Archive for April, 2008
What is Forced Continuity?
I had not actually heard of the term “forced continuity” before last week even though I have encountered it many times. It is where you offer your prospects a free trial to some product that automatically bills them after the trial period.
It’s just a free trial to a paid product and there’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is where you promote the free trial and try very hard to put the paid component very much in the small print. This is what Joel Comm did last week when he released a new version of his popular ebook AdSense Secrets.
He has since posted an apology (VERY long winded!) which you can read here:
http://www.adsense-secrets.com/apology.html
There is nothing wrong with giving people a free trial to something that they pay for later on - it can be a wonderful pre-selling technique and it gives the customer something for nothing. But I think Joel’s problem was that his sales copy was carefully written such that a large majority of people who bought his book simply didn’t see the fine print and didn’t realise they were going to be billed.
Of course Joel can simply say “but it’s right there - you just didn’t see it”, but still, we all know deep down that there is a level of deception at work and he must know that or he would not have issued the apology. Kudos to him for having the balls to admit he screwed up!
My Experience With Forced Continuity
Here’s something I have not admitted before - I used to make my living from a forced continuity program. Back in 2002 I did Internet marketing in a very different field. I had around 80 websites that were driven purely by pay per click advertising. I carried a free offer on my sites but every sign up that I generated earned me $10. How did I get the $10? Because the company behind the free offer used a forced continuity program as part of the offer.
The customer was given a trial period into a program that cost around $30 a month and of course it was cleverly hidden in the small print. Most customers never knew a thing about it until the first bill came out and for those that don’t check bank statements that carefully, who knows how many installments they unknowingly paid.
The IM Industry is Riddled With Scams
This was a shady business and I hated it. I felt like I was cheating my site visitors and it just didn’t feel right. Over the next year or so I tried many other ways of making money online using purely “legit” methods. Not only did I fail dismally but at every turn I seemed to just be learning more and more shady tactics. In those days something called “bait and switch” was very popular. You build a page that is highly optimised towards a popular search term that gets ranked highly in the search engines and as soon as its listed you change the page to something else that is just full of ads.
All the affiliate programs around then seemed dogy - software that would install dialers on people’s computers that would ring premium numbers unknowingly, links that said one thing and pointed to something else entirely. Pop ups, pop unders and all sorts of tricks to take over the browser to force the visitor to take some offer. The list goes on and on.
Eventually I got out of Internet Marketing entirely and I was left with the impression that you can only make money online by cheating or conning people in some way. It left an extremely sour taste in my mouth and made me feel very bitter. This is why I have a hard time with Internet Marketing second time around. I want to make money but I don’t want to cheat people.
Internet Marketing Doesn’t Have to be Shady
I felt very strange launching my newsletter last week. I felt like I had succumbed to the “money is in the list!” mentally and I think that has made me procrastinate about actually writing the thing!
When I think about things like list marketing, forced continuity and other techniques, really it’s not so much a problem with the technique but simply how it is used. I’ve already identified people who have great email lists that I enjoy being subscribed too and who still use it to make money. Similarly, I don’t think there is a problem with a forced continuity program as long as the prospect is fully aware of what he is getting into.
It all boils down to honesty in presentation and I think this cuts across any kind of business, online or offline. There are always going to be techniques and tactics that can increase revenue and there’s nothing wrong with making money itself. It’s only a problem if the way in which it is earned is in some way shady. As long as your prospect is getting what they pay for, and they know exactly what it is they are getting then everybody is happy and you have a win-win situation.
I have been planning to launch a Newsletter to complement this blog for months now. At one point I was going to do a project about it but really, I was just procrastinating. I decided to just go ahead and do it! You can see the sign up form in the top-right corner of the blog.
Why a Newsletter?
I’ll get straight to the point - I am launching this newsletter to build a list! There are two reasons for doing that. Firstly, now that I have started down the path of producing my own products (Stumble Rush being the first), I want to be able to tell my own readers about my stuff. However, my traffic is hovering on around 800 visitors a day with an increasing number of people coming in from search engines. These people probably do not subscribe to my RSS feed so they most likely leave just as quickly as they arrived. I want to capture those people’s attention and the newsletter is an additional channel for doing that.
The second reason is that Feedburner now has the ability to report not only your RSS subscribers but those from an email list as well. This means that if I have 2000 RSS subscribers and another 2000 people on an email list, I could have my little chicklet show 4000. Now you guys will know the deal because I break down all my numbers in my monthly stats but this is great for social proof.
