Blog Income Life

Blogging for Money and Loving It!

Posts Tagged social media marketing

Sold! For an Undisclosed Amount!

Dec 6

Posted by Valentina in Making Money, Social Media | 4 Comments

To blog income builders, “Sold, for an undisclosed Amount!” is a message that signals big bucks,  the exact amount of which is left to the reader’s fertile imagination, but you can bet your firstborn, the house and the dog that it’s more than a lifetime supply of peanuts for your pet monkey.  In a previous post I wrote about Danielle Friedland and how in four years, start to sell date, she sold her Celebrity Babies Blog for an “undisclosed amount”.

Yesterday, at my monthly Smart Thinking Marketing Group meeting,  I met someone who did that in what?  SIX … 6 … MONTHS! YES!  This is 6, SIX, half a year!

Gustavo Garcia and his colleagues began their project this summer … so whether that was June, July or sometime earlier, is somewhat besides the point, the point is, in something like six months, they sold their online business for an undisclosed amount.  Sweet!

with Gustavo Garcia - resized again

Gustavo  was our keynote speaker.  He told us how he had an idea that would improve efficiencies and the bottom line by the millions for the call center industry.  He tapped a few chosen former colleagues and  the Discreet Math Group was born.   What is so unique about this success story is that the marketing was entirely social media based.  They launched their product with a blog. As theirs was a business directed product, Gustavo relied heavily on LinkedIn which is the social media of choice for business and then went on to connect with Facebook and Twitter.  Here is the crazy figure that made my head swirl: in hard, actual, cash outlay, it cost them a total of $76.20!

I think that this is the penultimate in living the blog income life! Granted these gents weren’t exactly newbies.  They each pack some serious credentials behind them that go back some twenty years in internet marketing/technology, but you gotta love the speed of this success story.

Here is one other interesting fact.  Shane Morgan who owns and facilitates the Smart Thinking Marketing Group relied on social media searches to find Gustavo!

Time to head back to LinkedIn and polish up your profile and open accounts with Facebook and Twitter if you haven’t done so yet.

Here’s to your future headline:  “Sold!  For an Undisclosed Amount!”

Valentina
Lots of good cheese in social media!

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Blog Income Page One Newcomer … or is he?

Nov 6

Posted by Valentina in Blogging for Money, Making Money, Miscellaneous | No Comments

Market Samurai is my radar system for so many things including advance scouting for up and coming competitive sites for keywords that I am fighting for.  I find that the usual suspects hold sway over the top ten of most of the keywords – the weaker ones playing one-upmanship and sometimes dropping off to temporarily make room for a site that is muscling its way up to the top.

This morning when I was checking in on Blog Income there was a new interloper, yup, right up there in spot no. 5!  I blinked.  Could I just not have noticed it before?  The short domain suggested a long ago purchase, back to the days when it was still possible to buy a single word domain and this one had it in spades:  http://www.income.com/blog Everything about it was loaded.  Nah!  I would have noticed it if it was there before.  Quicker than you can say John Reese I boogied on over there.

What a surprise!

It IS John Reese!

He’s got www.income.com !  I mean, how cool is that?

For those of you who may not know of John just Google him.  He is one of those uber gurus and is a household name in any decent internet marketing household.  I met him at MC2 in San Diego this spring.

I mean, I had no idea!  I spent the best part of an hour reading his entries … interesting stuff.

Now John’s a smart cookie and I respect what he has to say … today, John not only upped my level of respect for him, but he stole my heart too! He has some interesting things to say about social media, especially about Facebook and Twitter.  I have said many a time here that while I do not dispute the importance of social media marketing, I’ll take my time getting around to it.  Whoa!  It seems that I have some commonality with a guru!  A legend no less!

John has published a free report:  Internet Marketing, 2010, The Road Ahead.  It’s a fascinating read.  Go ahead and download it, there is no opt-in, no signing for anything, just a PDF download … oh, and you’ll lean how he got to owning www.income.com

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money ….and big cheese too!

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Fork in the Road

Oct 21

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Making Money, Plan Development | 2 Comments

You have now been on the blog income journey for several months and have come to that proverbial fork in the road. Which one to take?

In yesterday’s post I talked about the next step to take in developing your own Blog Income Life.

The two options covered in that post were:

1. Take the road most traveled. Continue polishing what you have learned so far and get really good at it. While it may seem that this is a static position to take, it really is not if you rinse and repeat with a purpose and have a new goal to aspire to. Certainly you will get more attention from Google and other search engines with a result of at least some incremental traffic increase. Your expertise on your chosen topic will expand – even if you already know a lot about it, it is amazing how much more knowledgeable you will get as you do more and more research so as to meet the fresh content requirement for a robust blog.

You might even want to put up another blog in the same field, using a different niche within it. Your current blog and the new one should be complimentary but preferably not identical. An example might be if your current blog is all about canning vegetables, a complimentary blog could be making your own fruit jams or preserves. Or, you may want to take the same topic but market to a different demographic. For example if your blog is about working a business from home, stay at home moms are a different demographic than boomers facing retirement. This is a strategy that is often taken by the gurus. In fact they often have a slew of complimentary blogs.

One of our exit strategies when we first build blogs is to sell them. When you have a grouping of related blogs, all of which are enjoying traffic, ranking and revenue producing, you can bundle the lot and sell them for a premium over selling just one blog.

2.Choice two is taking the unknown, the road less traveled. If you are ready to take on a new discipline to advance your internet marketing knowledge, to apply it to your blog and see exponential traffic growth (ok, eventually), then this is where you want to go.

This is a good time to decide what you want to tackle next. Here are some considerations:

- Learn how to market smartly using social media
- Choose one social marketing membership site to become an expert at, i.e., Twitter or Facebook
- Specialize in article marketing
- Learn how to effectively market affiliate products
- Become an expert on the importance of keywords and how to best use them
- Become a master at link building

There are plenty more but by now you have some familiarity with the above. This is where I recommend you pull out your wallet and buy a course on your choice. It doesn’t have to be expensive, in fact I recommend that you do not spend more than $100, $200 at best. There are lots of good courses that are significantly less than that.

In my “based on making money” opinion, affiliate marketing is the next obvious fit. Learning how to effectively market affiliates puts bigger dollars in your pocket and it is a good method of getting noticed by the owner of the product – why is that important? It opens the door for future joint ventures and then the big bucks begin to roll in. Yup! That would be the money truck.

Tomorrow more on Affiliate Marketing.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for my big cheese!

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