategies, we were able to fully develop our tweets, Facebook posts, and so on. And, because we created social media content throughout the launch journey, from pre-launch to present, we needed a powerful, user and web-friendly calendar we could edit and add to quickly. When you’re developing a social media strategy, a calendar is essential.

For the Will It Fly? social media strategy, we used CoSchedule, a tool that serves as a social media content scheduler (with color coding so we could differentiate Twitter posts from blog posts), workflow manager, the nifty calendar, and so much more. But a nifty calendar isn’t always necessary. We started with a simple Google spreadsheet, which allowed us to compose tweets and easily see when we planned to post them:

To fill the calendar, we first came up with a list of essential dates starting eight weeks before the February 1 launch date. The eight weeks provided us ample time to coordinate as a team, develop and refine social media content, strategize on adding diversity to our approach, and be more aptly capable of anticipating things (e.g., a last-minute opportunity for Pat to promote Will It Fly? on another podcast) that could potentially arise.

We looked at weekly milestones that we’d promote on all of Pat’s channels, including this blog, the SPI podcast, and SPI TV. Content included episodes of the Smart Passive Income podcast delving into Behind the Scenes of Writing Will It Fly? (SPI 197) and Building a Book Launch Street Team + Pre-Order with Daniel Decker (SPI 198) and Pat’s guest spots with something like 25 other podcasters, including folks like Hal Elrod and Amy Porterfield. (A complete list of Pat’s podcasts appearances can be found here.)

We also continued to add essential dates and promotional opportunities leading up to the launch that would align with the overall social media strategy and give us the best chance to meet our primary goals. All these dates we added to our calendar.

2. Enriching the social media content experience with on-brand graphics in addition to text.

Images and graphics do a lot to enhance social media messages. They are often engaging, visually interesting, attention-grabbing, and used to support the text around it. In the case for the Will It Fly? social media strategy, Team Flynn created a number of great images that helped to to enrich the experience for Pat’s community.

Not only do these images help to reinforce key points of our strategy—pre-orders, launch date, theme of the book—but also they keep the visual of the book cover in front of Pat’s audience, generating even more excitement for its release.

3. Building an engaged and supportive Street Team.

As previously mentioned, word-of-mouth can be a pretty powerful tool. But you need people to make it work. With the help of Daniel Decker of Higher Level Group, we had a wholehearted, engaged, passionate Street Team eager to promote Will It Fly? The best part was that they truly wanted to be a part of the book launch journey from start to finish.

Daniel was instrumental in organizing this team. He helped us recruit team members, via an opt-in survey form that Pat sent to his email subscribers and made available on his blog and podcasts. Once the team of 500+ people was assembled, Daniel used the private Facebook group to keep their energy pumped by sharing things like a welcome video from Pat, quotes and images that the they could use on their own social media profiles, and previews of the book cover including early concepts before it was finalized.

The team’s excitement was pretty incredible to see. Some of which is represented here:

4. Interacting with fans on social media during promotional events like the launch day webinar.

On Will It Fly? launch day, an exhausted and eager Pat hosted a 90-minute webinar for both Periscope and Google Hangout communities, to bring everyone together and share in excitement for the book. During the 90 minutes, Pat thanked special members of Team Flynn, answered thoughtful questions that came in from both social media platforms, chatted with call-in guests (including one from Joey Korenman, Founder of School of Motion), shared insights on the book launch process, and gave away some goodies.

Many people who attended had been following Pat’s journey of writing and publishing Will It Fly? via all of this social media strategy we’ve been talking about, and they were even more excited for an opportunity to see Pat and interact with him live on launch day. One fun fact: the Kindle version of the book was delayed for availability in the Kindle store, which Pat explains in the video. Throughout the event, he kept refreshing to see if the status had changed. It does change from “in review” to “publishing” and you can watch Pat’s reaction around the 1:22 mark.

Click on the image below for the full replay of the Will It Fly? launch day webinar:

Well, that does it for the peek inside the Will It Fly? social media strategy. Before I sign off, I wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for this book launch journey—the excitement you’ve reciprocated, the joy you’ve shared. It’s wonderful. To Pat and to all of us in the Pat-verse, we believe that community is so essential. If you weren’t excited about Will It Fly?, all of this strategy wouldn’t have mattered. By being open and wholly genuine about the entire process of launching Will It Fly?, and by being consistent in his engagement, Pat naturally fostered an eagerness in his community. So, the lovely and impassioned community (you folks!) really was part of the book launch journey, which is just so awesome. Without that eagerness and excitement for every facet of the journey, from behind-the-scenes writing updates to the wild insanity of anticipating Amazon rankings, Will It Fly? would not be what it is today. So, thank you!

I sincerely hope this peek inside the Will It Fly? social media Strategy helped for whatever you’re working on promoting—your book launch or your business unveiling or your new product reveal, the Doc Brown doggy chew toys you’ve delightfully named “Great Scotty Dogs.”

Thanks so much for reading!

Non (like “known”)

The post Behind the Scenes of the Will It Fly? Social Media Strategy appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

In 2010, while documenting the creation of a niche site publicly here on the blog, I published a massive article called THE Backlinking Strategy that Works, and it did work – extremely well. That post helped thousands of others get their sites ranked on the first page of Google, and the article itself now has over 2,100 blog comments.

Of course, a lot has changed since 2010.

A lot.

Although some of the techniques from that original article still work, the environment of SEO, backlinking, and what it takes to reach the top of Google is much different.

I've since started a new niche site to discover techniques that work today, completely focusing on longer-term strategies based on relationship-building and delivering unique content (which has been working—see updates here), but somebody I recently discovered has me really excited about exactly what's working in today's world of SEO and backlinking.

Everyone, I'd like to introduce you to Brian Dean from Backlinko.com. The content on his blog is top-notch and has already helped me in several ways, and I asked him to create the new, latest and greatest Backlinking Strategy that Works as a guest post for all of you, and he happily agreed.

A couple of months later, here it is, and it's amazing! This post isn't just what to do, and not only how to do it, but why. I'll be putting many of these strategies to the test myself, and I hope you will too.

For those of you looking to get to the top of the search engines…here's Brian…

I first stumbled across Pat’s amazing guide, THE Backlinking Strategy That Works, in late 2010.

It was unlike any SEO article I’d ever read.

Actionable.

Hype-free.

And most important of all, darn effective.

But that was 2010…

I probably don’t need to tell you that A LOT has changed in the SEO world since 2010. [Editor's Note: Because so much has changed in SEO, we have removed the link to that older post. We don't want you accidentally spending time on out-of-date strategies.]

In fact, Pat recently added a disclaimer at the beginning of the article to let people know that this strategy isn’t quite as effective as it once was:

At this point, you may be wondering:

“Well, what IS working now?”

Well you’re in luck because that’s exactly what I’m going to show you today.

Like Pat’s original post, I’m going to break everything down for you in ridiculously detailed, step-by-step instructions.

Let’s do this…

First, What Still Works From The Original “THE Backlinking Strategy That Works”?

Here’s the deal:

You already know that the highly-tactical techniques from the original post don’t pack the same “umph” that they used to.

But that doesn’t mean you should toss the overarching strategy from the original “THE Backlinking Strategy That Works” out the window.

Before we get into the step-by-step guide, I want to quickly go over what techniques and concepts in that post still apply today…and what’s changed.

What Still Applies

SEO Is Still All About Links

Despite all the hooplah and hype over social signals and content, ranking in Google is still all about backlinks.

In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts recently confirmed that they don’t use social signals — like tweets, Facebook Likes or Pinterest pins — to rank sites. The fact that Pat had (and still has) a ton of success from a link-focused SEO approach should come as no surprise.

In fact, Moz’s most recent “Search Engine Ranking Factors” study found that 18 of the 19 top ranking signals were backlink-related:

Bottom line: Today’s Google rankings are still heavily-reliant on backlinks. That hasn’t changed. What HAS changed is the type of links you need to build (more on that later).

Focus on Building Links From Authority Sites

In Pat’s original post, he emphasized the importance of links from authority sites, like Squidoo, Hubpages and Ezine Articles.

Today, links from those particular sites won’t do you much good (you’ll see why in a minute). But a single link from an authority site still has a much greater impact than thousands of low-quality links.

Bottom line: Backlinking is still a quality over quantity game.

Anchor Text Diversity

Back in the day, if you wanted to rank for the keyword “green coffee mugs”, you’d want 100% of your anchor text to be “green coffee mugs”.

Not anymore. Today, over-optimized anchor text will get your site slapped by Google’s Penguin update.

In fact, MicrositeMasters.com found that sites with natural-looking anchor text largely survived Google’s original Penguin update…

…and sites with over-optimized anchor text got hit:

As Pat says in the original post: “The text of the links that point back to your site should only be your primary keyword about 20-25% of the time…Vary your anchor text using secondary and tertiary keywords.”

That advice is sound. I would just add that brand and URL anchor text should be part of your anchor text strategy.

Here’s what I mean:

If you look at any legitimately popular site’s anchor text profile, you’ll notice two things:

1. VERY little keyword-rich anchor text.
2. A LOT of brand name anchor text.

For example, here are the most commonly used anchor text phrases pointing to SmartPassiveIncome.com:

As you can see, SPI rocks a lot of brand anchors, like:

• Smart Passive Income
• Pat Flynn
• The Smart Passive Income Blog
• smartpassiveincome

And URL anchors like:

• https://www.smartpassiveincome.com
• www.smartpassiveincome.com
• https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/

That’s EXACTLY the type of anchor text diversity you want to have.

Why is this important?

First, it just looks natural.

Second, it shows Google that you’re a real brand.

I probably don’t need to tell you that Google has a crush on brands. Giants like Amazon and Wikipedia dominate the first page for nearly every high-volume keyword.

Here’s the good news:

You can tell Google: “hey, I’m a real brand” with lots of brand-name anchor text.

For example, Pat’s own Foodtruckr.com has mostly brand name anchors, like “foodtruckr” and “foodtruckr.com”.

And because of that, Google shows sitelinks when you search for foodtruckr.

Sitelinks are a sign from Google that they regard your site as a real brand.

Bottom line: Diversify your anchor text like a real brand. Focus on brand name and URL anchors.

What’s Changed

The Wrong Links CAN Hurt You

Before Google’s Penguin update, you could get away with murder.

10,000 blog comments?

Sounds good.

Submit an article to 5,000 article directories?

Sure, why not.

Order a link blast from Fiverr?

What a bargain!

Needless to say, those days are LONG gone.

I’m not going to lie to you:

That type of stuff can work.

The thing is, there are two HUGE problems with the spammy link building approach:

1. As Pat points out in the original post, results from this approach are inconsistent. It’s kind of like playing the lottery. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t.
2. Even if you do get lucky, your results don’t last. Most black hat SEOs I know talk about ranking for “weeks”…not “months”.

Bottom line: Be super-careful about the links that you build. In my experience, white hat link building is a safer long-term approach.

Relevance Is the New PR

A few years back SEO blogger James Norquay ran into an ex-Google employee that used to work in the uber-secretive Search Quality department.

James pulled him aside and grilled him about Google’s super-secret algorithm.

One interesting quote popped out of the ex-Googler’s mouth:

“…getting a link from a high PR page used to always be valuable, today it’s more the relevance of the site’s theme in regards to yours, relevance is the new PR.”

I’ve seen this firsthand:

A relevant link has a lot more ranking power than a link from an irrelevant site (even if they both have the same PageRank).

As you might imagine SPI’s link profile is made up of sites in closely-related niches.

As you can see, Pat’s links tend to come from sites about Podcasting, social media, SEO and making money online.

Bottom line: Focus on getting links from relevant sites. It’s OK to have a few oddballs in there, but most of your links should be from related sites.

Zero-In on Editorial Links

If you’re serious about link building today, you need to set your crosshairs on ONE type of link:

Editorial links.

These are the exactly types of links that Google likes to see.

What are editorial links, you ask?

They’re links added by another person based on merit.

For example, here’s an editorial link I recently received:

And here’s an editorial link pointing to SPI:

In other words, editorial links don’t include:

• Article directories
• Most web directories
• Blog comments
• Web 2.0 links
• Blog networks

As I said earlier, these links can work…but they’re full of problems and headaches.

Now that you know what to do, it’s time to show you how to do it.

Overview of the Process

Here’s the 3-step process I’m going to walk you through today:

1. Find a proven topic.
2. Create ONE awesome resource around that topic.
3. Reach out and get your links.

I should warn you:

This system is simple…but it’s not easy.

It takes serious amounts of work, hustle…and a little bit of cash. That’s what it takes to get editorial links today

If you’re up for it, let’s jump in.

Step #1: Find a Proven Topic for Your “Wow Content”

Before you build a single link, your first job is to publish an AMAZING resource on your site.

Not good.

Not great.

AMAZING.

Anything less simply won’t work.

I like to call mind-blowing content like this “Wow Content”, because (you guessed it), it makes people say “WOW” when they see it.

Note: Simply publishing Wow Content isn’t enough. You’ll still have to get out there and promote it. But when you do, you’ll notice that people will happily link to you (don’t worry, I’ll cover content promotion in step #3).

To give you an idea of the level of content I’m talking about, here are some examples of Wow Content from the real world.

100+ Ways to Conserve Water (WaterUseItWisely.com)

This beautifully designed guide lists 100 super-practical tips to help you save water. No wonder it’s attracted links from over 818 different websites.

How to Start a Podcast – Pat’s Complete Step-By-Step Podcasting Tutorial (SmartPassiveIncome.com)

You’ve probably seen this outstanding guide before. Pat provides literally everything you need to start a podcast, from the “why” to the nitty-gritty “how”. That’s might be the reason that 118 different sites have linked to Pat’s guide (and why it ranks #1 for “how to start a podcast”).

41 Camping Hacks That Are Borderline Genius (BuzzFeed.com)

It’s not easy to get 171 sites to link to a blog post about camping. But that’s what Buzzfeed pulled off in their incredible guide. I don’t even like camping that much and I was riveted by the hacks in this post (did you know you can use Doritos as kindling for a campfire? Crazy).

These examples should give you an idea of where to set the bar.

But first…

How to Easily Generate Ideas for Your First Piece of Wow Content

Before you sit down to write the first word of your Wow Content, you need to tackle one extremely important step: finding a proven topic.

Without a proven topic, your Wow Content may seem to have a ton of potential…

…but could fall flat when introduced to the real world.

But when you have a proven topic in-hand, you KNOW that you’re producing something people want to actually read and (more importantly) share.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an awesome tool that does something very cool:

Finds content that’s already performed well.

When you find a piece of content in your space that’s “made it” in the real world, it gives you a HUGE clue that it’s something you should model.

For example, let’s use BuzzSumo to find popular content around the topic of gardening.

Just head over to BuzzSumo and enter a broad keyword related to your niche. Let’s try the super broad keyword, “gardening”.

Hit “search” and Buzzsumo will show you popular content based on the number shares on social media networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Note: Some of the content you’ll find has a lot of shares because it was published on a massive authority site, like CNN.com or The Huffington Post…not because it’s particularly awesome. You want to keep an eye out for smaller sites that aren’t household names.

In about 12-seconds I was able to find a piece of winning content on a small blog. The post has hauled in an impressive 901 Facebook likes and 21,962 Pinterest Pins (!).

