How To Get 85% Confirmed Opt-in Rate

This is a guest post by Markus Allen. Markus has been a good friend to me over the last year or so. He is one of my top affiliates and had the best conversion rate for 100 Subscribers Per Day with over 25% of his traffic turning into sales. Below he’d like to share a little tip, and a fantastic service, that will help you get more email subscribers. 

Almost three years ago, James posted this tip at the Warrior Forum:

It’s a problem that almost every internet marketer I know struggles with… getting new subscribers to confirm their free subscription request.

And James was no exception.

Most of our new subscribers fail to confirm their opt-in request because of:

Dead ends
Our visitors have little patience these days.

They’re usually looking for solutions to their pressing problems.

So after subscribing to our offers, they’re met with a “dead end” - a “thanks for subscribing” message with no clear message on what the next action is to take.

As a result, they grow quickly frustrated and flee our website.

Confusion
Most thank you pages are flat out confusing.

Sure, we internet marketers are accustom to confirming our optin requests – we do it all of the time…

… But everyone else remains unfamiliar with the email-subscription process. They might fill out just a few optins per year. And unless we literally lead them by the hand and tell them EXACTLY how to confirm their subscription, they probably won’t finish off the confirmation.

Glitches
Even if you do all of the right things, forces beyond our control could make it next to impossible to get the optin confirmation.

Of course an email typo is impossible to confirm.

Also, some email service providers strangely delay sending each subscriber’s confirmation email…

… For example, the popular AWeber autoresponder service holds off emailing confirmations at least 30 seconds after a signup.
This strange delay hurts double-optin rates because our new subscribers fail to see the email confirmation and move onto something else…

… Of course when they decide to check email (later in the day for example), they forget about the signup and might think the confirmation is some kind of sneaky spam.

Is it REALLY worth investing the effort into
double confirmation?

Now with all of the hassles involved in getting double optin confirmation, you might be asking yourself, “Why not skip the double optin process altogether?”

It’s tempting to switch to a single optin model, but after much investigation, I choose double optin for these reasons:

It’s more profitable
Every case study I’ve seen confirms that a double-optin-email list is more responsive…

… This MailChimp report confirms everything I need to know on the value of getting a double optin.

Double opt-in lists have better open rates:

Single-optin emails are delivered via one IP address and double-optin emails are sent via another IP address. As a result, single-optin deliveries tend to show up on ISP-banned lists… and as a result email delivery rates plummet.

On the flip side, double-optin emails have much higher delivery rates because they’re delivered via more “trusted” IPs.

Eliminate “form spam”
A growing number of spammers use software to submit website URLs as an email address (in the super slim hope that we list owners will click to their spam site).

These spammers never confirm or respond… but instead inflate the size of our lists (which costs us money).

Needless to say, requiring a confirmation optin halts “form spam” dead in its tracks.

Saves you money
If you’re charged per subscriber and not getting a confirmation, you’re paying more money for a lower-quality list.

The good news is there’s a fast, easy (and FREE) way to SIGNFICANTLY boost your optin confirmation rates…

… The secret is to giveaway a valuable bonus on your subscription thank-you page AND word it in just the right way – like this:

James tested something similiar to this over three years ago on one of his lists, and was able to consistently get 85%+ confirmation rates.

I’ve got some bad news and
really good news…

Now here’s the bad news… coming up with a valuable bonus takes a lot of time.

The last thing you want to do is give away junk. That tells your new subscribers that you really don’t care about them.

Instead, you want to AMAZE your new subscribers.

Give them a bonus gift that could easily sell as its own standalone infoproduct that could sell between $19.00 and $49.00.

Unfortunately, crafting a valuable bonus giveaway takes a long time, requires a lot of effort and takes attention away from you growing list of things to do.

But wouldn’t it be great if you could ”borrow” a valuable infoproduct from a professionally-trained writer and give it away as if you created it yourself?

If so, I’ve got some really good news for you.

Check this out…

… I just launched a new service that offers you high-quality information products to help you boost your subscription rates (and get those pesky double-optin confirmations).

These are not those crappy PLR or widely-circulated ebooks that everyone knows about. Instead, they’re professionally written “how to” and online reference guides that could easily sell for $100.00 each.

And here’s the best part – this service is FREE because each author is looking for extra exposure.

So we win because we’re able to instantly offer an amazing bonus gift to give away, and these authors win because they don’t have to pay for expensive advertising to promote their own website.

Click here to grab a bonus gift giveaway to display on your thankyou page.

Unique Free Traffic Strategy Generates 100+ Visitors Per Day

Today I’m going to share one incredibly simple thing I do that consistently generates me over 100 visitors per day in three different ways. It also helps me build backlinks which contribute to long term traffic growth.

It is the simplest and most effective discovery I’ve made in the past year – and you can EASILY use this strategy yourself to get more traffic and make more money.

So what is this strategy?

(You’ll probably be a bit underwhelmed when I tell you!)

My free traffic strategy for generating 100+ visitors per day is…

ADD MORE IMAGES TO YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE

Before you close the window and leave the blog, let me reveal exactly what I’m doing and how putting more images on my blog is generating me over 100 visitors per day.

How I’m Doing It

Using the example of my natural health and beauty blog, every time I publish a new blog post, I include one high quality image at the very top of the post that’s relevant to the content.

For example: Top 3 Best Homemade Hydrating Face Masks

I find the image at iStockPhoto.com and I usually download images that cost 1 or 2 credits which is around $0.80 or $1.60.

