Since the early versions of PopUp Domination, the plugin has grown to include more themes, as well as shortcodes so that we can enter subscription forms about our website, such as in the footer and sidebar.

I use various themes from the premium theme pack at once, so that I can convert the most amount of visitors possible while keeping the offers relevant.

It’s helped me to build multiple lists, so I’ve written this post to show you the different ways I use PopUp Domination.

It may be more powerful than you realise – I use 6 different popups at once.

My Top Tips For Using PopUp Domination On Your Website

1. Exit PopUp Tool

This is my go-to popup, and where most of my opt-ins come from. I’m constantly updating this with one of the 28+ themes available, to see which provides me with the best conversion rate.

It’s set so that when you leave my page, the popup appears, asking for your email address in return for a free ebook.

I A/B tested it earlier this year, and I found that I got a better conversion rate by asking for people’s email addresses as they were leaving, rather than when they land on the page.

It makes sense really because when they’re arriving on the page, they’re looking for something, and when you display a pop up straight away, they’re more likely to get rid of it and find what they came for.

2. Display PopUp On Click

This feature is cool because instead of you choosing when the popup appears, the visitors does.

We have a free eBook teaching bloggers how to get more traffic. When we write blog posts about driving traffic to your website, we can add a link in the post that makes our popup appear, offering the free eBook.

Another option is, instead of using adverts to send traffic to your squeeze page, you can display your popup instead. This is great because, instead of a visitor having to load another page, they can signup straight away.

3. Countdown Sales PopUp

Every time I run a sale for one of my products, I add a count down popup to my landing page. This works great because it adds scarcity. People see it and think, this is a great offer and I don’t have much time to decide if I should buy it.

It significantly boosts conversions because visitors don’t want to feel like they missed out on a great deal!

I find that the first day and last day of my sale, I do the majority of sales and it’s because I have a countdown.

4. Mobile PopUp’s

With version 4 of PopUp Domination, you can now display your popups only on mobile devices.

Also, all popup designs are fully responsive, which means they will change in size, depending on the device they are viewed on.

With over 30% of my traffic coming from mobile, this feature is very important!

5. Video PopUp

Sometimes, video just works best.

I have various video sales letters, from the short and sweet, to the 15 minute long informational videos, and it’s good to be able to display these videos on relevant pages.

For example, I recently created a 7-day video course, for free, to help promote my paid course. I had a video popup appear to visitors on the pages where the topics were mentioned, asking them to opt in.

This way, I can talk to them through the medium they will expect to see me though, and I’m only targeting relevant content.

It also means that I can use my regular popups on the other pages.

6. For Establishing Interest in a New Product Idea

This is an awesome trick, if I may say so myself.

I’m testing the market for a new course on composition because it’s not worth me creating the course until I know whether there’s interest or not. Otherwise, I’ll do months of work, for very little return.

I create a popup with a similar offer to the product that I’m going to create.

For me, I’m thinking about creating a photography composition product. So I created a popup, offering a free composition video I’d made, in return for their email address. Then I go into the Analytics in PopUp Domination and look at the conversion rate. If it’s good enough, I will create the course.

And if I do launch the course, I have a list of potential buyers.

I only make this popup appear in the composition category.

7. Using PopUp’s To Offer Discounts and Free Trials

One of the best things you can do for increasing conversions on a sales page is to offer a FREE trial or a discount.

What we do is, we let visitors checkout our sales page, if they go to leave without buying, we show a popup offering them a free 14 day trial.

This converts very well for us!

8. Product Announcements PopUp

One of the most important things you can do when you run a membership website or sell software, is to keep it updated.

When you release updates, you want to tell everyone about it.

What I like to do is, add a popup, letting everyone know what the update is. This appears when a user logins in for the first time since the update.

Below you can see the popup we used to announce that we released our affiliate program.

9. PopUp Analytics Tool

If you work online, and you don’t know your data, then you’re just lazy.

One of the key ways to earn more money is to improve your conversion rate for more leads, or sales.

So for that reason, every page that could potentially lead to a conversion of some kind, is always being tested, and I’m always looking at the analytics.

PopUps are an incredibly powerful too, but you’ll never know how powerful it could be, without the use of analytics.

10. PopUp A/B Testing To Increase Conversions

Always be testing.

There’s always unlocked potential in your opt-in pages and popups, but you never know what’s going to convert best until you test it.

I initially tested a few different themes against each other, but when I found one I liked, that converted well, I then switched by making adjustments to one theme.

I test colour, heading, the length of bullet point, and my favourite point of all; button text.

To recap, here are some of my favourite PopUp Domination features:

Email Themes, Redirect Themes, Countdown Themes, A/B Testing, PopUp Triggers, OnClick PopUps, Exit PopUps, Analytics, Super Fast, Responsive Themes, Custom HTML/CSS/JS, Geographical Targeting, Page Specific PopUps, Referral Sites, Notification Popups.

As for my business, well my main source of income comes from my email list, so it makes sense for me to do everything I can to get more subscribers.

You may consider me to be bias, as the product was created by my brother, but I can say for certain that my business would not be where it is now without the use of PopUp Domination.

Along with OptimizePress, this is just one of the plugins that are essential to my business.

You can also follow PopUp Domination on Facebook and Twitter

The post 10 Different Ways I Use PopUp Domination At Once appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

When it comes to making money online, you need to have a relevant list of email subscribers that you can call upon.

It’s direct, and easy to do.

I tried to launch my first product with just a few hundred people on my list.

And looking back, that was a big mistake.

Here’s the fundamental lessons I’ve learned from growing my email list to 20,000 subscribers.

1 – You Have to Bribe People

No one really wants more email, so to get them onto your list, you have to offer them a small freebie that they’re interested in.

It’s often referred to, almost as an oxymoron, as an ‘ethical bribe’.

I created something (in an afternoon) for my photography website titled ‘1 Simple Trick to Dramatically Improve Your Photography’.

There’s enough intrigue in the title to make people want to download it, but first they have to sign up for my email.

In the past, I’d tried to get people to sign up to my list ‘for updates’, and it just doesn’t work as well. You need to give them something in return.

Honestly, it doesn’t even have to be much, but it has to be good. Mine wasn’t much more than a long, interesting blog post, in ebook form. It shared some useful information, and kept them interested in the emails which followed.

2 – Know the Value of a Subscriber

Big companies usually know this information really well, but it shouldn’t be too hard for you to work out.

You’re first going to need the list size of about 1,000 people, as it’s a good sample size that you can extract some data from.

After you’ve had the list for a while, and you’ve sold to them, add up how much money you’ve made. From your own products, and affiliate products. (Of course, there’s till money left in the list, but it’s best to be conservative). This will give you the minimum value of each subscriber.

Lets say your list of 1,000 people earned you $1,500.

That means that everyone on your list is worth at least $1.50, and that’s really useful information to have when it comes to buying subscribers.

3 – ‘Buying’ Subscribers Is Cheap

I have used Facebook ads to find subscribers many times in the past. It’s a really simple process.

You set up a squeeze page using OptimizePress, with your offer (which comes through in the first autoresponder message), and then simply drive your Facebook ad traffic there and watch it convert.

Speaking from experience, I usually only pay about 20¢ per click on my ads, and my squeeze page has at least a 33% conversion rate. This means that it costs me about 50¢ for every new subscriber.

If my subscriber is worth $1.50, and it only costs me 50¢ to obtain them, I’m going to triple my money.

This is the importance of knowing your numbers.

Of course, there’s more to the picture than this, but we’ll get to that.

