Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you guys and I haven’t gone into blogging retirement again. It’s just that I went on a week long vacation this month and I’ve been working on a ton of different projects, fueled by my new enthusiasm for business, while maintaining the same level of social life I’ve become accustomed to.

I’m really starting to enjoy the writing process though. I find myself typing up two thousand word essays with ease these days. Almost guilty again, good thing I kept this one just under

On to the Article…

Anyways, I had an amusing realization the other day that has completely sky rocked the level of productivity in my business. It’s funny because it is something so simple, yet it has lifted an incredible amount stress and doubt off my shoulders in regards to my business.

Wordpress is awesome. It allows you to set up the infrastructure for an amazing site in literally 30 minutes. This leaves you with plenty of time to focus on the content. But it does have a perceived (at least to me; in the past) downside: it is a blogging platform.

Now, I know modifying Wordpress to use it as a content management system for a “non-blog” website is nothing new, but this takes considerably more time and more planning to execute properly.

In the beginning stages of your site, time should be spent on making it remarkable (content) rather than burying yourself in coding, which can and will lead to procrastination. Likewise, major planning is best done after you have some material and feedback to work with.

Source of Anxiety for Me

I get ideas in my head for websites and businesses all the time. Friends pitch ideas to me all the time as well. And I genuinely want to work on a lot of them. You could say I have “entrepreneur ADD,” and it doesn’t mix well with blogging.

When you have a blog and an audience, you ideally should have a consistent stream of articles being posted (sorry, not going to happen on this blog anymore). They shouldn’t be posted at random intervals, too far apart, or too close together. But a new blog isn’t like an established blog.

A new blog has no audience; a fact we’re going to use to our “advantage”

To begin having people see your site as a legitimate player in your niche, you need unique and remarkable content, and you need a lot of it. But it’s hard to crank that stuff out day after day.

And I don’t know about you, but when I write something good I want to post it immediately. I’m proud of it and excited about posting it. But everyone knows that to have consistent content, and save your sanity, your need to utilize scheduled posting. Don’t flood your readers with posts and don’t put yourself in a pinch of having no choice but to write a good article before the night is up.

This is no fun when you’re starting a new site and want to fill it up with your brilliant ideas. For me, this stifles my drive to create that content since I know I will have to wait to publish it.

So What’s the Solution Already?

Remember, I told you this is very simple and I find it funny that I never though of it before. You ready…? Remove the date on your content!

Are you upset that you read that huge into and I have the audacity to give you such a basic and mundane tip? Nah, you probably just skipped to this part.

I think the intro sets the frame nicely though so make sure you read it and then stick with me while I’ll explain how this has benefited my web property development efforts and how it can benefit yours as well.

For me, having the date on my post caused a variety of negative reactions that just spiraled out of control…

Dismissing Ideas that Could Turn Out Successful

When I got an idea for a new site, I told myself that I was already spread too thin and there would be no time for me to work on it (and post articles) consistently. With the dates taken off and the connotation moved from “blog” to “content site,” I am now free to write on any topic I am interested in, precisely when I am interested in it.

Like I mentioned in my last post about my new business model, I am limiting myself to working in niches that I actively participate in normally. But I’m not interested in all of them every single day. I go back and forth depending on what my mood is at the time and with what interests I develop temporary boredom for. Just like business, I have “hobby ADD” as well.

(I don’t have real ADD, I’m just very impulsive when it comes to what I am interested in. I am someone who wants to learn and do almost everything.)

I used to only wrote posts when they needed to be published. But this wasn’t always when I wanted to be writing posts. Writing them ahead of time was much less gratifying though because I wanted to publish my work right away.

That led to not writing at all. When the time came that I needed to write an article, I wasn’t in the mood, so I didn’t do it. Had I sat down and forced myself to write it, I doubt the resulting work would’ve been very good.

So now, instead of forcing myself to write, and learning to hate a topic, I write when I am feeling the most passionate. You’d be surprised at how fun writing is and at how good you can write when you have passion.

Quitting Instead of Persisting

Many of my websites were given up on too quickly. If I failed at adhering to a consistent posting schedule, I deemed the site a failure and trashed it. It’s actually probably a mixture of thinking the site failed and just flat out hating writing about the topic for the reasons mentioned above.

