DKSpeaks Podcast: Internet Marketing, Blogging and Social Media Tips

“The Money is in the List” is something that you hear the moment you jump into internet marketing and it follows you whenever and wherever you go. And the fact that every experienced internet marketer tells you that the money is indeed in the list, goes to establish the fact that your list is your biggest asset and that it is the most important thing in your business. When I started my business, I never really cared about a list. Traffic generation was simple and Google Adwords and other ads networks were also very cheap. I built a lot of micro niche websites and I was able to generate huge amounts of traffic to these sites. I made and these sites did extremely well. But the biggest mistake that I did was – not build and email list. I never really cared about the “Money is in the list” thing because I was making money and that was all I cared. The next couple of years saw a lot of things change on the internet. The traffic to my sites dropped because they were not optimized and some of them did not even follow the guidelines from Google. Some got penalized and yet others dropped of the rankings. As traffic dropped, the money went down. And finally one day, by the time I could realize what was happening, pretty much all my sites were down. I am sure you don’t want to be in that situation. With the changing internet marketing world and the difficulty in generating traffic and visitors to your content and offers, the efforts that you are putting into generating every single visitor is huge. At the same time, the value of every single visitor coming to your website has increased. If you are not able to capture this visitor in the form of an email address, then you are losing a lot of money. If you haven’t yet started building your list, then start right away. Don’t waste time on planning and designing. Just launch it. Keep in mind that you will need some good and reliable tools in your list building efforts. I recommend using Aweber for your auto-responder. If you are looking for a self-hosted solution, you can use IMSC rapid mailer and use Amazon SES services to send your email. For building beautiful and high converting optin pages and landing pages, I recommend, Thrive Content Builder and Thrive leads. They are cost-effective and has a lot of features as well. Now, you have built your list. What next? Email Marketing Best Practices Building your list is important. It is equally important to manage it as well. One of the biggest mistakes that most people do is to ignore the list after you have built it. You don’t want a dead list where your subscribers don’t respond at all. Neither do you want to be building a list where your subscribers are unsubscribing faster than the rate at which they are subscribing. These 4 email marketing best practices that we are going to discuss today will help you build and manage an email list that is responsive and at the same time profitable. The Confirmation pages – I see a lot of people using the default subscription confirmation pages, which we also call the “thank-you” page, for the optin forms. These pages are hosted by the auto-responder services and have nothing but a message to the subscribers to confirm their email. This is sheer waste of a chance to better interact with you new subscribers. Build a custom thank-you page and give it your branding. You might want to personalize it while telling them who you are are. You might want to add a photograph of yours so that they know who you are. I prefer using this same photograph in almost all of my emails. People digest things better if presented visually. Rather than remembering my name, it will be easier for them to relate to my photograph. And after they have seen it a few times, they will easily remember my name. The Confirmation email –

Before we get onto today’s episode, I wanted to let you all know about a few changes that I am making to this show here. As per all the requests and suggestions that I received, we are moving to a weekly frequency from the next episode onwards. We are also changing the day on which we telecast the show from a Sunday to a Wednesday. So The DKSpeaks Podcast will now be available on all Wednesdays. This would mean that the next episode will be telecast on the Wednesday of the next week. I hope you all like these changes. Feel free to write to me about your thoughts, comments, suggestions and feedbacks. With that said, let us get onto today’s Episode of THE DKSpeaks Podcast. Today’s topic is – Making Money with Fiverr: Why FIVERR Could Be Your Best Option to Start Making Money Online? FIVERR has had its share of controversies with a lot of people complaining about the quality of services being offered there. You can call it the $5 value and would proudly justify it with the quote, “what you get is what you pay for”. But if that true? With markets becoming more of a buyers market and every Tom, Dick and Harry opening up an online service, the buyer always has an option of deciding where to buy from. And if you really think, $5.00 is not enough to get value for then you might just want to look for a better place for a better service. But FIVERR is not all that bad. Just as in the case of any other product or, service you are bound to find some bad ones and have some bad experiences as well. But you will be able to avoid all of this if you can spend some time and do your due diligence. There are tons of reviews for most of the sellers on FIVERR. And FIVERR sellers thrive on this reputation. Also keep in mind that these reviews and feedback are from genuine buyers. So there is no reason why it will be biased or, ingenuine. FIVERR has a lot of extremely good quality sellers and if you are ready to spend some time finding them, you can get some nice services done for a fraction of what it would cost you elsewhere. A couple of years ago, I first recommended FIVERR as a seller to my young brother. He was battling with unemployment. What worse could somebody go through than losing a job that was paying extremely well and that too unexpectedly. A dearth of good jobs, thanks to the IT recession added to his woes. His expertise was in graphics designing. He had a nice eye for colors and designs and was exceptionally talented. I found that designers were doing very good on FIVERR and there was a lot of demand for infographics. I recommended him to start a gig there for infographic creation. Until then I used FIVERR as a buyer only. He took my advice and setup a gig for infographic creation. He did not have to wait long. He got his first order on the 2nd day. And that was just the beginning. In just about 15 days he was buried deep into orders. There were more than 30 orders pending. The first month he earned about $600. That was big money for somebody who had just lost his job. He continued with his FIVERR gig for about 4 months. And by then he had realized the power of freelancing and being self-employed. Today he does freelancing for multiple high value clients and runs his own business. Why am I telling you this story? If you are struggling with making money, then FIVERR could just be the place which can help you with the push required. Making Money with Fiverr is not that difficult and it could help you get started with your Internet Marketing business. There are numerous sellers on FIVERR who rely solely on the income they generate from FIVERR. And that should be enough to tell you the kind of money you can make selling $5 gigs. So how you do start and How will you be able to stand out from the crowd? Making Money with FIVERR – The Basics Starting off with Fiverr is pretty simple.

