Here’s a very quick tip on how to write headlines that magnetically draw attention toward your sales letter/blog post. These headlines are 100% proven to drive people to click on your ad or read your sales copy. It’s sort of like the ultimate swipe file.

1. Go to EzineArticles.com and go to the home page. Click on the category that your niche is under. If your niche doesn’t have a category, I’m sorry, but this will not work.
2. Click on the first article in the category.
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom. Look under the articles titled "Most Viewed EzineArticles in the…"
4. Take any one of those article titles. They are, by far, the most viewed articles in that niche. That means that someone has seen the article headline and clicked on it. It has drawn their attention and curiosity enough that they wanted to read that article.
5. If you’re curious, you can even click on the article, scroll down to the bottom and see how many times the article has been viewed. You’ll be very surprised as to how some articles draw a lot better than others do.
6. Change it very slightly, or even use it "as is". Your headline will now magnetically attract readers, no matter what the niche.

What you have there is pure gold. You can use those headlines to study which words work and which do not in your niche. You can use it to come up with product ideas, blog post ideas, article titles, and a few more things less obvious (use your imagination)

OR, try this… before you write your next sales copy or ad, write 3-5 very similar articles and use different headlines in each one. Submit them all to ezinearticles.com. See which one outperforms the other. This is a free way to test your headlines before you lose money due to non-performing sales copy.

I hope this tip helps you out a little bit. Any questions?

Ohh and happy 4th of July Americans.

What is the most valuable asset to your business?

In other words, let’s say someone wanted to buy your site/business tomorrow. What would make it worth more than the next guy’s?

Ask yourself that question. What is your answer? Usually I get answers like "My list", "My readers" (which is the same thing as a list), "Pageviews", "Traffic", "My Brand", or something else along those lines.

I would agree that your most valuable asset is branding, readership, loyalty, or a list, which are basically synonomous with each other. One begets the other. Are we in agreement so far? Hang with me, I have a point here.

So let’s say Joe Visitor happens on your website from Google or some other random link. After they’re done reading what you put in front of them, what are their options ? They can hit the back button, click on a link, make a purchase, or sign up on a form. That’s basically it.

We’re all in agreement that you don’t want them to hit the back button (or close their browser) and the only way to stop that is to entertain and engage the visitor. Check. So that leaves clicking on a link, making a purchase, or signing up on a form. Which of these makes your business more valuable? Both making a purchase, and as we discussed above, signing up on a form. So why then, would you place advertising on your blog where you only get maybe 50% of what the click is worth?

Every once in awhile you stumble upon someone who "gets it" with respect to building a business and advertising. Chad’s post talks about how Adsense will pay you maybe 25% of what you’re actually worth as a blog, and while you may not think so, you can charge quite a bit for advertising. I wholeheartedly agree, and Chad’s someone I think you should listen to – he’s a marketing manager for b5Media.

In fact, I go as far as even saying that you should not place advertising on your site until you have a solid, loyal readership. Why would you send someone off to another site, never to hear back from them again, when you can just as easily turn them into a loyal reader? Is that $0.23 cent click really worth it? Is that how little you value your readers?

I will say, and Chad points out, that Ad Cents has its place. And it does. Just not for new sites, and not at the top of the page. It’s called remnant advertising and you should implement it while closely tracking your profits. It may very well have a negative effect on your readership/profit.

1. He generated most of his traffic through Entrecard.com.

   His most linked-to post was announcing the party in which he was supposed to surpass the 50,000 rank in Alexa. That never happened because Alexa changed their algorithm from bad to bad, but the party went on anyway. He received 1,003 links for that post, which is over 10 times as many as his second most popular post, Back Again, which only had 96 links, and even that was actually about his most popular post, the party.

   What does that tell you? He used a Web 2.0 technology to generate most of his traffic, and he used it correctly. He didn’t just bookmark every one of his posts on Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumble, Reddit, etc. and go along his merry way. He picked one social networking site and absolutely dominated it. He interacted nicely with the other community members, made friends, and leveraged those friendships to 1) generate traffic and authority and 2) help him pull together the party mentioned above which was a huge contributor to his success. I have always seen social networks as relationship builders, instead of spamming them, and strongly recommend you do the same. Pick a social network, make friendships and contribute to the community, and those friendships and partnerships will help you carry your business.
    

2. He outsources all of his menial and monotonous tasks, and recommends you do the same.

   So do I. It’s Plain and simple. There are way too many things you need to do in order to be successful as a blogger and businessperson to try to do them all by yourself. What will it take for you to start outsourcing? Sure, your first outsourced task may not be 100% profitable and successful, but that’s why you refine them until they are. With unskilled labor so cheap and at your fingertips, you really can’t afford not to outsource most, if not all, of your tasks.

   As I said in my last post, I will never outsource my blog posts, but that’s a personal decision. Marcus recommends hiring a ghostwriter if you’re not good at writing, and that is fine. But I say give it a shot. Blogging is not all that hard, and you’ll only get better if you keep doing it. I personally write my own blog posts because I love doing them. The things I don’t love doing that take up my time, I’m outsourcing. Don’t just blindly outsource, though. If you have been outsourcing something for a few months and you just can’t turn a profit from it, drop it altogether. It’s not worth doing by you nor someone else.
    

3. Hang around and learn from successful people.
   
   This is a mindset thing. If you aren’t doing it now, you should start. It’s plain and simple. It’s been proven thousands of times over again, and hundreds of books have been written about how success begets success. 

   This is my personal weakness. I love hanging around my friends that are stuck in their 9-5 job forever, and they’re great friends. I do, however, know that if I hang around them too much, I get sucked into their "watch 40 hours of football" mentality. That is just not me. I’m working on this. I don’t want to ditch them because they’re my lifelong friends, but they can’t keep sucking the success out of me. I’ve even tried to teach them how to make money online, but they wanted nothing to do with it, even after they saw how much I made myself.
    

