Today I want to answer a question that a lot of you have been asking recently – How do I grow my email list?

I will start by stating the obvious if I may. The best way to get subscribers to your list is to:

Deliver valuable content that adds value to the life or business of your visitor

If you have valuable content that will benefit your customer and/or their business then this video will help you. In it I review some of the strategies I use to get more opt-ins and grow my email list using AWeber, a Free Gift and creative copywriting.

Too many new bloggers just put up an opt-in form on the sidebar of their blog and hope for the best. Hoping for the best is not a business strategy you want to follow.

In todays video I go over 5 steps that will increase your opt-ins and grow your list FAST – including some I hope that you have never considered before.

One important point however: I use the word OPT-IN a lot in this blog post but the words you should use on your web-page should be terms like: Subscribe or Join Me or Grab My Free Report. The words used, make a BIG difference to conversions. Most visitors will not know what OPT-IN means, so for that reason avoid using the term OPT-IN on your site.

Today just about every business I know has a mailing list. My hairdresser has an email list – so does my dry-cleaners, and the garage I bought my car from plus of course the hotels I stay in. Seems just about everyone is growing their email list as part of their marketing strategy. I even read somewhere recently one business owner saying that having someones email address was more valuable to him than having their physical address.

Never be embarrassed to grow your list – people will follow you and will support you provided you are delivering awesome content and adding value to their lives and business.

To our continued success and an every growing list of happy subscribers.

Michael

PS: If you enjoyed the video you will also enjoy

Making Money with Email Marketing and an Autoresponder Series

More Email Opt-in Secrets

Video Transcript – with additional links and resources

Today we’re going to talk about something really important: how to drastically increase your opt-in rate.

For me, a large amount of my income today is generated by having a GOOD LIST.

In theory if you are delivering valuable content that adds value to the life or business of your visitor then growing a GOOD LIST should not be a problem but I have to say I have seen some pretty good Bloggers with excellent content not growing their list much at all, simply because that have not been using the right strategies.

It is those simple strategies that this video is about.

If you ask pretty much any Internet marketer, they’ll tell you that their biggest mistake in business was not building a list quick enough. For me, I think my biggest mistake was not that, it was the fact that I didn’t promote it enough. I was growing my list too slowly in the early days.

I know it is a bit of an assumption, but I am going to assume you have your OFFER sorted out – you’ve got a Free Gift, such as a free report on how to make money in your niche or a free seven day course plus hopefully some nice graphics that catch the visitors eye. I am also going to assume you at least have an Opt-in form in your side bar at present.

5 Tips For Growing Your Email List FAST!

My first TIP might actually surprise you because it is about having an effective Thank You Page. Read on to see what I mean….

No1) Have a Strong Thank You page.

Most people who opt-in for your free gift will be opting-in because they want your free product. Now a lot of people will just presume that if they put in their details then they’re going to get whatever you are offering. So the first step of your Thank You page is let your new subscriber know they need to confirm their email address. Get this wrong and in my experience you can lose as much as 50% of all potential new subscribers.

It is not the subscribers fault if they fail to re-confirm their email address – it is your fault!

In this day and age just about every reputable email marketing service requires a Double Opt-in, just so they can confirm that the person at this email address really does what what was offered. (Because believe it or not, there are some malicious people who enter in other peoples email addresses)

AWeber do an amazing job of providing an efficient thank you page – there is even the option to have an audio message explaining the next step as well as the written instructions.

Or you can create your own Custom Thank You page as I have done at:
http://www.incomediary.com/thankyou.html

Note – the page explains the Next Steps – 1,2,3 (Check and confirm your email, Register a Domain, Get Hosting)

Note – not only do I remind the new subscriber that they need to confirm their email I also in my custom Thank You page give them some options to spend money – even before confirming their email.

Almost nothing is as frustrating in Internet Marketing as getting a subscriber who does not end up confirming with the double opt-in so it is essential you explain this to your potential new subscriber. This is why I made my First Tip all about the Thank You Page. Not much point in getting people to take the first step and provide their email address if you ‘lose’ them because you don’t explain the need to re-confirm their email address.

No2) The “Squeeze Page“. As I mentioned before this page could more accurately be called the Michael Dunlop Squeeze Page because my definition of a squeeze is quite different from most other Internet Marketers.

If you look at How To Create A Profitable Blog you will see my squeeze page. Sure the page is also about ‘squeezing” someones email address out of them – but can you also see how there is an opportunity for me as a blogger to earn commissions – even if the visitor did not subscribe.

My squeeze page is just a separate page on my blog that I’ve set-up with information on my offer plus related products (that earn commission).

Everyone should have a page like this – and not rely solely on an Opt-in box in the sidebar

There’s a few benefits of this. Of course, you can tell people via Twitter or Facebook or anywhere, “Hey, check out my free gift.” Or “Have you checked out my free gift yet?” Also, if you’re doing posts such as top lists, when I do my Top 30 Bloggers, I can say to them, “Hey, want to follow in their footsteps? Go and request my free gift.”

No3) Consider a Light-Box Pop opt-in!

Now, I will assume not everyone is familiar with this term. A light-box is basically a little box that comes up on your page, and you can’t do anything on the site until you press the cross or you opt-in. These convert like crazy.

The only problem is no one really wants their readers to be bombarded by this. This turns readers off and they are going to leave. So you don’t want to give it to your regular readers.

But used correctly Lightbox Opt-ins are amazing tools in the email list builders arsenal. For example with a bit of clever code you can customise your opt-in to only appear to certain people using certain search terms – for example ‘Top Bloggers’. Or you could have it so that only visitors from Google saw it or Twitter or whatever you wish to set it to

This is quite a big topic in itself and I don’t want to go into in in huge detail here – however I will recommend this video which explains How to Add an Aweber Lightbox Pop to a WordPress Blog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X6R_d7sKOs&NR=1

No 4) A Rotating Opt-in offer

This is something I plan to use in the new IncomeDiary.com site that I am currently working on. (Again a clever but relatively simple bit of code is required)

Typically for every 1000 visitors I have 30 people opt-in for my blogging eCourse. Not bad, but not great either – a lot of people get away. Of course some of them are regular readers who have already taken the eCourse – but there are also a lot of people who have no interest at all in the Blogging eCourse.

