Winning the Web

Bloggers, Are You Spinning Your Wheels?

Gyutae Park — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:26:49 +0000

Yesterday I came across a post on Copyblogger entitled Is Blogging Keeping You Poor? and it opened my eyes to quite a few things that bloggers often fail to realize. Are you spinning your wheels, working hard writing posts but not really getting anywhere? It could be because you’re overlooking the following 3 concepts.

Bloggers fail to grow because they’re too self-reliant
Blogging is just one piece of the money-making puzzle
Blogging requires an enormous amount of creative energy

Let me explain…

Bloggers fail to grow because they’re too self-reliant
Let’s face it. Most bloggers think they can do everything on their own - from designing, programming, writing blog posts, SEO, link building, marketing, social media, and guest posting. In fact, most blogs are one-person operations with severely limited budgets. However, assuming that you can do everything on your own is not only unreasonable (trust me, I tried many times and failed), but also ineffective. The quality of your work will suffer if you spread yourself to thin. For example, say that you want to spend 2-3 hours everyday creating amazing content. When will you find the time to market that content using social media and being active in the community? How will you guest post, build links, and develop relationships with other bloggers on such limited time? Above all else, how will you make money? We’ll get to monetization in the next bullet point, but for now look at your blog and your business and find ways you can outsource work in a way that will free up your time and resources.

Blogging is just one piece of the money-making puzzle
Be honest. How much money does your blog generate on its own? If you were to divide the total revenue from your blog by the number of hours worked, what would your hourly wage be? If your name isn’t John Chow or Darren Rowse, your rate probably isn’t very high. Even if you do earn a considerable income blogging, you could probably do a lot better with another Internet business considering the amount of effort and time you put in. The truth is that 90% of bloggers spend ridiculous amounts of time giving away free content to garner attention but receive pennies in return. This is especially true these days with advertising revenues slowing down.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. What most online publishers fail to realize is that a blog on its own is a very poor business model. Rather than being an independent business entity, a blog should be considered a marketing tool. Use your blog to create a trusted reputation, develop relationships, and prove your knowledge. Then leverage it to sell services, tools, information products, and affiliate offers. Don’t just pump out free content everyday without a strategy for proper monetization. And no, advertising revenue does not count if you want to build a viable business for yourself.

Blogging requires an enormous amount of creative energy
Finally, blogging requires a huge amount of creativity that must be maintained continuously. In order to gain attention as a blogger, you need to constantly come up with new ideas for great content and effective marketing. Not only is this extremely draining, but it’s a hard task for anyone - even the best of bloggers. Post less if you have to. Remember that quality comes before frequency. Also, you might want to consider partnering with someone to share the writing duties or creating some sort of static resource that will act as an anchor for your blog. The most important thing is to provide a constant flow of creativity coming from your blog.

If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels with your blog, ask yourself a few questions. Are you too self-reliant? Are your focusing on your blog too much without a solid business model to make money? Are you burnt out and lacking in the creativity department? If you answered yes to any of these questions, it might be time for you to take your blog back to the drawing board. Blogging may be keeping you poor.

What can you do to catapult your blogging income?

Bloggers, Are You Spinning Your Wheels?

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8 Jobs You Can Outsource Using Elance & oDesk

Gyutae Park — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:54:33 +0000

After launching the Internet Marketing Top Blogs list, I received quite a few questions about the script behind it and how I put it all together. The tool has been extremely effective in gathering exposure for Winning the Web and I envision it to be a top resource for the community for many years to come. What you may not know however, is that there’s no way I could have possibly created that list myself. I’m not much of a programmer and even if I was, I wouldn’t want to spend time away from my business to work on it. What I did was I hired an extremely competent programmer from India to take care of the grunt work for me. He has simply amazed me with his skills and work ethic and I couldn’t be happier with the results. It definitely was not cheap (I paid in the low 4 figures range) but in the long run I believe the benefits will be worth the investment.

Everyone running an online business should consider outsourcing work to third parties. Not only can these providers do a better job, but it’s also cheaper. You should be focusing on your core business, doing what you do best. Everything else can be outsourced. You need to let go if you want to scale your business and take your income to the next level.