4 – Know Your Market

If you’re going to pay for Facebook ads, you really ought to know your target market first.

Do you have an avatar of your average customer? This is the sort of person you need to be targeting.

I only target people who can afford to buy whatever I’m selling. That means narrowing down my ads to only appear to people who speak English, live in English speaking countries, and are above a certain age.

I don’t want to target anyone under the age of about 25 really, as they tend not to have the sort of disposable income required to purchase my products.

I want a list of potential buyers.

5 – Collect Their Name

This is something I stopped doing a while back, on one of my lists, and I regret it.

It’s easier to get people to sign up with just an email address, but it’s not really ideal as you have a much stronger connection with someone when you talk to them by name.

They’re drawn to their name when they see it, and they will feel like you know them, rather than treat you like some stranger from the internet (which you probably are).

I’m going to be going back to collecting names pretty shortly, when I implement my new marketing strategy.

6 – Get Them to Reply To You

If you can get people to reply to you, they’re much more likely to buy from you, in my experience.

In my first email, I ask them a question, saying ‘If I could write about one thing to help you with your photography, what would it be?’.

When they reply, I’m getting them to complete an action that I’ve asked them to do, this is so they’re used to following my actions, such as ‘Click Add to Cart Now’.

When I reply back, I make a personal connection and now they know I’m a real person. A real person who’s proved that they can help them with their problems.

That’s really powerful for me, as I try to sell them a solution to their problems, in a couple of days time.

7 – Email Them Often

Those online who are emailing daily, are easily outselling those who don’t. And it makes sense really.

Who are you more likely to buy from: someone who teaches you something new every day, replies to your emails, and have a personal connection with…. or someone whose list you signed up to a few months ago, and haven’t heard from since.

Seriously, I spend maybe half an hour a day emailing my list, and I’ve not a never-ending list of tutorials and tips I can share with people. Most times I’m not even selling either, which makes it even more powerful when I do.

And trust me, people appreciate your emails.

8 – Don’t Be Afraid To Sell

Look, you’ve collected this list because you want to make sales, not friends.

I understand that you don’t want to annoy your subscribers, or maybe you’ve gotten a cranky reply in the past, and that’s maybe put you off, but don’t worry about it.

Email them every day, and sell to them often, until they either unsubscribe or buy something.

Otherwise, they’re just taking up room on a list you’re paying for.

The money is certainly in the list, buy you have to ask for it.

Unsubscribes are OK.

Think of it this way: if they unsubscribe from your list, then you’re no longer paying for them to be on there, and they were never going to buy anything anyway.

Being worried about unsubs is something that will hold you back in your email marketing.

9 – Listen to Your Mailing Provider (and Backup)

Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re in charge.

If your emails get too many complaints (marked as spam), then they’re not going to be happy hosting the list.

In Aweber, and I’m sure many other email list providers, they have something called a spam score. It looks over your subject line and scores it, depending on whether it thinks it’s too spammy or not.

Listen to this, and try to get the best score possible, because it knows from experience what’s going to get complaints, and what’s not.

They will contact you if you’re not playing by their rules, and make sure you talk to them, so that you can reassure them you’re on the same page.

Lastly, make sure you back up your lists as often as possible. Because if you mess up one too many times, they may delete your account and not give you access to the list.

And you don’t want that.

10 – Write an Autoresponder!

The best digital product I’ve ever bought is something called the McIntyre Method by John McIntyre.

It teaches you how to write an amazing autoresponder sequence which converts and makes you a ton of money.

It’s the reason my writing has developed to become so easy to read too.

I mean, you’re on the final point of this post and you’re still reading it, right?

“If you do this one thing, I promise you’ll triple your business, and you’ll work a lot less… spend the next two weeks writing 1 year’s worth of followup.” – Perry Belcher

A good followup sequence takes the pressure off you to write every day, and it means that you only need to focus on growing your list.

The money is in the list.

Conclusion

This can be broken down to three different points.

1 – You need to build your list, in every way you can, starting yesterday!

I sound like a broken record, but if the money is in the list, then you need to start building a list.

Our most effective way of doing this is to turn website traffic into subscribers with PopUp Domination.

We use it to display a highly effective light-box popup to everyone who visits our website, offering a freebie, in return for their email address.

But there’s loads of other ways we use PopUp Domination too. We target different offers to different pages and categories, and we also use it to link visitors to other pages of the website, such as a sales page.

The list goes on.

2 – You need to email your list often.

Every time you have something you think your subscribers may be interested in, email them. You can’t expect them to buy from a stranger.

Something I like to do is just link to my front-end product at the bottom of every email. Last time I did that, I got 3 extra sales. That’s an extra $291.

3 – Learn how to write your emails so that they’re always opened, and easy to read.

My email writing style consists of short, well crafted sentences.

One sentence paragraphs.

And not too many big words either.

They’re easy to read, which means they’re more likely to get read.

And lastly, I always leave an open hook at the end of an email, which gets people to open the next one.

But I’ll tell you more about that in my next post…

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I honestly can’t recommend the McIntyre Method enough.

The post 10 Lessons I Learned From My First 20,000 Email Subscribers appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

It could be anywhere from 20% to 400% depending on what we’re advertising.

Needless to say, it’s worth sharing with you guys.

We’ve learned everything we know on this subject from Brian and Scott Moran at Get10kFans and their Facebook Ad Academy course.

If you haven’t already, I would suggest reading my ‘Top 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid‘, as it will start you on the path to making money more before you’ve even started.

The Basic Premise

Lets say you’re selling a $100 (for the sake of round numbers) digital product online. Every sale makes you $100 clear profit.

So long as you spend less than $100 on advertising that product (and make a sale), you’re making a positive return on investment.

Just how much that return on investment is all comes down to how you market the product.

So how do you advertise the product?

Advertising Option 1

We’re first going to look at a popular technique of collecting emails first, and then redirecting people to sales pages, and chasing them up with emails.

Step 1 – Collect The Email

You set up a Facebook ad campaign to advertise a free ebook / report / course, in return for someone’s email address. This can be done with a page template in OptimisePress, and a whole host of other software.

When they enter their email address, they get added to your list, and the first followup email they receive contains the free offer.

Step 2 – Direct Them to a Sales Page

You have their attention; don’t waste it.

You can automatically redirect your leads when you collect their emails. Either when they enter their details, or confirm their email address. This is when you want to send them to a sales page.

I send people to my sales page, only I change the video to include a small introduction so that I can connect with people, rather than just saying ‘Here, buy my stuff before you’ve even received the free stuff I promised you.’

This is called a thank you video, and my introduction goes a little something like this:

“Hey, thanks for signing up for your free ebook, it’s on its way to your email inbox, but real quick, while I’ve got you here…”

And then I lead into a sales pitch.

That’s just one way of doing things though.

You could send people to a one-time-offer page, where they can a limited discount on a product if they purchase within the next hour.

Or you could send people to an affiliate page.

Or you could send them to a page with a bunch of discount codes for multiple affiliate products.

I’ve tried all three, and I prefer the first method as I can easily do the other methods later on through email too.

The possibilities are endless, and you should test for yourself, but there’s one thing that they all have in common: each page is monetized.

This means that the traffic you’ve paid money for is then being sent to pages which will make you money.

Step 3 – Add Them to an Auto-responder

You’re only going to make an initial return on investment from a handful of people in step 2, so it’s important that you keep in contact with these leads, providing them with a mixture of content and sales.

Because there’s still loads of money in that list.

Auto-responders are a different subject altogether though.

The Cost

Lets say for example that it costs you 20¢ a click to send someone to your squeeze page from Facebook.