I pick an image, download it and rename it from something like iStock_74354975345XSmall.jpg to something more relevant. For the photo above, I renamed it to “hydrating-face-masks.jpg”.

Then, when creating a new blog post, I open the Media Manager, upload the photo and set the alternate text to “hydrating face masks”.

Essentially, the alternate text should be a description of what the photo is. So if you have a photo of a banana, set the alternate text as “banana”.

That is ALL I do. It costs less than a dollar per post, takes two minutes max, but generates traffic using the three methods below.

1. Google Image Traffic

Sometimes, for reasons unknown, Google ranks some of my images pretty high up for certain keywords. It’s a bit of a lottery, but I have at least ten images that generate consistent traffic from Google Images.

For example, I have one image that ranks for the search phrase “wheat” in Google Image search.

Here’s the traffic I’ve been getting for it since November.

(Click to enlarge)

433 visits in total – and an average of over 5 visitors per day for that one keyword for that one image.

A quick search in Google Images for “wheat” shows that I’m in the second row of results, as shown below.

If they click on that image, it will take them to a blog post on my site. Admittedly, it isn’t the highest quality of traffic with only a 1.23 page views per visit average, but would you say no to an extra five visits per day completely passively and for free?

Another image that has generated significant traffic from Google images is this one of cocoa butter. It has generated 270 visits since being published.

Back in October I was generating 20-30 visits per day from Google Images for the keyword “banana”. That image has stopped generating traffic now, but while it lasted the keyword “banana” sent me just over 200 visits.

I have tens of keywords that have sent over 100 visits purely from Google Images.

Add some relevant images to your site, optimize them for the search engines and hopefully Google will send you some more free traffic, too.

2. Fellow Bloggers Borrowing My Images

This isn’t such a significant traffic source DIRECTLY, but who knows how important this is for improving my search engine ranking.

Often I find that other bloggers “borrow” images from my site. They really aren’t supposed to, but MOST of them link to my blog as the original photo credit so I don’t mind.

I’ll often get a trickle of traffic from the link they place to my blog, and it counts as a valuable link back to my blog which gives a little search engine boost.

3. Pinterest

I expect more and more of you are becoming aware of Pinterest – a new social networking site where users can “Pin” their favourite images to their virtual “Boards”. The image gets posted to their boards and their followers can see those images, and if they click on them are taken to the original site.

Having high quality images on your site increases the chances that Pinterest users will “Pin” your page to their board which can result in a nice little traffic boost.

Plus, other users can “Repin” the image which will then be exposed to their followers, who can again “Repin” until your image spreads virally throughout the site – and all the time the image will still link back to the original source it was pinned from.

I’ve just started using Pinterest myself for my health and beauty blog for the last 10 days or so. Take a look at my traffic stats so far…

Click to enlarge

It was about January 16^th I set my account up, which is just before the two massive spikes at the end of the graph. I pinned a few of my things (as well as interacting in the community and pinning other stuff, too) and have had two 100+ traffic days from Pinterest alone.

Before I even set up my account, I was generating traffic in late September and early October simply because someone stumbled across my site and Pinned one or more of my images. That can’t happen unless you have high quality images.

I think Pinterest is going to be BIG, so I’m going to be back later this week (or early next week at the latest) with a “Pinterest how to” so you can start generating some traffic with Pinterest as well. Make sure you are subscribed at the top right to get updated when this Pinterest update is published.

 ———————————–

So I hope I’ve made my case for including high quality images on your site. It’s made a huge difference not only for traffic generation, but for user experience, too.

Got any questions? Anything else to add? Or any other simple traffic ideas? Just leave a comment below.

And as always, don’t forget to Tweet, Like, Plus 1- or even Pin this post

Talk soon,

James

How To Get Free Original Content & Free Traffic On Auto-Pilot

Today I want to share a really quick idea that I’ve used over the past couple of weeks to:

• Get free, unique, original, high quality content from some of the top experts in my market.
• Build relationships with these experts.
• Significantly increase my traffic WITHOUT any extra effort.

Essentially I’ve set up a high quality blog that works on 95% auto-pilot to publish unique, original content and generate traffic.

Here’s what I’ve done…

1. I’ve set up a “Write For Us” page on my health blog at http://www.RevitaliseYourHealth.com/write-for-us

2. I allow readers to register as “Contributors” to the blog.

3. Once registered they can log-in to my WordPress admin panel and post a new blog post for review.

4. I log-in, read through the blog post, check that it is unique and meets my high standards, check formatting, perhaps insert an Amazon affiliate link or two and a few links to related posts and then press “Publish”.

5. Now I have a brand new, unique, high quality piece of content that will get indexed and start generating Google traffic.

Plus, after publishing the guest post I send an email to my subscribers notifying them of the new post and get 300+ readers within 24 hours.

And on top of that, I email the contributor letting them know that their post is published and that I would appreciate them Tweeting, Facebook Liking and sharing on other social networks – and that it would benefit both of us if they were to link to the blog post from their own websites in the future. That gets me traffic and boosts my search engine ranking.

Essentially I’m getting other people to come up with content ideas, provide content for me and promote that content for me… completely free!

Here’s how you can do the same…

1. Go to your WordPress admin panel and click Settings > General. Under the Membership field, select “Anyone can register”. And under that in the “New user default role” select “Contributor”.

This means that anyone can register but they can only submit blog posts for review. They can’t post directly to the site and they can’t edit any other blog settings.

2. Now you need to create a “Write For Us” page like mine. On this page you need to state the rules and guidelines for guest posts and instructions for submitting one.