2 of the best places to find remote contractors are Elance and oDesk. Between the two sites, there have been over $200 million in service transactions since 2005. They offer solid marketplaces that connect jobs with service providers. If you’re looking to outsource work, Elance and oDesk are must-haves. Below are some of the services available.

Web & graphic design
There are a ton of free and paid Wordpress themes that you can use for your websites, but if you decide you need your own custom design or logo, finding someone on Elance or oDesk isn’t a bad idea. The quality probably will not be as high as a dedicated web design agency, but it’s definitely a more affordable solution. Also, take a look at 99designs, a designer marketplace where you can launch logo design contests to find the best work (tip from QuadZilla of SEO Black Hat).

Programming
This is the primary reason why I use Elance and oDesk. Professionals from Russia and India are extremely skilled programmers and they’re usually willing to work for much less because their cost of living is lower. If you want to create a new tool or software application, definitely post a job at Elance or oDesk and see what the bid amounts come out to. You’d be surprised at the quality work you can get for cheap.

Multimedia
I haven’t really experimented with outsourcing multimedia, but I assume that it’d be much more difficult than programming. Unlike coding which is fairly straight forward and technical, multimedia requires a larger sense of creativity. You wouldn’t want some random guy in India recording the intro for your podcast in broken English, would you? Technical jobs like video and audio production are probably more worthwhile in this category.

Blogging / Writing / Translating
I’ve had pretty good success finding bloggers and writers using the Problogger Job Board. However, Elance and oDesk both offer similar marketplaces for services such as blogging, copywriting, translation, article writing, and business plan writing. Honestly, I don’t think you’ll find the best writing work at these marketplaces, but it is worth a shot.

Administrative support
How many hours do you waste every day checking email and taking care of administrative tasks? I’m guessing a lot. Elance was made popular by Tim Ferriss’ endorsement in his New York Times best seller The 4-Hour Workweek. In the book, Tim describes the benefits of a virtual assistant to help you take care of mundane administrative tasks. Sure you can always just do everything yourself, but think of the lost opportunities and the lost time. A VA might be just what you need to increase your productivity.

Marketing / Sales / SEO
Personally I would never outsource marketing and SEO. It’s what I’m good at and what I’d like to focus my attention on to gain a competitive advantage. However, if you’d rather leave the sales and marketing for your business to someone else, you may find some opportunities on Elance. Beware for scams though. There are many marketers out there who promise results but can’t deliver on them.

Finance
Book keeping, business plan development, tax preparation, and business analysis are just a few options in this category. You definitely want to be careful when outsourcing finance jobs. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to trust just anyone on Elance to work with my finances and my money. This is one you might want to hold close to your business.

Legal
Finally is legal service. If you’re dealing with copyright issues or patent law, it might be a good idea to hire someone to do the research for you. However, remember that it’s highly unlikely for certified lawyers to come looking for work at an online marketplace. Use with caution - there’s no replacement for a real lawyer.

Do you outsource work to various service providers via Elance and oDesk? What has your experience been like? It’s been great for me so far, but you may have a different story to tell. Leave a comment below and let us know!

8 Jobs You Can Outsource Using Elance & oDesk

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Shoemoney Tools Review - SEO, PPC & Link Building Tools

Gyutae Park — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:26:11 +0000

With the success Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney has experienced over the last couple of years, it’s no wonder that he’s recently launched a membership site that includes a suite of useful tools for SEO, PPC, and link building. Now you can get access to the private tools that Shoemoney himself has been using to make millions with his online business.

In case you’re not familiar with who Shoemoney is, he’s the guy who posted up his Adsense check for $132,994.97. He got his start in the Internet marketing world running a ringtone site called NextPimp.com and currently blogs about Internet business at Shoemoney.com. He also built up and sold a successful advertising network AuctionAds, runs a premier Internet marketing conference Elite Retreat, and is currently working on establishing Fighters.com. He’s a pretty successful guy who has a knack for making his online businesses work for him.

To be honest with you, I was a bit skeptical of Shoemoney Tools at first. I wasn’t sure if it could offer anything new or if it could live up to its monthly $99 fee. In this review, I’ll go over each of the individual components and let you know what I think based on my experiences with the site.