It's interesting though. This article, and several others found on this list don't have the “WOW” factor that we're aiming for.

And that's a good thing.

Let me tell you why:

When you find a piece of mediocre content that’s crushed it, it means you can easily create something even better.

With this proven idea in hand, you could easily create a vastly improved version of these posts.

Reddit

Reddit is an untapped treasure trove of proven content topics…but it’s very much dependent on your niche.

If you’re in a niche that appeals to men between the ages of 15-40, (like the consumer electronics or video game niche) Reddit is perfect for you.

Either way, it’s worth a 2-minute search because you’ll sometimes come across a topic idea that you’d NEVER find anywhere else.

First, find a subreddit or two in your niche using the very nifty SearchReddit.com.

Search for a broad keyword that describes your niche. For example, if you ran a niche site about gingerbread houses, you’d want to use a keyword like “cooking”, “baking” or “desserts”.

SearchReddit.com will hook you up with a bunch of subreddits that tend to cover that topic.

Click on one that seems like a good fit. I’m going to head to the r/baking subreddit in this example.

By default Reddit will show you the trending topics in that subreddit.

Trending topics are nice, but they’re not always the most useful. You want a topic that’s evergreen. To find that, click on the “top” tab at the top of the subreddit. This will show you that subreddit’s all-time most popular threads.

Bingo!

I found a handful of crazy-interesting topics that I know my target audience of hardcore bakers would love.

The best topic I found was “How cookies look with different ingredients”. With over 1700 upvotes, you KNOW that bakers want to learn more about this topic. Shazaam!

Quora

Quora is a souped up version of Yahoo Answers.

Quora is an amazing topic generator because of its robust upvote system (similar to Reddit). When dozens of people upvote a question, it tells you one very important thing:

People want to learn more about that topic.

Here’s how to mine Quora for awesome content topics:

First, search quora for a keyword that describes your niche. Unlike Reddit, you want to search for more precise keywords that fit your niche like a glove.

If you had a site about gluten free recipes, you’d search for “gluten free”.

Then look for topics that have a lot of upvotes and comments.

In about 27-seconds on quora I found 5 topics that would make awesome Wow Content pieces.

Here are some examples of how you can turn Quora questions into Wow Content titles.

Quora: What is your best recipe for a gluten-free cake?
Wow Content: 75 Mouth-Watering Gluten Free Cake Recipes

Quora: What are some good brands for gluten-free bread and bread products?
Wow Content: I Put 25 Gluten Free Bread Brands to The Test — Here’s What Tastes Like The Real Thing

Quora: What is the scientific consensus on the effect of eating gluten on your health?
Wow Content: Gluten Free Diet: Fad or Nutrition Miracle? The Experts Weigh In

You get the idea

Forums

I’m shocked at how few online marketers use forums to market their business.

Sure, forums and boards may not be “the next big thing” in marketing.

But they’re one of few places online where you can put your finger directly on the pulse of your target audience.

To find a forum in your niche, use one of these handy search strings:

• “your keyword” + powered by vbulletin
• “your keyword forum”
• “your keyword” + “board”

For example, I did a quick search for “baking forum” and came across a handful of active forums:

Let’s check out cheftalk.com.

Like on Reddit, forums put their newest threads at the top of the page.

That’s not what we want.

Click on “views” or “replies” to find the forum’s all-time most popular threads.

Can you say “gold mine”?

Look at all those awesome, tested topic ideas:

Google’s First Page

Sometimes the best ideas are right in front of your face.

And that’s certainly the case when it comes to Google’s first page.

If a piece of content makes it to the first page of Google, it tells you something important:

That content has generated backlinks.

You can’t be sure whether those links came from targeted outreach or dumb luck. But it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that you’ve found a topic that people like to link to.

Before you dive in, download the handy dandy Mozbar extension for Google Chrome and Firefox.

This toolbar will show you SEO metrics, like Page Authority, right on Google’s first page.

Here’s an example using the keyword “blogging tips”:

The next step is to look at each of the top 10 results. Find out what made the content great enough to accumulate links.

For example, let’s look at the 2nd result in Google, from SocialMediaExaminer.com. It’s called “39 Blogging Tips from the Pros”.

That post collected some highly-actionable blogging tips from 39 experts.

This tells you that people want to hear blogging tips from experienced bloggers. Write that down.

The 3rd result in Google is from SPI.

Pat’s page is a curated list of helpful blogging resources.

That tells you something else: people want a curated list of helpful resources. Write that down too.

We haven’t even gotten to the 4th result yet and we already know that:

• People want to hear blogging tips from real world bloggers
• People want actionable tips they can use right away
• People want lists of hand-curated resources

You could easily turn what you learned into a killer Wow Content piece. An article titled “50 Bloggers Share Their #1 Most Helpful Blogging Resource” would absolutely crush it.

At this point you should have at least one battle-tested Wow Content idea.

Awesome work!

Now it’s time to turn that idea into a living, breathing piece of awesomeness.

Step #2: Make Your Wow Content a Reality

You know what bugs me?

When so-called SEO “experts” tell you that the secret to higher rankings is to “publish great content”.

I’m not going to lie to you:

Great content is KEY.

But very few of those experts ever tell you how to create great content.

Don’t worry: I won’t leave you hanging.

I’m going to teach you three insanely-practical techniques to make your Wow Content worthy of all those “wows”.

Technique #1: Length is Strength

This may not come as a surprise, but I’ll say it anyway…

Long-form content absolutely CRUSHES short blog posts.

In fact, it’s not even close.

Here’s proof:

OKDork and BuzzSumo recently teamed up to answer the question: what makes content go viral?

After analyzing over 100 million articles (!), they found that longer content generated significantly more social shares than short content.

As you can see in the graph, 3000+ word articles get more social shares on Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin, Twitter and Google+.

This actually also plays out here at SPI. Here’s the social share/content length breakdown for content published at SPI over the last 6-months.

As you can see, Pat’s long-form content performs head and shoulders above shorter posts.

Longer content also tends to rank better in Google.

SERPIQ analyzed at Google’s first page results for over 20,000 keywords.

What did they find?

That long articles tended to rank higher in Google.

In fact, the average word count of a top 10 result in Google was over 2000 words.

Bottom Line: Make your piece of Wow Content is at least 2000 words. Don’t be afraid to publish something that’s 5000 words plus. The longer the content, the better it tends to do.

Technique #2: Stand Out With Your Content Design

Sure, content length is REALLY important…

…but long content isn’t going to get you anywhere unless you have the design to back it up.

Here’s what I mean:

A few years back Derek Halpern introduced a very interesting research study to the marketing world…

A research study that surprised a lot of veteran marketers.

The study was called, “Trust and mistrust of online health sites”.

In this study researchers asked subjects to look at two websites:

One website was professionally designed. The other looked dated and ugly.

When the researchers asked people why they mistrusted the information on either site, 94% said it was because of design.

And get this: the content on both websites was EXACTLY the same.

What does this have to do with your Wow Content?

The fact is, people make HUNDREDS of micro-impressions about your content before they’ve read a single word.

And those impressions are based 100% on your content’s design. The better it looks, the better impression you’ll leave (and the more people will link to it).

A quick example:

Last year Neil Patel published a jaw-dropping guide called The Advanced Guide to SEO.

Considering Neil’s guide boasts 45,000 words spread across 9-chapters, this guide would have done pretty well with a standard blog post design.

But Neil knew the power of awesome content design. That’s why he had every chapter professionally designed, like this:

Here’s what’s interesting:

When you read the blog comments that people left on QuickSprout, a good chunk of them are people showering praise the guide before they’ve even had a chance to read it.

How could James, Chad, Amir and Ivan get so excited about something they haven’t even read?

The answer: Neil’s guide looks amazing.

Obviously, the meat of Neil’s guide was world-class (as it always is). You’re not putting lipstick on a pig here.

But if you want people to really say “wow”, you NEED to invest in content design. Period.

Here are some simple (and cheap) ways to do just that:

Custom Post-Specific Banners

When someone lands on one of your blog posts what’s the first thing they see?

If you think it’s your navigation bar or first paragraph, you’re wrong.

Eye tracking studies show that people’s eyes naturally gravitate towards images:

(Red=where people look)

That’s why you want to include a custom image at the top of your Wow Content.

This is something that Pat does here at SPI for most of his posts:

It doesn’t take much to set these up.

Just grab a free stock photo, pop it into PowerPoint and add some text. Canva and PicMonkey work too.

If you’re not a graphic design ninja, you can hire someone on Upwork to make them for you (that’s what I do).

This post-specific image set me back a measly 10 bucks:

Looks pretty nice, right?

Section Banners

If you want to take your content design to the next level, consider using “section banners” to break up your content.

What are section banners?

They’re custom banners that you include with each subheader in your article.

For example, I have a post that’s a long list of Google’s (supposed and speculated-on) ranking factors.

I hopped on Elance and hired a designer to create custom banners for each category.

Here’s an example:

Not a big deal on its own. But when you have 10 of these on a page — plus the post-specific banner at the top — you really stand out from the pack.

Boxes and Callouts

Boxes and callouts make a bland blog post look more like a magazine article (which is a good thing).

More importantly, these custom design elements make your content look flat out better than every bland blog post out there.

Greg Ciotti, who runs the excellent Help Scout blog, uses callouts liberally to break up his blog posts.

Like this:

and this:

The rub is that you usually need to hire a developer to set these bells and whistles up for you.

Fortunately, I recently come across a nifty program called Thrive Content Builder. It basically allows you to add callouts and other design elements in blog posts without having to code.

Bottom Line: Invest some time and money into the visual side of your content and reap the benefits.

Technique #3: “An Inch Wide, a Mile Deep”

Finally, you want your content to boast what most of today’s online content lacks:

Depth.

Let me explain:

You see, most content skims the surface of a topic.

For example, you’re no doubt familiar with the dreaded list post, like “25 tips for burning fat” or “12 ways to get more email subscribers”.

The problem with these types of posts is that they briefly touch on a dozen different topics.

The fact is, people want insane levels of DEPTH in their content. Content that holds them by the hand and gives them all the meaty details.

A good rule of thumb is to go “An inch wide, a mile deep” with everything that you publish.

An inch wide because you’re covering one very small part of a larger topic.

A mile deep because you’re hitting every possible angle on that topic.

Example of a post that’s too broad: “5 tips for landing a job in a tough economy”

Example of an IWMD (inch wide, mile deep) post: “The 3-step strategy for making your LinkedIn profile stand out from the pack”.

Here’s a great example of IWMD content from the HubSpot blog.

Noah’s post goes into INSANE detail about his homepage redesign.

This is NOT “5 tips for getting more email subscribers”….

…it’s “How My Blog Homepage Redesign Increased Email Signups by 300%”.

See the difference?

This post gives you INSANE detail about creating a homepage that converts readers into subscribers.

This post covers things like:

• How to write benefit-driven copy and encourages people to sign up.
• Adding social proof
• Removing the navigation bar

This is super in-depth advice that people can put into practice right away.

Another example:

30-days of HIIT is a (free) comprehensive high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout.

And it’s one of the most in-depth pieces of content I’ve EVER seen.

Forget tips like “do 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off”.

This guide gives you the EXACT workouts to do for each of the 30-days.

For example, here’s day 1:

This content leaves very little guesswork. You have everything you need except for a pair of sneakers.

Bottom Line: Make sure your wow content is IWMD through and through.

At this point you should have one piece of Wow Content ready to rock. Now it’s time to do what you came here to do: build some links.

Step #3: Reach Out and Get Your Links

Here’s why most people struggle with link building:

They think that the only way to proactively build links is to blast their site with phony blog comments and spammy profile links.

Fortunately, that’s far from the truth.

When you have a piece of Wow Content, you’ll find that people actually WANT to link to you.

You just have to get those people to see it.

Here’s how.

Strategy #1: Resource Page Link Building

Resource pages are a link building goldmine.

What are resources pages?

They’re pages exist to link out to helpful resources on other sites.

Here’s an example from SPI:

Think about this for a second:

You’ve got a page that links out to helpful resources…

…and you just created a helpful resource.

Can you say match made in heaven?

Here’s exactly how to get backlinks from resource pages:

Step #1: Find Resource Pages In Your Niche

Most resource pages have footprints that you can use to find them at scale.

Here are some search strings to try:

• “keyword” + inurl:resources
• “keyword” + inurl:links
• “keyword” + “helpful resources”
• “keyword” + “useful links”

Going back to our gardening example, here’s a search string that you’d want to use:

In about 5 seconds I found over 150,000 pages that just might want to link to my Wow Content.

Of course, a good chunk of these results won’t make sense for one reason or another (for example, pages that aren’t actually about gardening).

But this number gives you an idea of how many potential resource page links are there for the taking.

Step #2: Evaluate the Page

Click on one of the pages in the results.

Here’s one that I found from my gardening search:

Here are a few questions you want to ask yourself when sizing up a resource page:

• Is this on a legit site? Or does it look shady or abandoned?
• Is this site relevant to my niche?
• Is the site offering up link exchanges (common with resource pages)?
• Does the page have dofollowed links out to other sites?
• Does the site have decent SEO metrics, especially Domain Authority (you can also look at Page Authority)?
• Would a link to your Wow Content add value to that page?

In the case of the page above, it looks great. It’s a super-niche relevant, DA51 site.
And a link to my awesome gardening resource would fit that page like a glove.

Now it’s time for step #3…

Step #3: Ask For Your Link

Once you’ve found a page that seems like a good fit, it’s time to reach out and ask for a link.

Here’s the script that I recommend:

Subject: Your resource page

Hi NAME,

I stumbled on your awesome TOPIC resource page today. Awesome work!

I actually just put the finishing touches on a BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF WOW CONTENT:
URL.

It might make a nice addition to your page. Either way, keep up the great work you’re doing with SITE.

I’ve found that this approach and script convert at 5-10% (depending on the niche).

Trust me: in the world of email outreach link building, 5-10% is AWESOME.

Plus, these are Grade-A white hat backlinks. The type of links that actually make a long-term difference in your site’s rankings.

Strategy #2: Broken Link Building

Want to take resource page link building to the next level?

Then broken link building is one strategy you want to start leveraging today.

What is it?

Instead of begging for links from site owners…

…you find broken links on their site first.

And then beg for your link

When you point out a broken link to someone — and offer your Wow Content as a replacement — they’re MUCH more likely to add your link.

Let me break it down for you, step-by-step.

Step #1: Find Broken Links

When you find a broken link on a page you want to get a link from, you’re good as gold.

The only problem is:

Finding broken links can be a HUGE pain.

I’m not going to lie to you: this step in the process does take some work. But the conversion rate you’ll get from BLB vs. straight up link begging is worth the trouble.

Here’s how to find them:

Resource Pages + Check My Links

Remember all those resource pages you found earlier?

Well before you reach out and ask for a link, check to see if there are any broken links on that page.

For example, here’s a PR4 page resource page I found using the search string “gardening” + inurl:links.

I could simply ask for a link on that page…and that would convert pretty well.

But I can easily double or triple my conversion rate by pointing out a broken link or two.

The easiest way to find broken links on a page is to run the free Check My Links extension for Chrome.