Another reason I gave up on them was because they weren’t taking off according to my expectations. I wanted to promote them heavily, but I didn’t believe in them because there wasn’t enough content. And if I don’t believe in my website, how am I going to “sell” it to someone else and get a mention? It’s not gonna happen.

By removing dates, you can view your site as a repository of great articles, take your time to write great content, and when you feel confident that it’s a valuable site, start promoting and SEOing it. When you believe in your site, and have a lot of useful content to promote, all kinds of promotion avenues open up… and they actually work. People like to share remarkable content.

Obsessing Over Creating Perfect Articles

I had a notion that blog posts were permanent and set in stone. Again, this is how I felt, it is not the absolute truth, but when there is a date on a piece of content, I felt like once I published it, it was done. What a stupid misconception. Some of the best sites on the web are always reworking their pages to make them better and better over time. So why couldn’t I do that with my Wordpress “posts”?

This caused me to hesitate on writing because I wanted to make the article perfect. Instead, now I just focus on making the article awesome, but not perfect, because I know I can change it later on.

Take the date off and it just becomes a page; a page that can continually be improved.

Wanting to Say Everything Before It’s Too Late

Unfortunately, dates make old content lose value, even if the ideas are still relevant. This is just a negative presupposition that you cannot get away from when your content is dated. People are going to have a different opinion about it if they know it’s two years old than they would if they didn’t.

Sure, they can still see dates in the comments (this could be removed too if you wanted to take it to the extreme) but most people will read the comments after the article, and therefore will already have developed their impression on it independent of the date.

By removing the fear of having your great content become dated, you can start a website today and work on it as a side project for a year or two before it is filled with immense value. No one will know it’s a site that was updated 10 times in February, 0 times in March, 30 times in April, and 3 times in May.

Ok, Time for an Action Plan

In my last post I wrote that you must start with only one site on a topic you are interested in. I was worried about being spread too thin. But here I’m going to retract that statement and recommend something completely different in this action plan:

1. Register domains and set up Wordpress for every single topic you are passionate about. Don’t spend time worrying about plug-ins and themes, just get a platform out there for writing about your interested whenever you get the itch.
2. Remove all references to date within your sites. You can keep the comment dates if you want, but all other dates should be hidden. This includes your monthly archives.
3. Write undeniably remarkable content. Don’t write for the sake of making a new post. There’s no pressure to produce content, so only write when you have something worthwhile to say. This will make your site much more valuable than most in your niche.
4. Don’t worry about getting visitors and don’t concern yourself with converting them to readers. Write as though you have an audience even when you don’t, do minor promotion, and people will find/follow you.
5. Develop a growth strategy, but only once you are proud of your site, and you feel that it has over-the-top value to your target audience. Consider incorporating some of the ideas from my new business model.

Sustaining the Awesomeness

You’ll eventually want to produce constant content in order to super charge growth and keep people coming back. But I’m betting that this low pressure strategy will have been fabulously enjoyable to you, so don’t f**k with it.

You will continue to post when you are passionate about the topic. Hire writers to do the consistent posting. And since you are proud of this site, don’t hire any writer who will cheapen it. Screen them carefully and pay them well. They should be writing content that you are glad to have on your site.

At this point, if you do have the content coming in consistently, you can bring the dates back on all the posts, start showing them on newer posts only, or keep them off indefinitely. You can even modify the posting dates on your old articles so that it appears you have been posting consistently since inception.

In closing, go set up those sites for your hobbies and be amazed at how much you will enjoy writing on your own terms!

… and now I’m off to make this website less date dependent.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m going to share the new plan I’ve been working on for my business. It’s not anything new and groundbreaking though, it’s pretty fundamental actually. I’m just now getting it started as I’ve noticed some joy in doing something different and working on things of value.

The experience I’ve gained and lessons I’ve learned over the past 6 or so years in affiliate marketing are very valuable, and I’m pretty financially stable thanks to it, but I feel I could have done so much more. Oh well, there’s always plenty of time to work

Becoming Discouraged with My Affiliate Marketing

I started trying to come up with a new business direction after feeling very discouraged with affiliate marketing. For one, I was at the mercy of Google because it was such an abundant traffic source that I was good at taking advantage of. The problem with this, however, is that recently (as you most likely know) they will not let affiliates play on AdWords easily like they used to.