SEO Tools

Backlink Analyzer
As you may already know, links are pretty much the most important factor when it comes to SEO. Analyzing and attaining quality backlinks to your site is crucial and the better tools you have, the more of an advantage you’ll have in increasing your search engine rankings. The backlink analyzer is a tool that lists out every link to any site you specify including the exact link anchor text. Not only is this incredibly useful for analyzing your own link profile, but it’s also a great way to spy on your competition and to attain links from sources you might not have previously considered. Below is a screen shot of some of the link graphs for Winning the Web (although I probably shouldn’t be sharing this publicly).

Domain MarketPlace
This is an extremely interesting tool that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Basically Shoemoney has figured out a way to collect link data for expired or unregistered domains and is selling this information to members of the site. Domains that have more links (including from .gov, .mil, and .edu) are valuable because they hold more SEO potential. Shoemoney has all of this data and you can take advantage of it by buying up some nice domains that already have a good amount of link equity. The only caveat is that you don’t know the exact domain name you’re buying. You can do a search for domains that contain a specific keyword, but you’re not able to see the entire domain name until you buy.

Find Backlinks
This is another great SEO link building tool. Essentially what it does is collect the top 10 results in Google for a keyword you specify, and aggregate all of their link sources. If you want to rank for “internet marketing” for example, a good link building strategy is to attain the same links that the top ranking sites already have. This tool provides an easy method to find them.

Keyword Density Tool
The keyword density tool helps you to tweak your site for on-page SEO attributes against your top ranking competitors. For example, below is a screen shot of how Winning the Web is utilizing one of its main keywords “internet marketing”. As you can see, it shows keyword density and whether or not the sites are using the keyword in their title, meta, and header tags.

Keyword Tracker
This one is pretty basic. It keeps track of rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN for keywords that you specify for your site. Honestly, the interface for this tool isn’t great and is actually very klunky. There’s no way to import multiple keywords and websites - you have to add everything one by one. For a good ranking tool, I’d recommend using Aaron Wall’s free Rank Checker.

Most Linked
Want to know which pages on your site are linked to most? This tool will show you the top 10 most linked pages within a specified domain.

Outbound Links
This tool shows what sites are being linked to from a domain that you specify. Most tools show links TO a domain, but few show links FROM a domain. This information will come in handy when researching link targets.

Text Optimizer
This one simply measures keyword density. Nothing really worth noting here, but the team is working on expanding this tool to include more SEO on-page factors.

PPC Tools

Ad Generator
This tool takes in a keyword and will give you the ad copy that people bidding on that keyword are using in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can then experiment with the ads and see how well they are performing. It’s not recommended to blatantly copy, but using existing ads is a good starting point for your own campaigns.

Keyword Generator
The generator lists out a bunch of keyword suggestions based on what you type in. This one isn’t too special and you can probably get better results by using the Google Keyword Tool.

Keyword Grabber
This tool allows you to attain all of the keywords being bid on for a domain. Spyfu and Key Compete offer similar services and I’d be interested in finding out how they compare to Shoemoney Tools. Anyone have any ideas?

Local Keyword Generator
The local keyword generator will make your life a lot easier if you’re looking to optimize for local PPC marketing. The tool allows you to add cities and zipcodes for a surrounding area per keyword. Clickthrough rates can skyrocket just by adding a specific locations to your keywords and ad copy.

Local Trademark Bidding Tool
The local brand tool allows you to find local competitors to add to your keyword list. You simply add the keyword, location, and radius and it’ll come up with brand keywords for competitors in the area. Pretty nifty.

Link Building Tools

Related Blog Posts
This tool finds blog posts related to your niche topic. I’m not too sure what the value is though because I can easily use Google Blog Search to come up with a more comprehensive list.

The Verdict

All in all, Shoemoney Tools is a great resource for anyone serious about SEO and PPC. The tools that I find especially useful are Backlink Analyzer, Domain Marketplace, Find Backlinks, Ad Generator, and Keyword Grabber. If you’re able to find some good SEO link opportunities or new PPC keyword and ad copy ideas using the tool, you can easily make the $99 membership fee worthwhile. Give it a shot and see what you think. Most projects backed by Shoemoney tend to be a success.

Try Shoemoney Tools. What do you think?

