Here’s a checklist I’ve made for my blog marketing activities. I find it useful going through this list every day during my blogging sessions. How many of these do you do?

Checklist For Blogging

1. Write two blogs posts if possible per day. One for today’s content, and one for later on incase I have writer’s block, I’m too busy or I don’t feel like it. Always plan ahead so that your blog is updated daily.

2. Re-read everything after writing your blog. There will always be the occasional mistake but keep these to a minimum. That is why I write ahead of my schedule. For any free time you have, re-read some of the blogs you’ve written ahead of schedule for any spelling or grammar mistakes.

3. Read websites such as Technorati, Sphinn or Digg. get ideas on what to write about and put these ideas on your notepad. If a topic is hot, plan to write about it in the near future.

4. Advertise your post. After you finished posting, spend time to advertise that post. Go to social sites and talk to people, mention it on forums, email your list and comment on other people’s blogs.

5. Make sure you commented on someone’s blog today. This drives targeted traffic to your blog and also builds relationships with your other peers.

6. Have you put any anchor text on your postings? Make sure you have at least one. Maybe pointing to your internal pages or to other blogs. Don’t worry about giving links to other quality blogs.

7. See if you can fit a joke into your post. No one likes reading boring crap. Fitting a joke in your post will raise interest.

8. Have you tagged your posts? Make sure you enter 2-3 keyword phrases for the tags. Places like Technorati will look at these tags to make their judgement on relevancy to topics.

9. Check the search engines to see if your post is indexed. If a particular has appeared to rank very well in the search engines find out why.

10. Look at your post. Does the appearance look boring? If so add some pictures to it. Or break it into smaller paragraphs. Add some sub heading to it. No one likes to read a blog like a novel on the internet.

Here is a post I did last month on Blogs that are worth bookmarking. Read and study. Learn from people who are succeeding.

http://trafficbeast.com/internet-marketing/blogs-worth-bookmarking/

Is the Money Really in the List?

One of the most popular phrases that is known among Internet marketers is that the money is in the list. What this is basically trying to tell you is that the money behind your Internet marketing efforts will really depend on the list of email addresses that you acquire.

By having these emails, you basically have permission to market to and contact them on a regular basis. Many people have received great riches by doing this the proper way but is the money actually in the list itself?

In order to find out if the money is in the list, you first need to identify what the list actually is. The email addresses that you have acquired are not simply letters that were typed out into your form, each of those email addresses identifies an individual that is sitting on the other side of the computer screen. You need to view your list as a group of individuals and not simply as a group of email addresses that you send out your marketing messages to on a regular basis. Once you have this concept in your mind, it will be much easier for you to maximize the profits that come out of your list.

You see, the money is not actually in the list but it is in the relationship that you build with the individuals that are on your list. If you have a large following, it is not possible for you to know each of them as an individual person but you need to email your entire list as if you were emailing individuals, not a group. All of us like to have our individuality intact and if you can provide this to your group of contacts, you will be providing them with the service that they will enjoy along with the information that you are giving them.

What you actually end up with is a group of people who not only like the information that you are giving, they look forward to the next time you contact them. If you continue to give them good information and treat them as an individual, when you do send out a marketing message from time to time or when you weave in your affiliate links, they will be less likely to ignore them as just another marketing message. So the money is in the list, it is just in the individuals behind the list and not in the list itself.

Remember all people care about are themselves. So speak to them individually and make sure they benefit by reading your emails or any other communication.

Here are some posts I found which you’ll find useful on building your list:

Make Money Online By Building A Profitable Massive List – It is basically teaching you from scratch about how to build your list in the Internet. List building is one of the important things to do as an Internet marketer. You need to consistently build a database of people who are interested …

Robin Hood & List Building – Building a List with “Mr. Nuggets” – Hey readers! I swear, you probably think I’ve lost my mind with some of my headlines. But, I’ll be blunt and to…

Article Marketing – How I Have Built a List of 1000 Subscribers in … – I have been online building a list of internet marketers for less than 3 months and have built a list of over 1000 current subscribers (out of 1282) total subscribers. About 80% of my subscribers have come from reading an article of …

Utilizing the secrets of optin-list building – An opt-in list is a directory of email address you can send to those mails to. Though it seems to be easy to find email addresses, if you are talking thousands in numbers, it is going to be hard. Besides, you have to determine the …

Increase web traffic to your blogs using a new software from Jack Humphrey of Authority Site Center. The latest software, TrackBoost will help you save time in making trackbacks.

Trackbacks are pings you make to a blogger’s website to tell them that you have talked and linked to them on your website. Normally, bloggers will approve these trackbacks and they will appear in their blogs’ comments section. This is an excellent way of building backlinks to your blogs.

The problem with trackbacks is that it takes a long time to do. Not many bloggers do this because they don’t have enough time and it’s a tedious chore.