Social proof is something that has been talked about a lot by Yaro Starak. People like to do what other people do so they subscribe to popular blogs. The higher your RSS count, the faster it tends to go up because more people subscribe as it looks more popular. This is why so many blogs show an exponential curve in their readership once they hit a certain point. So far my growth has been very linear so I’m hoping this will be a way of changing that.
So there you go - two purely selfish reasons to have a newsletter! :-p
What Will the Newsletter Have In It?
Longer term readers will know that I despise many traditional email lists. I find most of them to be sleazy pitch-fests. Some people make up all kinds of stories and outright lies in their autoresponder sequences and I can’t stand that stuff! I want to actually provide my readers with something worth reading! Shocking concept huh…
When I was first considering starting a list I read up on it quite a lot and the standard advice is simply “offer a free report in exchange for an email address”. The left me wondering, “then what??” That might be fine if you are trying to build a list for a specific product and you offer some kind of report that helps to pre-sell the product and then you use your list to offer readers more information about your product.
But nowhere could I find any information about what should go in a newsletter that accompanies a blog. I started looking around at what other people do and I couldn’t find much. Firstly, i was surprised at just how few bloggers in the IM niche even had a newsletter. A few people did the standard thing - have a free report. I subscribed to these lists but the problem was that all that came afterwards were pitches - usually to random affiliate products!
That’s no good at all. I don’t want to build a list just to pitch to the subscribers! Well I guess I do in a sense but in order to justify any kind of pitch there has to be a good deal of good quality content being given out. This is where so many other Internet Marketers fail - they just pitch non-stop and don’t give out content. The problem is, what content can I put into a newsletter that I wouldn’t put on my blog?
Yaro has a the best newsletter in the IM industry in my opinion. His is the “Blog Traffic Tips” newsletter which is has a very specific theme - each post is a full length article giving out some information on how to get traffic to your blog. It is not duplicated on his blog and yet it complements the subject of his blog perfectly. Furthermore, it is a wonderful pre-sell for his Blog Mastermind paid program. He also pitches in this newsletter but only occasionally and it never bothers me because the newsletter itself is great. No other Internet Marketer that I have encountered does this as well as him.
So, I had to come up with some kind of topic for the newsletter. I have seen that some bloggers simply publish a roundup of their best blog posts and call that a newsletter. Well I suppose that will do for those people that don’t already subscribe to your blog but that does nothing for your existing readers other than waste their time!
I had a look at the content of my blog and I noticed something - I no longer post news, or very rarely. I tend to stick to tutorials, opinion pieces, updates on my projects and the occasional resource list. I don’t blog about changes in PR (or only when I use it as an excuse to post pictures of my cats!), or new ad programs that are being released, or changes to AdSense terms, or new social media sites and so on. This is a personal choice - I prefer to leave the blog fairly clutter-free so that each post is value-packed.
So my newsletter is going to be just that - a NEWS letter! I’ll be reporting on the news that I don’t blog about. It will be fairly general in subject matter but I will probably have a slight leaning towards social media. If I had more room in my opt-in box, I would have called it “Caroline’s Internet Marketing & Social Media Newsletter” instead :-)
How Often Will it Be Published?
As and when I feel like it! I’ll be aiming for around weekly but it might be a bit less than that but hopefully not more. I find myself very overwhelmed by people that mail me too often and I’ll usually unsubscribe simply because I don’t like to see the number of unread messages going up faster than I can read them so I won’t be doing that to my readers!
As such, the news won’t be up to the minute. I guess you’ll need to subscribe to all the news blogs to get that. What I’m trying to do is simply round out my coverage of the IM scene. I’m not somebody who jumps on the latest thing the minute it’s out; I’m usually a bit behind everybody else so my newsletter may be a bit behind too but at least that way I know I can commit to keeping it packed full of content.
If I try to stick to a schedule or post news as soon as its out I’ll just stress myself out and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that would you :p
I haven’t written anything for it yet - I figured that actually just getting the thing on the blog and announcing it would give me the kick up the backside I need to actually start so for those of you who subscribe now, expect the first edition some time tomorrow.
Will Archives Be Available?
I pondered this lots. I will be writing about all sorts of topics that I don’t cover on the blog and the chances are that if I put the archives on the blog they could draw in a decent amount of search engine traffic. However, as I learn more about SEO I realised that in actual fact they probably won’t bring in that much because each edition of the newsletter is likely to cover a wide variety of topics so it won’t be optimised for any one particular term so all those people who specifically blog about those topics will far out-rank me.