Shoemoney Tools Review - SEO, PPC & Link Building Tools

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Here Comes Elite Retreat 2009

Gyutae Park — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:45:03 +0000

Last year (April 2008) I had the wonderful opportunity of attending Shoemoney’s Elite Retreat in San Francisco. At $5,000 a pop, Elite Retreat is considered by far one of the most expensive Internet marketing conferences on the planet. But is it worth it? An all-star cast of guys like Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, Neil Patel, and Andy Liu spill their “secrets” and definitely make it worth your while.

To be honest with you, my opinion of Elite Retreat is a bit biased because I went completely FREE of charge compliments of a contest held by Rocket Profit and John Chow. If you want to know whether or not a pass to Elite Retreat is worth $5,000, I’m probably not the guy to ask. Regardless, what I can tell you is that Elite Retreat is an amazing time of networking, learning, and reflecting on your business. I had the chance to meet some of the top Internet marketers I’ve looked up to for years and personally formulate my business plan with them one-on-one.

Each of the speakers had a unique story to tell and different pieces of advice to give. For example, we had Guy Kawasaki (venture capital and entrepreneur), Shoemoney (Internet marketing fiend), Aaron Wall (top SEO), Andy Liu (startup man), Neil Patel (social media superstar), Brian Clark (copywriting genius), and Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress founder) all share different perspectives based on their experiences. What sets Elite Retreat apart from the other conferences is its small group setting, which allows you to interact with everyone on a deeper level and share more business strategies. I had the chance to chat with Aaron Wall over a nice steak dinner. And oh yeah, Andy Liu, founder of BuddyTV was sitting to my left. If you’re interested in learning more, be sure to read my full Elite Retreat review.

Elite Retreat 2009 will be held February 18-20 2009 in San Francisco. There is limited seating and the event is expected to sell out fast so get on it soon if you want attend. Many of last year’s speakers will be present including Shoemoney, Neil Patel, and Andy Liu. Fresh faces to the conference include outspoken wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk, search expert Stephan Spencer, and Kris Jones of Pepperjam Network. Shoemoney is even planning an Elite Retreat field trip this time around - including a sweet limobus trip to some top silicon valley tech companies.

What do you think? Would you be willing to shell out $5,000 to attend Elite Retreat?

Here Comes Elite Retreat 2009

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Internet Marketing Top Blogs - Where Do You Rank?

Gyutae Park — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:08:18 +0000

Yesterday, you may have heard the buzz around the launch of Internet Marketing Top Blogs, the ultimate ranked list of the best Internet marketing blogs in the industry. The list uses a combination of 10 quality metrics that are weighted according to their importance and then combined in a way to give each blog a relative score in points (out of 1,000). IM Top Blogs uses data from Feedburner, Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Google PR, Yahoo links, StumbleUpon, delicious, outgoing links, and user votes to accurately rank each blog on the list.

I know that there are a few similar lists out there, namely the Make Money Online list from Digital Product Reporter and the Power150 from Advertising Age. Although these are fine lists, I’ve always been frustrated by that fact there isn’t a central resource that includes ALL Internet marketing blogs and takes into account a variety of different factors - not just Google PR, Alexa, and Technorati.

IM Top Blogs is my solution to that problem and I hope that you find it immensely useful in finding new blogs, monitoring the industry, and networking with the top players in the field. The goal of the list is to include and rank every blog under the Internet marketing umbrella - including categories like affiliate marketing, blogging, copywriting, Internet marketing, link building, make money online, SEO / SEM, and social media. If you see that I missed a noteworthy blog on the list (including your own), let me know and I’ll put it in.

I’m always working to improve the tool and tweak and algorithm so if you have any suggestions or feedback, simply contact me to let me know.

Winning the Web is currently ranked at #62. Where do you rank?

Internet Marketing Top Blogs - Where Do You Rank?

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Thank You October 2008 Sponsors

Gyutae Park — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:52:20 +0000

I’d like to use this post to thank all Winning the Web sponsors for the month of October. My blogging wouldn’t be possible without all of your support! If you’d like to advertise your Internet marketing-related product or service on Winning the Web, be sure to check the advertising page for the latest rates.

Thanks to the October sponsors!

Thank You October 2008 Sponsors

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What I Learned From Running the Ranksense SEO Launch Contest

Gyutae Park — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 01:47:49 +0000

The Ranksense SEO Launch Contest was a big success where everyone involved benefited in some way. The Ranksense team recruited new affiliates and made more sales, my readers won some amazing prizes (including an all-expenses paid vacation to the Dominican Republic), and I received a lot of new exposure and subscribers to Winning the Web.