TrackBoost was designed to save you time in making trackbacks and increase web traffic to your blogs. TrackBoost enables you to select the keywords you want and then the software brings up a list of blogs that have those keywords you can post trackbacks to. After reading the posts, you can select the ones you want to post a trackback to.

Once you’ve selected the related blog posts, you can paste the links on your blog and then publish it. Next, those related sites will receive a message telling them that someone has commented and linked to their blog. It’s very likely that they will approve of these comments.

Another feature of TrackBoost is that the software can monitor who has approved the comment and linked back to you.

This is a very powerful software which enables you to get backlinks from blogs on your niche. It will save you hours of time, improve your search engine rankings and receive targeted web traffic from other blogs.

The price of the software is $197 which is cheap considering it will increase web traffic to your website in the short term and long term.
You can see videos of the software at http://www.trackboost.com

However, if you join Jack’s Authority Site Center you’ll receive this software as a member. As I mentioned yesterday in my post, being a member of Authority Site Center you’ll get a blog built and hosted for you and training on how to publish blogs to bring targeted traffic. Read my initial review post of Authority Site Center here:

http://trafficbeast.com/internet-marketing/website-offline-for-a-week/

If you’re interested in TrackBoost, I would advise you to join Authority Site Center instead as it is cheaper and you get much, much value for the money you spend.

You can check out the Authority Site Center here http://www.trafficbeast.com/go/asc.php


It’s been a week since I’ve posted to Traffic Beast. It’s been offline for a week and it’s been a painful week because I was getting visitors to my website during this time. That means loss of subscribers and loss of sales.

However I took the risk and went ahead with the upgrade. Yes, I’ve upgraded my blog by joining Jack Humphrey’s Authority Site Center. It’s a membership site where there’s tons and tons of training on how to publish your blog and get targeted traffic.

I’ve been getting quite a lot of traffic to my blog on my own but the feedback on Authority Site Center was very very good. It was hard to resist. It deals a lot with Social Marketing which I haven’t done much yet.

Internet marketing is a life long study. Never assume that you know enough. This is how I do my business and also how I live my life. There’s always plenty of things you don’t know about which helps your business so it’s up to you to learn and apply it.

I’m going to carry out the 60 day marketing plan laid out in the Authority Site Center’s membership. Of course, I’ll also be continuing to market with my own methods as well and comparing the results. The testimonials of members that have received thousands of hits per month by following the training laid out is very inspirational.

So why was my website down for a week?

One of the benefits you get from the Authority Site Center membership is a blog built by them. The blog contains a personalized graphic header, a customized blog, and lots of plugins uploaded to help you get those visitors and make your blog more advanced.

So far, I’m pretty pleased with the training and the blog. The training is a very detailed step by step guide which includes videos as well. The training will take me months to devour. I’m pretty impressed with the blog as well because there were lots of plugins that I haven’t heard of and I can see that they are very useful.

However, there are 2 complaints I have with the Authority Site Center. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m not too pleased about the following:

1. There no clear instructions on what to do if you had an existing blog and you want it transferred to the Authority Site Center. There were some answers in the forum and in the FAQ but it was not enough. I had to email the support via the help desk and get a conclusion.

Your website will take 3 business days to complete after you have changed your nameservers pointing to the Authority Site Center. In my case it took 7 days including the weekends. But the problem is there was no mention that your exisiting website will be down.

I would have been happier if they offered a service that will build the blog for you first and then when it’s complete, you can copy your existing posts to the new blog and then change your domain’s nameserver. This will mean a downtime of the most 24 hours.

I mentioned this to the support but they said they can do that but for a fee. I didn’t know how much the fee was but I decided to go ahead since I can work on other things during this time.

2. I was not pleased with the graphic header for my blog. As you can see I still use the Traffic Beast header for my blog that was created by my friend Anthony Fesalbon of www.HyperCover.com

Here is a link to the header which Authority Site Center created for me. I preferred Anthony’s header so I didn’t make a fuss.

http://www.trafficbeast.com/images/logo.png

However, reading the Authority Site Center’s forum, it seems nearly everyone loves their personalized graphic header that was created for them. Hmmm…so I guess it’s probably just me then. I have been known to be very fussy

Summary

I’ve joined a lot of membership programs during the past 4 years. The Authority Site Center certainly kicks butt. It is very well organized and I’m amazed at the amount of training they provide.

For beginners who are serious on starting their own blogs I would recommend joining the membership. You’ll learn a lot from the training and also get to meet some very nice members in the forum.

However, if you don’t have time to work on your blog then I suggest you DO NOT join this program. It isn’t advertised as a quick solution to get targeted traffic and being an authority in your niche. It requires a serious amount of hard work. I would hope that you have 3 hours to spare per day to work on just this program.

Nevertheless, the proof is in the pudding as they say. I’m going through the 60 day marketing plan and will update this blog on the progress of whether it can increase web traffic to my site.

You can read the salesletter of the Authority Site Center here

http://www.trafficbeast.com/go/asc.php