“The number one mistake that many beginners make when trying to start an online business, is failing to create high quality, unique content and still expecting to attract visitors.”

Content can be anything of value that a user will visit a website for. It can be free, or paid for, and it can be one of many different types of media.

Articles, ebooks, video, podcasts, games, web applications, music, and downloadable software are just a few examples of different types of content. The medium used to deliver that content is unimportant. What is highly important however is that the content must be of value.

High value doesn’t necessarily mean that it is being sold for money, in fact there is lots of very valuable information freely available on the Internet (like this blog, or my Online Business Blueprints report!), but it does mean that it offers some real value to the consumer, helps them to solve a problem or achieve new goals (financial, aspirational, educational etc.).

There really is no such thing as free content. Even an article you can read online without paying for, or even giving your email address to access, costs something far more valuable than money – your time.

If you want traffic, you are asking people to give up their time to visit your site, read your blog, or listen to your podcast… If that content isn’t up to scratch they won’t stay long, probably won’t come back, and certainly won’t tell their friends or recommend your content to anyone else!

Just getting started online? Check out my content creation tutorials.

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It doesn’t matter if you’re writing copy for a squeeze page, a sales page, product reviews or adverts, you really want to focus on the benefits of what you’re selling, rather than the features.

What’s the difference?

A benefit is what your product can do to help your customers. A feature is something about the product itself. For example, if I want to sell a series of tutorial videos on article writing, I’m not going to focus my copy on what format the videos are in (MPEG, AVI, FLV etc.) or the resolution, or how long they are. What I am going to focus on is how these videos will help people write better headlines, choose better topics for their articles, or write faster.

The focus has to be on the customer - what we can do for them! Your customers don’t care about your product, only how it can help them. By focusing on the benefits, you’re telling your potential customer how your product can improve their lives… and who wouldn’t want to buy a product that improves their lives right?

Do you see the difference? It ’s a subtle difference, but once you get the hang of this it will have a dramatic impact on your copy writing skills. Now, there’s one more vital piece to this puzzle - what exactly do your customers actually want?

What your customers want

You need to find out exactly what your customers want - what their ‘hot buttons’ are. The best way to find out… is to ask them!

Find forums where your potential customers are likely to hang out, and ask questions. Look through old threads and find out what questions get asked again and again. Yahoo answers is a great place to do the same.

If you comprise a list of exactly what your prospect’s wants and needs are, and then focus your selling to address those problems, you’ll be on to a winner. If your benefits, align perfectly with your customers needs, and you also have a clear call to action (i.e. Sign up now, don’t delay, one-time offer! etc.) then you’ll be giving yourself the best chance of making a sale!

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I’ve just finished editing my Online Business Blueprints report and I’ve decided to give it away for free in order to get some feedback. If you want to download it just enter your details below. Here’s what you’ll find inside:

• The 3 keys to online success
• Why there’s no such thing as free content
• How to create content that will draw visitors in
• How to drive traffic to your site, and convert that traffic into customers
• My top 3 methods for niche research
• What tools to use to create content and products, for free!
• What type of traffic is the most powerful, and how to drive it
• How to monetize your traffic
• How to create income on autopilot
• And more…

I’m giving the report away as a bonus to anyone who subscribes to my Online Business newsletter, just fill out your first name and email and I’ll send you a free copy!

I hope you find it useful. It’s aimed primarily at beginner to intermediate marketers. If you’re brand new to online business, you’ll find enough in here to find your feet and start making a profit. If you’re already making money online, I hope you’ll find a few pearls of wisdom in here that will help you grow your business. Please do leave a comment and let me know what you think, I’d really love some feedback!

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Yesterday I posted a link to a prelaunch video for the Commission Blueprint which has just lauched today. I have just purchased the system so here are my initial thoughts. First of all the price is much lower than I was expecting, but to be honest there is also a very compelling one time offer on the thankyou page where you can choose to test drive their coaching program for 7 days for $4.95 - I did take up the offer, but I won’ talk about that here. I’ll just focus on the main Commission Blueprint system.

