I moved from working in my business to working on my business!
Jim White, Founder Savor Dallas
http://www.savordallas.com

I found a community of business leaders who make being in business a lot more fun and less lonely.
Jeannine Sandstrom,
CEO CoachWorks International, Inc.
http://www.coachworks.com

I now have a place to be open about my business success and future challenges.
Debbie Mrazek, CEO The Sales Company
Author The Field Guide to Sales
http://www.the-sales-company.com

RSP Updates on your Phone

First Name Last Name Your Mobile Number Your Mobile Carrier

By confirming my cell number, I agree that I am responsible for all of my carrier text messaging charges.

Posts Tagged ‘David Hurley’

How To Write An Original Article While Having A Coffee Break In An Hour Or Less

0 Comments

August 7, 2008

Written by David Hurley

If you are involved with an Internet marketing startup and are seeking to master the net in order to build your online business, one thing you are going to have to do is write articles – and write them good and fast.

Of course, you could search on http://Google.com or http://Elance.com for a professional copywriter writer to churn out articles for you, but if you are operating your work-from home business on a tight budget it would be a better idea to get into the habit of writing good quality articles yourself.

Although writing original articles may seem a daunting prospect at first, it is not so difficult as it seems, once you have mastered the process.

When you write an article, break the process down into a series of easily manageable writing tasks and give yourself a time limit for completing each task.

Here is a suggested method for writing a complete article in an hour without busting your gut – it includes a fifteen minute coffee break! (Once you master article writing you will be able to speed up the process considerably. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

Task One – Choose Your Topic (2 minutes)

Spend a couple of minutes brainstorming and write down anything related to your business niche that may present a problem for your target audience, or that they would benefit from knowing about. Your article will provide some advice about "how to" solve the problem, or it will show your readers "how to" benefit from the information you give them.

Task Two – Article Outline (8 minutes)

Allow yourself about five minutes to get your article outline down. It will be easier if you use a basic format like this:

Describe the problem.
Talk about how to solve the problem, dividing up this main section of your article into between three and five logical steps. Give each step a quick sub-heading. You can improve these later.
Conclusion. This is just a brief restatement of the problem and the solutions offered in sections a and b. and you could also use this section to provide a discreet link or two to helpful resources – especially to the resources that you offer on your site!

Task Three – Write Your First Draft. (20 minutes)

Give yourself a twenty minute time limit to write the first draft. You should write this first draft SWIFTLY. Write it as you would say it. Don’t use big words and long sentences. Don’t linger over the sentences trying to make them perfect – you can improve them later. Stick to the point and keep the tone natural.

Move the article forward so that the reader feels motivated to read on and discover the solution. Remember, an article should be no more than a few hundred words. We are NOT trying to write a 10,000 word academic essay!

The first paragraph requires special attention. If you are using "keywords," place them so that the sentences flow naturally. Your opening paragraph must persuade the reader that you understand exactly what the problem is and that you are the one who knows the best solution.

Many online readers simply skim-read articles to decide whether it is worth hanging around to read them. This is where your sub-headings come into the game. Try to write subheadings that will convince the reader to keep reading.

Remember to "KISS" – Keep It Short And Simple!

The conclusion is as important as the opening paragraph and it needs to end on a positive note so that your reader feels confident that your advice can be trusted.

In your conclusion you could emphasize how much time, money or effort your reader will save by following your advice. You could share a "secret" that has helped you solve the problem you are discussing. Add a link to a resource page on your website.

Task Four – Have A Cup Of Coffee! (15 minutes)

Well done! You’ve got your first draft down in just half an hour! It is time to reward yourself with a fifteen minute coffee break!

Task Five – Final Edit (10 minutes)

Now that you are refreshed, it is time to do the final edit. If you tend to write long sentences try to make them simpler and clearer. Cut out anything that sounds officious or impersonal and replace it with easy sentences that sound as if you are speaking to another person.

Make sure you have not overlooked any important advice. Remember, things that seem obvious to you may not be obvious to the reader who has less experience in dealing with the problem you are discussing.

Finally, run a grammar and spelling usng your computer, and then read it through again yourself to make sure. Check for words like "their" and "there" or "hear" and "here" and so on, words which spell-checkers fail to correct.

