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Comment Hitching for Traffic & COWnappers Update – Episode 4 of JOHNCOWtv

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:15:07 +0000

We have had a couple more COOL prizes added to the “Award” for the person selected that helps us solve this COWnapping Mystery.

The first prize is a 1 Year membership to Solopreneurs.org: The perfect place for those starting thier own business and need a place for support to be nudged into action, be held accountable and get excellent training in the areas where you could use help. This is a $279 value!
The second added prize is a FREE copy of WPReviewSite.com: Turn WordPress Into a Powerful Review Site Engine. This is a $97 Value

If you have a prize that you want to add to help us find the COW, let me know and you will get a mention in the next episode of JOHNCOWtv PLUS a mention in the posts (all of them from this point on!).

So remember, if you want to WIN…

$500 via PayPal + a 1 Year Membership at Solopreneurs.org + a FREE copy of WPreviewsite.com

Then Help Us Find the COWnappers! Click Here for the Contest Details!

Episode 4: In this weeks episode I share a strategy that is excellent for getting some great traffic and I call it “Comment Hitching”. The strategy is not rocket science and if you are already familiar and involved with Digg, Delicious or any of those types of sites then it is something very easy to be on the watch for and take advantage of!

So watch the below video, keep an eye on for the hoof print clue and give us some feedback!

Clue #2: The COW was not running but _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Remember, do not share this clue with anyone and keep it secret, keep it safe until the final clue is revealed in two weeks!

Click Here to Add JOHNCOWtv to Your YouTube

Click Here if You Want Your Website or Business Spotlighted in the Next Episode of JOHNCOWtv?

Check Out the Previous Episodes of JOHNCOWtv:

Traffic from Commenting | JohnCow Interviews IMWithJoe.com

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:52:13 +0000

Thought I would do something a little different here… seems I can never make everyone happy… so I am going to give you all the best of everything. If I hear any bitching about this.. just keep it to yourself

Yesterday I did a fifteen minute interview JK Swopes aka “Normal Joe” of IM With Joe dot Com

and I have put this into the following formats…

PDF (Click Here to Download)
MP3 (Click Here to Listen Now)
MP3 Zipped so you can download and listen later (Click Here to save to your computer)
and last of all.. transcript is available for your reading pleasure below…

Start of Interview…

JK: Hey everyone this is Jason Katzenback with JohnCow.com. Today I wanted to do a recording with someone who I’m sure you are all pretty familiar with if you spend anytime on JohnCow.com.

In fact if you frequent any of the other popular blogs, like Yaro’s Entrepreneurs Journey, Joel Comm’s blog, or Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report I’m sure you’ll have seen his face there many times, and who I am talking about is the man behind http://www.imwithjoe.com and I wanted to talk to him, simply because first of all I am always impressed with how much commenting he’s doing, but I’ve gotten to know him over the last little while and his mention was…his number 1 traffic method has been commenting.

I know a lot of us talk about commenting but we never really get into it about how we do it and the steps that are followed. So I wanted to talk to Joe a little bit about that today and let him share it, then we can talk a little bit about his blog too. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorites to go to. He’s got good information and it will also make you laugh. First of all Joe; thanks for being here.

Joe: Thanks for having me, man.

JK: Oh you’re welcome.

Joe: After you was talking about me last week, I had to bust you out.

JK: I have to admit that comment on your blog where the guy wanted to give me a titty twister; I didn’t quite know what to do about that.

Joe: People get territorial man.

JK: Oh they do, they do. My wife actually had a good laugh and, yeah it was all in good fun.

Joe: Yup.

JK: What I want to do is I want to ask you four specific questions that hopefully our readers and listeners will get some value out of. So first of all, this is an important one, especially for people who don’t have much time in the day.

How much time do you spend on commenting per day?

Joe: Man that varies. I would say at least you gotta spend about an hour, a solid hour; during the week. Now on the week-ends I ramp it up quite a bit and that’s usually when I get more of my commenting done on the week-ends, but I have a specific set that I go through during the week and try to get on. The thing, I mean if you’ve got at least an extra hour you can get a lot of stuff done. I say an hour because I actually read, you know, read the post I don’t go in and say “Hey good post.” So…

JK: And that’s such an important part and if you look at the blogs that you mention that you comment on and I know myself I’m pretty strict on it. If someone just give’s a generic reply, they haven’t proven themselves as a commenter, I’ll usually just spam it out. I’m thinking it’s just someone who’s trying to give a back link. If it’s someone for example, if you just gave a quick reply I know you’ve proven yourself with other comments. I think that’s a huge mistake. You kind of hinted on this, that you have a process you follow.