So what if I rotated my offers – or made my opt-in offer more focused on the content of a particular page or more focused on the search term the visitor used to find my site

For example if I had an opt-in for ‘How to drive traffic with Twitter’ on my Twitter Page I bet that would convert better than my Blogging eCourse on that page.

These are the kind of strategies that will really help explode your list fast.

No 5) Have More Opt-In Boxes

Too many bloggers have an opt-in tucked away at bottom of their side bar without a decent graphic of a strong offer. It is almost like they are embarrassed to ask for an email address in exchange for the information they offer.

Here’s how I think about it.

If you have advertising on your site, then the more advertising banners you have – the more clicks the adverts will get (and the more sales). So it is with opt-in boxes – the more opt-in opportunities you have on your site then the more subscribers you will get.

This is something that I recommend… you should have a real big OPT-IN offer on the home page – like I have on Income Diary. I’ve got a huge box. You should also have one on the top right of your sidebar. In addition consider adding an opt-in either at top or bottom of some of your most popular posts. Of course this only works if you have solid content and lots of it. If you are in the habit of writing short posts or re-hashing information found on other websites then you are missing my first point – The best way to get subscribers to your list is to:

Deliver valuable content that adds value to the life or business of your visitor

For example on Retireat21.com I have some pages that get really high traffic from Google. So what I did was I added an opt-in box right at the top of those high traffic pages. Here is an example: Young Entrepreneur Rich List

On a page like the Young Entrepreneur Rich List is is quite likely those visitors will be one time visitors only – and if I don’t get them to subscribe / join my list on that visit I never will.

So I have a special opt-in at the top of the page – and I get opt-ins from it every days.

Finally — as I have said many times before, if you are serious about building an email list, please invest in AWeber

AWeber is super powerful. It is my email marketing software of choice, helping me and many other business owners around the world to automate email follow up and email newsletter delivery.

I hope this has helped. Let me know your thoughts and questions in the comments below.

Michael Dunlop
IncomeDiary.com

Hi Everyone,

Do you struggle with your blog strategy and creating blog content?

My Cheeky and Fun Ways To Get Inspiration For Your Blog Posts article got some great feedback so today I thought I’d expand on my strategy for making my blog interesting and the ‘web destination’ of choice for everyone looking to make money as a blogger.

Today’s video is titled Killer Blog Content but really it is more about blog strategy – rather than creative writing because the best writing in the world doesn’t amount too much if you don’t have the right strategy. My hope is to inspire you to follow some of these strategies and for you to create the Web Destination of Choice for people interested in your niche.

I thought this quote by Ben Franklin could easily be a mantra for all Bloggers:

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing

and the following by Samuel Johnson sums up my own views on creating Blog Posts:

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure

Too many bloggers are looking for “Easy Posts” and while some posts will be easier than others I have always found I get the biggest and best response when I put significant effort and created a post of real value and help for my readers.

Also, and this is just something I have worked out I must admit – consider the medium you use to communicate in your blog posts. For example after getting over my initial shyness and nervousness with creating videos I have worked out that VIDEOS are actually a better way for me to create blog posts – especially when I get them transcribed as well. It ‘flows’ much more naturally for me in speaking rather than writing – so that is something some of you may wish to consider.

Not that all my posts in future will be video posts – but you will for sure see more of them

Enjoy the video and as always now – check out the Enhanced Transcription for additional resources and ideas.

To our Success

Michael

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PS: I just recently added one of my earlier videos over at RetireAt21.com – on the subject of How To Get More Subscribers / Opt-ins on your Blog. Some very useful tips an information that will get you more subscribers.

PPS: Check out the IncomeDiary.com YouTube Channel for all my latest videos – in advance of them being published on this blog. You can also Friend me and Subscribe to my channel there.

Video Transcript – with additional links and resources

Today, I wanted to share with you how I create killer content for my blog and my websites, and how you can do it too.

I am going to concentrate on four things:

Blog Pages / Posts, Interviews, Inspiration, and Guides

I shall start with Blog Pages and the first page I want to draw you attention to is My Story. The My Story Page is sort of like an About Page – only better.

In my case I have three different pages with slightly different versions of My Story:

http://www.incomediary.com/about

http://www.incomediary.com/make-money-online-my-personal-story-how-i-created-incomediary-com

http://www.incomediary.com/the-true-story-of-my-overnight-success

Now you don’t need three pages – an enhanced About Page will be fine. I evolved into 3 pages over the last 12 months – mainly in response to questions people asked me.

In my case, the My Story Page’s work really well, because they tell the story of how I started making money online – which most of my readers are interested to know this, so they may replicate / do the same.

The My Story Page is a great place to include affiliate links to products you purchased / invested in – showing your readers products that made a difference to your success while at same time giving them an opportunity to buy those products.

If you look at your Google Analytics, you’ll actually find that your “About Page” is often one of the most visited pages. So it’s pays to put some focus into how you can monetize this page

The next page is a “Contact Us” page. A lot of people have very basic contact pages with perhaps just an email address or a short form to fill in.

It is also a good idea to include things like details of your RSS Feed, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Give your readers as many ways as possible to interact with you.

You might also want to suggest things your readers might like to contact you about. For example: advertising, press, webinars, interviews and speaking engagements.

Next I suggest a “Comparison Page,” something I’ve mentioned quite a lot of times. Comparing products is great, because it’s clear to the reader which one’s better, and, of course, you an affiliate link for each product you are comparing. Actually sometimes I even include links to products I am not an affiliate for, simply because it comes across as more sincere and impartial. Sure, maybe I lose some commissions that way — but really it doesn’t matter that much if you build something else much more important with your reader – TRUST.

My Thank You page (from when people subscribe) includes links to Website Hosting Comparisons as an example.

The last page I call a “Squeeze Page“. Now more accurately this should be called the Michael Dunlop Squeeze Page because my definition of a squeeze is quite different from most other Internet Marketers.

If you look at How To Create A Profitable Blog you will get a better idea of what I mean. Sure the page is also about ‘squeezing” someones email address out of them – but can you also see how there is an opportunity for me as a blogger to earn commissions – even if the visitor did not subscribe.