Task Six – Post Your Article! (2-5 minutes)

Your article is now ready for posting on your blog or in your newsletter.

If you want to submit it to article directories don’t forget to add a box at the bottom with some brief info about yourself and your business, plus a link back to your website.

You have now written and posted a good short article and had a coffee break, all within an hour!

As you repeat the process both your speed and the quality of your writing will improve, because the art of writing original articles improves with every original article you write!

David Hurley writes articles on Internet marketing strategies and publishes a free Internet marketing newsletter which is available at: Grasp-The-Nettle.com.

Tags: David Hurley, free Internet, Internet marketing startup, online, online readers, professional copywriter writer

How Good Time Management Means Good Life Management

0 Comments

August 3, 2008

Written by David Hurley

For nearly everyone, time is a scarce commodity. Yet, it is a common fallacy to suppose that when you start a home business you will suddenly have more hours in your day than you did when you worked for someone else. But once you actually get started in your own business it won’t be long before you feel as if there are not only fewer hours in a day, but that those hours seem as if they have fewer minutes in them.

Time management is not an easy skill to teach. Rather, it is a process that has to be learned through constant practice. Many tools are available to help people manage their time, but they have to take the initial step in getting started before they can make better use of the time they have. The development of time management skills will also help you balance the demands of your work and home life. This is commonly referred to as creating a work-life balance and to start you need to be aware of how closely work and home life are related, particularly for the work-at-home entrepreneur.

Do not make the mistake of separating your work and family life into two separate schedules. With the two so closely connected, you should keep all your appointments clearly written on a single calendar so that you can quickly determine whether or not you can fit other appointments into your week. The important thing is not so much the price or quality of the planner you use; the only thing that matters is that you get a planner with a calendar and use it regularly.

Consider your priorities before you fill out the calendar. Fill out the calendar for the whole week and try to allocate time for your long term quality projects as well as the immediate and pressing priorities. Try to reduce the amount of time spent on unimportant and unproductive activities. Constantly review your goals for the week, the month and the year, as well as your longer term goals, and consider how you will move towards each of them, even if only in a small way, each week. That way, you will keep your dreams and your highest aspirations alive and constantly in view. That is one of the most powerful motivators you can have – the constant reaffirmation of the goals that drive you.

However, even the best laid plans stand to be disrupted as new contingencies crop up each day, such as emergencies and unforeseen customer demands. One thing to bear in mind is that when a customer emergency comes up and is in direct conflict with a scheduled event, you will have to decide on where your priorities lie on that specific occasion. If you have an assistant to whom you can delegate the customer issue, that’s a bonus. If not, the customer may have to wait until after you have completed your scheduled task or spent quality time with your family.

When setting daily priorities, you should always begin with a block of time being set aside as contingency time. That is, a period of time set aside specifically to handle unexpected issues, even if it is as little as 15 minutes. If nothing happens, you can feel justified in rewarding yourself with an extra 15 minutes free time at the end of the day. However, if something does occur, you have some slack time in which to attempt to resolve it without throwing a spanner in the rest of the day’s schedule.

One of the best habits you can develop is to better manage your time is to establish a minimum of 10 minutes either last thing every evening or first thing every morning to review what you have to do on the coming day and try to accommodate any tasks on yesterday’s list that were not accomplished. This daily planning session can be the last thing you do at your office, or before retiring to bed, or the first thing you do when you get to your office, or something you do with your first cup of coffee. When you do it depends on the way you prefer to work, but the important thing is that you do do it! Get into the habit of reviewing your daily plans and then stick to the plan throughout the day.

About the Author

David Hurley writes articles on Internet marketing strategies and publishes a free Internet marketing newsletter which is available at: Grasp-The-Nettle.com.

Tags: assistant, author, David Hurley, entrepreneur, free Internet, planner

How To Promote and Market Your Site With Private Label Rights Articles

0 Comments

August 1, 2008

Written by David Hurley

Private label rights exist to facilitate the trade of intellectual property beyond the scope of the original writer. The original property is generally commissioned for this purpose and the writer receives a one-time fee. In exchange, the writer retains copyright but the private label rights distributor receives the right to sell or trade the private label rights content. Generally, but not always, the original buyer receives master resell rights from the author, meaning that the purchaser has the right to not only redistribute the property but to sell others the right to do the same.