Welcome to Episode 8 of the DKSpeaks Podcast. Blogs thrive on fresh content and it is this fresh content that lies at the core of Blogging. One of the biggest reasons why blogs fail, after traffic problems of course, is the drought for fresh content. People start of blogging only to realize that after about a couple of months, they have nothing to write. The frequency of their posts drop and this in turn reduces the traffic even further leading to a gradual death of the blog. How to you find fresh content for your blog? What will you write about? Why will somebody read your post? In this episode of The DKSPeaks Podcast we will talk about, “How to Find Content Ideas for Your Next Killer Blog Post”. How to Find Content Ideas for Your Next Blog Post? Blogging is all about story-telling. And the popularity of your blog entirely depends upon how well you tell a story. If you make a list of about 20 good blogs and read them regularly, you will find that all of these blogs pretty much cover the same topic. The only difference is the way they present it. If you watched the latest movie “Jurassic World”, you will be able to relate to what I am saying. The storyline of the movie is pretty much on the same lines as that of the earlier ones. It was just about the way the story was told. And we know what the movie did at the BOX Office. And this is precisely what every movie reboots do. They pick a hit formula and retell the story. If they are able to present the story in a more engaging way, the movie is a hit, else it flops. Do this to blogging. Retell stories in a better and more engaging way and people will come. Let’s get onto some actionable steps in finding content for your next blog post. The first question is – where will you find topics for good content? How do you know if this piece of content will do well? We will go by the assumption, “past experiences are a good indication for the future“. I use 2 sources to find good topics for my blog posts – Buzzsumo and aHrefs. Buzzsumo is an excellent tool to find top content that are viral and has been shared on social media sites a lot. You can search with any keyword and there are lot of search operators with the help of which you can refine your search. Buzzsumo searches for articles, infographics, guest posts, interviews, videos etc. The simple trick that I follow is to search for content that was published at least a year back. Pick the top content and read through it and by the time you have finished reading it, I am sure you will have your next blog post idea and maybe a couple more for the next week. Ahrefs content explorer is a similar tool as Buzzsumo. They too give you a list of content based on your search criteria. I found this content explorer tool much more accurate than Buzzsumo and hence prefer using it. Follow the exact same process as we did in Buzzsumo. There are a few other tools as well that you can use to find content gems. I like  using these to find good content. There are basis content aggregators that will send you some of the latest and best on topics of your choice. Alltop is my favorite. At alltop you can get a list of the best content on a certain topic. This can serve an a good inspiration for your next blog post. Some other similar tools include Content Gems, Zite, Flipboard and Prismatic. Another good place to search for your blog post idea is Quora. Quora is a question board where people ask questions and others answer. People also vote up and down the questions and answers that they found useful and informative. If you are frequent on this board, you will find a lot of good topics, in fact questions that people are searching answers for. One of these could be the topic for your next blog post. Once you have your blog post idea, it is just about writing it,

Welcome to episode 7 of the DKSpeaks podcast.  Some of you had sent me some feedback on my earlier episodes and had asked me to make this podcast a weekly affair. I just wanted let you all know that I am working on it and we might soon get in to a weekly frequency for this show. In today’s episode we’re going to discuss about blogging and how to publicize your blog posts and get it the required attention. Let me ask you a few questions. * What is the first thing that you do after you have published a blog post? * Do you work on promoting it? * What is your strategy to build traffic to it? There are a lot of  blogs that  create extremely good content. But there’s very little that they do to promote their blog posts. It is here that they make the biggest mistake. Their  posts go unread and there is little traffic that they are able to generate to these posts and to their blogs. In this episode we are going to discuss about the 8 most important things that you need to do immediately after you have published your blog post, in order to get it the required attention and in order to drive traffic to them. So let’s start. 