Plus of course the bigger concern is that if I do make them available on the blog when by bother subscribing at all? People could just come to the blog and read it and that defeats the whole point of delivering it via email. So no, archives will not be available.
Technicalities Of My Opt-In Form
Do you like my little box? I am using Aweber to build the actual form code but all that does it give you the input fields and the submit button - there is no graphics or styling. So I looked around for some ready made templates. I actually bought some (for $7 no biggie) but then realised they were no good because they simply didn’t fit in my header and I specifically had this blog layout designed this way so I could put a newsletter signup form in that box.
I searched for more templates but couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted so I just did it myself. I used a technique called slicing. Basically, you load up a graphics package and you design your form purely as graphics leaving a blank space for the actual form elements. Then you use a slicing tool to cut your image up into little pieces and you do this in such a way that one graphic represents the blank space. This is more easily explained by showing you:
I am using Photo Impact 12 for this and that has an option to export your image as HTML and it builds a table with all the pieces of the graphics in the correct places. Then what you do is edit your HTML to replace the blank space with your Aweber code. You can probably see this if you look at the source for this page. I could go into more details but that is probably beyond the scope of this blog post.
One point to note - the HTML that was originally exported looked fine in Firefox but Internet Explorer inserted some whitespace in the middle of the graphicn Luckily with the aid of my wonderful Twitter followers, well Tobey from Yebot in particular, I had it solved within 5 minutes. Another great reason to be on Twitter!
Is There Anything You’d Like To Know?
I’m really not sure if this whole subject of newsletters and opt-in forms etc is something that you guys are interested in. If you have any further questions about it then please go ahead and ask. Judging by the response I’ll either answer your questions directly in the comments or do a follow-up post or two.
Social Media provides us with a multitude of sources from which to satisfy our thirst for information. Many bloggers are now catching on to the power of social media which means that a good blog post will often be propagated far and wide. Could this phenomena be silently destroying our RSS readerships without us knowing?
I Used to Read a Lot of Blogs
Like, 30-40 blogs… It was too much and I have been on a never-ending quest to cut back on my daily reading as I found much of it to be non-essential. On the flipside however, my consumption of social media has increased somewhat.
I am an avid user of Twitter, and keep an eye on my twitter feed all day long, I Stumble every day and regularly check out the Stumble feeds of my friends and stumble through the friends channel. I visit niche specific news submission sites such as Sphinn on a regular basis. After a while, I noticed something rather interesting…
The Good Stuff Is Everywhere!
Lets take a very popular blog as an example - DoshDosh. Maki is an avid social media user himself and he has a high profile on all the sites I mentioned plus other big ones such as Digg and Reddit. What I started to notice was that everywhere I looked, I would see Maki’s work. All his good posts would be on Sphinn, every single post would be Stumbled and reviewed many times meaning that I would see links to them multiple times over when looking through my StumbleUpon feeds.
Really, I don’t need to subscribe to DoshDosh because it is highly unlikely that I would miss any of his good stuff because I’d see it all over the social media sites that I use. Dosh Dosh is not the only site. As I began to use Sphinn more and more I found content from the same sites being posted over and over.
This is a GOOD thing, because only the best content gets submitted to social media. You don’t get the irrelevant fluff posts like how the blogger is going on holiday for a week, or how her cat died :(
So Did I Unsubscribe?
I didn’t unsubscribe from DoshDosh’s feed because I actually prefer to read his posts in my feed reader and I know there is no fluff on his blog but I did unsubscribe from many others that I was only partially interested in. Over the last few months I have continued to cull my RSS subscriptions and I have felt much better about doing so knowing that I can find the best stuff from those blogs in the social media space.
Does it Even Matter?
I suppose this is the bigger question. Does it matter if I unsubscribe from a blog but continue to read the good content? The question is that of sourcing - rather than source the information directly from the RSS feed I source it from a submission to StumbleUpon, Sphinn etc or a tweet in the Twittersphere.
As a blog owner what is important? Is it the RSS number or is it the number of people who truly read the content? For many bloggers, myself included, it can be quite hard not to focus on the number - it’s lovely to see that number go up and up every month. But really, it’s just a number and it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
Even though I still have around a dozen blogs in my reader that still doesn’t mean that I actually read every post in there. I scan through the headlines picking out what interests me and I ignore the rest. Everybody does this! The RSS number is essentially meaningless, but it’s handy for getting more people to subscribe which makes the number go up which um… we’re going round in circles here!