What is a private label rights service and how can it best be used to help you master the net and successfully promote your business? What are the pitfalls to be avoided in using plr articles?

A plr service produces a certain number of articles and even full-length ebooks every month for its subscribers. The articles are available to all the subscribers and they have the right to publish the material on their websites or elsewhere. The idea is that plr articles enable Internet business and marketing start-ups to build content quickly and are an option that many busy website owners are keen to use to add content to their sites under their own names. Plr ebooks may also be republished under the subscribers own name and marketed as new products or offered as incentives to visitors to sign up for their newsletters.

These features are said to give plr users extra credibility and make it more likely that a visitor will return to their site, or even go so far as to buy something.

However, remember at the beginning I asked "What are the pitfalls to be avoided"?

Well, there is just one pitfall, but it is a rather LARGE one that must be negotiated before you rush off to sign up with a plr publisher and start posting articles to your site.

That there pitfall is called "duplicate content."

Always remember: Google just hates duplicate content.

If you publish an article without making any changes to it, it will be identical to numerous articles found on many other sites. Your article will therefore be rated as "duplicate content" by the search engines.

The reason for this is that search engines aim to present their users with material that is useful, unique and relevant to their search terms. So, if 100 subscribers of a plr publisher simply paste and post the same articles on their sites, search engines that lack a "duplicate content" filter would turn up 100 identical articles for their users. As someone who probably searches for stuff on search engines, you can imagine how pleased a user would be with the results of their search if the first ten pages turned up identical sites! A search engine that did not filter duplicate content would soon go out of business as searchers would avoid it like the plague.

If you plan to use plr content, first check out how many other sites are using the same article before you publish it. You can easily do that by copying a sentence from the article straight into a search engine. Place inverted commas around it to narrow the search down to that exact string only. You’ll probably discover that as many as 100 or more sites have already beaten you to it and published the article.

If, on the other hand, you find just a handful of articles, and if it is a Google search you are conducting, don’t jump to the conclusion that your article is still quite fresh and new… Look out at the bottom of the listings for Google’s duplicate content message:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

The last part of that sentence links to the full search results and you will almost certainly find many many more copies of the same article have been published.

So, is there a way to get your plr articles out there without suffering any penalties?

Yes, there is, but there are some steps you must take first. Here they are.

Make sure you write your own unique title for the article.
Write a unique opening paragraph for the article.
Sorry, but you also need to rewrite large chunks of the second, third and probably fourth paragraphs too. Actually, once you get used to the process it is not so difficult. Read a few sentences at a time, then rephrase them, turn them around and mix them up.
Write your own closing paragraph.

You will now have four to six paragraphs that are in your own words and that are therefore very unlikely to be counted as duplicate content.

Just how much of the article you rewrite is up to you. The more your rewrite and, the more changes you make, the more original the article will appear to both the search engines and your site’s visitors.

Well, you may ask, by the time I’ve done all that I could have written an original article from scratch. Of course, if you can write articles from scratch that is to be encouraged, and indeed, even if you use plr articles, you should still aim to write at least some articles entirely by yourself.

You will find that writing your own article takes longer than reworking a plr article, however. Plr articles can be rewritten in just a few minutes once you have got used to the process, so they save you a lot of writing time – and they also save you many hours of research.

Used properly, therefore, plr articles are a valuable tool in increasing both your personal productivity and your presence on the Internet.

About the Author

David Hurley writes articles on Internet marketing strategies and publishes a free Internet marketing newsletter which is available at: Grasp-The-Nettle.com.

Tags: author, David Hurley, free Internet, GOOGLE, Internet, original writer, plr publisher, Search Engine, search engines, search results, search terms, writer

The Money Is In The Follow Up Not The List

0 Comments

August 1, 2008

Written by David Hurley

I guess that most Internet marketers have heard the marketing proverb that goes, "The money is in the list."

The idea is that if you are to make money online it is no good simply putting up a site and adding a bunch of affiliate links and banner ads to it then sitting back and waiting for the cash to come rolling in.

…It isn’t going to happen.

No, the idea is that if you are going to make money online your first aim is not to sell to your visitors straight off the front page of your website but to CAPTURE your visitor’s name and, more importantly, email address. Your visitor will then be automatically placed on your auto-responder’s mailing list and will automatically start receiving your mailings, which you previously loaded into your auto-responder.