You will need to link to the Registration page where users can create their Contributors account. The registration page will be:

Yourdomain.com/wp-login.php

3. Now it’s simply a case of finding people to guest blog. I’ve used only two methods so far and have had over 20 submissions in just under 10 days. (I have rejected about half of these posts due to poor quality)

Method 1

Optimize your page with keywords like “write for us” and “guest post” followed by your niche – for example: “write for us health”.

This means wannabe guest bloggers can find you when they search in Google. This is probably my main guest blogger source so far.

Method 2

Register for free at http://www.myblogguest.com and post in the forum that you are looking for guest contributors.

This has also resulted in a number of contributions.

If the number of guest submissions dries up in the future then I may actively search out writers. For example, I’ll head to some related blogs in my market and invite those bloggers to contribute.

Another idea I have is to somehow get guest authors onto my email list when they register. That way if I’m ever short of content, I can blast an email to my guest contributors email list and see if they’d like to have another article published.

I’m kind of thinking out loud here but there are a number of different directions you could take this idea.

I know it’s not a new idea. It’s been used by a lot of people, but it’s a great way to build a big content site without spending an awful lot of time and money.

I hope this quick article has given you a few ideas and perhaps planted a “seed” of an idea that you can take and turn into money.

Any questions, just ask by leaving a comment below.

And by the way, if you want to see an example of a guest post I’m hosting then take a look at this:

How To Look Younger For Less

After emailing the author of that article, she has Tweeted, Facebook Liked, Stumbled, Dugg and added the post to Pinterest which has given me a nice little traffic boost.

Free content, free traffic and rock solid relationships. The perfect scenario.

Thanks for reading,

James

5 Ways To Make More Money From Your Subscribers

I’ve sold a number of list building training guides so I hope a lot of my subscribers now have email lists of their own.

If not, why not? Pick up a copy of 100 Subscribers Per Day and follow my list building plan to get your email list going.

Even if you have 100 subscribers, 10,000 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers, here are five ways to make more money while still maintaining your relationship with them.

1. Educate & THEN Sell

Some of my most successful product promotions have involved me educating my subscribers and then selling the solution; or by providing real life results from using the system or by following the guide and then sharing those results with my subscribers.

For example, I bought The Lincoln List a month or so ago. It revealed a strategy to get thousands of visitors to your squeeze page really, really fast. I read it, thought it could work and so sent a promotion to my subscribers. It sold pretty well but it wasn’t exactly flying off the shelf.

Two days later, after I’d experienced some results using the method, I wrote this blog post and mailed it to my subscribers. That post resulted in a huge number of sales and converted clicks into sales at something like 23%!

Test the products you recommend, share your results and your sales will go through the roof.

Similarly, about seven or eight months ago a new product came out called Nano Continuity. It reveals how to set up really simple $5-10 per month continuity sites and how to attract hundreds or thousands of members. I bought it, loved it and wrote this blog post revealing how I was going to use it to make $500 per day.

That blog post resulted in a huge number of sales and I was competing with some of the biggest marketers in the world in the JV league table (even though I was unaware of the competition when I initially promoted.)

2. Send More Emails

This is just common sense really.

I try to make sure that at least 50% of my emails contain pure educational content that can be used to help the reader make more money. The other 50% are promotional emails that generate me a profit (but I still only recommend stuff I know you’ll find value from).

Therefore if I send two emails to my subscribers per week, that will mean one content email and one promotional email per week.

But, if the next week I send four emails, that will include two promotional emails which will effectively double my sales.

There’s obviously a limit to how many emails you can send without pissing off your subscribers. Four emails per week is a good number, I’ve found.

3. Sell Solo Ads

This is a good way to make quick cash if you are in desperate need but I’d advise against regularly doing this because it could burn your relationship.

You can sell solo ads to fellow marketers in your niche for around $.3-.5 per click. Therefore if you can send 100 clicks you could charge $30-50.

You’d usually only want to send to a free offer because firstly you’ll be able to get more clicks (and therefore more money), and secondly it won’t harm your relationship with your subscribers so much.

4. Ad Swap

This is an indirect way of profiting from our subscribers. It involves us leveraging our current email list to get more subscribers.

An ad swap involves two marketers with email lists in a similar market sending a dedicated email promoting each other’s’ free offer.

It’s a great way to get new subscribers and you can generate instant revenue from these subscribers with one time offers after opting-in, from follow-up emails and broadcasts, and having more subscribers enables you to ad swap with bigger partners who can send more subscribers.

Again, I don’t recommend doing ad swaps too often. Once or twice a month is more than enough.

5. Encourage Your Subscribers To Spread The Word

This is another way to use your subscribers as leverage to get more subscribers.

I do this in two ways.

Firstly, when I send my subscribers to read my blog posts (like this one!) I encourage them to Tweet, Facebook Like and share on other social media platforms. I’ve got a core group of subscribers who do this for me on almost all of my blog posts and I’m incredibly grateful.

This social media sharing brings me more traffic and I can then turn them into subscribers.

Secondly, I try to turn my subscribers into affiliates for my products. This is one of the twenty affiliate finding and recruiting strategies I shared in my latest report Affiliate Sales Army.

Affiliates send traffic to my product salespages and I capture buying subscribers from those who download my product, and I capture prospects from the exit pop-up that I have when visitors leave my page.

Your subscribers are your biggest asset. Look after them, treat them well, don’t send them junk, don’t promote every offer under the sun, but utilise these five methods to increase your bottom line.

