Author Archive | John Aleer

Did you know there are four types of residual commissions? Let’s explore them…

Automatic recurring commissions are likely the ones you’re most familiar with. You promote a membership program and get paid monthly for as long as that customer retains the membership you sold.

Cookie commissions – when you sell a product, a cookie is placed on that customer’s computer. Then anything else the customer purchases from the seller is linked to you, and you get a commission. But if the cookie is deleted or the customer changes computers, you will no longer receive commissions on their purchases.

Lifetime commissions work like a cookie commission; only the product seller uses the customer’s email address instead of a cookie to track sales. Thus, as long as the email address remains the same, you can receive commissions on all sales from this customer for years.

Second tier commissions – this is when you refer other affiliates to the merchant. Sort of like a multi-level program, you get a small commission for the sales your referral affiliate makes.

Now then: If you make a traditional affiliate sale, you get paid, and that’s it.

If you make a monthly membership type of sale, you get paid until the customer cancels, which means you usually get paid for several months. Not bad.

But if you promote products with either cookie or lifetime commissions, you can get paid for years on anything else they buy from that vendor besides the original sale.

Imagine a product seller with a fleet of 30 or 40 products. You promote just one of their products, and 20 customers buy it. Over the next few months and years, this product seller promotes other products to these 20 customers, resulting in a further 80 sales over time. Usually, you wouldn’t make a dime on these sales, but you make the full commission on everyone in this case.

So next month, you get unexpected commissions, and the month after that, five years from now.

Nice.

And it’s all because you promoted products with lifetime referrals or cookies.

So where can you find these products?

One method is to keep your eyes peeled. Not all selling platforms allow lifetime referrals, so by looking at those that do, you can find the product sellers who will pay you for every product they sell to your customers, not just the ones you promote.

Next, use a search directory, such as www.affiliatescout.com. When doing your search, choose “lifetime commissions” under “features” without any other search parameters, and you’ll find hundreds of results. Go back and narrow your parameters to find the programs your audience might be interested in.

Whenever someone asks you to be their affiliate, ASK if they pay lifetime commissions. Sometimes they’ll have two programs, one in which they only pay commissions on the first product sold and a second secret program they reserve for their heavy hitter affiliates in which they do pay lifetime commissions. It never hurts to ask.

Bottom line: If you can make recurring or even lifetime commissions from your promotional efforts, why not? You do the work once, and you get paid repeatedly. You can’t beat that.

Once an online marketer gets to a certain income level, that marketer almost invariably gets stuck. They can’t seem to make any more money, even when they pour more and more of their time into their business. Why? Because they are working IN their industry rather than ON their business.

That’s why it’s essential to begin outsourcing as soon as possible, much sooner than you probably think. If you believe you need to bring in a hefty six-figure sum before you can get some help, think again.

The sooner you begin outsourcing some of your business, the more mundane and time-consuming facets, and the sooner you can start powerfully growing your business.

You’ve only got a fixed number of hours in the week. Do you spend them doing the following:

A: The tasks you don’t like to do
B: The tasks you don’t mind doing, but they could quickly be done by someone else
C: The tasks that you’re brilliant at doing and that you enjoy performing
D: Planning and strategizing to take your business to the next level

You want to delegate A and B as fast as possible so you can focus on C and D.

Are you doing your support? Are you answering your emails and phone? Is it taking your entire morning to help, answer emails, and so forth?

Next question: How much do you earn each time you work your support desk or answer your emails and phone? What’s that? Nothing? Maybe it’s time you hired someone to do it for you.

If you do it correctly, hiring someone to perform your support tasks can pay off from day one.

That’s because it frees you up to do the things that MAKE YOU MONEY.

Ah-hah! Imagine that – devoting nearly all your working time to those tasks that make money rather than doing support.

The military has two distinct areas of operation: Front line and support. The front line wins the battles while the support does just that – support those out there beating the actions.