As you can see, when I ran Check My Links on that page, it found a broken link:

When I click on that link, sure enough, it’s a 404 page pointing to a page that used to have information about the US Botanical Garden in Washington DC:

Rinse and repeat with all of the resource pages that you come across.

OSE Top Pages

Another awesome way to find broken links is with a little-known feature of Open Site Explorer.

First, grab the homepage URL of a site you’d like to get a link from and pop it into OSE:

Next, click on the “Top Pages” tab. This will sort the pages on that site by Page Authority.

Finally, choose “4xx” from the dropdown menu “Show pages with status…”

This will give you a list of authoritative pages on that site that are broken.

For example, Inc.com has a PA72 404 page that used to contain links to their marketing guides:

So what do you DO with this link?

You find all of the pages that link to this page.

You can use Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs for this step.

I prefer Ahrefs.

Just enter the 404 page’s URL into the tool…

…and you’ll get a list of pages that link to the broken link you just found.

Now it’s time to get your links.

Step #2: Reach Out and Get Your Links

Finally, email the person that runs the page with the broken link with this script:

Subject: Broken link at SITE

Hi NAME,

I stumbled on your awesome TOPIC resource page today. Awesome work!

Just wanted to let you know that I found a few dead links:
URL #1
URL #2

Also, I actually just put the finishing touches on a BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF WOW CONTENT:
URL.

It might make a nice addition to your page. Either way, keep up the great work you’re doing with SITE.

As you can see, it’s very similar to the resource page link building script. The only difference is that you add a touch of value before your pitch.

Strategy #3: Reverse Engineering

Next, it’s time to tap into an old school link building strategy that never goes out of style: reverse engineering.

Here’s the 3-step process:

Step #1: Identify an Authoritative Page

First, you need to find the right page to reverse engineer.

The “right” page is a relevant page in your industry with lots of white hat links.

Here are a few places to find them:

Google’s Top 20

Just search for keywords that you’d like to rank for and see what shows up. Generally, pages that rank for competitive keywords have some link authority behind them.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo shows you content that’s generated a lot of social shares. Generally, content that’s racked up a lot of social shares has also acquired some backlinks to boot.

Open Site Explorer’s “Top Pages”

This is the tab in OSE that I mentioned earlier. Instead of looking for 404 pages, you’re simply looking for pages that have a lot of links pointing to them.

Content You Used to Inspire Your Wow Content

You already did the hard work of finding popular content in your industry. And you made something even better. Sites linking to the content you found in Step #1 from this post make PERFECT link opportunities.

Step #2: Find Their (Quality) Links

Next, it’s time to find the links pointing to the pages that you found.

First, pop the URL into your link analysis tool of choice.

Then identify any of their links that you may also be able to get your hands on (for example, an editorial link on a resource page).

Word of Warning: You want to be super careful that you reverse engineer the right links. Keep in mind that just because a site is ranking above you today, doesn’t mean they’ll be there tomorrow. Use the criteria I outlined under the “First, What Still Works From The Original “THE Backlinking Strategy That Works”?” section of this post to make sure you’re only reverse engineering white hat backlinks.

Step #3: Grab As Many Quality Links as You Can

Now it’s time to grab the links that your competitors have. Your approach will depend on the type of link.

For example, if it’s from a guest post, you’ll need to also write a guest post. If it’s a resource page link, you’ll need a piece of Wow Content that would make sense for that page.

For example, let’s say you wanted to reverse engineer the Wow Content I mentioned earlier: 100+ Ways to Conserve Water.

In about 15 seconds I found a niche-relevant resource page about water conservation linking to that page:

Sure enough, that page has several broken links…making it a prime broken link building opportunity.

Repeat the process until you run out of potential link opportunities.

Strategy #4: Infographics (With a Twist)

Infographic marketing — when done right — is easily one of the most scalable white hat link building strategies on the planet…

…Especially when you add the twist I’m about to share with you.

Now I could write an entire post about how to create and design an infographic (in fact, I did).

But here’s the thing:

Creating a winning infographic isn’t very different than any other piece of Wow Content. The difference is how you promote it.

And now I’m going to show you how to turn an infographic into high-quality links using the 5-step Guestographic Method.

Step #1: Publish an Awesome “Wow Content” Infographic on Your Site

This step is pretty straightforward: just follow steps #1 and #2 from this post. The only difference is that your Wow Content will be an infographic instead of a blog post or article.

Step #2: Find People That Want to See Your Infographic

Don’t overthink this:

Once you have your infographic in hand, it’s time to show it to people that would want to check it out.

Who are those people, exactly?

Bloggers that write about your infographic’s topic.

For example, let’s say you just published an infographic about the paleo diet.

Head over to Google and start typing “paleo diet” into the search field. Grab the top 20 results for the keyword “paleo diet”…and anything else Google Suggest throws at you:

Step #3: Send Your Infographic

Now it’s time to reach out and pitch your infographic to the people you just found.

You’re not asking for anything at this point. You just want to gauge their interest.

Here’s the word-for-word script to send them. I’m going to use an infographic about paleo desserts as an example.

Subject: Paleo desserts

Hey Pat,

I was looking for some paleo recipes this morning when I came across your excellent post about paleo side dishes.

I actually just put together an infographic about paleo desserts last week.

As someone that’s interested in paleo recipes, I thought you might get a kick out of it. Let me know if you want me to send it over.

Step #4: Send Your Infographic (with a bribe)

When they get back to you saying “sure, send it over”, it’s time to send them this script:

Cool. Here’s the infographic:
URL

Also, let me know if you ever want to publish this infographic on your site. I’ll be happy to write a unique introduction just for you.

Why the unique intro?

Well when someone wants to publish an infographic on their site, there’s a HUGE barrier that prevents them from pulling the trigger:

The fact that they have to write a unique introduction to go along with the infographic.

After all, they can’t simply copy and paste your infographic into WordPress and call it a day.

But when you offer to write that unique introduction for them, you remove that barrier and make their life easier.

Step #5: Write The Intro and Get Some Awesome Links

Finally, it’s time to write a high-quality 200-300 word introduction to accompany the infographic.

Make sure to add a link to your infographic in the intro.

Here’s an example of a Guestographic backlink that I built a while back:

As you can see, contextual links like that are the type of squeaky clean editorial backlinks that Google likes to see today.

The post THE Backlinking Strategy That Works: 2014 and Beyond Edition appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

When I think back to all of the most noteworthy moments of my online business career—from my first digital product sale back in 2008, to my first feature article on a top-blogger's website in 2009, to my first speaking gig in 2011, to the launch of my best-selling book [This link leads to Amazon. As an affiliate, I receive a commission when you purchase through this link.] on Amazon—beyond the hard work and the patience I had to have, they all have one major thing in common:

For every milestone, I can pinpoint one or more people who played a critical role in the outcome. Without those people, those events may never have happened.

In other words, I would not be where I am today if it weren't for those people I had built a relationship with.

You must be actively building real relationships with other bloggers and entrepreneurs—online and off.

In my opinion, there is no better way to grow your blog and business and create real life-changing opportunities for yourself.

If I could go back in time and give my younger self some advice, it would be this:

“Pat, dude. First, lose the bowl cut. Second, and more importantly, the best way to get ahead in life is to get to know and build relationships with as many people as you can. When you get a job in the architecture world, it's not going to be because of your resume, it's going to be because of someone you know. When you lose your job in the architecture world, it's going to hurt, but other people will be there to guide you. Search for those people, find the ones you trust who inspire you, and let them guide you. It's all going to work out, but one thing's for sure: you cannot do it alone.”

Now it's my turn to introduce someone who is a master at relationship building, and definitely a person you should know about: John Corcoran of Smart Business Revolution. You'll see just how systematic, but real and valuable his approach is.

John has introduced me to so many amazing people, many of whom have been featured here on the blog and SPI podcast before. He has a gift for knowing who should know who.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell states, “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” Gladwell discusses three types of people who become those “Agents of Change” in the tipping points of epidemics. They are:

1. Connectors
2. Mavens; and
3. Salesmen

John is a connector. I met him in person earlier this year and I already felt like I knew him. I'm 100% positive you'll find major value in his guest post below about how to go about approaching other bloggers and entrepreneurs and how to build a true and mutually beneficial relationship that will take you and your blog or business to the next level.

Take it away, John!

Jeff Rose is not your typical personal finance blogger. In fact, one of the most valuable lessons he learned about blogging came in Baghdad.

As an Army Staff Sergeant for the Illinois Army National Guard, he led a division of nine other men into battle in the early years of the War in Iraq.

That’s right folks: he can explain the details of annuities to you, and he can operate an M-4 rifle. Better pay attention, right?

The experience taught him many lessons: the importance of working hand-in-hand with teammates, building relationships with your team, and helping one another. “Early on during training, it was embarrassing. We couldn’t function as a team,” says Rose. Over time, Rose and the other members of his platoon got to know each other better and their relationships gelled. “Everything started to click and then by the end of our tour in Iraq, we were a machine.”

It was a lesson that Rose applied years later when he had returned to the private sector. When Rose started his own financial planning firm, he knew he needed something unique to stand out.

“I had just left my big firm, so I was looking for unique ways to market myself,” says Rose. “I was reading a financial planning trade magazine, and they had an article that said if you want to stand out from the crowd of other financial advisors, you need to start a blog. I didn’t even know what a blog was, but I was determined to figure it out.”

But Rose soon found blogging wasn’t as easy as it seemed. “There was some growth early on, but not much,” he says. “If I got 100 people to my blog, I was blown away.”

He quickly learned it takes more than writing regularly to grow your blog.

That’s when Rose started connecting with other personal finance bloggers. Rose found a mentor—another financial advisor at his former firm who had been blogging for a number of years. “He gave me guidance. He showed me how it was done.”

Shortly after that, Rose joined a private forum with other bloggers who provided critical advice and support. Much like Pat’s experience with the Internet Business Master Community early in his blogging career, this little community of other personal finance bloggers became a crucial source of support, guidance and friendship.

The group also helped Rose with putting together a major post that put him on the radar screen of many fellow personal finance bloggers.

“One of the very first posts that did really well for me was ‘107 things that make good financial cents,'” says Rose. “I had at least 60 bloggers who contributed. That was the post that put me on the map.”

Jeff Rose’s story is a common one, because his experience demonstrates the importance of teamwork. Like an army platoon going in to battle, you need a team. You cannot go it alone.

In this post, I’m going to explain why one of the most important things you can do as a blogger—especially early in your blogging career—is to start building relationships with other bloggers and online entrepreneurs. This is a theme Pat has written or spoken about frequently, as he’s credited the value of relationships with other bloggers, key mentors and mastermind groups with much of his success.

However, if you’re just getting started, you might be unsure of where to begin or how to go about connecting with other bloggers—particularly bloggers who are more advanced and successful than you are.

To help you develop those key relationships you need to be successful as a blogger, I’m going to share my own 7-step system you can use to build relationships with other bloggers and online entrepreneurs that can lead to real growth for your audience.

Why You Need to Forge Relationships With Other Bloggers

First, I have a confession to make. For years, I went about blogging the wrong way.

I spent day after day laboring over new posts for my blog. I didn’t get to know other bloggers. I didn’t attend conferences or meetups or try to connect with other bloggers or online entrepreneurs.

Then, one day, I took a hard look at my results. I realized I hardly knew anyone who was doing what I was doing. I had few friends who were on the same journey. More importantly, my growth was stagnant.

That’s when I realized I had to break out from behind my WordPress walls. I had successfully built networks in different industries throughout my career—from politics to Hollywood to Silicon Valley—and I needed to do it with blogging as well.

Corbett Barr agrees. When he started blogging back in 2009, he struggled to gain traction. “I was in the trenches, just trying to write content that would break through.” He found he needed to branch out beyond his existing circle of friends at the time. “You realize for the type of thing you’re writing in your circles there are only going to be a few people who care about it.”

That’s when he discovered how important it was to connect with other bloggers. “I didn’t have a breakthrough until I focused on relationships,” says Barr.

Today, as the co-founder of Fizzle, Barr shows other bloggers and online business owners how to use a casual, friendly approach to grow relationships first, which can later blossom into business opportunities. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

“Just make friends with people then talk about what each other is working on. Start first with casual encounters by attending a meetup or some event, then become friends, then start sharing, then move on to affiliate relationships,” he says.

How to Systemize Your Relationship Building

I'm going to share with you my 7-step process for growing your blog by building relationships with other bloggers and online entrepreneurs.

This is a plan I wish I had five years ago. As soon as Pat figures out how to get his hands on a real-life Flux Capacitor, then I’m going back in time and handing this plan to a younger me five years ago.

First, I'll go over the seven steps. Then, I’ll dive into how you can apply them to growing your blog and your business.

Here are the seven steps:

1. Develop a Mindset of Helping Others First
2. Create a Roadmap to Your Future
3. Before Reaching Out, Lay the Foundation Using Social Media
4. Learn How to Email Busy Bloggers and Get a Response Every Time
5. Get Offline and Start Attending Conferences and Events
6. Create a System for Following Up
7. Measure ROI and Optimize Your System

OK, now let’s take a look at how to apply these steps.

1. Develop a Mindset of Helping Others First

One of the biggest barriers for new bloggers who are trying to build their platform is not that they don’t have any connections to begin with, or that their blog readership is small, or that they don’t have anything to offer. The problem is they are thinking too much of themselves, rather than of others.

That can sound confusing. How can you build your own audience and following if you’re supposed to focus on helping others?

In fact, as Pat has demonstrated over the years, you get ahead by helping others, not by helping yourself. Just take a look at his Twitter stream sometime, and you’ll see how much time he spends helping others.

As Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

Jeff Rose says it took him a while to realize the importance of helping others first. “I think at the beginning I didn’t quite get it. I was being somewhat selfish,” says Rose. As an example, Rose approached the Art of Manliness blog and pitched himself to be profiled in their “So You Want My Job” series.

“I emailed and said I love the blog and you’ve never done a ‘So You Want My Job’ profile on a financial advisor—and I offered myself,” says Rose, who laughs at the memory. In spite of his approach, Rose landed the profile. “It was very self-serving at the time. If I did it again, I’d do it differently.”&

2. Create a Roadmap to Your Future

You wouldn’t leave the house for a 1,000-mile journey without a map, would you? Of course not. You wouldn’t make it very far.

In business, your relationships make up the roads and highways that guide your journey. You can’t get to your end destination without them.

And yet most people embark on the journey of their career, or try to build a business, without taking time to map out their route. They spend almost no time thinking about how they should build relationships to support their journey—even though those relationships are one of the most critical factors in a person’s success or failure.

As a result, they wander without direction or focus.

So, create your own roadmap. Sit down and create a list of the 50+ bloggers or online entrepreneurs you want to connect with in the next 12 months.

I call this your “Conversations List” because you should think of it as a list of people you want to have an ongoing conversation with over time. You can do this by creating a very simple spreadsheet using Google Drive, like this:

As you can see, you don’t need much information. Just some basic details. I also like to write down how I can be of help to that particular person.

For example, if Pat Flynn was on your list, then you could make a note that he’s interested in doing more keynote speaking. If Jaime Tardy was on your list, maybe you’d note she can always use interesting guests for her Eventual Millionaire podcast or help with promoting her book. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Who should be on your list? Don’t just include people who are already successful. “Often people think that networking is all about connecting with people who are bigger or more successful than they are,” says Corbett Barr. “But actually, you should focus often on people who are at about your level. Some of my most meaningful relationships have been with people who were at my same level.”