And that your conversion rate on the squeeze page is 40%.

That means that for every dollar you spend, you will get two leads.

50¢ a lead, if you will.

Now, looking back at our $100 product, we know that for $100 we can get 200 people to our sales page, while collecting 200 emails at the same time.

All you need to do is ensure that your page converts, your offer is great, and you’re targeting the right people on Facebook.

If you can get everything right, and one in every 100 people purchases your product, you will double your money.

It’s that simple.

It’s not always that easy, but it is that simple. The most important factors here is making sure you have an offer which converts, and you’re targeting the right people.

If you can get that right, you’ll be laughing.

Of course, you can completely skip step 1 and 3, and send people directly to your sales page, but I find it’s best to build a list at the same time.

After all, the money is in the list.

But lets look at that option now.

Advertising Option 2

You can simply send people directly to your offer.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, for one, if you’re paying 20¢ a click still, then you can send 2.5 times as many people to your page before breaking even. Rather than sending 200 people, you could send 500, which is quite an appealing idea.

But this is not an option I recommend, and I’ll show you why now.

3 Reasons Why I Rarely Choose Option 2

First, it’s unlikely that you will still only be paying 20¢ a click.

Your cost per click depends on your click through rate (how many times your ad is shown before it’s clicked on), and people are much more likely to click on an ad for a free offer, than a paid one.

This means that your CPC goes up. In my experience, it’s usually by around 50%.

Second, if people choose not to buy your product, then you’ve kissed that advertising money goodbye. At least if you send people to a squeeze page first, you can collect their email.

Third, people like to know who you are before they buy something. Especially if it’s an info product, and not software.

They want to see that you can provide quality content to them, before they start paying for it. Which you can do in the form of a free report or ebook.

You have to make that human connection.

As I sell info products, I rarely choose option 2, but there are times when you might want to.

When To Choose Option 2

If you’re targeting your fans with information on a sale you’re having, then option 2 is a great idea. They already know who you are, and they’re much more likely to buy from you then.

It’s also a good choice if you’re marketing an affiliate product. I’ve seen lots of people advertising OptimisePress 2.0 in the past few weeks, because it’s killer software which people actually want to buy. All you have to do is send people to the page, and the software’s found, James Dyson, does all of the hard work.

Another good idea is if you’re advertising a customer testimonial.

Brian Moran, the founder of Get10000fans runs a sponsored story every day, detailing a customer’s testimonial for his Timeline Blueprint course. The reason that ad runs every day, is because it converts like mad. It leads people direct to his sales page, but the conversions on the ad are great.

Bonus Tip: Be Careful About Tracking Conversions with Facebook

I’m not saying you shouldn’t track conversions using Facebook’s methods, as it does work; you just need to be careful.

If you’re running a campaign and you have it optimised for CPC, and then you go in and edit the campaign to track conversions, Facebook will automatically change the ad from CPC to ‘Optimised for Conversions’.

This essentially means that you’re going to start paying a lot more for those clicks.

That’s at least what happened to me.

Rather than paying 20¢ per click, I ended up paying around $2.50, with terrible results. It spent my whole daily budget in just a couple of hours.

I don’t know if Facebook is trying to be sneaky with this one, but watch out for that.

So there you have it, there’s an introduction to Facebook advertising.

Read more: ‘Drive Traffic With Google Adwords’

The post How I Doubled My Money With Facebook Ads appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Free traffic sucks.

This is something I learned the hard way.

I have over 17,000 fans, and not only is the traffic minimal, but when I get it, the quality sucks.

And I can prove it.

Last week I was running a Facebook ad campaign. Nothing major, just a couple hundred bucks on a free ebook squeeze page.

And I’ve just started using OptimizePress 2.0, so I was split testing three different page templates at the same time.

Below is a screenshot of the conversion rate of this split test, over the top of the when I was spending money on Facebook ads.

It’s pretty clear from that image that when I paid for high quality, targeted traffic from Facebook, the conversion rates on my squeeze pages went up.

Way up.

We’re talking the difference between 10-20% and 40-50% conversion rate.

If you have something to sell, then you need to send quality traffic to it if you ever want to make any money from it.

So long as you’re seeing a positive return on investment from your ad spend, you can ramp up your ad spending, and watch your profit increase.

Today I’m going to help you get a positive return on investment by pointing out the top 9 mistakes that Facebook advertisers make.

Avoid these and you will be well on your way to turning a profit with Facebook advertising.

#9 Targeting Your Fans

Your fans already know you, they know what you have to offer; you don’t need to advertise to them.

They’re your fans, so if you want to reach them, just create a status update.

Offer them something good for free to that it gets shared and liked and commented on, and then when you’ve got their attention with that, you can then sell to them.

The only time I ever advertise to my fans is when I’m having a sale on a product, and that’s usually in the form of a promoted post.

#8 Not Setting Clear Goals

I can’t believe how often I see this.

Ask yourself a very simple question when you set up your Facebook ad. “What do I want to achieve with this ad?”.

More sales?

More opt-ins?

More free sign ups?

Whatever you’re advertising has to have a goal which is ultimately going to make you money. Don’t bother with page views if they’re not going to make you any money.

#7 Choosing The Wrong Landing Page

Don’t advertise your Facebook page, or blog post.

This is a just a great way to burn through piles of money.

Fans look great, they’re social proof, and they make you feel good, but they don’t do a whole lot to your bottom line.

And that’s what it’s all about – making more money.

You need to choose a landing page that will make you money somewhere down the line.

Advertise your products, or a squeeze page. This way you will either make a sale, or gain a new lead, which you can sell to in the future.

This ties in nicely with setting the right goals.

#6 Broad Targeting

Facebook allows you to be really specific about who you target, so pay careful attention to this.

You can target people based on age, location, gender, sexual preference, language, education, interests and more.

The most important of those is interests.

I’m going to use myself as an example here.

My target market is beginner photographers, but it would be a big mistake to go into Facebook and choose people whose interests are ‘photography’.

Why?

Well, because my mum likes photography, but has no interest in learning about it.

You need to be much more specific than that.

What I do is search for entry-level camera models that I know amateur photographers use. Canon EOS 550D, Nikon D3200, etc.

If someone has listed these as one of their interests, then they’re likely to be amateur photographers.

Think carefully about who the people your targeting are, and what their interests may be.

#5 Weak Ad Images

I’m a photographer by trade, so I’m pretty good when it comes to creating images that get attention.

When it comes to images, we are drawn to those with the strongest ‘visual weight’, as it’s known in composition.

We’re naturally drawn to certain elements in a frame, and I’m going to list the top three now, so that you can use them to get your ad clicked on.

First and foremost is human eyes. Whenever we talk to someone, or look at someone (for the most part), we look into their eyes. If you look at a photo of a person, whether you realise it or not, this is where your eyes are drawn.

And remember, you’re competing for attention on the sidebar, against 4-5 different ads. Yours need to stand out the most, so adding a human element to your sidebar is a good idea.

The ad below has been in my sidebar for months. It wouldn’t be if it wasn’t still converting.

The next most powerful visual weight is size/color/contrast. Something that stands out in the frame.

This is a little harder with the limited space you have on Facebook, as you can’t really create anything too big.

If it was just a big orange box (not sure if that would be approved), it would certainly stand out, but it doesn’t really advertise what you’re selling, so bare that in mind.

The third most powerful visual weight is writing. Specifically the ABC alphabet. We’re naturally interested by writing, and want to read it, so we’re drawn there quite easily.

So there’s a brief introduction to visual weight, for more information on how to create ads that get clicked on, keep reading.