Thanks for reading and if you have any out of the box ideas to make more money from your subscribers while still maintaining a positive relationship with them, then leave a comment below. And don’t forget to Tweet, Like or Share this post if you found value from it

Talk soon,
James Penn

P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you’ll probably love these, too…

50 Ways To Get More Subscribers
5 Ways To Get Your Subscribers To Love You
Daily Action Plan To Build Your List Fast
Super Quick Strategy To Get More Subscribers Fast
500 Subscribers Per Day

Plus, be sure to check out our Offer Of The Month.

Five Principles For Building A Successful Online Business In 2012

I’m going to do everything I can to make sure your online business succeeds in 2012.

I’m going to be posting a lot of new content to this blog. I’m going to be releasing new products and new training. And I’ll be recommending some sensational products from other marketers, too.

Starting with this blog post, I’m going to reveal five principles that if you stick to, will make sure 2012 is your most successful year ever.

Principle #1
Focus On ONE Business Model

The number one problem most marketers face is that they jump from one business model to another. They may start building affiliate review sites, and then get bored and switch to product creation, and then after a few weeks with that, they switch to list building, or blogging, or offline marketing, or any of the other 100+ ways to make money online.

This year you need to pick ONE business model and invest all your time, energy and resources into building that business.

Principle #2
Invest In Your Education

I often hear horror stories of new marketers investing $10,000+ in their education before they even know what their business model is. They buy eBooks, software, coaching, PLR products and resale rights products.

I don’t suggest you do this, but I do feel it necessary to continually invest in your education. For example, a few weeks ago I purchased a report for $5 that revealed a list building method I’d never heard of that has since added hundreds of new subscribers to my email list.

Not every product you buy is going to produce the same results, so ask yourself these questions before you buy another training product.

1. Can I afford it?

If you don’t have the disposable cash to buy a product AND spare cash on top of that for emergencies – or simply to implement the training in the product, then don’t buy it.

2. Is it related to your chosen business model?

If you’ve decided on the affiliate review site business model and you’re getting the urge to buy a training product revealing a new list building strategy, don’t buy it.

It’s not relevant to your business and will only serve to distract you.

3. Will I really act on the training?

Sometimes I buy training because I simply want something to read. I buy it more for entertainment purposes than for education. Before you buy a product, make sure you really are going to act on the advice.

4. Is the seller reputable?

There are some marketers who’s products I will always buy WITHOUT even reading the salespage because I know, like or trust them and I’ve had positive experiences with them before.

Sometimes I buy products from people I’ve never heard of before, but I usually do a bit of research first. Google their name, find out about them and then make a more informed decision.

5. Can I get a refund?

If the product offers a guarantee then take a chance on it. If it doesn’t meet your expectations, then politely request a refund.

Principle #3
Get A Coach Or Get Support

I’ve never had a coach, but if I was starting all over I would probably invest in someone.

It’s sometimes hard to see what direction to take, what step to take next, or simply to get the motivation needed to take action.

A coach, mentor or mastermind group where progress is shared and where there are others to guide you and JUDGE you if you aren’t working hard enough will be worth your investment.

Principle #4
Set Goals & Give Deadlines

Set specific actionable goals and give realistic deadlines to make sure you remain motivated and continue to progress in your business.

If you decide that blogging is the direction you want to take, then goals like these would be ideal.

“I want to reach 500 total visitors by February 1st” (Avg. 16 per day)

“I want to reach 2,500 total visitors by March 1^st” (Avg. 42 per day)

“I want to reach 10,000 total visitors by April 1^st” (Avg. 110 per day)

…

…

“I want to reach 250,000 total visitors by the end of 2012” (Avg. 683 per day)

And then once you’ve set your goals you need to formulate a plan to achieve them.

Principle #5
Do “Something” Every Day

Some days you’ll wake up and you just really can’t be bothered to do any work. I get days like this occasionally – but I ALWAYS make sure I do at least ONE thing per day (excluding weekends and holidays [vacations]).

It doesn’t have to be a huge thing but if I can write just one article and post it to my blog, or write one guest post for another blog, or post a few comments on relevant forums – then every single day my business is growing and I keep the forward momentum.

2012 can be your year if you want it to be – and I’m going to be right here beside you helping you along the way.

If you have any questions, need any help, or just want to share what you are up to this year, leave a comment below or send me an email using the Contact link at the top of this page.

And if you think this blog post will help anyone you know, please share it with them using the social buttons below. I would really appreciate it

Thanks for reading and I’ll be back with more great stuff really soon.

James Penn

My Plan To A Passive $250 Per Day In 2012

If you haven’t “made it” online yet, then 2012 is going to be the year you achieve your dreams.

And in this blog post I’m going to reveal an action plan you can follow to create a $250+ per day passive income.

Start on January 2^nd (January 1^st can be hangover day!) and work your way through this plan throughout the year.

Here it is…

The Set-Up

1. Pick a topic that you can blog about.

For example, gadgets, photography, men’s health, women’s health, beauty, fitness, gardening, money, home improvement, dogs, cats, food and drink, real estate, travel, stocks, self-improvement, gaming, business etc.

You could even pick a target market rather than a topic – for example a blog for men, or a blog for women, or a blog for teenagers, or for OAPs.

Pick a topic that you enjoy, or know a lot about.

2. Set up a WordPress blog on a memorable domain name and configure it to be optimized for the search engines.

Have a theme designed or download an existing WordPress theme – either free or paid. A Google Search will provide you lots of different WordPress themes.

Customize the design and install social sharing buttons. I use ShareThis.