Barr also says you should try to connect with other bloggers who are go-getters with good work ethics. “Spot people in your peer group that are standouts and become friends with them,” he says.

I suggest a varied approach—include a lot of bloggers who are “at your level,” but also include some bloggers you admire who are further on the journey and who you think you can help out.

You can create a similar list for organizations you are interested in participating in and events you want to attend. I’d suggest a much smaller list of 6-8 organizations and 6-8 events you’d like to involve yourself with over time.

3. Before Reaching Out, Lay the Foundation Using Social Media

Before you dash off an email to a blogger you are hoping will become your new BFF, hold your horses a minute. Slow down. You don’t ask to get married before asking for a first date.

Take some time to lay a little foundation.

Let’s pretend you’re back in high school, and you want to meet a new girl. Do you walk right up to her and introduce yourself? Probably not, right?

Instead, you show up where she hangs out. You find ways to have a few short conversations in the halls or the cafeteria. Then, once she has seen your face around awhile, you are no longer some anonymous person she doesn’t know.

Social media works the same way. You can use it to show your face around and exchange short messages so that when you go in for that direct email, you’re not some anonymous stranger.

The key here is to use the platform where the blogger is most active, not your social media platform of choice. You may prefer Facebook, but if the blogger you want to connect with is most active on Instagram, then that’s where you need to be.

In Pat’s case, he’s pretty active on Facebook:

On the other hand, if you wanted to connect with Facebook marketing wizard Amy Porterfield, you’re more likely to make a personal connection with her on her Instagram account:

Online video expert “Uncle” Caleb Wojcik is active on Twitter:

Whatever the platform, look out for opportunities to help, or reply to a request for feedback. Here’s what that might look like:

4. Learn How to Email Busy Bloggers and Get a Response Every Time

Assuming you have already laid the foundation and “warmed up” the relationship using social media, then you’ve already done the heavy lifting. Now you need to contact that person. There are four key principles to connecting with other bloggers who may be as busy or busier than you are.

The four principles are:

1. Do Your Research
2. Keep it Short
3. Focus on THEM
4. Have a Clear Call to Action

One of the best books I’ve read on how to email busy bloggers was originally published in 1936, and it’s one of both Pat’s and my favorites. It’s called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. [This link leads to Amazon. Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Of course, Carnegie didn’t know he was writing a book that would apply to blogging or email, neither of which would be invented for another 40+ years. But the principles in the book are universally applicable, whether you are connecting with someone in-person, over the phone or via email.

“Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it,” wrote Carnegie. “But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.”

Corbett Barr says that when you email someone, you should entice their self-interest by grabbing their attention. “Lead with your best foot forward, whether by name dropping or key facts, such as ‘my podcast gets 50,000 downloads a month, and I’d love to have you on as a guest,'” says Barr.

Another approach is to try to land a big name first, then use that to reel in others. For example, if you were creating an interview series, you might say something like “I’d love to get 15 mins of your time to participate in the interview series, and I’m going to make it really easy for you,” says Barr. “Oh, and by the way, Leo Babauta has confirmed he’s participating as well.”

The blogger you are trying to get involved may want to participate just so they can connect with or be associated with the big name blogger.

One last tip: “Pull out and make bold the thing you’re asking them to do,” says Barr. “Often you have to read five paragraphs to figure out what the ask is.”

5. Get Offline and Start Attending Conferences and Events

Another thing you should absolutely do is get out of your office, crawl out from behind your laptop and start meeting people.

If you live in a small town, this is even more important. Start traveling to conferences like the New Media Expo, World Domination Summit, Financial Bloggers Conference (FinCon) or Social Media Marketing World.

You’ll make great friends and meet partners you can work with as your business grows.

Whatever you do, don’t expect to build as solid relationships with people without meeting them in person. I hung out with Pat at New Media Expo one year and even though I had connected with him online years earlier (and even wrote another SPI guest post years ago), I believe you get to know someone far better once you meet face-to-face.

6. Create a System for Following Up

The next step is to create a system for following up. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make after meeting someone is failing to follow up.

Here’s how it happens: you meet someone at NMX or WDS or a meetup. You have a good conversation and maybe you think, “This is someone I'd like to get to know.”

And then… nothing.

You don't follow up with that person. And they don't follow up with you. It's as if you never met.

Do you realize how crazy a strategy this is, especially if you don't like networking? By not following up, it's like you're dooming yourself to the networking hamster wheel.

If you want to go pro with your blog, you need a system for following up and managing relationships. If you have a system for following up, it helps ensure you spend time deepening your relationship with the people who matter.

Now, you can try to schedule reminders in your calendar manually, but that will get unwieldy quickly. A much better approach is to use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program to automate reminders to follow up.

There are literally dozens of CRMs, and more and more of them have been aiming at the small solopreneur market. These include Insightly, Podio, Nimble, and larger options traditionally used by sales people like Salesforce. Products like Infusionsoft [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] and Ontraport have CRM features built in.

I use a tool called Contactually which I love because it helps me manage thousands of relationships in minimal time.

Here’s how it works: you sync your email account, your LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media profiles, and then Contactually creates merged profiles for all of your contacts. You then prioritize people into “buckets” based off how frequently you want to follow up with that person. Contactually will send you reminders to follow up at that interval.

Here’s a quick video to walk you through how it works:

(Here's a direct link to the same video on YouTube)

7. Measure ROI and Optimize Your System

Finally, you need to be able to figure out if all of this is worthwhile. Are these relationships generating more income for your business? Or is your blog just a fun hobby?

To figure that out, practice keeping track of any incoming business or professional referrals for 30 days. This is going to be easiest if you use your blog to sell a service like coaching or web design, but it can also work if you sell digital products as well.

Create a simple Google Drive document that includes the first and last name or the business name of the new client or buyer and the referral source. The referral source could be a person, an organization or a conference where that new client came from.

Here’s what it might look like:

Now here’s the key point. Over time, you will be able to see patterns emerge. Notice in this example:

Pay attention to these patterns. Not only will you see which relationships are bearing the most fruit, but you’ll also see which relationships are most useful or which conferences or meetups you attended yielded the best payback.

You can also figure out which organizations you should remain involved with—or better yet, deepen your involvement with. Then you can double-down, or cut out what doesn’t yield results.

Now Go Out and Build Your Network

There are no black hat ninja SEO tricks that will get you a flood of powerful connections and friends overnight.

If you want to break through as a blogger, then you need to focus on building relationships.

But if you are willing to put in the time and effort, your relationships will be be an asset that fuels your business for years to come.

“You've got to find other bloggers you feel you can connect with,” says Rose. “You don’t have to go for the big time bloggers. Find the bloggers who’ve been around 3-5 years who haven’t reached that A+ elite status who you can connect with—find that commonality and give first.”

The post How to Grow Your Blog Audience By Building Relationships with Other Bloggers: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

A note from Pat: I'm in Australia right now with my family—part vacation, and partly to give the keynote presentation at the ProBlogger event this weekend on the Gold Coast! It's been such an amazing trip so far (thanks Queensland!), and be sure to check out the Facebook Page, Instagram or my Twitter feed for updates throughout the week. In the meantime, I have an extremely exciting guest post to share with you from Josh Earl, who used one tool to grow his email list by almost 200k emails in less than two weeks. A crazy and awesome story, and what he talks about is definitely something new that I am excited to try myself soon too. Check it out and enjoy!

Here's Josh…

When the biggest opportunity of my entrepreneurial life showed up in my Gmail inbox, I did what I do dozens of times a day.

I archived it.

What was this opportunity?

At first glance it just looked like an email announcement for yet another contest.

The email was from Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo. He was giving away five of his favorite books from Seth Godin to anyone who entered his contest.

>I already have 150-plus books on my reading wish list, so the contest didn't appeal to me.

A couple of minutes later, I had second thoughts. I've used contests before to help grow The Sublime Text Tips Newsletter, and I was planning to do another one soon. Noah's a pretty savvy guy, I thought, so maybe I could learn something from how he's running his contest.

I dug through my archived items, clicked through to his contest landing page and entered my email address.

Then my jaw dropped.

Why Most Contests Are Broken

As I mentioned, I was no stranger to contests. I'd run two of them, and both were fairly successful.

But there was a fundamental flaw that always bothered me. I'll come back to that in a minute, but first, here's how I ran my first two contests.

First, I picked a giveaway. I'm selling a book about a programming tool called Sublime Text, so the most logical choice was a license for the software I was writing about.

Next, I wrote a short blog post announcing the contest. The winner would be randomly selected from my email list, so people had to opt-in to enter.

Then I shared the contest on social media and Hacker News, and hoped for the best.

Do you see the fatal flaw?

It's subtle, but in order for my contests to succeed, I needed people to act against their own best interests.

Imagine that you discovered a little-known lottery. Only 10 people had even purchased tickets, and one of those was a guaranteed winner. You have a 1 in 10 chance of winning.

Now, the lottery rules specify that there can only be one winner, so if another person enters, your chances of winning drop to 1 in 11.

What would you do? Are you going to tell all of your friends and neighbors about this contest, diluting your chances of winning further every time you open your mouth?

In the case of my contests, a few people were so excited about the giveaway that they did just that. My giveaway promotional tweets got a healthy number of retweets, and the announcement for the second giveaway landed on the front page of Hacker News due to all the upvotes it received.

>But each of those tweets and upvotes was a little act of self-denial, and a majority of people made the rational choice and decided not to hurt their chances of winning by sharing the contest.

This built-in conflict of interest bugged me, and I kept trying to think of a way to overcome it.

What if the giveaway could harness self-interest instead of fighting it?

That's why Noah's contest floored me: He'd flipped this equation on its head, finding a way get people to share his contest rather than sitting on it.

Here's how it worked.

He sent out an email, inviting me and everyone else on his email list to enter a giveaway he was running for five of Seth Godin's most popular books.

All I had to do to enter was put in my email address.

After I entered, he sent a follow-up email asking me to confirm my entry, and offering a way that I could increase my chances of winning.

The email included a “lucky URL” that I could share with my Twitter followers and Facebook friends. For each person that entered after clicking my lucky URL, I'd get three extra chances to win!

Now I had an incentive to plaster my lucky URL all over the Internet, turning me and the rest of the contest entrants into list-building ambassadors and driving ever-increasing amounts of traffic to the giveaway.

It was engineered virality.

Mind. Blown.

So How Can I Make My Contest Go Viral?

Then I happened to notice a little badge on Noah's giveaway page:

Wait–you mean there's a tool that would let me do the same thing?

Yep, Noah and his taco-fueled ninjas had released the code behind this brilliant giveaway strategy in the form of a WordPress plugin called KingSumo Giveaways.

And it was only $197.

I instabought.

How to Setup a Viral Giveaway

I'd wanted to run another contest this summer, but my internal struggle over what format to use had kept me from pulling the trigger.

That resistance vanished when I discovered KingSumo Giveaways, and I quickly sketched out my schedule.

I'd kick it off on Monday, July 7, immediately following the July Fourth holiday weekend in the U.S. My previous contests had each spanned more than a week to give me plenty of time to promote them, so I decided to run this contest through the end of July 17. I'd choose the winner the next day.

With my schedule mapped out, it was time to set up my contest.

What I Needed

To run a contest with the KingSumo Giveaways plugin, I needed to have a few things in place:

1. A website or blog that runs on WordPress
2. The ability to install WordPress plugins (wordpress.com sites won't work)
3. The ability to send emails from my website.

Installing the KingSumo plugin

KingSumo Giveaways is a premium WordPress plugin, and it installs just like install other plugins.

Once I'd purchased and downloaded the plugin, I logged in to my your WordPress site and clicked Plugins | Add New.

I clicked the Upload tab, then Choose File. Once I'd selected the .zip file, I clicked Install Now, and I was ready to set the plugin up.

Configuring the plugin

Before I could run my first contest, I had to do a little setup in the KingSumo Giveaways settings page, located under Settings | KingSumo Giveaways in the WordPress sidebar.

Entering the license key and social media info

The General tab included fields for my license key, Facebook page and Twitter handle. These are important–they're included when people share the contest. I didn't bother with Facebook, since I mainly use Twitter. Big mistake! I ended up gaining a lot of Twitter followers during the contest, and I could have grabbed a ton of Facebook fans if I'd been smarter.

Customizing the emails

The Emails tab is where I customized the emails that went out to people who entered my contest, including the email addresses used in the From and Reply-To fields, as well as the subject line and body for the entry email (sent to every person who enters) and the winner email (sent after the contest ended).

The email templates support short codes that will customize the email with the name of the giveaway and other contest-specific info, so the same template can be used for multiple contests.

I tweaked the subject line and body of the default entry email to encourage more people to share the contest–more on that in a bit.

Adding a physical address

Under the Settings tab, I entered an address for display on the contest page. I have a P.O. box that I registered for use in cases like this where I don't want to broadcast my home address.

Connecting the plugin to an email provider (optional)

The Services tab offered the option to connect the plugin directly to my email provider, so everyone who enters the contest would be automatically added to my mailing list. (Aweber and MailChimp are supported at the moment, and I hear that the KingSumo team plans to support other major players in the future.)

However, I didn't connect the plugin to MailChimp, and I'm glad I didn't.

I say this for two reasons. First, my contest did better than I expected, and I would have suddenly found myself with a bill of more than $1,000 from MailChimp.

And second, a few people tried to cheat and submit a bunch of fraudulent email addresses to game the system, and this could have gotten my MailChimp account shut down.

If I'd been piping emails directly into my email service I would have been in trouble. Instead I opted to download the entries as a .csv file and import them by hand.

Adding tracking scripts

Under the Advanced tab, there's a spot to paste extra code that will be included in the footer of the contest pages. I use Google Analytics for tracking, and this is where I installed it.

Setting up the contest

With the setup out of the way, it was time to create my actual contest.

To get started, click KingSumo Giveaways | Add New in the WordPress sidebar.

The fields on the Add New Giveaway page set the rules for the contest and customize the appearance of the giveaway page.

The contest rules options include the contest start and end date, when the prize is awarded, the number of entries a contestant receives when they refer a friend, the prize name, value and image, and the number of winners.

It also includes a “question” that contestants have to answer. This is designed to reduce the number of spam submissions, like a captcha, so I made the answer really obvious.

The title, description and images fields control how the contest's appearance.

The title text is included when people share the page on social media. I deliberately kept mine short and clear, and made sure to include the word “giveaway” so that all those tweets would attract attention.

I used the description field to “sell” the giveaway a little. I mentioned that contestants were giving me permission to add them to my email list, just in case they don't read the full rules before entering. (Everyone reads the rules, right?)

The plugin also has slots for a background image and several secondary images. I kept it simple and just used a screenshot of Sublime text.

Finally, I hit Publish and the contest was live!

Planning My Promotional Strategy

Once my contest was ready to go, I had to figure out how to promote it. I settled on a three-pronged approach:

1. Send an email to my email list, which numbered exactly 5,500 subscribers at the time.
2. Schedule a series of tweets, one per day, to promote the giveaway to my 13,400 Twitter followers.
3. Email the editors of a half dozen or so email newsletters that focused on web development, hoping for a mention in their next issue.

