How to Repurpose Your Content Online

How can you leverage your content online?

The following is an excerpt from Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, Wiley) by Patrick Schwerdtfeger. The book has 80 chapters covering dozens of online marketing tactics that deliver results, especially for small business owners and self-employed professionals. The book is being released on June 7th, 2011. Learn more at 80shortcuts.com.

If you’re smart about content creation, you can create it once … and then repurpose it seven different ways! You can literally flood the Internet with your expertise and work less than most of your competition.

Think about your content as either beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The idea is to give the beginner content away for free to demonstrate your expertise and build trust with your audience. Your beginner content becomes your blog posts, your articles, your podcasts and your videos. The intermediate content is free as well, but only in exchange for their email address. Your intermediate content is used to build your list. And your advanced content is what you’re actually selling; it’s where you drive revenue.

Well, your website or blog is the perfect place for some of that beginner content. Try to organize your beginner content into a series of “lessons” and then write an article about each one. Always make sure your articles are at least 500 words long. If you write an article that’s longer than 1,500 words, break it into two separate articles. Are you ready? We’ll be using your articles in seven different ways, maximizing the bang you get for your buck.

If you don’t have your website built yet, don’t worry. The important thing is to realize how your content can be repurposed on the Internet. Knowing this process will help you deploy your online strategy once you start building.

Step 1 – publish on your blog

First, publish your article as a post on your blog. Easy enough. Your blog is the center of your online identity and any content you publish should also be published (or at least summarized) on your blog.

Step 2 – social bookmarking

Second, ask some of your friends to bookmark your new blog post on a few of the large social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Doing so will introduce your content to a huge audience who then have an opportunity to endorse it and pass it along to others.

Step 3 – blog carnivals

Third, visit BlogCarnival.com and submit your new blog post to a bunch of upcoming blog carnivals. Carnivals are like online magazines. There are large prominent bloggers on the internet who host “carnivals” about one topic or another, and they can feature your blog post within their carnival, exposing your content to their readership in the process.

Step 4 – article directories

Fourth, modify your article slightly and publish it on EzineArticles.com and some of the other article directories on the Internet. You could even use a distribution platform like iSnare.com to get it on hundreds of article directories within days. Each directory will allow you to include a link back to your website so this strategy will result in hundreds of one-way inbound links to your website.

Step 5 – ebook directories

Fifth, summarize your article into a punchy bullet-point PDF file and make sure it includes plenty of links to your website. Upload your new PDF to the many free e-book directories such as ebookdirectory.com or ebook2u.com. Yes, it’s true. There are dozens of e-book directories and their visitors are searching for information. They can find your information . . . but only if you upload it.

Step 6 – audio podcasts

Sixth, read your article into a microphone and record it. Now you have a podcast that you can register on iTunes and dozens of ‘‘podcast directories.’’ Podcasts accumulate incredibly loyal listeners over time with 90% of them listening to your podcasts at the gym, commuting to work or walking their dog. Not only that but audio content does a great job of inspiring trust among listeners.

Step 7 – YouTube videos

Seventh, get a Flip digital video recorder (about $200) and record yourself as you explain the topic you wrote about in your article. Don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just speak about the concept as if you were explaining it to a friend. Once you’re done, add your website address to the video and upload it to YouTube. Video inspires trust better than any other type of content. And besides, YouTube is the third highest traffic website on the internet (after Google and Facebook).

These seven effective ways to get your beginner content out into the world will cost you next to nothing (except perhaps if you need to invest in the Flip recorder). Yet very few people take advantage of these opportunities to spread their message across the Internet. By following these steps, you can take one piece of beginner content – one lesson – and use it in seven different formats, populating multiple platforms with your expertise.

This is powerful stuff. It’s extremely efficient and caters to the different ways people use the Internet. Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be. Most people think they need to create new content for every platform. No way! That’s too much work. You could write one lesson every week or two and end up with a massive online identity within a few months.

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Building an Email List the Cute Way with Emma

As a frequent reviewer here at Clickfire, I like having more than one option for recommendations. For example, if someone asks me about the best web conferencing software, I can recommend Skype for personal chats and GoToMeeting for more professional settings. In the case of email marketing platforms, I’ve also got a favorite or two that I can keep neatly tucked away.

Emma, believe it or not, is one of them. They’ve been able to find and exploit a neat little niche not simply by offering email marketing solutions, but by crafting these solutions around a specific type of customer: someone who wants their email campaigns to, well, look cute.

I know the name Emma just sounds cute, but that’s just effective branding on their part: everything about the service is warm, from the stylish, customized-to-your-brand email templates to the way they package all of their features and pricing into a neat PDF for all to enjoy.

So if anyone asks me for an email marketing solution with which they can market their chocolate truffle or teddy bear business, I’ve got the answer for them. And despite a few complaints you’ll read about in this Emma review, I like that.