Can you kind of just give us an idea of what your process is and how you use commenting?

Joe: My process is ever changing; I just switched it up probably this week or like towards the end of last. I had a process where I categorized all my RSS feeds into specific groups. If a blog had top commenter’s they would all go in one group, if it had comment love or keyword love or, you know? A lot of different things I would categorize and put into different groups like that. On top of that I always had a set of blogs that I read daily and you know, always have a list of blogs that I read that are new for the week and stuff like that. Recently I went through and kind of cleaned house, got rid of a lot of blogs that I actually don’t read and just narrowed it down to daily, blogs that I read daily, blogs that I read every week, I got one for new blogs that I found that week and…what’s the other one? Daily, Blogs, Weekly, New Blogs…I think that’s pretty much it.

JK: Do you track when you’re finding a new blog do you have a process, do you test the new blog and make sure you’re getting your comments approved and then watch to see if you get any traffic from them? Do you have any strategies like that?

Joe: The main thing I like to look for on a blog when I comment is if they have subscribe to comments enabled, otherwise I can’t really keep track of it. For a long time and I know I’ve met many people that have thought the same thing, I thought that subscribe to comments was a default feature in WordPress, so for awhile I didn’t have it on my blog. I think it was Yan, he told me “Yo you need to put subscribe to comments on your blog.” And that was a few months back. For the longest I just thought that was just the default, so if they don’t have that on there and there not a blog that I visit regularly I’m not gonna comment on there because I don’t wanna just be a one hit drive by comment person. I rather focus on, you know? Commenting on specific blogs, then going around and throwing my link up and my name up on different blogs that I have no plans on going back to.

JK: So basically what you’re saying is that you kind of found your home base of blogs that you visit regularly, you’re always looking for new blogs and different areas, but, also first of all you look to make sure that it’s got a subscribe to comments and you also like to see if there’s something like comment love and keyword love.

Joe: Right, Right. Lately I re-organized everything, so a lot of that stuff I don’t organize my RSS feed that way anymore. Actually you can see all my RSS Feed, it looks like a blog roll on my blog now, cuz I have it all in separate boxes. Those are actually my RSS subscriptions.

JK: That’s on your blog http://www.imwithjoe.com

Joe: Right. So if you go over there, you can see Daily, Weekly, New Blogs, you can see all that stuff listed right there and that’s actually directly from my feed reader. It will update dynamically you know if I change somebody from daily to weekly or weekly to daily or if it’s a new blog that I’m reading, I’ll just add it to my reader and it will just show up there.

JK: Basically one thing that you are saying, if there’s anyone out there that wants to encourage people to post comments on their blog, because we all know that the more comments you get on your blog, the better it is; because first of all it encourages interaction by others but also the search engines love it. But it would probably be pretty wise to enable at least the subscribe to comments and maybe one of those great plugins. I’m a bit fan of comment love, if someone’s taking the time to comment I want to give them a link back, but make sure it’s not done in a spammy way.

Joe: Right, well I think if you want to attract quality comments then you should put in that subscribe to comment, cuz most people who are putting in quality comments probably want to come back and see what you have to say about. Now they don’t care if they are just driving by and leaving a link because they see that you have a certain PR or whatever on your blog, then their not gonna care about subscribe to comment, it’s not gonna make a difference. But I noticed as soon as I put that on my blog I started getting higher quality comments.

JK: What are your main blogs? You’ve got maybe a half dozen, or maybe a little bit more I’m not sure, but why have you chosen those blogs as your main ones?

Joe: The blogs I choose, I mean I just…when you first start blogging, you hear everybody say you know “you should do this to build link and build traffic” and try to you know find the blogs that are most popular or have the highest PR, but I realized I wasn’t really following that because I just choose blogs based on the content and the community of the blogs and the content they are providing. If I vibe with the blogger or I like their content and they are helping me out, those are the people I continue to go too and network with.

JK: You hit on something real powerful there. Me and you we’ve started communicating more recently and it’s a good way to build a relationship with people as well. If you’re a blogger and all of a sudden you see someone who’s a regular contributor, supports what you’re doing their going to be a lot more open to you communicating down the road as well. But if you’re a fly by nighter and say ‘hey I’ve commented once on your blog, do you have a moment?’ I’m going be like “well there’s a lot of people who’ve commented once.’ But if I see that your someone whose adding value to my blog, I’m going to be in a position that I’m going to listen to you because I’m thinking well I don’t want this guy to leave. I think that’s a great point that you can use it as a networking tool as well.

