We all know that Twitter has morphed into far more than just answering the question “What are you doing?” and become a valuable tool for business. And although I’ve stated for the record that I’ve have used Facebook more than Twitter for my business purposes, there is still a lot that you can do to use Twitter to help promote your business. And one of the most important things you could be doing is something that you probably haven’t thought of.

The most obvious way to use Twitter is to use it to promote your site, whether that be your latest blog post, or news about a new product that’s just been added to your lineup. That’s not news, and everybody should be doing that by now (right?) But the thing that most people aren’t using Twitter for that they should be is…

…are you ready for this???

They should be using it to LISTEN to your customers.

Yes, I know that goes against what you think about Twitter; it’s a platform to help you talk about yourself and your business, another way to get your message out to the masses. We’ve become so me-centric and used to talking about ourselves that we rarely think about listening. Which is crazy, really, because we all know that they key to success in business is to listen to your customers and then make sure that you’re giving them what they want.

Maybe that’s just because we’re not used to thinking of Twitter that way – as a way listen to people as well as a way to talk. But you can. Identify search terms and phrases that are targeted towards your business. Then, when someone tweets about something to do with your business or niche, you can retweet and offer them a solution to their problem, whether by promoting your products, or maybe just by pointing them to your blog where they can learn valuable information. This is especially useful if you are in a service industry – people tweet a lot of the time with recommendations for restaurants, hairdressers, accountants of all sorts of other things.

Now, it may take a little trial and error to figure out what search phrases will work for your business, and how to ensure you’re finding people who are looking for information, and not people who are trying to promote their own products and businesses (although that can be a great way to meet some like-minded colleagues in your niche).

By looking at it in a different way, you can get even more out of Twitter; you just need to remember that they key a successful business is not only promoting it, and also in listening to what people want.

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Over the years one of the biggest challenges I have seen with people and website promotion is wanting results now. Yes that might sound fine but if they are putting the cart before the horse… well that picture really says it all.

Just yesterday I was on the phone for one hour helping someone with his website (consulting if you want to call it that) and the first 45 minutes where just spent on steps that had to be taken before he even launched into the actual promoting…. these where important steps that help ensure the promotion effort is as effective as possible.

The following guest post, from Justin Khoury of Insane Profits, covers 10 common mistakes that every webmaster or blogger will want to review and the focus is on helping to ensure your promotion efforts are as effective as possible.

Instinctively, many of us rush out into the seemingly never ending depths of the internet after launching a website, product or service and begin frantically attempting to gain some sort of exposure. In the midst of our enthusiasm and excitement however, many of us seem to commonly overlook what I have come to dub ‘the 10 deadly sins of promotion’. Without further ado, here they are.

10. Using a little too much Java script can actually hinder crawlers from catching up with and identifying your page for inclusion in the search results of top internet search engines. This means that your website will be relegated to some bottom place on the list that comes up on results of searches by engines. This also happens with indiscriminate inclusion of Flash and frames.

9. You are neglecting linking to related content on other sites. It is often surprising just how powerful including relevant articles and pieces of information from other sites or blogs can be. Besides providing a different insight into something you may have already covered, it also allows you to begin establishing a relationship with other website owners in which you may both eventually benefit off.

8. You are not subtle enough. When promoting your website or blog on forums based on similar interests, you have to take care to go about it in a subtle manner or else your target audience may actually be repulsed by your tactics.

7. You did not include relevant keywords. Keywords are what will get your website or blog listed on any search result when a user types in that keyword in the browser of a search engine. Include enough of these and you are sure to get a high listing.

6. Keywords again. You need to select keywords in which you can actually compete for. There’s no point targeting the most popular keywords because chances are you will find it extremely difficult to attain a decent ranking for them. Keywords should be selected carefully, if need be, invest in programs (like Keyword Corral) that are designed to make the process much simpler and effective. This is also covered in page 42 in Building a Business NOT a Blog.

5. You rely on SEO alone to fuel your traffic flow. Explore other methods too, like social media, social book marking, participating in forums, PPC and link baiting. This brings me to my next point.

4. You are incorrectly using social media to promote your site. The key behind using mediums like Facebook and Twitter to effectively promote your website is building relationships. Neglecting this will substantially impact on your social media promotion efforts.

3. Your content is boring. If you want word of mouth promotion by visitors, you have to supply them with content that is interesting, fresh and which the visitors can talk about.

2. There re just too many pop ups. This is something I’ve noticed with many websites lately. Get rid of pop up ads, whether your site hosts them or whether you use pop ups to promote your own site.