In sports, you’ve got offense and defense. The defense is crucial for stopping the other team from scoring, but they generally DON’T SCORE any points themselves. The offense does that. If you’re spending all of your time on defense (answering emails), then you’re not devoting any time to crime (making sales.)

Here’s how to hand off the bulk of your email tasks to your new assistant: If you don’t already have a private email address, create one. You give this address to JV partners, fellow marketers, and your mother—the people who matter most to your business and personal life.

Once a day, you check this address and answer these emails personally.

Everything else – EVERYTHING – goes to your support address or support desk, where your support person checks it daily or several times a day.

This includes payments, autoresponder emails, hosting emails, customer questions, complaints, testimonials, affiliate requests, etc.

Your support person has access to your accounts, too. Your hosting account, autoresponder account, PayPal account, etc. I know – it seems like a giant leap of faith to give someone else access to your PayPal account, but no worries. You can limit the PayPal functions your support person has access to. For example, they can issue refunds but not withdraw funds.

Your support person or team will run your business’s day-to-day operations for you.

When training your support staff, you can write step-by-step procedures on how to do things, record videos or audio, or have them contact you when something comes up they haven’t handled before. In other words, there is a learning curve. But after the first week, you shouldn’t have to spend much more time on training, especially if you’ve got the right person for the job.

You can also have your support person or team do all those other things you don’t like to do, such as analyze stats, clean email lists, install websites, and social media, etc. Whatever you prefer to hand off, go ahead and do it.

Hiring someone for 2 hours a day frees up 2 hours of your own time. If you pay them $12 an hour, that’s $480 a month – possibly more than you currently pay for programs and how-to info.

And it’s 40 hours per month that you’ve just gained. Imagine using that 40 hours each month to create and market a new product – 12 new products in a year. If each product would initially make you just $3,000 and then just another $500 a month – well, you do the math.

If you’re still hesitating, think about this: If you strike a deal with your support person to pay them monthly, then you’ve got 30 days to use your newfound time to make more than enough money to cover them for the first month.

Thirty days and 40 newfound hours. But that’s not even the most significant benefit of bringing someone in to help you with your business.

The most significant benefit is what it will do for your mindset because suddenly, you ARE a business person. There’s no more wondering if you’re dabbling in a hobby. This stuff is REAL, and you are now responsible for someone else’s income. This motivator will kick you out of bed each morning and ensure you have a successful day.

Use one of the freelance sites to find someone. Yes, it will feel like a big step because it is. A big step in the right direction that is. Because the rewards will prove that taking this next logical step in your business evolution was worth it.

Standing apart from the crowd of other emails in your prospects’ inboxes isn’t easy. There are gimmicky ways to do it – write subject lines that shock, use lots of funny characters in the subject line, use the latest “hot” subject line [for the past year, this has been “Hey”], and so forth. But how do you get your recipients to become avid readers of your emails?

Sane Method #1 – Tell stories. There is a marketer who appears in my inbox about once a day. Gmail highlights this email because Gmail knows I read his emails. Why? Because he entertains me with stories. When I click his email, I will get swept into another world. And even if it’s just his world and just for a minute, it’s a great escape to my otherwise sometimes monotonous day. And yes, I buy his products, too.

There’s a bonus to telling stories besides the fact that your emails get opened and read, and it’s this: Telling stories is fun. Instead of selling, selling, and more selling, you’re now entertaining. You can embellish, you can be flamboyant, you can add your personal touch, you can get creative, and you can have a blast doing it.

Suddenly your day is just a little more exciting because you’re watching for the next story to fall into your life every moment. Even a routine trip to the store can become an exciting adventure. The newspaper holds new meaning, and the websites you visit are a treasure trove of possible stories you can share.

Sane Method #2 – Be a coach. Think of your readers as your students. Love your subject and stick to your topic. Only build your list with people who want info on your subject, then teach them all you can about it. When recommending products, tell them the good and the bad. Give them lots of detail. Be their coach first and foremost; they will hang on to your every word.

