How to Generate Traffic to Your Website – Bob Walsh Review
Bob Walsh recently gave a very positive review of my latest EBook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website on his blog 47Hats.com. To quote his blog post title “An Excellent Ebook for MicroISVs”
The following is an exert from his review:
“As someone who knows a fair bit about these topics, I found Steph’s down to earth – here’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-why – presentation very complete. His chapters on SEO, AdWords and press releases were some of the best material from a microISV’s point of view I’ve seen to date. Steph pulls from both the experience of his microISV – LandlordMax – and other sources to illustrate and illuminate his points.
The SEO chapter in particular is must reading for any microISV because it focuses on techniques that work today – not 5 years ago – and because it gives you for the time invested a solid set of strategies to start acting on now. MicroISVs seldom have the luxury to dive to the bottom of any of the many subjects we have to deal with.”
You can read Bob’s full review here. Thank you Bob for the great review!
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How to generate traffic to your website – John Cow Review
Today I got another great review of my latest EBook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website from John Cow. John gave it a very positive review which you can read in full here.
My favorite quote from his review is:
“Stephane absolutely knows what he’s talking about, and a lot of this is also coming from his personal experiences as a webmaster. We’ve got nothing bad to say – in fact, looks like we’re going to have to redo our own ebook in the making.”
John’s also found one small minor flaw on Page 68 which he’s making into a contest. The first one to tell him what it is will win $30 via PayPal. In other words if you find it first, you’ll be getting the ebook for free! I’ve since found it and will correct it as soon as he lets me know someone has won contest.
Thank you John for the great review.
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How to generate traffic to your website – Reviews and Comments
Reviews of my ebook “How to Generate Traffic to Your Website” are starting to appear online. Ian Landsman, founder of UserScape, commented earlier last week on his blog:
“Stephane yesterday released an interesting book on generating traffic to your site. It’s remarkably in depth. I’ve only read some of it so far, but what I’m most impressed with is the breadth of the coverage. It pretty much hits on everything someone starting a commercial website needs to think about. ”
Thank you Ian for the great comment.
And to add to this, yesterday Mani Karthik of Daily SEO Blog wrote a review of the ebook on BloggingTips.com. It was a very positive review. Below are some of the highlights:
- To my surprise I found that Steph has done an indepth analysis of the traffic generation process and the sheer volume of topics covered in the ebook itself, reveals the amount of research Steph has done to accomplish this book.
- In total, there are 11 chapters under the two sections that takes care of all the things (yes, I do mean it) that you need to know to create traffic to your website
- Honestly, each section and category in itself could’ve easily made into another E-Book and believe me there are lot of e-books out there which deals with only 1/220th of what Steph’s written about in thie ebook, but sells for a higher price.
- Steph’s done an amazing job on this ebook, and his hardwork is very evident from the research done, the topics and the sheer depth of information present on each topic.
- Every page is simply worth the money you pay. And it’s cheaper that all those “I’ll teach you everything in two minutes” kind of books.
But my personal favorite is: “I can assure you that this is NOT an ebook that will contain information that you’ve already read elsewhere.”
Thank you Mani for the detailed and very positive review. If you’re interested you can read Mani’s full interview here.
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InBoxer – Email Spam Filter for Outlook
About a year and a half ago I was getting really frustrated with the levels of spam my personal emails were receiving so I wrote a blog post asking what others were doing to reduce their email spam. Someone suggested SpamBayes, a free open source solution, which worked great for a while but then I had some issues with it. This eventually lead me to InBoxer, which is basically a commercial version of SpamBayes.
Over the last year or so it’s been amazing! It uses Bayesian spam filtering, so it took a bit to get it fully going. But once up and running things were great. Unfortunately, last week for some strange reason the database corrupted itself. Who knows why but it was frustrating. My greatest fear was that as I was launching my new EBook I’d be in the middle of training the Bayesian spam filter. I couldn’t ask for worse timing!!! In the middle of promoting the ebook I’d have to look at every single email as the spam filters wouldn’t be trained enough yet.
The good news though is that because of the volume of emails I get I was able to train the spam filter to a good enough level before the ebook launch. It has slowed me down a bit, but not nearly as much as I expected. And it’s reminded me of the appreciation I originally had for InBoxer when I first got it. For $40 it’s well worth it!
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EBook is ready!
What an insanely busy week! But the good news is that the EBook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website: How to let people know you exist and get them to come to your website! I promised is finally now available for purchase.