Let’s break down the results of the contest…

In the time frame of the SEO Launch Contest (October 1 - November 2, 2008)…

The contest post had 1,631 total page views, which only translates to about 49 per day. Not spectacular and I’ll explain why later in this post.
I generated 37 leads and sales to the Ranksense software as an affiliate and my sub-affiliates generated 45 leads and sales. What does this mean for me? Around $200 in recurring commissions (i.e. I get paid monthly as long as my referrals continue using Ranksense). The payout isn’t as much as I expected from a big event like this, but I’ll take it.
70 new subscribers to the Winning the Web email newsletter from the contest page. Again, this is solid but isn’t great considering that my previous huge contest yielded over 500 new subscribers.

Overall, I’m satisfied with the results since running the contest literally cost me nothing. Hamlet Batista, owner of Ranksense, provided all of the awesome (and expensive) prizes and paid for all of the advertising costs - including reviews on John Chow and Shoemoney. I supported Hamlet by organizing and masterminding the contest and ensuring that it ran smoothly. I acted as an evangelist for the Ranksense product and even wrote a couple related posts that made it to the front page of Sphinn (What SEO Software Means For the SEO Community and What Does Sphinn Think About SEO Tools & Software?).

The contest was a great learning experience that helped to increase awareness for Winning the Web. Below are some of my key learnings and takeaways from the promotion.

It’s better to be known for something

Hamlet approached me in September asking me to work with him in setting up an affiliate contest for Ranksense. He liked what I did in my previous contests (especially this one) and thought I was the man to create another buzz-worthy contest. He provided the prizes and I did the rest to promote Ranksense and Winning the Web.

Apparently, it seems that I’ve developed a reputation as “the contest guy” over the past year that I’ve been blogging here. Just recently, John Motson of DNXpert and Joe Tech separately emailed me letting me know that they’re starting new contests inspired by my own efforts. I feel honored to be a contest inspiration.. Ha.

Anyway, being the contest “guru” has helped me to realize that it’s always better to be known for something than to follow everyone else and fit in. No matter how stupid or insignificant it is, it’s always more advantageous to be the best at something than to be mediocre. There’s some food for thought. We could use a circus clown blogger in our niche.. maybe a new career for someone?

Always leverage bigger companies - they’re willing to work with you

The Ranksense SEO contest goes to show that you don’t necessarily need money to run a successful contest promotion. In my case, Ranksense paid for everything - including over $14,000 in prizes and over $1,000 in advertising. Sure, I put up a lot of my own cash in previous contests, but you could easily work with larger companies with deep pockets to help you out. Companies need bloggers to generate buzz and to reach their audiences through trusted figures in the industry. They gladly pay for that and you should always look to leverage their needs for your own benefit.

Don’t be afraid to approach companies and ask them about how you can work together for mutual gain. Just look at Tyler Cruz… he’s worked with Market Leverage to run 4 contests already and the referrals earn him over $4,000 per month!

Promoting an affiliate marketing competition is hard

When I was in the planning stages of the Ranksense contest, I thought nothing of the affiliate marketing component. With the insane high-ticketed prizes, I was sure that the contest would generate buzz and go viral in the SEO and Internet marketing community. Little did I know that affiliate marketing contests are extremely difficult to promote. Why? Because no one wants to talk about the actual contest, they just want to win! The biggest problem I had in getting the word out about my contest was that everyone would talk about Ranksense (to get more referrals) but they wouldn’t talk about or promote the contest (since competition is bad). There’s no reason for people to mention it and it actually hurts their chances of winning by doing so.

The lesson I learned here is that you shouldn’t run an affiliate marketing competition of any sort unless your blog already has a large audience or unless you have a big budget devoted to advertising. The viral marketing potential is naturally low so you have to promote it through your own efforts.

Free trials by themselves aren’t enticing enough

Ranksense offers a free trial to test out the software, but it requires a credit card number to sign up for an account. Believe it or not, this was actually a large barrier to sign ups as many people didn’t want to risk getting charged for something they weren’t going to use. John Chow even offered a free review to a lucky reader who signed up under his affiliate link, but many people were still turned off by the credit card requirement.