Also if you tell people to go to your site and request free report (or whatever you are offering) then it doesn’t matter how easy you make it – some people are still going to fail to find how to subscribe.

But having this separate Squeeze page dedicated to people joining your list – all they need to do is go to that SPECIFIC page rather than hunt around on the site for a place to subscribe. My: How To Create A Profitable Blog solves that problem for me.

You can tweet about your squeeze page. You can promote it on Facebook, YouTube etc.

Now On To Interviews

Interviews have been very good to me. It’s the easiest way to get great content and build relationships and Authority not only with your readers but also with the people you interview.

So who shall you interview?

For me, I would find people who are making money online, with a product, and doing it all online, and interview them, such as Yanik Silver and Gary Vaynerchuk

A big benefit of interviewing BIG NAMES is of course their names alone bring you TRAFFIC. I rank first page of Google for both many of my ‘Interviewees Names + Interview’

Because people will be searching for these people online you naturally end up getting traffic. And my goal with every new visitor no matter how they find my site is to impress then so much the become a subscriber, join my mailing list, take my eCourse.

Not everyone will grant you an interview but if you present yourself well and write a decent email there is a good chance many will agree. In the end it is a numbers game – you have to accept some NO’s in order to get those YES’s. And once you have interviewed one big name it gets easier to interview other big names.

Now once people have agreed to an interview you have to ask the right questions. For me personally these days I prefer to do my interviewing over SKYPE and record the conversation. I also nearly always have the Interview Transcribed by CastingWords.com. The advantage of this is that I have lots of text / copy for the search engines to index and I find it incredibly good for search engine optimisation. You will note I do the same with Videos.

Now A Tip About Asking Questions

Now this might just be me but I have found my interviews go better if I don’t over think the questions and just plan one or two questions in advance. You see if you are asking the questions you have pre-planned I find you spend less time listening to the answers and more time planning the next question. However, if you are listening to your interviewee then the next question always follows quite naturally I find. (I expect a lot of professional interviewers would not agree with that – but that is what I have found)

The whole point of the interview is you can roll from question to the next question smoothly. So if they’re talking about one thing, you can elaborate on it. Make sure you’re engaging the interviewee with all the things that are necessary.

In addition to doing videos via Skype and audio you can of course also do it by email (that is how I started) of via Video as I have done several times, such as when I flew to New York to interview Gary Vaynerchuk.

Very Important:

When you publish the interview make sure to use a good Title – one that will get peoples attention and also one that is good for the search engines. I used to start every interview and call it “Interview with Name of Guru,” but we found that most people when searching for interviews actually searched ‘Name Of Guru – Interview’ – for example ‘Yanik Silver Interview’.

An example of a good interview title for myself would be:

“Michael Dunlop Interview / How to Make Six Figures Blogging,”

Inspiration

Interviews are of course inspiring but I have found that producing Top Lists on a regular basis can also be very inspiring – and Great for Traffic.

And the more inspired people are they more likely they are to invest in your products or the products you are promoting.

Lists like: “Top 30 Bloggers,” or “Top 30 Golfers,” or “Top 30 Richest Celebrities in the World” always get attention and as I have mentioned before, one of my very first Top Lists (3 years ago) which was a Rich List Of Top Young Entrepreneurs went Global and I ended up being interviewed and mentioned myself all over the world.

Indeed it was that Top List that got me interviewed by a Brazilian Newspaper

I used to own a web design blog and we did spectacularly well with Top Lists such as “Top 30 Green Website Layouts.” – because people who want to do a green website layout want to know what other people have done for their green website layout. And we’ve done “Top 30 Logos,” and “Top 30 Twitter Backgrounds” etc.

More Inspiration:

Success stories – feature other peoples successes. Better still interview those successful people. “Your Story’ should be another inspiring page.

When people read my stories, about how these are all my failures before I got this site and the other site, and how I became a success. So having your stories are really important as well, and people love reading those. I actually get more comments per visitor on that than anything else across my site.

Any you will note I like to include some positive and inspirational quotes from time to time – this is all part of the INSPIRATION theme.

Ideas

Give people ideas – ideas for things to do with their business, things to discuss, new ideas, old ideas recycled

My aim with every blog post is to give my readers at least one new idea – hopefully more. And of course these IDEAS are INSPIRING.

If you follow this strategy then you will have inspired readers who follow you enthusiastically and who create Buzz for you and your Blog.

Guides

Top Tip – don’t copy anyone elses guide – go out there and create a better guide than anyone else has done.

Of course with a blog or a guide you need to carefully consider your subject.

A lot of people write a guide, because there heard something or another was a good topic, but they don’t really know exactly why they’re writing it about.

A good way to consider what you should write a guide about is to consider what questions people ask in your niche and answer them

For example when I started IncomeDiary, people were asking me, how do I make a blog? How do I make money blogging? How do I do blogging full stop? So, firstly, find out what people want, and then provide them with that solution, and obviously monetize it.

In a guide, your structure is vitally important. Make it easy to follow and better still intuitive. In my case I broke it down into a 7 Day Blogging eCourse

The guides work really well for monetization I find. Give your readers ACTION STEPS. Usually there’s something to buy with everything. For example, you’re teaching someone how to bake a cake. There’s going to be something in that, that people don’t have this tool, or they don’t have some cookery ingredient. You can promote it. JUst about every product you can imagine has some sort of affiliate program for it these days.

Also have a way to Follow-up with your guide. For example in my case with a Blogging eCourse I know people will suffer from writers block so I have various products that I can follow up with and promote – for example Blogging To The Bank by Rob Benwell.

And one other benefit of having a guide is that when you get interviewed yourself you have something to promote – ‘give away’ and grow your subscriber list with.

Finally the best thing about this structure is that everything is interlinked – for example in your Guide you may send people to Your Story or your Squeeze page or vice versa.

All the time your visitors are in your loop rather than a competitors loop you have a far better chance of making a sale

I hope this has helped – as always if you have any questions please comment below or Contact Me about My Blog Mastermind

Join Me On YouTube

Check out my new YouTube Channel at The IncomeDiary.com YouTube Channel You can also Friend me and Subscribe to my channel there.

