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Authority Blogger Course members have been asking me about my statement that Authority Bloggers are best placed to ride out economic turbulence. Can I stand by this statement?

OK, there are never any guarantees, but there are several factors that make me believe this.

1. Authority means top of mind - When you become the go-to person you get the pick of opportunities, deals and customers. You know in any market there is a minority who gets the lion share, you want to be first pick rather than the end of the queue.
2. Online means low overheads - Just being online rather than off means you have potentially lower overheads, but being an Authority Blogger means you don’t need inventory, real estate, or many of the staffing costs, but can still make the same profit or more. The surprising and hidden benefit is online authority leads to more offline deals!
3. Ideal for diversified income - If you have all your profit eggs in one revenue basket then you are at risk, an Authority Blogger has multiple streams of income, from your own products and services, through to selling leads and affiliate products. That’s before traditional ProBlogger style direct income. On top of this, an Authority Blogger can keep adding income streams, that build authority further.
4. Visibility means fewer marketing costs -Do you want to be paying by the click to achieve visibility or do you want people to naturally turn to you because everybody knows you are the place to go? Search engines love an authority too, no SEO tricks necessary.
5. Community means more sustainable and scalable traffic - Build a loyal and engaged audience and it doesn’t matter what happens, they will keep returning to you. On the other hand, look at the screams of dismay every time Google shrugs! Don’t be caught out by shifts in search engine algorithms, build your own defensible and receptive audience.

Make sense?

The Biggest Difference? Serving Your Audience First

The main difference between an Authority Blogger’s site and other sites is a good blogger will treat readers as people.

That’s an important distinction.

We serve our audience first, providing useful, valuable, entertaining and engaging content is top priority.

Most sites, especially in the more technical arenas, run their sites like spreadsheets, where visitors are just a number, or a click delivery system. Think of all the sites that are no more than glorified made for adsense spam, paying a couple of dollars a post for some rehashed nonsense page-filler. Even those with good quality content tend to lose visitors as soon as they acquire them like a leaky bucket.

Why is that so important?

When you treat your readers as human beings, when you nurture them, you talk to them, you give them more of what they want and need, then you keep more of them coming back. When you treat them purely as a metric they have no reason to come back so you have to work extra hard to keep your traffic up. You want to work smart, and you want to be productive with your time. Keep people engaged by providing value, personality and community.

If you can grow and maintain an audience naturally, then you are not beholden to any one traffic generation tactic but you can take advantage of all of them, plus you are producing something that is recognized as quality so those tactics are easier!

For example search engines will be more favorable towards you, because authorities attract links, and search engines are getting better and better at recognizing quality sites. Of course, it is also easier to get social media votes when you are an authority. The less attractive your content, the more you have to pay through the nose to maintain the same level of attention.

What About Advertising?

Yes, advertising will drop in a down economy, but companies will not STOP advertising, and more will run to the internet where every dollar is accounted for.

Companies have to sell their product to survive, but might be more selective.

Consumers will not stop buying products, but they might be more price conscious, and they will gravitate towards publishers who empathize with them, who seem to understand what they want and what they like. Those sites that provide advertisers a good return on investment and customers consistently good advice will stay strong.

Be Top of the Pile

Name a list of car manufacturers. Are they all equal in your mind? What about computer brands? Portable music players? Even beans? Who gets the bulk of customers money?

In any market we have a mental ladder of brands, those at the top get all the money, and it rapidly falls off towards the bottom. Not only do those at the top get the majority of the attention and custom, they also get to charge a premium over the rest. The struggling, smaller names, get to live off the scraps that fall through the big names cracks. Your goal has to be for the world to see you in the compelling 20% rather than the me-too 80%.

So while the overall economic pie might well shrink, it will be those at the end of the queue who miss out, the first picks will always get the lions share.

Being an Authority Blogger means not just being one of many, but the main draw, the person who everyone trusts and turns to instinctively.

If you can be seen as a quality choice for customer or advertising dollars (or both), because of your expert content, your attentive, engaged audience and your good name, while keeping your overheads down, then you will ride out any road bumps in the economy.

When the economy picks up you will be stronger for it.

You have to raise the bar; be unique, focus on quality, on your audience, on your brand, and stand out.

Be the first choice, or as near as you can, and provide what people really want, then you can grow in any economy.

Join the Authority Blogger Course today and stake your claim to the top spot in your niche.