I just couldn’t bring myself to spend the time and money building a marketing campaign for AdWords (looking back, that was a stupid thing to do, build it just for AdWords) when I had been there five times before and, like clockwork, they all got slapped with low quality scores and traffic came to a halt.

So I got to thinking, “okay, I’ll diversify my traffic sources and make something of real quality so that I can still run it on Google.” But then I thought, “well, affiliate marketing and quality is pretty much an oxymoron, and the legitimate niches just aren’t as easy.”

There have been a few affiliate programs that I’m proud to have worked with. I’ve gladly used them myself and recommended them to friends and family. They consist of various physical goods, online game rentals, online movie rentals, web hosting, internet faxing, online dating, and VoIP, to name a few.

But the thing is, of all the offers I have promoted, most of them were, in my opinion, not worth their cost (to the consumer). Here are a few of my old niches and how I feel about them:

• Free downloads: Smileys, cursors, screensavers, games, layouts, etc… The user is subjected to Ad-ware.
• Mobile subscriptions: Ringtones, mobile dating, horoscopes, etc… The user gets “hidden” charges on their monthly bill.
• Email and zip submits: Best case, they get spam email. Worst case, the user is stupid enough to try out all the offers and they have one hell of a time cancelling them after getting charged for things they didn’t realize.
• Paid software: P2P downloading, driver updaters, registry cleaners, anti-virus, etc… seriously, these programs aren’t that good, there are much better, free alternatives.

I have never promoted any of the rebill offers, and I’m not saying I would be above it, but come on, most of them undoubtedly offer negative value to the user. I’m not here to protect consumers, I enjoy making money off of general stupidity and I’ve done it plenty, I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s possible to build a long term business on something that isn’t offering a win-win situation.

If I’m convincing my visitors to purchase or sign up for shitty products, they aren’t going to be happy with me and aren’t going to want to build a relationship. So that makes each and every promotion very short term. Granted, you can make enough money short term to last for years to come, but that eventually gets boring (for me anyways).

What to Promote Then?

One type of affiliate offer that I left out of the that list was information products. Aside from offers like the legitimate ones mentioned above, I like promoting these because even though the information that they contain is available elsewhere, it isn’t available as conveniently. I am very good at researching and learning what I want to on my own and even I have been happy with more than a handful of information products that I’ve purchased.

I used to bring in quite a bit of revenues promoting these things with the standard single offer presell or multiple offer review page (all fake of course). But then the FTC started hating on these types of promotions and AdWords pretty much slapped all of them. So then how are we supposed to promote information products?

We could make a website around that topic! But wait… the information that is for sale isn’t really that great, so how do we publish a good website without giving away what is in the product? We can’t.

And this is where I started to go in circles, moving back to promoting shady offers wherever they were allowed and/or continually trying things that I knew didn’t work anymore. But I thought there had to be a way to make it legit, and then I realized something so universally known and so simple…

People Love to Pay for Convenience.

You already knew that though, right? So did I, but I didn’t apply it correctly to my business. I was trying to market with low quality content in fear that I would give away the secret and my visitors wouldn’t want to pay for anything. My new plan is to simply give away great value for free, but also great value and convenience, from a trusted source, for a price.

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you can get started in a niche without spending the time to create your own product. Eventually, you should create your own products and have your own affiliates, but it is much easier to learn a market by selling preexisting things.

So what I am now doing, in the following order, is this:

1. Choose a Niche

This absolutely must be something you are interested in. When doing bullshit affiliate marketing, you can enter as many niches as you want because you are just making things up. To provide real value though, you must either have a lot of cash to pay other people who are interested in the topic, or be interested in it yourself.

Deciding if the demand/competition level is acceptable is a matter of personal preference. I am currently only interested in very high demand markets. I don’t want to spend my time on something unless it has the potential to eventually bring in over $1000 per day profit. Those new to the game might feel more comfortable starting in a less competitive market.

Unless you have already succeeded more than once, have a process developed, and are doing some serious outsourcing, you have to stick to one niche at a time here.

2. Register a Brandable Domain Name

Forget about putting keywords in your domain name, you want something that is brandable and professional. A really good name will appear much more trustworthy and open up plenty of areas for expansion.

3. Write Extremely Valuable Free Content

The purpose of this is to build your brand’s image, get visitors to come back for more, and attract massive amounts of free traffic. Oh, and of course to provide tons of real value to your readers.

