Say Hello to the New ZacJohnson.com Genesis Blog Theme

Since going live with the blog nearly four years ago, I’ve also prided myself to have one of the best themes around. This not only means having a great theme, but also changing it up year after year, and hopefully for the better. The latest theme change is my favorite yet, which a much cleaner, faster and user friendly design. The new ZacJohnson.com theme is run off the Genesis Framework theme from StudioPress and was put together by one of their designers. Rafal.

You can see a comparison of past ZacJohnson.com blog themes below.

As you can see from the screen shots above, the design just kept progressing over time. The first theme was created mainly for content and was the launching theme for the site. The next release was the first test for monetizing the site, and the introduction of banner ads displayed on the site. The last version above was an amazing update, which leads us to the blog theme you see on ZacJohnson.com today. The first theme was created by a designer I used a while back, the previous two themes were created by Unique Blog Designs, and the new theme is from Genesis Framework.

I am proudly promoting Genesis Framework to all of my visitors, as it’s an amazing theme and the customization and design features are just amazing. If you are thinking about redesigning your web site, I would definitely approve of the Genesis Framework, and any other themes available through StudioPress. At the bottom of every post, before the comments, you will see the following:

ZacJohnson.com runs on the Genesis Framework

The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. Genesis provides the secure and search-engine-optimized foundation that takes WordPress to places you never thought it could go.

Check out the incredible features and the selection of designs. It’s that simple – start using Genesis now!

Genesis Framework is more of a foundation for a blog, then a complete theme. You can buy Genesis Framework, then buy other themes at a much discounted rate to which work with Genesis. For more information on how Genesis Framework works, head over to StudioPress and they have a ton of examples and themes to work with. The StudioPress team were also amazing to work with, and I would recommend their services to anyone.

In addition to the new theme going live, I will be working on some new additions on the blog, including some new guides, wordpress themes area, tools references and more. Let me know what you think about the new blog theme. I love it!

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Is Your Low Social IQ Dooming Your Blog?

What’s wrong with my blog?

That’s a very frustrating question that many bloggers ask.

You’re passionate about your topic and you provide great advice to solve reader’s problems. You wrap up your posts with interesting questions, inviting readers to share their opinions in the comments. You offer clear calls to action. 

Unfortunately, no one seems to be listening. 

Post after post reveals no more than a handful of comments (and half of those are your own replies). Your subscriber numbers have flatlined. And forget fan mail, that showing up seems as likely as finding a tall glass of water in the desert. 

I hate to be the one to tell you, but the problem might not be your blog. The problem might be you.

Why bloggers need good people skills

Considering you don’t share the same room, or perhaps even the same continent with your readers, the vital need for interpersonal skills on your blog may be a bit puzzling. 

But as Jon Morrow points out, “Those traffic figures in your analytics account aren’t just numbers, they’re people.”

And people with high social intelligence are magnetic.

Have you ever noticed how popular bloggers have a knack for writing about their readers’ hopes and frustrations? Popular blogs sound like they were written just for you. The comments are filled with statements like, “This is just what I needed to hear,” or “Wow, I could have written those same words.”

Successful bloggers build the confidence of their readers, not just themselves. They create rapport by making readers feel valued, one person at a time. 

Good writing alone won’t drive people to subscribe, leave thoughtful comments, or share your material. Social intelligence is the currency of the blogosphere. In fact, it’s the key to good business too.

And the best part? It can be learned.

Sizing up your social IQ

In his book, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success, Karl Albrecht highlights the five dimensions of social intelligence. The trick is understanding how to translate those often nonverbal dynamics into the text-based world of blogging. 

1. Situational Awareness Having situational awareness means you understand the social context of situations and respond appropriately. People missing this skill take phone calls in the middle of meetings or blast their car stereo while returning home late at night. They’re not purposely rude, just oblivious to the wants (and reactions) of others. In the online world, this is the equivalent of committing the blogging sin of boorishness.