What I learned through this observation is that free trials by themselves aren’t enticing enough to attract new customers. People aren’t going to download something for free if they aren’t really interested in it. The credit card barrier proves this point. In your own marketing efforts, remember that generating interest comes before offering any free incentives.

Contests are losing their luster

Earlier this year, I started a few contests and the reception was huge. Hundreds of people participated and the results were enormous. However, these days everyone and their mothers seem to be holding blog contests and contests have lost their luster as a result. No one wants to spend their entire week trying to win prizes from the same old contests copied on thousands of blogs.

I’m going to continue running contests here on Winning the Web - there’s no doubt about it. However, I sense that most people are tired of the same overused promotions and are looking for something new to get involved in. It takes something a lot more unique and creative to get attention these days and that’s what I’ll strive to do.

For everyone who participated, I hope you enjoyed the contest and I hope that you can take a few lessons away from it as I’ve done. Was there anything else that you learned that wasn’t mentioned in this post? I’d love to hear about. Leave a comment!

What I Learned From Running the Ranksense SEO Launch Contest

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Revolution 2 Now Live - Free Wordpress Themes

Gyutae Park — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:31:36 +0000

As I mentioned a couple weeks back, Brian Gardner of Revolution Theme is taking a new approach to his Wordpress theme business. He’s going open source. In other words, all of his amazing magazine-style themes are now available to you for FREE.

You might have noticed that Winning the Web uses a customized version of the Revolution City Theme, which is no longer available for sale. Once the old Revolution site was taken down, all of Brian’s previous themes went down with it. In a way, I’m actually glad this happened because it means that my theme is more exclusive and that less people will be using it around the web. Not bad for a $60 investment on my part.

The new Revolution themes simply look amazing. It’s actually pretty crazy that Brian is giving them away for free.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Revolution Black Canvas - This one uses Wordpress as a photo portfolio site. Great for photographers looking to showcase their work.

Revolution Lifestyle - This is actually pretty similar to the theme I’m using here at Winning the Web, but with some added features and vibrant colors.

Revolution Office - The tabbed navigation in this theme is just beautiful. Something like this would work extremely well for an article site.

Revolution TV - Wow, now you can use Wordpress as a video review site. It’s sleek and clean and like nothing I’ve ever seen before on the Wordpress platform.

As you can probably tell, I’m totally a fan of Revolution themes and plan on using them for many of my new sites. It doesn’t get any better than this. I highly recommend you check it out as well.

In case you were wondering how Brian Gardner makes money from his new business, he’s offering support memberships that go along with his free open-source themes. Benefits include unlimited theme support from the Revolution experts, customization techniques with detailed theme tutorials and professional design services.

If you’re looking to customize your Revolution theme, you should get a support membership with it. The Pro Package costs $99.95 per year and the Pro Plus Package offers the same benefits only you get lifetime access for $149.95.

Take a look at the Revolution 2 Wordpress themes.

Revolution 2 Now Live - Free Wordpress Themes

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6 Crucial Factors to Determine Whether Continuity is Right For Your Business

Gyutae Park — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:29:45 +0000

Do you have continuity in your online business? Last week I talked about why the continuity model makes sense. If you haven’t looked at it yet, now is the time. There are some big advantages of continuity that you may not have realized before. For example, did you know that with continuity you get continuous cash flow, long term profits, lower price points, more efficiency, higher conversion rates, and higher perceived value?

Sounds enticing, right?

Well, although its many benefits, it’s important to note that continuity is not for every niche or market. There are some critical factors that determine whether or not the continuity model is appropriate for a particular audience. If you’re looking to incorporate continuity into your business, be sure to look at the list below.

6 Crucial Factors - Is Continuity Right For You?

Need for ongoing support - will they be around in a few months?
First and foremost, a continuity program or membership site automatically assumes that there is a need for ongoing support. Without it, the continuity model would fail miserably in your business. What do I mean? Say for example that there are 2 membership sites - one for fixing a car engine and another for learning how to play the guitar. Which is better? In this case, learning guitar is a much better market for continuity because playing the guitar is a lifetime journey and requires ongoing support. On the other hand, fixing a car engine is a one time ordeal. If you want to create continuity, be sure that you’re working in a market that supports it.