This method works incredibly well if you love your topic. It’s for you if you spend hours on the Internet learning about this topic, hitting all the forums and websites, finding the best products, and so forth. Every new site you visit is an adventure because you continually seek more information to share with your students. And selling becomes easy because you share your knowledge with your students.

The [Not-so] Crazy Method – Hide clues in your emails that lead to prizes. I haven’t yet tried this method, but I’ve been tempted. What if every email you send out holds a clue to a valuable prize? Collect all the clues, and you will find the award online. There’s little doubt this method will open your emails, but will they be read? In the right niche, yes. Imagine doing this in a gaming niche – what a killer technique. The viral effect alone could be huge.

So tell me – is this last method crazy, or a millionaire maker? I don’t know of anyone who’s doing it – yet. But no doubt someone will. And in the right hands, it could be decisive, indeed.

The easiest way to go full-time is to be full-time. Quit your daytime job and begin working full-time online. When you’re full-time online, you’ll discover opportunities that otherwise would have passed you by. And you’ll be able to create many more options by having the time to forge relationships with other marketers and work on your social media, blog posts, products, etc.

But the problem for many is their online business isn’t making enough money yet to enable them to leave their job. And until they leave their employment, they won’t have the time to grow their business into a full-time income. It’s a catch-22 situation that has held many marketers hostage for years.

So how can you get some extra money coming in immediately? By offering services online. When you submit a service, getting clients and pay is pretty straightforward. You typically won’t make a fortune, but you can make enough to replace your income from your job. And then you can use your extra time to create your products, build your sites, and so forth.

Here’s a list of services you could offer:

You are a personal assistant to another marketer. This job is doubly significant because you’ll also learn as you earn. You’ll need a good variety of skills to land a VA position, but never underestimate the power of Google, either—anything you’re required to do but don’t know how can be found on Google and YouTube.

Freelance customer service. Many marketers don’t want to hassle with support tickets but can’t afford to hire someone full-time because their business isn’t big enough. Offer to do support for 1 hour per day, 5 or 6 days per week, for $10-$20 per hour. Get three clients, and you have a nice little side income. And best of all, you can do these support tasks as you have time throughout the day from the comfort of your computer or mobile device.

Writing. can be anything from simple articles and emails to full-blown product creation. Content is hugely important, and every marketer needs more great content. If you can write conversationally and do good research, you can do money freelance writing. You might even ghostwrite books, too.

Copywriting. It is trickier than simply writing because your job is to sell with the written or spoken word. However, it can pay quite well if you’re good, and copywriting is a skill you’ll need to hone for your business.

Proofreading and editing. If you have an eye for details, you can be a proofreader. If you’re good at turning a rough copy into something coherent that flows well and makes sense, then editing is for you.

Ebook formatting. Getting a book ready for Kindle or making it into a sharp-looking PDF takes skill. Can you do it? Then tons of marketers need you.

Graphic design. Are you good at Photoshop? Can you make headers, product covers, logos, and so forth? Then this is a great way to make some extra money.

Website design, maintenance, security, SEO, and so forth. In other words, anything and everything technical. If you’re good at the technical side of online marketing, you’ll always have work because most marketers don’t want to bother with it – they’d hand the job over to an expert such as yourself.

And anything else an online marketer needs.

In the course of building your own business, make a note of the many things you have to do. Ask yourself, “is there a market for this service? Do I enjoy performing this service?” If so, you have a skill you can sell to others to make ends meet until your business runs full steam ahead.

 It’s an excellent daydream: You make a ton of money online and then tell your boss to ‘have a nice day.’   the scenario you see in sales letters all the time. “Buy this product, put it to work, and next week you can kiss your job goodbye forever.”