#4 No Clear CTA

I see this time and time again, and I’m going to show you a couple examples.

Which text do you think drives more people to click on the ad, this one:

Or this one:

The second one, clearly.

It doesn’t just say what it does, it commands you to click on it with ‘Click here’.

#3 CPM Rather Than CPC

CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions (M being the roman numeral for 1,000). CPC stands for cost per click.

You want to use CPC bidding, because then you can control the price of your bid. It will save you money in the long run as you will never go over that price.

You see, as your ad starts to get older, and people have seen it a few times, they’re less likely to click on it. They become blind to your ad. But this doesn’t mean Facebook will stop showing it, which ultimately results in you getting less clicks for your 1,000 impressions.

#2 Using The Suggested Bid

This scared me when I first started using Facebook Advertising.

I entered in exactly who I wanted to target, and Facebook told me that my suggested bid was 67¢. When I ran the campaign, I was only paying 13¢ a click.

Don’t be put off by Facebook’s suggested bid, which tends to always be grossly exaggerated.

#1 Not Tracking

How are you supposed to know if your marketing efforts are working if you’re not tracking them?

There’s countless tools on the market for tracking, including Google Analytics, which is completely free. You’d be a fool not to track everything you do.

In internet marketing, there’s two things you should be doing. Always be tracking, and always be testing. That way you will get the best possible results, and know how you should move on.

If something’s not working for you, it’s important to know about it.

Read more: ‘How I Doubled My Money With Facebook Ads’

The post Top 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

You’re Not Telling them Why

I know this sounds like fluff, but bare with me, it’s actually very important.

I’m constantly running into fan pages who are now using Timeline, but haven’t set a cover photo – that’s just lazy. There’s countless fan pages, Twitter accounts, and Pinterest accounts, with no bio whatsoever. If you don’t let people know what you’re about, how are they supposed to know whether they want to follow you or not?

I start with a Twitter bio, which might seem like a weird place to start, but it forces you to stay short, but sweet. Here’s my bio:

I teach expert knowledge and techniques to photographers, from beginners through to advanced.

It tells you exactly what I can provide you, without forcing someone to read some lengthy paragraph (which they probably wouldn’t). If this information isn’t included, then the page just looks naked to me, like there isn’t a human running it (we’ll get to that further down the page).

The same goes for when you ask people to click like in your posts, something as simple as ‘If you would like to see more content like this, click like below’ can work a treat. 

You’re Not Making it Easy for Them

This was a struggle I had in the early days of ExpertPhotography. I couldn’t understand why people weren’t clicking like onto my fan page when I wanted them to, and then it dawned on me like a smack in the face; I wasn’t making it easy for them.

Asking someone to ‘Come on over to the fan page and click like’ isn’t exactly making it easy for someone to who may want to like your page, especially when some many other pages make it so easy. As soon as I installed the Facebook like box at the bottom of every post, and in the sidebar, I started seeing way more new fans.

I know the complaint, Facebook isn’t the most attractive widget, and it probably doesn’t fit in well with your design (this was a complaint of IncomeDiary), but needs must. Most people are used to seeing them these days, they don’t really ruin your design too badly.

You’re Not an Early Adopter

Oh wow, I wish someone had pointed this out to me. The importance of being an early adopter was lost on me when I first started, and I ignored a very important source of traffic, which now feels like throwing away thousands of dollars. The social network? Pinterest.

It was over a year ago when I was checking my Google Analytics and I saw traffic form some website called Pinterest, and I had a brief look, thought it looked good (but was clearly a website for women), and moved on. If I had jumped on board then, when the website was nothing (it’s now the third largest social network in the world, after Facebook and Twitter), I could have built an account which would probably be 100 times the size by now.

I liken it to claiming the Facebook fan page for ‘Photography’ when you run a photography website. If I was an early adopter, and got on board back then, the traffic I would see from Facebook now would be enormous.

Constantly check your Google Analytics for new sources, and see the content they’re linking to, and write more content like that. Not every website is going to be the next Pinterest, but once a year or so, there’s going to be a website that has the potential to drive lots of traffic to your website, and you need to jump on at the start of the wave.

You’re Not Encouraging Sharing

Sharing is caring, and that’s exactly what social media is all about. You want people to constantly share your content over their preferred networks, because that provides you with traffic and recognition. But for people to share, you really need to make it easy for them. You have to remind them that they want to.

The first thing you need to do is install some sort of sharing plugin, I use Sharbar on my website Mike uses Digg Digg on this website. I find that these bars work better than buttons at the end of a post, because they’re constant reminders to people, but you can decide for yourself.

Another thing you can be doing is actually asking people to share it. Something like ‘Sharing is caring, if you think others would enjoy this post too, please share it’ in your footer works really well. It adds a little bit of guilt to the reader who feels like they should be sharing it, and it reminds them that they can share it too.

Just ask, you may be surprised by the results.

You Don’t Post Frequently Enough

I get it, you might not have much content just yet, but that’s no excuse. I post at least five times a week on my Facebook, just to let people know I’m still there. Facebook in particular will vary the amount of people who see your content, dependant on how active you are. You need to make yourself known.

I post every day to Twitter and Pinterest, because although people will always see what you’ve been posting, you can get away with sharing more content, because that’s the norm. I probably post to Twitter around 10 times a day, and then always post any Facebook posts or Pinterest posts to Twitter too. I’ve never had complaints about too many posts and I have 11,000 followers.

Pinterest is a little bit different, because I post around 5 times a day, every day. Posting lots of good content here is encouraged, just be sure not to only post your own content, as this puts people off. Oh, and make sure you post at the right time.

You’re Posting at the Wrong Time

Check your Google Analytics, and see which countries send you the most visitors. If you’re anything like me, it’s the US and the UK. You need to time your posting so that is matches up with the right countries. I post on Twitter all day, but lets have a look at Facebook and Pinterest, which I post to at different times.

Knowing my audience, I post at 5pm UK time on Facebook, because I know that in England, people are finishing work, and in the US east coast people are having lunch, and US west coast, people are waking up. These are all key times to post to Facebook. You can post earlier on in the day, but it’s not usually as effective, unless it’s a really popular post.

Pinterest is a little bit different, because people seem to be using their accounts at different times. At times that annoy me, here in the UK. If you want to find out when the most popular time is to post to Pinterest is, you have to use Google Analytics. Make an Advanced Segment to include Pinterest and m.Pinterest traffic (mobile), and then only view that traffic. This will allow you to break down when your website is most popular with that source of traffic, because rather than looking at it on a day to day basis, you can look at it by the hour.

These are the times that I find to most popular on Pinterest.

So 3am and 8pm is when I should be posting to Pinterest, which is when I’m asleep and when I’m eating dinner. But that’s fine. I usually don’t sleep until very late, so I post right before I go to sleep, and allow other others to repin it, and I also at 8pm, no big deal.

Great information to know. If you would like to schedule your posting, try using Pingraphy.

You’re on Too Many Networks

Jack of all trades, master of none. I don’t know if that’s a british expression, but it means that you’re better off focusing on a few different aspects of social media, rather than every single social network available. Don’t spread yourself too thin.

I don’t use Google+ (still not entirely sure how it works), and I automate Twitter (except for replies), which frees up the time I need to focus on my top 2 referrers – Facebook and Pinterest.

If you’re anything like me, you probably have a notebook with a never ending list of stuff that needs doing in it, and there never seems to be enough hours in the day. Rather cover many social networks poorly, I made a conscience decision to only focus on the best networks in my niche.

Social media is only a small aspect of all the work that I do in a single day. The traffic can be good, but I need time for many other tasks too.