Looking Good, Emma

Why the love for Emma in particular? Certainly there’s no shortage of email managers that offer design help for your email templates. But if you’re going with Emma as your email manager, I imagine that it’s because this is specifically what you’re looking for, rather than icing on the cake.

That’s because Emma’s designs are among the best I’ve been able to review and not only that, but Emma makes it simple to procure these services. (Sure, simple costs a bit of money, but that’s not what we’re talking about right this instant, you overzealous follower of frugality). In fact, Emma actually recommends starting off with a custom design in order to kick-start your email list building services, which might sound like it comes off a bit scammy but is actually done in a rather elegant way. Emma brings me in and actually makes me want to have something cool for them to design a template around.

Okay, why not talk about price? The basic structure you’ll see for the upfront designs are as follows:

• $99 for “Studio Design,” some of the most attractive-looking template designs I’ve seen.


• $249 for “Concierge Design,” pairing you with a designer whose job it is to make your emails look good.


• $399 for the “Design Suite,” which expands on the Concierge design with a number of varying templates.

It might sound like a lot to pay upfront, but when you consider all of the value you can get out of some of these headers and templates – you can even incorporate them into your website as a whole, or use elements of your website to incorporate into your emails – there’s a lot of value packed in here.

And, of course, the price comes this way because you don’t go to Emma for some ordinary run-of-the-mill email marketing campaign. You’ve got to have a specific kind of brand situated in a specific kind of niche for this to make sense. And if you can nail that niche, Emma really helps you to nail the emails.

Technical Details: When Cute Just Isn’t Enough to Satisfy

All of this cuteness abounding in the world of Emma isn’t enough to override certain technical concerns, of course. Email marketing is by its very nature a technological endeavor, and even if your emails look good on the back end that doesn’t mean things always look good from your control room.

Luckily, Emma doesn’t disappoint with its features list, providing many of the same services you should expect from any vertical response platform. Creating surveys, real-time analytics, member management, autoresponders – all of the basics are covered which guarantees your email marketing program won’t have you looking like you’re wearing a well-tailored suit while working at McDonald’s. In other words, the features rise to meet the assertiveness of the strong Emma templates and designs.

A bit of a complaint here, however, is the pricing of these basic features. In the previous section I was okay with shelling out a little dough for a design – I mean, heck, you’re paying to work personally with a designer for a very reasonable price. But when it comes to the email management side of things, the pricing should be a little flatter.

Consider: a monthly volume of 1,000 means you’ll be paying $30, around twice what I’ve seen from other email campaign managers. The prices as they go up the list remain relatively high even after you’ve paid for the customized designs. If Emma’s main appeal are said designs, why do they seem to want to make so much money on the back end?

This isn’t enough to make me reconsider recommending Emma to certain businesses and certain people. But it would mean Emma’s recommendation comes with a caveat: “it can be a little pricey.” Hey, you get what you pay for.

Who Might Like Emma?

And thus we come back to the central theme of this review: what kind of customer is Emma best suited for? I think it’s someone with a particular niche, generally a business that falls in the “online shopping” category. People like their online shops to be warm and inviting. Heck, even if you’re selling an information product like an Ebook, having a well-tailored email will give you an air of professionalism and therefore trust that you can’t simply manufacture.

Emma’s specialty is in tailoring – not manufacturing – that professionalism. It can be a very important thing in the Internet world, and certainly can mean the difference between making a sale and almost making a sale.

If that’s the kind of touch you’re looking for with your emails, you’ll definitely want to consider Emma as a potential vehicle for your vertical response efforts. If it’s not, then heck, why did you bother reading this review this far? Go visit the other Clickfire reviews for something down your alley.

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My Blog Guest – Hype or Monstrous Backlink Machine?

Oh no! Run for the hills. It’s another backlink service!

Not quite! My Blog Guest (MyBlogGuest.com) is not some pay and spray link building service. There are no macros or other gimmicks involved. Actually, it requires some work on your part, but you’ll end up saving a butt load of time by leveraging with this service. Read on to find out how I’ve started making tons of high quality backlinks each month with this awesome backlink monster. Think of all the possibilities! Imagine!

My Blog Guest – Friendly Backlink Monster

Guest blogging is a great way to get high quality backlinks, but it can take a lot of work to find somebody willing to publish your articles. Creating a list of potential websites and writing emails to their webmasters is a tedious and time consuming task indeed.

I wanted to do more guest blogs, but I didn’t have the time to invest in researching sites and contacting all the webmasters in hopes that they might be accepting guest blogs. I set out to do multiple guest blogs a month, but things were starting off really slowly and I was losing hope in my guest blogging strategy.

