Who am I to teach you about blogger mistakes? I’m not a big-time blogger. Neither has my blog won any award.

But I do know one thing, that is, how to use my blog as a tool to achieve my goal.

I’m telling you this because this is exactly the TOP mistake that many new bloggers make.

Many new bloggers tend to treat their blog as some kind of online holy grail, thinking that as long as they have a blog, traffic will come and they will make money.

What they should do instead is to think of blog as just another a tool. It should be part of the business, not the business.

I know this is a bit theoretical and ‘dry’, but this is an important fundamental that you must understand, if you want to follow my advice.

As you know, I get most of my writing inspiration from our members’ questions. Today’s topic on blogger mistakes is no different.

Here’s the question I received from a member:

“I respect you as a master marketer with great knowledge and insight. Could you have a quick look at my blog, http://membership-millions.com/blog/, and suggest ways to get it really going… and also to start making REAL money??” - Izzy Joseph

I’m not sure how Izzy’s blog is performing now. But if I were to be critical, here are some advice I can think of:

1) Build A Business, Not A Blog

As I said, I don’t consider myself as a blogger. My approach to blogging is from the perspective of a marketer.

To me, blog is one of my marketing tools for my business. In other words, blogging is not my business, and it should not be your business too.

Frankly, I can’t see a business in your blog. What I can see instead is you are trying to write some articles and get people to buy the Clickbank product you’re affiliated to. That’s not a business.

Your domain name is membership-millions.com. If I were you, I will turn the blog into a resource centre that teaches people how to make money from membership. You may write articles that teach people how to start a membership site, how to promote membership sites, etc. You can engage a freelancer to create a membership script to give away.

If you choose to go the membership way, everything you do should be related to membership. Your opt-in freebie should be an ebook about membership. Your articles should be about membership.

If you are afraid that you may not have enough material to write about membership, your worry is unnecessary. Everything about internet marketing can be twisted to link to membership. For example, your little twitter ebook can be renamed to “how to promote your membership with twitter”.

2) Forget About Making Money

Beggars can’t be choosers. New bloggers can’t be choosers too. For a new blog, you must focus on providing useful content and forget about making money.

At the beginning stage, you MUST establish your blog as a useful resource that people can turn to. Promoting affiliate products should be a by-the-way thing.

For example, while teaching people how to promote their membership websites, there may be some traffic tools that you can recommend.

You are more likely to make sales if you focus on providing useful advice rather than focusing on promoting the product.

3) Be Extremely Proactive In List Building

If you have been reading my blog, you should know that I advocate ‘list’ before ‘blog’.

If you haven’t started building a list, you should do it asap.

When I say building a list, I’m not talking about the opt-in form that is currently in your blog. I’m talking about a separate squeeze page that you actively advertise and promote to get people to opt-in.

You need to build your list fast so that these subscribers can become your blog readers. Else you are forever talking to dust.

Check out our list builder script in your members’ area and see how it can help you in this.

4) Practice Search Engine Optimization

Your blog may be SEO ready, but your articles are not, or at least I can’t see how a new blog can get to the top search result for a highly competitive keyword of “How To Make Money Online Fast” with some 1,390,000,000 competitions.

If you don’t understand SEO, learn it. If you have learnt it, practise it.

Build links to your blog. Research your keywords before every post. This is the minimum you should do.

You won’t see immediate effects. But in 3 to 6 months, you will reap what you sow.

These are the immediate things you as a blogger.

Moving ahead, there are tons of things you can do to keep you very busy. For example, you can sell your own product, start your own affiliate program, create a brand for yourself in your niche and a lot more.

The key message I want to put across to you is a blog is just a tool to achieve your goal. Create a game plan and see how a blog can fit into the picture instead of the other way round.

Recently I received an enquiry from one of our members asking me how to advertise her online store. I thought this is an interesting discussion and thus decide to discuss it in our blog today.

First, here’s her question:

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Hello Kenneth,

Firstly, I want to tell you that your blog is awesome. Its content is extremely rich. I can spend hours reading your posts and I learned many things with.

I’m Emilie To. I have just acquired this online store www.NiceDigitalGoods.com.

My questions are:

1) To take advantage at most your advertising system, do I write an ad for the whole shop or for a single category or for a particular product?

2) As there are 32 categories and over 380 products in the shop, how to determine in what category, on which product it is necessary to concentrate the efforts of advertising?
————————————————–

Who is your target audience?

As an advertiser or a marketer, the very first question you MUST ask yourself is “Who is your target audience?” or “Who will buy your products?”

(Take a look at her website and see what she is selling www.NiceDigitalGoods.com.)

One extremely common mistake that online store owners make is to think that their target audience is EVERYBODY.

If you are targeting everyone, you are getting no one. Trust me on this!