Don’t worry about giving away the “secret” that is in what you are trying to sell. Remember that people will still buy your products even if they have read the information for free, you just need to find a way to sell the convenience (I’ll make another article in the future about ways I’ve come up with).

Create a blog (or whatever publishing medium you choose) with awesome content that will get spread around, linked to, and picked up on social media. Make the content extraordinary and have an angle that is unique from your competitors.

4. Create a Very Valuable Free Product

This is what you are going to “sell” to your paid visitors. It must really be something good though. For the first of these sites I’m making, I put together a huge audio course. I could easily charge for it by todays ClickBank standards, but I’m going to give it away for free.

It was so easy to make too. I recorded the entire thing on my iPhone while driving. Not an entire driving session, but if I had to run to the store, I would make a new section to my course. Then I spent a couple hours editing it with Audacity to make it more professional.

Now that I have everything in audio form (which has more perceived value than text), I can turn it into a bonus eBook and include additional points (or notes, or whatever) to have an even more valuable product.

I’m currently working on a few different landing pages to sell this free product. One for anything goes advertising that is a very hard sell and one that should (in combination with the blog) appease picky advertising platforms like AdWords… more on this in a future post.

5. Build a Client List

How many times have you heard the value in having subscribers? Email marketing, RSS readers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans… that’s where the money and longevity is at.

You’re client list is going to consist of all these services that help you stay connected to people. And you are going to collect them in one of two ways:

1. Providing amazing content that they do not want to miss
2. Selling your valuable free product for the low low price of their permission for you to contact them

Once you have an audience (no matter how big or small) that you may contact at will, you can start making some money…

6. Sell Products as an Affiliate

There’s no point in spending thousands of dollars and countless hours creating the best products (yes, you should want to make the best, remember we are offering true value) in your niche before you really learn it’s inner workings. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in.

Do some research and you will be surprised at how many different affiliate programs are either directly related to your niche or that most of your audience would also be interested in. Then promote them to your existing audience (also for a future article will be how to do this, it’s too much to add into this little section)

7. Develop Your Own Products

Here’s where the serious money is made. Be sure that you’re offering a ton of value. You can sell anything from a $7 eBook, to an $80 audio course, to a $200 DVD course, to a $500 online boot camp, to a $2000 live seminar. You can create physical products, software products, paid memberships. You can have your own affiliate program. The possibilities are endless, and it’s totally up to you.

One of the best things about being able to contact your subscribers is that you can ask them what it is they want (maybe not so directly though), and then deliver just that.

How’s That Sound?

So there you have it. That’s basically my new online business strategy for 2010. It really goes back to the basics and away from making a quick buck while still implementing much of affiliate marketing’s unique ability to make that quick buck. It’s a mix up of  true website development, affiliate marketing, email marketing, branding, and product creation.

Let me know what you think of these ideas, any questions you have, and especially any feedback. I’m going to use everything written here as a main source of informational posts on this blog, I’ll go deeper into many of my ideas and provide real case studies and insights as my current projects progress.

As you can see, my last post was July 28th about trying Twitter (and the last post before that was from 2007)… well two things I’d like to say about that post…

First of all, I’m still not really feeling Twitter. I have the account for following other people but don’t post on it. I just don’t see the value in updating everyone with my current status. Any advice or suggestions that could help me see how to enjoy it?

Second, something terrible happened just a couple days after making that post, I was one of 3 passengers in a car accident and one of my closest friends passed away. The rest of us are all healed up now, but needless to say, it had an effect on my view of life and my desire to work (which was already low to begin with).

Lately I’ve been feeling like I want to get back into marketing though, but do bigger things besides just being an affiliate. I’m beginning to make businesses that actually have tangible value (products, customer lists, branding, etc). I’m experimenting with more fundamental marketing tactics and with diverse traffic sources. The case studies that I posted on here before were fun, so I’m gonna do more write ups of what I’m doing now.

This blog is also gonna get slightly more personal with added randomness to the topics… and there will be no posting schedule.

Oh, I also have a pretty bad ass tracking software that I’ve been programming and using in-house since April ‘08. Every time I fire it up to make marketing decisions, it gets me pumped to start more campaigns. I’m probably going to be releasing it free as open source, but it’s no where near polished for public use yet. Anyone interested in beta testing?