The Table of Content for the book is:
Section 1: Time Based Traffic Generation Techniques
- Chapter 1 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Chapter 2 – Content
- Chapter 3 – Freebies
- Chapter 4 – Blogging
- Chapter 5 – Socialize
- Chapter 6 – Social Network Sites
- Chapter 7 – Web Directories
- Chapter 8 – Miscellaneous
Section 2: Money Based Traffic Generation Techniques
- Chapter 9 – Google AdWords
- Chapter 10: Press Releases
- Chapter 11: Domain Acquisitions
Although the dedicated purchase page won’t be ready until tomorrow, for those of you who can’t wait, you can already start buying it here right now for $28.95. It’s less than the price of a dinner at the restaurant, and you’ll get a lot more out of it!
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EBook Update
Last week I mentioned I would have an EBook entitled How to Generate Traffic to Your Website: How to let people know you exist and get them to come to your website! ready for Monday this week. Well Monday has come and gone. I’ve decided to postpone it’s release until Monday next week (March 10, 2008). As I’ve always said in the past I’d rather release something of higher quality and value than to push it out to meet a date, even if I publicly stated it.
A preconception I’d also like to discount here is that EBooks are pure profit machines. Far from it. The work that involved in creating a good EBook is substantial. For my upcoming book Interview the Pros: What does it take to create a Successful Blog? which will be published in the traditional sense (both as a softcover and hardcover through bookstores like Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, etc.) I calculate I easily put in over 500 hours. For this EBook I calculate the total will be about 350+ hours. Assuming a 40 hour work-week, that’s about 2 months of full-time effort!
As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of the work was already done before I decided to finish and polish it a week or so ago. But 2 months worth of full-time work is not cost free. Just looking at the opportunity cost I’ve already invested a significant amount of money. As well each transaction is not free, there is a processing fee. It might be small, but let’s not forget it (There are other costs such as support, but we’ll ignore these as they’re harder to pre-calculate).
What I’m trying to get at is that the author of an EBook has the same risks as a software company. All the risk is front-loaded. That is all the time and money upfront has to be invested before any revenue is generated. That’s a lot of risk. Assuming a round rate of $100/hour, at 350 hours that’s $35,000 invested in the book ($100/hour is not my rate, it’s just a simple number to work with). Adding another 5% for transaction fees, that’s another $1750. That means that to balance out with a consulting gig I would need to generate $36,750! Only once I’ve achieved this revenue do I start to make any profit in comparison to straight consulting. If I don’t achieve it, I’ve lost money!
In other words:
- At $20/EBook I need to sell 1835 books
- At $25/EBook I need to sell 1470 books
- At $30/EBook I need to sell 1217 books
That’s a lot of Ebooks. If I want to break even selling 1000 EBooks I need to price it $36.50. If I sell less than $36,750 worth of the EBook than I’ve lost money!
EBooks are sold differently than traditional books, so the numbers are different. As an author of a traditionally published book you need to sell more copies to break even with your time, but I believe it’s easier. Firstly you’re not the only one selling your book, other reputable bookstores are listing your book (people search Amazon for example). Another disadvantage of EBooks is that have a shorter lifespan. For example the materials in this book may not be as relevant in a couple of years, so I need to make my revenues sooner than later.
Another large benefit with traditionally printed books is that they can easily be used to increase your reputation, credibility, etc. People generally put more worth into traditional books than they do EBooks, even though there are some very amazing EBooks!
Therefore the idea that EBooks are profit machines is simply not true. At least for high quality EBooks. Sure I could have just slapped together some text taken from here and there and made an EBook in a few days. Added some pictures and pretty graphs. But that’s not a high quality EBook. Such an EBooks revenues will be limited purely by my selling abilities. Instead I’d rather my EBook sell itself. There’s nothing as powerful as word of mouth marketing!
In any case, all this is to say my upcoming EBook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website: How to let people know you exist and get them to come to your website! release date has been postponed from this week to next week (March 10, 2008).
If you’re interested, come back on Monday to see if the book is available. And you can also subscribe to my RSS feed so that you don’t have to remember to come back, that or you can also subscribe to my email newsletter which will send updates to your email box directly.
See you next week!
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How to Generate Traffic to Your Website
Since I finished my book Interview the Pros: What does it take to create a Successful Blog? (it’s been sent to my publisher and is now going through an editing phase) I’ve been reconsidering finishing my previous book about online sales and marketing. What really brought this thought forward was buying and reading Bob Walsh’s ebook MicroISV Sites that Sell! It convinced me that I needed to finish it sooner than later.
Unlike Interview the Pros, which is going to be available on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, etc., this second book will only be available as an ebook here. I chose to go the ebook route because of the time and costs it takes to get something to print. The material in this ebook is much more time sensitive and therefore I felt it wasn’t valuable to wait until it could be available in print. I did try to keep the content as timeless as possible but some of the information will become less pertinent quicker than a traditional book can afford. That’s the nature of the internet and online traffic generation.