You mentioned that your online store has 32 categories and 380 products. But seriously, who is likely to buy a dog training ebook from your online store? Someone who wants to train his dog or someone who wants to buy the Master Resale Rights of that ebook?

From my assessment, I feel that your target audience are internet marketers looking to buy MRR (Master Resale Rights) and PLR (Private Label Rights) products for their niche websites.

If so, the answer to your first question would be:

You do not write an ad for the whole shop, single category or a particular product. Instead, you need to write an ad to target internet marketers looking for MRR and PLR products.

What is the Unique Selling Preposition of your website?

Before you start to advertise your online store, you must establish a Unique Selling Preposition (USP) for your website.

Basically, you need to ask yourself, “What’s so special about your website? Why would someone bother to pay attention to it?”

Without a refreshing and attention-grabbing USP, your online store is just another online store started by a newbie who simply install a script and load some products into it. And if I’m a visitor to such an online store, guess what I will say: “DON’T WASTE MY TIME!!”

When deciding on a USP, you need to know what is REALLY a USP. For example, a website selling MRR and PLR products is not a USP. But a website selling such products at $0.99 each may be a USP.

Just to give you some idea, a good USP will make people say: “wow, that’s a great!”.

With that, let me answer your second question:

Forget about the 32 categories and over 380 products in your online stores. You should concentrate your advertising effort is delivering the USP of your online store. You need to tell me people “hey, I’m different. Take a look at me!”

How to get people to opt-in?

I probably repeat this a hundred times, but I still need to say this again… build a list!

This is especially true if you are running an online store.

Look, you may be selling hundred and one things in your online store that people have no need at the moment. But one day, they may need one of your products.

What’s the best way to make them remember you when they need your product or service?

2 answers: Either you keep on spending money to advertise in front of them or get them into your list so that you can remind them of your existence, for free.

Which way do you prefer? The second way of course!

How to get them to opt-in is another challenge. But first, you must make list building your top priority and make sure every visitor is presented with the opt-in offer.

In my previous post, I wrote an article on Should I Start A Blog or a Website First? and some of you shared very good comments in the blog. Today I shall attempt to discuss another common question - “Should I build a list?”.

To kick start the discussion, let’s take a look at what I did when I first started online……

I built an info-rich website in an unpopular niche. As the website started getting some traffic, I prepared an email tutorial series, delivered through autoresponder, as a bait to entice visitors to opt-in to my list. Every email tutorial sends the reader back to my website to read the full tutorial that has Adsense ads in it. Within each tutorial, I also try to promote affiliate products. Other than that, I do not follow up with the list anymore.

Did I regret spending time to build the list? Not at all. Despite my lack of maintenance, it is still adding a few hundreds into my pocket every year, until today.

If you are going to spend time and money promoting a website, yet you are not building a list, you are leaving money on the table, period.

But DO NOT build a list for the sake of building one. In the past, I may simply build a list by offering a PLR or MRR ebook, thinking that I will follow up with the list in the future. I never did. Yes, I’m lazy, but I believe most of you are lazy too.

If you were to build a list, you have to know EXACTLY how you intend to monetize the list. Else, list building will really be a waste of time for you.

In my example above, I offered a free tutorial. Those who opt-in are looking forward to that tutorial. When an email tutorial comes to them, they must go online to read the tutorial. And I monetize every tutorial through Adsense and affiliate sales.

I always tell my regular advertisers that if they are spending money to advertise, they should build a list, especially when they are advertising products in the same niche. But they often tell me things like:

“Kenneth, I’m only interested in the money, not in maintaining a list.”

Building a list is one issue, maintaining the list is another.

You can build a list and get more sales out of your existing traffic without providing any form of maintenance.

For example, there are some lists whereby I simply load some standard email tutorials that come with the affiliate product I’m promoting into my autoresponder. People opt-in to get the tutorial and since every tutorial ends up promoting that product, I manage to get some extra affiliate sales. For such lists, I do not provide any form of maintenance. If they want to unsubscribe, they just have to click the unsubscribe link. But very few people will unsubscribe because after the autoresponder series, they won’t hear from me anymore.

I am not saying this is the way you should manage your list. In fact, this may be the worst list management strategy you may hear. But the worst strategy can increase your profit. Moreover, you are not doing something evil or unethical. Your subscribers get free tutorials on the subject they are interested in. You get more affiliate sales. It’s win-win.

Note: Some marketers may teach you to keep blasting offers to your list until they either buy something or unsubscribe. I don’t do that. I want to maximize my profit, but I am not that hungry.

I need to reemphasize that this is not the way you manage ALL your lists. If you are building a list in a niche that you want to establish a name in, you will have to provide lots of support and follow up emails to build relationship with the list. This kind of list will need a lot of maintenance effort, but the potential return is also much higher.

When is the right time to start building a list?

There isn’t a single answer for this.

If you are building a niche site, you may want to wait until the website starts getting consistent traffic. You won’t want to spend too much time preparing the material before the website shows any potential.

But if you are promoting some program big time, you may want to start building a list immediately.

The key is if you foresee a lot of traffic will be coming to your website, always get your opt-in form ready. You’ll want to retain and recycle that traffic instead of letting the traffic flow through your website.

Should I start a blog or website first? I believe this is a common question many newbies ask nowadays.

To answer this question, you must first ask yourself what is your objective?

Are you trying to:

- sell your own product?
- make money as an affiliate?
- make money from advertising such as Adsense?
- Or you simply want to share your knowledge with the world (and make some money in the process)?

Sell your own product….

If you are trying to sell your own product, the answer is obvious. You should first have your product website.

You should focus your initial effort in getting traffic from joint venture and advertising, and building a list. You should not waste your time blogging to thin air (assuming you are totally new and has no traffic sources).

BUT as soon as you have a substantial list, say 1000 subscribers, you can start blogging, with 2 intentions in mind: 1) to build relationship and sales, and 2) to build search engine traffic “for the future”.

Make money as an affiliate….

With so many ways to make money as an affiliate, it’s impossible for me to cover the details here. But whichever way you use, starting with a blog is definitely not the fast way and certainly not the way I would recommend.

You can start with a presell website, advertise to get targeted traffic and sales. Or you can start with a squeeze page to build a targeted list.

You should start a blog ONLY when you have a list, and you should blog with 2 intentions in mind: 1) to build relationship with your list and make more sales, and 2) to build more traffic from the search engine.

Make money from advertising such as Adsense….

How about building many blogs on different niches, optimizing them for search engine traffic and monetizing them through Adsense?

Compared to static HTML websites, blog indeed offers a better alternative because you can easily make changes to your blog through templates.

But as your empire gets bigger, you may realize that it becomes troublesome to manage so many blogs, with so many different logins, databases and templates. I believe there are software that you can use to mass manage blogs, especially Wordpress self-hosted blogs. (I don’t use such software. If you have any recommendation, feel free to share it below.)

Note: If you want to use blog for this purpose, remember to remove posting date from the template and DO NOT show any post history by date. The reason is obvious. Since you are not going to update the blog very often, disclosing the posting dates will not do you any good.

Besides static HTML website and blog, another alternative is to start with .php websites. (Note: Wordpress blog is also a PHP website, but here I’m talking about simple PHP website without the need to install or create databases.) The advantage of creating website in .php instead of .html is that you can use the PHP INCLUDE function to build simple templates for your website. If you were to make some changes, you just have to change the templates instead of altering every file. If you understand HTML, you can easily pick up simple PHP language and learn to do it.

Share your knowledge….

Lastly, if you simply want to get online and share your knowledge, I advise you to start with a content website instead of a blog.

Before you think I am anti-blogging, read my explanation below:

If you are good at scrapbooking, you probably have some fundamental skills that you want to share. It will be better if you create something like an online learning center for scrapbooking fans, with organized scrapbooking tutorials that your visitors can study.

You can still have a blog, but it’s more for current issues, latest promotions, etc. Yet again, you should always build a list if you want to start a blog.

“I am a blogger with Adsense now and I need to know what I can do in LeadsLeap to improve my traffic to my blogs to make money from the ads?” - Love in Jesus, Marina.

There are many things you can do in LeadsLeap to drive traffic to your blog. Here are some of the ways I can think of:

1) Set up your LeadsLeap ad

The easiest way to drive traffic to your blog is to set up your LeadsLeap ad. If you have an ‘okay’ written ad, it should drive some traffic to your blog. If you upgrade your account, it will drive more traffic to your blog. If you’re using a free account, make sure that you have positive credits in your account or you should build a team that you can advertise to.

2) Build a list

As a blogger, you must understand the pros and cons of a blog.

A blog is good at attracting Search Engine Traffic and building relationship with your prospects. But it is not effective in retaining traffic, especially traffic generated from advertising.

This means if you advertise your blog, chances are you are driving traffic ‘through’ your blog, i.e. the traffic just come and go.

To me, that’s a waste.

You should try to retain the traffic (a.k.a build a list) so that you can drive this traffic back to your blog again and again.

You can easily build a list with two of the tools provided in LeadsLeap:

- List Builder Script: Install this script to your server and you’re ready to build a list (as well as a full-fledged business).
- SlideSense: Add SlideSense to your blog to send your blog traffic to your opt-in offer.

3) Practice search engine optimization

If you are running a blog, but not practising search engine optimization, you are missing the greatest power of blogging.

Though LeadsLeap has YET to develop any tool to help you in this search engine optimization, I’ve written many articles in this blog to teach you how to do it. Read this blog. If other members get result after following my advice, there’s no reason why you can’t.