As your list grows, so will sales from the links you provide in your mailings. To add to your income, you will be advised to send out an e-mail broadcast from time to time with a special offer.

This is all well and good, up to a point. But a one off e-mail broadcast is not much different from a one off visit by a surfer to your website. Indeed, it might be less effective since the surfer quite likely initiated his own visit to your site, whereas your broadcast arrives in his inbox for him to delete or ignore without taking any further action at all if he wishes.

A one-off broadcast or a series of preloaded mailings that skip from subject to subject is therefore not the best solution no matter how big your list is.

What is needed is a concerted campaign in which an initial mailing is followed-up with two or three more messages, each one different in style or perspective, but each helping to reinforce to basic "buy now" message of the first.

It is said that 60% of sales are made not in the initial approach, but in the follow-up. Hence, my title: The money is in the FOLLOW-UP rather than in the list.

Now you might reasonably object that without a list there could be no follow-up…

…but I say unto you that with no follow-up there will be no money!

Or at least, not as much of it sloshing around your bank account as there could have been if you’d followed up your initial approach with, well, with follow-up letters.

Here’s what I suggest to improve your sales, using a Clickbank product as the example and a mini follow-up series as the model.

First, choose a Clickbank product that fits in well with your niche, then BUY it and thoroughly familiarize yourself with it.

Now, write a review of it in three parts.

In the first part you will need to focus on a strong curiosity-arousing headline to get your message opened by a reasonable percentage of your list.

Next, in the main body of the article you will want to focus on the key BIG BENEFIT of the product. Don’t waffle on about the features – focus on HOW those features will BENEFIT the reader. Be benefits focused, not product-features focused. One way to go is to write "Feature – SO – BENEFIT"

For example (to take something near to hand for someone who lives in Japan), the humble Mitsubishi pencil might not be thought to offer too many benefits, but you can always dig deep and find something:

"The Mitsubishi pencil has an eraser firmly attached to the top by a metal band [FEATURE] SO when you screw up your sketch you’ll never have to go searching around your cluttered desk for an eraser [BENEFIT]."

You know, stuff like that.

The aim of the first review should be to build rapport with the reader and introduce the major benefit from the reader’s perspective, dampen skepticism and arouse sufficient curiosity or eagerness to cause the reader to click through to the main product sales page – the one provided by the Clickbank product provider.

Now, if you get your reader that far you will have done well.

Two or three days later, follow up with your second review. This one attacks their objections and predisposes them to buy. To do that it is best to use a Question and Answer format. To anticipate the objection by asking a question about it is already to weaken it by suggestion; the suggestion being that you have already considered and dealt with it. The proof lies in the answer, so make it strong and decisive. By answering objections you predispose your reader to buy, or at least to have another look, and familiarity, one of the key tools of the follow-up method, is an important wallet-opener.

Let another couple of days go by and send out your third message about the product.

This message drives home the points made in the previous two in a series of short sharp bullet points that encourage an instant click-through and purchase.

The follow-up technique should then be reapplied to all the names on your list who actually purchased. Transfer them from the "Subscribers" list to a new list designated "Customers".

Customers who had a good experience buying from you will be much more predisposed to purchase again, so make sure you keep them updated with a fresh series of mailings and with offers that you know they will love.

So the money really is in the follow-up, and in following up on your follow-up with more products to sell off the back end of your initial offer.

About the Author

David Hurley writes articles on Internet marketing strategies and publishes a free Internet marketing newsletter which is available at: Grasp-The-Nettle.com.

Tags: author, bank account, Clickbank, David Hurley, free Internet, Internet marketers, Japan, metal band, Mitsubishi, surfer

Small Business Success | Small Business Mentoring

Around RSP

RSP Updates on your Phone

Links

Posts Tagged ‘David Hurley’

How To Write An Original Article While Having A Coffee Break In An Hour Or Less

How Good Time Management Means Good Life Management

How To Promote and Market Your Site With Private Label Rights Articles

What is a private label rights service and how can it best be used to help you master the net and successfully promote your business? What are the pitfalls to be avoided in using plr articles?

The Money Is In The Follow Up Not The List