You and I could spend a month just breaking down all the pieces that have gone into the build up to this product launch, but for today we’ll break down a single post from Rich’s Strategic Profits blog to see how he is promoting the launch of his new product, and so that you and I can learn how he is using important psychological triggers to promote action on his blog.

Here are some of the blog elements we are about to examine:

• A Benefits Driven Blog Header
• Clear RSS Feed Subscription
• Large Newsletter Signup
• Pillar Article Highlights
• Traffic Sharing With Blogrush
• Product Self Promotion
• Affiliate Linking
• Friend Linking and Social Proof
• Visual content Breaks
• Graphics With Text Call To Action
• Creative Copy Writing Snippets
• Over sized Icons
• Blog Tagging
• Related Post Linking
• Social Proofing Comments
• Easy Blog Linking

Keep in mind that a lot of these blog elements are covered in more depth in Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program. Rich is Yaro’s blog business mentor. Considering both of them are doing very well at building their online businesses it is a good idea for you and me to pay attention to what they are doing.

A Benefits Driven Blog Header

The very first thing to notice about Rich’s Strategic Profits blog is that the header has benefits driven text in the title. Benefits driven marketing tells buyers why they should pay attention.

Rich’s blog header says, “More Money. More Business. More Time Off.” Clearly this is something that all business owners and entrepreneurs want and Rich knows that. Money is the leader, business is a given, and time off appeals to the emotional side of everbody’s life.

By having this right up front Rich is setting the tone for the rest of the blog.

The only missing element from the blog header is an image of Rich himself, but he already has his picture on almost all of his marketing materials so there really is no need to over work it on the top of the Strategic Profits blog.

Clear RSS Feed Subscription

A portion of the blog header is also an over sized RSS feed subscription chicklet. Over sized blog elements are a reoccurring theme throughout Rich’s blog and there is no mistaking what he wants people to do when they land on his blog.

The only missing element here compared to “everyday blogs” is a link to a “what is RSS” description. But in this situation the target blog visitor probably already knows how to use RSS. If they don’t there is a clearly marked second option displayed just down the page, the newsletter sign-up form.

Large Newsletter Sign-up

Again the newsletter sign-up form is over sized just like the RSS subscription chicklet. Without using a lot of words the intended action is obvious to most people.

Rich is obviously serious about list building. He is spending a lot of energy to get people to his blog so they can read about all the great things that are happening and it is important to capture opt-in subscribers during this attention frenzy.

Pillar Article Highlights

Further down the page Rich highlights his other pillar blog content. He has already posted quite a few articles on his blog and by highlighting these in his sidebar he is making it easy for blog visitors to find the rest of his content.

The longer a visitor stays on the blog reading content, the more likely it is that they will take some sort of action before they leave, like signing up for the rss feed, or newsletter, or even clicking an affiliate link.

Traffic Sharing With Blogrush

Just below his pillar content Rich is using the John Reese’s BlogRush widget to get blog traffic to his blog. Now, I don’t honestly think Rich needs to have BlogRush on his blog to get traffic.

So either he is promoting the widget as a favor to John, or he is banking on racking up display credits now to help promote continued blog traffic to his blog later on. Either way it’s interesting.

Product Self Promotion

Another thing to note are the links to Rich’s own products on the blog sidebar. I’m not totally surprised to see them there. Rich would be silly not to add a plug for his previous products. It just wasn’t something I was thinking to do myself.

Every opportunity you have to get extra mileage out of existing work is something you should be open to doing. Being able to reuse and re-purpose content over the long run is a clear advantage that knowledge management affords each of us.

When you create a blog post be sure to consider how you can use the content later. You should also be thinking about how you can re-purpose content that you’ve already created.

Affiliate Linking

Since Rich is promoting his previous products, it should come as no surprise that he is also promoting products for other marketers as well as an affiliate. In fact there are several tools listed on his blog.

It’s important to remember that Rich is a marketer and that not only makes him a content creator, but can also make money from other revenue streams as well.

Investing all your time and energy in one revenue stream may be leaving money on the table. Rich is not letting that happen here and neither should you.

I bet there is at least one way right now that your blog could be tweaked to help you bring in additional revenue if you are only willing to push on your comfort zone.

Friend Linking and Social Proof

One way to push your comfort zone is to get active in your market’s community. If you haven’t already, you need to get out and make some contacts so you will have opportunities to build leverage through future joint venture deals.

Rich has an interesting mix of friends in his blogroll. Some are marketers he has mentored and some are people that have mentored him.

Regardless of his relationship with his friends, you can bet the people on the list are there for a specific reason. I say this because any number of people could have been listed on his blogroll, but only a few names are showing there.

One possible reason for this list of names is that they are all very popular names that Rich’s blog visitors will easily recognize. There is almost an element of social proof in the list. Who you link to on your blogroll is a reflection of your interests and your taste in friends.

But, don’t be confused and think that you can just put a who’s who list on your blog to gain some value.

