I got a great question last week.

Michael  submitted a question from my contact form.

I really love your site!

I'm considering an info-website about digital audio, music servers, how to
preserve your analog record collection etc.

Would you recommend a blog or a website? I plan to monetize mostly with
affiliate stuff and/or Adsense but who knows - I might develop some
commercial products in the future. Does this still fit into a blog style
website?

Thanks for your ideas,

Michael

This is a great question because some of you may not know the difference between a blog and a web site.  Traditional web sites are created using software like Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver.  You create the pages on your home computer and upload them via FTP to your web server.

A blog is different.

A blog is kind of like having some helpful software which runs on your web site.  You don’t have to have tools like Frontpage or Dreamweaver because the blog software has that stuff built in.

The other thing about blogs is you typically can use them to create more complicated web sites.  You don’t have to run a blog, you can add regular web pages, you can add advanced plugins, etc.  I’ve seen some blogs which are actually ecommerce web sites or membership sites.

I prefer WordPress as my blogging platform but if you are looking to blog and want to do some more sophisticated things check out Drupal.     It is more of a content management system.  Basically it helps you build and manage sophisticated web sites and can include blogs.  Some other content management systems to look at are Joomla and PHPNuke.

You can also setup a basic blog with a platform like WordPress.  You can then expand WordPress as your site grows using what are called “wordpress plugins”.  So you can start simple and work your way up and create a more sophisticated web site.

Even if you start a regular web site I encourage you to put a blog on your site.  Blogs add so much value to a site and can help you get new readers as well as better search engine rankings.

Did this help answer your questions?  If  you have more questions about blogs vs. web sites leave me a comment or contact me on the contact form.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 62% [?]

Here is a little excerpt on why blogs are so powerful.  I just wrote this section for my upcoming ebook and training course Nichework Marketing.

Blogs are easy to promote. There is a huge community of millions of bloggers and millions of blog readers. These people are actively looking for new blogs to read. Dozens of web sites have sprung up to help blog readers find new blogs. You can easily get your site listed on these services.

This is really important. Please read closely.

Blogging is a community. There are MILLIONS of bloggers in the world. (A blogger is someone who has a blog.) Many of these bloggers are actively looking for interesting blogs. This helps them get ideas of things to write about on their own blogs. In essence these people can help you promote your own blog!

In addition to the bloggers you have the community of millions of blog readers. They find out about new blogs from the blogs they read, but they also go to blogging web sites and find other blogs that way. There are hundreds of these blogging “directories” or “search engines” that help people find new blogs or blogs on specific topics. They form their own social networks and these can be a great aid in getting your blog new readers.

IMPORTANT – Remember I said I know some more search engine tricks?

Here is another search engine trick for you.

One of the keys to getting good search engine rankings is to get links to your web site. Particularly you want one way links to your web site. Meaning someone likes you and links to your web site without you linking back to them. What used to happen and this is a myth that has persisted because it used to work, was you used to be able to trade links with people. If you liked their web site you’d link to them and ask for them to link back to you. However the search engines got smart and realized that if you really liked a web site you’d just link to it. You wouldn’t ask for a link back, so this led to Google and other search engines giving a priority to someone who has a lot of one way links coming into their site.

What does this blogging thing have to do with one way links?

Well remember the hundreds of web sites that exist to help bloggers find new blogs?

MOST of those web sites will give you a link to your blog, without asking you to give them a link. Usually they do this for free. These sites will only link to blogs. They don’t care about regular web sites so you have to have a blog to take advantage of this. Simply because you have a blog you can get dozens (or hundreds) of one way links to your blog that you couldn’t get with a regular web site.

Are you beginning to see the picture? Since you have a blog you have the ability to get a bunch of additional one way links to your web site which will help you get better search engine rankings!

Are you beginning to see the power in having a blog?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 38% [?]

In my series on niche network marketing I’ve spoken a few times about the importance of having a blog.

Today I’m going to go into more detail on why blogs are superior.

1. Blogs are easy to run
2. Blogs are popular
3. Blogs are easier to get subscribers than a regular web site
4. Blogs require less specialized knowledge or skills
5. Blogs are free and almost every paid web host has easy one click blog software

1. Blogs are easy to run. Blogging software has built into it a mechanism for creating and publishing web pages.  They make it very easy for you to create new web pages.  If you were cutting and pasting in content from an article site like ezinearticles.com it would literally take you two minutes a day to post articles.  It’s as simple as cut and paste.

2. Blogs are extremely popular and a millions of people are avid blog readers.  Not only are they avid blog readers but they actively look for new blogs. In addition there are dozens of web sites that are designed to help you get new subscribers and readers for your blogs.

3. Blogs are easier to get subscribers because they have built in mechanisms for people to subscribe to your blog.  All blogs come with an rss feed which allows people to be notified when you update your blog. They don’t even have to visit your blog, the updates are downloaded automatically.

4. I alluded to this in item #1 but Blogs don’t require a lot of specialized skills.  Most blogs allow you to create and edit blog posts without knowing HTML or FTP or any of this technical stuff.  The interface for writing messages looks  very familiar as they use the same type of icons as Microsoft Word or other familiar programs.  As I said in #1 this is also why it is so easy to setup a blog because you can get your blog up and running without having to take a training course or learn techy stuff.

5. Blogs are free!  You can get a free Google Blogger Blog or a free WordPress blog. Even if you have your own web site you can use WordPress.  Most web hosts offer a cpanel for managing your web site, email addresses, etc.  The cpanel usually has a simple one click install of WordPress built in.  You just tell it the name of your site, your requested username/password and wha-la you have WordPress up and running!

I’ll go into more depth in the future but I hope this explains some of the basics of why blogs are so powerful and are in many cases superior to your old fashioned web site.  At the very least blogs are usually easier for novices to get up and running.  They don’t required specialized skills and there are a ton of great resources out there to help you get your blog going.

In the next couple of days I’ll tell you more about how to use  your blog and articles to build your niche network marketing site.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 57% [?]

Tomorrow we’ll talk more about blogging, but I just found this article and had to share with you.

Kim Klaver pointed me to this excellent article about the comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s secret to a successful comedy career.

Basically Jerry Seinfeld broke down his comedy to one thing.  One thing he could do every day.  What was it?

It was to write better jokes.  So he came up with a routine to force himself to write every day even if he didn’t want to.

In network marketing we face those same struggles.  So the question is what one thing can you do every single day to grow your network marketing business?

• In my company that single activity is doing demonstrations with people.
• In a nutritional company your single activity is probably getting someone to take a free sample of your product
• In other businesses it may be that your daily activity is to get someone to attend a business presentation, a hotel meeting, etc.

What Jerry Seinfeld did was take a big giant calendar.  One of those calendars that have all 12 months on one big sheet of paper.  He put that calendar on a prominent wall in his office.

Every day he set out with a goal of spending some time writing and working on new jokes.  For every day he completed his writing activities he took a red marker and put a big red X over that day on the calendar.  After doing this for a few days in a row he began to see chains of XXXX’s.  Several days in a row where you accomplished your goal and put an X on your calendar. It became important not to break the chain.

This was Jerry’s secret and it’s a secret many others have used in their businesses.  Your goal is “do NOT break the chain”.  Keep going.  Keep doing that daily activity every day.

Some days you won’t feel like doing that demo or talking to people.  But what separates the top networkers from the rest is they don’t stop.  They fight through those feelings and take action any way.  They “don’t break the chain”.

This is a great tool and one our own company has been working on.  We recently came up with a daily score system to grade our daily activities.  At the end of the day if you’ve done everything you should, then you’ll score 8 or more points.  At the end of the week you should have a point total of at least 40 for the week.

Simply methods like this can help you keep your business on track.  To be really successful, to be one of the top people, you’ve got to fight through those days where you don’t feel like working.  That’s what separates the good networkers from the great.

What single daily activity can you do daily?  What one activity could you keep track of for your business?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 37% [?]

Hey guys,

You know “hey guys” is Californian for hey y’all.  But when I moved from Louisiana to California at the age of 15 it wasn’t very cool to say “Hey y’all”.  So I learned to say “Hey guys”.  It applies to everyone guys and gals combined!

I’m taking a bit of a break today from my normal blogging.  However I did want to introduce you to this great new blog.  A couple of AWESOME ladies on my team that both have cerebral palsy and are wheelchair bound.  Well these extraordinary ladies have put together a darn good blog about their experiences breaking through barriers and overcoming their disability using the internet.  It’s a really cool blog and I can’t wait to see what else they have to say.

Will you do me a personal favor and check out their blog?   It’s called Crashing Through Barriers.

Sandy and Jan are the two ladies you should meet.  When you go visit their blog be sure to leave them a comment & say hello to them.  I know they’d appreciate it!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 36% [?]

Many of you are probably reading my series on picking your network marketing niche, and wondering…

What next?

Next is probably to pick up a good domain name using your keywords and begin working on your web site.

Personally I recommend Hostgator for a web hosting company. The reason is simple. They provide excellent service at a very low price. They also have an easy to use interface for your web sites.

One thing I HIGHLY recommend to anyone is a WordPress blog. I’ll be going into more details on this soon. The idea with a WordPress blog is that using WordPress’s cPanel web hosting you can have a blog setup in about 3 minutes. It’s very easy to do. You don’t need to know HTML or FTP or any of that stuff.

With a blog you have a platform built in that allows you to post articles. Even if you don’t write the articles yourself you can reprint articles from EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com.

WordPress is generally considered the best blogging platform and is the one I run all my blogs on. You can start off with the basics and as you learn more about it you can use plugins to extend your blog and add lots of new features.

In my upcoming training series on WordPress I’ll go into more detail on how to set it up. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is.

Tomorrow I’ll write more about why to use a blog for your niche network marketing site.

Disagree with me? Let me hear why by leaving a comment!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 52% [?]

Hi guys,

My friend Gaines just reported that the RSS email feed wasn’t working right.

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I think I fixed the emails.  If you see any more weird emails let me know or have problems with email subscriptions let me know.

To subscribe via email go to our subscriptions page.
- Ben

Popularity: 35% [?]

We’ve been talking a lot over the past couple of weeks about Niche Network Marketing. However I’ve mostly been talking about products and not opportunities.

I’m sure many of you want to know how to pick a niche to find new opportunity seekers.

Here is a personal example: I was trying to envision the kind of leaders and people I want on my team. When I thought of these people one type of person came to mind. I wanted goal oriented people.

Studies show goal oriented people earn 2 to 10 times as much as those that aren’t goal oriented.

So I decided to put together a web site all around goal setting.

Now it isn’t neccessarily “opportunity” focused but I figured if I could build a mailing list of goal oriented people and market my opportunity to them, I’d find a few good leaders.

So I set about writing a free ebook on goal setting. I gave away this ebook free to people if they would simply opt in with their email address. I also got some other materials on goal setting and made a special offer to anyone who downloaded my ebook to buy these other goal setting materials.

Here is the brilliant part of this.

I’m building my mailing list & I’m getting paid to build my mailing list!

Many of these people are downloading the free ebook but they are also purchasing the additional materials to go with it. In fact I even have affiliates who I share part of that income with. These affiliates are helping me build a list of goal oriented people. Exactly the kind of people I want to introduce to my business opportunity!

Now I went to the extreme of writing my own ebook and having someone create some goal setting software for me. However you don’t have to go to that extreme.

As I’ve mentioned before you can start by using an article site like Ezine Articles .com to get articles to republish on your web site. You don’t have to write them yourself! Use these free resources! That’s what they are there for!

Are you beginning to see the big picture here?

What other types of business opportunity niches are out there?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 52% [?]

Let’s take a break today from niche network marketing.  It’s been fun and I’ll continue this topic again next week.

Here’s a little tip for you on how to subscribe to blogs.

Got a blog you really like? Well did you know that you can subscribe to it!?

ALL Blog’s have something called a newsfeed or rss feed. (learn more about rss feeds at wikipedia)

Often you’ll see an icon like the one to the right. It won’t always look like the icon but this is the new standard icon so more and more blogs will have an icon like this, or maybe one that says something XML.

If you click on that you’ll see a bunch of gobbledygook.  That’s techy stuff.  It’s called XML and what it does is it allows you to get updates everytime a blog is updated WITHOUT having to visit the web site.

Let me repeat that.  You can subscribe to a blog and never have to go back to the blog again.  Every time it is updated you’ll get the latest  updates.

Pretty cool right?  You can even use services like bloglines which are web sites that allow you to subscribe to a bunch of blogs and get all your updates in one place.

So one of the reasons I suggest YOU start a blog is that YOU can build a big subscriber base.  That’s why blogs are more powerful than regular web sites.  If I bookmark your regular web site I have to go back to visit your site over and over.  However if you subscribe to a blog’s rss feed you can get updates without actually visiting the blog.

So here’s a tip for you.  There is a cool free newsreader.  It is called Sharpreader.  It is software that you install on your computer.  You then put in your favorite blogs and it automatically keeps track of all your favorites for you.  You don’t have to go visit them every day it will download the updates for you.

Sharpreader is an awesome little software package that you can download and install on your Windows PC for free. (looking for a paid software with customer support? Try Feeddemon.)

Basically you go to your favorite blogs (or you can use their software to search for blogs on particular topics.)  Then you subscribe to the blog.  To do that simply find that rss icon like the one above.  Right click on it with your mouse.  Then “save link” or “save link as” or “copy link location”.  That’s going to copy the address of their rss feed.  Then you simply paste that into Sharpreader or Feeddemon.  Feeddemon since it is paid software doesn’t even need the rss feed. It just needs the address of the blog and it is smart enough to find the rss feed for you!

Wha-la!

Now you’re subscribed to the blog’s newsfeed.  Next time the author posts to the blog you’ll be notified and your Sharpreader or Feeddemon will download the new article for you.

So that’s how you can subscribe to blogs and save yourself a lot of time.  You don’t have to check all the blogs for updates you can simply read them in your newsreader.  If the blog hasn’t been updated you don’t have to waste any time “checking” for updates.

Got questions?  Leave me a comment and let me know!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 35% [?]

Yesterday I wrote about how to find your network marketing niche. In my example I used Xango juice as an example and how you might target autism nutritional therapy.

Let’s go into a bit more detail on how this can help you attract prospects to you.

If you tried to compete on the general niche of “autism” there are over 17 million web pages which mention autism. That is a lot of competition.

However if you break it down there are only 343,000 web pages about autism treatment. YET autism treatment is one of the most popular searched for variations for “autism”.

Wow. I’m not in Xango and I’ve never done a nutrition company before but I KNOW I could take about 3-5 days and put together a great web site that has a bunch of content on autism treatment. In less than a week that site would be in Google and generating traffic for me.

If you look at it further. Go to Google and search for “autism treatment”. Make sure you use the quotation marks. That will show you that there are only 165,000 web pages that include that exact phrase on them. So if you load up your web site with some articles using that keyword phrase and get links to your site using that keyword phrase then you’ll quickly begin to rank for that term.

Maybe you aren’t great at it, but you still get on page 2 of Google. Could you handle 100 or 200 people a month visiting your web site as a result of Google?

Using Google’s keyword tool I see some more similar keywords to target:

autism therapy
treatment for autism
treatment of autism
autism treatment
cure autism
cure autism now
autism help
autism products
treatment for autism
autism books
autism video
autism diet
cure for autism
cure autism
articles on autism
autism articles

So you can see there are like a dozen easy to target keywords that you can target.

Nutrition Therapy didn’t come up on the list but I think that’s only because it is new research that is being done.

However many of these keywords not only tie into our overall idea “autism treatment” but some of them lead right into being able to talk about how some research has said that autism can be treated through diet. I’d bet if you had a little bit of information on that subject and someone searched for “autism diet” or “autism product” you’d probably convert a LOT of these people into prospects or customers.

Additionally because only 24,800 web pages are competing against on Google for a phrase like “autism diet” then you’ll be able to get ranked for that term really quickly. Most of those people probably aren’t “trying” to rank in the search engines for the word they probably just mention that phrase on their page.

Do you see how you can easily build a web site around a niche and dominate that niche?

Please feel free to click on the comments to the right and ask me questions. I’d be happy to go into more detail on the subject.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 51% [?]