I’m sitting here at my computer, sipping my first cup of coffee, and wondering what I’m gonna write about that would be of interest to readers of my blog. I’m thinking about all the facets of Internet Marketing: product creation, list-building, copywrighting, follow-up message writing, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, traffic generation techniques, niche marketing, keyword research, ppc,joint-venturing, give-aways, and seemingly the list could ramble on ad-infinitum! How can a person possibly get one’s head wrapped around all this stuff sufficiently enough to take the first step into this alluring, yet crazy world of Internet Marketing?? It’s no wonder 95% is the failure rate!

After a year of buying up everything I could afford to buy, lurking in dozens of forums and reading so many blog posts I’ve lost count, I’m just beginning to see the “Battle Fog” begin to lift!

What’s interesting is where all that ‘Fog’ came from. Innocently, I subscribed to a couple of Give-Away events about one year ago. I perused the ‘free’ offers of promises of ‘internet marketing greatness and massive wealth with my product’. Each time I succumbed to a good sale page, I freely gave my name and email address in exchange for the purported “Golden Nugget”. But as an uninitiated ‘Newbie’ I didn’t really understand what I was actually doing. I was commiting myself to the first stages of a massive avalance of endless ‘ the-greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread’ offers one could imagine! The feeding frenzy had begun. In the days and months to follow, dozens of hyped emails filled my inbox with offers for products that were making each sender a friggin’ fortune! That’s the ‘Fog’ to which I previously referred! The dust stirred up by the relentless pounding of incoming rounds of awesome offers had my vision and focus so clouded I strayed aimlessly, with wallet open, for several months! I spent lots, read a ton, realizing I was often reading rehased, out-dated garbage. After 6 months I was officially ” Information Overloaded”!

At that point, with gigabytes of product, some valuable, most trash, I realized I was doing exactly what scores of marketing ‘Gurus’ hoped I would do….buy everything that promised success. I then decided to take control of my destiny. I began to catalog all of the ‘product’ I had accumulated. Then, with a vengence, I began assessing each product. With a plan in hand, I gleefully began deleting. A tremendous feeling of euphoria began to envelope my very existence! Somehow, once I decided a product to be a ‘waste of my time and money’, the act of pressing the DELETE key made me feel more in control of my life again! A clarity of purpose arose and for the first time I believed, no…I KNEW I could do this business.

Presently, with more patience and a clear mission, the ‘Fog’ has completely cleared! Soon I will be productive! The real purpose of documenting my experience here is to ask you, the reader, to share your beginning experience in hopes other readers can benefit. So, I simply ask that you leave your comments on this post and let’s begin a meaningful dialog that might help others avoid these traps.

Make it a Great Day!

Bob

As blogging and, in particular, blogging for profit becomes ever more popular amongst online entrepreneurs, we’re seeing new tools developed to assist in this process being released, what seems like every week.

In this post I’m going to talk about one such tool, Firepow Blogging Software,because I believe it might just be a cut above the rest in terms of it’s flexibility of use, and overall effectiveness in accomplishing the three primary aims of blogging – creating a blog, managing it or maintaining it, and getting traffic to it.

It was hard to know where to start with this post because there are so many individual features of this software that could be mentioned.

To give you a brief overview of how it works…

Firepow is based on the Wordpres platform, and allows a user to install a fully customized and functioning wordpress blog with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you’ve used WordPress before, you’ll know that one of the best things about it is it’s ability to be enhanced by third party plugins. You’ll also know that it’s not hard to get LOST in all the plugins and potential feature additions that CAN be made.

The first thing great about Firepow from my point of view is that they have done the plugin work for you. The best 50 or so plugins from around the web have been programmed into the software so as to be automatically installed when your blog is.

That’s a good feature, but it’s even better when you consider that while these plugins normally require manual fiddling to get installed, tweaks made to your theme CSS code and more – the software actually does that part for you too – so you click the button, and you have the function of that plugin added – VERY time saving!

The “Create” part of the process is also helped by the ability to create your own custom wordpress theme completely from scratch, with more functionality than we’ve seen from free theme generators EVER before – not to mention the ability to create your own categories from scratch, automatically create the perfect permalink
structure for SEO, and more.

Before even getting into the WordPress panel of the site Firepow creates you’ve also got a site management tab where all your blogs can be managed from one place, an SEO tracking tool to monitor the search rankings of all your sites, and a task manager
that tells you what needs to be done to maintain your blog/s and when.

I dare say though that the best things happen once you’re actually IN the blog.

Here you have crazy abilities to make your post content better, easily being able to add relevant images, videos, or trackbacks (automatically building backlinks to your site) to your posts… and even that’s leaving alot out.

OR the crazy abilities to monitor your blogs success, like being able to split test the results of different posts, monitor your traffic through in depth reporting (utilizing Google analytics), monitoring your search spider activity, the popularity of your posts, the terms people are searching on your site, and more still.

I feel like I’m getting too salesy in this post to you but I can assure even with everything you’ve read here, I haven’t even really touched the surface of what’s going on inside this thing called Firepow – heck we didn’t even get to the promotional tools.

The best thing I can probably do is tell you go to look at the darn thing yourself:

Firepow

Oh and I could also tell you that if your into blogging and you don’t, you’ll probably regret it big time.

I hope you’ve found the information here valuable, and don’t hesitate to leave your comments on Firepow here to share with others.

Ever feel as if nobody is reading your blog? You do all the SEO you read, still the visitor numbers are missing. What do you do? If this kinda describes your current feelings then this article will provide you with ways to blast off your blog to grow your business.