Real life doesn’t always work like a sales letter. Life continually gets in the way. You make some extra money, but then it dries up. Or you have an emergency, and the extra cash bails you out of that crisis, but you’re no further ahead. Or this is the most common. You have the best intentions but never quite get around to making that fortune online. And so you are still at your job. Even though a year ago/two years ago/five years ago/ you swore you would be retired by now.

Whoops.

How do you eat an apple? Unless you’re a horse, you eat it one bite at a time. In my early years, building your online income and telling my boss to shove it works the same way – you replace your income one step at a time.

It’s funny that you can quickly make $5,000 a month online, but only when you know you can. Until you know it, it seems just out of reach. And as long as the goal seems out of reach, your subconscious will sabotage your steps to see it never happens. If you can’t conceive it, there is no way you will achieve it, no matter how hard you try.

It’s like getting a job. You can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job—the same way with making money online.

But right now, this instant, I’ll bet you know that you can make enough to cover just one of your bills, right?

So pick a monthly bill of yours, any account. Now get enough income coming in each month to cover that bill completely. Maybe it’s your $100 water bill. Great. All you need to make is consistent $100 a month, and it’s taken care of.

Don’t spend this new income on anything but paying that bill. Any extra money you make after you pay the bill is reinvested into your business. You pick another tab and start covering that each month, too. And you keep adding another account and another bill into the mix until they pay, including your mortgage or rent, food, and everything.

But notice how you did it – not all at once, but simply one bill at a time. Your mind can wrap itself around taking it one step at a time. Your subconscious will stop fighting you, and you’ll be surprised at how easy the process becomes. It’s all about small steps proving you can do it, and moving on to the next level.

Once you’ve got all your bills covered and then some, you can quit your day job confidently because now you KNOW you can make money online. There is no question. You’ve already proven you’ve got the confidence and the skills.

The magic is this: Instead of sitting at your computer and thinking, “Okay, I’ve got to make enough money to cover all my expenses this month,” you tell yourself you’ll make enough to cover one little bill.

You’re no longer trying to create an entire business; you’re simply taking the first steps. You’re enjoying numerous successes that fuel you to keep going.

Get that first bill paid, and you’ll achieve total financial freedom, one step at a time.

Do you have domain names sitting around idle? Maybe you bought them intending to do something at a particular time, but you haven’t gotten around to it.

Here’s an excellent idea: List them for sale on sedo.com and then forget about them until one of two things happens.

You decide to use them or…

… you get an email from Sedo from someone who is offering to buy one of your domain names.

You never know if or when this might happen, but why not try? One marketer I know of did this with his domains. Six months later, he got an email from Sedo saying someone offered $100 for one of his domains. He wasn’t interested in taking such a low offer, so he countered with $2,000 to see what would happen.

The buyer countered with $300, disagreed with $1800, and after several emails and a counteroffer later, he sold it for $950. Not bad for a $9 investment. Sedo took a cut, and he got the rest.

And while he did have plans for that domain name, he figures he can choose a different but similar name when the time comes – no big deal.

There’s no guarantee you’ll sell your domains this way or make a lot of money if you do. But as you know, domains have sometimes sold for ridiculous amounts. There’s no harm or fee for listing your part, so why not try and see what happens? You have nothing to lose and potentially an excellent fat check for trying it.

Plus, if you’re creative and do some market research on hot topics and keywords, you could start registering new and marketable domains with a high chance of selling when you list them in a domain marketplace like Sedo.com and turn this strategy into a full-time business. Some people are already doing this now. Why not you too?

You might think you are not qualified to coach anybody on anything. After all, what kind of an expert are you to be telling others how to run their business or their life right? The odds are you couldn’t be more wrong. I’ll show you WHY and HOW…

When we think of coaching, we think of it on a grand scale—for example, helping someone to turn their entire life around or to start and run a brand new business from scratch.

But those are just two types of coaching, not what we’ll discuss here.

When you get into online marketing, what is one of the first pieces of advice you receive? To choose a particular niche and then narrow that niche down to a profitable target market, you can help.

