Set of 3 e-books to walk you through twitter.

Twitter Beginner’s guide

Twitter App directory (lists 250 apps, bots & wp-plugins)

250 microblogging sites

3 great resourceful books for $9.95 only

For details, click here to get your set of twitter reference guides

Unique décor: Choose a unique style for your website. This will leave a lasting impression on the visitors. It gives out a professional look. Imagine a white page with black letters or a web page which looks like a cluttered html lab. Yes, I agree that to get a professional designer work for you = shelling out hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Best alternative is to buy a template of your choice. A template is a readymade website within price range of $1 to $100. All you will need to do is copy, paste your content and upload to the server. I create and sell original SEO friendly web templates and distribute large collection of budget templates starting at $1. The motto is “Something for everyone who aspires to get online”. Checkout my templatefair.com.

Offer something free: Your visitors have so much of choice. If you want to keep them, you need to show them how good your products are. This will attract people to your site. Offer them a small free gift for signing up to your email. This is not just to attract people but also as a courtesy for the newsletter signup. Don’t spam. Keep strict privacy policy and adhere to it. My vocab falls short to stress enough on this point.

Choose the things you offer to people: You need to pay close attention to what you are offering your visitors. Don’t just offer because it gets you more commission. Try it out yourself if possible, or browse around for reviews. Mention to people what reviews you went through and how you support them or controvert them.

Candid: Don’t false make false promises. Even if you make a sale with an enticing sales letter, once your customer gets to know the product does not match with your boasting sales copy, they know they dealt with … They will never come back again

Genuine: Be yourself. Don’t sell yourself as someone else or boast that you are something which you are not. This will help build credibility.

Attention to detail: Don’t rush. Take time on each thing and draw attention to detail. This will bring out the best in you. I’m still working on this. As a child I always wanted to finish my work as fast as possible and get things on track as soon as possible. I think I still have this problem.

Stay in touch: Once you build a subscriber/ customer email database, you’ll need to use that list to stay in touch with them at pre-mentioned intervals (week, fortnight, month  or once in a quarter) by sending e-newsletters, special offer emails, special discounts, free products etc. This will help them remember you among your competitors.

Price: Don’t expect to become rich overnight. You will have 2 options to decide. 1) Volume sales: sell more products to less number of people. 2) Volume is low but prices are high.

Taste: If you have what they are looking for, and instead of just reading about it, if they can savor a little, they are obvious to come for more.

Specialize: specialize in a micro-niche in your area. If you are running a blog on pets, find a micro-niche you are passionate about. Like Pets > Dogs > Great Danes, for example. Master that area.

Fast: Quicken your speed than competition. If you’ll be able to do an amazing piece of work in 3 months and your competition will take 7 days to create a good one, what % of clients, do you think, will choose your services?

What is more important for a professional blogger? Quality of writing or quality of information?

I know of blogs where each post is a master piece and still have less than 100 visitors a month. On the contrary, there are blogs with thousands of readers and you will hardly find a well drafted post. I’ve also known blog posts written in less than 5 mins but well appreciated.

What factors make or break?

It depends on two major factors.

1. It is in the quality of the information you are trying to provide to your visitors.
2. Employing appropriate marketing techniques.

If i’m running a blog on gardening and I post a great work on window cleaning, I wonder how many of my visitors will be interested in reading it.

Unless you are planning grammer lessons on your blog, it doesn’t matter whether you started writing at the age of 5 or 50.

Provide quality information and let the appropriate people know that you have information they are looking for.

I am not sure if there has been a blogger who hasn’t staggered initially to get visitors to his blog.

Persistance is the key. Stay focused and keep writing.

What do you think? “Quality of info Or Quality of Writing” - what attracts you to a blog? Opinion yourself through comment box.

Did you hear all the buzz about twitter?

Twitter is perhaps the most popular microblogging service. It allows you to post brief and frequent posts through web, IM, SMS from mobile or from an app. It is ultimate way to network with people around the world.

If you are a beginner or just starting out on twitter or want to change your twitter strategy, here is a reference guide which will walk your through each step and reveals a 7 step twitter strategy.

Twitter Reference Book

Grab it immediately and grow your business and network like never before.

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emails

Setting up the first downloadable product in Zencart is slightly confusing. Going through the immense help pages, wiki, FAQs, forum becomes pretty frustrating and takes ages to figure out. I went through all that too. So I decided to write this tutorial for all the newbie zencart store owners.