Launch Stage #1
The first place to look at is the basic foundation of a successful blog
(back to the basics). Here are few things that you should keep in mind:

(1) Be sure your blog has a niche topic so you can make a concerted effort to
reach specific blog visitors. So, if you have a hobby such as collecting butterflys, then your main topic should be concentrated on reaching
web visitors who love butterfly collecting.

(2) Use categories/tags that are sub-topics of your main topic. Going with the
previous niche topic, then good sub-topics would be: authors, types,
illustrations, geography, etc.

(3) Good oontent is key to building traffic to your website. Make sure that your
content includes the keywords that you want associated to your niche blog.

Launch Stage #2
Once you have the basics in place, then you need to create a “community” within
your blog. Building a “community” means that you want to create a reason for
repeat visits by your blog visitors. This will help you in the long run to one
day setup a membership website. What does it take to build a “community”? Glad
you asked. Below is a short list of things you can do.

(1) Create a way for your web visitors to contribute to your blog. This can be
done by allowing them to comment on your blog posts or by allowing them to
submit content to be considered for posting to your blog.

(2) Ask your web visitors to submit a link for consideration to be added to your
“blogroll” in exchange for them putting a link back to your blog from theirs.

(3) Visit article websites such as Free Article Directory and find articles that
are in your niche. You would have to give credit to the author of the article
but it is a great way to add content to your website.

Launch Stage #3
Give your blog visitors a reason to come back by rewarding them for continuously
visiting your blog.

(1) Give-away freebies to your blog visitors.

(2) Create a way for them to tell-a-friend about your blog.

(3) Have a contest for guest authors in your niche topic to be guest authors on
your blog and ask them to share a link to the article on your blog from theirs.

Ok. You’re ready to market online. There are a bazillion different options you can choose from for promoting your products or services.

WordPress Marketing is a strategy that can make you thousands
of dollars if done correctly.

If you don’t know WordPress, it is a FREE blog service that allows you to create, and thus control, your own website (blog) for free! You can use your own domain name (wordpress.com/nameofyourblog) and anybody with an internet connection can view your page by visiting that web address.

Now you’re online and ready to do business! Got your own product or selling OPP’s (Other People’s Products), all you gotta do is market. Pick a hot product and write a review, or
provide your readers with tips and shortcuts. You can place ads on your site for Google or Yahoo (also FREE) and YOU GET PAID anytime someone just clicks on one of the ads on your site!
It’s a short learning curve and can be lucrative.

Let’s see what else we can do with WordPress.

You know that “the Money is in the List”, why not build your opt-in list of email subscribers by giving away something of value for FREE right from your blog, in exchange for the email address of your reader. You could give-away e-Books, e-Courses, software or a short report. Be sure that what you offer is something that is of value, something you would want yourself. If you choose the freebie wisely, you’ll have a subscriber for life.

Good autoresponders services are available for under $20 a month and you can easily set up the email address capture form where the customer must enter their first name and email address in order to receive the free download you have chosen to offer.

You can find free auto-responder services, but it’s wise to invest on the paid auto-responder service as you can be sure of high deliverabilty of your messages with paid services.
Once you harvest their email addresses you can promote (legally!) products and/or services to them via email and then you can make some serious money!

Of course, creating and marketing your own product is the way to greater riches. That then lends itself to building your own army of eager affiliate marketers selling your product for a commission! That is WordPress marketing in a nutshell!

When you first start your blog, you have so much to say that you
have no problem posting every day. After a while, you begin to
run out of ideas and you can’t seem to come up with fresh
content. Every blogger has this problem from time to time. So how
do you keep the blog going – keep it fresh and full of value?
Here are some ideas:

Do a top 10 list – “The top 10 mistakes people do when trying
_______ for the first time.” “The top 10 tips for ______.” Lists
tend to be easier to write and take less time to formulate. If
you can’t come up with 10, perhaps you can make it the top 3 or
top 5.

Interview an expert – Approach someone who is very knowledgeable
in your blog niche and you may find they’ll be happy to do an
interview, especially if they have a new product just launched
and would like the exposure. Put together some thoughtful
questions and ask them to write out their answers. The beauty of
this blog post is that aside from asking the questions, the
interviewee does all the work!

Answer a recurring question/problem – Go to the forums you
frequent in your niche and look for a recurring question that
people have. Doing a little research and coming up with answers
makes for an excellent blog post. You also can become the
expert.

Blog about other blog posts – Have you read a blog post recently
that caused you to stop and think, or offered up a huge
glittering gem of priceless information? Blog your opinions,
insights, and inspiration you’ve gotten from that person’s post.
Be sure to provide a link back so your readers can read the
original post.

Use the weather – Look around you at the season and tie it into
your niche. Does the hot weather inspire you to share a story on
your internet marketing blog about going fishing while your
internet marketing business is still making you money? Does the 4
feet of snow outside make you think about reading your favorite
books? If so, you can do a niche-related book review with your
Amazon or other affiliate links attached.

What’s up in your business world – Blog about what you’re working
on now. Using a personal tone, explain what your current project
is. Letting a few tidbits escape builds anticipation and helps
your readers feel like they’re now on the “inside”.

I can always find great content at Bryan Winters’

InfoGoRound.  I recommend his service totally. And,

he has a neat way to let you get your membership

FREE every month. Go check it out…

http://www.AnyOneCanDoThis.biz/Suggests/IGR.php

Have a great Weekend!

Bob Kimball