You’re Clearly Automated

Grr, this is a real pet peeve of mine. Yes, I’ve admitted to my Twitter being mostly automated, but there are exceptions to the rule. Firstly, even though Twitter doesn’t technically allow automation, it’s widely accepted by Twitter users, so long as you’re providing a service that they’re looking for. I have my human side of Twitter where I reply to tweets, and post from Facebook and Pinterest, but the automation lives on, and that’s fine.

Now lets look at when automation isn’t allowed.

Well, if you’re using a program called HootSuite, I’d go ahead and uninstall that now. When you post to a social network like Facebook, using any automated program, people feel an instant disconnect. Think about it, when you see ‘via HootSuite’ or something similar, doesn’t it feel like you’re talking to a robot and not a person?

People like to talk to other people, not robots. I see this mistake all the time, and I’m pretty adamant that people stop making it.

I have started to see some Pinterest automation software surface, and unfortunately it all seems to be Windows based, and not Mac (which I use), so I can’t test it out yet. But to be entirely honest with you, I can’t really see the advantages. I can imagine it’s just very agressive pinning and following, but I don’t agree with that strategy. You’re better off having a trusted hub for people to follow, in my opinion.

Your Readers Don’t Know You

This might seem like an odd one, but it fits in nicely with the point I made above about being automated. People want to make a connection with a person, not a machine. The same goes for companies or websites; if you can put your face on it, you’ll find that people are more likely to follow you as a person.

My Pinterest and Twitter username is PhotoJosh, so already people know what my name is, and what it is I do. But I go a step further than that, because most people know me because of my website, and not my social network.

At the bottom of every single post, there’s an about the author widget, where people can read just a small paragraph about myself, see my name, and a photo too. After reading multiple articles, they know who I am.

I recently launched my own forum, and I was surprised by the amount of people who were mentioning me by name, as if we were old friends. I was just ‘Josh’ to those guys, which just goes to show that this can really pay off. I thoroughly recommend putting your face on your business/blog if you can. 

Everything is Self Promotion

This is one of the biggest no-no’s in the game of social media, but probably one of the most commonly broken rules. It’s easy to see why you might think it’s a good idea to only promote yourself, the reasons are obvious, but I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong, and to do so, we’re going to look at Starbucks.

When it comes to restaurants/coffee shops, there is no business in the world with a more extensive social network than Starbucks. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. Starbucks almost always comes out on top with the most followers. Lets have a look at their Pinterest to see what they promote to their fans.

This is their blurb:

These are some of the things we love: coffee, food, music, inspiration. But most of all, we love sharing these things with you.

Nothing like ‘Follow us for coffee and coupons’ or something equally self-promoting. And have a look at their page, it’s all food, coffee and design related, nothing to do with their business. They see the value in stepping back and becoming a brand that their customers can relate to, and find value from.

Check out their Facebook page with 32 million fans. Very little self promotion, mostly nice images, messages, and polls, but it’s certainly not hurt their business at all.

The point is, you’re better off only promoting yourself 50% of the time, and the rest of the time promoting content that other people want to see. That way you’re providing them with a service and they’re more likely to follow you.

—–

That’s all from me today, I hope you’ve learned a thing or two, and can stop making the mistakes that so many other people are making. It will give you the edge.

The way I see it, you probably know enough about social media right now to start your own side business!

The post 10 Reasons Why You Suck at Social Media appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

This is part 2 of 2 on Pinterest Marketing, click here for part 1. I would suggest you read that first, because this is more complicated.

This is a fair bit of work, but it will absolutely 100% be worth it. One of strategies I walk you through in this guide took me 4 days to complete, but I saw results immediately. If you’re looking for massive traffic, you’ve come to the right place.

Lets start off easy by looking at…

Pinterest Specific Images

These are images that you create purely for posting on Pinterest. Have a quick browse on Pinterest, and what do you constantly see? Long images with useful information. There can be a lot of information, or just a very small amount.

Infographics. Yes, infographics work great on Pinterest because it’s a visual medium on a visual forum. They usually contain a lot of information, and get shared like a wild fire. No surprises here, lets move on to something more specific.

I’ve created a couple posts which have been purely for posting on Pinterest, lets have a look at one of them now, it’s the image on the right hand side of the page. It’s a range of images which show the correlation between the aperture size, and the depth of field in a photo. This might not mean much to you, but it means a lot to photographers.

This is a really simple, and very visual example of how this works, and it makes learning depth of field much easier for a photographer. This is exactly what people like to share, because it makes their board look good.

The pin on the right-hand side was pinned over 150 times, when I had far fewer followers, and that’s just from my board, not including how many times it was repinned after that.

Twitter Promotion

This section is especially important if you use TweetAdder for your internet marketing, as it steamlines the whole process with automation.

First of all, whenever you pin a link that goes to your website, you want to click on ‘Post to Twitter’, because not only will this drive traffic, but it’s driving traffic to your Pinterest at the same time.

If you’re using TweetAdder, then I recommend automating some tweets to encourage people to come to your Pinterest. It takes about five minutes, and can be left alone after that. Something like ‘Hey, have you seen my Pinterest board yet? Lots of cool links…’ usually works fine.

If you’d like to completely streamline this process, then add your Pinterest RSS feed to the RSS feed tweeter in TweetAdder. This will tweet everything you pin, and you can stop thinking about it. To find your Pinterest RSS feed, go to your boards and add /feed.rss so mine would be pinterest.com/photojosh/feed.rss

My Most Advanced Strategy Yet

Ok, now what I’m about to tell you has dramatically improved my traffic, and Pinterest presence, but it’s not for the feint of heart. The whole process took me four days to complete. Don’t get me wrong though, this is 100% worth it, and part of the reason it took so long is because of how many posts I’ve written (200+).

The general premise is that you take your website, and your put the whole thing neatly onto Pinterest.

Let me explain.

You should already have your posts in the correct categories, but you may want to be more specific. Last year, I went through all of my posts, and I added subcategories to each of them, so I could organize them in a directory. These subcategories then become my Pinterest boards.

Here’s how I spent my four days: On every single post I…

• improved the title so that people were more likely to click on it.
• changed the URL slug for better SEO.
• used the Yoast SEO plugin and improved the SEO on every single post (needed doing, and I was going through them anyway).
• created featured images with the title text overlayed (see below).
• installed a related posts plugin with some call-to-action text at the bottom, and added my featured image again, only this time with my logo and some ‘Pin It!’ text (see below).

The most important part of those steps, is where I changed the images.

When you have bold text on an image, it’s hard for people to ignore, because we’re drawn to text, so just by adding text to your images you have the upper hand over your Pinterest competitors. Here’s what mine looks like. As you can see, it’s a pretty simple design. I used a graduated filter to add a dark fade to the bottom half of the photo, and then I overlayed the text on top. Using layers in Photoshop makes this a really quick process.

Lets have a look at the footer for my posts now. The text flows straight into this, so it looks like it’s part of the post.

You’ll notice that the image is slightly different, with my Logo, and a Pin It! button at the top. Whenever someone hovers over this with their cursor, the button appears, and they can easily pin the image onto a board.

Because I’m seeing so much Pinterest traffic, people are more likely to pin the image again, and this gentle reminder at the end of a post can be really helpful.

Now it’s time to bring this all together. I mentioned before that I had subcategories, and I used them to organize my posts, well, now it’s time to turn them all into boards. If you have a look at my boards here, you can see there is a total of 15 different boards, 14 of which come from different categories.