Joe: That’s basically what it is for me, it’s not just you know ‘let’s go, let’s find where we can get links at’ I just, you know I find a blog that I like and I tend, I’m going to play loyal deuce, I tend to get loyal to certain blogs and that’s just where I go. I’m always looking for new ones but I don’t just pick them on popularity otherwise I’d be on a whole bunch of blogs that I don’t comment on that a lot of people do. But I don’t do it because 1 – their not really appealing to me personally and I just don’t find them interesting and 2 – there’s no point, if I’m not going to say something worth while then there’s no point of me even commenting to say “Hey” so my name shows up on this blog or that blog.

JK: You know it’s funny I’m sure you get this as well, you get those repeated comment that say things like “Well I didn’t agree with you at first but your last paragraph made sense.” And you know that’s somebody just copying and pasting or using some spam system. But if they would just take the time whether it was five minutes to read the post and put something worth while and get their comment approved by a blog that’s high quality. Cuz the blogs they are getting approved on are not high quality blogs, so the long term benefit is so minimum. So if you just take the time and do this right, actually read and I think one of the things your saying too is because you have a home base of blogs of stuff that you like to read, it makes it a lot easier to go and comment because you want to read what’s there instead of making it a chore to find blogs and kind of struggle through the content.

Joe: I know people that do that and they have, they doing blog commenting, they just out looking for random blogs to comment on and if I say I’m, you know I’m catching up on my blog comments, that means I’m catching up on reading. I can’t just; I can’t just fly through and read, like if I come to your site I’m not just going to be able to just you know read it in five minutes and read, cuz you know you write long posts. Same with Yaro, he writes long posts, I can’t just go in two minutes and comment. It takes time to do it because people are writing quality content, so the posts are going to be a little bit longer and you’re going to have to take the time to read it.

JK: Now one of the things that a lot of people do and I see people doing it and it just mind boggles me; why they even try, is being spammy with names on the post and links inside the post. What are your comments on that, like when you’re commenting, in general what are your feelings on that?

Joe: I’ve never really been one to put links in my comment, I finally did it once ever and it was directly related to a post and it was on a blog that I frequent, “oh yeah I just did that over here.” but for the most part I don’t put links in my posts. I don’t really like the “sell more tupperware bowls” as comment names neither. I mean just, you know; if you want to comment on my blog use your name. If keyword love is enabled then that’s different, if not, just comment as your own name then. I tend to think higher of commenter’s that do that instead of using a keyword as their name.

JK: Yeah and I think, yeah your right. There are tools like keyword love but still they still enable it so the link is separate then the name. But even if it’s a brand, for example like John Cow or Shoemoney or you know any of those where it’s just a name where you recognize it right away, but if you see posts that are “The best mesothelioma help out there.” You know it’s like well, and their giving you a four word comment, you’re like ‘no I don’t think so.’ Because you gotta think when you’re leaving a comment and you’ve mentioned this a few times, you’ve got to add value. You want to, it’s like a you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. You provide a value comment; I’ll approve it and give you the link love.

Joe: There’s definitely a method to my madness. The blogs that I choose to comment on. Content is the first thing. Like you said, the more you comment and offer good content in your comments on another blog, those people are going to take notice.

JK: I’ve noticed your blog, your starting to rank up there pretty good with some regular commenter’s and getting quite a few comments per post. What percentage of your increased traffic has been from commenting on other blogs?

Joe: Man, I would say at least maybe 50, 60 probably 75%. I talk to different people, different bloggers, I talked to one a couple of months ago. He was like his girlfriend seen me comment on his blog and she was like “That’s that guy imwithjoe” and I’m like ‘well how she know me?’ and he’s like “Well she recognized your picture somewhere, I don’t know.” So I mean you know when people start seeing you and I’m the same way, if I start seeing the same people on certain blogs that I read, there’s a higher chance I’m going to go visit that blog.

JK: It’s almost like building a brand name. You know, if your using a different keyword every time and your avatar’s different all the time, cuz it’s different URLs and everything, but if you stick with it, like your using your name and everything, people start to recognize it and they get curious. Man this guy’s all over the place, and they want to check it out.