Need help developing better situational awareness? Check out LaVonne Ellis and David Crandall’s Customer Love e-book.

2. Presence Presence is the ability to project confidence and self-respect, and as a blogger, it derives primarily from your voice. If you’re used to writing term papers or corporate vision statements, finding your writing voice can be tricky. When you get it right, it’s an extremely powerful way to build connections with readers.

3. Authenticity The blogosphere likes to talk about the importance of authenticity, but what is it really?  Albrecht calls it the “opposite of being phony.” Seth Godin describes authenticity as ”doing what you promise, not being who you are.” Many associate authenticity with revealing the person behind the ideas, like Corbett Barr’s blog post “33 Things I Never Told You.” For bloggers, authenticity is probably somewhere in between ideology and action. The point is to be genuine: express opinions you believe in, endorse products you use, and network with people you actually like.

4. Clarity How well you present ideas and influence others comes, in part, from your clarity. It’s a balance between knowing enough to be specific and having enough distance to speak directly. The classic advice is to explain a topic like you were speaking to your grandmother. This is particularly relevant for bloggers, who often assume their audience is social media savvy instead of the “average Grandma Minnie.”

5. Empathy Empathy involves understanding the experiences and motivations of another person. Looking for a topic that has viral potential? Want to invoke an emotional reaction to your post? Empathy is the cornerstone of social intelligence.

Creating the complete social intelligence package

The best way to improve your social IQ is to spend some quality time alone. After all, if you don’t understand your own motivations, how can you hope to predict the fears and desires of your readers? 

You’ll be surprised how hard this is.

I recently left a 20-year career in science. As I was evaluating new career options, I wrote down all the jobs I’d considered as a kid, before (I thought) society had imposed its expectations on me.

I’d always dreamed of becoming an actor. But the more I thought about it, I realized my interest in acting was more an interest in fame. I wasn’t actually very interested in joining a local theater company.

Many writers use journaling as an effective way to explore the undercurrent of their emotions. 

What’s the first thing you worry about when you wake up in the morning? If the doctor gave you three months to live, what would you do with the time? Why aren’t you doing that now? What makes you cry tears of joy? Why aren’t you doing that? 

This isn’t just advice for those woo-woo, self-help bloggers either.

Social media junkies are scared they’ll sell their soul to get 5,000 friends on Facebook and still won’t have anyone to call when they have a bad accident on the interstate. New tech users worry they’ll drop their iPhone on the subway platform and will never, ever re-create their contacts list.

That little voice whispering insecurities in your ear all day long? He’s a blogger’s best friend.

Listen to your insecurities carefully, then find a way around them. This will likely bring up more insecurities. Find a way around those too. 

Write about the solutions you find, with all the social intelligence you can muster.

You’ll not only be a better blogger, you’ll be a better person.

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6 Ways to Sell a Website, and 4 Ways Not to Sell One

This guest post is by 0Mathew Carpenter of Sofa Moolah.

It’s gotten harder and harder to generate a stable income as an affiliate over the past two years. From Facebook’s decidedly anti-affiliate mindset, to the lengthy list of regulations that search engines such as Google have released, generating stable, consistent, and stress-free paid traffic isn’t as simple as it once was. For thousands of affiliates, it’s been a major frustration and a potential business killer.

But alongside the “Google slaps” advertisement disapprovals and the massive flock to second-tier ad networks is a change in the mindset of many affiliates. Instead of focusing on the hustle of direct-response advertising, many successful affiliates and product owners alike are looking to search or socially-powered websites as a source of traffic, a source of sales, and as a source of income.

I’ve been following this same formula—alongside some other online business models—for the past few years, and while it’s far from the cash cow that a giant advertising campaign can be, it’s a form of income that’s significantly more reliable and steady. Advertising and sales checks from blogs and search-powered websites tend to be quite constant—at least more so than the average ad campaign.