Get an autoresponder account, such as Aweber, and place an opt-in form in a prominent position on your blog. Perhaps have a pop over form, too. (A pop over converts really well). I’ve also found that giving away a free report increases conversions monumentally but you can do this later on.

Add some form of monetization to your blog – such as Google Adsense or some Amazon affiliate links.

Now you have a nicely designed, well optimized, blog ready to generate traffic and revenue.

Daily Tasks

1. Using the Google Keyword Tool, find a search term that gets 500+ searches per month based on the topic or target market of your blog. Write a high quality blog post that targets this keyphrase. Include monetization within the post by perhaps linking to a relevant Amazon product.

Everything we do for the rest of the day is designed to drive traffic back to our blog or blog post and increase its search engine ranking.

2. Send your email subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook fans to read your article. Obviously for the first few posts you won’t have any of these but as your blog grows so will your following.

3. Write AT LEAST one article per day that you can use to publish on someone else’s blog. This is known as guest blogging and is one of the most effective link building and traffic strategies available. Within the article, link back to the blog post you published earlier in the day. This will ensure every post you publish gets link love.

Read this article on how I find guest blogging opportunities and approach fellow bloggers to publish my content.

4. Turn your published blog post into a video and publish it to YouTube. Link back to your blog in the description and encourage viewers to visit your blog.

5. Once your blog post has been indexed on your own blog, submit it to article directories such as EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com and link back to your blog.

6. Leave a few comments on some of the most popular blogs in your market and include a link back to your blog or a specific blog post.

7. Participate in forums related to your blog leaving a link back to your blog in the signature.

The above seven strategies are nothing new. You’ve definitely heard of them all before – but if you apply yourself every day and complete each task, your blog will grow and grow and grow at a faster and faster rate.

For example, if you have one guest post published per day that sends just 5 clicks each per day to your blog, then after 100 days you’ll be getting 500 visitors per day from just your guest blogging opportunities. Plus, each backlink will move you up a few places in the search engines.

You’ll also have 100 YouTube videos sending you traffic, you’ll have 100 articles published on article directories sending you traffic and backlinks, you’ll have hundreds of blog comments sending you a trickle of traffic and you’ll have hundreds of forum posts sending you traffic.

You’ll also be building a bigger email subscriber database, bigger Twitter following and a bigger Facebook following meaning every email, Tweet or post you publish will result in more traffic to your blog.

Plus, as your traffic increases, so will the number of people who share your content on social networks like Twitter and Facebook which will have a positive impact on your search engine ranking. Plus, the more traffic you get, the more chance of a rival blogger reading your content and deciding to link to you from their blog increasing your ranking and traffic.

This is a simple business model that, if you follow, will generate you passive traffic and earn you passive advertising revenue and affiliate commissions.

And the best thing of all – it’s really, really easy to get somebody else to do this all for you so you can simply sit back and watch your traffic and your income grow.

Sidenote: Download this 155 page guide called Outsourcing Blitzkrieg that reveals how you can outsource pretty much any task really, really cheaply.

Bonus Tips

1. Each month, create one premium piece of content that is designed to get talked about, get linked to and get shared on social networking sites. These pieces of content can take longer to create, but a well created, well executed piece is capable of getting 10,000+ visitors within 24 hours and providing an incredible long term positive impact.

This guide called Trophy Pigeon reveals how Chris Munch created a piece of content that generated over 100,000 unique visitors and an insane number of powerful backlinks.

2. Add more monetization to your blog. Optimize your Adsense placement, create posts like “Top 10 Gifts For…” and link to affiliate products, create an “Offer of the Month” page and link to a special offer, create your own products and sell them to your subscribers and blog readers, promote affiliate products with your email list and much, much more.

3. Publish a press release to promote some of your more unusual or interesting blog posts. This is often free and can get you lots of backlinks and traffic.

4. Keep learning blog promotion strategies and implement new methods to promote your blog and your blog posts.

5. Encourage experts in your market to submit guest posts on your blog. This will enable you to get completely free content, take no time on your part and you’ll often find your guest authors will promote your content to their audience giving you more traffic and greater exposure.

Eventually, you may be able to reach a point whereby:

• You have so many people wanting to guest post on your blog that you have a constant stream of new content that you don’t have to create or pay for.
• Google loves you so much that every new post you publish is indexed instantly and put on the first page of Google for the target keywords.
• And you have such a big email list, Twitter and Facebook following that you just need to notify them of a new blog post to get a huge instant surge of readers.

ProBlogger.net has reached that point.

90% of blog posts published there are from guest authors. It has over 160,000 email subscribers, 33,000 Facebook fans and 150,000 Twitter followers. Every time a new post is published, each of these subscribers, fans and followers is notified – that’s nearly 350,000 people. Plus, Google loves it and ranks ProBlogger content at the top of the search engines.

It requires minimal upkeep and pulls in an incredible amount of traffic and revenue.

And there’s nothing to stop you doing the same in 2012.

This may be my last contact before Christmas. I’m going back up to London on the 22^nd until approximately the 30^th to see my parents, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins for the first time in over 2 months and I can’t wait.

I don’t intend on doing any work so, if you celebrate Christmas, I’d love to wish you a very happy one, a fantastic New Year – and I can’t wait to help your business grow in 2012.

Thanks,
James Penn

P.S. If you enjoyed this post and you’d like to give me an early Christmas present, then a Tweet or a Facebook share would be more than enough

My List Building Experiment

Today I have some really exciting results from an experiment I ran. My initial results aren’t extraordinary, but it was a half assed effort just to test out a unique list building strategy I discovered. I also did a lot wrong so my next campaign is sure to be more successful.