Joe: Right

JK: Well Joe I just want to thank you so much, because I’ve been wanting to, I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago I wanted to interview you just because of the commenting side of things. How old is your blog, the http://www.imwithjoe.com, how long has that been around?

Joe: Ah man it’s probably…I think I started it in like March.

JK: So this is a pretty new blog and its started to gain some good momentum.

Joe: Not even six months.

JK: So there you go everyone, that’s the power of commenting and that’s the strategy used by Joe from http://www.imwithjoe.com go check it out, he’s got a lot of cool videos out there, he’s just real down, he loves eating “sammiches”.

Joe: Yeah man “sammiches”.

JK: And he’s got some pretty fancy sponsor’s too. So go check it out and have a laugh. So again Joe thank you very much and to all the readers of John Cow we’ll be talking to you later.

Joe: Alright, Thanks.

Planning Our Subscriber Traffic Strategy – Part 3 of An Aud Life Dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:57:32 +0000

In the previous post in this series “Understanding the How and Where” we broke down the sources of traffic we are going to target. Now I want to dig a little deeper into that because we need to make sure we really get a clear picture in our mind of what this looks like and a plan for each source.

For example, it is easy to say “Subscribers” but do I really have a solid understanding of what this means and a plan as to how to gain subscribers?

The four sources of traffic that we mentioned in the previous post that we are focusing on to achieve our “traffic goals” are…

1 – Subscribers (repeat visitors)
2 – Search Engines (Mainly Google)
3 – Forums & Social Networks
4 – Word of Mouth / Recommendations

Today we are going to start with…

Subscribers (repeat visitors):

Having subscribers is wonderful for repeat traffic, plus you have an asset of readers that you know are targeted to the market of your blog. It is the same as repeat customers, if you ask any profitable company they will tell you that it is much less expensive to sell to a current satisfied customer then it is to a new customer that has never heard of you.

The funny thing about subscribers is the message of “you need a list” is always being preached and yet one of the first things I notice on any new blog or website that I am asked to review is they have either a very weak incentive for people to subscribe or there is nothing at all.

I am a huge believer that if you want to grow your company for the long term, you NEED to create a list of subscribers. This has been a major influence in the growth of my entire business but the challenge that most people have is they think that if they simply put the little rss icon on their site or say “subscribe to my blog” they will build a huge profitable list of subscribers… BUT this simply does not work effectively for the average blog.

Here is how I look at it, there are currently 6 “make money online” blogs that I subscribe to. I have no reason to want to subscribe to any other blogs, especially just for the the sake of doing so because they say so. I might (if i remember) come back and visit other blogs, but unless it gives me a special reason (benefit) for why I should subscribe, well it just is not going to happen. I already have enough information coming my way.

You need to clearly understand that just because a subscription to your blog is free, that is not a compelling enough reason for people to want to make a commitment to your blog by subscribing. You need to create a USP (Unique Selling Position) that sets your offer apart from what everyone else is offering. Give Them a Reason!!!

“But would they not subscribe because of good content like at problogger?”

Yes but lets look at that example:

Problogger.net does not offer an incentive to readers to sign up and has a huge list but it is one of the original make money online industry blogs, it is highly referred to by other high authority sites, it is mentioned in books and loads of other places PLUS it has lots of history of reliable good content.

Now ask your self the question –> Does your new blog fit that mold?

Chances are it does not and the bottom line comes down to this, it has been proven over and over and over again that if you want to dramatically increase your subscriber rate, make an enticing offer with a high perceived value. The high perceived value means that the reward for subscribing outweighs any potential negatives.

OK, so hopefully I have drilled into your heads the power of not only a list but that you need to offer a good enticing offer that encourages readers to subscribe, so now we need to lay out how we plan to do this with http://www.anaudlife.com

1. The first thing is to decide on how we are going to manage subscribers. Our preference is using a combination of Feedburner with Aweber as they work extremely well together tracking your email subscribers together with your direct RSS subscribers. The power of this is with Aweber you can also email your list private offerings and send them occaissional free gifts that encourage them to stick around. You are creating an asset that you own and can use over and over again.
2 . Our target market is those looking for help dealing with “Rheumatoid Arthritis Symptoms” and the number one symptom is “PAIN”, so we want to make sure we offer something of value that directly benefits them in this area. For this blog we decided on putting together a free ebook called “Leaving Arthritis Pain Behind”. Make sure if you are going to do this that you put together something of value and create a professional looking ebook cover.
3. Another powerful incentive that works very well for us, is contests. This has been very effective at growing our lists but you must do it right. You want to first of all make sure you offer prizes that relate to the interests of your readers. The great thing about contests, is they can not only boost your subscribers but if done right, can get you loads of backlinks and recommendations, which very effectively help with search engine and word of mouth traffic.