8 Things To Do after You Publish Your Blog Post Okay before you hit the publish button on your post there is one critical thing that you need to do – Optimizing your post for the right keywords. The first thing that you need to do is to ensure that your blog post is optimized for the right keywords. I always recommend that you write the title of your blog post at the end. In doing that you will be able to write a headline that gets attention and at the same time you will also be able to optimize it by using the right keywords. Head over to the Google keyword planner tool and do a quick research for the keywords relevant to the topic of the blog post that you have just written. Doing this is pretty simple. Just enter the seed keyword into the tool and then research for related keywords. You will get a lot of keyword ideas from the tool. You can note down about 5 keywords with the maximum search volume and with medium to low competition. Then head over to Google and enter the first keyword into the search box. As you enter the key word Google will start suggesting  search terms. These are terms that are being searched by a lot of people. You can use these terms for the title of your blog post. Another way to do this is by looking at what other terms are being searched on Google. You can see this by scrolling to the bottom of the search results page. You will see a lot of these suggestions at the bottom of the page. Again these are the terms that are being searched for by a lot of people. You can use them in the title of your blog posts and it will make them stand out and also help you in ranking your posts in Google. Second Thing – The second thing to do is to ping the world and let them know that you have published a post. While WordPress has an inbuilt pinging solution, I somehow feel that it isn’t enough. So head over to pingomatic.com and pingoat.com and enter the details of the post that you just published and click on ping. That should let everybody know that you have just published an awesome post. Third thing – The third thing is to syndicate and bookmark your content. Syndication is a nice way of publicizing your content to your relevant audience and to other relevant sites in your niche. There are a lot of bookmarking sites that have a very high authority and syndicating to these sites will also help build backlinks and authority for your blog and your blog posts. Syndication services like Outbrain, Zemanta, Taboola etc. are extremely powerful when it comes to promoting content. You can create small campaigns with these services in order to build an initial impetus for your blog post. You can use services like Onlywire.com or, socialADR.

In the last few podcasts we touched upon topics like social media, Private Blog Networks, Productivity etc. When I sent out an email to my list of subscribers about the podcasts, I got a lot of questions from them. One of the questions that some of my subscribers asked me when they got to know about these podcasts was, why didn’t I do a podcast on Youtube Marketing, considering the fact that I am a video marketer and that video marketing is the niche that I have been making some decent money in. It was a fair ask and it actually made sense because I know a lot of you might have had this question on “How to rank Youtube Videos on Google”. And it is hence I thought I will pick the topic of Youtube Marketing for this podcast. So in today’s show we are going to discuss, “How to Rank Youtube Videos on Google”. How to Rank Youtube Videos on Google Now when I say Google, I mean the 1st page of Google. If it is not the first page then it is no use ranking on Google. Statistics show that the search results on the first page of Google are the only ones that get some clicks, especially the first 4 results. So if your video is not appearing on the first page of Google, there is no point ranking them. You might have seen a lot of videos ranking consistently on the first page of Google and you too can get the same kind of results if you follow the below instructions. I have made a lot of money with videos. I get my videos to rank on the first page of Google, especially during big launches and these videos bring in a decent amount of money for a long time. You can see an example . Just go to Google and search for the term, “Bleupage Review” and you will find my video is the first result. This video brought in a lot of money for almost 7-8 months because there was a subscription offer related to this product and it did well. The product was in the facebook marketing niche and was a good product. The subscription offer paid well and the money was consistent until Facebook changed some of its algorithm and the demand for the product dipped. Now that you have seen an example of a result, let us look at some key factors in getting your videos ranked on the first page of Google. I do a lot of launch jacking. I pick products that are about to be launched or, have just launched and I create review videos for these products. Review videos are amongst the best videos to create, if you want to make money fast because they tend to do really well on Youtube. Creating review videos are easy as well. I normally recommend a screen capture video with a walk-through of the product and its features and how it can benefit the users. But, you can also create simple powerpoint presentations talking about the features and benefits of the product and do a straight comparison with a similar product to prove the point. That brings us to the first point which is to pick keywords that you want to rank for. Keyword Research Since we are going to rank review videos, the obvious choice of keywords would be Product name + review, Product name + bonus, product name + discount, product name +bonus etc. But if you are not creating review videos, then you might want to spend some time researching your keywords. Follow a normal keyword research method with the only difference that once you have a list of keywords selected, just head over to Google and Youtube and search for the results using these keywords. You might want to see the amount of competition and the age of the video that is ranking first. Also prepare a checklist of the optimization factors that we are going to discuss below and take note of how many of them are being followed by these videos. Optimizing Video Attributes Always ensure that you save your videos with the keyword phrase. So if you are targeting a keyword “Social Robot Review” then y...