Put yourself in the shoes of an amateur photographer. You turn up to a page, and you see all of the tutorials you could possibly need, all organized neatly, with images, into their respective categories. Does this look like something that may be useful? I think you’re going to be quite likely to follow it.

So that’s what I did, and this is what it looks like. I can click on any board, and almost every pin has at least a couple of repins. People browse, see what they like, and repin it to their own boards, often as a replacement to bookmarking.

So this is a pretty lengthy progress, but there’s actually a little bit more to this than meets to eye, because all of my boards have covers, detailing the content that’s inside them. To find out how I did this, we need to look at plugins.

Advanced Plugins

Category Images

This next step will allow you to add an image to your category pages, so that you can then pin this image to your board, use it as the cover, and have the pin go back to a relevant location. It’s an important step to making your board look good; these finishing touches count.

You need to install this plugin, called Then go to Appearance > Editor, and find your category file. It will be one of the five files listed here. Then input this code where you want the image to appear.

<ul>
<img src=”<?php echo z_taxonomy_image_url($cat->term_id); ?>” />
<a href=”<?php echo get_category_link($cat->term_id); ?>”><?php echo $cat->cat_name; ?></a>
</ul>

I chose to input this right at the bottom of my page, just before “</div><!– /#main –>” so that it was inline with the content, and not the footer. Don’t worry, it’s not hard to do; I have zero training with any coding.

Then you simply edit your categories and upload the image that you want to appear. When this is done, pin this image to your board, and set it as your cover. This all may sound complicated, but it’s not, and it looks way better.

Specific Social Notification Bar

This is one of the only paid plugins that I pay for, and it’s only $8 so check it out. It’s a notification bar that appears at the tops of my page, which I can apply a message to. I can also animate it, and I can change what appears, depending on where my visitors have come from. Specifically, if they came from Pinterest.

When you visit my website through Pinterest, the notification bar appears in the Pinterest colours, notes how many times it’s been pinned before, and gives you the option to both follow me, and pin the post. It looks like the image below. 

This is a really handy tool to have, because I’m directly targeting a very specific type of visitor. This kind of visitor is very used to sharing posts on Pinterest already, and by using this plugin, I can show that my post has already been pinned many times before, which gives it more credibility.

Check this plugin out because it does more than just this, you can do the same for Facebook and Twitter, etc. or you can just use it to promote a product at the top of your page.

Pinterest Analytics

If you search Google for Pinterest analytics, you’re going to find yourself bombarded with products to trial. Too much choice in my opinion, which is why I stick to just two. Google Analytics, and a website called Pinfluencer. I mentioned in the last post that I wanted you to get setup with this program, so you should be ready to go. Lets look at Pinfluencer first.

The first thing I recommend that you look at is the most engaged, and most influential pinners. These are the people that pin the most of your content, and the people who produce the most repins. You can look at this on a number of different time scales, but I suggest weekly for now. You need to suck up to these people as they are providing you with lots of lovely traffic.

A good practice is to go onto the boards of these people, follow relevant boards to you, and ‘like’ 5+ pins of theirs, especially your pins. What this does is helps you to take up space in their notification window, which will help them to notice you. If you’re an authority in your niche, you will be recognised, and they will appreciate being noticed by you. They will then be more likely to pin your content, because they’ve had some personal interaction with you. Leave a thank you comment here and there too.

Makes sense right?

When you select the Pins tab, you can see all of your pins, over a selected period of time (7 days for me), and see which have generated the most traffic. You can organise by engagement and visits, but you can also see all the details such as pageviews generated, repins, comments, likes, etc.

There are also tabs to see your most influential followers tab (although sometimes I find that these are people I’m following, not following me), and more tabs for your boards, metrics, and competitors. You can explore these all for yourself for now, although I may come back and write a post on them. It’s pretty self explanatory.

Google Analytics also plays a really important role, because it’s all in real time, where as Pinfluencer works a day in the past. You can select your period of time, then select Traffic Sources > Referrals > Pinterest, and it will list all of the pins that are linking to your site. I have about 10,000 in total, with 6454 of them in the last month. 

You can view the most popular pins coming to your website, and then follow my advice mentioned earlier, about going through to your followers, and thank them.

This is all good practice, but you may see it as tedious. Work hard now, and it will pay off in the long run.

A Note to Finish

I know this seems like a lot to do, it really does, but it just doesn’t feel like it to me. And remember, I’ve done it.

Everyday feels like a little win, as my traffic gets better and better, I’m seeing the results of my hard work. Remember that great feeling your get whenever you get a new ‘most traffic in one day’, or the first time you broke 1,000 visitors? It sort of feels like that.

So yes, there’s a lot to do, and you may find some of it boring, but I guarantee that if you follow the detailed steps I’ve left for you here, you will start to see the results you’ve dreamt about! And when there’s more traffic, there’s more opportunity for monetization.

Thank you,

Josh Dunlop

Read more: ‘10 Article Headline Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers’

The post Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies for Dominating Web Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Well, I have 8,350 Facebook fans, 10,200 Twitter followers and 1,550 unique Pinterest followers. Last week, I saw five times more traffic from Pinterest, than from Facebook and Twitter combined.

So yes, it’s amazing. Here, have some proof:

If that doesn’t convince you to listen up, then I don’t know what will.

This post is a BS-free zone. I’m not going to leave you snipets of information, or little tips that you can quickly forget, I’m going to provide you with the process I’ve gone through to see the traffic I’m seeing. If you want to master Pinterest, then this is the post for you, so stop making excuses.

A little heads up here, this is a long post, and it will take time to take it all in, but this is only part 1 of 2. My advanced strategies will be with you soon (see bottom of post for more details).

Pinterest

Imagine a website sort of like Facebook, only instead of people liking a post, they shared it instead. And then their friends shared it too if they liked it, and so on. Can you start to imagine the sort of traffic you might see from this?

Ok, so we’ve already established that you need to be on Pinterst, but I’d imagine that most of you already knew this. You were probably like me, knowing that you should be on it, but couldn’t really be bothered to divide your time over another social network (hello Google+), and kind of just hoped that you wouldn’t have to.

When I first got started, I felt like I had missed out on being an early adopter (I saw my first Pinterest traffic about a year ago), but after a few months of using it, I don’t feel that way at all, because it’s not that hard to catch up.

I’m going to show you exactly what I do to see so much traffic, but first, lets start with the basics.

How does Pinterest Work? (Read this)

From a marketing point of view, it can be hard to get your head around how pins are counted, and how it converts into traffic, so let me give you a little run down.

You post an image to a board, where other people can browse, see what they like, and either like it, or pin it to their own board. This image links back to the webpage that you pinned it from, and most people will click through and read the post. If the image is an infographic, and all the information they need is on Pinterest, then they probably won’t bother so much. Hold a little something back (although Pinterest does make long images very narrow when you click on them).

So lets say I pin something to my board, and it gets repinned 10 times. That counts as 10 repins for my pin. If someone takes one of those repins and repins it again, that does not add towards my total number of repins, because it was pinned from another source.

I’ll give you an example.

Choosing a board at random, I can find a pin with 7 repins. If I have a look at who’s repinned my pin, I can see that the majority of them receive just a couple likes and repins. Except for one. One of them has 26 likes, and 103 repins. And I could go on further, and look at how many times it’s been repinned from there, but I think you get the picture. It can start to spread like wildfire.

The point is, just because you can’t see how many repins you’ve received, that doesn’t mean you’re not seeing big traffic. Use Google Analytics to have a better look.

Setting Up

This is pretty basic, so I’m going to speed through it, but it’s worth reading.

When it comes to choosing a name, I suggest something along the lines either the name of your website, or whatever other name you use in social media. I like to associate myself with my website, so I go for PhotoJosh (which I use as my twitter name), which is good, just don’t call yourself something that doesn’t have anything to do with your website or brand (such as SamSmith).

Looking for a bio? You should already have a pretty solid one with your Facebook/Twitter so use that. If you don’t, then just make sure that you use your keywords so that they come up in searches.

Connect your Facebook and Twitter too, that will help you to see some more traffic.

When it comes to your profile image, use a photo of yourself, not your website logo. It allows people to feel that they’re connecting with a person, rather than a brand. It’s my experience that I find better interactivity this way.

Your Boards

Start of with one main board, the one that’s going to be followed more than your others. For me, this is ‘Photography Tips, Tricks, & Tutorials‘. This is where you’re going to pin your very best content, with diverse sources, not just yourself.

Now it’s time to learn from my first mistake.

Pinterest can be a lot of fun (and I say this as a young, heterosexual male), and you might find the urge to pin other interests that you may have, which for me were male fashion, food, and architecture.

This is a big no no. Rather than people clicking on the ‘follow all’ button, they chose to follow individual boards instead. The problem with this is that when you add new boards, only the people who are following all of your boards will be following your new boards automatically too.

Stay within your niche, and keep the titles short. They can all be searched for.

To start with, I would suggest building perhaps 4-5 boards to begin with, before we look at more advanced techniques in the next post. Here’s how I started in my photography niche.

1. My main board, where I pin mixture of content, related to photography.
2. A gear board. This links to a bunch of Amazon Associates posts on my website (you can’t earn commission straight through Pinterest any more, it has to link to your own site).
3. 30 Day Photography challenge. This was a niche within my niche, where people could find all the relevant links to a challenge I had set.
4. A group board. This is powerful for finding traffic, and followers.

If you look at my boards now, you’ll notice that there’s currently 15, but I will get to the rest of those boards in the next post.

The Group Board

This is my first little trick for you to start seeing more followers and traffic. On Pinterest, you can allow multiple people to pin to a board at once, so why not allow your fans to pin with you?

Create a board, invite all of your fans and followers to come and pin with you. You have to follow them to add them to the board, but that’s fine, and you’ll undoubtedly get a follow in return. Then you have a board that gets lots of followers, and all the pinning is done for you. You can occasionally take links and pin them to your other boards, and promote your own stuff there too.

It’s easy to do, a great way to find followers, and in my experience, the great content that gets pinned on there sees a lot of repins too. Check mine out.

Follow Pinterest Etiquette and Find Pinterest Love

Ok, time to bare with me as we have a look at the house rules of Pinterest, or rather, the etiquette.

This is hugely important, because you don’t want to scare off potential followers.

You don’t want to stand out as a bad pinner, and it’s really not hard to use Pinterest effectively, so adhere to the following rules.

1. Don’t solely pin yourself. Ease off the constant self promotion (spam?), and try to pin 50/50 on your main board, of your content, and someone else’s. Your followers will appreciate this, and you’ll actually see more of them.
2. Credit your sources. This means don’t take a nice looking infographic, host it on your website, link back to the source (on your webpage), but pin your webpage. This isn’t playing fair, and people actually want to see the source.
3. Pin to the correct board. Don’t go posting graphic design on a photography board. Similar? Yes. Right place for the pin? No.
4. Write a description. Sometimes the image doesn’t tell us much, and a few words will help people to click on those links!
5. Don’t go too mad with the pinning all at once. If you’re brand new, then this is fine, but you don’t want to spam followers. I pin 1-5 times a day at the moment.
6. When you see something you like, like it.

How to Pin Effectively

As I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, Pinterest is very image heavy. You may think that you don’t really work with images, so it’s not relevant to you, but it is. Even if it’s just an image of some fancy text, including your post title, that’s enough to get pinning.

But how can you best use images to your advantage?

Images

There’s a few things you need to remember. Firstly, when we talk about visual weight in photography (as in, what do we look at first and longest), writing come pretty high in the rankings, because we’re so used to looking at it. Add text to all of your images to let your followers know what they’re about.

You will also notice that on Pinterest, there is a maximum width for images, but no apparent maximum length. This means that you can add some serious Pinterest real estate by making long images, and pinning those. Check out the image to the right that I used.

Rather than pinning a single image, I took five minutes, added all of the photos to a single image, and pinned that instead. Trust me, this works wayyy better.

You will also want to consider watermarking your images. Perhaps with your website URL or your Pinterest name; it’s a good idea to brand your images.

Descriptions & Prices

Your description is important too, even if you have your text on the image. People can search for pins and you want your pins to show up in the results too. Cover all of your bases.

If you’re marketing products on Pinterest, then it’s a great idea to include a price in your description. Why? Not only is this important for your description, but Pinterest will very kindly add a price banner on pin for you, so everyone can easily see how much an item costs.

Become the go-to Board

If you post only your own content, then people are going to see this as advertising. If you post a wide variety of content, from the best on the internet, you’re going to find a lot more followers, because people see that you hold the board to a high standard. You can then include your own content, and more people are going to see it.

How to Find Followers

I’m going to start with the obvious here, as it’s all too often ignored. Promote your page through your other social media accounts. Post on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and let people know that you want to see their boards, while telling them about yours at the same time. Promoting a social account is not too dissimilar to promoting a website.

Cool, now that’s out of the way, lets look at Pinterest specific ways of promoting yourself. This is similar to Twitter marketing if you’re familiar with that.

Firstly, make sure you have at least two boards made, and then you want to go looking for other people posting similar content to you. Use the search bar, and type in your niche (for me, it was photography tutorials). Then in the top left-hand corner of the page, you will see the option to choose between pins, boards, and people. Choose boards.

Without even clicking on the boards, I can see nine of my tutorials pinned to three of the first 10 boards. Perhaps I’m doing something right here?

Start by following up to about 100 of these boards straight away. This will get you noticed, but there’s more that you can do. Go back to all of these boards, and like 3-5 of their posts. Quickly browse for what looks like the best content, and click like. I do this with all the boards that I follow, because you take up lots of room in their notifications, so they’re more likely to check out your profile.

Finding your first set of followers is really important, so don’t skip this step.

For example, if I click on the very first board that pops up, they’ve pinned 36 of my posts, and those pins have had a total of 498 repins. From one board.

Plugins I Use

You should be using some sort of social sharing plugin on your WordPress site, and I strongly recommend that you add the Pinterest button. The majority of Pinterest users will have a browser plugin or bookmark, but this does help to remind them. It’s also a nice way to see a count.

I also use a plugin called Pinterest Pin It Button For Images which isn’t the most popular Pinterest plugin, but I think I’ve probably tried them all by now, and this is my favorite for images. When you install it, you need to input the maximum width for your images in the settings, but after that you’re ready to go.

The reason I like this plugin is because the ‘Pin it’ button appears above every image in your post (except featured image), and then when you highlight the button, the image brightens, which makes it stand out. Very useful. It also skips the step that a lot of these plugins make you go through. When you click on the button, you don’t then have to choose an image, and it will also take your title text as the description. Perfect.

Always post your featured image at the bottom of the page too, to remind people to pin the post.

Another plugin you might like to consider when starting out, is called Pinterest RSS Widget and it will take your latest posts and display them anywhere on your website, in a size that you specify. I used to have mine set up in my footer because it would show people that I was on Pinterest, and allow them to follow me. I’ve found a good standing on Pinterest now so I don’t really need it taking up more page space (but I would recommend it for you).

So you should have your website optimized, as well as your other social networks. Whenever you post something to your main board, click on ‘Post to Twitter’ too, because this will tweet the pin, rather than the link.

Things I Don’t Do

I don’t comment.

This goes against what a lot of Pinterest marketers will tell you, but I have my reasons. Firstly, most people don’t comment. Secondly, have you seen the notification system? It’s pretty poor, you can’t look at all of them, so when people comment on my pins, I tend to miss them. I’m not looking for comments, I’m looking for repins and likes. If I want to give someone a nod for a good post, or to thank them for pinning my content, I like their pin.

What you Need to do Before Part 2

You need to get setup with an analytic service like Pinfluencer, as they have a 60 day free trial, and you can use that time to track your pins, see who follows you, who’s the most influential, which are your most popular pins, what your competitors are doing, and much more. Like Google Analytics, you can only track your progress after you set this up, you can’t look into the past, so the sooner you get started, the better.

I will see you in part 2, where I show you how I converted my Pinterest boards into a mini version of my own website, and I start to see the best traffic I’ve seen in a very long time.

Read more: ‘Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies for Dominating Web Traffic’

The post The Beginner’s Guide to Seeing Massive Pinterest Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

One of the most famous purchases by an infamous billionaire goes to Richard Branson for his island in the British Virgin Islands, named Necker Island. Planning on using it as a private island getaway for the artists on his record label, he quickly fell in love with the island, with its spectacular views and stunning wildlife. After a round of lowballing with an offer of £100,000 for the £5m island, he eventually came to own the island for just £175,000. With strong restrictions from the government, he had to build a resort on the island within just five years, or give up ownership.

He bought the island at the age of 28, and in just 3 years, he had spent $10m, and turned it into the spectacular resort it is today. It’s a ten bedroom Balinese-style villa, which rents out for $54,000 a day, and sleeps 28. It recently got struck my lightening and burnt down, but Branson has plans to rebuild it.

Check out this video to see what all the fuss is about.

Yuri Milner’s Mansion

If you read my article on who owns Facebook, then you’ll be familiar with the name. He’s the head of Digital Sky Technologies who has made an absolute fortune investing in start-ups such as Facebook. This has provided him with enough dollar to splash a bit of cash on the world’s most expensive house, which comes in at $100m for a 25,500 sq-foot property in Los Altos, California. That’s quite a purchase, and something which contrasts hugely with the home of Mark Zuckerberg, listed further down the page. What do you get for $100 million of your finest American dollars? Well, a ballroom, home theater, wine cellar, indoor pool, the list goes on, and why not!

Trump’s Outlandish offer to The White House

Last year, Donald Trump kindly offered to build The White House a ballroom, isn’t that nice?

“I called up the White House about a year ago.  And I saw that they were having lots of functions for people like the President of China…And I said, ‘Listen, every time I see a function, you put an old broken canvas tent that they probably pay some guy, some local guy a fortune for’…I said, ‘I will build you, free of charge,’ to a very high official at the White House, ‘one of the great ballrooms of the world,’”

“I will build it.  It’ll cost maybe $100 million.  Anywhere from $50 to $100 million,” Trump continued. “I will give you a gift and what we’ll do is we’ll hire the top ten architects in the world, hopefully, the United States, but in the world.  We’ll have a committee, a review committee set up.  We’ll pick the one that everybody agrees, because it’s a little delicate.  You know, it is the White House, after all,” he said.

Sounds good to me, but he never heard back from them. Source.

Mukesh Ambani Billion Dollar Home/Skyscraper

This was all over the trashy newspapers in the UK when it was first built. Sometimes a simple house just isn’t enough, and mansions are just so last year, the only other reasonable option that I can see is to build yourself a personal skyscraper. Well you would, wouldn’t you? That’s exactly what India’s richest man chose to do. The building is 27 stories and 173 meters high, and it has pretty much everything you could ever want in it. Cinema? Check. Swimming pools? Check. Health club? Check. Staff of 600? Check. A Picasso hanging on the wall? You betcha. You don’t really get much more outlandish than this.

Roman Abramovich’s $1 Billion Super-Yacht

Second only to owning football (soccer) teams, it seems that yachts are the best way to pour your money away, and the owner of this one just so happens to own both. When it comes to super yachts, it seems that people spend more on them, then they do their homes, and when you consider that this one cost a reported $1 billion, you might just spit your tea all over your computer screen. Security in the form of bulletproof glass and rocket detection system keeps the russian billionaire safe, while the likes of two helipads, 11 guest cabins, three launch boats, 2 swimming pools (one isn’t enough, you can never get enough water at sea), an aquarium, and even a mini-submarine.

This is Roman’s fifth luxury yacht, because there’s some things you just can’t have enough of sometimes, but this one is not only his biggest, but it’s the biggest privat yacht in the world. With annual running cost of £15 million (give or take) for all his boats, it’s probably not a great thing that Russia’s richest man lost £13billion in the global financial crisis.

Chase Bailey’s Cabernet Sauvignon 1992

The former Cisco Systems executive paid $500,000 for a six-liter bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon 1192. Granted, the procedes went to charity, and the bottle only really retails at about $300, but the point stands that it’s half a million for some wine. Even knowing it’s true value, I would have a very hard time popping the cork in it. I might not have a particularly sophisticated palet, but I’m happy when I can pick up two bottles for a tenner. 

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud’s Private Jet

The Saudi Prince bought an Airbus A380 for $400 million in 2009; that’s four times as much as the world’s most expensive home. I know what you’re thinking, he’s be done there, I know for a fact that an Airbus A380 only costs $300 million. I know, I was thinking the same. You see, he decided to drop another $100 million on decking the plane out, because you know, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. That’s correct, $100 million. On interior decoration. Of a plane.

Long haul flights are such a bore, that’s why there’s a concert hall, a turkish spa, a garage, 20 first class seat/beds, a boardroom, and even a prayer room. If all that sounds like a lot of walking around, then don’t worry, there’s a lift to take you from floor to floor, and act as a private entrance. Lavish living, or a disgusting display of wealth? You be the judge.

David Martínez’s Jackson Pollock

Billionaire producer David Geffen sold the 4-ft. by 8-ft. painting to financier David Martínez for $140 million, making it one of the highest priced paintings in the world. Think of the sort of money you’d have to have before you could even consider hanging $140 million of it on the wall. Geffen is well known as a lover of art, and a bit of a collector, and has sold various paintings in the past, so it’s come of no surprise that he would sell the painting. That sure is a lot of money for a painting though. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s Contrasting Home

Mark recently purchased a $7 million house in Palo Alto, which when you consider his personal wealth, isn’t all that much money. He’s never really been one to splash the cash, and it is Palo Alto so $7 million doesn’t really buy you a lot. It’s a simple enough house, and not a mansion by anyone’s standards, but it’s enough for Mark. I mean he drives an Acura for crying out loud. It speaks a lot about Mark as a person, and how he compares to other billionaires like himself, such as Yuri Milner’s $100 million mansion, who is an investor in Facebook.

Bill & Melinda Gates Donation

This splurge completely differs to the rest of the list, and that’s for a single reason. It’s selfless. Bill & Melinda gates started their charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in 1994, and gave it a little boost in 1999, by personally donating $5 billion of their own personal wealth. That’s right, $5 Billion. They could have done everything above put together with that sort of money, but they didn’t, they gave up some of the cash they have lying around, and put it to a goof cause. To top it all off, a couple years ago they pledged $10 billion over the next 10 years to help research, develop and deliver vaccines for the world’s poorest countries. Well isn’t that nice of them.

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