Six steps to a successful site sale

These six rules—and four anti-rules—can help you develop and sell your own web properties, to generate a strong and reliable sideline income in addition to your main online venture. Despite the comfort of steady and recurring passive income, it’s often the case that you need short-term cash to fund other websites or advertising projects. In that case, be sure to put these six tips for selling your website into action.

1. Understand your website’s long-term value in advance

The average sales price of a successful website tends to range from six to ten times its profit on a monthly basis. While this can sound fairly hefty—particularly for a website that generates several thousand dollars monthly—it’s really a fraction of the type of value assigned to offline businesses.

Think about Facebook’s current valuation—the ludicrously high $50 billion. Does this reflect the website’s current earnings? No. While the website is profitable by all accounts, it’s far from those levels of profitability. The valuation reflects the website’s long-term value—something that can be applied to your own websites too.

So instead of thinking in terms of short-term revenue for your website and monthly profit, think in terms of your website’s potential for revenue growth over time. If you’re trying to sell a site that’s a real social media hit, for example, or a website with a growing search presence, use this potential as an indicator of its value and price it accordingly.

2. Know your audience, and know how to sell them

The biggest mistake I see being applied to website sales is one that’s repeated in almost all aspects of online marketing: using the same tactics for very different audiences. Just as you’d use different sales tactics to sell a car than you would to sell a bag of candy, you need to use different tactics to sell different types of websites.

Know your audience, and understand how they’re going to respond to your website auction. On one of the bigger marketplaces like Flippa, it’s important to remember that people value revenue data or profit information above anything else. For an independent website investor, information about your website’s potential for growth may be more important.

3. Research successful website sales before listing your own

When asked about how he acquires new skills quickly, productivity guru (and now fitness author) Tim Ferriss explained that it’s best to look at people who have achieved massive success in a short amount of time. It’s a philosophy that can be applied to everything from online marketing to selling your own websites, and it always produces good results.

Instead of going with your gut when deciding on how to present your website for sale, look at other websites that have achieved high sales prices in the past. What information do they disclose? Which sales tactics and pitches do they use to frame the auction? By reverse-engineering sales information from successful website auctions, you can vastly improve the results of your own.

4. Take steps to optimize profits before making a listing.

There’s nothing worse than seeing a website for sale that’s barely been optimized. From blogs that lack even the most basic advertising to affiliate websites that reek of poor conversion testing, if an online property hasn’t been optimized, it’s never going to reach its true value at sale. If your site is on the market without any profit optimization, you’re making a huge (and potentially costly) error.

Test different advertising networks, different ad creatives, and different affiliate offers on your site before you put it up for auction. Test different ad placement, different monetization methods, and a lengthy list of different lead capture strategies. Unoptimized (or poorly optimized) websites can be great deals for buyers, but they’re never a good option for you as the seller.

I’ve optimized many of the websites I’ve sold to increase profits by as much as 415% before making a sale. Small changes, particularly to the wording surrounding your call-to-action text or ad placement, can make a huge difference in the amount of income that your website generates.

5. Use a popular outlet that attracts the right audience

There are hundreds of auction sites out there that allow you to list your website, but only a select few are worth your time. The most popular is Flippa, which, despite its reputation for occasional shady websites, is actually the best option out there. I’ve sold two websites on Flippa for mid four-figure sums recently, one of which achieved an ROI of over four hundred percent.

Don’t, however, confuse a large audience with a good audience. If you own a website in a specific niche, for example, it’s almost always better to appeal to others in your niche directly instead of an all-purpose outlet like Flippa. As I said in step two, it’s important to know the type of people you’re marketing to, not just the amount of potential buyers that you have access to.

6. Minimize “fluff” statistics, and focus on the substance

“Fluff” statistics are, to me, information that’s impressive when explained in an auction, yet utterly meaningless when it comes to your website’s ability to generate income or influence change. The types of statistics I’m talking about are total pageview information—generally information that has no tie to real profitability—or data about how much traffic your website generates in total.