1. You seem too desperate in your promotion. This puts potential visitors off.

If there’s anything I’ve left out which you feel should be included, I’d definitely love to hear about it.

About the Author: Check out Justin Khoury’s blog Insane Profits where he is always delivering a wealth of prominent content to webmasters seeking assistance with monetizing or managing their online properties.

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

In the previous post Planning Our Subscriber Traffic Strategy I talked about planning out our strategy for growing subscribers and today I want to talk about a fantastic method that works very well for not only growing subscribers but also getting lots of buzz and activity going about your blog.

Before I get into this however, I want to bring up an important point that I really want to set straight. Your job with your blog is not about trying to sell things to your visitors and you need to remember that. No one likes being sold to and what you need to do is look at it like a Doctor or Teacher. The good doctors and the good teachers are the ones that truly care about helping other people, they genuinely care about the people they interact with. Yes many of them… well in fact I am sure 99% of them would not be there if it was not for money but the point is they do not look at their patients and students as money. Focus on being a trustworthy resource to your site visitors that truly wants to provide value and they will trust you and come back again and again.

A Contest or Giveaway?

Contests and giveaways are very different from one another, a contest is a competition where a winner will be chosen because they have acheived the best results. Giveaways on the other hand are open to anyone that wants the participate and everyone has an equal chance of winning.

Contests (competitions) are great but I do not recommend them for a blog that is just starting out and the reason is it can limit the amount of people that may participate based on feeling unqualified to participate… but this of course is just my opinion.

What Does Your Audience Want?

I feel like I am beating this to death but this is another reason blogging about something you are passionate about it so much easier. If you do not really understand the market, if you do not understand the needs and wants and desires of the market then it is hard to understand what types of things would be of most interest to them. When having a contest/giveaway on your site you want to offer something that your audience would appreciate and you would be surpirsed to know that money is not the usual #1 choice.

Funny thing about money is that we all want it but it is not as big of an incentive as you would think. Offering $150 in cash will 90% of the time be less effective compared to a physical product of equal value. I am by know means certain as to why but my best guess is getting money is usually put directly to paying a bill or an expense of some sort and getting a prize… well that is different. For example, I would never buy a MacBook Air… yes they are cool and fun but they are just not very functional and practical but I would absolutely love to win one.

So the very first part is to understand what you are going to give away. You will need to come up with the initial prize because for a new blog the chances are you are not going to have people jumping at the opportunity to sponsor your site.

Remember that you look at the investment it is costing for the contest as advertising and you could blast through $100+ pretty darn quick with adwords, sponsored banners and numerous other strategies that would disappear as soon as the money stopped. The cool thing with contests is if you do it right the initial expense will be paid back over and over again for the long term through backlinks and subscribers.

This is why i mentioned in a previous post about understanding your resources available and you will want to be able to budget money towards this. What you need to do is figure out what you can afford and be careful not to stretch yourself thin… do not think that going into debt for a super prize will be much more effective then a less expensive prize.

Target Your Audience!

Over the past few months I have recieved a lot of sponsor requests and what I have found absolutely surprising is the markets some of these sites are in. Having a blog on gardening that is giving away a banner ad on a “make money online” blog is not what I would call ‘Targeting Your Audience’.

I think part of the problem is that people see what appears to be working on JohnCow.com and try to mimic it but fail because they are net stepping back and focusing on providing value to their readers, instead they are focused on marketing. You need to be sure that the prizes you are giving are prizes that your target audience is interested in.

The other reason for this is return on investment. Lets say you have a gardening blog that offers a grandprize of a sponsor ad on Johncow. This may be attractive to some gardeners that run a website but I would guess that 95% of the gardenign market does not own a website or need advertising.

Summary:

• 1. Decide if you want to do a contest or a giveaway

• 2. Understand what types of things your audience want (for example with An Aud Life, “Pain Relief” is what the majority of people in this market desire, so our prizes will focus on that).

• 3. Know how much you can afford to invest.

• 4. Put together a package that targets your market.

In the next post on this series I am going to talk about how to plan the criteria of your contest/giveaway so that it encourages people to spread the word and also helps promote your blog to various locations. It wil be a couple more posts about the contest side of things and then I will move on to the search engine part of promotions.

So what are your thoughts on this post… got anything to add?

• 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

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

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

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

In the previous lesson “Planning Out Your Promotion Strategy“, we decided upon our traffic goals and now it is time to lay out the where and how to achieve those goals.