One of the biggest problems that most people face in internet marketing is in staying productive. Because there is no schedules to govern you and because there is no laid out activities for you to do, most people find it difficult to stay organized and be productive. In episode 5 of “The DKSpeaks Podcast” we will be talking on how to stay organized and Productive in your business. Show Notes and Transcript One of the biggest problems that I faced when I jumped into Internet Marketing was the difficulty in staying productive. Internet Marketing is a very simple business and just as everything else, it is the simplest things that we tend to ignore and miss out on. I still remember, one of my early mentors asking me, “Do you know how much a morning walk can benefit you?” I said, “Yes, absolutely!” He asked, “What is the most difficult part about walking – the activity”. I replied, “Nothing. It is so simple. You just need to walk.” He then smiled and asked me, “So, do you go for a morning walk”. I reluctantly replied, “No.. but that is because I have…” And before I could continue, he interrupted me and said,”Everyone knows the benefit of a morning walk and the goodness it can bring to your body. It is probably one of the simplest things to do because there is nothing complex about it. Yet hardly anybody does it. Do you know why?” I nodded in a “No”. He continued, “It is because the simplest things tend to take the last position in your to-do list. Because it is simple. And these simplest things are the ones that can be best pushed the next day because they are too simple to be done today.” It is true. The problem with internet marketing is the fact that there is no monetary investment and this is one of the biggest reasons why we tend to be lazy. But only if we could picture the reasons why we set out to start an internet marketing business, we would not push another task to tomorrow and instead complete it today. On that note, let’s start episode 5. How to Stay Organized and Productive in Internet Marketing? As a blogger, I am almost always impacted by the problem of procrastination. The tomorrow that I pushed that post to never comes and I end up staying up late in the night writing, editing and publishing my posts. This again leads to a multitude of problems – like lack of quality, poor presentation, inadequate coverage of the topic etc. A couple of years ago, I read about this nice little technique called “Pomodoro Technique”. This is one of the best and proven methods to improve productivity developed somewhere in the 80s. It follows a simple methodology. It uses a timer to break down your work into small intervals, traditionally about 25 minutes, followed by a 5 minute break. It is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility. This technique has a lot of benefits. It makes you stick to a schedule. It stimulates your brain cells to think. It brings that sense of urgency and above all it improves productivity like you would have never imagined. So this is how the technique works: * You decide on the task that you would want to do – in our case write a blog post. * Set your timer to 25 minutes. * Start writing your post. Just write. Don’t bother editing or, correcting or, even checking the sentence structure or, grammar. Work until the timer rings * Take a short break. I usually take about 10 minutes break. * Come back on time and start again. * Repeat this until 4 such productive intervals. After that you can take a long break of about 30 minutes. There is a slight twist that I added to this. I time myself to finish my post in the first 2 intervals,

In this 4th episode of the DKSpeaks Podcast, we are going to be discussing about social media marketing and how to build a strong and effective social media marketing strategy. With Google coming up with frequent updates to their algorithm and with the increasing relevance to social media presence and social media signals, it is becoming more and more important to have a strong social media strategy for your business. All the on-page search engine optimization factors are just not enough these days to get ranked on Google. In addition to all the link building that you are doing, it is also important to have strong social signals pointing to your sites, if it is to be considered worthy of ranking on search engines. This has in fact led to every website owner rushing over to the social media sites and submitting content like crazy with the expectation that some of it will get picked up and shared by people and that it will go viral, sending out strong social signals to their websites. And this in turn will please the Google gods who will then rank their site on the first page. But this doesn’t happen. People waste their time and money on all these efforts and finally quit, complaining that nothing works. Why are these people failing? What’s the mistake that they are doing? Social media marketing is just like any other project. And I am sure that you will agree that you need a strong plan for any project to succeed. It is no different with your social media strategy. You need a strong social media marketing plan, if you are to succeed at social media. And creating a strong social media marketing plan is not difficult if you follow these 5 simple steps. In this episode we will learn these 5 simple steps to creating a strong and effective social media marketing strategy. 