Is that any different to picking out the good stuff from a social media site? I don’t think so. In fact, if anything I think it can be better if people find you from social media because that means the content has already been endorsed by other people so those readers come in with the impression that the content is good.
What Do You Think?
I’d love to know if I am the only one who has done this - have you unsubscribed from blogs knowing that you can find their content in social media? Do you think this will become common practice? What is your opinion of RSS in general? Should bloggers be obsessing with the RSS number so much? Will RSS shift the emphasis away from individual feeds? Does anyone even care?
A little while ago I explained how I needed to change my strategy and reduce the posting frequency on this blog. An idea that I toyed with was inviting guest posters so I ran a poll in that blog post.
The most important statistic is the number of people who didn’t vote at all. Out of over 2000 subscribers, less than 100 voted so from that I can conclude that the majority of my readers really don’t mind if I have guest posters or not. The poll ran pretty much neck in neck for about a week and then finally the “yes” vote managed to just about pull ahead.
My personal feeling is that a few select guest posts could be a welcome change but I would not want to overuse them. I had originally suggested a weekly slot which I now think would be too much. I will use no more than two guest posts per month.
So, the purpose of this post then is to invite those of you who wish to guest post to submit your work to me. I’ll need to lay down a few guidelines:
Subject Matter
As this is a personal blog branded to my name, I need to make sure that any opinions expressed are my own. Even though every guest post will be properly credited to to the author and linked to his site, many readers miss this and still see the guest post as having come from the blog owner. Therefore, I’ll ask that the posts be guides, resources etc and not opinions. And I don’t want to see “10 top tips for a killer sales letter” :-)
Posts should stick within the topics that I cover here, that is generally Internet Marketing, Social Media and blogging. I’ll be particularly interested in posts about Social Media as that is a topic of growing interest for me.
Post Quality
This is a hard one to pin down but I’m not going to publish anything that I feel doesn’t add value for my readers. I see a lot of posts around the blogosphere which are well written and reasonably informative yet they are just “blah”. Its rather difficult to explain. A good post should enrich the reader in some way - teach him something, spur him into action, make him think etc. Post quality is a very subjective matter so to cover my butt I reserve the right to reject anything I don’t like for any reason whatsoever! However, if I don’t like your post I’ll try and tell you why.
Submission Details
Just email me via the contact form. You can either send me your complete post or just shoot me an idea. Either way, I won’t publish anything without reading it first and I will always write back and tell you if I’d like to use it. I’ll maintain a list of guest posts and I’ll publish them in accordance with what seems most relevant at the time. I will always contact you before I publish your work.
Please make sure you give me your full name, the title of the post and also a link to a site that you would like to have promoted in the post. Also, feel free to send me a short bio or some kind of introduction that I can add at the beginning to encourage readers to click through to your site.
If you are somebody who has emailed me about guest posting in the past then you can probably expect an email from me over the next week or two as I am going to be trawling through my email archives to contact those people - I’ll point them at this post.
People often call me Carolyn Middlebrook which is incorrect, it’s spelled Caroline. There is a difference, in the UK at least. Over here there is a difference in pronunciation. You pronounce the last syllable in Carolyn like you would the last in Violin but with Caroline, it’s pronounced like line!
Why am I waffling on about my name? Um well actually, this is an SEO experiment. I have been noticing with interest that my search traffic has been climbing quite steadily over the last few months so obviously this blog now has the ability to generate search traffic but the vast majority of it is from single search terms - there’s not many terms that are searched for over and over which tells me that I’m not optimising too well.
So I’ve been reading a LOT about SEO over the last week or so and today I had a look through my search traffic for the last month and decided to just pick a term that is already getting some traffic and see if I can rank better for it. I chose Carolyn Middlebrook because it’s easy to write a post about :-)
At first I wondered why I would be ranking for it at all but it’s obvious really - people write Carolyn in the comments quite often - proof that all those lovely comments get ranked.
So this means that I’m probably going to be ranking for some highly dubious terms thanks to Mr Mark Mason and some recent comments he left in jest :-)
Oh and just in case you didn’t realise, my name isn’t Carolyn Middlebrook :) I hope I didn’t stuff the keyword in too many times! This is a pointless post for you guys so I’ve published it just minutes before the next post comes out so it doesn’t hog my front page for too long!