Also make sure to check out:

Cheeky and Fun Ways To Get Inspiration For Your Blog Posts

Another video post today along with an enhanced video transcript (make sure to read). Today I cover the exact strategy I used in March 2009 to generate $5000 in my first month with this blog in.

I am enjoying creating these videos. I was just looking at some videos I made a year or so ago. Wow, I have come a long way in the last 12 / 18 months – from my original stumbling and nervousness.

Using the whiteboard as an aid has been a huge help to me – I strongly recommend it to anyone who is just starting making videos or even if you are an established YouTuber.

Some People Don’t Want To Get It

But before I go on I wanted to go back to a post I did a little while ago called Are You Too Clever For Success?. Readers may remember how some ‘sad people’ seem to only be able to feel good about themselves by putting other people down and I like most bloggers get the occasional negative and even offensive email.

These sort of comments ‘amuse’ me for want of a better word and usually I just delete them but I know from the feedback that some of you have sent me that it is an issue – so I just thought I would highlight that even pro-bloggers like me get negative comments such as this one about my last video.

Amusing Blog Comments

This person really doesn’t like me. I did think to myself could I be missing something and is this sincere feedback but considering they provided a false email and web address I must assume it is not.

The first part of their comment is somewhat valid – because British people pronounce NICHE differently to American people and in my videos I used the American pronunciation – mainly because most of my readers are outside the UK. So this commenter was really just showing their ignorance on this point.

However the remainder of their comment was a lot more personal. I have no issue with people taking a personal dislike to my mannerisms, I think that is a common enough thing – not everyone relates to everyone but I subscribe to my Irish Grandmothers view that if you cannot say something good about someone then say nothing at all.

I have a friend of mine who says:

If you are not getting up someones nose, you are not trying hard enough

Not sure I 100% agree, but you get the point. Some people (often so called well meaning people) will always try to steal your dreams – accept that, get over it and move on. I also think the more successful you become the more comments like this you receive.

By the way – note I said ‘negative email’ — this is quite different from a critical email that is genuinely sent from the heart in an effort to help / assist.

There is a lot of information in this video and the transcript includes even more. I have several more videos planned but you can help me by Contacting Me with suggestions for future video topics or commenting below.

Also because of the Title of this video “How I Made $5000 in The First Month With a Brand New Blog” I would just draw you attention to my Earnings Disclaimer. It is a bit sad that we have to do this but my Lawyer says it is best to always point out that just because a dyslexic college drop out like me did it – it doesn’t mean other people can do it! Duh!

Finally I encourage you to check out the IncomeDiary YouTube Channel. You can also Friend me and Subscribe to my channel there.

To All Our Successes

Michael Dunlop

PS: If you enjoyed the video you will also enjoy:

The True Story Of My Overnight Success
AND
My Personal Story, How I Created IncomeDiary.com

Video Transcript – with additional links and resources

Today I want to talk to you about something really cool – how I made $5,000 in my first month (March 2009) with IncomeDiary.com

Now the concept behind it is really simple, and something you can all do. I started with an idea. People wanted to know how I was doing what I was doing with RetireAt21.com. They wanted to know how I got it up, how I was making money, how I was getting traffic and everything.

I listened to them, I provided the solution, and pretty much monetized it, which is what I’m going to teach you here.

The first step is taking action.

You need to do something about it, you’ve got to get the site up. Everyone has these ideas, but many just don’t act. So the first thing I did was, once I got the blog up, I bought a WooTheme from Woothemes.com, and I uploaded it.

After that, I built momentum, which is hugely important. Because a lot of people don’t build momentum. By the way, I should stop for a second and tell you that I did everything I needed in pretty much three or four days, so don’t think I had this huge planned launch.

I was very busy with my Twitter accounts.

At that time I was adding up to a thousand people to each account per day. I had one for my Michael Dunlop, I had for Retire at 21, I had one for Income Diary.

I was just blitzing it. I was adding as many people from the accounts that I knew I wanted to follow. For example following people in my niche such as pro-blogger John Chow – anyone like that. I got their followers and followed them. If they followed me back – Wicked! If they didn’t, I un-followed them.

And then I start following more people again, regular Tweeting. People came to my profile to see my site, see that I had something coming, and they got excited. I’d Tweet that “I just interviewed this person” or “I just put up this top list” or “Watch out for this….” etc.

Once I did that, obviously I had to get the content. I was doing interviews and I was doing top lists.

TOP TIP: Interview people who have a significant following.

So for example, I interviewed John Chow. John has a great following. If you do a good interview, he’s likely to Tweet about it – bringing you more followers in return.

I also interviewed Joel Comm. He’s got a huge following and he Tweeted it out. That got me even more followers. That’s the huge benefit of social media such as Twitter and Facebook – you can get to a huge audience really quickly. It never has been easier to become an Online Celebrity or Authority in your Niche than it is right now.

So after that I did some top lists with TaskUs.com. I asked them to do a top list on the top 30 bloggers, the top 30 webmasters, the top 30 anything. Whatever came to my mind, they did for me. We got those up. And pretty much after that I started building my eCourse.

Here’s what I did different than everyone else.

A lot of people say: “Hey, check out my free report or Check out my free ebook.”

Great ideas, but I wanted to offer something different and better to get them to join my list. I also needed to make sure people really took action. I didn’t want to just get them on my list, I wanted them to take action.

So what I did is offer a seven day free eCourse . An eCourse that frankly was better than some products people were paying good money for.

I got myself an AWeber Email Marketing account and set up my eCourse to be delivered via an autoresponder.

Once people opted in / joined my eCourse the auto-responder would start sending them an email every day for a week. The course was very much step by step – “Day One, installing your blog” – “Day Two, adding a theme, doing some changes,” – Day Three: monetizing” etc

Every day subscribers would look forward to the next addition. I did this over a year ago, and even today I get emails from people saying, “Hey, Michael, is there any chance I can get Day Two now, rather than wait to tomorrow?” Subscribers took action straightaway. Because I was like, “Look, take action on this today, and then you’ll be ready to do tomorrow’s assignment tomorrow.”