Step 1: Where are we going to get the Traffic?

I think we often jump into a promotion strategy and immediately think “link building”. While that is an essential part of it, you want to be able to really understand where your traffic is coming from. This is where you need to really understand your audience and where they are. If you simply focus on getting good rankings in Google then you are going to be missing a huge part of the bigger picture. So this is where we lay out where it is we want to get traffic from.

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

These are basically the same for all our promotions but it is the next part that separates them for each different niche. You may also wonder why such a different approach compared to that of the COWpetiton blog from our eBook and the simple reason is TIME. We only had 30 days in that example to accomplish our goals and some of these above steps take a lot longer then 30 days to even get started.

Step 2: How are we going to get Traffic from those sources?

Those above 4 steps might seem really basic to you and the reason is “They Are”. Those are essentially all that we are going to focus on and if I did not really want to give you good information I could stop here but the fact is you need to go much deeper and drill down into each specific section to the “HOW”.

It is easy to say I am going to get traffic from subscribers, but if I truly do not understand or plan out how I am going to achieve that, then I may as well say I am going to pull them out of my butt.

So how do you figure out the “HOW”?

You need to clearly understand two things…

• 1. Who is your audience?
• 2. What resources do you have available?

For http://www.anaudlife.com, the target audience are people who are suffering with Rheumatoid Arthritis Symptoms or have a loved one who is suffering with it and are looking for help, answers and someone they can relate to. Audrey is not targeting “customers” at all right now and instead is looking to build relationships with her readers.

NOTE: This is an important point and I am not saying you can not monetize your blog right away but you need to be careful and not be in such a rush to make a quick buck. Often we want to start earning revenue so badly that we become “in your face” with our marketing message and completely forget about building a relationship with the reader. Now on the other end of this, their comes a time when you need to try to earn some money and do not be afraid to do it. You may have some of your readers send you hate mail but remember, you have mouths to feed and you are in this to generate revenue.

One of the strong points to the arthritis niche, and I do not want to sound bad here, is that there is no cure for this condition. Of course we pray for a cure everyday but right now there is not one and because of this, it is not a market that people do not come and go out of. Once you have arthritis, you have it for life. (Man that sounds bad to say, please do not take it that way). The point here is it can be tough to build a subscriber base if the niche is one time purchases (say a mattress or GPS device), it is not impossible but a lot harder.

As for the resources available, Audrey is in a very good position here as she is a stay at home mom, who has a husband (ME) that does this for a living. Now for those of you that are not in that boat, what you need to do is take a realistic view of your time and money situation and be honest with yourself as to how much time per day you can spend on this and how much of a monthly budget you can afford to invest in. You NEED to understand this from the beginning because it will influence the next steps dramatically.

IMPORTANT: I want to assure you that 5 years ago I was working a 8 hour day job, supporting a young family and trying to get this business started. I was living pay check to pay check and barely had any time during the day to focus on the business. It was small successes and victories that eventually lead to bigger and better things and if you are in that boat, please do not get discouraged. I understand your situation and I promise that you do not need loads of cash and tonnes of free time to get this started. What you need is a plan, commitment and dedication.

Once you clearly understand your audience and the resources you have available, the next step (which I will cover in the next post) is a continuation of the “HOW” step and we are going to list out exactly how we are going to reach our target audience with the resources we have available to get traffic from each “WHERE” source.

hmm say that three times fast!

So what are you thoughts on this post… does it make sense to you?

• 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

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

I am sorry, I meant to announce this yesterday but for those of you that have followed along the eBook, you will know about my secret weapon that i use to get my sites loads of traffic is TrafficKahuna. Well we have opened the doors to TrafficKahuna today for a limited time (about 24 hours).

If you are not sure what TrafficKahuna is, it is a system that provides extremely powerful tools for promoting your business online. If you want more targeted traffic, back links and to dominate the search engines — without maxing out your Visa card buying traffic or spending 10 hours a week doing everything by yourself — you will want to check this out.

We have a desk drawer stuffed full of success stories from TrafficKahuna customers (you can read them here http://www.traffickahuna.com/

When you consider that buying one link from an established site or blog can easily cost you $200 per
month, you will quickly realize that Traffic Kahuna is an absolute steal of a deal!

Give Traffic Kahuna a try for the next 30 days. I know you will be impressed with the results you get!

Click Here Now!

PS: Over the past few months, you have seen the quality of material I have been providing you here, I promise to not let you down with whats inside TrafficKahuna.

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

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

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

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…

[poll id="8"]

• 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

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved