For someone who is about to start up their own business, whether online or not, this is an essential question to ask.

When you sell a product or service you need someone to make a purchase so you can make money. The most important principle in business is that there are two different types of people involved in your business; customers and clients.

While both of these may appear at first to be the same they are critically different and concentrating on one over the other can be the difference between success and failure.

This concept, what I call the $ 1 Customer, I teach to clients in order for them to focus on building relationships that last.

The difference between a customer and a client is repeat business.

For every link you exchange, promotion you run and ad you place to attract customers to your business or website there is a cost involved. It can be something as simple as your time, but the cost reduces your profit immediately.

For every $ 1.00 someone spends an initial customer will cost you something; regardless of whether that cost is $ 0.15, $ 0.25 or $ 0.50. With a customer you never get your full $ 1.

A client, in comparison, is a returning customer to your business and can cost you nothing. They may purchase something because of a promotion, but clients are the most likely to return to your business because of their positive first experience or because you have a value proposition (like Daily Blog Tips) very few others do. In the online world clients are what attract advertisers and build your email list. Clients are highly targeted high value customers.

Very few businesses can survive on customers alone; a successful business needs to concentrate on turning any and all customers into a client.

High value clients are also the most likely to refer your business to a friend or acquaintance providing you with another $ 1 customer and prospective client.

Email lists are the best way to stay engaged with your clients as you can inform them of promotions, new products or services and announcements related to your business. A customer is a one-time transaction or visit with no loyalty; a client is someone whose repeat business can be forecasted, expected and maintained over a long period of time.

Are you paying enough attention to your customers and turning them into clients?

Brad Ferris is a marketing consultant and writer of Triage Investing Blog where he authors content on business fundamentals and successful investment practices.

Daily Blog Tips

So many bloggers put tons of time and effort into getting more traffic – but perhaps that sounds like trying way too hard. Your ideas are so awesome, your personality so strong, that readers will just come to you.

I’m going to give you ten straightforward ways to make sure the whole world knows you’re not going to pander to your readers. (Oh, and if you would like to have a few more readers – try doing the opposite of everything on this list.)

1. Give Your Post the First Title You Come Up With

You’re in a hurry, right? So your post will do just fine with the first title that pops into your head. Sure, that title might not be descriptive or engaging – but hey, you’re not worried about enticing people to click through and read your post.

2. Write Whatever Comes Into Your Head

Instead of sifting through some great ideas or coming up with a plan, just write whatever comes into your head. What you had for breakfast, that cute thing your cat did, your favorite rant about the goverment … put it all in.

3. Write Long, Dense Paragraphs

Subheadings, lists and bold text are for the weak. If someone really wants your content, they’ll manage to get through those long blocks of grey text that you’ve written.

4. Use Formal Language

You were probably taught about writing in school: why not simply apply all those rules to blogging? Write in a dry, academic way, with plenty of long words, and you’ll be certain that your posts are worth an A (even though no-one’s reading).

5. Make Your Blog All About You

It’s your blog, so make it about you. Every example you give should be drawn from your own experience. Don’t bother phrasing talking to the reader as “you” – instead, use “I” as often as you can. [link to my post on you & I]

6. Don’t Edit or Proof-Read

No-one cares about good writing online, do they? Don’t bother re-reading what you’ve written: those typos won’t matter. And if your general point is a bit vague and unclear, perhaps that’s for the best…

7. Never Link to Old Posts

All your (three) readers have been with you from day one, so don’t link back to old posts: they’ll already have read them. New readers can just use that handy “Archives” page that’s definitely on your blog somewhere.

8. Don’t Promote Your Post

If you build it, they will come. Don’t bother tweeting your post or mentioning it on Facebook: you need that space to moan about the long line at the grocery store and that weird guy on the bus.

9. Post Erratically

Sometimes you’re filled with the desire to create – and sometimes not. Post whever the muse descends, even if that means twenty posts in a week followed by nothing for two months. Your real fans will stick with you … won’t they?

10. Plaster Your Blog With Ads

You don’t actually care about the readers: you’re into blogging for the money. And you’re pretty sure that the best way to monetize is to shove as many ads onto your site as possible, so that the actual content almost vanishes.

Ali Luke is a writer and writing coach, and has a weekly DailyBlogTips column on content creation. If you’re struggling to get enough writing done, check out her free ebook How to Find Time for Your Writing.

Daily Blog Tips

Experienced bloggers may have a profound understanding of the dynamics of composing an engaging and informative blog but they may also be entirely clueless when it comes to applying their writing skills to a very different medium: their email newsletter.

The creation of an effective email newsletter requires a very specific form of writing moxie and the mastery of a structure which varies considerably from your garden variety blog post.

Promotional vs. informative

The first determination which must be made is what your readers want to read. In order to address this situation you might need to rewind your entire creative process back to Square One and re-determine what the actual goal of your email newsletter is in the first place. Of course you’re trying to drive more traffic to your blog, but are you doing it in a promotional or an informative manner? The two approaches can translate in very distinct results.

Depending on your email subscribing audience they may be more responsive to a form of mini-blog which presents ancillary or even totally separate information than what you are currently featuring on your formal blog.

However, some types of readers would rather receive the information you provide on your blog itself and may be confused or irritated by having to resort to two separate channels to receive “the full picture.” You can certainly rely on your knowledge of the sector, but by far the more accurate manner to make this determination is by extensively testing both approaches to see which one provides the better conversion rate.

Short & punchy

Once you have the overall approach set, it’s time to simplify. Most bloggers craft email newsletters that are way too long, complex, convoluted, and detailed to be effective. The best email newsletters feature short, punchy paragraphs, a wealth of bullet lists, and links that not only lead back to your blog, but to other pages that your readers could find of interest.

There is usually no need to cram in everything but the kitchen sink into your email newsletters, as general summaries with links back to your blog for the meat of the matter is usually all that is required. If you find yourself composing voluminous tomes for your email newsletter content that requires repeated scrolling by the reader, you should channel that time and energy into your blog itself.

Chat, don’t lecture

Your email subscriber is a regular person, not a member of a peer-review scientific journal committee. That equates into your composing your email newsletter in the style of a one on one conversation not a post-graduate thesis. You can reserve the heavy lifting of facts and figures for your blog, as an email newsletter is best written in the way that you would chat with them, not lecture them.

Reward your reader for having the trust and confidence in you to sign up for your email newsletter and then carrying through to actually opening and reading the emails they receive by providing them content that is friendly, approachable, and conversational.

Avoid insider-speak

Jargon is one of the greatest enemies of a successful email newsletter campaign. Even though you may operate in an extremely technical industry, you should always aim the readership comprehension of your email newsletter writing at a reasonable eighth grade education level.

Take whatever steps are necessary to avoid writing email newsletters that require extensive technical footnotes, or worse yet read like the Hollywood trade magazine Variety where different movie genres are described in insider lingo as laffers (comedies), mellers (melodramas), oaters (Westerns), or chopsocky (martial arts). Excessive jargon or technicalese can lead to misunderstanding which can alienate a large part of your audience.

You should always place yourself in the position of your subscriber when writing an email newsletter. If you were subscribing to your blog, what would you react to most favorably? If you find that the way you are crafting your email campaign now is actually responsible for disaffecting your subscribers, it’s time that you made a change… while you still have subscribers left!

Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

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Daily Blog Tips

If you are a freelance writer, designer or consultant, you’ll certainly get involved in projects where you need to bill your clients by the hour. But how do you track your time accurately so that both you and your client will be happy?

There are several solutions available (both free and paid) which help you with this task. For example, if you are using Firefox or Google Chrome you’ll certainly find extensions that do it.

The problem with most of those solutions, though, is that require you to actively start the timer when you start working on a client’s project, and to stop it once you are done. Sounds simple enough, but what if you working on multiple projects at the same time? Or if you are working on a client’s project when you decide to check your email or chat on Facebook for some time? As you can imagine, it becomes a mess.

Is there a better way? Yep, and it’s called Chrometa. It’s basically a time tracking software that automatically starts and stops your timer for you, depending on what activity is going on on your computer. Here’s a small video illustrating how it works:

How does the software know to what client the work you are doing belongs? You can create keyword-based rules and the times will be assigned automatically according to those keywords.

On top of that you can also create invoices on the fly or export your time to a third party billing system (like Freshbooks). Here’s a screenshot of the user interface:

The basic version starts at $ 19, but you’ll probably be able to make that money back in a matter of days once you start tracking your time more accurately. Reading through their testimonials there were users who increased their billable time by 20% once their started tracking time spent with email, drafts and so on. Here’s the link to their website if you wanna check the product out.

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The launch of the AdSense Profits Course is getting closer (February 14), and I have two more interviews with past students lined up for you. Today’s interview is with Simon Ng.

Simon blogs at SimonBlog.com. As you might have guesses it started out as a personal blog, but after a while Simon started focused on the iPhone, and today his blog is one of the most popular in this niche.

Another interesting fact is that Simon is not located in the US, and yet he’s making a nice living thanks to his site, proving that you really can do this from anywhere around the world.

1. When and why did you start your blog?
I started simonblog.com in June, 2007. At that time, I just wanted to learn about blogging, WordPress and AdSense. So I registered the domain and started my personal blog. At the very beginning, I had no idea what to write. I only published a few short posts related to my personal life. Rather, I focused on testing out different WordPress themes and plugins.

2. When did you decide to focus on the iPhone?
I bought the original iPhone in October, 2007. You might know that the first generation of iPhone was not sold globally. You had to jailbreak it and use special software to unlock so that it could be paired with any SIM card. I bought one through a local store in Hong Kong. The iPhone was already unlocked and it worked pretty well with my carrier. I loved the iPhone but after five days, the iPhone hung with an iTunes error shown up. That really scared me up. As a tech guy, I started researching solution to fix the problem. It took me a few hours to bring my iPhone back to normal. I wrote up a detailed post sharing my experience and how the problem got fixed. It turned out the post received quite a lot of feedbacks. From that time onward, I occasionally wrote articles about jailbreaking and iPhone hack. One year later, my blog was devoted to iPhone covering jailbreak tips, hacks, news and app review.

3. Were you planning to make money with the blog when you started it?
Yes, absolutely. Like many bloggers, I hoped to earn some side income from the blog. But honestly, I had no idea how I could make money from it, other than putting up AdSense on the blog.

4. When did you decided you should monetize it, and how did the first few months go?
As I mentioned, one of the reasons I started blogging is to learn about AdSense. I would like to know how easy it can be integrated with WordPress and to see I could really earn a few bucks. So right after I put up a few posts, I implemented AdSense on my blog. Without a good traffic, the initial result was, of course, disappointing. I earned two dollars for the first month. My site’s traffic sucked at that time. I got 10-30 visits per day when the blog was first launched.

I thought there should be something to do with the AdSense. I tried out different ad position and adjusted the theme layout. Obviously it didn’t help. I still got a few cents each day.

Finally I decided to devote my time writing up useful guides and tips about iPhone. Since Apple released iPhone 3G in July 2008, the blog traffic kept increasing. People started searching for guide about jailbreaking and unlocking. Luckily, some of my blog posts ranked pretty high in Google and received decent traffic. After that, I regularly earned the AdSense minimum every month.

5. How did you promote the website, and what strategies worked well to increase your traffic in the past?
I do not promote my website using Adwords or other types of ads. From my experience, the best way to promote the blog is to keep writing good content regularly. People love good content and Google loves it too. As I put up more useful articles on my blog, the traffic keeps increasing.

I have to highlight the word “regularly”. Even when I first decided to focus my blog on iPhone, I didn’t write regularly. Sometimes, I put up daily article for a whole week. But when I was busy with my day job, the blog was not updated for over three months.

I came across an article on problogger.net. Don’t ask me for the link (I already forgot it) but the key message is that you have to publish article regularly. It can be daily or weekly. Having a regular publishing schedule, your reader knows when you’ll have fresh content. Most importantly, Google prefers websites with consistent update frequency.

Since then, I wrote a daily post. Even I was on vacation, I prepared the posts in advance and scheduled the posts. This “Write Regularly” strategy did work for me. The traffic improves gradually.

6. How did your earnings change after you joined the course?
I was already making over a thousand dollars when I joined the course, so I had some experience with AdSense and was curious to see if the course could help even someone relatively experienced like me. It turns out that it can, as my earnings jumped by around $ 200 monthly after the course, so my investment paid out pretty fast.

7. What concepts and strategies you learned in the course that you liked the most?
The best part is Daniel’s personal advice. In the first week of the course, he personally reviewed my site and offered detailed suggestions. I’ve optimized my blog title and it turned out the traffic improved indeed.

Honestly, I wasn’t new to AdSense and the optimization techniques as I mentioned above. But I still learn some thing new from Daniel such as his own technique for split testing, link building and keyword research. These techniques can help you improve both site traffic and revenue.

8. What tips do you have for those who want to get started with AdSense?
Tip #1: Don’t focus too much on AdSense optimization when you first start your blog. Focus on the content! Over time, as you build up your audience and traffic, it’s easy to receive a monthly check from Google.

Tip #2: Find a niche that you truly love. Remember you have to write regularly if you’re serious in making money from blogging. It’s very difficult to create good content if you’re not passionate about the topic.

9. What plans do you have for your blog, and how much do you expect to reach in terms of earnings?
I want to add more content (e.g. iPhone development). I also want to add a forum to the blog.

I think the blog might potentially earn several thousands dollars a month when the site traffic keeps improving.

The AdSense Profits Course re-opens on February 14. Stay tuned if you want to join!

Want to start making some money with your website? Join my OnlineProfits.com training program today, it’s free!

Daily Blog Tips

After Groupon’s success thousands of collective shopping websites and deal aggregators appeared online, and every single niche you can imagine. What about Internet marketing and web design? Yep, that’s covered as well.

The most popular deal aggregator on this niche is called MightyDeals.com, and they offer items like ebooks, templates and scrips with discounts up to 90%.

I was talking with the owner of the site last week and he said he would be glad to give away 10 items for DBT readers. In order to participate you need to follow two steps:

1. Subscribe to their email list via the form below
2. Post a comment below stating what item you would like to win (check the items available via the link above).

The winner will be picked next Monday, via a random draw (we’ll be using random.org). I’ll post an update on this same post next Monday with the name of the winners, and if you are among them you should also receive an email from the MightyDeal guys with a code to download your item.

Good luck everyone!

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Daily Blog Tips

Active Participation in Discussion boards

Participation in discussion boards which relate towards the blog topic is really one very simple method for blog owners they are driving traffic to their own blog. However, one word of caution to using this kind of promotion for your blog is to avoid violating the guidelines of the message forum board. This really is important because some discussion boards have strict regulations concerning the inclusion of hyperlinks to other web sites on the message forum board. Failure to follow along with these guidelines may lead to the blogger staying blacklisted from the forums and may even furthermore result in different message board subscribers not to think highly of the blog site creator.

Another consideration for the weblog creator would be to prevent submitting the website to his / her blog site in ways that is considered unsolicited mail by some other message board customers. This is essential because other forum users will probably not visit the blog site if he or she consider the blog site holder is simply spamming the message forum board. This is often avoided by including the url to the web site within the signature and making sure the posts created on the forums are informative as well as of interest towards the other message panel users. Building a reputation like a useful contributor to the forums will be good for enticing other customers of the message forum board to visit your blog.

Optimizing Your Weblog

Search engine optimisation is another element which blog owners also needs to carefully consider. Optimizing the blog for search engines like google can be advantageous because improved search engine rank often lead in order to increased blog visitors. Depending on the quantity of competition on your blog subject rising to the the surface of the search engine rankings might not always be simple. Blog owners who’ve a blog having a very popular topic may face rigid competition for search engine rank from other weblogs and websites which might have the way to hire professionals in the seo industry to aid them in attaining high rankings. Nevertheless, there are a few steps the doodlekit can take to try to boost rankings. Many of these methods consist of researching and utilizing relevant keywords normally throughout the website posts, combining these types of search phrases in to the heading, META and also image tags as well as avoiding black hat optimizing strategies that could result in your blog being punished by search engine listings.

Keeping Your site Interesting

Finally, among the simplest ways the blog owner will help drive traffic in order to his blog is actually by regularly updating your blog and keeping this interesting. This is important just because a blog which is actually interesting is more likely to not just maintain blog traffic but additionally generate new visitors. This is because readers who’re interested in the posts about the blog are not just likely to keep returning to the blog but will also be likely to recommend your blog to other members from the target audience. This kind of word of mouth advertising can be quite beneficial because anyone who has an interest within the content of a specific blog also routinely have friends who would also want to consider the blog. Once one weblog owner recommends the blog to a number of friends, these new blog visitors will also be likely to recommend your blog to others when they find it to become interesting, useful or else worthwhile.

You might have written your best post ever — but without a call to action, it’s not going to get you the results you’re hoping for.

A “call to action” is a copywriting term. It simply means asking or telling the reader to take a specific action. That might be:

• Subscribing to your blog or newsletter
• Buying your ebook
• Sharing the post on Twitter or Facebook
• Downloading a free report
• Trying out a particular technique or idea

… or almost anything that will benefit you and/or the reader.

Your call to action should be clear and specific. Don’t simply link to a post and assume that readers will get the message: tell them “click here to read…” or “find out more by clicking this link” or similar. If you’re asking for comments, give them a specific question to think about.

There are two places to put your calls to action:

#1: At the End of Your Post

The final line of your post is a natural and effective place for a call to action: you’re helping the reader decide what to do next. It’s crucial you don’t leave this to chance. After reading a post, the reader has lots of options open — including leaving your site altogether.

Some great closing lines are:

• What do you think about [topic]? Let us know in the comments below.
• If you enjoyed this post, please share it on Twitter by clicking on the “Tweet” button to the right.
• To find out more about this, read [link to another post on your blog]

#2: Throughout Your Post

You don’t just have to put calls to action at the end of your post. By including them earlier, you prime readers to take action, and get them thinking.

For instance:

• To introduce a list post: See what you think of these ten ideas (and add your own in the comments).
• To sell an ebook: I’ve just launched my new ebook, [title of ebook]. I’ll be saying a few words about that at the end of this post, but if you want to find out all about it now, you can click on this link [link to sales page].

Now, it’s your turn. Think about your blogging goals (e.g. growing your subscriber base or your newsletter list) and come up with a call to action for your next post.

Bio: Ali Luke is a writer and writing coach, and has a weekly column on content creation for DailyBlogTips. Her new writing community/teaching site, Writers’ Huddle, is open until January 31st: check it out here.

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Daily Blog Tips

I receive around 20 guest post submissions per week. Usually I let them pile up and once a month I go through all of them, replying to the ones I think would be a good fit for the blog.

There are two types of submissions I discard right away, though, without even taking a look. I also consider those the two biggest mistakes you can make while trying to guest post on some blog. They are:

1. Not including the name of the blog owner

If by opening your email I see something like “Dear Sir” or “Dear Blog Owner” I’ll send it to the trash bin immediately. Why? because it tells me that this is a generic guest post offer, and that you probably sent the same post to dozens of other blogs.

The least you can do is to visit the site where you want to guest post and to discover the name of the owner.

2. Not including the post itself

Many of the guest post emails I receive are only asking if I would be interested in having a guest post written. Something like this:

Dear Daniel,

I have been your blog for a long time, and I was wondering if you would be interested in having me to write a guest post for you. I was thinking to write something about Facebook marketing or email marketing.

Please let me know and we’ll get moving.

Thanks,
John Doe

My thoughts when I see such emails: “How on earth can I know if I would be interested in having your guest post if I don’t know how you write or what ideas you have?”.

Sometimes the person will include the title of the guest post. Same deal. How can I approve or reject a guest post just by looking at the title?

Sure, I could reply explaining this to the person, but why waste my time?

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Daily Blog Tips

Many bloggers accustomed to dealing with topics in 400 to 600 words are finding concentrating their messages down to a mere 140 characters to be extremely challenging. Twitter can be a minefield and the slightest error can cost you readers and reputation, so follow these top 7 blogger imperatives for Twitter and rise to the level of a whiz tweeter, not a whizzing twit.

1. Wach ur Spelink & Gramma – Your Twitter content represents your blog and if you’re illiterate in your tweets then the reader can expect more of the same in your blog. Even though you only have 140 characters to work with, abbreviations are generally frowned upon, so it’s best to state what you have to say very concisely but in perfect English.

2. Ice your head first – The CEO of the leading company in your field has done something so profoundly cretinous that they’re making Steve Ballmer look like Albert Einstein, so your first temptation is to fire off a tweet calling him a moron and a bozo. You shouldn’t insult anyone on Twitter ever as it can come back to haunt you and will alienate many of your followers. You’re best off to criticize the factual policies, without engaging in ad hominem attacks.

3. Thicken your skin – One of the most frustrating things about being on Twitter is how many of your followers will not hesitate for a moment to call you a moron and a bozo. Just like you shouldn’t engage in vulgar tweeting about industry figures you have to restrain yourself from engaging in an exchange of expletives with instigators. Just ignore them and they’ll go find some other playground to engage in their silly games.

4. Just the facts ma’am – Twitter is a factual communications medium, so you’re best off to reserve your editorial ruminations to your blog and provide information and links which are both relevant and valuable to your reader. They read your blog to obtain the latest happenings in your industry, whether it be the specs on the latest 128GB SSD or what Lindsay Lohan has done now. “Just had a great Mocha Frappuccino #starbucks” is not really either relevant or valuable to anyone and it verges on…

5. Shill Shill Hurray (Not) – The great dirty non-secret of Twitter is that influential tweeters can cash in bigtime. When a major celebrity movie or sports star makes an offhanded remark about how great their shoe/car/watch/whatever is you can bet that their motivation is not altruistic sharing of a great customer experience but a real big check.

As a blogger you have a responsibility to remain unbiased and balanced, so ranting on about how fantastic a specific product is will communicate to your readers that you’ve succumbed to payola and your opinions can no longer be trusted to be your own.

6. Politickmeoff – Are you writing a political blog? Then feel free to engage in all the political wagging your heart desires. If your blog is not related to politics in any way then your tweets should never broach the subjects. If your readers are seeking information on your industry’s latest news, they really couldn’t care less if you’re voting for or against Obama. You can make an exception when political maneuvering affects your industry, such as the Keystone XL pipeline being momentous for the oil business or the Stop Online Piracy Act shaking up internet providers.

7. No laughs for gaffes – We all laugh uproariously when a major twitter makes a boneheaded mistake, such as Ashton Kutcher railing against Penn State Coach Joe Paterno’s firing before learning it was due to a molestation scandal, Kenneth Cole connecting the violent Egyptian uprising to his new spring fashion collection, or Gilbert Gottfried making jokes out of the Japanese Tsunami.

So… what have learned, Dorothy? Don’t repeat their mistakes! You should be lighthearted in your tweets but not ever broach the limits of insensitivity or make factual errors. The wrong 140 characters can wipe out years of work building up your blog!

Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

Want to start making some money with your website? Join my OnlineProfits.com training program today, it’s free!

Daily Blog Tips