Coaching can work the same way. Instead of trying to be all things to all people or to teach someone every facet and nuance of starting a business from scratch, why not coach them on that one thing you are very, very good at

Maybe you’re excellent at writing or at getting ghostwriting assignments. Perhaps you are terrific at website building, SEO, or getting traffic.

Or maybe your specialty has nothing to do with online marketing, but instead, you are a master at meditation, organizing your life, prioritizing, or dealing with ADHD. There are infinite possibilities. And if you think about it for a moment, you will realize that you are good at something others want to learn.

By getting so specific, you can become a very successful coach.

Maybe you are a master at deciphering a holy book. Or you are terrific at helping people over 50 loose weight and get fit. Maybe you’re excellent at helping people find their sense of direction in life and discovering what they are meant to do. Or perhaps you can help someone present their business in a way that makes it stand apart from all others. The list is endless.

What skills do you have? Do you want to share them with others? Would you enjoy honing those skills even more as you teach them? Because when you become a coach, a side benefit is you become even more skilled and proficient in your subject. You get better and better at teaching it. And thus, you can charge more and more as you progress and get positive testimonials from your clients.

Getting back to the online marketing realm, forget about trying to coach a new marketer into building their 6 figure business and instead focus on just one aspect, such as adding 1,000 subscribers a week to their list, or on creating great content, or using social media to become a star in their niche.

There are tremendous gaps in the coaching realm, and if you can fill one of those gaps, you can get more clients than you can handle.

To do: Once you have chosen your coaching niche, you might create a simple information product that sells for a low price of perhaps $10 or $25. Then offer your coaching as the upsell.

Write guest posts and do interviews to talk about your specialty. Give lots of good info, but clarify that you can coach them if they don’t want to do it alone. Please spread the word, and those who need your coaching will step up to claim a spot before they all disappear.

Somebody can do coaching through Skype and email; you can coach anyone anywhere.

And once you get good at teaching your specialty, you can create a big-ticket course that teaches everything you would teach a coaching client. You can then sell this course for $100 to $1,000 as an alternative to your coaching services.

Don’t dismiss this concept, thinking that you have nothing to offer. Worst-case scenario, you might need to improve your skill before you start coaching. But one week of concentrated study can make you more of an expert on your topic than 99.9% of the people on the planet.

You can do this. You can become a coach. And it’s as simple as doing what every good marketer does – finding your specialty that appeals to a small but zealous segment of the market who want what you offer.

Wouldn’t it be terrific if you could go from being an unknown marketer to immediate “guru” status overnight? You’d enjoy instant authority in your niche and high credibility with your potential customers and JV partners. People would trust your opinion. You’d be quoted in blog posts and asked to do guest posts.

You could get interviewed. You could join lucrative joint ventures and mastermind groups. Your social media accounts would become magnets to followers and fans. Customers’ sales resistance would decrease, your sales would increase, and so forth.

Becoming an ‘overnight’ authority in your niche shaves a few years off your online marketing career path. You’re taking a quantum leap from being an unknown to being known in your place. And you receive all the benefits a known expert in your field gets, without the years of work.

Sounds pretty good. Yeah, it’s cheating, but it’s not. Whoever said you have to take years and years to accomplish what you can do in a few days or weeks?

Here are five ways to do it:

1. Interview others. Oprah wasn’t an expert, and she interviewed experts. And by doing so, she became associated with every expert she interviewed. In your case, you’ll want to go much more narrow and deep than Oprah, choosing your targeted niche carefully and then interviewing anyone in that niche.

2. Buy named rights products and sell them. These are products sold by big-name marketers that allow you to keep their name on the product when you sell it. You’re co-featuring with an established expert. At the bottom of the sales letter, you can write something like, “From the desk of ‘your name’ and ‘guru’s name.’ Buyers will assume you have partnered with the guru in putting this product out. These resale rights aren’t cheap, but that also plays in your favor since it dramatically limits competition.