Instead of offering this type of information to potential bidders, highlight your website’s strengths and offer real data to buyers. Talk about how many unique visitors your website gets, your biggest traffic sources, and the value of a visitor to your website. “Fluff” statistics are only worth mentioning in one situation: your website is overvalued and you’re desperate to complete the sale quickly.

How not to sell your website

I’ve mentioned what you should do when selling your website. Now, it’s time to cover some of the most common errors that are made by those auctioning websites. While some of these tactics can help you, particularly if your website isn’t valuable, most will push away the types of buyers you want to attract. Ignore them at your own peril, as they’re definitely techniques to be avoided.

1. Load your auction with worthless data and needless hype.

Nobody cares about your blog’s unique design, its flashy navigation system, and the level of praise it has received from others in your niche. They do care about its potential for generating revenue or, in rare circumstances, its level of influence in its niche. In most cases, it’s best to leave subjective data such as critical praise or “best blog in ___” type feedback off your website’s auction page.

On the same note, don’t load your auction page with fifty-point red headers and sales copy. Look at rule two again—you’re marketing your website to other marketers. Instead of pulling out every last direct response trick in the book, offer information that’s of value to people. It’s very hard to sell to marketers, and it only gets worse when you employ the same tactics that they use on a daily basis.

2. Capitalize on temporary fads, short-term events, and crazes

I see this type of mistake all the time on Flippa. Marketers—typically newbies—buy a domain that is loosely related to the latest celebrity death, put up a generic two-page WordPress site, and think it could be the next big thing. These auctions tend to be loaded with potential-driven sales copy and an overwhelming contempt for their potential customers, all in an effort to make a quick buck.

Here’s what they all have in common: they rarely, if ever, make a decent profit. While the owners of these websites may make a few dollars on the sale, it’s rarely enough to even consider. The best type of website for onward sales is one that’s loaded with long-term potential, not some hyped-up spur-of-the-moment domain name.

3. List your website but make little or no effort to monetize it

The only thing worse than overselling a website, as above, is underselling it by failing to spend any time on monetization. This mistake is constantly be made on Flippa, although unlike many of these errors, which are made by newbies, it’s the professionals that tend to make this one. Always short on time and challenged by other projects, they list websites without even trying to monetize them.

Any signs of profitability—even a Google Adsense block atop your page—are a good thing for lifting your sales price. While websites occasionally sell based on their unrealized potential alone, it’s not at all a common occurrence. Take the time to test your website’s profitability level, and even when it’s not a winner, let people know that it’s at least capable of generating income.

4. Defining your website’s potential without thinking long-term

Browse any auction website and you’ll see descriptions where the merchant has been, shall we say, a little too optimistic about their website’s future. No, it probably won’t become the next Facebook, and no, it probably won’t triple its revenue in two months. While these examples take long-term prediction to its extreme, they’re a good indicator of how a little long-term thinking can help with your sales.

Website aren’t bought to immediately be flipped—at least, not in most cases. For the most part, they are bought as a fairly long-term investment (by online standards). Be upfront and clear about how your website is performing now, but don’t forget to include a description—even quite a salesy description—of how it could perform in the future.

Have you successfully sold a website before? If so, how did it go? Did you break even, lose money, or make a profit on the sale?

Leave your own experiences in the comments and let me know if you’ve got any suggestions on how to sell websites more effectively. I’ve seen plenty of very different techniques do well in this field, and it’s always an interesting to experience how well people are doing with less orthodox tactics.

Mathew Carpenter is an 18-year-old-business owner and entrepreneur from Sydney, Australia. Mathew is currently working on Sofa Moolah, a website that teaches you how to make money online. Follow Mathew on Twitter: @matcarpenter. Follow Sofa Moolah on Twitter: @sofamoolah.

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A Second Look: 6 Types of Twitter Tools That Come in Handy

Tweet

We go over so many tools here are Blogging Tips that many of them are often forgotten as they’re buried deeper into the archives.