However, things made a complete turn when I learned about a service called My Blog Guest. It’s kickasscular, broham…But I’ll be honest, I was a bit skeptical at first like I am with most new products and services. However, after seeing it work for me over and over I can tell you that it’s a really awesome way to get lots of good backlinks. The brains and brawn behind My Blog Guest is Ann Smarty. Major high five, Ann!

What is My Blog Guest?

It’s like the best kept secret on the interwebs! Duh!

Basically, My Blog Guest is a web service that lets you submit your articles to a database, and publishers who are seeking out guest blogs can view your articles and make offers on them for publication on their websites. My Blog Guest is very intuitive and easy to get the hang of after you’ve submitted a few articles.

On the flip side, if you’re interested in finding guest blogs then you’ll also enjoy My Blog Guest. You can freely search through the database and put offers on the available articles. My Blog Guest is free from the publisher’s side, and it’s twenty dollars a month for the premium membership if you want to submit articles to the database. If you want lots of steady backlinks then this is a fair price to pay though.

My Guest Blogging Objective

In the past couple of months, my objective with My Blog Guest has been to publish about fifteen to twenty guest blogs a month on high PageRank, well trafficked websites. I can tell you that I have been very successful so far. I’ve been able to publish as many articles as I can possibly write, and I could get more published if I wanted to write more. Article turnaround has been really fast for me generally. I usually publish a few articles at a time, and I sometimes get anywhere from five to ten offers within a day or two on each one.

Well…What Can I Get Published Here?

If you want to get a lot of good offers on your articles there is just one main requirement. Your articles need to be at least decent, well written, and interesting to the publishers that view the My Blog Guest database. Create good quality content and you will get good quality backlinks in return.

I’ve experimented with some of my article submissions to see what gets the bidders biting out there either more or less. At first I was worried about including too many authority links in the body of my articles, but soon found that it didn’t make any noticeable difference. People were accepting my articles with about five body links and respecting the integrity of the system by posting them exactly as they were presented by me in My Blog Guest.

I’ve never included affiliate links or promotional links, and I’ve only included one link back to my site. I include my backlink and anchor text either in the body or the footer section. Publishers have always respected my links and never made them NoFollow. One tip I would say about putting links in the body is to write in the Notes section how many links you have included so publishers know. This is important since publishers can only see a preview portion of your whole article before getting their offer accepted.

My Blog Guest is especially effective for those people who are writing about anything technology or internet related. There are a ton of internet marketers and bloggers who peruse the article database looking for content. I’ve found that they’ll try to snatch up a tech related article within hours of submitting one.

A downside to My Blog Guest though is that for many other topics there are not as many users or as much interest. This can make it difficult to create a large number of backlinks with My Blog Guest for certain topics. I have only posted technology, internet, marketing, weight loss, and dating content so far. Compared to the technology topics, weight loss and dating had less demand. It’s going to be different for each topic, and I still recommend giving the service a try if you’re interested in guest blogging about something other than technology.

My Results So Far

I’ve been able to churn my tech-related articles through My Blog Guest at a pretty rapid pace. I get so many offers sometimes that I just let them sit in the article gallery for weeks to wait for the best possible offers.

Here is a chart showing a snapshot in April - May of my results since I started using My Blog Guest:

The average Google PageRank of the main page of these blogs came to 3.15.

From the chart below, you can see that PageRank 3 blogs were the most common. I thought about using other metrics like number of times retweeted or shared or commented on, which in some cases proved to be pretty sweet.

Link builders rejoice! This tool really works. From my results, we can see that there is a strong demand for content out there. Of course, not all content is created equally. I’ve been putting out good quality articles somewhere between 500 and 800 words. My articles are hardly literary works of art though. As long as you’re not a knobhead, and you can string your sentences and ideas together into a comprehensible and interesting article you’ll be fine here. It also helps to write creative and attractive titles. Also include valuable authority links in the body of your content and leave out any cheesy or self-promoting links. You can promote your sites in the footer section.

By following these simple rules of content creation, I’ve noticed that my articles are getting picked up even faster. Either that or people are just super hungry for content that they’ll take whatever they can get. However I doubt this is the case. Low quality content is usually flagged and taken out of the database

If you’re still on the fence about My Blog Guest, then let me refer you to three other reviews.

Review One – This review actually motivated me to give My Blog Guest a try in the first place. If I had not read this review I might have passed this service by the wayside.

Review Two – Learn more about the Premium membership plan and how you can benefit from it with your guest blogging.

Review Three – This person explains how he used My Blog Guest to spread the word about his new start-up company.

If you want to do more guest blogging and get lots of high quality backlinks then I highly recommend My Blog Guest. It’s easy to use, you can get really nice results, and the price is right. Guest blogging is a really good way to build high quality backlinks and to diversify your link portfolio. If you’ve got content to publish and you’re willing to pay for the monthly membership then I believe My Blog Guest is right for you. Give it a try and you might be surprised by your crazy high results.