It’s important that you hand pick your links and know why they are on your list. It will speak to your blog visitors and they will make unspoken connections.

Visual content Breaks

One of the many things I like about Rich’s blog is that he uses bold sub headers in his blog post to visually break up content while still communicating clearly with visitors who only scan the page.

The two headers above tell a story even if you didn’t read the actual content and their job is to try and draw the blog visitor in so they will read the entire entry.

Graphics With Text Call To Action

I mentioned earlier that Rich uses his own image in most of his marketing materials and here is a great example how he blends his own personality into his marketing message.

Take notice of the fact that his face draws your eye on the page and that he has promotional text and a clear call to action mixed in with the graphic.

Creative Copy Writing Snippets

If you don’t have a swipe file, you need to start one. You should store all the creative marketing copy and ideas that you find as you are reading sales letters, testimonials, email, and other marketing materials. You can use the file later to come up with creative ideas when you are trying to write your own ad copy.

I found this piece of text particularly interesting on the Strategic Profits blog.

Rich is voicing the concerns of the reader so that he can provide an answer and remove any barriers to them taking the desired action.

This is a genius way to draw the reader in and address any concerns they might have. Notice that he keeps the tone conversational and light. It is disarming and makes the desired action a “no-brainer.”

Oversized Icons

Again Rich uses over sized icons to encourage specific action on his blog.

There is no doubt about what he wants you to do here. In fact, there is almost a pull to do something even though you may not have even read the action text.

Blog Tagging

Rich is also using internal tagging to help link his previous content together. This is just another way for blog visitors to find more of his blog content. Whether this helps him with search engine rankings or not is a non-issue really since he is generating plenty of backlinks from other sources.

If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform there are plugins to help you with tagging. I recommend Ultimate Tag Warrior. The most recent version of WordPress supports internal tagging natively, but Ultimate Tag Warrior is still superior in my opinion.

Related Post Linking

Linking to related post is also another great way to draw blog readers through to more of your content. If they have read down to this part of your blog post then they are probably interested in the other things you have written so this is a great opportunity to pull them through to more content and keep them on your blog.

If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform there are plugins to help you with managing your related posts. I use the WordPress 2.3 Related Posts Plugin and it works great.

Social Proofing Comments

No matter how great your content and how well your blog is laid out, nothing adds more interaction and energy to your blog than reader comments. A great way to encourage comments is to show blog visitors that other readers have already commented.

Whenever you can, encourage your readers to join the discussion. Let them know you want their opinion and give them an opportunity to see that others are already leaving theirs.

Reader comments are like free content that you don’t have to generate. However, to keep the ball rolling you should be sure to respond to comments personally so that everyone can read what you said and respond accordingly.

Easy Blog Linking

The last thing I want to highlight is the easy linking box at the bottom of each blog post. Rich has provided all the code necessary to link to his blog posts.

This is really a fantastic idea. In fact he has made it so easy to copy and paste the link that all you have to do is hover your cursor over the link text and the linking code is automatically highlighted. All you have to do is copy and paste it into your own blog post.

Reducing barriers to action is absolutely necessary to achieve a desired result and this one idea is worth exploring on your own blog.

In fact, each of these elements can be used in your blog to some degree. The important take away is that nothing on your blog should be there by accident.

Every element of your blog should serve a purpose and be designed to help you achieve some sort of goal. You spend a lot time on your blog and every part of it should help you do business better.

Studying Success,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Ps. Be sure to watch for the launch of Rich Schefren’s Business Acceleration Program. 2008 is going to be your year to shine. Why not let Rich help you accelerate your business growth?

Click Here To Accelerate Your Business

BlogRush was launched over the weekend and I signed up as soon as I heard it was open. Immediately I started seeing visitor traffic to my blog, OpenSourceMarketer.com. The result was a sharp increase in mailing list subscribers, RSS subscribers, and blog comments. In fact, I am continuing to get visitors from the BlogRush widget on the blogs, though it has slowed down just a bit. Some of the slow down might be due to the overwhelming response that BlogRush has received. I bet John Reese didn’t anticipate such a great response, even though he founded the project.

BlogRush has enjoyed great success so far because it is context sensitive so it display blog posts from other blogs that are relevant to the content on the page. That means if your blog is part of BlogRush then your blog posts will show up next to relevant keywords on another blog. Ultimately that means that if someone is looking for information on a specific topic and they are searching blogs for that information then a link to your blog posts are going to show up near those relevant keywords. This is how Google runs their entire Adsense program so you know this is a proven method of getting readers to click on links.
BlogRush also has a viral marketing element to it that helps to make the thing attractive for everyone. Your blog posts get displayed on other blogs once for every time your widget is displayed on your blog. That is a good method of making sure that active blogs are being rewarded for attracting readers. And, when you refer someone to BlogRush and they create a free account, you get partial credit for their signup. This process goes ten people deep so the more people you tell the more your blog posts will be shown.

Now, let’s look at StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is basically a system for sharing user contributed links and reviews of content. Any StumbleUpon user can bookmark, or stumble, a page on the Internet. They can write a short review and categorize that content. Stumbles shows up on the user’s profile page and is included as part of the great StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon users can also randomly stumble through content that is included in the StumbleUpon index of content. When someone stumbles through content it is usually by a specific category or media type, such as news, movies, random pages, and the like. Because the act of stumbling is so random and effortless, StumbleUpon users don’t really have to do anything but click a button. This potentially puts them one click away from your content. This is where it gets hairy.

You see, if they don’t have to put any real thought or effort into the process then it will be just as easy for StumbleUpon users to click away from your blog. We will look at how you can make something positive out of this traffic in another aritcle, but for today just note that big StumbleUpon numbers is not a guarantee of success. Honestly, when I submit my articles to StumbleUpon I always get traffic within a few minutes. Sometimes my blog articles get a few hundred unique hits, sometimes my blog articles get one or two hits.

The initial rush of StumbleUpon traffic doesn’t usually last more than thirty minutes or so and then the excitement dies down. However, the articles still continue to get hits over the long term. Even today I am getting traffic from StumbleUpon for articles that were submitted weeks ago. StumbleUpon can pull the traffic, but you still need to consider the value of that traffic.

So, which is better, BlogRush visitor traffic or StumbleUpon visitor traffic? Honestly, they are both good for two reasons

1. The required actions to get the traffic are minimal. For the effort on your part, the return in terms of raw traffic is fantastic. So, really unless you have another activity that brings you better quality traffic, you have every reason to use these tools to gain blog traffic.




2. Even blog traffic on its own isn’t enough to bring great rewards. You have to give the visitor a reason to stick around and read your content. Then your content has to convince the reader to stick around, subscribe to your RSS feed, subscribe to your mailing list, click a link, or whatever. Traffic won’t make a blog successful on its own.

Ultimately, if you are looking for ways to get eyeballs on your blog, then both of these tools offer a free, low touch method of attracting visitors. Whether those visitors turn into blog readers is really another discussion all together. If you are considering ways to monetize your blog while using these tools, you might consider impression based advertising. While impression based revenue has been typically low for some time, you can still make a few dollars you didn’t have before. It really depends on what you are already doing and how many sites you are doing it on.

The important point is to focus on creating good quality content, get traffic to that content, try to convert those visitors into readers, offer those readers an opportunity to take some beneficial action, and repeat. BlogRush and StumbleUpon are only tools in this process and they can not take the place of having a good plan. So use them both and enjoy the traffic.

Working the plan,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

So, what’s a blogger to do if BlogRush doesn’t produce stats? Well, no worries. From the beginning I have been using StatCounter.com and Google Analytics to track all blog activity.

You might be asking, “Why use two separate analytics tools?” And the answer would be, because not all analytics tools are created equal. Google Analytics is a very useful tool that has slick reporting features, but the numbers are only updated on a 24 hour cycle and sometimes you just want a quick look at how things are going on your site. This is where statcounter.com comes in.

StatCounter.com offers a free account that lets you track multiples sites. The stats are constantly updated so you get more of a real time view of what is going on with your blog and all the common information you are concerned with as a blogger is presented right at the top.

So, if you don’t want to wait for BlogRush to work out their reporting issues, then visit StatCounter.com and setup a free account. The process takes two minutes. Put the tracking code in the footer of your blog and your done. You will have stats to look at within minutes, as long a there is traffic on your site.

So what’s next? If you are getting traffic to your blog then today should be about creating more quality content and working on ways to reader conversions. Use the stats from statcounter to understand where people are coming from, how long they are staying, where they are leaving from, and what keywords they are using to find you. All these things create a story and that story should end with a desired result that makes your online business stronger.

Enjoying the BlogRush,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Get BlogRush: Syndicate Your Blog Posts To Get More Reader Traffic

1. Listen to the blogcatalog interview I did with one of the experts from BlogCatalog.com. We talk about how to get blog readers and how to find joint venture partners for your online business. Every month I see a steady flow of new traffic from BlogCatalog.com and other social blog catalog sites. If you are looking for a solid way to build real relationships with your readers and other bloggers, then listen to this talkshoe interview and find out how.




2. Signup for a free BlogRush account and syndicate your blog posts on keyword targeted blogs. Remember, this is just one of the many ways that you should consider for getting reader traffic to your blog. This will not be a silver bullet for traffic generation but it promises to be a good method of sharing traffic between blogs. Your posts will appear on related blogs based on targeted context matching and blog categorization. This will put your blog posts on relevant blogs so you will get in front of the right reader audience.

Oh, and be sure to look for an upcoming blog post on what not to do when hosting a conference call using TalkShoe.com. I’ll share with you what I learned on the BlogCatalog call. It will save you some grief if and when you ever decide to conduct your own phone interviews.

Enjoying life,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com