Ready for launch …

The entire contest took about two hours to set up, including writing the copy for the giveaway page, customizing the entry confirmation email, writing and scheduling the email announcing the giveaway to my list, scheduling the tweets and contacting the other newsletters.

It was all set to go at 10 a.m. on Monday, July 7, and I did my best to forget about the whole thing.

Launching anything–even a free giveaway–gives me the jitters.

How I screwed up the launch

The email announcing the contest went out Monday morning as scheduled, and within minutes I got a barrage of replies telling me that the link to the giveaway was broken.

Apparently I got sloppy with my HTML formatting and forgot to double check everything. Dang.

I decided to fix the link and resend the email. This one went out around 11 a.m., and this time I got another reply from someone informing me that I'd left the plain text version of the email blank.

Seriously? Arrrrrgggggghhhh!!!

Well, this is off to a good start, I thought.

After that, I avoided my inbox for the rest of the day and tried to pretend the whole thing wasn't happening–it was stressing me out.

It wasn't until 7:45 p.m. that I summoned the courage to log in to Google Analytics to see how much traffic I was getting.

I almost fell off the couch.

More than 473 people were on my site at that very moment. This on a site that typically had less than five visitors at a given time. I watched as the number climbed to 510. Later it would soar to more than 750.

The most visitors I'd ever seen on this site in the past was around 60, and that was when the blog post announcing my last giveaway landed on the front page of a major news site for programmers. That was nothing compared to this.

And apparently it had been going on all day. 44,463 people visited my site in the first 14 hours—that's nearly 2.5 times as much traffic as I typically get in a full month.

Then I logged into my site and checked the KingSumo stats.

Wut?

15,753 people had entered my contest? That couldn't be right. A bug in the plugin was inflating the numbers. Had to be.

I was in denial. Maybe the site was getting hammered by spammers submitting dozens of entries to try to game the system.

So I downloaded a .csv file of the contestants and checked to see how many of the people who entered had clicked the confirmation link in the follow-up email. Nearly 39% had confirmed.

This was really happening. Even if I just looked at the confirmed addresses, I'd more than doubled my email list in eight hours.

The stress knot in my stomach tightened

I was stoked, but at the same time I started thinking about all of the things that could go wrong.

Can my server hold up under this beating? What if the traffic continues to increase?

Then, while I was going through the pile of email that had stacked up during the day, I found one that freaked me out:

Someone requested that the password be reset for the following account:

http://sublimetexttips.com/

Username: admin

If this was a mistake, just ignore this email and nothing will happen.

Someone's trying to hack my site! I guess that's what happens when your site attracts a lot of attention. I did in fact have an admin account that I never used. I quickly logged in and deleted it, along with several other unused accounts. Whew.

I was getting other troubling emails as well. Dozens of people responded to the confirmation email saying they were getting error messages back from my server when they tried to confirm their entry. Others complained on Twitter that they'd tried to enter the contest but couldn't even connect to the site, or that they got an error when they submitted their entry.

It was relentless, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I couldn't fiddle with my server while the contest was running. Any downtime for the site could mean losing the momentum I'd built.

And then my worst fear came true …

Around 11 a.m. on the second day of the contest, I was chatting with a coworker online and mentioned the giveaway. He wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so he went to check out my giveaway page.

Here's what he saw:

And then the emails and tweets started pouring in. Hundreds of people were trying to enter my contest at that very moment, and my server was coughing up blood.

Had I been hacked?

Had the tidal wave of traffic managed to corrupt my site's WordPress database?

Did my hosting company take the site offline because of the overload?

Inside I was freaking out. I have a private Linux server that I maintain myself, which meant I was on my own to figure out what was wrong.

I logged into the server and started fumbling my way through half-remembered Linux commands. Memory and CPU usage were fine–since my site was basically offline, the server wasn't doing any work at the moment.

Aha, the hard drive was basically full. This is a common problem for high traffic sites. The server keeps a record of every visit in a text file, and these log files can eat through disk space in a hurry.

I logged into my hosting provider and added as many gigabytes of extra space as my account allowed, then rebooted the server.

After about 30 minutes of downtime, my site was back up.

Did the crash kill my contest?

>As the site came back online, I logged into Google Analytics. I relaxed a bit as I watched the real-time counter start to climb again.

By the third day, I couldn't take it anymore.

The endless stream of problems and complaints finally wore me down.

I felt like the guy who wrote Flappy Bird, a simple iPhone game that went viral a few months ago. The programmer who wrote it found himself making millions from the ads in his game—and feeling heat from haters. He quickly cracked under the pressure and yanked his game out of the App Store.

After three days of this contest, I decided to “pull a Flappy Bird.” I logged into my site and moved the contest end date up by a full week.

Within 24 hours, it would all be over. Relief swept over me.

I emailed the guys in my mastermind group, John Sonmez and Derick Bailey, to tell them how happy I was about my decision.

They didn't share my joy.

No, instead they told me I was insane and begged me to let the contest run its course:

They were right, of course–this really could be a life-changing breakthrough in my business. I gritted my teeth and set the contest back to its original end date.

“Everyone in the world who is interested has already signed up.”

it turned out, things settled down quite a bit on the fourth day. My traffic dropped from 500 to 750 simultaneous visitors down to a more manageable 250 or so.

The wildfire was starting to burn itself out.

“Probably because everyone in the world who is interested has already signed up,” joked Damian Hodgkiss, the lead developer for the KingSumo Giveaways plugin.

Throughout the contest, the KingSumo team provided excellent support.

For example, I'd collected so many email addresses by the end of the second day that it broke the plugin's .csv export feature. Damian rewrote the code that handles the export to help me get my entries downloaded. He also fixed several minor bugs I reported and helped me troubleshoot a few issues that contestants were reporting.

As the traffic began to die down, I finally had time to breathe a bit and take in what was happening.

While I didn't yet know the final numbers, one thing was clear: I'd just grown my email list by tens of thousands of people, many of whom would someday become customers.

I felt like I'd won the lottery.

What will 11 days of viral traffic get you?

I'm no stranger to abrupt surges of traffic–I've published several successful blog posts that pulled 20,000 or 30,000 page views in 24 hours. I thought I understood viral, but I had no idea what is possible when something truly catches fire.

My site received 482,044 visits from 398,896 unique visitors*. For perspective, in a similar timeframe before the contest I got 7,593 visits and 5,806 visitors.

Thanks to the flood of tweets that mentioned the contest (and included my Twitter handle), my Twitter following more than doubled from 13,460 to 32,427:

This massive, sustained flood of traffic also had a huge impact on my site's Alexa ranking. I leapfrogged 2,043,911 other websites and became the 49,137th most popular site on the Internet.

I'm sure that's very temporary, but as of a couple of weeks after the contest, I'm still seeing a sevenfold increase in traffic over what I was getting before.

But how well did the contest perform in terms of collecting email addresses?

When the dust settled, I had collected 364,104 email addresses:

There were so many email addresses that I couldn't export the .csv from the KingSumo plugin. Damian rewrote the plugin's data access code to be more efficient and released an update, but it still wasn't enough. The file was taking too long to download, and WordPress was timing out.

I had to make a quick manual hack to the KingSumo plugin to extend the timeout, and then I was finally able to export the file.

Even opening the file proved to be challenging. It was so big that it kept crashing Microsoft Excel, and I ended up using Sublime Text to do a lot of the editing.

When I finally got to see the numbers, they were astounding. I'd collected 66,320 confirmed addresses–these were from contestants who received the confirmation email and clicked the link it contained. (This number would have been higher if my server hadn't been so overloaded. People were emailing me to tell me they couldn't confirm.)

Of the remaining 297,784 unconfirmed addresses, I ended up deleting 146,553 obviously bogus entries. These bad addresses were mostly from people who figured out how to game the system, setting up bots to automatically submit thousands of fake email addresses.

I guess I was asking for that when I decided to run a contest for programmers…

One determined contestant managed to submit 101,962 variations of his own email address. (I disqualified him from the contest, along with anyone else who obviously cheated.)

This manual cleanup took several hours, but when I'd scrubbed most of the bogus entries, I was left with 121,671 unconfirmed addresses.

My grand total for the contest came to 187,991 email addresses.

But were all these people just interested in the giveaway?

That question gnawed at my mind as the contest wound down. It was going to be expensive to run an email list of that size: MailChimp would cost me nearly $900 a month for that many subscribers.

Initially I considered just using the confirmed addresses, but I decided to take a shot at salvaging the 121,671 unconfirmed subscribers as well.

I imported the entire list into MailChimp and blasted out a message welcoming my new subscribers. You can see the email I sent here. I used this email as an opportunity to introduce myself, explained why I was emailing them and invite them to unsubscribe if they didn't want to get future emails from me.

As it turns out, sending an email to 187,991 people is nerve wracking. I had no idea what to expect. Was I going to get a flood of hate mail? Would people report me as a spammer? Would MailChimp ban my account due to thousands of bounce backs from bogus addresses?

It wasn't as bad as I feared. My first couple of emails to the list did generate a ton of bounce backs–24,196 in total. And I got 11,472 unsubscribes and 179 spam reports. I also got a few angry emails, mostly from people who didn't win the contest, but they were outnumbered by positive responses from people who were excited to be getting my newsletter.

I've sent two newsletter editions out to these new subscribers, and both have received open rates of just over 31%. That's lower than I used to see on my smaller mailing list, but it's still very healthy.

After I send several emails, I'll trim my list down to a more manageable 80,000 or so by deleting anyone who didn't open any of the emails I sent.

What Can You Learn From All This?

It's hard to know exactly what magic ingredients combined to make my contest such a runaway success, but there were several factors that I believe worked together.

Here are my major takeaways….

People act in their own self interest

People are most likely to take an action when it benefits them directly.

There's nothing wrong with this: We're all faced with thousands of decisions every day, and if we did everything that anyone ever asked, we'd just run around in circles and never accomplish anything.

Self interest is a filter that screens out most of the messages we're bombarded with.

To get through that filter and get someone to act, you have to show them how what you're asking provides a direct benefit to them.

The KingSumo Giveaways plugin harnesses people's self interest by rewarding them for sharing your contest.

Offer + audience = success

When you're promoting anything, there are three main factors that play into your success: the offer, the audience and the presentation (including design, copy).

The offer and the audience together account for about 80 percent of the promotion's success. Get these right, and you're going to get some results.

In a giveaway, the offer is the prize. You need to pick the right prize. The best prize is one that meets the following criteria:

• It is highly desirable to your intended audience, but totally uninteresting to everyone else. When I talk to most people about doing a giveaway, their first instinct seems to be, “Cool, I'll do a contest and give away an iPad!” Bad idea. You'll get plenty of attention–who doesn't want a free iPad? But 99% of the people who sign up won't be in your desired audience.
• It still has a broad enough appeal to go viral. I've had the chance to watch several other people launch giveaways since I did mine, and I've noticed that it's possible to pick a prize that is too niche specific. For example, running a contest to give away books that focus on a specific JavaScript framework will get you some subscribers, but if you're interested in attracting JavaScript developers as a whole, it's better to offer something that's interesting to all JavaScript developers.
• It has a clear, intrinsic value. Giving away your own products probably won't work (unless you're Apple). Choosing a prize from a third party lends credibility to your contest. AppSumo gave away Dropbox licenses, I gave away a Sublime license. We both have our own products, but it's better to use something that has an established market value.

Email is (still) King

>Even though I had 2.5 times more Twitter followers than email subscribers, my email list was the key to getting the viral effect started.

How do I know?

A couple of weeks after my contest finished up, a friend of mine ran an identical contest for a Sublime Text license. When I saw his tweet about it pop up in my Twitter feed, I retweeted it from my @SubimeTxtTips account, which now has more than 32,000 followers.

So how'd it go?

He later told me that he got around 40 entries from that tweet.

When you send a tweet, typically only about 5% of your followers will actually see it.

By contrast, both of my announcement emails were opened by more than 40% of my subscribers.

My email subscribers flooded the zone with a rush of hundreds of shares, setting things in motion.

Communicate the benefits clearly

When I was setting up my contest, I made sure to emphasize the benefits of my contest at every step.

The name of my contest included the magic word “giveaway,” which wasn't an accident. That ensured that every time someone shared the contest link, their tweet or Facebook post would include that word.

I also customized the confirmation email that went out after people entered to emphasize the benefits of sharing, both in the subject line and in a P.S.:

Subject: Confirm your entry for the Sublime Text Giveaway (plus more chances to win)

Hey!

Thanks for entering the Sublime Text Giveaway.

To confirm your entry, click here: [confirm_url].

Josh

P.S. To increase your chances of winning, be sure to share your lucky URL with your friends. You'll receive 3 extra entries for every person who enters via your lucky URL.

Your Lucky URL: [lucky_url]

While I don't have hard numbers to prove it, I know that this had a huge impact in terms of keeping the contest growing.

It allowed me to send an email to every person who entered with a reminder of what they stood to gain by sharing their lucky URL.

Give your contest a good shove

To get something to go viral, you need an initial burst of exposure.

I was able to get that from my email list.

If you don't have an email list of your own, see if you can borrow someone else's audience.

This does take some planning in advance, but the payoff is worth it.

One way to do this is through your prize selection. When you're trying to decide on a prize, take a look at whether the company or person who made the item has a large existing audience.

Pick several options for your giveaway, then approach each company or person before your contest starts and pitch them on the benefits of promoting your contest (more attention for them and their product with no additional work for them).

If you can get someone with a big megaphone to announce your giveaway, it'll go a long way.

Be prepared to handle the traffic

While there's no way to know if your contest will go viral like mine did, it's a good idea to plan for it.

If you have a small blog and mailing list, and you choose a highly targeted giveaway, you probably won't have trouble handling the traffic. But if you have a few thousand highly engaged people on your mailing list, it's best to be prepared.

WordPress tends to bog down under heavy traffic unless you do some work to improve its performance. My contest would have fizzled out long before it did if I hadn't had my site running on a private server with a caching system in place. If none of that makes sense, no worries: Hire someone to help you out.

I wouldn't let this stop you from running your own contest–it's almost always better to take action then to wait until you have everything perfect. But it's good to be aware of the issue.

Surround yourself with successful people

Fear of failure is powerful, but there's an equally powerful fear that sometimes accompanies success.

When I realized what was happening with this contest, I freaked out. What was I going to do with all of these new email subscribers? How was I going to pay for the extra cost with my email provider?

Almost overnight I'd gone from maintaining a small email list to having tens of thousands of subscribers, and it felt like a huge responsibility.

I almost pulled the plug and robbed myself of reaping the full benefits of this opportunity I'd been handed.

After the contest ended, the letdown I experienced had me wanting to just give up on this huge group of people who had trusted me with their email addresses.

If my mastermind group hadn't intervened, I would have sabotaged myself at multiple points during this experience.

There's a saying: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Pick those five people carefully, and they just might save you from yourself.

You never know when you're going to get an unexpected break

Most success stories involve an element of unpredictability–a “lucky break.”

It's easy to look at someone else who has gotten where you want to go, see those tipping points and think, “They just got lucky. That kind of thing doesn't happen to me.” I certainly feel this way sometimes.