4. Build a list and create your own products
   
   What will it take for me to convince you to build your own products? If you’re already blogging or are in a niche, I guarantee you can make your own products. Let’s look at Marcus’s: 2 interviews and 4 DVDs. How long does it take to make a DVD? That depends, but it should take no more than a couple of days with research included. It helps if you have at least a little bit of knowledge of the information you’re teaching, but it’s not required. Don’t think you can make a good DVD? Call up someone successful and interview them. Don’t think you can do that? Then outsource it! See above paragraph for information on how to do that.

What can Marcus do, in my opinion, to double his profits?

It’s just one simple suggestion, but this has lead to between 40 and 70% of my sales, depending on which market and niche you’re talking about: release the power of the affiliate (or JV)!

Marcus should host his products on a separate domain and use something like 1shoppingcart.com to track affiliate referrals. Or perhaps slap up a sales letter and put it on Clickbank. It’s something to look at with regards to growing his business, considering he has outsourced a lot of his tasks already. He can leverage his popularity in the Entrecard community to help him sell his products. That’s really my only suggestion.

In all… congratulations, Marcus. Your stats are nothing short of phenomenal.

My mom knows nothing about business. She has taught piano lessons for the last 20 years to neighborhood kids, and she’s pretty much a typical Italian mom

We have a different type of relationship. She is an extrovert, and is always striking up conversations with other people she doesn’t even know. I am a natural introvert, which has served me well, especially in the Navy when I couldn’t talk about 90% of what I did. It also probably helped in my decision to start doing business online, as well, since you never have to talk to people you don’t even know, or so I had thought.

I honestly don’t think I learned all the much from my mom, but I did learn one thing that I can point to as playing a huge part in my success as a businessman:

It’s not about what you know, but who you know.

In my neverending quest to automate everything I possibly can, there are some things I will never outsource or automate, no matter how busy I get (and recommend you do the same):

1. Blog posts – You, as my reader, deserve more than a hired freelancer or "intern" who writes my posts for me. I have a lot of experience in internet marketing and making money online that I am not sure a freelancer could ever convey
2. Blog comments – If you see a comment with my name, Bryan Reed, on it, I wrote it. That is my contribution to that blog.
3. Joint Venture relationships – Any one of my joint venture partners have direct access to my personal cell phone, email address, and snail mail address.

That’s it. Everything else is either automated, outsourced, or will eventually be automated or outsourced. Those three never will be. Why don’t I hire blog ghostwriters, outsource blog comments, or hire an affiliate/joint venture manager? Simple: it’s what my mom taught me: it’s not about what you know, but about who you know. Without relationships on the web, we would there would be no web.

This is a fundamental aspect of business that I wrote about (among other things) in my book, which I just released. If you would like a copy, it’ll cost you a subscription to my blog updates. It’s a 28 page, single spaced, all-meat-and-no-fat ebook that gives a step-by-step overview on how to start an internet business. I have used this as a guide to successfully start every one of my businesses online, and don’t plan on stopping.

I challenge you to always be thinking about how you can be improving your relationship with your customers/clients/readers by helping them and doing something for them. Like I said, my mom taught me that, and I think it’s the single most valuable piece of business advice I could ever give.

The only thing that will keep advertisers on your site is sales. Nothing more, nothing less. If you produce sales for an advertiser, they will continue advertising on your site, and pay as much as they need to in order to keep making sales from their advertising on your site. Smart advertisers (and most of them are) learn quickly that they need to track their ad impressions, clickthroughs, and sales from every ad. They know how much of your traffic is junk, transient traffic, and how much are great, happy readers.

Why are consistent advertisers a good thing? As a direct marketer, I can tell you that the absolute best tool I have is competitive intelligence. AKA where are my competitors advertising, and even better, where are they consistently advertising? If you’re making money for Brand X, Brand Y will quickly find out because Brand X will be there day in and day out.

So how do you get people to click on your ads and buy? That’s the million dollar question. Let’s put it this way: a 125 x 125 banner in the sidebar isn’t going to cut it. Here are 3 quick tips:

1. Throw an endorsement in with every banner advertisement. Do a quick blog post about how you had this problem last year and their product solved it. I’m not saying lie, because you shouldn’t, but definitely let your readership know that this product has really helped you out. If you have loyal readers, they’ll listen. 
2. Cut your advertising in half. This may be contrary to what you think, but by actually giving your readers more focus, you will be able to show more results for your advertisers. You’ll sacrifice short term profits, but you’ll gain some dedicated advertisers that will consistently advertise on your blog. As I said before, 

   dedicated advertisers = more advertisers. 

   Sacrifice short term profits for long term gains. 

3. Help your advertisers. Chances are, you are only one place of hundreds that your advertiser is advertising on. They can’t dedicate even a fraction of their resources making sure everything is going OK.  Help them out by sending them an email every once in awhile saying "this week, I noticed a drop in CTR for your ad. I’m going to bump you up to a higher spot and I won’t charge you for this week. We’ll try to figure out what’s going on." Or if you think you can help them increase conversions on their site with a better design, better copy, better banners, etc, let them know. Use Google as a good example: they have Analytics and Adwords Conversion tracking for their advertisers. Without those two tools, they wouldn’t be the huge giant they are now. (Even though Google slaps me around every once in awhile, we have a relationship like a battered wife does with her husband. i just can’t let her go. She provides for me and I still love her.)

So in short, my advice is this: start putting your advertisers on the same level of importance as your readers. Trust me, as an advertiser, I thank you.