5 Steps to an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy – Podcast Notes These 5 steps that we are going to discuss today is a proven method in creating an effective social media strategy. It is extremely simple and easy if you follow it in the same sequence as we show here. You will get extremely good ROI from your social media efforts if you follow these steps to the T and don’t skip any of these. So with that being said, let us jump straight into the 5 steps to creating an effective social media marketing plan. Step 1 – Create a Detailed Social Media Objectives and Goals This is the foundation of your social media strategy. You need to have a detailed document on your Social Media Objectives and the goals that you plan to achieve. When it comes to objectives, most people will go about writing down objectives like, “I will tweet 10 times in a day regularly without missing a single day” or, “I will post consistently 5 times a day for the next 5 months”. These are not objectives. Your objective has to be the end result that you want to achieve with your social media marketing plan. It could vary depending upon what you want to get out of your efforts on social media channels. Your social media objective could be to generate leads, maybe 10000 leads in a month or, it could be to double your sales by the end of the month. Whatever your objective is, you need to write it down in your planner along with clear goals that you want to achieve, so that you are able to track your success. Keep in mind that these objectives of yours need to be aligned with your long term goals, else you will find yourself running in an entirely different direction to your broader goals. Step 2 – Evaluate Your Current Situation I am sure you are doing something on social media sites right now as a part of your social media marketing plan. But it is not effective, which is why you are listening to this podcast. So before you formalize your new plan, you need to know where you stand today in terms of your social media pr...

This is the 3rd and the final part in the “How to Create a Private Blog Network” series of episodes. If you haven’t listened to the earlier episodes, I will recommend that you first listen to them to understand the details of a private blog network and how to set one up for you own use. In this final part I will be answering some of the questions that I received after the 1st 2 episodes. These are some of the best questions and the ones that were asked by more than 1 person. There were many more that I had received but since I couldn’t cover all of them and also since a lot of them were on aspects that I had explained in detail in the earlier episodes, I had to discard a few of them. If you still have any questions, you can write to me using the contact form here and I will respond to them as soon as possible. Show notes and Transcripts for this Episode Okay! So let’s get started and get straight onto the questions. How many backlinks will I need in order to get my site on the 1st page of Google? It entirely depends upon your niche and the competition in your niche. If you niche is not too competitive you could do with about 10-12 backlinks. But if it is too competitive it might mean a lot of backlinks. There is no hard and fast rule to this though. But my recommendation is to first research your niche well and see the strength of your competition. Review the search results on Google for your primary keywords. Evaluate the DA, PA, TF and CF for the results. You can install a toolbar called as Mozbar which gives you all these details about your search results on the search results itself. Plan from there on. How many blogs should I build in a particular niche specific PBN? This is again a contextual question and I will say that there is no hard and fast rule to it. I started seeing results to one of my niche blogs in the personality development niche with just about 6 blogs and about 30 articles in total in them. I would recommend that you start building it slowly. Don’t go all out buying domains and building blogs. Start with 1-2 blogs a month and monitor the results. Then build another couple of them the next month and so on. Are you sure Google will not penalize me? If you follow the guidelines and don’t leave footprints for Google to come back to you, there is no chance that you will be penalized. When Google penalized PBN a few months back it had a pattern to the sites that got penalized. They were either overdoing it or, just not doing it the right way. Most of the networks that got penalized were the ones that had a little too many outbound links. So one of the biggest recommendation is to ensure that you are limiting the number of outbound links on your PBN. IF possible link to only one money site from each blogs in a PBN. Another thing that you should keep in mind is to not share your network. Whatever the reason, don’t be tempted to share your network with anyone. This in turn means that you are restricting the number of backlinks from each of your blogs. Do I need to build links to the blogs in the PBN as well? This is a nice question. In order to maintain the authority of the domain on which you are running your PBN blog, it is recommended that you build links to them as well. In fact I recommend that you build a tiered linking to your PBNs as well. So if you have 10 blogs in your network, build a tiered backlinking. This means build 5 backlinks to your money site from 5 of the domains. Then build links to these 5 domains from the rest of the 5 blogs. You could also build backlinks using sources like Web 2.0 Sites, Social Bookmarking sites, Social Networking sites, Article sites, PR sites etc. You can find a lot of fiverr sellers who can do this for you for only 5 bucks. You could even buy a link pyramid package for about $5 at Fiverr and us...