While you can't control these kinds of events, you can manufacture them, in a way. When you show up every day and consistently put yourself out there, these unexpected breaks become almost inevitable.

I've been working on this side project steadily for two years, waiting (not so patiently at times) for my big break to happen.

It did, and I never saw it coming.

Ready to Try a Contest of Your Own?

I can't promise you'll see anything like the success I saw with my contest, but if you'd like to try one of your own, I can help.

Noah Kagan and the team at KingSumo gave me a discount that I could share that's good for a 50% discount on the KingSumo Giveaways plugin (and yes, I do get a commission if you use it. Pat gave me permission to include this here).

But what kind of email marketer would I be if I didn't ask for the opt-in?

To claim your code, click here and enter your email address. I'll send it right over to you.

P.S. If you're interested in running a contest like this, don't hesitate. Like many good tactics, this approach to getting viral traffic for a giveaway will get less effective over time as more and more people catch on. Get your 50% KingSumo Giveaways discount today and start your own contest before it's too late!

The post What I Learned From Growing My Email List 3,418% (Nearly 200k) in Just 11 Days appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

This is a guest post by Chris Huntley, a good friend of mine who works in life insurance. We've had lunch together quite a few times and we usually discuss topics like blogging and the joy (and challenge) of being parents, but at one particular lunch we started talking about how more and more people are becoming solo entrepreneurs and that because it's happening so fast, most of those business owners probably don't have a “business continuation plan” that determines what would happen to their business if they were to die.

Although I have some of the basics in place, this discussion was a big wake up call for me, especially because my online businesses are the primary source of income for my family. After some back and forth, I decided to invite Chris to write a guest post for everyone here to share what we can do and what options are available to us.

This is obviously a very touchy subject, so I apologize to anyone who isn't very comfortable thinking or talking about death—but I think deep down that we all know that we have to plan ahead, especially when there is family involved.

I also want to mention that yes, Chris is in the life insurance business and does include a link and a phone number in the middle of the article for a life insurance quote, but I assure you that he's not here for the purpose of generating new leads for his business. He was actually very concerned about including that information here at the risk of looking shady, but I insisted he keep them here because they are convenient if that option is right for you.

I also insisted that I do not earn a commission from any leads generated from this article.

Before I hand it off to Chris, I have to mention that before you make any decisions, please seek the advice of a trusted professional and be sure to talk this out with those who may be involved in and around your business.

Thanks, and take it away Chris…

Business Continuation Essentials for the “Solo Entrepreneur”

Written for the friends of Pat Flynn and the Smart Passive Income community.

When people like Steve Jobs die, we expect large organizations to have a plan for their succession.

Apple did, making the transition from Jobs to Tim Cook as new CEO, seamless.

But what about business owners like Pat Flynn who have no partners or employees? [Editor's Note, 2019: SPI now has both a partner and employees.]

How can the “solo entrepreneur” plan for business continuation when no one is being groomed to take over the reins?

Great questions.

In this article, we’ll discuss why even a single man (or woman) operation needs a succession plan, and a few practical ways to create one.

Reasons the “Solo Entrepreneur” Needs a Succession Plan

Consider this. What would happen to your business in the event of your unexpected passing or a life altering disability?

Would your spouse or beneficiaries of your estate have any clue what to do with your business?

Would they suffer financially? Do they have the knowledge to:

• Take over your business,
• Hire someone to take it over,
• or sell it for fair market value?

And even if they did possess the know-how, would they want to take over your business? (Perhaps your husband or wife already works at a full-time job!)

For the remainder of this article, we’ll assume that neither of the above is true. Your successor is a spouse or family member who neither has the desire or know-how.

Which leads us to the question, “What can I do as a one-man-operation to plan for the unexpected and make sure my family’s financial future is secure?”

Option 1: The Bare Minimum

At the very least, write your spouse or loved ones a detailed letter about what you’d like them to do with your business upon your passing or disability.

Components of your letter should include:

• What you want to happen to your business: Should your heirs sell it, hire someone to run it, or assess and decide when the time comes? My recommendation would be for your successor (see below) to assess your business and, with the input of your family, make the decision together. Working together, your family can instruct the successor about their cash flow needs, and your successor can competently recommend what’s best for your business based on the market at that time.
• Name a “Pat Flynn” as your Successor: If you have a competent friend who understands and/or could run your business, ask them if they would be willing to help out your family if something happened to you. This should be a paid job.
• Name a Contingent Successor: In case your first choice is no longer willing or able.
• Provide essential details about your business: Imagine walking into a friend’s office, sitting down at their desk, and all they have to guide them is this letter. What do they need to run your business? Include:
  1. Essential Info for Keeping Your Business Going – Try not to teach them everything you know. Think more along the lines of how to maintain your most important sources of income. Also include key business expenses. (You don’t want your website to disappear because no one renewed your domain name.)
  2. Passwords – Computer passwords, website control panel login, etc.
  3. Key contacts – Make a list of who they can call for help with any question about your business.

A 10 minute screen capture showing where to find the essential files and programs on your computer would go a long way here.

In my case, I actually have a formal agreement with a partner to buy out my business, but I also took the time to write her a letter. She’s not very computer literate, so for example, here’s a snippet from my letter to her.

Once you’ve written your letter, review it with your loved ones and tell them where they can find a copy. Leave copies for them in multiple locations (in a safe, on your computer, etc.)

Option 1b

If writing a letter is too hard, please at least have a serious conversation with your spouse or loved ones discussing the points above.

Note: If you’re in a highly specialized profession (i.e. attorney, financial planner, sword swallower), have clients, or if your business is built around your personal brand (i.e. magician, sword swallower, public speaker) while some tips here will be helpful for your business, this information is really geared toward those earning affiliate commissions, Adsense income, doing lead generation, and generally following more of the passive income, internet marketing model.

Option 2: Cover the Gap with Life Insurance

No matter how well you plan, it’s unlikely that anyone will run your business as well as you did or sell it for as much as you could have.

If your family depends on a certain level of income from your business that could be reduced upon your death, you should consider life insurance.

Life insurance protects your family from loss of income and other financial hardship by providing a lump sum benefit to the beneficiaries you name upon your passing.

The benefits for life insurance in business continuation are:

• Family has access to quick liquid cash – The proceeds are usually paid out within 30 days of a claim being filed.
• Buys your family time – With cash in hand, your heirs can take their time deciding what to do with your business and prevents a “fire sale”.
• Makes up for Bad Planning – Even if you don’t take my advice from options 1 or 3, your business might still survive your death if your family has sufficient funds to bring in qualified professionals to deal with your business after your death.
• Death benefit is *100% income tax free

Please feel free to visit our website for an Instant Life Insurance Quote, or call us at 877-443-9467.

*For non-U.S.-citizens who want U.S. insurance, click here.

One Last Twist of the Arm

Options 1 and 2 are fairly easy to implement. Option 3 is a bit more complex, so before we get there, please let me make one more important point.

The Passive Income Model Raises the Stakes

If you're building a passive income stream like Pat, you have to realize you’re building a special business. Understand what’s at stake if you let your business die.

Most established businesses are valued at 3 to 5 times EBIT (Earnings Before Interest & Taxes).

Does that apply to us, though, the SPI fans with businesses earning passive earnings?

Here’s a quick example.

I own a life insurance website where I sell leads. While it took me hundreds of hours to set up, now I probably work on it for a total of one hour per month. An article writer on oDesk writes and posts the articles for me, while I sit back and watch it work on auto-pilot.

There’s no way I would let my wife sell that site for 3 to 5 times annual earnings upon my death.

First of all, she probably wouldn’t get fair market value for it (a distressed seller rarely does), but more importantly, I understand that with very little planning, that site could generate income for my family for 10 to 20 years… or more!

Do you want your family to miss out on years and years of passive income because you failed to plan for the unexpected?

Of course not!

Scrutiny from Life Insurance Colleagues

As a life insurance guy, I know that some of my peers will balk at this article.

They’ll say:

“Chris, why not just have the business owner take out a life insurance policy for the value of the business to ensure their families are taken care of?”

I would respond with two main reasons why it’s not that simple:

1. I prefer my clients get every penny of value out of their business upon their passing, whether they own life insurance or not.
2. Why pay for life insurance when a few simple steps could be taken to ensure the continuity of the business and avoid the need for insurance?

Option 3: Put on Your Big Boy Pants… We’re Going to Set Up a Trust

The superior option would be to formalize your wishes for your business’ succession, and ensure your desires are adhered to in some sort of legal documentation. After consulting with various attorneys on the subject, I’ve learned multiple ways to accomplish this.

My particular favorite, which I’ll lay out for you, is to “formalize your wishes” by setting up a trust.

“A trust is a document that spells out the rules that you want followed for property held in trust for your beneficiaries.” www.dummies.com

So in a nutshell, you spell out what you want to happen to your business in the trust, and those rules must be precisely followed by the person who you elect. (called the successor trustee)

Here’s one way you could set up the trust:

• Have the trust own your business – This applies to you whether you are a sole proprietor, LLC, Corporation, etc.
• Name yourself as the trustee – This means while you are living and sane, you call all the shots.
• Name your spouse or loved one as successor trustee – This is the person who will make the decisions for the property held in trust (your business) upon your death.
• Name a “Pat Flynn” as co-successor trustee (Optional) – If you have a friend who understands and/or could run your business, that’s the person you want in charge of administering your wishes as it pertains to your business. This person would handle the business side of the trust after you’re gone, while the other co-successor trustee would handle the personal stuff.

Note – Just like in Option 1, be sure to ask for your friend’s permission first!

If you don’t have any friends capable of handling this job, and the same goes for your spouse/loved ones, then you might name a professional fiduciary as co-successor trustee.

• Fund the Trust with Life Insurance (Optional) – By taking out a small policy on yourself for $50,000 to $100,000, and leaving the trust as beneficiary, the trust would have sufficient funds to pay your co-successor trustee for his or her time. The funds could also be used for your family, if business income decreases while transitioning to a new business manager.

Here’s another reason to set up a trust – If you die without a trust, and have assets totaling more than $100k to $150k (in most states), your estate will have to go through probate, which could be disastrous for a business. *Probate may be avoided if you’re married.

How to Set up a Trust

You’ll have to contact an attorney who specializes in business contracts or estate planning. Sorry. You won’t be able to set up this trust in LegalZoom, since it’s not a plain, cookie cutter trust.

Again, please understand there are many ways to legally formalize your business continuation wishes. My setup above is just one example of how you could do it. Please consult with your own legal counsel for the best setup in your particular circumstance.

Take Action Now

In closing, if you have not done so, please take the necessary steps to ensure your family’s financial future is secure upon your death. Whether it’s a formal action like taking out a life insurance policy or setting up a trust, or simply writing a letter to your loved ones about your wishes, do something, and do it now!

*Huntley Wealth Insurance and its representatives do not give legal or tax advice. Information contained on this page simply reflects our understanding of the tax rules and regulations in effect at the time of publication. Please consult your personal tax and/or legal advisor regarding insurance and/or estate tax law as it applies to you.

The post What Would Happen to My Online Business if I Died? appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

This is a guest post by my good friend and mentor, Todd Tressider of FinancialMentor.com. Todd and I are in a mastermind group together (the same one as Jaime Tardy, who recently wrote a guest post about masterminds and mentors on SPI a couple of weeks ago), and he's also coaching me on the side about investments. Besides being ridiculously tall and a super nice guy (I met Todd in person at the Financial Blogger's Conference in Chicago last year), he's incredibly smart when it comes to money. He's been experimenting with a lot of cool things online for his brand, and he wrote this in-depth guest post to share some findings with you when it comes to giving stuff away and strategies to monetize. Enjoy!

Pat makes it look so darn easy that it can be frustrating.

He gives away his best stuff, and his income skyrockets. I give away my best stuff and, well, I give away my best stuff.

Maybe you can relate? Your results pale in comparison to Pat’s. You only see a trickle of income for your efforts, while his income skyrockets.

Did you ever wonder if you were missing a piece of the puzzle?

In this article, I’ll dive deep into Pat’s “giving it all away” model so that you can learn a few advanced tricks and tips for applying it profitably in your business.

The Hidden Triangle Behind Giving It All Away

Pat’s model looks simple on the surface.

Develop niche expertise and give it all away to your followers through high quality posts, podcasts, and videos. The premise is that great content eventually draws targeted traffic. You then monetize throngs of hungry visitors with the best tools available to satisfy their unmet needs. They joyfully buy from your site because they know, like and trust you to direct them to the best resources.

It’s a simple formula where the triangle of profitability appears to be formed by three sides. Let’s use SPI as an example:

1. Pat is a content marketing machine applying the “Be Everywhere” philosophy to the internet marketing niche.
2. Targeted readers are attracted to Pat’s site by his useful, high quality content thus building authority and trust.
3. Pat offers affiliate products that match the needs of his readers thus he converts without pitching. They just click on the links naturally connected to the useful tutorials and resources he provides.

For example, if you want to make money on the internet you’ll need someone to host your WordPress site and run your email marketing. Bluehost and Aweber are industry leaders that anyone starting out would be well served to use. Pat produces content showing you how to set up a blog in minutes on Bluehost or build an autoresponder system using Aweber. These products are a natural fit and Pat makes a killing offering them. No sales pitch required. They trust Pat’s expertise, he tells them the preferred vendor, they need the service, and conversion results. End of discussion… or is it?

Editor's Note: We now recommend ConvertKit for your email service provider, rather than Aweber.

What happens if your niche doesn’t offer high quality affiliate programs?

Is there a deeper level of understanding to what Pat is doing? Are there other ways to apply this triangle of profitability to your own business in ways that aren’t obvious based on what you see at SPI?

How To Monetize Your Site Without Affiliate Programs

For example, I’m a financial coach who teaches wealth building strategies. The affiliate programs in my niche are the garbage I educate people to avoid. I can’t offer credit cards, payday loans, and forex trading because it’s out of integrity with my teachings. So how do I monetize?

The obvious answer is to develop my own products and services but that introduces a new problem. You can’t give it all away when the product or service is your own. The triangle doesn’t exist when there is no third side.

In other words, one of the many keys to Pat’s effectiveness is how he monetizes through independent third party products and services. We know there are multiple hosting companies and email service providers with affiliate programs, and we trust Pat to pick the best. He isn’t selling “Pat’s Web Hosting” because then he would be biased. He is telling you about the well-known, trusted name brand that he prefers above all others. We trust he did his homework.

The key point is the sale must occur as a result of something else. The pitch cannot be direct. This is critically important to the system working. In fact, it’s the key to taking the strategy a cut deeper and applying it at every level of your business.

Think about it. We trust Pat because he is truly giving us his best stuff which establishes his expertise through content marketing. We all need the products he offers and fully expect that he has handpicked the best from what is available. We are leveraging his depth of knowledge in the industry by buying what he thinks is best, and he is leveraging our wallets. Both sides win.

This is all fine and good if you can mimic his model, but as I already stated, I can’t do that. There are no affiliate programs for persistence, financial intelligence, and a strategic wealth plan. In fact, very few market niches have the depth of quality affiliate programs that Pat’s niche provides, and that’s a key problem for many of us.