I say I discovered it, but it was actually something I learned from Eric James and Bruce Boretsky with their new special report The Lincoln List.

I recommended this product a few days ago and said I’d share my results using the method once I had some data.

I now have that data and in this blog post I will reveal the exact details of my list building experiment, what I did wrong, what modifications I’m going to make, and how you can use The Lincoln List method yourself to get crazy traffic, rapid influxes of new subscribers and mega affiliate commissions.

Unfortunately it would be a bit unfair of me to share exactly what the traffic source is since I’d effectively be stealing it from Eric and Bruce but I’ll share details of the traffic I received and the number of subscribers I generated and then you can make an informed decision as to whether or not to invest in getting yourself a copy of The Lincoln List.

Here we go…

On Tuesday December 13^th, approximately one hour after reading through the Lincoln List, I set up my first campaign.

I paid just over $18 and in exchange I would receive 8,000 clicks. I decided to send traffic to a really short squeeze page that gave away a free report called Automatic List Building Machines – a report about list building, surprisingly.

You can buy traffic in 1,000 visitor batches and you can select the location of each set of visitors. For example, it’s $4 per 1,000 US and UK visitors, $3 per 1,000 Australia, NZ, Ireland visitors, and $2 or less for visitors from other locations such as India. You can also buy “Proxy Traffic” – I don’t know what it means but it is only $0.40 per 1,000 visitors so I bought 2k worth of traffic from there.

From inside the dashboard of this traffic source it’s showing that it has sent 8,140 visitors. Google Analytics is showing me 6,710 visitors to that page and my Aweber web form is showing 9,142 unique displays so we’ll just assume approximately 8,000 visitors saw my squeeze page.

Of those 8,000 visitors I had 111 form submissions which is around a 1.3% conversion. However, only 43 of those email submissions went on to confirm their email address so I ended up with 43 confirmed subscribers.

So, for my $18 investment I received 43 double opt-in subscribers. Not sensational, but certainly not to be sniffed at.

Plus, I didn’t notice much difference in traffic quality between the US/UK $4 per thousand traffic and the $0.40 proxy traffic. This means I could now go and spend $40 and get 100,000 visitors using just proxy traffic.

And believe me I’ll be testing this shortly. In fact, I can’t wait!

Here are a few things I think I did wrong, and a few adjustments I’m going to be making in my next campaign which I will be setting up ASAP. (I’d of done it already but I’ve been travelling the country visiting family and preparing for Daisy’s birthday in a few days and this is the first chance of been able to get on my laptop).

1. Here’s how the traffic arrives at your page. They click a link which is supposed to take them to a destination, but before they reach the destination, they arrive at your page. They have to click “Skip this ad” to continue their journey. I was simply showing people my standard squeeze page, but a more eye catching page that grabbed their attention would have converted MUCH better.

2. The traffic you get is real human beings from all walks of life and with different passions and interests. The chances are, only a tiny fraction of them knew that list building on the internet even existed, and even fewer would know why it was so important. That’s why my opt-in rate was so low – no one was interested. A more generalised offer that would appeal to more people (think weight loss, money making, health etc) would have yielded a better response. I’m getting ready to set up my weight loss campaign tomorrow.

3. If I wasn’t using double opt-in I would have 111 subscribers instead of 43. Aweber don’t allow me to use double opt-in, although I believe I can request it and they can either accept or deny. If they deny perhaps I’ll set up a second account with another autoresponder company and try using single opt-in.

This is a really exciting method that can deliver huge volumes of traffic really, really quickly. Take a look at my Google Real Time Analytics after my campaign went live.

My first campaign got me 8,000 visitors and 43 new subscribers for a cost of $18.

My next campaign is going to do much better using the knowledge I’ve gleaned and the mistakes I’ve made and I can’t wait for it to go live.

If you think this is a method you’d like to try then pick up a copy of The Lincoln List for yourself.

Sorry I couldn’t be more specific about the method but I think it would be out of order for me to buy a product and then instantly go and share the method with my subscribers.

I hope you understand and thanks for reading.

James Penn

How To Promote Big Ticket Affiliate Products & Make $500+ Per Sale

In 2012 I’ve decided to add a new method of income to my online arsenal. It’s something I’ve just started doing in fact.

While I love building email lists and I love selling my own products – I want some form of income that is COMPLETELY PASSIVE.

So what I’ll be doing is setting up really simple websites or blogs promoting HIGH TICKET physical affiliate programs.

I’m talking the kind of offers that pay $500+ commissions with just ONE sale.

There are a number of advantages to promoting high commission products.

1. You DON’T need to generate huge amounts of traffic.

If you’re promoting a product paying $20 commission and it converts at 5%, then 100 visitors per day will make you $100.

If you’re promoting a product paying $500 commission and it converts at just 2%, then 100 visitors per day will make you $1,000 per day. That’s 10x more.

Plus, from my research (learning from others promoting high ticket products) I’ve found that conversion rates don’t differ greatly between high ticket and low ticket products.

2. There ISN’T a lot of competition.

While everyone else is promoting the supposedly “easier sell” lower priced products, you can swoop in with the luxury offers targeting a specific market and pick up $500 per sale or more.

————–

Just a few days ago I set up my first site promoting a high ticket product – actually over time it will grow to promote a number of related products starting at $300.

The first product I’m promoting costs $14,256. I’ll earn about $1,000 when I make a sale.