3. Create a product yourself, then let a big-name marketer be the co-author and co-owner. These heighten your profile and generally bring in a lot of sales from that marketer’s list and from affiliates who promote for that marketer.

4. Write/edit a book full of other people’s articles. Choose a topic and then find articles written by experts on this topic. Ask their permission to place their pieces in your book, giving them full credit and links to their website. If you choose, edit, write the introduction, and add notes at the beginning and end of each article. But the experts still do all the heavy lifting while you get to associate your name with theirs. It looks like a collaboration between you and all these big names, with YOUR name on the front cover.

5. Do all 4, along with guest blogging and being active on social media. Suddenly, people will say that they see and hear you everywhere.

Some people take a lifetime to go from the mail room to a company’s boardroom. But this is your business, and YOU make the rules. Don’t wait years to become an expert in your niche – decide to become one today.

Getting traffic isn’t rocket science – it’s pretty easy when you know a few of the best tricks pro bloggers use daily to get more traffic to their blogs.

Create a not-so-secret inner circle of your best buddies.

Put together a list of your very best and most influential readers. These are the ones who regularly interact with you or post replies to your posts, share your posts with their followers, send you articles, buy your products, and so forth.

Put these folks on your special inner circle list, and email them to let them know of their newly attained status. Let them know the benefits – they’ll see your posts before the general public and get apprised of any new offerings, updates, and ideas before anyone else.

Solicit their feedback on your posts. These create a sense of ownership and increase the odds they will go out of their way to share your content with their followers. Give them unique benefits, thank them for their help, and offer to help them in return.

Make it brain-dead easy to share your content.

If the content is too difficult to share, your readers and inner circle are less likely to share it. So add the appropriate social sharing buttons for sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Write in-depth content that makes your readers look sexy-smart.

Here’s a little secret: People like to look super smart to their readers and friends. Okay, so maybe it’s not a secret. But the fact is, in-depth articles tend to get shared more because the people sharing them want their friends to think they read in-depth articles. Plus, when someone new lands on your in-depth article, they are more likely to subscribe to get even more info than if they land on a simple fluff piece.

Another secret: Posts with images, lists, and videos will attract over five times more links than posts containing only plain text. So don’t stop at the words – add things like images and graphs to make it share-worthy.

Cheat—just a little.

That isn’t cheating, but it sure feels like it. Look at your old content and find the still relevant pieces, whether they wrote three months ago or a year ago. Now share them again via social media. This way, you get new traffic without writing new content – how awesome is that?

Write a mini-sales letter to promote each blog post.

Traditionally, when a blogger writes a new post, she sends the title and first paragraph to her list with an invite to click the link and read the rest. But the real meat of a blog post isn’t in that intro paragraph, which is why this method isn’t worth the beans.

Instead, write a mini sales letter that gets the email reader curious and excited to know more. It doesn’t have to be long; 50 -100 of the right words are perfect. Build curiosity and show them the enormous benefits/takeaways of reading your article, and your click-through rates could double, if not triple.

That’s it – 5 simple tips to increase your blog traffic. Pick out your favorite and try it right now, then make a note to use the other four within the next seven days, and you’ll see a real boost in your traffic within the month.

One of the most challenging things about blogging is the self-imposed pressure always to have a terrific, earth-shattering, life-changing blog post that makes people catch fire reading it.

You know what I mean. You’ve got that little voice whispering that if your posts don’t measure up to some impossibly high standard you’ve set, all is lost, and the world will know you’re a fraud.

The good news is, it simply isn’t true. You don’t need every post to be a 2,000-word masterpiece or the final definitive word on your topic. Instead, you need content that gives your readers what they want. That’s it. Do your readers want to know the latest news or the best methods? Then that’s what you give them. Forget trying to be a great writer and instead focus on being your readers’ ‘friend in the business,’ and you’ll be an AMAZING blogger.