Well, necessity is the mother of invention, so I dug a little deeper into what makes Pat’s model work. I redefined the triangle of profitability so you can figure out how to apply Pat’s model to all those situations in your business where the superficially obvious solution doesn’t fit. Let’s explore this a bit…

How To Give It All Away by Giving Something Else

The key to gaining a deeper perspective on Pat’s model is to redefine the sides of the triangle.

For example, if you redefine the content marketing leg to “giving something of value” many possibilities open up. You can give away personal attention through email responses, a teleseminar or group coaching program, an ebook, a networked resource, a guest post, and much more. The key is you must give something of value that builds trust and authority.

You can redefine the second leg of the triangle from “reader” to “anyone”. In other words, you can give to every human connection you have. It could be the network of bloggers in your niche, it could be your friends and family, or it could be someone else’s list. In fact, it could be all the above. And yes, it can also include your email list of readers. Just don’t limit your thinking to your own list. The concept is much bigger than that.

Finally, redefine “affiliate program” to include any third party monetization strategy. This is critical to shifting your thinking when your niche lacks quality affiliate programs. It could be as simple as an advertising network or it could be two layers removed from your business like Amazon’s targeted client base or Google’s search traffic.

These redefinitions are more than just semantics because they open up possibilities. These broader definitions allow you to create a virtuous triangle of profitability in situations that extend beyond what is superficially obvious from Pat’s affiliate business model. There is far greater depth and potential to what he is doing.

Let’s look at some examples…

Giving Away Amazon Ebooks

Amazon is a massive marketing machine holding the dominant position in the book market. Think about it. If you are looking for a book you don’t Google it. You go to Amazon to search for it similar to how you would search for a video on YouTube or a podcast on iTunes. Just as YouTube owns the video market and Apple owns podcasting, Amazon owns the online book market.

In addition, Amazon provides us with an example of a third leg in Pat’s giving it all away strategy – an independent third party monetization platform – but it operates on two levels simultaneously. The superficially obvious level is their affiliate program where you drive traffic to Amazon and get paid on purchases. That’s one monetization approach we all know.

What a lot of people don’t understand is the incredible power of Amazon’s internal marketing machine. The key to monetizing long term on Amazon is you must provide a great book (sells well, receives great reviews, low return rates) and drive that book up the ranks until Amazon takes notice and begins marketing it for you. That is when it becomes smart passive income.

You’ve probably seen how the Amazon marketing machine works through their direct emails, the “customers who viewed this item also bought this” recommendations, and so on. Amazon has multiple ways of direct selling and cross promoting built right into the largest third party book marketing platform in existence. You just have to figure out how to rise up and get your product noticed on that platform thus leveraging Amazon’s marketing prowess producing sales and passive income beyond anything you could have done on your own.

But how do you achieve that goal? By giving it all away, of course!

As a neophyte, I tried just giving my book away. That’s the duhh-obvious idea. Rather than content marketing I gave the book itself as the item of value (again, we are redefining each leg of the triangle). Unfortunately, this is a problematic strategy when the “something of value” you give away is the very product you want to sell.

The new world of book marketing says the concept works like this: the market for my book inside Amazon is huge so when I give the book to my 7,000 (and growing) loving readers they will “like” the sales page and leave favorable reviews. I give them extraordinary value in the form of a quality book and they help drive the book up the ranking scale with their downloads, likes, and reviews. Amazon’s massive built in market takes notice of the social proof and reader interest thus lifting it up their internal ranking system. The premise is Amazon’s market is far bigger than mine so it is smart business to give the book to my market in an effort to get noticed by Amazon’s market.

The result? It worked okay.

In exchange for giving the book to my best buyers thus pillaging future sales from my list I got 29 likes, 19 great reviews, and bounced around the best seller ranking between 10,000 and 30,000 in the weeks that followed. Better than nothing, but not exactly retirement. It definitely gave the book a kick start selling hundreds of copies and got things moving, but there are smarter ways to apply the principles.

In hindsight, my big mistake was not having the paperback version of the book available for purchase during the promotion. The ebook giveaway would have driven paperback sales creating immediate revenue and greater total sales volume by allowing people to consume in their preferred format. All was not lost, however, as all other books in the same series experienced significant spillover sales from the giveaway.

My next lesson occurred when I gave away a promotional webinar demonstrating how to actually implement a critical aspect of the book’s teaching. The premise was to give “next step” education for people who had already bought and read the book. The only thing I asked was to prove you read the book first by leaving a review showing yourself as a verified purchaser (social proof in Amazon’s system). I didn’t want just anyone in the class – only people who had read the book. This encouraged both purchases and reviews.

Again, the key here is to give killer value to people (in this case, my readers) through value added content (advanced education webinar) and to monetize through a third party platform (Amazon’s massive marketing machine). However, this time I added a twist by requesting an action that cost the reader nothing (a book review showing them as a verified purchaser that can be completed in two minutes). Some might argue that I didn’t give it all away, but I did because I gave the book earlier to my list and invited anyone who wanted the next level of instruction to simply leave a review showing they read the book. The cost was nothing.

The results were surprising.

Many readers left reviews, but they were low quality. The book was 4.95 stars (19 reviews before the promotion) but dropped to as low as 4.7 stars (after 25 additional reviews during the promotion). What I discovered was these readers were leaving genuine reviews but they weren’t familiar with the review process. They didn’t understand how a 4 star review was lukewarm and a 3 star review was actually “critical” in the Amazon system. They incorrectly believed they were leaving positive reviews when they were actually lowering the average rating of the book. Once I pulled the promotion the reviews immediately returned to consistent 5 stars and delivered much higher quality statements about the value of the book.

In summary, these two “give it all away” examples provide a successful case study in creating passive income through Amazon. The book appears (as of this writing) on page 1 in Amazon for the competitive term “retirement planning” in both the “Kindle store” and “books” categories. I still have more work ahead of me, and I’m sure many readers will share great strategies in the comments below to build on what I’ve shared here, but for now I want to point out one more strategy I’m implementing that astute readers might have already noticed…

This Guest Post Is Meta

This guest post is walking the talk. I’m giving you (Pat’s readers) this valuable case study as a gift.

You are Pat’s fans and I’m demonstrating my expanded definition of “readers”. In addition, I’m demonstrating my expanded definition of “affiliate program” to include any third or fourth party monetization strategy.

For example, if you look over this post I don’t have an affiliate link in it. I have no overt monetization that would cheapen this gift or break your trust. However, notice the anchor text links going into the sales page at Amazon and resource pages on my site from Pat’s valuable PR5 site.

It won’t take too many backlinks like this to drive the rankings for the book’s sales page to the top of Google for relevant terms because Amazon is such a highly trusted site. This will cause thousands of targeted searches per month to find my book as an authoritative solution to their question, “How Much Money Do I Need To Retire?” (on page 2 for this competitive term and rising). The sales driven by Google search (independent third party) will, in turn, further boost my rankings within Amazon’s marketing system which will drive additional promotion to their customers (independent third party).

Notice how the monetization is twice removed and never overt. Sure, a handful of you might buy the book, but that is not the intention (although I really appreciate it – oh, and make sure you “like” the sales page while you are there. Thanks!). The real goal is to drive thousands of targeted buyers through my Amazon sales page every month from Google organic search by giving value to Pat’s readers and receiving backlinks as a natural part of that process.

Notice how this strategy is totally different from Pat’s affiliate marketing model even though it is still the triangle of giving it all away. Rather than sell from my site I’m getting two huge marketing juggernauts – Google and Amazon – to do the heavy lifting for me and these two marketing juggernauts are taking their cues to market for me from independent, third party resources (Smart Passive Income).

In other words, this guest post is a meta example of giving it all away; yet, it is totally different from how Pat walks the talk. Pat would never publish this post unless I was giving something hugely valuable to you (creative insights to apply his strategies). In turn, I’m not using an affiliate program and I’m not even giving to my own readers. It is a creative twist on the same principles to fit my own business model.

Taking “Giving it All Away” A Cut Deeper>

The point here is to look more deeply at what Pat is doing here at SPI. His results aren’t random, but they also aren’t easily duplicated by you and me. You’ll need to get creative and find your own twist to make it work.

I had to look behind the superficially obvious to redefine the key principles from SPI into something I could apply in my own business. It wasn’t until I took the learning a cut deeper that I was able to produce meaningful results.

Always remember, when you give it all away you build trust and authority, but without a monetization plan you don’t have a business. That is key!

Everyone wants free ice cream so giving valuable content is the easy part. Figuring out the third party monetization is the critical component too many people miss. I know I did. For SPI the monetization was easy because of the niche. For the financial education niche I had to find more creative solutions.

So now it is your turn. Take these lessons and share in the comments below how you could apply the principles to your own business. Or maybe you thought of more strategies for developing the book business at Amazon that will expand on the ideas shared here. I’m all ears and look forward to a great brainstorming session in the comments below…

Thanks to Todd once again, and don't forget to visit his website at FinancialMentor.com if you're interested in learning more about what he does.

And if you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and get started, check out Affiliate Marketing – The Ultimate Step by Step Guide. Cheers!

The post How to Profit by Giving It All Away: The Missing Ingredient appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

There are many success stories out there about people who have build websites and selling a website later for a large sum of money. I love these stories because each story is a little different, but the underlying themes are generally the same.

This is a guest post by Patrick Meninga who recently sold his flagship website for $200,000 dollars. He had worked on his website for 4 years before being approached by an advertiser who offered to purchase it. It's a great story of what hard work combined with some smart thinking can do for your website, and he offers some great advice for all of us.

I asked Patrick if it was okay to disclose the website that was sold, and he said it was totally cool! (Thanks Patrick!)

The website he sold was a site he created about addiction and recovery called Spiritual River. The site presents his unique ideas about how to overcome any addiction using a holistic approach to personal growth.

Here are some of the things Patrick learned from his experience.

I recently sold my flagship website for $200,000 dollars, and to be honest, the site was not even for sale at the time.

I am a long time reader of SPI, and I used many of Pat's ideas to help me build the website. Let me tell you exactly how I did it, and give you advice if you desire the same thing.

Choose a Topic for Your Website that has Decent Profit Potential

Most internet marketers would advise you to start a website about something that you have extensive knowledge, expertise and interest in. But, I would go one step further and make sure there is potential to make money with your topic too.

It's not about what you know, it's about what you know that's also profitable. Starting a website about free poetry will probably never make you any money, even if you rank number one for most of the related keywords.

Consider a topic and look at the type of advertising that appears on similar websites. How much is a new customer worth in each case? How much are people willing to pay for advertising? If the answer is “very little” then move on and find something more profitable.

Be Original and Avoid “Me-Too” Content

Every time you publish an article on your website, ask yourself: “Would anyone share this article for any reason?” If the answer is “no” then you should not publish the article.

When someone lands on your website you have an opportunity to capture attention and possibly take the relationship one step further. If your website has low quality, uninspiring or spammy articles, then what kind of impression are you going to make on new visitors?

Here is the guiding principle when it comes to content on the web: nobody cares. Anyone can go to the search engines and read hundreds of different articles about payday loans. Why would they care if there is yet another unoriginal 400 word article about payday loans on your website?

If you want to succeed online then you have to rise above the sea of web spam and offer something unique, something original and have insight and ideas about your topic.

If you publish an article that could have been outsourced for under 10 dollars then you are probably wasting everyone's time. Yes, you might play this game for a while and even get some search traffic, but your website is not going to stick around for the long haul if that is the type of content you normally publish.

Be original. Be insightful. Create something amazing.

Anything less is going to end up in the dust bin of the interwebs.

Focus on Quality AND Volume

My website sold for such a large amount was because I averaged 3 new articles per day for the 4 years that the website existed.

The long tail is where my website site made all of its money. The best keyword on the site made less than 50 dollars per month in income. Much of the site's authority came from having over 1,500 articles.

I wish I would have published three articles every day, but in reality my journey was much more erratic. I went for months at a time without publishing a thing, but other times I was publishing over 20,000 words per day.

All told, I averaged 3 articles per day. If you are interested in building a serious online empire like I did, I suggest you aim for a similar level of output. Writing one article per day is not going to get you to your income goal in a reasonable amount of time. Three articles per day will make things really exciting if you stick with it for at least a year.

It is possible to create a healthy income stream while publishing less, but most people are not going to be that lucky. If you are interested in creating a long term, sustainable income then you should focus on both quality and volume.

Pat (Flynn) stepping in here for second. I had to comment on this section because I partly agree, but I partly disagree. It's obvious that the more content you post on your site, the more (long tail) keywords you'll eventually rank for and the more traffic will come your way. I've experienced this first-hand with my security guard training niche site. But, in some niches 3 articles per day is overload for its readers (imagine trying to take action when if I posted 3 articles per day on SPI) and for many people it's just impossible to post 3 quality articles per day, let alone 3 quality articles per week.

The point here is: push yourself as much as you can, both in terms of quality and volume. Just be careful about prioritizing volume over quality—it should be the other way around. It's like working out—you get the most benefit to your body by just pushing yourself a little bit more when your mind tells you you've had enough, but go too crazy and you just might hurt yourself.

Don't hurt yourself.

Okay back to Patrick!

Build a Community Around Your Ideas

When you start to get regular traffic and people begin to leave comments on your site, you should answer those comments and start to have conversations with your visitors.

Some comments may be worthy of a new post in order to further discussion. In other cases you may talk about a new topic and ask for feedback, which will also encourage discussion.

Once you are receiving comments on a fairly regular basis and you see a small community forming, you might consider adding a discussion forum to your website.

I believe it's important to do this for a number of reasons. In the eyes of the search engines, having a community of people who regularly visit your website and join in the discussion can help you because:

• People create free content for you every day, expanding the size and footprint of your website.
• Repeat visitors improve your “stickiness” metric, showing trust in your site.
• Fans of your site can help spread your ideas via word of mouth or by creating real links.

If you are receiving search engine traffic every day but failing to build a community by “capturing” some of it, then you are missing an opportunity.

Engage your audience and start a discussion if you want to build a following. My website sold for a large amount because it was more than just a search engine trap. The buyer of the website saw value in the community and knew that this would help it to be a sustainable investment in the long run.

Experiment with Different Forms of Monetization

Many internet marketers get their start with Google AdSense, but the search for online income should not end there.

If you look at the businesses that are advertising via Google Adwords to purchase your traffic, you will learn how to move up the value chain. The Adwords advertisers are profitable. This should be a big clue as to how you should be monetizing your website.

For example, let's say that your website is about food allergies and you are making a certain amount of money with AdSense on the site. You examine your advertisers and realize that most of them are buying your traffic in order to sell your audience an ebook about food allergies. In this hypothetical example, you would be better off selling that book directly to your audience rather than using AdSense.

This is an example of “moving up the value chain.” If people are buying your traffic via Adwords, there is always a way to move up the chain and monetize more efficiently.

I was able to negotiate direct advertising deals based on this technique, and eventually one of my advertisers made me an unsolicited offer to purchase my website. It was the experimentation with monetization that led to this opportunity.

Pat (Flynn) again here. When I started GreenExamAcademy.com I was running Adsense on the site and noticed one advertiser that was advertising their practice exams for this test. I built a relationship with them and eventually started selling their practice exams as an affiliate on my site. Commissions from one sale as an affiliate was the equivalent of 30 Adsense ad clicks. I've been an affiliate for 3 years and have made over 6 figures promoting their product. So yeah, this works.