The ebook will be titled “How to Generate Traffic to Your Website: How to let people know you exist and get them to come to your website!” Instead of focusing on the many aspects of marketing and sales as I originally planned, I decided the book would be more beneficial to you if I narrowed the focus to only how to generate traffic to your website.
The book should be ready by the end of this to early next week because I had already written a large portion of it before I wrote Interview the Pros and because it covers a lot of the same material I presented at a 4-day seminar on how to generate traffic for a website. It won’t be as encompassing as Interview the Pros, but it’s definitely loaded with valuable information. It’s got almost everything I’ve used to get this blog and my company LandlordMax to where they are today (a combined traffic of more than one million unique visitors a year).
If you’re interested, come back very soon to see if the book is already available. Like I said it should be available later this week to early next week if all goes well. And if you want to save yourself some effort, you can also subscribe to my RSS feed so that you don’t have to come back each day. As well you can subscribe to my email newsletter which will send each of the blog entries I publish to your email box directly.
See you in a few days!
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Do You Make These Mistakes When Writing Your Blog Posts?
Dear Diary Entries
In other words talk about things other than yourself. It’s ok once in a while to say something about yourself, but other than your family and close friends most people aren’t interested. They want to get some value from what you have to say. Talking about your dog or sister just isn’t valuable for most of the world.
Talk About Nothing
Blah blah blah blah blah some interesting content blah blah blah blah blah… Talk about something. Be about something. Have an opinion.
Extraneous usage of overzealous utterances and discourse
What? Write in clear and easy sentences. Write so everyone can understand what you’re trying to say. This doesn’t mean dumbing down your content, what it means is that you should write as if you’re talking to a normal person. Not as though your writing Shakespear’s last sonnet.
Use Bait and Switch in Your Headlines
Headlines are important, just make sure that you deliver what you promised. Don’t pretend that your article will be about one thing and then write about something else.
Regurgitate the same content
It’s hard to always come up with fresh new content, that’s what good blogging is all about. But if you don’t, then you’ll quickly become very boring and your audience will lose interest.
Copy large amounts of content from others.
There’s nothing wrong with quoting people, but if the majority of your posts are copied from other sources then you might want to consider another vocation. Be original. Add something to the online discussion if you’re going to be quoting or responding. Use quotes to add to your post rather than be your posts.
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Where to Get Blog Article Ideas
Last week when I wrote my blog article The Importance of Writing Your Blog Posts Ahead of Time, and a commenter asked me: “How do you come up with ideas of posts?”. This made me think a bit. It’s easy to suggest you write blog entries ahead of time but where do you get those ideas. So I looked at my most recent articles to see what inspired them. Surprisingly most of my articles from about a handful of different sources. They are:
My own direct and personal experiences running my company LandlordMax, this blog, and a few other projects
By far my biggest inspiration source is my day to day experiences running my company LandlordMax, followed by this blog, followed by all my other projects I have going (such as my book Interviews With the Pros, my upcoming website FindYourWeddingDress.com). I’ve written numerous times on what’s happening, what I’ve learned, etc. Last week alone two out of three of my posts where on these topics.
Examples include:
- 2 Very Simple Ways to Significantly Increase Your Productivity
- The Importance of Writing Your Blog Posts Ahead of Time
- 12 Tips on How to Prepare Your Laptop for a Presentation
- Yours Truly is in the Press Again
- What is Scope Creep?
- The Year 2007 in Retrospect
- Ideas are a Dime a Dozen
- Nine Woman Can’t Have a Baby in One Month
- A Large Monitor is Actually Cheaper Than a Small Monitor
- How to Write Out Your Domain Name
My experiences investing my money
I’ve done a lot of investing in the past. This is what’s allowed me to start and fund my company LandlordMax. Today however most of my money is one egg basket, my company (which I watch very carefully). I just don’t have the time to diversify right now. In any case, a lot of my posts stem from my past experiences investing and building up my wealth, along with my commentary on what’s happening today.
Examples include:
- Why a Balanced Portfolio Can Be Bad For You
- 7 Simple Tips And 5 Secrets to Increase Your Credit Score
- The Simplest and Best Way to Protect Yourself from the Real Estate Crash
- How interest rates can drastically affect real estate prices
- Can You Save Your Way to a $1,000,000 Dollars?
