Leverage What You Know!

Enter Your Name & Email To >>

1. Get My FREE Training On How To Use Content To Get More Clients & Cash

2. Get My Weekly Marketing Articles Sent To Your Inbox

3. Get My Exclusive "Email Only" Content Marketing Strategies

Get Your FREE Training Here!

We respect your privacy!

Are You Writing Articles That Attract Your Ideal Clients?

by Lisa Angelettie · 3 comments

About two years ago, I worked with a client who wanted help with positioning himself as a go-to authority in his industry. He initially found me through an article I had written somewhere (as most of my clients do) and wanted me to basically perform miracles for him. Okay — I’m a miracle worker sometimes (dusting off my shoulders:), so I took on the challenge.

client attracting articles

My first job was to take a look at his business and one of the first things that I took inventory of was the types of content he had created and in particular if he was creating content that resonated with his ideal clients. He wasn’t, and at first, he didn’t get it. He would occasionally write articles and publish them, but never with any purpose or rather enough purpose. Never strategically. He really just wrote what he thought was important for his ideal clients to know, titled them what he wanted,  and waited for them to come. They didn’t come.

And that’s my point here.

If you are going to spend your valuable time creating content such as articles, wouldn’t you like to make sure that they are working hard for you, and pulling more of your ideal clients towards you? Of course you do!

So here are a few points you should consider when sitting down to write an article this week. Think about your ideal client during this entire exercise – not yourself:

1. What is the point of this article? Is it to entertain your ideal clients? Am I solving a huge challenge for them?

2. Did I write this in a way that my ideal clients can understand and relate to? Am I using language that they use or am I talking above their heads or to the lowest common denominator.

3. Have previous clients asked you about this topic? That’s always a good indication that you will attract more ideal clients with content designed around the same topic.

4. Are you publishing the articles places where your ideal clients visit? Why are you guest posting at a home business site if your ideal clients are frustrated  and burned out CEO’s?

The key to filling your business with not just clients, but clients that you LOVE working with, is to ensure that you know who those ideal clients really are and that you create content that they are looking for. I’ll be talking more about how to create client attracting content like this in my upcoming teleclass, “The 5 Biggest Shifts You Must Make When Writing, Publishing & Marketing Articles That Attract Clients!” .  Register right now!

Are You Struggling With Implementing What You Learn?

by Lisa Angelettie · 2 comments

I have a question for you this week…are you struggling with implementing what you learn when it comes to marketing your business?

implementation frustrationConsider all the articles you’ve read, videos you’ve watched, audios you’ve listened to, information products you’ve invested in, teleseminars or telecourses you’ve signed up for. How many pieces of content in your niche do you think you’ve consumed? 100? 1000? More?

Now think about the time you’ve invested reading, listening or watching all of these bits of information. Do you think  you’ve spent a week, a month, a year or even longer of your time consuming all of this information?

Finally, consider the cost of consuming this content. How much money do you think you’ve currently invested in ebooks, information products, telesminars, workshops, etc. $100? $1000? $5000? What about intrinsic value. What about the time away from actually doing things in your business, with your family, for yourself at the expense of reading one more book or listening to another two hour teleseminar.

Now don’t misunderstand me here. Consuming content that can directly educate you about what’s going on in your niche or how to grow and expand your business is very important. Crucial even. But the key element that many entrepreneurs, especially solo professionals, tend to make when consuming information is actually implementing the strategies after they’re finished.

Hey, we’ve all done it. I did it a lot in my early years online. Mainly because I was totally overwhelmed with all of the information that I was consuming on building my business and improving my marketing. It was a lot! And there were many strategies. Lots of experts. And much of it was conflicting. I was truly swimming in a pool of quicksand and I can safely say that I know there are a lot more entrepreneurs who are currently in the spot that I was in back then. Is it you?

Here are some of my tips to get out of the sinkhole and back on land where it’s safe!

Pick One Marketing Strategy That Resonates With You And Do Only That (for now:)

The first thing I find when I work with clients is that they are trying to implement every marketing strategy that they’ve learned all at once. Needless to say that scattered implementation process does not produce results. Instead you need to focus on one strategy at a time and when you’ve mastered that, move on to the next. For me that first strategy was article marketing. For you it may be another content marketing strategy, such as video articles or guest posting.