I thought it would be nice to go over a few Twitter tools that are useful and definitely worth a second look. If you’re an avid Twitter user, it’s a good idea to use a tool from each of these categories to help with productivity, build your brand and get the most out of Twitter. Since this list only includes past posts from Blogging Tips, it will not address any new tools (which I’m sure there are many of) that may exist in each category; so feel free to add those additional tools in the comments!

Schedule Your Tweets

If you don’t have much time to spend on Twitter yet still want to appear active, 3 of the tools listed on 5 Ways to Schedule Your Tweets (2 are no longer available) can help you schedule future tweets. Scheduling tweets is also great for promoting a product or service. You can schedule 1-2 tweets per day for a certain amount of time, but just be sure to change up the wording as much as possible for each tweets. Twitvance is also a great tool for scheduling unlimited tweets.

Clean Out Your Followers

If you are following over 200 or even 100 people on Twitter, it’s just impossible to manually clean out your followers (ie. inactive users, spammers, etc). You’d have to go to the page of each user and then look at their tweets to see when the last one was posted and then check out what type of content their posting. No one has time for that! Luckily, there are lots of tools out there to help you clean out your followers. None of the tools listed on 4 Twitter Account Cleaners are still around, but the tools listed on Four More Twitter Account Cleaners along with Refollow are sure to come in handy.

Sift Through The Junk

Let’s face it, the amount of spam and shameless promotion on Twitter is getting out of hand. There is so much that it is often hard to find anything useful in your Twitter stream. After using one of the Twitter cleaners above it shouldn’t be so much of a problem, but just in case here are a few tools to help you filter through the junk and find the tweets that matter: Cascaad, TidyTweet and Filttr.

Shorten Your URLs

Most Twitter tools come with an integrated URL shortener, but surprisingly Twitter.com does not have that feature (yet). So if you are in need of a short URL or want to tool to help you condense URLs while browsing check out 9 Short URL Services and 8 URL Shorteners for Quickly Sharing Links.

Keep Up via Alerts

If you’re an extremely busy person, keeping up with Twitter can be impossible and hiring help is just out of the question for most. Having to login each day and look through thousands of tweets can be a pain and many users just give up from frustration. If you’re looking for a more convenient way to keep up with Twitter, then opting to receive alerts is a good idea. With TwitterAlerts you can receive notifications by SMS, email or IM for an unlimited number of keywords. If you want to keep up with specific users instead, I find that IFTTT handles that job quite well.

Backup Your Tweets

Lastly, you want to be sure that you are backing up your tweets on a regular basis. There is nothing worse than building up a Twitter account for a year or two and then losing it all (trust me, I know). Plus, there’s always something weird going on at Twitter and users often complain about missing tweets. You can save yourself the hassle by using one of these 10 Twitter Backup Tools for Preserving Tweets (plus 8 bonus options at the end). You know what they say, it’s better to be safe than sorry; make sure you’re safe!

(image source)

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Are We Having Fun Yet?

This guest post is by Justin P Lambert of Words That Begin With You .

Quick question: are you having fun?

I mean, you’re sitting here reading Problogger, so you’re likely a blogger, or at least thinking about jumping in. And you’re likely interested in making some money from your efforts. There’s nothing wrong with that at all.

But are you having fun?

Courtesy
of Douglas R. Witt (flickr)

Maybe you’ve been at it for a while, or maybe, like me, you’re just a babe learning to crawl at this point. Either way, there’s a universal truth of blogging you’ve probably already figured out: it ain’t easy.

A tough gig

If you’ve done what you’re “supposed” to do blogging is tough. Editorial calendars, social media, building a list, seeking subscribers, tweaking the theme, ads or no ads… Wow.

Back in the ancient days of online journals, (you know, like 1996) most of the folks who “blogged” before “blogging” was even a word did it for fun. They had a particular interest, or just a desire to share their thoughts and activities with the world long before status updates and tweets were even on the horizon.

These folks probably didn’t think about making money from their online activities at all, or at least not seriously. Not long ago, Skelliewag wrote a really beautiful post about the transition that happened later on.

Darren also shared a quote from his wise-beyond-his-years son: “tell the world something important.”

Together, these two uber-experienced bloggers taught me a valuable lesson, grabbing my metaphorical wheel just before I hit the metaphorical guardrail, if that makes any sense.

You see, I started my blog just over six months ago, and I learned quickly that it was hard work. But good writing always is. The payoff, for most of us any way, is that we enjoy writing. Or, at least, we enjoy getting our thoughts out there for others to read/see/hear and interact with. This is something I lost track of, somewhere around post #13.

I started getting so wrapped up in my posting schedule and my analytics, actually writing the posts became an annoyance. “Man,” I’d think, “I wish I could get this over with so I can get back to Twitter!” It got to the point, only four months into my blogging, where I burnt out and suddenly went from posting daily to three posts in a month!

I spent most of that month kicking myself and desperately trying to figure out what happened. The answer blew me away when it finally arrived: I had sucked every ounce of enjoyment out of writing a blog because I had gotten too involved in “blogging”.

So, I ask you again: are you having fun?

How to have fun

Now I’m not going to sit here and try to preach to you about how to fix this issue. I’m still trying to figure it out myself. But since I realized how close I came to giving up, I’ve done a lot of thinking about why things changed. And I’ve come up with a few items that I know are going to help me.

I’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts in the comments too, because most of you are far more experienced than I am in struggling with this issue, so I know you’re going to have more ideas to share.

Relax

You know what? While consistency is important and your readers deserve to receive what they’ve come to expect, no one’s going to lynch you if your post is a day late every now and then.

I had a tough time figuring this out, and when life got in the way and I missed a post or sent it out late, I felt the need to fire off apologies to my subscribers and wallow in self-pity.

Give me a break. Do your best. Then relax. It’s just a blog.

Converse

I quickly morphed from sharing interesting information that I thought would be of real value to my readers to slicing off chunks of pre-made content and stringing it out over weeks in order to ensure that a post on a particular subject would go out every Monday for the next four weeks.

This approach is kind of like inviting people over for a turkey dinner and then serving them Spam. I was short-changing my readers and my conscience was nagging me like mad, which is no fun. I lost the conversational aspect of my blog in favor of a series of mini-lectures that (not surprisingly) got little if any comments.

Make sure you give your readers what they deserve: your best every time. Even if that means you can’t post as often. Make sure it stays a conversation, not a choppy lecture. Who has fun at a lecture?

Focus … or not

I struggled for a long time with the question of niches and specializing, and felt like a failure from the start because I just couldn’t narrow myself down to a niche.

I created my blog as a means of sharing my expertise and engaging an audience in connection to my work as a freelance writer. But I don’t specialize on a particular writing format or project group, so how could I blog on just one niche? Yet the experts say I should. Oh woe is me!

It took me a long time to realize that my generalist scope is who I am. Anything less would be boring to me and that would automatically become boring to my readers. So if you’re like me, having a tough time finding a niche that satisfies you,

Get over it!

Think about what you want to write, then think hard about how to connect it all in an understandable frame that your readers can latch onto. It’s better for everyone involved. Like I said, I’m still learning. But I’m finally having fun with my blog, like I was back in June when I first started. I hope you’re doing the same. Because if you’re not, it shows. Believe me.

Please, share in the comments your suggestions for having fun with your blog, how you overcame issues that were keeping you from having fun, or how you plan to do so starting now!

Justin P Lambert is a freelance writer who has been blogging for seven months and has enjoyed it for two. He’s working on it. Drop by Words That Begin With You to see how it goes. You can also follow him on Twitter.

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10 Marketing Strategies You Can Implement Today

Tweet

If you run an online business, blog or website you know you need to be marketing. Maybe you aren’t sure where to start. These ten tips are things you can start implementing right away to grow your business and start getting the word out about your product or service. These tips should be used over and over to continually grow awareness of your blog/product or service. Use them weekly, but they are easy enough that you can start using them today.