Looking at what’s going on in the blogosphere
I subscribe to over 100 different RSS blog feeds. Of course I don’t read them everyday, but I try. It helps me keep track of what’s happening in my niches, my industries, etc. The biggest tip I can offer here is that you shouldn’t just post about what other people say (reactionary), rather you should come up with your own ideas. It’s hard to explain, but use them as inspiration instead of a discussion or response to what someone else has said. I also recommend not adding another post on a topic that’s currently on fire. Don’t be just another voice in a crowd. Be a leader.
Examples include:
- Be the Best at Something Instead of Average at a Lot of Things
- Developer Debt
- Almost all of my Quick Links
Books
I read a lot. I try to read at least a book a week, or at the very least one book every other week. I’ve found that book authors often go deeper into their material, research it more, etc. than bloggers. But that’s probably because they write hundreds of pages on one topic versus a few paragraph to a dozen pages for bloggers. It’s the nature of the medium.
Examples Include:
- Now That’s Motivation!
- Another Record for this Housing Market Crash
- Is it Possible to Predict When a Market will Crash?
- Asset Risk Management
Personal discussions
One thing I’ve really gotten myself to do a lot more these days is to pay attention to the many discussions I have with other people. Look at their viewpoints. Look at yours. Look at the questions they ask you. Often a post will come directly from a question.
Examples Include:
- This post: Where to Get Blog Article Ideas
- What’s the Secret? How Do You Have Time To Do All That?
My Environment
Another thing I continually do is look at what’s going on around me. This is something I used to think I was doing well, but I wasn’t really. I didn’t fully appreciate what it means to look around you and your environment until I read books like Freakonomics, Blink, etc.
Examples Include:
- 12 Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) You Should Always Do
- Why Coupon Codes are Bad on Websites
- HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray: From the Consumer’s Perspective
- Free Business Idea
These aren’t my only sources of inspirations, but it’s a good start if you’re looking for places to start. Basically keep your mind open and look everywhere.
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The Importance of Writing Your Blog Posts Ahead of Time
We all know the importance of writing regular blog posts, how important it is to keep a regular schedule. But few people talk about how to do this. The reality is that you need to get ahead of yourself, you need to write some of your posts before you’ll need to publish them to meet your regular schedule.
For the longest time I would write posts just in time. That is I would write and publish them the same day, or within a day. This worked well but I wasn’t nearly as consistent as I am today. Some weeks I would post new entries almost every day, then a week would go by with only one entry. As a general rule of thumb, I always wrote at least one entry a week, but it wasn’t terribly consistent.
That was ok when I was starting, like everyone else I had few readers initially. However as I’ve grown I’ve noticed more and more the importance of consistency in posting. These days I write at least 2-3 posts per week. You don’t have to write at that frequency, but what I strongly suggest is that you pick a regular blogging schedule, one that you can live with, and stick to it.
That being said, the reality is that you can’t consistently write your posts week after week. Things happen. That little thing called life. But that doesn’t mean I still can’t post regularly. As a professional that’s not acceptable. You need to accept that you can’t write every day and find a solution. And that solution is to write as many posts as you can in advance.
Preparation is key. Prepare for when you have no time. Prepare for when you don’t have the motivation. Prepare for when you’re sick. Prepare prepare prepare!
And so I strongly suggest you write posts ahead of time. I currently try to keep at least 1-3 weeks written ahead of time. Since I’ve started doing this things have been running much more smoothly. For example, although many of you probably didn’t realize it, in the last 2-3 weeks I’ve only really written one or two posts! All the others were pre-written beforehand. And it’s a good thing!
Towards the end of January I was extremely busy trying to finish up the blogging book I’m writing (Interviews with the Pros: What does it take to create a Successful Blog?). It’s kept me extremely busy. Not only that, but I’ve been writing a lot for the book: The Preface, the Introduction, the Epilogue, etc. Needless to say what little time I had left, which was pretty much nothing, I wasn’t really interested in writing any more. If I hadn’t pre-written several posts ahead of time there would have been very few posts in the last few weeks, and what I would have posted would probably have been of lower quality. Something nobody wants, not me nor you.
At this point I’ve only got a few more pre-written posts so I need to start catching up again. And obviously this week I’ve slowed down a little in posting because of that, I will only published 2-3 posts this week. but that’s mostly because this week is also extremely busy for me for other reasons. For example tonight I’m giving a presentation to a passive income investment club (MyOpic) on revenue generating sources for a blog/website (being on both sides as a publisher and advertiser I have lots to tips to share).
In any case, a very big tip I can give you is that you should plan and prepare your blog ahead of time for when your life gets busier. It’s not a matter of if you’ll get too busy, it’s a matter of when. If you’re well prepared then things will go very smoothly and no one will notice.
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