Blow Up That To Do List!

Most people who are struggling with implementation are overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that they have on their to-do lists. I’m laughing as I write this because this was me FOR SURE. I have an old list that had like 123 things on it. The problem with this is that you only complete #1 and maybe #2 but you look at your big ole’ list and feel like you haven’t accomplished anything. So you don’t do anything the next day because you are all bummed out. Ick!

Take that list and blow it up! Pick out the top 10 things off of the list that are easiest for you to do and will make the most impact on your business. Now tomorrow you will tackle the first item on that list. You may have to chunk that item down into mini steps to get it done. Check off each step as it is completed. So your list may look like Item #1 and then a,b,c, under that item. When checked off it feels as if you’ve gotten a lot accomplished that day (and you have!) and you’re in a better place mentally to handle the next thing on the list.

Get Yourself Some REAL Accountability

This is probably the most effective strategy I used to kick my butt into gear. It’s simple. Check around with the leaders in your niche, and I guarantee you that they all have a mentor and/or a coach. The reasons to hire someone to help guide you are endless, but one of the major reasons that it’s always better to have a coach in your life is the accountability factor.

The reason why is that the person you bought that information product from really wants you to implement their strategies and see results but they’re not going to email you or call you to make sure that you did. Once the transaction is made — that’s it. But when you invest in a coach, you’re investing in someone’s expertise and their ability to keep you on task.

My business completely changed once I did this. Many of you know that I often talk about my mentors. They were very important to me and still are. I currently have 3 coaches and have seen the results in my income literally triple because of them; and I’m proud to say that I too hold all of my wonderful clients extremely accountable for moving forward in their businesses:) Do you hear me guys?

When To Write Your Halloween Articles

by Lisa Angelettie

When To Write Your Halloween Articles For Optimal Search Engine Placement

Halloween is the BEST holiday for one of my favorite income streams - affiliate article marketing. While I do not spend a huge amount of time on affiliate article marketing, I do like to do some strategic affiliate article marketing on certain holidays and Halloween is definitely one because of the growing size of the market annually as well as the surge in popularity of all things supernatural (vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies, etc.) right now.

Halloween Affiliate Article Marketing

Remember Her Hairpins?

The time to start writing your Halloween articles for the season depends upon a few factors such as where you will be publishing the articles (on a PR1 vs PR 5 site?) and the traffic the site gets, etc. Your backlink juice matters when it comes to timely affiliate article marketing, so if you know you have an uphill battle ahead of you, it’s a good idea to get started with your Halloween affiliate article marketing in the summer — like mid to late June.

Now if you know of a few major sites that you can publish your articles on and get good PR power and traffic numbers from them – then you’re golden and can write as late as the first week of October.

People are often shopping for Halloween costumes, accessories, and party supplies up until the very day – so as long as you have some visibility in the market – you will get some hits and hopefully click conversions.

I myself like to write up to the last moment:)

SO – if you haven’t written your Halloween articles yet, you still have time, so get started. Here are a few articles that I have written in the past discussing good Halloween affiliate companies to work with, hot Halloween keyword phrases, and more info to get you going:

Top Halloween Keywords – Lisa Angelettie

Have You Written Your Halloween Articles? – Lisa Angelettie

Affiliate Article Marketing: Writing Halloween … – Lisa Angelettie

Halloween Affiliate Article Marketing – Lisa Angelettie

Learn more about writing & publishing articles for the web with my new article marketing toolkit found only on Facebook.

 

 

 

 

How To Create A Trackback URL

by Lisa Angelettie · 19 comments

How To Create A Trackback URL

For a web writer, links and backlinks are serious business! We love ‘em. So today I wanted to discuss with you the value of using trackback url links and how to use them in your blog.

What Is A Trackback?

First of all, it’s important that you understand what a trackback is. A trackback is a method for web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their articles. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their content. Blogging platforms such as WordPress, Drupal and Movable Type, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published, although WordPress is considered the favored platform for trackback linking. Side Note – Blogger does not support trackback linking.

