I have been talking about making money and automating tasks, today, let’s talk about saving money. As they say, Money saved is money earned.

With our regular mobile and telephone services, we keep worrying about pricey penalties for exceeding mobile phone minutes, unlimited US and Canada calls plan costing nothing less than $20 per month, absurd hotel telephone charges, and calling from the road costs too much.

Today, I want to share with you a cool gadget that I have been using for more than a year and this one has won “Best Product of The Year” award for 2 subsequent years! J It’s called Magicjack.

I am sure you would have heard of Voice Over Internet Protocol popularly known as VOIP, Skype, Vonage and others are VOIP services. But, Magicjack is much better in features and much affordable in prices compared to them.

The device is as small as a pack of gum. Using it is also very easy; all you do is plug this cool thing into a USB port. It automatically installs its own software: a nifty little dialer. When you set it up for the first time, you get to choose your number. Now just plug any corded or cordless handset into the MagicJack and presto, you’ve got a dial tone. Magicjack comes with voice mail, call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling and directory assistance. You can also use a headset if you’re traveling and don’t want to carry bulky phone.

It is so handy that you can carry it anywhere in the world. All you need to use it is your laptop and a broadband connection, voila, you are in the business. Now, your phone travels with you wherever you are in the world, without costly roaming charges and using it you can make unlimited calls to US and Canada without worrying about those crazy international call bills.

Now, hold your breath as I tell you about the price. MagicJack costs only $40, which includes a year’s worth of unlimited local and long-distance calls. After that, you’ll pay just $20 per year or $70 for 5 years. As of now, it’s available only in US and Canada.

It’s been aptly called Skype and Vonage Killer. It is way easier to use than Skype, way cheaper than Vonage, and way cool to boot. Skype will cost you at least $36 for a year’s service (and features are limited compared to the ones offered by Magicjack) and Vonage costs you $24 per month and for Vonage, if you are travelling you need to carry bulky instrument provided by them.

So get a second phone line or a dedicated business line for your home-based business. Magicjack is really a cheap way to make calls while traveling the world. You can’t get anything lower than $20 bill for one full year to make unlimited calls to US and Canada.

Automation is the key to everything we do. To the extent possible we should try and automate routine tasks. Unfortunately, we can not automate brushing, bathing and getting ready; but we can at least automate computer tasks! J

In this post I want to share with you how I automate my blogging tasks and how you too can. In Part 1, I will share with you what I do to automate blogging tasks in WordPress and in Part 2, I will share with you what I do to automate traffic generation activities to the blog.

I will share with you some plugins and the overall strategy that allows me to blogging in WordPress blog. So, let’s get started.

Automating Twitter, Facebook and Buzz Announcements

Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz are the most popular social sites where people share “What’s on their mind” or about the latest site they are enjoying or their latest blog post. So, in case you don’t have these as a part of your blogging strategy, you should include them. They do help you in creating buzz about the blog post you have made and lets people know about what you are up to.

Now, let’s see how we can automate these tasks, rather than doing it manually by going to all 3 sites. You will need to use one plugin and one service to achieve this and believe me it’s very simple to do it.

You need to have Twitter Tools plugin installed on WordPress, it will automatically post to twitter when you post on your blog. I have written about Twitter Tools plugin in my top 10 wordpress plugins post. So, you have automated posting to Twitter.

The service you need to use is FriendFeed, this is also used as social bookmarking site, but you will use it for automating your posting to Facebook. Create an account with FriendFeed and go to Tools, you will have an option to connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Connecting here means allowing FriendFeed to post to both these account and get the latest posts from these accounts to post to FriendFeed, in short to keep all 3 accounts (FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook) in sync. Once you connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts at FriendFeed, it will get the latest tweet from Twitter account and then post it on to your FriendFeed and Facebook account. So, now you have automated posting to Twitter and Facebook without even logging to your accounts. Now, let’s see how we can automate posting to Google Buzz.

Login to your Gmail account and access Buzz. There is link available Connect Sites, where it allows you to connect other sites, connect Twitter to Google Buzz. This will allow you to post your latest tweet to Buzz. So, now you have automated posting to Twitter, Facebook and Buzz without even lifting a finger. Wasn’t it simple?