The most common question I have been sent lately about this series has been

I know I need a list but what do I send? What should I write about? How can I get people to buy?

An email list is just a delivery mechanism. What you send to people is up to you. That is both a liberating and scary thing, because it is a blank canvas, but a very public one.

Put yourself in the role of the subscriber. What do they expect from you? Why did they enter their email address? When you put your subscription form up there you are making a promise, so deliver on that promise!

First, Content

Above all else you should provide useful, valuable content. It stands to reason that if people are not gaining by being on your list then they will leave it.

Should it be unique and different to your blog content? In my case subscribers get the same content as my feed readers, but with additional downloads or emails that don’t appear anywhere else.

There is no rule that you have to follow that route necessarily, you could use your blog content but packaged differently. For example you can do a weekly roundup, or highlight the best articles from the week.

Random alerts are another solution. Michael is sending very short emails about links he has discovered.

Another popular choice is the email course or sequence, where you sign up and get several pre-written emails in a row about a certain topic, delivered by your auto responder software. Sonia has a 10 part marketing course, but you could write one on anything, how about “Ten Tasty Tips About Broccoli“?

Sell Stuff With Email

The key to selling stuff with your email list is to make what you offer also content.

Take the role of an editor, or connoisseur, you are providing your list subscribers the choicest, best, ideal selections. Even better, make the email worthwhile even should someone not buy, so everyone gains. You can introduce products as part of a tip, solution or piece of advice, or as further reading.

In general you want to be following the 80-20% rule, where 4 out of 5 emails should be pure content, and only one promotional. You can still often get away with a “footer” that links to your products and services though.

Summary

The golden rule of email marketing is to TEST - watch the reaction to everything you do:

1. Incentives
2. List building efforts
3. Frequency
4. Subject lines
5. Content
6. Offers
7. Click throughs
8. Unsubscribe reasons
9. … everything else!

Your subscribers will tell you what you get right and wrong, listen to them!

That’s the end of this series but look out for more email marketing tips right here in future.

Got any questions about email marketing? Let me know in the comments and I will do my best to answer

Authority Blogger Forum has been quietly growing, with the emphasis on “quietly” for a while, so I wanted to update you with some cool news.

The first big news is for anyone who would like to attract guest posters to their blog, or who wants to find blogs to guest post on.

Get Guest Posts or Find Blogs to Guest Post On

On the forum now are profile fields where you can add your blogs, your topics and check the box that says you are open to guest posts. You can also search to find blogs to guest post on that match your preferred topics.

As a writer, guest posting is a brilliant way to grow links, traffic, profile, a way to network and help another blogger into the bargain. For a blog, this is a source of quality, free and unique content. Win-win!

Get a Guest Post From ME!

This may or may not sway you, but by the end of October I will be back guest posting again. So if you want a guest post from me, read this again carefully - I will only be using this search form to find blogs to guest post on

Second piece of news is how you can win Authority Blogger Course membership, respect of your peers, a full month of fame and glory, and lots of gratitude from me.

Win Authority Blogger Course Membership Every Month

Each month the wise and expert commitee of forum members puts their collective brains together to select the forum member who stands out as providing a consistant and valuable contribution to the community. This person is elected Featured Blogger of the month and wins access to the Authority Blogger Course.

Couldn’t be more easy, hang out at the forum and win a cool prize!

• In August the winner was Siyab who blogs at Putting Blogs First
• Septembers winner was PetLvr who blogs on around a gazillion blogs
• As PetLvr is already a course member, I am going to have to think up an alternative prize - suggestions in the comments please?

So, want to win access to the Authority Blogger Course or something equally valuable and cool? As October has just started, now would be a good time to make yourself useful on the forum

A few years ago a book changed my thinking about business in a way only one other author has managed to do. The first of these will be familiar to a lot of you, especially my clients, it is the E-Myth series. I’m not alone in having a light bulb moment with those books. The book I am talking about here though blew me away because it made me realize what was wrong with the systems I was fighting against every day.

The book was, I think, “The Goal” by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, and the light bulb wisdom was his “Theory of Constraints“. I say “I think” because I quickly read all of his books that I could lay my hands on.

You don’t need to read up on the theory as much as I did though. In a nutshell, quoting from Wikipedia …

every organization has - at any given point in time - at least one constraint which limits the system’s performance relative to its goal

Common sense, right? Well the trick is consciously looking for the constraint, finding the real constraint, then elevating the priority of the constraint in order to fix the problem. The solution is, again, forehead-slapingly simple.

0. (Step Zero) Articulate the goal of the organization.

1. Identify the constraint (the thing that prevents the organization from obtaining more of the goal)

2. Decide how to exploit the constraint (make sure the constraint is doing things that the constraint uniquely does, and not doing things that it should not do)

3. Subordinate all other processes to above decision (align all other processes to the decision made above)

4. Elevate the constraint (if required, permanently increase capacity of the constraint; “buy more”)

5. If, as a result of these steps, the constraint has moved, return to Step 1. 

Again, online marketing consulting clients who work with me will be familiar with these steps.

Very often clients are worried about traffic, or their web design. I will sit down with them or go over the issues via the telephone and we will realize web design or traffic is not their real problem relative to their goal.

Had they just fixed the symptom they identified they would be wasting their money, because the root cause is something else entirely. This is why system thinking is so important rather than reliance on tactic-du-jour.

Rich Schefren has written a fantastic report that gets right to the heart of it, and it is free to download. Go click, download it, and read it today.

In the last article of this Email Marketing tutorial series we looked at email copywriting and the goal of each element of your emails. We also looked at the importance of your subject lines in getting your emails opened. Let’s look at this aspect in detail.

As previously discussed, your email subject line has one main priority; get the recipient to open the email.

A Word of Warning

First of all, we have to keep in mind the risk of being flagged as spam.

While there are plenty of ways you can ratchet up the impact of your subject lines, balance this impulse by remembering you want to maintain the long term value of your list.

What do spam emails look like? Just look in your spam folder. They shout, they use lots of dollar signs, excessive punctuation, and tend to be, well, needy. Having said that, you can learn a lot from the good spams, there is a reason why spam continues … it makes money, so some of this has to be down to copywriting and not just sheer quantity.

Keep your email subjects familiar and consistent also, start with the same words so the recipients recognize you. I tend to start with the name of the newsletter. You are better off starting with the name of the newsletter because a lot of email clients will chop off the words at the end for space reasons.

Now, some of you will be thinking “Hey, there is no need - the recipient gets my email address”, which is true if you send your emails from “XXX Newsletter” but a lot of people don’t have a special email account for your newsletter. For example I like people to reply to the emails I send out so I send them out from me. Also, a lot of times email software shows the email address, not a friendly name, or the recipient only looks down the subject lines. My advice, as always, is do your own testing.

Optimal Email Subject Line Lengths

“How long should my email subject line be?” is the next question we need to cover. I get asked this a lot, and my answer is always “Long enough but not too long”

The maximum subject line length will be enforced by your software, but always try to keep it below 50 characters (including punctuation and spaces), because after that you are almost guaranteed to get cropped by email clients. Personally I aim for much lower, a goal of 20-30 characters has worked well in my testing, and certainly those with below 30-40 characters perform much better than those above …

That said, I do NOT rigidly stick to this. It’s important to get your point across clearly, and if that takes a few extra characters, so be it. I refer again to my point above about long term value. Your emails have to make sense.

Writing Compelling Email Subject Lines

The trick to writing email subject lines that get your messages opened is to appeal to the recipients emotions, needs and curiosity.

Consider your own behavior. When you are going through your inbox, what are your thought processes? You open emails based on the five ‘I’s …

1. Importance - If it is work-related, or a PayPal payment, you are going to open that email smartish
2. Intrigue - Curiosity, like a good joke or riddle, causes you to open the email to see what the punch line is.
3. Interest - We all have subjects that we love to read about, so sometimes all you have to communicate is the topic
4. Involvement - Pull on the heart strings, appeal to passion, greed, narcissism or any other emotional hot button
5. Investment - Recipients will be personally or financially invested in something. Craft your subject line around it and it will get opened.

So how do you put that into practice?

• News - Tell your recipients what’s new, something that is happening or just happened that they will want to know about
• Tips - “How to” is a great way to get your email opened, providing you connect your solution to the recipients needs
• Offer - Make a compelling offer that the recipient will want to take up
• Question - Ask a question that the reader will answer “yes” to, or maybe put the subject in the form of a mystery or puzzle where the they will feel compelled to find out the answer.

You can mix and match, of course. Consider the headline “Who else wants to learn how a librarian made $1,000 in one day?”. It’s a question, a how-to, and it is news.

The Most Important Factor in Email Subject Effectiveness

What people forget, of course, is that it is not how clever the email subject is but how much it appeals to the reader. The main factor that will impact your success (or lack of) will be how well you address your target audience.

In fact, naming your target audience (”Freelancers! Now you can …”) can sometimes increase performance.

Appeal to your audiences current interests, needs and challenges and your emails will get opened. As an example, I knew my readers were interested in the Thesis theme but had a reason to resist buying, read about how my email overcame their sales objection.

It’s all about knowing your market.

Got any email copywriting tips to share? Please add your tip or link in the comments. Remember to subscribe so you don’t miss the next part of this email marketing tips series!

Sales objections do not only cost you sales, but they can increase your sales too.

This might seem paradoxical, but consider a market where you are selling the same product or a very similar product to competitors. Whoever does the best job of addressing objections can sell more.

Overcoming sales objections is essential in making sales, but it also makes you more competitive, or can even give you an entry into a market that would otherwise be closed.

As proof you can take a look at a recent article of mine where I wrote about the brilliant Thesis WordPress theme. I had no hesitation in linking to this product with an affiliate link as I stand by it 100%, and in fact now use it as the basis for all my new blog build service customers unless specifically requested otherwise.

Now there are a lot of people writing about that product, Brian does well marketing it at Copyblogger alone, without his army of followers and affiliates. But still I know a decent amount of people bought through my link.

The trick with affiliate marketing, especially when you know you are going up against established affiliates, is to find a new angle. Luckily Brian let me know of a couple of new features that gave me the hook I needed.

I knew an objection that was stopping people buying the theme was “it looks great, and will help me in the search engines, but won’t by blog just look like everyone else’s?”.

That objection, connected to the new features that allowed you to easily personalize the theme, became my hook. “You no longer have to worry about looking the same, so you can have a great looking, unique blog, and get all the other benefits too”.

Objection removed, affiliate sales created.

Talking about affiliate marketing, I will be on the “Affiliate Doctors Live” panel at the A4U Expo London in October. If you would like to go for free, Kieron is giving away two full passes worth £299 each, check it out.

You may have already spotted, I have started allowing people into my Authority Blogger Course. This is not the full launch, just a quiet opening of the doors. Pre-order customers get a special deal, I think you will like it.

• Three 30min 1:1 coaching calls
• Email support
• Private forum members area
• Early access to all the content as it is added daily
• Group conference calls, with recordings and transcripts
• The full 3 month course when it officially launches

Get the full details here.

What is the Authority Blogger Course?

The Authority Blogger Course is an online course designed to teach you how to use blogging to build an engaged, loyal audience, industry profile, more respect, and trust. You will learn everything from growing a popular and effective blog, through to creating and selling your own products and services.

Click here for more details and to sign up now.

I’m a book addict, I must buy hundreds of dollars of books each month, enough that I dare not count how much I spend at any rate. But I am a lucky guy too, I get sent great books for nothing. Yes, it is not just fancy bean bags I get sent through the post, I also get excellent reading material like these books that I want to tell you about.

Now, that first paragraph might come across as a little smug, and it might also make you a little cross that I am suggesting you buy something that I got for free. That’s why the links in this post are not affiliate links, I will not gain anything should you buy other than a warm feeling that you took my advice

Click Here to Order

This book is being heavily promoted in the internet marketing space and for good reason. It’s a fascinating look at the history of making money online and how the big stars got to where they are today. In fact, it is such a good idea for a book, I can’t believe nobody did it before.

As well as being a fantastic read, you should also take note of Joel’s promotion of the book. He is sure to get this book onto the best-sellers list if he carries on the way he is going. Buy it now and you also get special bonuses.

50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies

SEOBook must be the product I have recommended most over the years. Not just because Aaron Wall is a great guy, not just because he knows his stuff and is the “SEO’s SEO”, but because his advice works. Whole successful businesses have been built from scratch off the back of his techniques.

Now Aaron has done it again with another brilliant ebook that rather than just telling you how to perform keyword research, teaches you how to PROFIT from keywords.

If you want to know how to really rock your SEO, this ebook is for you.

How to Start a Business Website and Hire a Web Designer

Now the last book might have seemed a little advanced for anyone who has yet to build their website. Well, good news, Michael has the book for you. No doubt you realize just by browsing around your competitors there is a right way and many many wrong ways to build your first business website. In this ebook you get all the advice you need to get it done right, first time. If you are about to embark on getting your website built, this ebook could save you a fortune by showing you how to avoid getting it disastrously wrong.

Thesis was already a brilliant theme, I have to concede that. Thing is, I am one of those people who zags when he sees everyone zig. The theme was getting popular fast and I worried the blogosphere was going to look like the Thesisphere. No need to worry now, though, good news everyone!

Chris Pearson has just added the capability to easily change from your control panel

• Font selection
• Column number and size

and next week you will be able to easily change color scheme too! All without touching the code. Chris is constantly upgrading his themes and customers get those improvements completely free of charge.

Now it is not just a great theme (it always was the best for SEO and XHTML goodness), it is probably the only theme you need and it need not look like anyone else when you are done. Even better, right now you get a free magazine style theme with every Thesis purchase.

You know as one of my services I have a combined blog building and coaching package? All my blog builds from now on with be built with Chris’ Thesis and DIYThemes

Click here to grab a copy of Thesis now while the deal is still on!

Email copywriting is probably the one aspect of actually doing email marketing that people either fuss over or neglect. People either doubt their abilities in this area, don’t think about it or over estimate.

Bloggers, being writers, would expect to be ahead of the game, but sadly that is not always the case.

While a couple of years ago it was common to see newsletter writers brag that they write 50 or so articles a year, a blogger today probably writes as many in a couple of months or less. So there is a practice-makes-perfect advantage in favor of bloggers, but writing a blog post is not the same as writing an email.

Email is Personal

When you are writing an email for broadcast it is best to think of it as from you to one person. It is not a Superbowl ad, it is a letter from one individual to another.

Obviously when subscribers get the RSS feed automatically delivered as email there is not much that can be done, but as my email subscribers found out this week, when you do send out an email broadcast the tone needs to be a little different to be successful.

Always keep in mind the recipient, write it to them.

AIDA for Email Marketing

In the marketing world AIDA is an acronym used as shorthand for

• Attention - Get them to open the email
• Interest - Introduce the email well. Give them something interesting to read so they don’t hit delete right away.
• Desire - Build motivation in the body of the email
• Action - Drive the reader to click your link

Priority Number One - Email Subject Lines

The first order of business is to get the recipient to open the email. That means your email subject lines have to rock.

Yes, you need great content to your email, but it will never be seen if you don’t get that email opened.

Obviously, as we saw in the previous article in this email marketing tips series, great open rates do not necessarily translate into better sales, so we are not looking to gimmicks, or to make a sale using only 5 words, but ways to invite the recipient to read.

Interest and Desire

Rather than launching into a sales message, make the email about them.

Instead of your products and all the fantastic things you can sell, write about your list members problems and how to solve them. Your products and services can be introduced as part of that solution.

Just as the subject line is there to get the email open, your intro needs to do one job; get them to read the rest of the email!

The introduction is a landing strip that leads to the body of the email. Tell a story, capture some interest, build a mystery, whatever it takes to make your reader stop thinking about what is for lunch and take notice of what you have to say.

It does not need to be pushy, conversational works best.

If you do a good job, the next bit is easy.

Action!

Your email has a goal, and that is to get people to do something; take action.

The Action part confuses people. This might sound strange in a series about email marketing but I do NOT suggest you try to sell directly from the email message. That is asking too much. Just get them to click through to the landing page is probably sufficient. While people do manage to sell in their emails and drop people straight onto a credit card page, I think you will have much more success just getting people interested in reading more about your offer.

Action does not necessarily mean “sale”. It could be a click, or could be hitting “reply”. My email subscribers will have seen this when I wrote about what my email list is about and asked for some specific replies. That email, about 24 hours later, is looking to have about a 5% response rate, which considering people have to make an effort, write an actual reply, and send it, is doing pretty well.

Bottom Line

1. Consider what your most wanted response will be.
2. Create a compelling subject line that invites opening.
3. Write your email content to build up motivation.
4. Make your call to action clear and easy.
5. Track response.

In the next article I will give you some compelling subject line formulas that will give you the best chances of having your emails opened rather than thrown in the junk pile.

Better subscribe now so you don’t miss it!