Here are 10.5 more tips to take some of the blogging pressure off of you and put the fun back into blogging:

Make a posting schedule, then stick to it as regularly as you brush your teeth. Surprisingly, having a blogging schedule makes it easier for you to blog. It provides soft deadlines that keep you motivated to sit down and write. You won’t be able to put off your blogging if your readers expect a new post every Tuesday and Friday, and you know it.

Keep a running list of blogging ideas. Use a program like Evernote to keep track of your thoughts and the resources you can draw from when writing your posts.

Forget being original. Seriously. Every idea is built upon or inspired by someone else’s opinion. So give credit where credit is due, provide your unique twist or take on the subject and relax – no one expects you to reinvent anything.

Re-purpose your content and other people’s content, too. Curate, list, pull bits and pieces from here and there – it’s all good. Just give credit to everyone you sourced the content. And go back to your content and see if you can’t update it, re-purpose it, mix it up, or whatever. Oddly, if you’ve been blogging for over a year, you’ve got a small goldmine of content you can mine to create new content.

Be more of a reporter and less of an expert. Being the go-to expert in your niche is difficult, especially when you’re new to blogging. The pressure can become so unbearable that you cease to write, afraid you’ll pen something that will make you look foolish in your readers’ eyes.

But magic will happen if you focus on reporting instead of being the absolute authority. You’ll feel freer to express your opinions and find it easier to write posts. Because you are referencing other leaders and experts in your niche, you become your authority to your readers.

Mix up your content. Are you only writing blog posts? Then add videos. Are you only podcasting? Then write blog posts. Limiting yourself to one media means limiting the number of people who will engage in and benefit from your content.

Short is great. There was a time when this suggested (actually, I saw this again quite recently) that no post should be under 2,000 words, and all posts should take days to write and be the absolute authority on whatever topic you’re writing.

Hogwash. I briefly mentioned this initially – write as much as you need to. If you can cover your topic in 200 words, DO IT. If it takes 2,000 words, ensure you’re holding your readers’ attention for the ENTIRE 2,000.

It reminds me of the “short sales letter vs. long sales letter” debate. It’s a ridiculous debate, and here’s why: A blog post or a sales letter should be exactly as long as it needs to be and no longer. Peri

Stop leaving terrific blog comments on other people’s blogs. Seriously. You just read a post on a high-traffic blog, and you’ve got your own opinion or insight to share that will help that blog’s readers.

Please don’t do it. Instead, create your blog post and link to the original blog. Then let the original blog know you mentioned and linked to your post. This way, your blog has more great content, and who knows? You might get a backlink from the blog you referenced.

Use images. Every. Time. Maybe more than once, too. It’s irrefutable that ideas work at grabbing attention, so make sure that every post you make has at least one image. And be sure to place a caption under the image because people are far more likely to read the image caption than anything else on the page (other than the headline, of course.)

Publish your articles on other sites. Sites like LinkedIn, The Huffington Post, and many others allow content to be republished on their sites as long as it fits their guidelines. It’s a terrific way to attract new subscribers by posting a link to your profile or blog.

And what about Google’s duplicate content penalty? The exact content penalty doesn’t apply to syndication or curation. If it did, you’d never see a primary news site appear at the top of the search results because they all subscribe to services that help them get duplicate content, such as the Associated Press. And bloggers who frequently syndicate their content to other quality sites report that they receive no penalties whatsoever.

10.5. Ask for the subscription. Ask. And ask. But don’t be obnoxious. You wrote a post on getting traffic and got a free report on even more ways to get traffic. Ask them to subscribe right there at the end of your post. “To get 27 more ways to get targeted, free traffic with the push of a button, simply tell me where to send the report, and it’s yours.”

If you’ve been having trouble blogging regularly, hopefully, reading this has made you realize that blogging doesn’t need to be stressful. The rules are not as rigid as some would have you believe, and the most important thing is to give your readers what they want and lots of it, in whatever form it might take.