Summary: We are going to user Feedburner and Aweber, we are offering a valuable ebook and the last part of our initial traffic plan for “Subscribers” is we are going to create a contest.

In the next couple posts I am going to cover the “contest planning” and I am also going to get into more detail of setting up your opt in system. After that we will move on to the traffic plans for “Search Engines (Mainly Google)”, then “Forums & Social Networks” and then “Word of Mouth / Recommendations”

NOTE: I feel the need to throw this in –> If you are not going to offer an ebook or report or anything like that but just the subscription, you still want to make sure you say more then “Subscribe now” or “sign up for our newsletter”. It is so vitally important that you remember to always ask your self “what are the biggest benefits of doing this for my readers”. I will get into this in more detail in the next few lessons.

So what are your thoughts on this post?

Part 1 – Planning Your Promotion Strategy
Part 2 – Understanting the How and Where of Your Promotion Strategy
Part 3 – Planning the Subscriber Traffic Strategy
Part 4 – Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going
Part 5 – Planning the Contest Criteria
Part 6 – Protect Yourself Before You Start a Contest
Part 7 – Rule of the Contest Prize Delivery

My Secret Weapon is Open for a Limited Time Only

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:55:05 +0000

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Planning Your Promotion Strategy – Part One of An Aud Life dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:34:02 +0000

When I originally did the COWpetition section a few months ago on promoting the GamerzReviewz blog, I saw a few people try to replicate what I did without understanding the need to step back, look at the big picture and then properly plan. You see, each niche is a completely different animal and what works in one niche is not guaranteed to work in another niche.

For example, I have found twitter to be very good for markets that are full of people that are online addicts, these include marketers, bloggers, programmers and gamers. The real power of Twitter comes from getting people that actually use it to follow you. Getting someone to create a twitter account and follow you is almost useless if they never actually visit the account.

So the first step is to plan out our strategy and this includes creating a goal and then planning out how we are going to achieve that.

Step 1: Set Our Goal

When doing a promotion campaign, you should set your goal as “Traffic” not google rankings, links or subscribers. The reason for this is traffic is where the money is and rankings, links and subscribers are stepping stones to achieving that goal. We also want to create three goals… 6 months, 3 months and 1 month. You can plan out further then that if you want but I do not like to because the blog might not catch on.

This is not by business goal, it is my specific traffic goal for this specific blog. The fact is that not all sites and blogs are going to catch on and after 6 months you will know if you should continue to focus a lot of effort into this project or move on.

Remember you blog is a part of the bigger picture and is a stepping stone to achieving your financial goals. You do not want to digg your heels in and focus your energy on something that is not returning an investment and so after 6 months, re-evaluate the situation and either make plans to grow it more or move on to focus efforts elsewhere. At the minimum I will let a site run for 3 months and within that time will have a good idea about how well it will do but I have also had sites that sucked at first and suddenly 9 months later Google started ranking and sending traffic to it.

Our Traffic Goals:

6 Month: 600 Uniques a day
3 Month: 300 Uniques a day
1 Month: 100 Uniques a day

My Reasoning: I have found that on average doing standard promotion strategies that these numbers are about what we should expect from a niche specific site in the health industry. Whether you agree with me or not, I do not really care and when you set your goals remember they are your goals not someone elses. You do not want to go too high because your first initial few months are in need of momentum and a great way to give you momentum is by achieving realistic goals. You also do not want to under estimate too much because if you make it too easy on yourself you will get lazy.

Now here is the challenge and I know a few of you will say… “I told you so”

http://www.anaudlife.com is already averaging 100+ a day because of this case study and being mentioned on this blog. The challenge is I want to show exactly what we are doing and there is no way to hide the site from you but what we can do (using google analytics) is calculate the traffic from all other sources and get an estimate. The traffic being sent from JohnCow is also not niche targetted and so for the most part will disappear once the case study is over, so we want to dismiss this traffic up front.

IMPORTANT –> Do not be distracted by the fact that the results will not be exact due to the mentioning of the blog, look at the strategies and follow along and implement them yourself. Here is a twist on a popular saying for you that is something I truly believe…

Some people say the glass is half empty, others say half full, I say… why waste time over analyzing the darn thing, slam it down and enjoy it!