Reinvest a Portion of Your Website Income

If you reinvest 100% of your earnings into site growth then you never get to enjoy any of your success.

On the other hand, if you never reinvest any income into growing your site, then the rate of growth will be very, very slow.

Therefore, I would recommend that you reinvest a certain percentage of your income. One strategy is to start by reinvesting 50% of your income into the website until you reach your monthly income goal. After that, reduce your investment into the business to 25% of revenue.

That way you can aggressively grow the business until your reach your desired income level. After that, you insure that the site stays fresh and continues to grow.

How do you reinvest your earnings into the website?

There are two options. One, you could pay for more on-site content, and essentially hire writers. Two, you could pay for promotion.

I think it's wise to avoid the first strategy and pursue the second. Write your own content and use your income from the website to further promote it and increase its authority. This is a smart strategy for two reasons:

1. When you outsource on-site content, quality typically drops. This is not good for your brand or long term outlook.
2. If you outsource your promotional efforts, it frees your time and mental energy to focus on creating great content on your website.

Create amazing content on your site, then outsource the promotion of that content. This will free you up to create more amazing on-site content.

Pro tip: One way to implement this idea is to use paid Stumbleupon traffic. Create an amazing article on your website, then spend as little as five dollars sending traffic to the page. See how many people give it a “thumbs up” and then create another piece of amazing content to repeat the experiment. By examining your results and comparing the number of “likes,” you can continuously refine future articles that you write to better serve your site visitors. Thus, this can become an iterative approach to crafting the best possible content on your website.

Find the Big Advertisers in your Niche and Reach Out to Them

If you are using AdSense then you are aware that Google makes a certain percentage from each pay per click transaction. If you were to go direct with one of your advertisers and eliminate Google from the equation, both of you would come out better.

Pay attention to the advertisers that show up on your site when you run Google AdSense. Examine their business model, see how they are making money, and understand how they profit from purchasing your traffic.

Then approach them with a proposition. Ask them if they would be interested in eliminating Google and buying your traffic directly. Brainstorm and consider other compensation models. You may be able to negotiate a much more profitable deal if you go direct with the company.

This is exactly how I stumbled into such a lucrative sale for my website. I contacted all of my AdSense advertisers with a friendly email that sought to open discussion and negotiate a direct relationship. This led to a few trial runs that basically fizzled. Then one advertiser approached me and eventually offered to buy my website for a huge sum of money.

It is very likely that the biggest websites in your niche monetize traffic more efficiently than you do. Capitalize on this and reach out to the big players and offer to negotiate a direct deal. If they know the value of your traffic (and they obviously do!) then they should be eager to either advertise directly or purchase your site outright.

Ignore Internet Marketing Advice (including this) and Do your Own Testing

Internet marketers are always giving advice. Take all such advice with a grain of salt and test everything. What works for them will not necessarily work for you. Every niche is a bit different.

The key is to take action. Once you have some traffic and income trickling in, it is time to make a serious effort to really grow your website. Take massive action if you want big results.

For example, how many articles are you publishing per day on your website? One? Could you push it to two or three?

The long term effects of publishing multiple articles every day are enormous. When creating an authority website, volume matters—a lot. Push yourself to create lots of new (quality) content and this will also allow you to do more testing about what works well and what does not. Thus, you learn simply by taking action and refining your approach based on your results.

Be Patient and Let Success Unfold in its Own Time

Most people who dabble in internet marketing give up long before they see a payout like the one I received. The problem is that there is so much spam on the internet that the search engines have to “put everyone on probation” for such a long time in order to see who is really serious and who is not.

This creates a barrier to entry, but it also represents a huge opportunity. Most people do not have the patience to keep creating high quality content while the search engines turn up their noses at them.

Realize that this is an opportunity for you to persevere and be rewarded. The average time to success on the web has been stretched out considerably. Most people will give up within the first year or two due to lack of results.

If you create amazing content over and over again, eventually you will be rewarded with a steady stream of traffic and income.

But, you have to believe in the process and have the determination to keep pounding away.

Be patient enough to let success find you.

Create something amazing, and one day you might be telling someone like I did:

“Yes, I will sell you my website for $200,000 dollars!”

Thanks, once again, to Patrick for sharing his story and advice. You can read more from Patrick on his blog at Make Money with No Work. Any comments or questions? Please leave them in the comment section below. Cheers!

The post One Entrepreneur’s Journey to Selling a Website for $200,000 appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

One of the principle ideas of Smart Passive Income is that small changes can add up to big wins. For example adding an opt-in form to your About Page or simply finding the optimal price for your product.

These smart changes take just a few minutes but can lead to big time results.

Identifying the small tweaks that yield huge rewards is an extremely powerful idea, which is why I'm happy to host a guest post by Tyler Tervooren of Advanced Riskology and creator of The Bootstrapper Guild, who explores this idea and applies it to earning more money.

I've known of Tyler for a long time, but over the past couple of years we've become much better acquainted with each other through a fantasy football league and although we're competitors during the NFL season, he's definitely a top-notch player and friend in my book.

Please enjoy this incredibly powerful post from Tyler…

Everyone knows Charles Darwin’s theory: “survival of the fittest.” But most people understand it incorrectly. When we think of the fittest, we think of someone or something that’s superior right now. Whoever’s the biggest, strongest, and fastest wins.

But that’s not really what Darwin meant. Well, at least it’s not all he meant.

What Darwin was really talking about is the ability to adapt to change. If you’re able to take anything thrown at you and come out stronger, then you’ll survive in the long run.

I’m kind of a scrawny guy. If you stood a bodybuilder next to me, you’d estimate correctly that he could kick my ass in a heartbeat. But if you threw the two of us in a pool with cinder-blocks tied to our feet, that doesn’t matter anymore. Whoever grows a pair of gills first is now the real winner. Whoever adapts.

And so it is with life and money. It’s hard work to succeed over the long run; you have to adapt quickly when things aren’t working. If you’re a freelancer, this can literally be the difference between eating filet mignon next month or working like a dog to afford the “good” ramen.

Earning more money and enjoying your work is all about adaptation—the faster you do it and the more you commit to it, the better you become.

How to Evolve Your Income the Charles Darwin Way

In the natural world, we don’t have much control over evolution—it just sort of happens. But if you want to increase your income, you’re going to have to work at it. This means experimenting with different ideas that may or may not turn out the way you want them to and constantly testing and improving.

The ultimate goal is to find the smallest change with the greatest effect. In scientific terms, the “minimum effective dose.” Easier said than done. Often, the evolution you need to make to increase your income is one or two steps removed from the problem itself.

Let me give you an example. Think about someone trying to lose weight. The obvious solution is to eat less and exercise more, but how often does that actually work? That plan goes fine for about a week until you’re crazy hungry and your friend offers you some pie. The real solution is not to try to eat less pie, but to surround yourself with people who won’t offer it to you in the first place.

When it comes to evolving your income, you have to get creative and look beyond the surface. Let’s look at a business that made a minor change that drastically increased their speed of growth.

How “Putting it on an iPad” Created a $10 Million Business

Shopkeep is a little Internet startup that caters to local businesses looking for a simpler way to handle payments than a cash register and complicated sales systems.

For two years, the development team worked to build a solution that would make handling money easy for people who ran bakeries, coffee shops, corner stores, and other retail shops. And they created a great solution! Anyone who wanted to use their service could run their program from a Mac or PC to handle any kind of sale, and it was all managed and stored in the cloud.

But when Amy, one of the founders, described the early days to me, her words were, “We were doing ok, signing up a modest amount of customers…”

“Ok” and “modest” aren’t exactly words you’d use to describe a home run, right? But they had a great service, so what was wrong?

Talking to one their customers—a coffee shop owner—they learned that what was really needed was something even smaller and even simpler. The answer, to them, was obvious—an iPad app. Simple, completely portable. And creating it would be easy because the hard work was already done.

A month later they released it and the numbers started rapidly improving. Just a few months ago, they were given $2 million in financing to expand. When you put the numbers together, that makes Shopkeep about a $10 million company.

The pivot worked. And because small shop owners talk to each other, their customers do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to selling their new service.

I can personally vouch that the change worked, too; I’d never seen an iPad cash register before, but now I’ve seen three cafes in my neighborhood switch to their system in just the last few months.

Shopkeep found a way to take all the hard work they’d already done and move it to a new platform.

What small change can you make to capitalize on all the hard work you’ve already done? How can you adapt?

How a Yoga Enthusiast Added Six Figures to Her Business by Adapting to Change

Rachel Cook started her career in yoga like most others do—as an enthusiast. But the way she built her yoga empire was through a series of adaptations much different than most yoga professionals.

When she’d had enough of her corporate job (helping small businesses grow) she knew she wanted to do something with yoga. She could take a lot of training courses, become an instructor, and eventually open her own studio. But that would take forever and she didn’t even want to run a studio.

So instead, she adapted in a way that made more sense for her. She took the years of business advising she’d already done and focused in on other yoga instructors (who are great at what they do, but notoriously bad at running businesses).

This shift wasn’t just a shortcut, it also played on the unique experience she already had—no additional skills required. Taking the valuable skills and experience you already have and re-positioning them is a key factor to increasing your income quickly. There is absolutely no need to start over.

Pretty soon, Rachel was flying all over the country to meet with clients. Rachel had a serious business as the “yogipreneur” built around helping yoga instructors grow their studios.

Then she had twins and was faced with a difficult choice. Should she:

• Keep going at this pace and miss out on seeing her kids grow up? Or,
• Scale back and sacrifice her career to be “Mom?”

But Rachel saw this as a false dichotomy. Rather than choose to give something up, why not just evolve? She picked option three: move her business online where she could scale up, work from home, and spend time with her kids.

And this evolution hasn’t just benefited her with more time and a potential six-figure jump in income this year, it’s helped her clients who now have easier access to her and pay less for the service. Win/win.

One reason so many people think they have to start over is because the skills they’re using at work aren’t making them happy or they don’t feel “passionate” about what they’re doing. Nonsense. What this really means is that the skills you have aren’t being applied in the right places. You’ll feel plenty passionate when you adapt them into work that actually excites you.

Rachel used the momentum behind her to evolve into bigger and better things. Adapting doesn’t always mean completely changing direction. Just a small change can make a huge difference.

Chargify makes a great example of this point, too.

A 600% Increase in Income…Overnight

When Chargify opened in 2009, they had a grand idea that would change the way businesses made money; rather than rely on selling something new every month, now they could easily sell subscriptions and make money every month. It’s a full-scale business, but the lesson they learned applies to increasing your income no matter who you are or what you do for a living.

Chargify opened strong and had thousands of people sign up for their service. But there was a problem; everyone was signing up for free accounts and never upgrading. They were losing money!

Well, you can’t get away with losing money for long, so Chargify made the difficult choice to change one small thing in their business and stop doing work for free. The backlash from customers and even the press was fierce.

But what happened next is far more interesting: They started making money. All of a sudden, paying customers started to show up. From Michael Klett, co-founder:

“Ending our freemium model increased our revenue by nearly 600%, almost overnight. We lost some customers, but there was a large segment of our customer-base that wanted to pay us because of the value we brought to their business.”

And there was another added benefit: The number of customer complaints fell dramatically. Apparently, when you’re running a real business you’re more concerned about growing it than complaining about details.

Today, Chargify is profitable and growing. But if they hadn’t adapted when they did, there might not be a Chargify at all.

How to Evolve Your Own Income—3 Incredibly Important Questions

So how do you put this concept of adaptation to work in your own life? How do you increase your income by making a small change to how you work?

The answer is that, to get good results, you have to ask good questions. And you have to ask them before you make changes. Specifically, you need to be able to answer these three questions:

1. What problem needs to be fixed?

2. What's the right adaptation to make?

3. How do I know the change is working?

Let's say you're a freelancer who makes cupcake deliveries to your neighborhood (a real business in my home town). Things are okay, but business could be a lot better.

Let's answer those three questions for your confection venture.

1. How do I know it's time to make a change?

This is going to start out vague, but then get a lot more specific. Obviously you want to change something because you're not making enough money, but you need to zero in on why you might not be making enough money.

You think about it for a minute and come up with a few ideas:

1. Ingredients are too expensive, but you don't want to charge more and lose customers.
2. Customers are too sporadic. You can't plan out how much money you're going to make.
3. Delivery is too expensive and is eating up all your profit.

These are all things that could change (and probably should). Now you need to figure out exactly what to do about these problems.

2. What's the right adaptation to make?

There's no way to answer this question without testing. Since you don't have a crystal ball, the best solution is to make a list of each thing you might change. Then—and this is very important—put them in order from easiest to most difficult, and start testing them one-by-one.

How could your confection service attack the problems you just listed?

1. Ingredients are too expensive.

• Buy cheaper ingredients and charge the same price.
• Charge more.
• Buy cheaper ingredients and charge more.
• Find a way to attract more customers and start buying in bulk to get lower prices for the same ingredients.

2. Customers are too sporadic.

• Ask for re-orders at the same time you make a delivery.
• Create coupons that give an incentive for quick re-orders.
• Start a subscription service and charge customers monthly.

3. Delivery is too expensive.

• Charge a delivery fee.
• Lump all deliveries together and only deliver on specific days.
• Cancel your auto insurance and use Zipcar for deliveries.
• Deliver by bicycle.

Now you have a list of action steps you can take to make real changes to how you work. Start with the simplest changes—the ones you can implement right away—and work your way down the list as necessary.

3. How do I know the change is working?

This is where things fall apart if you're not careful. It's easy to get excited and make changes, but there are two things you need to do to make sure you know with complete certainty which ones are actually working and which ones are wasting your time.

1. Test only one thing at a time. If you make multiple changes at once, it's incredibly difficult to tell what's affecting what. When you make one change at a time, you know it either worked or it didn't.
2. Set a goal and a deadline for each change. Without these two things in place, it's almost impossible to declare success or failure. When you have a goal, you either reached it or you didn't. When you have a deadline, you either made it or you missed it. There's no excuses—”Well, it looks like it's making things better,” or “Maybe if I just give it a little bit longer…”

When you put these objectives in place, you can quickly test small changes and either keep them or dump them before moving onto the next one. There's no guesswork.

Declare success or failure, and then begin the next test. Do this consistently and the successful adaptations start to compound. This is how you systematically improve your income.

The Bottom Line

When you try to increase your income, you’re not going to fail because you didn’t try hard enough. You’ll only fail if you’re not willing to adapt your plan when it isn’t working.

If you accept that you can’t run a business on autopilot forever and adjust to changes as needed, you can get through nearly any hardship. If you accept that uncertainty is part of the game and embrace it, then you’ll see problems early and react to them rather than bury your head in the sand.

Most importantly, you won’t lose hope and quit trying because you’ll know that just a few little changes can make an incredible difference.

Evolve early. Evolve often. Repeat. You’ll be glad you did.

What are 3 adaptations you can test this week to start increasing your income? List them in the comments below.

Do-It-Yourself entrepreneur Tyler Tervooren writes at Advanced Riskology, a site dedicated to living a better life through risk-taking. He’s also the creator of The Bootstrapper Guild, a program for DIY entrepreneurs to start their first micro-business.

The post How to “Evolve” Your Income and Build Your Business the Charles Darwin Way appeared first on Smart Passive Income.