Do you want to learn how to build a brand, learn how to do affiliate marketing, learn how to make money online? If so, Click Into Action! This is where you will find that information in easy step-by-step instructions.

So you have seen the CPM initials around, and can’t put the words to the letters.  Well, CPM stands for Cost per Thousand Impressions (yes I know neither Thousand nor Impressions start with M).  It is a way to pay for advertising.  Basically the number of impressions a specific ad gets is then used to calculate how much the advertiser will pay. 

Since usable Ad space on a page is finite, the larger the traffic number and views on a site, the more that owner can charge for his/her advertising space.  What are some averages?  Well, from reading Seth Godin’s blog a couple days ago, he mentions that “Ads online typically cost between $5 – $20 for 1,000 impressions“. 

So, one way to make money online is to create a great blog that gets lots of traffic.  Creating a lot of great posts and interacting with your readers and marketing well could get you to the point of being able to sell some advertising.  Many sites do this.  Take a look at the WSJ, NYT, etc.  and you will see advertisements.  The large audiences they draw are probably allowing them to charge more than the $20, but they are also unique.  Read More

So, you find yourself needing an email management system.  One that you can use to send out emails to your list, as well as keep track of email names that are no longer in use, as well as keeping track of the number of recipients that open, click, etc.  Other options that would be great would be to save some templates so you just need to input new text in the body and hit send to list.  Well, I have great news for you.  You can get all of these features in Constant Contact!

I have used Constant Contact to send out a few newsletters and the setup could not be easier.  The user interface was actually intuitive, the whole process of sending an email to the list and then watching how it was received was perfect.  The first newsletter I sent out had about 1,000 names on it from contacts over the years.  Turns out about 350 or so of them no longer worked at the company I had on file (managers moving to other companies, etc.).  It was a perfect email list updating tool because I could see exactly which names no longer existed. 

I know what you are thinking – 1,000 names, holey donuts!  I am not going to type in 1,000 names (or however big your email list / contact list is).  Don’t worry.  I didn’t either.  Constant Contact has a downloadable program that worked with my Microsoft Outlook and uploaded all those contacts for me.  All I did was sort my database by the contacts that wanted a newsletter, then uploaded that group.  It was a couple clicks and presto, I had a 1,000 name group.

Another plus was that along with the body of my email there was a link for any recipient to click that would unsubscribe them.  About 8 people actually un-subscribed and Constant Contact’s software took care of it all.  I could see the names of the people how opted out and it also already moved them off my list.  If course, with most great companies they allow you to give their services a try and see how you like it.  Here is a link for a Free 60 day trial of Constant Contact. Constant Contact helps you to connect with your customers and build your business. Try our no risk FREE 60-Day Trial.

The features keep coming though.  I can easily incorporate a Opt-In message on my website (they provide the code, so it a copy/paste job) and then all the traffic that comes to my site in the first place has the option to opt-in to my newsletter.  Anyone who opts-in will automatically get placed your lists and then you can assign them to a group. 

Oh, you didn’t know about groups?  Yeah, I can break out my contact list into groups and send any of my emails out to the groups I choose.  For the first couple trys I usually just send the email to an internal group to make sure everything looks right and works.  Then once all is kosher I can send the same email to the large newsletter recipient groups.

The options in Constant Contact are quite expanse.  In addition to all of the above, I could also send a email out saying “Here is the contact information I have for you, if it is incorrect please reply and I will correct it.”  Then the email would send dynamic name, address, etc. data as well.  I have tested this a couple of times internally, and it worked well.  I looked at the Constant Contact code based (they provide) and built a Contact Update template.  Then when I send this email out the Constant Contact program will pull all of the data specific to the recipient that I chose to input.  Each of my contacts will then recieve their own personalized message with their own information in it.  If I send this email out each year or every two years maybe I won’t run into the 350 old names problem again.

But how much does it cost?  Well, everyone is different.  They have a pricing structure related to the number of contacts you have, not the number of emails you send out.  The monthly rates increase as you build your contact list.  So in essence I could divide my contact list into 5 different email groups and send out a different newsletter to each group.  That would still be the same 1,000 emails sending out, but 5 different Send events.  Constant Contact is still only going to charge me for the 1,000 names I have in my list.  So several of those groups could receive weekly newsletters and then the other groups monthly newsletters and I would still be paying the same.  Constant Contact has made the pricing structure easy.

Don’t believe me?  Go ahead and give it a try, after all they are offering a Free 60 day Trial, what do you have to lose?

Chuck
Click Into Action

Teaching you how to make money online, giving you online opportunities, and helping people make money for free!