If you are going to sit here and over anlyze and pick apart different things, you are going to miss out. I encourage each of you to follow along and figure out how to make this work for you. Make the best of what you are given and enjoy it.

Also, for those of you that have read the eBook “How to Build a Business and Not Just a Blog” this is going to give you a different view because the goal of the COWpetition blog was to sell in 30 days and that limited us on what we could do with it. This one is different and will be a great compliment to the eBook.

Tomorrow I am going to show how I come up with the actions steps to achieve my goals.

[poll id="9"]

So what is your feedback on this post?

Part 1 – Planning Your Promotion Strategy
Part 2 – Understanting the How and Where of Your Promotion Strategy
Part 3 – Planning the Subscriber Traffic Strategy
Part 4 – Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going
Part 5 – Planning the Contest Criteria
Part 6 – Protect Yourself Before You Start a Contest
Part 7 – Rule of the Contest Prize Delivery

How to Promote & Run a Contest – A Case Study of An Aud Life dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 22:00:12 +0000

If you have been a reader of JohnCow for a while now, you will know that we are constantly holding contests here. Contests are fantastic ways to get a good amount of exposure, gain readers and more.

One of the huge advantages of us having a well established blog (along with lots of business contacts) is we have been able to sponsor some pretty sweet contests that have not cost us a single penny. This however does not mean that if you are just starting out and have few (if any) contacts that you can not hold a successful contest. What it does mean however is you are going to have to work a little harder to get some buzz going for it and you may have to spend some of your own money on the prizes.

Over the next week or so I am going to put together a case study for promoting a new blog which includes how to hold a contest and we are going to lay out every step of the process here in a blog series so you can learn first hand how to do it. The blog I am going to use for this is a blog that my beautful wife of 12+ years just created at http://www.anaudlife.com

Since I first got into running a business online, my wife has had 0 interest in any part of it. She did not like computers, had no interest in running a business and had not a clue as to how to describe to others what it was I did. The only part that she had any interest in was spending the money that it generated

As a stay at home mother (raising our two daughters) she has recently started to show an interest in blogging and getting involved with some forums and places like FaceBook and about 2 months ago asked if she could have her own blog. After about 10 minutes of laughing (because I thought she was joking), when I could tell from the look on her face that at that moment she thought I was a jackass… I then said in disbelief…

“Are You Serous?”

Well, she was serious and so immediately it popped into my mind… “What a great opportunity for a case study for my readers!”

So the first thing I had her do was list the top 5 things she was passionate about and loved to research on the internet. Number 2 on her list (after shopping for clothes) was rheumatoid arthritis. You see my wife was diagnosed three years ago at the age of 30 with rheumatoid arthritis and in fact it had gotten so bad that she had to use a cane full time. Once she knew what the cause of the pain was, she immediately began researching and testing treatments and everything else related to this condition. She has since eliminated the need for a cane completely and has become very physically active (our dog cant even keep up with her anymore).

As soon I saw this on her list –> BINGO!

You see, having a niche that you are 100% passionate about is a niche you want to be in. You can write with passion, relate to your readers and best of all it encourages you to learn even more about the topic so you can have stuff to write about.

Over the past 4 weeks Audrey has started to piece together a blog that is pretty darn good and she has done it by herself…

She has wanted to learn how to do it and so alI I have done (other then a little graphics help from some of my office staff) is provided some direction. It is a definite learning curve for her (little things like how to write a title, researching keywords, using forums for ideas and so) but I am very proud of how well she has done so far.

She is now at the stage of starting the promotion for her blog and this is the part that I am going to get a little more involved in and this is also the part that I am going to completely share with all of you. You will see first hand what we are going to do and the first part of this is going to be planning out the promotion strategy and organizing a contest.

So, you are going to want to get your pen and paper ready (you will want to jot down ideas that pop in your head) and get ready for some fun learning. I also recommend, if you have not done so already, that you subscribe to our blog so you can keep up with us… we will also be putting this into an ebook form for all our readers after it is done.

PS – One of my good online buddies is putting together a wicked contest for you all that will be hosted here on JohnCow starting next week, so stay tuned!

So out of curiosity…

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Part 1 – Planning Your Promotion Strategy
Part 2 – Understanting the How and Where of Your Promotion Strategy
Part 3 – Planning the Subscriber Traffic Strategy
Part 4 – Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going
Part 5 – Planning the Contest Criteria