And great news is that I created a screen cast or a video tutorial on “setting up downloadable product in zencart”. Download the video from the link at the bottom of the post. The video will show you how easy it is to add downloadable products in zencart.

Let’s get started.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking defines Social bookmarking as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of meta data.

For answers on what, how, why …, you can download this 2 page report from Educause.
Listed below are Top 45 bookmarking sites.
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1. Have a voluntary following.
2. Demonstrate to your followers that you are the most informational person in your niche.
3. Build credibility among followers that you can help them achieve their goals.
4. Have the ability to motivate others.
5. Continue learning and growing in your skills.
6. Communicate often and encourage two way communication.
7. Understand your strengths and weaknesses and work on the weaker corners.
8. Hold a “Ask a question” day and inform your followers one day prior to the day you decide.
9. Appreciate your followers when they share a tip.
10. Know that each individual counts.
11. Provide powerful & relevant bio.
12. Give a link to your website where people can get more relevant information.

This blog is new. I’m using the following techniques to market my blog. Check the analysis at the bottom.

Prior to setting up my blog, I spent some time to select wordpress theme, made some SEO tweaks, modified few default setting in wordpress.

Now I’m turning to next 5 ways

1) Social media marketing: More than marketing my sites, I’m trying to learn from places like twitter. If you take a look at the tweeters I’m following, you’ll find that most of them are experts in their fields. That is where I can get the best of information from. As Lynn Terry quoted on twitter the other day “you are the average of the 5 persons you are with”. I also added mybloglog widget on this blog. I’m yet to see traffic with this.

2) Article marketing: This is a great way for beginners. I am writing informative & relevant articles and submitting them to 6 article directories. Yes, I do have an article submitter which looks great. But I don’t think it is necessary to post the same article to hundreds of directories. Select top 5 or 10 and rule them on your topic. Don’t miss ezine articles. Its google’s favorite.

3) Forum posts: I hand picked 4 forums for different reasons. One ranks very high in search engines, second one has loads of members, third one is where I belong, fourth one has a “follow” tag. I got as many ‘track backs’ as my posts. I’m yet to score good number there. I’m planning to work on this in the next few days.

4) Commenting on other blogs: I post comments on 3 niche blogs. No-follow on comments in wordpress blogs is default. If you are expecting link backs, it will be a big time-waster. What you might gain is identity building. If you post thought provoking, relevant, informational posts and share a link (at times) depending on the relevancy of the topic, you might expect some click backs. I downloaded “Comment Kahuna” last night. Looks like a handy tool. Yet to try. Will post a review on its functionality tomorrow.

5) Social Bookmarking: I’m still working on this area and was surprised to see that ‘Technorati’ referred one visitor today. This suggests that social bookmarking services work even for beginners. I’m planning to use either socialposter or socialmaster to semi-automize the process.

Results so far:

Social media worked well & brought in 40% traffic

Forum & Comment posting put together brought 40%

Social Bookmarking sites: 10%

Misc: ( email marketing): 10%

With this analysis on hand, I now have a clearer picture of the marketing techniques I will be using in this week.

Today is the final day of the experiment I’ve been doing for four days.

This month’s Experiment: Stop reading blogs. If you want to read about the experiment from the starting, here are the links.
Day 1; Day 2; Day 3

Conclusion:

My productivity increased by 70%:

Tangible proofs:
• I wrote 18 posts in this blog,
• Designed and launched 2 more web templates on templatefair.com
• Submitted 3 articles on 4 article directories
• Posted comments on pro blogs
• Joined some communities and improved my social network group
• Found a mentor
• and my blog stats show that I had the highest number of visitors in these last 4 days than in the last 4 months I started this blog.
• Chalked out a step by step plan to improve and market my websites

It has been an enlightening period:

Intangible Corollaries
• I’m not confused or bewildered with all the contradictory info available on the net.
• Feel more confident
• I’m able to peruse the prospects more logically because I know things are going to work

Won’t I read blogs in the future:
Ofcourse I will read. But a selected few. I unsubscribed to 32 RSS feed of the 50+ I had. The remaining feeds include 4 pro blogs on IM, 5 on web design stuff, 4 IM news and rest are misc like CNN, BBC, Times etc. I’ll utilize the most unproductive time of my day for reading other blogs in the bookmarks.

Time to Implement
Read only as much as you can implement and utilize. If you are looking for basics, choose a blog which caters for the needs of beginners. Don’t try to learn rocket science with the intention you might one day after 100 years would get to handle a rocket.