1. Interact on related blogs & forums. Simply find blogs and forums that are in the same niche or category as your site and start interacting with people. You can leave comments, offer helpful advice and suggestions or just get to know people.

2. Write and distribute to article directories. Writing an informative article is something you can do today. There are many article directories that will allow you to post your article for free. Not only is this a way to give readers pertinent information but you also get a backlink in your bio or resource box.

3. Guest blog. You may not get a guest blogging spot today, but you can write the blog post and start contacting blog owners to see if they are interested.

4. Create a compelling email signature. You need to do this in your autoresponder signature as well as your personal email signature.

5. Create videos and put on Youtube. Videos are getting more popular every day. You can create several short videos, upload them to Youtube and then share the links with your readers, in your email signature, on Twitter and Facebook. Don’t like seeing yourself on screen? That’s not a problem, you can create Power Point Presentations for the visual and then read from a script so all that’s “seen” of you is your voice.

6. Write a review. You can write reviews on products you’ve tried, ebooks you’ve read, webinars, videos, books you’ve read, affiliate programs. The list is endless on things you can review to help your readers and give you exposure.

7. Tweet to your followers. You don’t have to get on Twitter every single day and bombard your followers with tweets, but you can use Twitter as a strategic source to build your following, set up your personal brand and reach out to others looking for your information.

8. Share your stuff on Facebook. You can set your blogs to post on Facebook through Networked Blogs, you can set up plugins that allow you and others to share your blog posts on social networks. Utitilize these tools for yourself too. Your readers aren’t the only ones who can use them–you can too.

9. Email your list. This one is pretty self explanatory, you can email your list once or twice a week with updates, promotions and other stuff. If you don’t have a list, start a list building campaign and start sending people to your opt-in page.

10. Create a free report. You can write up a report to give away that contains relevant information to your website, product or service. Brand it with your website address in the footer so people know where to go to find more information.

These are all pretty simple methods you can start doing immediately to grow traffic to your blog or website. Do you have any simple solutions not mentioned here that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

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Direct Response Marketing – Ways to Crush Your Competition

Every once in a while I will meet someone who is very smart about the industry in one area, but not taking a full advantage of what they have available to them. One of these instances was when I met with Rich Gorman at DK’s ThinkTank last year. Rich is a really smart guy, and he’s making some serious money online. Rich is already fully dedicated to his work at Health Converter, but once I told him about the power and benefits of blogging, he just had to get started. A few months later and Rich is up and running with his own flashy and content loaded blog at DirectResponse.net.

Direct Response Blog – Must Read Content

Rich’s blog is off to a great start. What’s going to be exciting for Rich, is that he most likely has hundreds if not thousands of awesome topics to write about, and since he just started, his blog will be full of killer content for a while. Here are some of my favorite and most useful posts since DirectResponse.net went live.

• Building A Million Dollar Offer – For Less Than 2k

This post might seem like generic information, but once you actually put everything in place and realize how crucial it is to your success and business, you will appreciate the value in this post.

• How To Improve Conversion Rates By 2,100%

An excellent post that walks through various ad copies and landing pages. The easier and more direct you make your ad campaigns and landing pages for your customers, the more money you will make.

• How Experts Get Paid For Their Time

This one is a personal favorite, and perfect for anyone that has ever has someone come up to them and say, “I’d love to sit down with you at the show and pick your brain sometime.”. Believe it or not… we really do value our time!

What Can Direct Response Marketing do for You?

Having a blog is all about getting your name out there and building contacts. Rich is now putting his name out there and wants to help others succeed, and build a super networking group around himself and his blog. Whether it means partnering on a new project, or simply hiring Rich for his wealth of knowledge and consulting, I’m sure you will be happy with the results. Just from sitting down with Rich at ThinkTank, I still think back at some of the crazy ideas, insane numbers and potential projects we discussed over breakfast.

Be sure to check out DirectResponse.net and add it to your blog reading arsenal.

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