So that’s about it for my “coming out of retirement” post. Sometime this week I’m going to put a post up talking about my current business plan. It uses a lot of fundamentally sound marketing techniques, mixes in affiliate marketing, has it’s own products, has future plans, and best of all, has real value.

Leave me a comment and let me know you’re still reading

Yeah, I quit blogging. I found myself spending way too much time coming up with article ideas and then actually writing them. Instead, I chose to do things that I enjoyed such as making more money through marketing and building a much more entertaining social life.

I use my iPhone a lot though when I am driving around or sitting around the house (I bought a nice, large foreclosure a few months ago; maybe I’ll post pictures when I’m done with the remodeling). So, as of yesterday, I have decided to try out Twitter since I can make short status updates whenever I am bored. I’m using it purely for entertainment, for the purpose of getting into conversations with people.

If you want to follow me, here is my profile: http://www.twitter.com/derekbeau

I don’t know the perception of all my readers, but I’ve received many compliments that my writing style is easy to read, understand, and digest. Throughout grade school and high school, I never really had the impeccable writing skills of a novelist, they were just slightly above average. This, however, turned out to be a good thing when I started learning about business writing.

Using long paragraphs and big words doesn’t really work in business conversation, and the same can be said for blogging. Most of your readers aren’t sitting down next to a fireplace with a cup of coffee to read your words as if they were a novel. Instead, they are trying to extract the usable information from what you have to say.

Writing and developing a reader friendly blog does not need to be a painful task. In fact, the guidelines are simple and actually make blogging easier than most other formats of writing if they’re just practiced. Unfortunately, sometimes we all get carried away and forget how simple it should be. This article will give you some tips to get back in touch with the secrets of a reader friendly blog.

1. Create Catchy Headlines – The first thing a reader sees, often even before they make the decision to click that mouse button and proceed to your blog, is the headline. Write them descriptively, but keep them just alluring enough to draw the reader’s curiosity and the click that follows.
2. Explain Above the Fold – Tell your readers right upfront what you plan to elaborate upon in the rest of the post. Don’t make them have to scroll down just to figure out what they’re going to read.
3. Save The Eyes – Our eyes are sensitive, especially when reading from an electronic screen. Keep your blog eye friendly by using a large enough font (or at least one that the reader can scale up), proper contrast, and lots of white space – no more than 4 brief sentences per paragraph.
4. Establish Scannablity – Help guide readers to what they really want to see. Use bold headlines to break up a post at the transition points throughout. Think of this tactic like an ongoing table of contents.
5. Paint the Picture – I don’t mean you have to actually use your own artwork (even though it’d be cool if you’re good at it), but sometimes illustrations help the reader understand what’s going on. A picture might not always be worth a thousand words, but I bet it’s usually worth at least half of that!
6. Chat Up Your Readers – Whether writing for a blog or the web in general, it’s accepted practice to write in a chatty, friendly, and conversational tone. When writing, just picture your target audience and begin talking to them through your keyboard. Blogging shouldn’t be stuffy.
7. Don’t Create Distractions – If there is just one caveat to the tactic above, it would be that it is easy to get carried away while ignoring traditional rules of grammar. Use your blogging liberty where you’d like, but try to revert back to what you learned in school the rest of the time.
8. Spell It Out – And for goodness sakes, with spell check and a quick proofreading, there’s just no excuse for incorrect spelling unless it’s for expressive purposes. And even that’s a stretch…
9. Break It Up With Bullets – Use bullet points and lists whenever possible. A blog reader is much more likely to finish an article that cuts straight to the point and just presents the meat rather than struggling through paragraphs upon paragraphs of fluff.
10. Use Even More Whitespace – When in doubt, space it out! If you’re using bullets or a numeric list style format, make sure there’s enough space between the lines so it doesn’t all just blur together in the viewer’s browser. Plus, it makes it easier to read between the lines. Also, try increasing your line height to increase the space between each line of text.
11. Let Your Readers Share – There’s nothing worse as a reader than reading to the completion of a great blog post and wanting to share a few thoughts, then finding out that the blog doesn’t allow comments. Let the reader share their piece!
12. Punctuate For Readers – Don’t be afraid of the … or the — They help web readers understand tone that is usually lost when translating spoken word to written text. Also, put some emphasis on your words with question marks and exclamation points… using nothing but periods can get boring.

Writing your blog for your readers is more than just telling them what they want to hear. It’s also about writing so they can read it easily!