An Important Point

When I started my eCourse I did not have all 7 days ready – indeed any of you who were taking my Blogging eCourse a year or so ago will know that the ‘daily additions’ did not come Daily to start with. The point here and one I think that trips up a lot of well meaning people is that I did not wait for PERFECTION before getting started. So what, the course was not finished – but the most important thing was to get started. Someone told me recently that this is called the “Good enough is good enough principle‘ or the ‘Ready, Fire, Aim‘ principle. I somewhat embarrassingly have to admit this is usually the way I do things.

Of course if it is a physical product and people are paying money for it you have to deliver but in my case and in most start up bloggers cases the most important thing is to get started – TAKE ACTION (My first point in the video)

By the way – working with AWeber is probably one of my best business investments ever. AWeber makes life easy for anyone who wants to manage an email list.

When people opted in for the eCourse on of the first things they saw was this page:

http://www.incomediary.com/thankyou.html – which included links to Website Hosting Comparisons.

People immediately got a chance to take action on their Dream of being a Blogger.

If you visit my Thank You Page you will see I am promoting domain registration, website hosting and blog themes. But you can’t just assume people are going to take your word on these suggestions – which is why I include comparisons – to allow my subscribers a chance to ‘shop around’. Of course I make a clear recommendation but there are other options also.

Fortunately just about every supplier of domains, hosting and blog themes have an affiliate program – so even if the subscriber does not go with my recommendation there is a good chance I will earn a commission.

Now getting people on the list is one of the most important things. So what I did was I actually got a separate page. I made a page in WordPress and I called it “Creating a Profitable Blog” (A rather long Squeeze Page is what I would call it)

This was an Alternative Optin Page for the eCourse – but the difference here was that visitors got a chance to take action – buy domains, hosting themes etc – before they even signed up for the eCourse.

I also emailed all my other lists (eg RetireAt21 list) about this page. I would explain that “You may have to spend some money if you want to make some money” – not a lot of money just a little if you really wanted to be serious about blogging. (Less than $100). I included special offers on domain names and offers on hosting such as get your first months hosting for 1 cent and coupon codes. (People love coupon codes)

This worked amazingly well.

Pretty much one of the reasons it worked so well was because I showed my readers exactly what I’m doing. I was not asking them to do anything that I had not done myself.

Another huge benefit of having a squeeze page, or a separate page on WordPress, is people have a link they can share with friends if they wish to recommend your eCourse. It is great when people Tweet things like “Check Out Michael Dunlop’s Free Blooging eCourse” and link to this page.

I also mentioned this page in my blog posts – for example if I did a Top 30 Bloggers list I would finish it with a link says:

“Follow in their footsteps, check out my free course”

Then of course, once they’ve opted in, there’s a thank you page saying, “Thank you for joining. Make sure you check your email. Oh, by the way, check these products out.”

Then there is the all important NO LEAKAGE RULE.

A lot of bloggers have a blog roll – that links out to other blogs. We don’t have that on IncomeDiary.com

Or they have links to the Top Commenters in the sidebar – again not available on IncomeDiary.com

Links like this represent Leakage. If I compare my two biggest sites – Retireat21.com and IncomeDiary.com – Retireat21.com has much more leakage with advertisers etc but actually produces much less income for me despite having 3 times the traffic.

People get distracted – click on ‘competitors’ links and you lose an opportunity to earn commission. Yes, of course it is nice to have regular advertisers and it is a lazy way to make money but it is not really the best way to make money and as I have proved with IncomeDiary.com the less LEAKAGE the more you earn.

Income Diary outperforms hugely, and Retire at 21 has like three times the traffic.

The reason there is LEAKAGE with most blogs is because people get distracted. If you have advertisers – they will naturally check them out. That is Your ‘competition’ that they’re going to. They will also check out your blog roll. Yet again, mostly ‘competition’, you are directing them to. And then again top commenters are often your competition.

So you don’t really want to have all that stuff because they’re going to get distracted and start going in different directions. For the money that you get, it’s not worth it. So I got rid of that and I made sure that they either went to my opt-in page, or if they didn’t, then they left the site. That was all I wanted.

I have to admit, I wasn’t the best blogger when I started this, and for me to create all this with just a few days of work to start with is quite amazing.

I really think anyone could follow in my footsteps and do the exact same thing or better if they would just be prepared to take ACTION

Good luck to everyone – let me have you comments and in particular your suggestions for future videos.

Remember - The Gurus charge for this kind of info. You get if for free as a Subscriber to IncomeDiary.com

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The True Story Of My Overnight Success
AND
My Personal Story, How I Created IncomeDiary.com

Blogging Overnight Success?

It is time to put the record straight.

The story of how I created IncomeDiary.com is well documented but I have been thinking recently that what is not so well known is all the things I tried and ‘failed’ at before IncomeDiary.com.

I was thinking this in particular because I have had a few emails from people that 1) Assume I am some sort of overnight success and 2) people who had become disillusioned with their lack of online success.

So in this post I am going to discuss some of my earlier online endeavors (and ‘failures’) and what I learned from them.

Of course my definition of “Failure” may well be different to most people. You see, I see failure as nothing more than a learning experience — and if you have always learned something, how can it really be failing?

If you Google “overnight success’ it will turn up some interesting quotes such as this one by Monty Hall:

Actually, I’m an overnight success. But it took twenty years

Or this one by Diana Rankin

Instead of thinking about where you are, think about where you want to be. It takes twenty years of hard work to become an overnight success

The good news is it doesn’t have to take 20 years any longer – technology has sorted that out for many of us younger entrepreneurs, but the fact remains – all reasonable and sustainable Success is dependant of Work (often hard work) and diligent application.

If you are going to give up at at the first hurdle or when your first blog doesn’t turn out as you hoped then you may as well not start in the first place.

In this post I hope you will see that I am anything but an ‘overnight success” as I explain just a few of the online efforts I ‘failed’ at before launching IncomeDiary.com. You may also discover somethings about me that I am no longer that proud of.

eBay Business

Yes, my first online business was an Ebay one. A simple strategy – buy low and sell high and I sold pretty much anything I could get my hands on.