Automate WordPress Blogging and Backup

How do you normally publish your blog posts? Do you type the complete post and click Publish button to publish it instantly or do you the schedule them for future release? With version 2.5 WordPress introduced a new feature i.e. allowing us to schedule the post to get published on a specific date at specific time, similar to autoresponders. This is a very powerful feature.

Let’s say you are going on vacation for 2 weeks, but you still want to post on alternate days, so, type out your blog posts and schedule them for release on specific dates at specific time. You have already automated announcements to Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, so, as soon as your automatically scheduled post appears on blog, it will notify the 3 accounts also.

Backup is another key aspect of your blogging tasks. If your blog is really important asset for you then you need to back it up daily, WordPress database backup plugin comes by default with WordPress, you just need to make the necessary settings, after activating it, and ensure that a daily backup is automated.

That’s it for this part. We saw how to schedule your posts in advance, how to automatically post at Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz and how to back up your database. In part 2 we will see how to automate social bookmarking and submission to blog directories and submit your content to other web 2.0 sites.

How do you automate your blogging tasks?

In part 1, I shared with you the plugins I use to get people share by blog posts on social sites, tweet my posts and build list after driving traffic.

In this post lets go behind the scene of blog and see some plugins that help me know more about traffic to the blog, what visitors are looking for, how much time on an average a reader spends on my site and how to automatically backup my blog.

Google Analyticator

Goggle Analytics is a great tool for bloggers also, it tells us a lot about our visitors, where are they coming from, what posts are being read the most, which social sites are sending us traffic, how much time is spent on an average by a visitor, which are the entry points, which are the exit points. If you set up conversion goal, it will track that also for you.

If all this is done by Google Analytics what does the plugin do? You know, I am a lazy person, I would like to see everything in one place rather than going to different places and logging in to different sites. Google Analyticator, gets all the data from Google Analytics and displays in my admin dashboard, so, I can view everything I want to know about without leaving my blog.

Psychic Search

This plugin also tells you about your visitors, how they are finding you and what exactly are they looking for on your site. It keeps a log of every search someone has looked through your site with, it groups all the searches together and you can see what terms have been searched the most.

Psychic Search also stores the searches people typed into Yahoo, Google, and MSN in order to find your blog. It also stores those words that returned zero results to your readers. This tells you what to write in future posts. It’s very easy to install plugin and you will be able to view all the data from your admin panel.

Admin Management Xtended

How cool will it be if you could change the order of your posts? How cool woul it be if you have to make a small change in the title of the post, you don’t have to open the post, edit it and update it? All this and many more features are available in Admin Management extended plugin. As the name suggests it gives you the extended admin management capabilities.

You can change the order in which posts appear, if you want some post to appear at top, using default wordpress it’s not possible, as it will display all posts by publish date only, but using this plugin you can specify the order. To make a small edit in the post title, go to the posts listing page and there you have a quick edit button, just make the change and you are done. You definitely feel more empowered, don’t you! J

All in One SEO

I am not a SEO expert, I haven’t studied much about how to optimize my blog for good SEO rankings, I write blog posts to share what I know and interact with you. If that’s the case with you, this plugin can help.

All in One SEO, can help you optimize your blog post for search engine, by putting targeted title, small excerpt/ description about the post and meta tags. So that when search engines crawl your site, they find what they are looking for and you can concentrate on generating the content, which is what you like to do, correct!

Permalink Migration

The permanent link to the blog post is known as permalink. This is the setting we define in the admin panel >> general settings. For example, my permalink structure is %post id%/%post title%. So, it will display the link as http://www.amarmehta.com/92/my-top-10-wordpress-plugins-part-1

Now, what if I decide to change the permalink structure in future, to make it more user friendly, say add .html at the end of all post titles. It’s easy for me to do it in the admin panel, but what happens to all bookmarks that have been submitted, what happens to all the posts that have been crawled by search engines, what happens to all the links I have posted in forums, reports, ebooks etc. When people click those links, they will get 404 Page not found error, correct, no more! J I have Permalink Migration to help me. It indexes all links and when I change the permalink structure it will have the mapping of links i.e. old link and corresponding new link, so, when someone comes to your site, they will get what they are looking for.

WordPress Database Backup

This plugin comes installed with WordPress and provides an easy way to backup your WordPress database. You can download the backup file, or have it emailed to the address of your choice.

Having backup of your online assets is very important. Mailing list and blog are very key assets, so, being able to automate your online backup is a blessing. The plugin is very easy to use – just activate and then select “Backup” under “Manage” in your WordPress control panel.

What are the plugins that you use that allows you to get the best out of WordPress? Please share them here.

Before starting my blog, when I used to visit other popular bloggers blog I would always observe what system are they using, what kind of images are they using, what kind of information are they sharing and what plugins are they using for their blog.

So, when I started blogging, I took the entire list of plugins and installed them on this blog, but then gradually I started realizing what is useful for me and what’s not and based on that I deactivated some and installed some one.

In this two part series I will cover the 10 plugins that I like the most. In Part 1, I share with you the plugins that will allow you to increase traffic to your site, increase involvement and build your list. In Part 2, I will share with you how to add some advanced admin features.

Let’s get on with this part.

AddThis and Digg Digg

We need traffic, we write so that people read and share it with others. Social sites have become good stream of driving traffic. So, the easier we make sharing our blog posts to various social sites the better.

AddThis is one of the most popular social sharing buttons available. They have quite a few services available and you and pick choose from the list to display on your site. You can select from their default options of you can select a button style and add the sites and the order in which you would like to display them. For this blog I have chosen that option. It’s very easy to configure, no coding required, simply install the plug-in and select the style and option from the settings panel and you are done.

If AddThis is so good what’s the need for another plugin. I installed Digg Digg because, it gives those buttons on the top right side at the beginning of each post, you would have noticed it on this post also. There are some people who notice big buttons at top and would click them to share, there are others who would do it only after they read the complete post, so, the easier we make for them to share it, the better. That’s why I have installed both AddThis as well as Digg Digg.

Disqus

While driving traffic is important, it’s equally important to involve them, get them to contribute them on your blog. This is when WordPress has included comments feature. But, I didn’t like the default comments feature, because if someone has put a comment and you want to reply to that, but there are 5 more people who commented after that, then your reply will have to refer to the person name and write response. I wanted something that allows me to give nested comments, so that my response is below the main comment.

But that’s not the only reason why I got Disqus, as there are many simple plug-ins that give me nested comments feature. Disqus does 3 things in one (that’s what I have discovered so far, when I discover more I will definitely share them with you). A) It gives you nested comments structure B) It allows you to import comments from popular social sites like Facebook, Twitter etc and display on your blog C) It does comments moderation based on the rule set by you and will keep very selected comments for your moderation, otherwise your comments moderation is automated.

Twitter Tools

Do you use Twitter as part of your online marketing strategy, then you definitely tweet about your latest blog post. But, you have to login to Twitter every time your post on your blog. How would you like to automate this?

Twitter Tools, as the name suggests is not just one plug-in it contains 4 plugins in one. You can activate whichever ones you like. The main plugin does the job of tweeting about your latest blog post as soon as you post. You can add the prefix like “Latest Blog post” and then your blog title and link will appear.

You can use additional plugins that will allow you to use bit.ly (url shortening service) API to post shorter urls in your tweets and in case you want to post it for some Twitter lists then you can include hashtags also in your tweets straight from wordpress. Isn’t this automation cool! J

Action Popup

This is by my favorite programmer and brilliant marketer Robert Plank. You have got the traffic to your site by putting together quality blog posts and people talking about your site on social sites, how about building your list.

You might have noticed a pop-up on this site when you visited the blog for the first time. I have installed Action Popup with basic design and subscriber option. You can design it the way you like and you can make it appear as many times as you want and specify if it should appear in specific post or not. The pop-up appears when someone is trying to leave your site.

You have a very good control over the pop-up content and appearance and its very easy to configure.  You can do many cool things with action popup. So, get Action Popup today for your site. In fact Robert gives you 3 cool bonus plugins as a bonus! J

What plugins do you use for driving traffic, interaction or building your list? Any cool tricks you would like to share?

Your very encouraging response to my previous post, 5 Powerful free resources for your business, is the motivation behind this sequel.

Fax Zero

In the last post I had shared with you a resource that allows you to get your personal fax number and receive faxes at no cost, but it does cost you to send fax using eFax. How about a service that allows you to send fax at no cost? Fax Zero is a simple, no frills service. They have a very easy to use interface.

You need to have scanned version of fax you want to send out, key in your details and the recipients details. They send you an email with verification link, to ensure that you are real human being and no one is trying to mass broadcast faxes using bots. That’s it, recipient will receive your fax with the first page printed with Fax zero.

Jing/ Screen Toaster/ Screener

We have talked about a free software that you can use to create screen capture videos. If you don’t want to install anything or if you want to host the videos at no cost, I have 3 services that you can make use of.

Jing

Screen Toaster

Screenr

All 3 services have very simple and easy to follow instructions on how to take captures and once you are done how to share the video. They will host the videos for you and you get a simple link that you can put on your site. It can not get easier than this to create videos. Now, you don’t even have to install a software, just go the site and start taking screen capture videos. Create one today and you will soon be addicted! J

Google Analytics

Testing and tracking are very important part of all businesses, they are very important for online business also. We need to know where people are coming from, what they are going through while they are on our site, what are the hot spots, what’s the conversion rate. There are many sophisticated scripts available costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get all this data. But, you don’t want to spend that much, you don’t want to spend a penny when our friend Google is at our help.

In case you haven’t heard, Google Analytics is very powerful resource that you can use to check traffic to your site, page visits, time spent by visitors, search terms, conversion and make more. You can add as many sites as you want, you can set your own conversion targets, you can do conversion tracking while doing split testing. It’s a very powerful resource which reveals a lot about our visitors. It’s not complicated to use at all. You get a simple javascript code to insert in your site and if you are having a wordpress blog then this cool google analytics plug-in will do everything for you.

Media Convert

What do you do when you have a file that you are unable to open on your PC or Mac? You normally get a suggested program to open the file but you many not be able to view the file. I go to Media Convert and check if I can convert it to the format I want to view it in.

It’s a service where you have to upload the file you want to convert, you can give a url also and you have to select a format in which you want the file to be converted. They have formats for documents, audios, graphics, videos or any other media type. Just select the option and submit, the conversion process starts and in a short while you a get link to download document in your desired format. They even have a service that allows you to host this media to share with others.

Audacity

This is the best free resource available for creating audios. You can record your own voice or you can record an interview using audacity. Use the Lame (yes, that’s actually the name) plug-in to convert the recorded files to MP3 format.

You can use Audacity for editing existing audios, adding background sound or adding intro and end to the audios for your branding.

So, there you are with 5 more powerful free resources. Do you want more? I share them at Give Me My Bonuses site.

Do you use any cool free resource? Why not share it? You know sharing is caring! J

Have you asked this question to yourself? In today’s busy life where we are running to meet two ends, when we are spending 10-12 hours at office, what we discuss at times with friends and family is work and office, it really helps to know the reason why we work.

According to me people work for WORK:

W – Wealth

O – Opportune

R – Responsibility

K – Kindness

Wealth

Money is necessary for living, we can not buy the basic necessities of life without money, but money shouldn’t be everything for you. There are people who are so crazy after money that they forget enjoying their life and they are running only after gaining wealth.

If you have seen “Up in the Air” movie, they show lead protagonist George Clooney is crazy about collecting miles to get a platinum status, and that takes him away from enjoying his normal family life. But, finally when he gets that status, he doesn’t react as he had dreamt he would, because by that time he had realized what he is losing out on. Similarly, while running after money we may not realize that we are sacrificing good family time, but when we grow old we realize what we missed out on.

Opportune

You like what you do. There are many people who sacrifice high paying jobs to get in to jobs which they like to do, even at a lower pay. We become mechanical after a period of time doing a job that we don’t like to do. We should ask ourselves that questions when we wake up in the morning, whether we would really like to do the work, if money is the only motivation, then we might start looking out for another job that interests us.

The other job can be a full day job, a part time job or a home business, but it should be something you enjoy doing. If you are happy, you will be able to spread the joy around and that makes everyone in the family and friends happy.

Responsibility

We have obligations to fulfill. We have family who is dependent on us, we have to pay installments of home/car loan, we have to plan for higher education of kid and we have to plan for good vacation for family. There could be many other responsibilities you have that makes you work like clock. Putting in extra time at work, working on weekends, taking extra load may be things you do to meet the need.

Have you ever tired sharing your responsibility? Sometimes, we feel we are the only who has to do it and no one else can do it, but it’s good to check out for a possibility. This is not to run away from our responsibilities, but to try and find a balance in life. The way we consider outsourcing when we want to get a task done quickly and we are the only doing it; we might want to look out for the possibilities of responsibility sharing in the family, say your spouse may be able to help you.

Kindness

There are some people who just work out of kindness. They just want to help others; they get happiness by helping others. Either they have achieved the financial status or they are philanthropic by nature and hence basic salary for survival is what they need.

People working at NGOs and charitable trusts have those philanthropic qualities; they get happiness by helping others. And then there are those rich people who have achieved good amount of wealth in life and they want to give to the needy. Many celebrities in different fields support or endorse a NGO or a charitable trust, this helps to give a boost to the NGO or the trust in collecting more funds.

Whatever your reason may be for work, or even if you have multiple reasons for work; you want to ensure that you have a work and life balance and enjoy the moment you are living in. It’s not always possible for all of us to be that way, but we can at least try to work towards being happy about working! J

What are your reasons for working? Are you happy?

All of us have the same number of hours in a day, then why some of us are able to do a lot in a day and others are able to do nothing or very little. Many a times we wish, we had more than 24 hours to do more.

The reason why the successful people are able to get a lot more done in a day is because they follow APT formula.

Presenting, the APT formula to get more done in a day:

A – Assign

P – Perform

T – Track

Assign

Do you plan your tasks in advance?

Do you allocate time to do a particular task?

Do you plan what you want to achieve in a day?

Many people just start their day by thinking that they want to do something big and want to have a very productive day, but don’t know what all they want to achieve. So, they will keep doing something and at the end of the day they will figure out that some key tasks were missed and some not so important tasks have been completed.

Plan the tasks you want to perform in advance, ideally do a week’s plan, on a broad level plan for a month and on a very high level plan for the year. First thing you want to do is get yourself a good planner from Office Depot, Wal-Mart or any other super market near your place. Assign yourself the daily tasks at least on the previous night if not in the previous weekend. Put duration against each task to complete it. This is very important as you need to monitor your assignments.

Now, let’s get on to performing your assignments.

Perform

Since you have already assigned tasks to yourself, key planning is done. Now you need to perform those tasks to achieve the target of the day.

Do you perform under pressure or do you perform under relaxed environment? This is very important thing you need to know about yourself. Some people perform great under pressure, when there are too many things on to do list they will start working faster and will be able to achieve a good amount of tasks. There are others who can not perform under pressure, they get very nervous; they need finite tasks to accomplish.

You know what type of performer you are, so, based on that you should have over assigned or under assigned tasks to yourself. While performing don’t change the order in which the tasks are assigned, also try to accomplish the tasks in defined time limit. And last but not the least while you are working on tasks; stop all distractions like mobile phone, instant messengers, checking your emails. These will help you do a lot more in the defined time limit.

Also, don’t burn out yourself; take small 10-15 minute breaks after every 2 hours. Based on your own condition you want to decide whether you need hourly break or a break every 2 hours. But, taking a small break is a necessity and it will definitely boost your productivity.

At the end of the day you will need to Track.

Track

Tracking is as important as assigning and performing. If you plan really well but not able to perform as per the plan than you need to revisit it and tweak it to get it on track. You need to analyze the reasons about why you are unable to perform as per the assignment.

If you take longer than expected to perform the tasks i.e. you complete all the tasks defined for the day, but end up spending 6 hours instead of 4 hours then you need to analyze the reasons for the duration, which tasks took you longer to perform, what were the issues. This will help you in future to plan your time in a better manner.

Tracking will also help you to analyze a trend about your working style and you will be able to find out ways to boost your productivity. Let’s say one day you were able to write 10 articles instead of 5, what did you do differently and then you can repeat the same in future. If on a given day you were able to do only 3 blog posts instead of 5, you will know what went wrong and hence what to avoid in future.

So, there are you are with the APT formula to get more done in a day.

The other thing that you can do to get more done in a day is to outsource some tasks, but there also APT formula is applicable. You should have great control over assignment, performance and tracking of the person whom you outsource the task. These are the quality of good managers! J

Hope you found the APT formula useful to get more done.

What do you do to get more done in a day? What are some of the best productivity tips that help you achieve more?

In the last post we covered 5 tips to become blogging superstar.

We talked about conducting surveys, giving very useful information worth paying, blogging on controversial topic, participating in other blogs and discussions, and optimizing your post for search engine. Let’s continue with some more tips to become blogging superstar.

6. Arouse curiosity with password-protected posts.

Your visitors can see that your blog has a lot of good content. But then they notice that you lock up your best content behind password protected posts (with the passwords only being available to your subscribers). You can bet curiosity will get the best of many of your readers… and they’ll subscribe.

Script like Wishlist Member and Digital Access Pass allow you to do it easily, they allow you to put teaser text that is enough to arouse curiosity and then lock up the rest of the text only for your members. You can do similar thing for premium downloads or audios and videos also.

7. Learn to create killer headlines.

People will decide whether to read your post based on your headline. As such, use headlines that include power words like “how to”, “amazing”, “secrets” and “discover”.

Your headline should create curiosity in their mind to read your post. They should be willing to find out more about what you have covered. With social bookmarking becoming very important part of blogging strategy, it’s crucial to have attractive headline, as that’s the only thing visitors of social sites would see to make a decision to click your link or not.

8. Vary your posting style (some long, some short, etc).

Don’t always post a 400 word “how to” article. Instead, mix things up by posting articles of different lengths and different styles. I have covered different blog post styles in 6I formula for creating popular blog posts.

There are times when you want to share some personal stuff also, or you may invite some guest blogger to post on your blog. Variety is spice of life, so, mix and match different things on your blog to keep the excitement going!

9. Interact with your readers by answering their comments.

Your comment section isn’t just a place for your readers to talk amongst themselves – it’s also a great place for you to interact with your readers. In fact, if you’re not responding to comments on your blog, you’re missing out a huge opportunity. Since people buy from those they know, like and trust, this simple act of interacting will grow your income.

Also, comments section is a great source of knowledge for you to know what your readers want to know. You can cover responses to their questions in future blog posts, and if you see a trend then you may consider creating your next product also on the same. Comments are also as important as surveys.

10. Make blogging a part of your daily routine.

Add “write a blog post” to each and every daily to-do list until it becomes a habit. If you write just one short blog post per day, in a year you’ll have 365 blog posts – and a whole lot more readers, subscribers and income!

But, don’t over kill yourself, if you don’t have anything to blog about, you may want to limit yourself to once a week blog post, and blog more often when you have something to say. But, make sure you have a routine for blogging and you stick to that. This will get your readers to make a routine to read your blog posts on specific time intervals!

Creating a big, popular blog isn’t a matter of doing one thing in a short span of time. Instead, you can become blogging superstar by consistently taking a series of smaller steps. The information covered in these posts may sound simple and common sense, but believe me that’s what it is, there is no great secret. Remember our age old saying “Slow and steady always wins the race!”

Please share, which are your favorite tips? What do you do differently? What has worked for you?

Just imagine if you developed one of the most popular blogs in your niche. Think of how much money you could make selling your products or affiliate products. Imagine how big your fan following would be.

All of this is within your reach – especially if you follow these 10 quick tips to become blogging superstar:

1. Survey your readers to find out what they want.

Adding a poll or short survey to your blog not only makes your blog interactive (which is a good thing), it also gives you an idea of what kind of content and solutions your readers are looking for. WordPress has free plug-ins that allow you to add polls to your blog.

You can do this even before you start your blog, survey your niche or look at popular forums in your niche and figure out what are the most frequently asked questions. You can consider answering those questions in your blog post and wherever needed you can recommend resources that contain your products or affiliate link. Surveys are very powerful for planning your next product! J

2. Give your readers info that they’d gladly pay for.

Just because your blog is free doesn’t mean you should post content that’s not worth anything. On the contrary, you should post valuable content – the kind of solutions your market is already paying for – on your blog. That way you can build trust and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.

This goes back to the age old marketing principle or human psychology that “if free content is this good, paid content will be Great”. This doesn’t mean you should give away everything you know for free. You need to draw a line between what to giveaway and what to sell. You can give them useful information that gives them good deal of information about the topic of your expertise, but they can make the best use of information by using your product or service.

3. Write about hot or controversial topics to spur discussion.

When there’s a controversy going on in your niche, decide which side you’re leaning towards and blog about it. Push a few emotional buttons. Then create a call to action at the end of your post where you specifically ask your readers for their opinions and feedback. The more emotionally charged the post, the more likely it is that you’ll get comments.

We, human beings are emotional and curious by nature, so, any controversy will attract us to give our thoughts or opinion on the same. So, if you take up a current hot topic or controversy and express your opinion on the same, people would like to express their thoughts and they would invite their friends and relatives to put their thoughts also, so, you are talking about viral, word-of-mouth traffic.

4. Join the blogosphere discussions.

Your blog is not an island. Start visiting other blogs in your niche and join the community discussions. You can comment directly on their blogs. Or better yet, write a response on your blog using a trackback link.

Forming a network and collaborating with others helps you in getting better and quicker exposure. If you are kind, others would do the same to reciprocate your favor. This means more backlinks to your blog from other highly targeted sites from your niche.

5. Optimize your posts for the search engines.

You don’t have to optimize every post you make. But if you make a point to optimize at least one post per week, you’ll see a steady increase in traffic.

Tip: Use a tool like WordTracker.com to uncover your niche keywords. Choose words that have low competition. Then include your keywords two or three times for every 100 words of content.

Don’t stuff all your posts with keywords, that will do you no good. Your readers will be able to immediately make out that you have written it to get higher SEO ranking for your chosen key word. Now a days, search engines have also become smarter, if you use the same keyword repeatedly in your post then they will penalize you rather than rewarding you. So, write it in your natural style and keep few basic SEO principles in mind.

In the next post I will cover 5 more tips to become blogging superstar.

Who is your favorite blogger? What do you like the most about him/her?

In the last post we discussed 4 formats of packaging your knowledge. Let’s continue with the other 5 formats to package your knowledge for maximum sales.

In this post we will cover A.N.E.N.T part of the P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T. formula.

Audios

Audio products also have high perceived value. You can record your own product as audio book or it can be offered as an upsell to your eBook. You can interview other experts on your niche and sell the audio interview as product.

To add value to your audios, you get them transcribed and have the audios and transcript available as a complete package. You can also put the audios and transcript on CD and deliver it to your customers.

Newsletter

Even though we have picked up the electronic trend, we still like to touch and feel things. That’s why we still get newspapers every morning even though all the information is available online for free. Off late the there has been an increasing trend of monthly print newsletter for internet marketing as well as other niches. Doctors, engineers, companies, holiday clubs etc. have been sending month newsletter for long time.

You have to ensure that you put together quality information that customers feel worth paying for. Get the format done once and then stick to the format. Printing can be handled by one of the fulfillment companies. If you deliver quality information every month, you are bound to have good retention rate and good publicity by word of month.

eCoaching

People in all niches like hand holding to reduce the learning curve or a support they can fall back on. eCoaching allows you to offer this support. All the product formats listed above are one way communication i.e. something that you want to communicate to your customers, but what they understand from your eBook, audios, newsletter or home study course is completely dependent on their receiving ability.

eCoaching allows you to deliver information in audio or video format at regular interval and you give assignment to your students, they have to submit the assignment to you before the next session. They can also contact you if they are stuck at some point while doing the assignment. This has more person touch involved and hence eCoaching gets you good returns for slightly higher involvement. Since everything is online you don’t have to deliver the lessons again, create them once and deliver the same in future sessions, then your involvement will be only supporting your students.

New Formats

As internet has involved new formats of packaging and delivery has come out. It’s always good to embrace new technology that allows us to give more personal touch to our knowledge sharing. You can use Teleseminars or Webinars to deliver your knowledge.

You can also package this with Web 2.0 style community learning format. Everyone loves community, because collective knowledge takes individual’s knowledge to higher level. So, you can create blog or forum where you can post your sessions and invite responses from the participants.

Tape Videos

Videos are becoming part of day-to-day life. People like watching videos than going through 100 page ebook. Videos also have greater perceived value as a package. Videos can be instructional, demonstrational or presentation.

You can create power point slides on the topic you want to cover and record instructional videos using screen capture tool. When you want to demonstrate how to do something or how to make best use of a system or service, then you create demonstrational videos. If you are not camera shy then make a presentation as if you are speaking in front of live audience, that will have greater impact than screen capture instructional videos.

There you are with the PERMANENT formula of packaging to leave everlasting impression on your customers and evergreen sales of your products.

If you have created product in one format, it is very easy to convert it in other format and each format has its associated advantages and disadvantages. Before you decide on your product delivery system, make sure to research your niche to see what the norm is. Figure out what would be best for your niche and proceed accordingly.

Would like to add any other format to the P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T. formula?