Just one sale per week and I would be earning a full time passive income.

Plus, imagine seeing that email notifying that you’ve earned $1,000 – or logging into your account and seeing it right there in front of you.

————–

Now I want to share a few ways you can find these high ticket products you can promote so you can start earning four figure commissions.

1. Few people realise that Amazon sell many products that are over $5,000. Choose a category you may be interested in promoting and sort by Price: High to Low.

There are products over $100,000 (but I wouldn’t suggest promoting them!) and many over $5,000.

Here’s one product that looks like it would be fantastic to promote.

The P3ProSwing Pro Indoor Golf Simulator

It costs $4,599 so at a 7% commission you would make $322 per sale. Plus, I just did some searches with Google’s Keyword Tool and you could target the below keywords and convert that traffic into sales.

Indoor golf simulator – 1,600 searches p/m
home golf simulator – 1,300 searches p/m
golf simulator reviews – 1,000 searches p/m
pr3proswing golf simulator – 210 searches p/m

A quick note on Amazon commissions. The higher quantity you sell, the higher your commissions. For example, sell one product a month and you’ll earn 4% but if you sell just seven items you’ll earn 6% and your commissions will continue to increase up to 8.5% if you sell over 3,131 items. For that reason I suggest you also promote some low priced offers to increase the quantity you sell and increase the commissions you earn on the big ticket sales.

2. Search for “luxury” items and services on Google. For example search “luxury vacations”, visit the top sites and look for affiliate sign up info. Or search “luxury watches”, visit the top websites and join their affiliate programs.

3. Last night I purchased access to 61 high ticket affiliate offers paying $100 to $10,000 per sale. The affiliate programs are in all kinds of different niches like dating, fitness, golf, forex, health, green, hot tubs, internet marketing, jewelery, real estate, self help, travel and many more.

There are some fantastic offers in there and so if you want to promote high ticket affiliate programs then pick up this database for yourself.

Click Here To Download It For Yourself

———————

That’s one thing I’ll be doing in 2012 to ramp up my income. I will of course still be updating this blog (even more so next year hopefully), I’ll be building my email lists and I’ll be selling my own products.

One more thing before I sign off…

The key to profiting by promoting high ticket products is to set up a simple review website and then to get it ranked at the top of Google. To get it ranked in the top spots you need to build backlinks – but there is a lot of conflicting information on what types of backlinks you should build, where you should get them from, how many you should get, how quickly you should build them, what anchor text you should use and much more.

That’s why I’m so glad Peter Garety has released his brand new special report called Strategic Link Building. It’s a step by step link building system based on FACT rather than myth. Follow his plan and you will start climbing up the search engines in no time.

I’ve got my copy and I’m going to be going through the link building strategies over the next few days and weeks.

Click Here To Download Strategic Link Building

What do YOU have planned for 2012 to make it the year you REALLY succeed?

Thanks for reading,
James Penn

Super Easy Way To Create Your Own Bestselling Product

As you may well know, I released my brand new guide late last week. It’s called Affiliate Sales Army and nearly 250 customers have snapped up their copy already and the feedback has been fantastic. You can read the comments so far here.

Affiliate Sales Army reveals how to approach potential affiliates to make sure they promote your product – even if you have no existing relationship with them. Plus, I share twenty places to find potential affiliates capable of sending you tens – or even hundreds – of sales.

There’s just one problem…

I know a lot of my subscribers don’t yet have their own product to sell. That’s why I’ve prepared this article revealing one of the easiest ways to create your own bestselling product – even if you have no knowledge or experience in that market.

Super Easy Product Creation Idea
Ask The Experts

This is a fantastic way to create a product easily, quickly and to build rock solid relationships with the big names in your market. Plus, once the product is created you’ll have a ready-made affiliate sales force.

With this method you find one of the most common and most desperate questions in your market. You ask that question to some of the biggest names in your industry, and you compile their answers into a special report.

For example, Jason Fladlien used this strategy in the internet marketing industry recently. He, along with his partners Wilson and Dean, posed a question asked by desperate internet marketers daily to 26 of the internet’s biggest superstars.

“You need to make $500 in 24 hours from scratch – what would you do?”

The result?

A fantastic product that customers are desperate to buy. Plus, you can be sure that each of the 26 contributors will promote the product to their subscribers resulting in a huge number of sales right off the bat.

Click Here To Take A Look At $500 In 24 Hours For Yourself

This product creation method works in ANY market. Here are a few examples:

Weight Loss: You need to lose 10lbs in 10 days – what would you do?

Anti Aging: You need to look 5 years younger in two weeks – how do you do it?

Relationships: You have three days to get your ex back – how do you do it?

Making a success of this product creation method requires just two things:

1. Identify a desperate question

There are two really easy ways to do this.

Firstly, visit the most populated forums in your market. Look at the thread topics and see which questions are being asked most commonly and which are yielding the most discussion. (Anyone who’s ever been on The Warrior Forum will have seen the “Help! How can I make $xxx in xx days” threads. That’s why Jason’s $500 in 24 Hours product will sell so well.)

Secondly, and this is probably the best way, visit Yahoo Answers, navigate to the most relevant category to your market and look at the most common questions. For example, I went to the “Hair” category to see what I could come up with. It seems the most common question is: “How can I grow my hair longer/faster?”

2. Find the experts

Locate the authority bloggers, the email list owners and the physical book authors and get in touch with them. Explain that you simply need them to answer the question in 500 words or less, that it will take them no more than 15 minutes, and that they can put a plug for their website or products at the end. Then explain that you will be selling the report and you expect to sell x number of copies.