Ebay really started to go somewhere for me when I played an online fighting game called Runescape. (I am sure some of you have heard of it)

On Ebay I noticed there was a market for Runescape Gold (The better the player you were the more Gold you earned in the games — and the more Gold you had the more difficult it was to beat you – the better you could Arm / Protect yourself in the game) Because of this a market existed on Ebay for “Runescape Gold”

Not being modest — I was GOOD, so I started playing Runescape more in the evenings, winning lots of battles and earning more gold. Then in the morning I listed what I had won the night before, on eBay. Usually you would get around £40 per 1 million gold, usually breaking it up into smaller deals like 100,000 gold for £7. One guy I played with was quitting because he was going off to university and wanted the extra cash, so after some negotiations, he let me buy his account for $200. To most that would probably sound like a lot of money and a silly thing to do but when I tell you that he had around 400 million gold and the account was actually one of the best in the game you will now be thinking, WOW what a deal. I managed to in the end break down the gold into small portions and probably sell it for over £2000. (about $3200) Not a bad return for a $200 investment.

I decided to keep doing this with other people who were quitting the game for various reasons but after a while Runescape clamped down on this trade (as IP owner) and it was no longer allowed to sell Runescape Gold on Ebay.

Not so proud of it now — but that didn’t really stop me, indeed I got banned a total of 5 times before realising enough was enough.

After Runescape i sold all sorts of stuff, including wrist bands, remote control cars and Lacoste Polo shirts. After doing a few transactions here and there, I got a phone call from a friend who was selling on eBay, he told me he was getting out of the business and wanted to sell his stock. He had several hundred items, mainly Lacoste and Abrocrombie and Fitch. I paid him £2000 ($3200). I was foolish not to go through the stock before I bought it. I had presumed that because he was a family friend that it would be all great quality. Turned out around 30% was unsellable because it was factory seconds. Also most of it was silly sizes like extra larger and extra extra large but in the end this actually worked to my advantage because it seemed larger sized people went online to buy instead of going to shops.

The main downside of this business was that I had to constantly be packaging products and going to the post office, it was also more responsibly then I wanted as I had to make sure it got into the post right away. Often I would forget or leave it for days and end up sending two products for the price of one to make it up to the buyer.

Biggest Lesson Learned: Customers want it now and if that doesn’t work well with your work hours, then you will disappoint and they will leave negative feedback. I also found that there was a lot of things I could do to improve the result of auction, for example if I ended the auction at the busiest time of day in terms of Ebay traffic, I would likely make a lot more money from the sale then if I did it at say 10am.

ShoutGFX.com

Once I got out of the eBay business I decided that I should learn more about Web Design and found myself on a design forum called GameRenders. The forum had a great model, every time you posted on the forum you get a point and there was a market place where you could buy, sell and trade with your points. I loved the model and without knowing the meaning of GFX, I registered the domain ShoutGFX.com to go in direct competition with that forum and 100s of others.

I didn’t know much about web design, nothing about graphics, couldn’t even think about installing forum software but I managed to get my forum online and customized. I created friendships with the top users on the forum and other great designers and managed to convince them to join my forum and help build the community. In 6 short months, ShoutGFX had around 70,000 posts and 2,000 members. I remember I was running ShoutGFX.com when I first met Yanik Silver back in 2006.

Unfortunately because of my great success, came jealous competition that hacked my site and destroyed it. I knew the old owner of GameRenders and asked that he took a look, fix it and let me know how it was done. He let me know who the Hacker was (someone we both knew). It may have been something to do with the maturity of the audience but when I brought this up on the forums no one seemed to really care – so I tried to fix the site and carry on.

Later I discovered that two admins on my forum wanted to delete my site because they had just launched their own site and it would be easy to poach my users if my site was no longer online. In the end, I lost the site due to not having a decent backup.

Nasty — But I learned a lot. Mainly the experience made me more mature and of course I learned that what goes around, comes around.

Biggest Lesson Learned: Keep backups of your website, you never know when you will need it!

ShoutGFX Design We Were Working On Before We Got Hacked

Webdesigndev V.1

A web design site seemed a nature transition from a design forum, I already knew quite a lot about the niche and wanted to give a website a try. I was using a forum called Pixel2Life at the time where I found a young programmer aged 13. At first I agreed to pay him $30 to code my design and as we started talking I found out that he knew a lot about programming and we added really cool things such as a CMS to easily add content (basically like WordPress but nowhere near as good), a custom Newsletter (not compliant with spam laws) and a bunch of other cool ideas I had.

When I launched the site I added Adsense to the sidebar of the site and above each tutorial, I saw that I was earning around $5 – $10 a day and was mildly impressed with myself but knew I had to do more so I could make more money to expand my business. I researched how others in my niche were making money and they were all using Adsense as well but the difference is, they placed images next to each Adsense text listing – in a similar way to how they also listed their Tutorials / main content. This made readers think the adverts were real content.

First Version of WebDesignDev.com

So I did the same as these other sites and in no time at all my earnings with Adsense jumped from $5 – $10 per day TO $50 per day

I should point out this ‘trick’ is no longer allowed by Google but it was at the time. I didn’t feel bad about it at the time because the advertisers were getting targeted traffic from me – It was just one of the Tricks that online entrepreneurs were using just a few years ago. That said, it does not make it right and I am glad that Google clamped down on it.

After that I still thought I could do better, I went to my good friend, eBay and bought around 2000 website templates for £5 which included resell writes so I could sell it on. I created an advert to drive traffic to the page on my site where I was selling the templates and managed to increase my daily earnings to over $200 with the help of advertising. Webdesigndev.com grew to over 100 tutorials and 200,000 monthly visitors in weeks and I was managing $1000 advertising deals – all at the age of 16.

It didn’t last long though, first came the bad news from my host, having a 13 year old program your site meant that he may know a lot about programming, but didn’t actually mean his code worked well. They told me it was badly programmed which caused huge issues with my server and finally they shut us down. After moving to a new host, I found I still had the same problem and shortly after that I got contacted by Adsense, telling me that the site was banned from the program. (poor quality traffic apparently). Then there was a decline of interest in the template pack so in the end I decided to shut down the site down and begin on my next project.

Biggest Lesson Learned: It is well worth the money hiring a professional. I decided to hire a 13 year old programmer who was cheap but lacked the skills to create a robust website that could handle a lot of traffic. In the end this ‘cheap option’ cost me a lot more then what a good programmer would have.