Year-round sales - will they be interested once the season is over?
One of the main benefits of continuity is that you constantly accumulate new members and build on your current customer base. However, in order for this to happen, your business needs to support year-round sales. Seasonal markets are not conducive to continuity because they kill momentum and require that you start from scratch every new period. Continuity programs on snow sports and the summer Olympics, for example, are not optimal. Find a market where you can build upon your efforts without having to worry about seasonal factors.

Online market - can they be reached via the Internet?
This is more of an obvious factor, but does your business cater to people online? The majority of people in developed countries are connected and using the Internet on a daily basis these days. However, many continuity programs and membership sites are technology-heavy and require that users be savvy online. For example, a membership site targeting visually impaired senior citizens probably won’t see much action. Search online for related online websites, blogs, and forums to see if your target market is reachable online.

Market with passionate/desperate people - how bad do they want you?
People who join continuity programs or membership sites are usually deeply interested in the subject matter at hand. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be investing so much time and money into it. If you want to start a successful continuity program for your business, it’s important to work in a market full of these passionate and/or desperate people. Niches like fitness, self improvement, business, finance, and hobbies are lucrative for this very reason. For instance, a woman desperately trying to get into shape, a passionate musician, and a businessman trying to take his income to the next level are great candidates to join membership sites.

Unique angle or story - why should they care about you?
Everyone loves a good story - they’re fun and engaging and help people to connect on a deeper level. Continuity programs are essentially relationships with your customers and you’re much more likely to get their attention and keep them on board if you have a unique selling proposition and a story to tell. If you’re in the “make money online” niche you can describe the struggles you’ve overcome to reach the income levels you’re at today. If you’re in the fitness niche you can show your before and after photos and leverage them as living proof that your methods work. Maintaining a successful continuity program requires that you work in a market where you can tell your unique story and engage your members.

Magazines in your market - is there money to be made?
The final factor in determining whether or not your market is ripe for continuity is to look at the existing magazines in your niche. Most magazines already use the continuity model via subscriptions and the existence of trade publications usually means that there is money to be made in that market. For more info, be sure to read my article on how to use magazines as a market research tool for your sites.

So what do you think? What’s your market and how does continuity fit in? Be sure to leave a comment below.

6 Crucial Factors to Determine Whether Continuity is Right For Your Business

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Ranksense SEO Launch Contest Winners

Gyutae Park — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:57:17 +0000

After a full month of promoting the Ranksense SEO Launch Contest, it has finally come to a close. Hopefully you’ve all had a chance to try it out and optimize your sites for the search engines using the software.

The contest was a big success, attracting new customers and affiliates to the Ranksense SEO software and new subscribers to the Winning the Web newsletter. There were 50+ people who actively participated by downloading the Ranksense trial and blogging about the product.

Without further adieu, here are the winners…

Affiliate Marketing Competition

After John Chow offered his readers a chance to win a free $500 review on his blog for trying the Ranksense SEO software, he quickly led the competition with 19 referrals in a single day. However, Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips stole the win in the last week by writing a post on his popular blog and engaging in an efficient paid search campaign. Congrats Daniel! (and sorry John).

1st Place Winner: Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips - 20 referrals
An all expense paid, 7-day trip for 2 to La Romana, Dominican Republic

2nd Place Winner: John Chow of John Chow dot com - 19 referrals
Panasonic Viera 50-Inch 720p Plasma HDTV

3rd Place Winner: Donna Fontenot of SEO Scoop (6 referrals)
PlayStation 3 80 GB Metal Gear Solid 4 Pack

Random Draw

There were over 2,000 entries into the random draw portion of the contest including existing newsletter subscribers. Basically what I did was enter all participants into a spreadsheet followed by the number of entries they had. The higher the number of entries, the higher the chances of winning. Using the random number generator, here are the 2 winners I came up with…

1st Place Winner: Brian Weaver of Prof Web Marketing
Apple MacBook Air 13.3 Inch Laptop - 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive

2nd Place Winner: David Schloss of The Daily Dollar Report
Apple iPod touch 16 GB 2Gen

Congrats to all the winners! And thanks for taking part in another successful Winning the Web contest. Better luck next time for everyone else.

Ranksense SEO Launch Contest Winners

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