The Commission Blueprint

The purchase went very smoothly, as you would expect from a Clickbank product, and once logged in to the secure download area my first reaction was that there is a LOT to this system. The site is very clean and well designed, and leads you through a series of PDF files to begin with. Release notes, Opt-in page secrets, Pre-sell page secrets, and Review page secrets are a series of well written reports. Then you get into the meat of the Commission Blueprint system - the videos…

Commission Blueprint Videos

There are 14 videos totalling over three and ahalf hours of content. Obviously I’ve not had time to watch them all yet, but first impressions are that they are well produced and high quality. Each video is widescreen with a ‘talking head’ on the right and slides to the left. They are in FLV format and you can watch them online, or opt to download them. The FLV format means that an FLV player is required to view them offline, but a link to a free player is included on the doanload page. A nice touch is that the slides used to produce the videos are also available as PDF files.

To accompany the videos are very well written templates for review pages, pre-sell pages, and opt-in pages. These are supplied as zip files and are well designed html files with accompanying images. No PSD source files are included, but they are not heavy on the graphics so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Finally, there are a few unadvertised bonuses including Michael Rasmussen’s MiniSiteProfts Exposed, and Email Promos Exposed which is a nice unexpected touch.

The Commission Blueprint System

I’ll be able to write more about my thoughts on the Commission Blueprint content once I’ve gone through the entir series of videos and started to put it into practice. From what I watched so far though, I’m quite impressed and eager to give this a try. The very clearly outline the entire process in the videos, broken down step by step. There is no ‘filler’ information and complete newbies might have to look elsewhere for the basics since they assume a basic knowledge of Adwords etc.

The system seems to revolve around the idea of applying a science to choosing the right keywords, the right products to promote, the right landing page etc. and they give a formula to follow for the entire process. If the system works anywhere near as well as it should then this is a no brainer for me. I’m quite a numerical guy anyway (some would say geeky!) so this is right my street.

So there you go, a quick look at the Commission Blueprint and what is has to offer. I can’t say much more right now until I’ve properly tested the system so check back in a few days and I’ll share my findings, but I can say this - I’m very excited about this and can’t wait to see the results!

You can check out the CB site here

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I’m sure you’ve heard of YouTube, and maybe MetaCafe, and maybe even Viddler…. but what about Blip.tv, or HowCast, or Sclipo? The truth is that, while YouTube is far and away the market leader, there are lots of other sites where you can publish your videos, and if you’re not using them you could be missing out on valuable traffic.

Until fairly recently, submitting to all of the different sites was very time consuming but no longer - enter TubeMogul!

TubeMogul is a free service which allows you to publish videos to all of the main video sharing websites from one central control panel, PLUS they throw in free tracking to boot! Currently the list of supported sites is:

• 5min
• AOL Video
• Blip.tv
• Break
• Brightcove
• Crackle
• Daily Motion
• Google Video
• Graspr
• Howcast
• Imeem
• Metacafe
• Myspace
• Revver
• Sclipo
• StupidVideos
• Viddler
• Vimeo
• Veoh
• Yahoo Video
• YouTube

Getting started is very easy, just head over to TubeMogul and register for a free account. You can then start publishing right away. You start a submission by uploading your video to TubeMogul, and then filling in some details (such as title and description etc.) while you’re waiting for the upload. You then select which sites to upload to, hit the submit button and you’re done.

Just like social bookmarking using the Social Marker tool, you’ll need an account at each of the individual video sites. That means the first time you use TubeMogul it will take some some, but from then on it’s a simple matter of uploading, filling out the form and bam - you can publish to a bunch of different sites in no time.

Once your video has been uploaded, you can start to view stats after 24 hours. A great feature is that you can track viewing stats for videos, even if you didn’t upload them through the service. For example, I use TubeMogul to upload to several sites, but I do my YouTube submissions manually (since Youtube are by far the market leader, it pays to give them special attention!) but I can still track my Youtube stats from within TubeMogul.

All in all it’s a great free tool. Without TubeMogul I probably wouldn’t bother submitting to any site except YouTube, but this tool makes it worth the time to submit. Since using TubeMogul, approximately 15% of my views have been on sites other than YouTube, and those are views I was missing out on before!

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Check out this amazing video about two guys who you won’t have heard of before.  Tim Godfrey and Steven Clayton don’t sell Internet Marketing products, they promote business to consumer products via Clickbank and last year they made $526,422 - with no list, no JV partners, selling other people’s products!!

They have turned their Clickbank strategy into a product called Commission Blueprint which will be released tomorrow, 27th August.  Their formula exploits Clickbank and Google in a way that results in these amazing profits.  Watch the video to find out more, and I’ll be sure to post a review once I get my hands on a copy tomorrow!

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