TalkDev.com

From building ShoutGFX I knew quite a bit about running a forum and promoting it. I decided to give it another try in a similar but more mature market. The site went well but never picked up like ShoutGFX and I decided to sell it on SitePoint for around $1500 a few months later.

Biggest Lesson Learned: It’s not always the best choice to spend your whole budget on building a site, promoting it can be far better use of funds. I spent $650 to buy the TalkDev.com domain from a Domainer – which may sound a lot of money but at the time I had big dreams for the site and if it worked out, the price would of been well worth it.

Retireat21.com

Retireat21 was born out of an idea I got at the Underground Online Seminar that Yanik Silver held in the UK in 2006

I had noticed that there weren’t very many young people in the Internet Marketing business – so I wanted to connect those who did and inspire those who were not yet involved in Internet Marketing.

First Version of Retireat21.com

My original idea for Retireat21 was some sort of social site and in fact at the beginning it went really well. Each user had a profile page, could leave comments, vote up and down young entrepreneurs and we also had a big contest. Along with that I added pages about creating your own website and business and a bunch of other cool options. Although we had a great start, we still ended up with the same issue as last time, bad coding (didn’t learn the first time).

The most exciting day was when I release my young entrepreneur rich list and received over 50,000 visitors in one day and I was mentioned in news papers around the world and was mentioned in AOL and Yahoo news along with 1000 of other sites. I even ended up appearing in a leading Brazilian Newspaper.

Over the years we have worked hard to restructure the site and in 2010 do plan to make the move to a new design and to use WordPress for all of the site – not just the Young Entrepreneurs Blog

Biggest Lesson Learned: Content is king, once I learned that I started to get a sold following.

Webdesigndev V.2

With Retireat21 finally earning some money, I decided to go back and look at WebDesignDev.com again. This was also just around the time of my “near death” experience in Ghana. (Not sure how many of my IncomeDiary readers know about this – but another life-changing experience)

I always enjoyed WebDesignDev.com and knew it had great potential. So I decided to hire a designer and with in 1 hour had a design I liked and found a programmer to convert it from PSD to WordPress. I relaunched it using old tutorials and it quickly made its way up to around 35,000 monthly visitors but because I couldn’t bring anything new to the site, struggled to bring it any further. Another main concern was monetization, I was banned from Adsense and couldn’t get more then $300 – $500 for advertising on the site.

Second Version of WebDesignDev.com

Biggest Lesson Learned: At the time of creating WebDesignDev V.2, I had all the same content on Retireat21 for at least a year and when I copied it and put it on the new site, WebDesignDev instantly out ranked Retireat21 in Google. I put down the success of WebDesignDev in the search engines to a great bit of software called: WORDPRESS!

IncomeDiary.com

With so many people asking me how I created Retireat21.com and WebDesignDev.com, I knew I had to create a great FREE guide. Add that to the demand for more interviews and lists in a broader niche then just young entrepreneurs, IncomeDiary was born.

To get the full scoop on how I created IncomeDiary and how you can create a similar blog, check out this post

Biggest Lesson Learned: Consistency is important for success! If you take your eye of the ball, your level of success will drop.

WebDesignDev V.3

Early in 2008 I went back to Webdesigndev.com with a different approach – this time, not to deliver step by step tutorials but to give inspiration and showcase some of the best web design on the net. I was also fortunate to find a young writer who was interested in the web design niche and willing to write for a revenue share. This made a big difference and we were able to bring the site from 30,000 visitors monthly to 160,000. As some of you know – I sold WebdesignDev.com last month for a nice $xx,xxx figure. Very pleased with that because just a year or so ago I was considering accepting an offer of $5000 for that site!

Biggest Lesson Learned: WebDesignDev.com got me by far the most traffic of any of my sites but when all was said and done it earned me the least. I just did not have the time to take WebdesignDev to the next level which is why I sold the site. For me I find it better to concentrate on the sites that make me the most money right now – rather than distracting myself with lower earning sites. That is the case for me right now — I am not necessarily suggesting that will be the case for you.

My “Unfair” Advantage

I was fortunate enough to start my online business very young. I now realise I started my business with very little in the way of overheads – after-all I was still living at home with my parents. A significant advantage for sure but then I was no A Grade Student and I really struggled because of my dyslexia – so in many ways starting an online business was more difficult for me.

But I did have an “Unfair Advantage” — but it is perhaps not an obvious one if you don’t know my whole story. You see I was fortunate that early on in my online career I met and hung out with some of the most successful people online such as: Yanik Silver, James Schramko, Ryan Lee and Alex Jeffreys.

So many people get disillusioned when their first blog or online business does not work out as they expected – and make the fatal mistake of giving up.

Look, if it really was that easy, then everyone would be doing it.

Personally I don’t consider it very difficult – but it is vital to no under-estimate the amount of effort required.

As I have said in previous blog posts recently you have to be prepared to invest in yourself, educate yourself if you ever hope to move from being a Wannabe Blogger to an A List Blogger

Give yourself an unfair advantage – get yourself a coach, a mentor or join a Mastermind. That has been the single biggest influence on my own online success

Finally

I was looking for a story that might inspire those of you who are considering giving up or who are disillusioned and I came across this one:

Abraham Lincoln’s Incredible Journey To Become The 16th President Of The United States!

I think President Lincoln lived one of the most motivational and inspirational lives ever.

Think you have had it hard – look at this “Failure” time-line

* He had to work to support his family after they were forced out of their home. 1816
* His mother died. 1818
* Failed in business. 1831
* Was defeated for legislature. 1832
* Lost his job and couldn’t get into law school. 1832
* Declared bankruptcy, and spent the next 17 years of his life paying off the money
he borrowed from friends to start his business. 1833
* Was defeated for legislature again. 1834
* Was engaged to be married, but his sweetheart died and his heart was broken. 1835
* Had a nervous breakdown and spent the next six months in bed. 1836
* Was defeated in becoming the speaker of the state legislature. 1838
* Was defeated in becoming elector. 1840
* Was defeated for Congress 1843
* Was defeated for Congress. 1846
* Was defeated for Congress again. 1848
* Was rejected for the job of Land Officer in his home state. 1849
* Was defeated for Senate. 1854
* Was defeated for Vice-President — got less than 100 votes. 1856
* Was defeated for Senate for the third time. 1858
* Was elected President of the United States. 1860

I hope you enjoyed this post – I believe passionately in helping as many people as possible to succeed online.