If you have created a lot of content over a period of time and don’t want that content lost forever in your archives, then an ebook is for you.  That isn’t the only application, but it will certainly be the easiest to create since you already wrote some great stuff.  You are sure to have readers that missed some of the articles, or are new to your site and the articles could help tremendously.

Here are some easy steps to follow to make a ebook: Read More

Branding

What did we learn from our Project Brand Building?  Over the last 2 months or so, we have been building our brand using a specific topic.  If you used all of the post ideas I gave you and added more, you should have been able to post almost everyday.  This would have helped you establish some authority on the subject and Google would have liked it very much.

Run some searches on items you think you should be ranking on the Google results for.  I ran some searches for Bernie Madoff since that was the subject of our branding experiment and I did rank for some results.  This also was with limited articles since I was only giving you ideas and not fully developing them for my own site.  You should fare much better in the rankings.  Share with us if you started a subject, what kind of rankings you got, etc. Read More

Sentencing has ended and Butner Federal Correctional Institution is where Bernie Madoff is going to end up.  How do I know this?  He arrived in mid-July.

So what is the take-away from this post?  If you are writing about current events, you should be able to take the information from a lot of sources and draw some conclusions from them.  You will then be prepared to write about subject and give your readers some value-added information / perspective.  Many times articles are written with a specific view point in mind, so be taking several viewpoints you can give readers a full picture.

Chuck
Click Into Action

If I am wrong on the prison, I will adjust this post.

UPDATE: Judge sentences him to 150 years!!

It is headlines like this that draw in users.  Will he be sentenced to life – yes.  How do I know?  The man is 71 so all it is going to take is about a 30 year sentence to really do the job.  He will easily get 30 years.  That would be 1 for each of the years he was swindling people.  There is no way a judge would be able to justify something less – like the 12 years Bernie’s lawyer suggested last week.  Even the lawyer said based on the average age of death for men puts a 12 year sentence as a practical life sentence.

Building a good headline that actually explains the content of the article is one of the more crucial portions of bringing in users.  If your headline doesn’t have anything to do with the content, you are going to have a lot of disappointed users on your hands.  They may never come back to your site again. 

(Note – I will acutally update this post with the real sentence once it is announced). 

So, remember when you are building your brand or writing an awesome article, try and keep your title appealing as well as informative.  People should get a general idea about what they are going to read from the title.

Chuck
Click Into Action

Teaching you about Affiliate Marketing, online opportunities, and brand building

Follow me on Twitter – @JohnnyOptimist

Even major brands like the NY Times, CNN, and MSNBC have been busy building their sites for the search engines.  They all have been busy publishing a lot of articles on Bernie Madoff and trying to garner the users eyeballs.  Even though not much has really happened since he was put in the Metro facility and has been awaiting sentencing, the News agencies have been covering or writing about anything they can that has to do with Bernie.  Several of them even have little Bernie sections to give you all their information in one little spot.

Why?

Because come Monday June 29, 2009, Bernie Madoff will be sentenced (likely to life).  People will be all a tizzy trying to get the latest news and find out where he is going to be holed up.  The CNNMoney website published an article with some tips for Bernie’s prison stay, as well as a little bit of speculation as to where he will end up. 

Why?

Because when people start searching for Bernie Madoff, these news agencies want to be at the top of the list.  Therefore, the more they report on it, the more keywords and search engine bait they can produce, the more authority they get, and the higher their ranking.  Then people will click on their article and maybe buy something or click on one of the ads on their site.  That is really the whole point for the news agencies.  They want the eyeballs so they can earn some money.  They all want to have the “Latest News” on the subject so it appears they have the most recent information, or that they have something you haven’t seen before which would give you a reason to click to their site.  If you look closely however, A LOT of their “information” is repeated from earlier articles.  Take the link I put above.  There is talk about where Bernie will be placed.  If you look at an article from CNNMoney from March 12, you will see a lot of the same info.

Now that you see how to build a brand, and have been deploying your strategies for the last 2 months, what have you learned?  If you are anything like the rest of us, you learned that it took a lot of freakin time.   Have you been building your brand with this or another strategy?  If so, sound off, let us know what your brand is and how it has developed.

Chuck
Click Into Action

Helping you build your brand, learn about online opportunities, learn how to make money online, and many other tidbits of information

Follow me on Twitter – @JohnnyOptimist

By now, you have been researching the heck out of Bernie Madoff and incorporating all you have learned into your site and building your brand.  I assume you have found the Investor List already, but if not, HERE IS THE INVESTOR LIST.

I haven’t looked at it in detail myself, but one thing you could do this weekend is do some composite numbers such as Florida residents total investment, NY residents total investment, etc.  There is plenty of ways you can compile and manipulate the data to show some trends.

Chuck
Click Into Action
Teaching you how to build a brand, teaching online opportunities, and much more.