And then you just have to take the answers, compile them into a PDF and start selling your product. You could even be a bit cheeky and ask some of your contributors to offer a bonus to bolt on extra value.

If you really do identify a desperate question and you secure authority figures in your market to answer that question, then your product will sell itself.

Make sure you set up an affiliate program so that your contributors can promote the product to their subscribers and readers – and use the strategies inside Affiliate Sales Army to find more affiliates and convince them to send you sales, too.

If you don’t have a product yet or if you don’t think you are capable of creating a product that people want, then use this method and you’ll have a bestseller on your hands in no time.

Good luck.

Thanks,
James Penn

“Hijack” Other People’s Content & Get Them To Send You Free Traffic

If you are a subscriber of mine and you opened the email I sent yesterday, then you’ll know that either late this week, or early next week, I will be releasing a brand new product. My first new release in over 8 months!

In today’s blog post I have more information as to what this product will be about and a short excerpt from the guide so you can take action on just one of the methods I share before I release this product.

My new product deals with two massive problems that a lot of us face:

1. Where to find affiliates

2. How to get them to promote your products

Over the years I’ve devised a system that I use to find thousands (and I really do mean thousands!) of potential affiliates. I’ve also become rather talented at sending just one (and sometimes two) copy and paste emails that convinces them to promote my products, even if I have ZERO prior relationship with them.

I’ll be revealing every single strategy I use to find affiliates and every single strategy I use to convince them to promote my products. I’ll even include copy and paste email templates that you can use to recruit your own affiliates.

I’m only about half way through the guide so far. I’ve planned it all out and will spend the whole of this week making it the best it can possibly be – and I promise it will be really good.

UPDATE DECEMBER 2011: Affiliate Sales Army has now launched and everyone LOVES it. Click here to check it out. 

In this blog post, I’m going to share just ONE of the affiliate finding strategies you can use to get hundreds of affiliates to send you passive traffic.

———————-

How To “Hijack” Other People’s Content & Get Them To Send You Free Traffic

While it’s great to have an email list owner blast an email out and send you 500 clicks in 24 hours – I prefer to have passive traffic. It’s great to have affiliates who send a reliable stream of highly qualified, targeted traffic to my offers and this is one of the best ways to achieve this.

Here’s what I do…

I find people who are ranking in Google for the most targeted search terms related to my product.

For example, my product 100 Subscribers Per Day reveals ten methods I use to build my email list. So people typing the keyphrases below would likely be interested in buying my product.

How to build an email list
Build a list
Email list building
How to get more email subscribers

I’d now go to Google, type in those search terms and go through the top ten results for each.

If I found an article on someone’s blog or website then I’ve struck gold. For example, after searching “How To Build An Email List”, here is one of the top results:

http://www.listbuildingblogger.com/how-to-build-an-email-list/

It’s an informative article on the topic of list building. I’d now email this blogger (who I actually know because he’s a big commenter on my blog) and say something like:

“Hey Jorge,

I just came across this article on your blog: http://www.listbuildingblogger.com/how-to-build-an-email-list/ after doing a Google search for “how to build an email list”.

I was wondering whether you’d be interested in just making a quick edit to the end of the article and putting a link to my product 100 Subscribers Per Day?

Of course, use your affiliate link and you will make instant $9.95 commissions on every sale you generate.

It will be a nice little passive income stream for you. If you are interested, here’s some text you can use but of course feel free to use your own.

“In this article I’ve revealed exactly why it is so important that you build your email list. A well-treated list of subscribers is an absolute goldmine and is the closest you can get to printing money on demand. If you want to discover ten incredible strategies to start generating over 100 subscribers per day to your email list, then pick up a copy of James Penn’s list building guide”

It would be great if you’d stick a link at the end, but don’t feel like you have to.

Here’s where you can get your affiliate link

http://www.acceleratednicheprofits.com/100perday/affiliates.php

Thanks for just reading this email and if there’s anything I can do for you just give me a shout.

Thanks,
James”

Let’s just assume for arguments sake that that blog post gets read 20 times per day and 25% of readers would click through to my product – that’s an extra 5 visitors per day.

That might not sound like much but it’s about the most targeted traffic you can get. Plus, over the course of a year that’s 1,800 visitors. At a 10% conversion (and I’d expect no less from this type of traffic for a $10 product) that’s 180 extra sales per year.

Now imagine convincing just 10 bloggers to add a plug for your product within their content.

This is one of the most effective ways to get more people promoting your products since you only have to encourage them to commit to doing this one small thing. And then once they’ve done that and they’ve seen that your product converts, you can get them to:

• Put banners on every page of their blog
• Write a review of your product
• Blast an email to their subscribers
• Put an email in their auto-responder sequence

Give this strategy a go and see just how effective it is.

———————————

So that’s a sample from my new release. What did you think?

If you’re subscribed to my email list you’ll be the first to know when this is available so if you aren’t, then enter your email address into the form on the right.

I better get back to working on this.

UPDATE DECEMBER 2011: Affiliate Sales Army is now live and you can download it here. 

Talk soon,
James Penn

P.S. If you’ve missed my last couple of emails then you should definitely check out this hidden traffic loophole from Alex Jeffreys. It reveals how you can generate crazy levels of passive traffic with just a few minutes work. And you can replicate this as many times as you want. It’s currently less than $7 but it’s going up all the time.

Click Here To Download This Hidden Traffic Loophole