As you can see, I did not always get it right – but you will also I hope note that I NEVER GAVE UP. Actually as I read it I actually impress myself – It makes me wonder just what could be possible to achieve in next 4 years – when I reach age 25.

I look forward to your comments.

To Our Success

Michael

PS: I just came across this great quote from that great Positive Thinker – Mr Jim Rohn. It seemed to fit in well with my strategy – hopefully it will inspire you also.

You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.

I am a stock trader who’s learned that while trading is fun and profitable, it’s far more fulfilling and even more profitable to teach others to profit just the way I have for a decade now. So, in late 2007, I created a publishing company, BullShip Press, LLC to cut through all the BS in the trading world as 90% to 95% of traders lose money and the “gurus” don’t share their trades/track records because they’re mostly frauds. My goal is to get the number of losers down to 60-70%, but it’s a huge undertaking considering the amount of misinformation out there.

To get the goodness out there, I blog, have a have a real-time trade alerts newsletter and sell instructional trading DVDs that teach how I turned $12,415 in Bar Mitzvah gift money into $2 million in 4 years, was the #1 ranked short selling hedge fund manager 2003-2006 (Barclays) and earned 200% last year making me the top ranked trader out of 20,000+ on Covestor.com, a website that verifies trades and investments.

As I detail in my book “An American Hedge Fund”, I closed my fund because due to the popularity of my TV show “Wall Street Warriors”, I was getting hundreds of emails/day from people who wanted to learn more about my strategy because they had dreams of turning their small accounts into millions just like I had.

Last December you posted that your blog earned $83,358, could you give us a break down on how you accomplished this?

Sure, as I wrote in my blog post detailing the income much of it was due to holiday DVD sales and lump sum affiliate payments, so here’s the breakdown:

$20,229 TIMalerts

$27,688 Instructional DVDs

$29,407 Advertising & Affiliates

$2,084 An American Hedge Fund

$3,950 Trading Profits

What advice would you give a new blogger trying to make money from their blog?

Prove that you’re expert advice/blog is valuable by creating solid word of mouth with free content at first and then showing off all the testimonials from happy readers to seduce even more readers into purchasing your premium product/s, whether they be in the form of a newsletter, DVDs, affiliate products, etc. DO NOT FOCUS SOLELY ON ADS!

I’m actually in the process of creating a how to make money form blogging instructional DVD with a ton of proven experts, contact me if you’re interested in staying updated!

You are now currently living the Internet Lifestyle, what does the Internet Lifestyle mean to you?

It means I’m gonna work my butt off to take advantage of the power of social networks and all sorts of cool new technologies to build a profitable, and more importantly, helpful business. Work hard play hard as having an internet-based business allows me to travel extensively, while also working so already in 2009, I’ve visited nearly half a dozen countries seeing amazing sites, meeting exciting people and having a great time!

I understand that at 18 years old you took $12,415 Bar Mitzvah Gift Money and turned it into $1.65 million using the stock market, what was the biggest lesson learnt from this?

There are times when you must be aggressive in trading, investing and business because the environment is ripe for massive gains….at all other times, be as frugal, cynical and conservative as possible.

Tell us about how you went from Young Stock market Prodigy to one of the highest paid bloggers?

I worked my butt off for a year proving that my investment strategy and my teachings were valuable….then I added in a ton of marketing to get the goodness out there because nobody else in business is going to help me as much as I can help myself.

The stock market niche is particularly easy to excel in since 90%+ of traders lose money, 70%+ of “professional” money managers fail to beat the S&P 500 each year and 99% of people selling investment wisdom don’t share their track record and trades/investments because a.) they’re not as good as they claim b.) they’re total frauds and c.) they’re cowards because industry regulations prevent them from sharing performance (it’s pathetic, imagine a baseball player unwilling to tell you his batting average!)

Seriously, brutal honesty is a revolutionary concept in finance, I wish more joke-of-an-industry-finance people will see the success its brought me and be inspired to do the same as i’m far from the best, just the first!

What would you say the benefits of having a blog over a traditional website or forum?

It’s interactive, real-time, data-minable…it’s not even a debate, you need to market your knowledge every day and better understand/stay in contact with your customers and blogs help you achieve both.

Static websites are soooo 2004 and older, forums are ugly and inefficient unless we’re talking about them being based off Twitter like StockTwits is (I’m an investor)

You are known as the authority blog in the Stock Market niche. What advice would you give a new webmasters to dominating their niche?

Nah, I’m just the authority on penny stocks, gimme a few years until I takeover the entire market….but my advice is to never sell out for the money and promote crap products/probable scams, sketchy-type stuff. Your readers’ trust is everything and you gotta have some self respect! Search out other quality people in your niche and related ones and figure out ways to partner and cross-market each other’s blogs/products.

What advice would you give to people just starting out with an online business?

Prepare to work harder than you ever imagined—this ain’t the 4- Hour Workweek, this world is constantly changing so you must learn about new technologies and trends, ignore most of them, not be afraid of making mistakes, try everything to gain greater exposure, more sales, more testimonials and definitely take on partners who you can trust.

If you could go back in a time machine to the time when you were just getting started, what advice would you give yourself regarding making money online?

I would say reinvest more of the profits into marketing and accounting. For the first several months, I didn’t know if this was going to be a sustainable business so I was scared and selfish, but now I realize I gotta keep putting some $ back into the biz to help more organized and targeted.

What is the best advice you have ever been given?

Don’t invest in anyone who hasn’t been scarred at least once…losses and mistakes help you learn and grow infinitely more than gains just make you cockier and more susceptible to making mistakes.

Thanks very much for the interview, Have you any plans (personal or business) that you can share with us about your future plans / goals / lifetime goals?

Stay tuned for more instructional DVDs, not just for penny stocks and short selling, but general stock market strategies, options trading, and as I already mentioned, blog marketing. The goal is to get as much good information out there in many different formats. And while that’s a nice goal, I’m also going to make sure all my DVDs and experts prove their expert status and regularly converse with our customers! So feel free to visit http://www.timothysykes.com/contact and ask me anything!