Takeaways:

1. It does work for link building


2. Low cost service


3. Content demand from high PR blogs


4. No submission limits

Monkey see and monkey do! Come see what Alex and the Monkey are working on over at Monkeydo Marketing. If you like Internet marketing then you should check out their new online video marketing stuff.

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Logo Design Guru Review

Is This The Guru For You?

Logo design can be like a recipe. You’ve got to start off with a good chef, sure, but if you don’t put together the right ingredients and follow the process correctly, even the good chefs out there can turn out some pretty bad food. So can gurus of logo design, the exact type of “chef” attracted to a site like Logo Design Guru. What is it?

Well, you wouldn’t have clicked over to this Logo Design Guru review without knowing that you were at least interested in finding out. So let’s start there: a simple definition. Logo Design Guru is a crowd source site, which means that you’re actually turning to a “crowd” of designers to finish your logo work. But rather than paying a team of some 99 designers to complete your work, these designers are actually competing for your project and hoping to win your affection by standing out from said crowd.

Confused yet? It’s actually quite a simple process, and once you check out a site like Logo Design Guru, you may just be hooked on the idea of crowd sourcing. But unless Logo Design Guru actually delivers on what it promises, it’s just another site you’ll want to delete from your bookmarks and move on. So what’s the verdict?

Talking to the Crowd

Crowd sourcing is an interesting phenomenon, and even I – a humble freelancer myself – don’t really understand how the economics work. How do so many designers find that submitting their work as just 1/90th or so of what the customer has to choose from end up being economically viable for the designers? Sure, we know it works out quite well for the logo buyer – they get a cheap logo and they get to choose their logo from among many – but it’s hard not to wonder if the designer isn’t ending up, in a manner of speaking, screwed.

Obviously this isn’t the case, because the sheer amount of designers that flock to sites like Logo Design Guru (where they promise you can expect to see around 50-150+ designers competing for your project) dispels the very notion. Crowd sourcing works, and Logo Design Guru probably works too.

Is Crowd Sourcing the Solution?

But how does Logo Design Guru do it? In the normal fashion, to be sure: you post your project – very easy to do, by the way, and we like that – and you make sure you’re able to pay for it, and the designers are off to the races. A simple browsing of the site’s current project board yields a hive of economic activity, and even shows off some of Logo Design Guru’s nice features, like posting private projects and making your project “featured” to attract even more attention.

All of these little details count when you’re running a site like Logo Design Guru. Why? Because there are so many other crowd sourcing sites out there these days and the concept is so simple that these little details become major indicators of a quality service. Logo Design Guru nails on most of them, which is a good sign and an indication that this might just be the crowd sourcing site for you.

Prizes and Prices

Two sides to the same coin, really. What is a prize for one logo designer is a price for someone who’s interested in finding a logo. And depending on how high or how low that price is, someone will be at a disadvantage. In other words, the prices on any crowd sourcing site can’t be a major coup for both designer and buyer, right?

You’d be surprised. If someone had been paying a graphic design firm thousands of dollars for all of their logo needs and just needed to simplify, a much smaller price at a site like Logo Design Guru is a major coup. And even though this price may be smaller than the thousands earned before, a nice-sized project can be well worth a designer’s while.

That’s how the economics work, and that’s why looking at the prices and prizes is so important.

Logo Design Guru does a good job at keeping the prices reasonable. A minimum project will run you about $179, which is not too bad considered how often people will pay several hundreds of dollars and well into quadruple digits to secure the same type of quality from a well-established firm.

It’s near the standard industry price for crowd sourcing these days, but considering the overall ease with which one can acquire a logo now, that’s not a bad price base at all.

Usage and Interface

All of this overall karma is let out of the balloon, however, with a bad functionality. Luckily, Logo Design Guru meets my personal standards by opting for a pretty straight-forward, simple approach that shouldn’t confuse anyone who has more than a few hours of experience on the Internet.

There aren’t any major labyrinths to find, and the big buttons up front tell you how to get started right away. Hey, I’m not a computer genius – I need big buttons telling me to what to do!

Conclusions

Overall, I’m left with a very positive impression of Logo Design Guru. It’s not spectacular in any one way, but it avoids many of the easy pitfalls a crowd sourcing site with lesser standards might fall in to.

When you add in a money-back guarantee to seal the deal, you realize there’s no reason at all you couldn’t check out Logo Design Guru in addition to some of the big boys like 99 Designs.

Is this the first crowd sourcing site you should check out? Well, that’s a matter of taste. I personally don’t think there’s such a difference between all of these logo design sites that you need to choose one in particular. If you have a logo that needs designing and you’ve got the budget for it, you can get started on the process today.

Sites like Logo Design Guru are great at making you wonder why you ever waited in the first place. So what are you waiting for? Start clicking those big buttons.

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