Let Me Explain Trackbacks In Even Simpler Terms…

If you are cruising around my site and you see an article on creating a custom Facebook url that you want to share with your readers, the obvious thing to do would be to link to that article: http://lisaangelettieblog.com/how-to-create-custom-facebook-url/. Linking to this article from another trackback enabled blog (like another WordPress blog) would automatically create a trackback link.

This type of link that lets me know that you have made reference to my article and it also lets me know in which article on your site you did this – by including a link to that article. At best this gets me interested in you and I will visit your site and read (and possibly refer) to some of your articles as well. We could build a relationship. At worst, you at least have my attention and you have a backlink to your site on my site.

Where Would I Find A Trackback Link?

The way trackback links are displayed can differ based on the type of blogging platform you are using, and even if you are on a WordPress blog, the display can differ based on theme. But for the most part – you will find trackback links in the comment section of your blog or right before the blog comments. This is what a trackback looks like on one of my fav’ sites Problogger:

trackback example

Please be aware that some blogs show trackback links differently and this is usually dependent upon the preferences you have set up for your blog’s comments. For example, on my site, I just show the link to the referring article. I don’t include the excerpt like Problogger does.

Other sites do enable trackback links but choose not to show them on their site, while others choose not to enable trackback linking at all (which I don’t agree with), but this is probably due to something out there called “trackback spam”.

What Is Trackback Spam?

Well, if you start seeing some trackback links from totally off topic sites or if you get a trackback link from the same site every time you publish – you are probably receiving trackback spam. It’s a good idea to delete those trackback links because they are basically fishing for links all over the web. They aren’t really referring you to any qualified reader that would actually visit your site.

The WordPress plugin Akismet does a really good job of keeping trackback spam at bay, although there are a few other solutions out there such as Simple Trackback Validation that do the same thing as well.

How Concerned Do I Need To Be About Obtaining Trackbacks?

You really cannot force trackback links to your site. They happen organically because someone liked something you wrote on your blog – end of story. So I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Just pay attention when you do get your first few trackback links and see if the blogger would be someone with whom you could build a relationship with in the future.

What you can do purposefully though is refer to relevant articles yourself and build trackback links on other sites. Do this only when you really like the content and preferably on a high traffic blog. The reason why I say high traffic is that most trackback links are NOFOLLOW links, so the advantage of having the link is so that a human being (the blog owner and/or a reader) will see it and click on it. There is no SEO benefit, although there are a handful of blogs that have purposefully turned their trackback links into DOFOLLOW links.

*Bonus Tip – TweetBacks

There is also something called Tweetbacks. That’s when a link pops up in or under your comment section because someone on Twitter has referred to (linked to) one of your articles. This is just another great way to continue the conversation about your content in the social media stratosphere. We like these too!

How To Create A Tweetback

So for instance, if you wanted to recommend this article to your Twitter followers, you would copy the url of the article, shorten it using tinyurl or bi.tly etc., and create a tweet adding that link. Once you do that, a tweetback would automatically appear in my comment section from your Twitter profile.

*This article idea was submitted by a valued reader. Feel free to submit article ideas you’d like me to write about over on my Facebook page.

How To Add Audio To Your Articles

How To Add Audio To Your Articles: Give Your Articles A Voice One of my coaches writes articles regularly on her blog and always has an audio version of the article available as well. While she has been doing this for years, there was something about it the other day that truly hit me. I [...]

Read the full article →

10 Things I Learned About Article Marketing In 2010

10 Things I Learned About Article Marketing In 2010 Please check out my latest guest article over at BizChickBlogs.com. It’s all about the 10 things that I’ve learned about article marketing in 2010. I never think of writing these types of “reflective” articles, so it was great fun writing this one. Look out for big [...]

Read the full article →

Article Writing 2011 – Stop Writing So Old School!

Article Writing 2011 – Are You Ready For The Revolution? Are you ready to stop writing with an old school agenda and move forward? I recently wrote and published an article on this site about my article marketing income breakdown and whew! I got a lot of emails from you all with excited comments and [...]

Read the full article →

Article Marketing Income Breakdown – 2010

My Article Marketing Income As our year comes to a close, you will no doubt read dozens of articles and emails from folks on what you should do to improve your writing, your blogging, and your business for the following year. I myself love to set business intentions for myself every new year — but [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries