8 Power Tools To Turn Your Blog Into A Profit Center

Turning your blog into a profit center. It sound like a dream, right?

We’ll continue to talk more about these things here on SocialMouths, hopefully you can benefit from them.

In this post we’ll take a closer look at what I call a perfect setup for your online income powerhouse, in other words, the tools you need to run your blog as a business.

Notice that I don’t include advertising or affiliate programs as ways of blog revenue, it’s because I talk about blogging as part of a marketing strategy for business rather than becoming a full-time blogger.

One thing I will mention before diving into the list is that while none of these applications are free, they are very affordable. And since we’re already in the subject, I will also say that I do love the whole “Free” concept BUT (uuuh… the big “but”!), when we’re talking about our business, and I will assume we want to be successful at it, we should be open to invest.

So I’ll include the cost of each service and at the end of the post we’ll add it to see how much we need to spend in order to turn your blog into a true profit center.

Disclosure: None of these companies has asked me or pay me to review their products or services. It would be nice… but they didn’t.

1. MailChimp

Let me put it this way, an email list is a list of people that have said “Yes, I like you and want to know about your updates, events or products”. My preference at the moment is Mailchimp but there are also other products like Aweber, MyEmma and others.

When you’re shopping around for a system to handle your email marketing, you need to consider things like how it integrates with your blogging platform, what kind of metrics it offers, if you can connect to Google Analytics, etc.

Cost: With Mailchimp you can manage lists of up to 1,000 subscribers for $15/month

2. SalesForce

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is not always necessary, let me explain. If you sell a quick check out product such as an ebook for $24.99, people come to the site and pay for it then maybe you don’t need to capture any data other than what you get on an email subscription.

Now, if you provide services as a freelancer, let’s say web design, copy writing or life coaching, then it is important to establish a stronger connection with your prospect or client. This requires more information than a name and an email.

SalesForce can capture those leads right from your site.

Cost: The “Group” package which includes basic sales and marketing for up to 5 user costs $25/month per user.

3. Paypal

Not much to say about Paypal other than you MUST have it, like it or not. It’s been a while since Paypal became an online standard for payment processing, even if you had your own merchant account, Paypal should not be ignored.

Cost: Since you pay a percentage for each transaction you run, I’m not adding a monthly charge here. We’ll leave it open.

4. E-Junkie

E-Junkie is one of those “behind the scenes” kind of application. Some of you might not even know it. What it does is help you sell stuff online. It is an excellent tool if you are selling digital (downloads) products such as an ebook or an mp3 recording. It protects your file by being downloaded multiple times and it hides your url so it is not visible to the user.

You can also use it to redirect traffic to your own page if you want to host the file to download. E-Junkie also works for tangible products.

2 more things, it’s very cool that it makes Paypal part of its ordering process and lastly, you can manage affiliate programs for your products.

Cost: If you have 10 available products, e-junkie will cost you only $5/month including 50 MB of storage and 100 daily checkouts. You gotta be kidding me!

5. Flowtown

Email lists are usually very limited since we usually capture a simple name and email address. Flowtown takes that information and pulls all the social profiles affiliated with that address.

Don’t take this lightly, in my opinion this is pretty powerful, you just went from having an email address to a full profile that allows you to search and filter subscribers by different criteria. AND, having the opportunity to connect on different social networks with that person that just gave you his/her email address, that’s building community right there.

Two more cool things about Flowtown, first, if you manage your email lists with Mailchimp, you can now integrate Flowtown to add muscle to your plain mailing database. And second, the integration of Klout in their system so you can actually tell how influential your contacts are.

Cost: Flowtown packages start at $17/month and you have to add 4.5¢ per import OR, you can “pay-as-you-go” 5¢ per import, 250 emails/month, which means you’ll be paying $12.50/month. This is just ridiculous…

6. SurveyMonkey

You might be thinking what do surveys have to do with turning my blog into a profit powerhouse. Remember how for the last couple of years we’ve been talking about how social media is a 2-way channel? a dialogue rather than a monologue? Well, bloggers are changing dramatically and are becoming more and more engaging with their audiences. Technology also allows us to push the envelope and get more creative.

The concept of crowsourcing is huge, your community is now telling you what they want, with detail. We just have to listen. Tools such as SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo make it very easy and affordable to take those conversations with your reader and kick it up a notch, now you can ask questions directly and the best part of all is… your reader, prospect or existing customer loves being asked!

Cost: For $16.67/month, SurveyMonkey gives you an unlimited account, that means you can setup as many surveys as you want with as many questions as you want.

7. Unbounce

Pretty cool stuff here. Unbounce helps you build landing pages, track your traffic and conversion, run A/B tests and set up your own domains. They also have some pretty kick-ass templates that you can just grab to customize or you can create your own from scratch. You can run several campaigns at the same time.

This is a great tool for lead generation.

Cost: You can check it out by using the Free package which offers 200 visits/month, after that, the Basic package offers 500 visits for $25/month and it doesn’t show any Unbounce branding on your pages.

8. Google Analytics

Don’t you feel like it does matter what we’re talking about, Analytics is always mentioned? Well, the application is pretty powerful and we probably use only a small fraction of it. When you’re running a profit center, besides measuring your visits, your bounce rate and all that stuff, you also want to track conversion.

The good thing about Analytics is that you can seamlessly integrate it with other platforms, for example, you can connect it to e-junkie to know each time a person bought your ebook or, you can track ROI on all your Mailchimp email pieces going out.

The truth is that Analytics is pretty powerful and you should commit to learn more about it no matter what you do online. Cost: AND… it’s Free!

So how much is your profit center?

Let’s see, we have…

• Email list management and marketing for $15
• Customer Relationship Management for $25
• Payment processing (open)
• Ordering process and downloadable files for $5
• Subscriber visibility, demographics, location and social profiles for $12.50
• Online surveys for some kick-ass, crowdsourcing product development for $16.67
• Landing Pages for $25
• And web analytics of all kinds for $0

Our monthly cost to handle business online like true ninjas is $97.17!!!

Ok, so you’re not very impressed… let me share this with you, about 7 years ago I spent $70k on a web-based CRM that is now obsolete, around the same time I purchased a $60k phone system that is now worth $2k, if I wanted to hear my prospects opinions I would have to organize a focus group for a couple of thousands to get bullshit results, I paid around $20k for a static website that the only interactivity it had was the contact form and, believe or not, I never got to know any of my customers, hell! I barely had their location!

Let’s just leave it there, you don’t want to get me started with mailing lists… what is this water coming out of my eyes?

Your Turn…

What are your thoughts? are you using any of these tools or maybe different ones? What are your suggestions if you already have some experience or what are your questions if you are barely jumping in the water?

Happy profiting!

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Announcing “Launch Your Awesomeness”

SocialMouths is turning one year and to celebrate, I’m launching my first product.

It’s called “Launch Your Awesomeness – Your own kick-ass blog in only 48 hours” and I would absolutely love it if you can take a couple of minutes to read this post to understand what it is, why I created it, for who and how you can hopefully benefit from it.

Also, I’m leaving the comments open if you want to give me feedback, if you have some ideas to improve it or to simply ask questions.

So What Is It?

It’s a packaged solution to speed up the process of launching your blog, a successful one, either for your business or for your own personal brand.

I figured that every new blogger needs 5 essential elements to have any chance to success:

• Full control. In other words, eliminate the webmaster
• A kick-ass first impression, which today means a few seconds
• Some SEO basics to be search engine friendly and don’t invisible
• Social media integration to amplify the message
• And traffic analysis for better performance

So I came up with a solution that provides all that by implementing the necessary tools. Your blog is ready to perform at its best and at the same time, I’m eliminating the learning curve. These tools I’m talking about include WordPress, Thesis, Disqus comments, Tweetmeme buttons, sharing systems like ShareThis, Facebook and Twitter widgets and others. These are the tools you have already seen being used by successful bloggers out there.

A true powerhouse, ready for you to come in and start dropping your awesome content.

Also, I have put together a couple of designs so you can pick your choice. The trick here was to create something that looks good and at the same time it’s simple enough to be usable in any kind of business or industry. You can’t just base your online presence on good design BUT (notice I used the big “but”…), don’t you agree that a decent design build that initial trust any website needs? I thought so, you have been in that situation when you hit the back button in a matter of seconds too, right?

What’s NOT

It’s not a WordPress “Premium Theme”. Period.

Who Is This For?

Well, being an entrepreneur myself, I understand beginnings are not easy specially in the financial department. This means that while we’re looking to launch something of quality, we don’t always have the necessary budgets and resources to build from scratch. I see this with some of my clients. Launch Your Awesomeness is a solution for those people.

The reason I didn’t conduct a survey to have a more crowdsourcing approach to the whole thing, which is something I plan to do in the future, is because I had already enough feedback from over a year of working with clients. I have listened carefully all this time to the needs and objectives of people launching their first blog, redesigning an existing one or even going for a second one.

This Is Your Chance

If you have been postponing the launch of your blog because you didn’t have enough money, you didn’t know how to implement all that technology or your cat is looking at you weird, this is your chance to stop those excuses that build up an unreal sense of fear in you and… Launch Your Awesomeness!

Go visit the site at LaunchYourAwesomeness.com

Thank you!

You still there? Go!

How to increase web traffic (without getting banned by Google)

If you are a newbie at internet advertising or internet marketing, then you probably need some filling in on Google’s policies regarding rankings.

Have you ever wondered why you hear a lot of people say they want to be on top of the first page of Google’s search results? For a company site, the top spot should always be the priority. Being on top means the possibility of being able to generate
a lot of leads.

In order to achieve internet advertising effectiveness, you have to first and foremost understand that Google is where people to turn to when they do research. So, you may as well be thinking right now, is it really possible for you to actually be on the first page of Google results when you have millions and millions of competitors out there? Well, I’m telling you right now, there is.

Having a personal or a business blog is one of the best strategies to getting quality links for you business’ site. By installing a blog site to your company website you get better chances at increasing web traffic that your site gets.

Here’s what blogs can do for you and your site.

Blogs are perfect platforms for keyword-rich content. Google robots are naturally attracted to websites that do not only have regularly updated content but also with content that have keywords.

Blogs provide you with a high probability of getting links from other websites. You have to make sure that your blog has quality content. This way you will have more frequent visitors and who knows, you may even get trackbacks or links from high-ranking websites.

Blogs attract blog commenters. If your blog has content that is of really excellent quality, your posts will be found by those who are looking for blogs they can post comments on. Who knows, the blogs commenters can easily turn into customers. Your blog can even help you join networks that can be beneficial to your business.

Blogs are a form of social media marketing. I have made mention earlier that you can create networks through blog sites. Also, by maintaining a blog site, you will be able to measure the ROI of your social media efforts. This can be tricky but you can always start calculating how much you would want to spend for your marketing efforts – blogging and social media alike.

So if you are not yet into blogging, I think it’s time you create one and install it as an additional link to your website. This is one internet advertising strategy you wouldn’t want to skip.

If you want to know more about how blogs can help you and your business, click  here.

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This device was advertised on TV, sells on the Internet with guarantee back in 60 days. Anybody heard of this? It would be
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