In this article, guest contributor, Ruth Awad explores the consequences of social media and blogging gone wrong!

Essential reading for every blogger and their team!

Costly Social Media Mistakes That Can Bankrupt a Blogger

Social Media Mistakes are not exclusive to what you may say on Facebook or Twitter – they impact everything you say in your blog, email, and all forms of digital content.

Most entrepreneurs and bloggers know their industry inside and out. But when it comes to how the law applies to their online marketing? Not so much.

The good news: you don’t have to be a legal whiz to know what online marketing mistakes can land your business in trouble.

Playing it safe with your social media marketing.

Why Social Media Mistakes Matter

When entrepreneurs and small businesses are sued over reputational harm – including libel, slander, and violation of privacy – it costs $50,000 on average, according to Insurance Journal.

One misconception is that small businesses or solopreneurs don’t get sued, but the data says otherwise. According to the US Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, small businesses bore 81 percent of all business lawsuit costs in 2008, plus a Harris poll found that more than a third of small businesses surveyed had been sued before.

Worth noting: a lawsuit is more than just a tangle of legal bills and time spent in and out of the courtroom. Being sued is never a good look for anyone and it can hurt your brand’s reputation.

With that in mind, let’s look at some common social media marketing mistakes that can lead to legal headaches and discover ways you can avoid them.

Social Media Mistake #1: Libel and Slander

Most of us have said unkind things in the heat of the moment, but at what point does our statement become defamation? Generally speaking, a statement is defamatory if it is…

• Falsely stated as fact. In most places, a truthful statement can’t be defamatory. The same typically goes for opinions.
• Harmful to the subject’s reputation. Hurt feelings usually aren’t enough. Damages need to be more tangible, like getting fired, losing a promotion, or receiving hate mail.
• Communicated to a third party. Comments written in a private diary usually don’t rise to the level of defamation.

Libel and slander are two types of defamation. If you write a harmful and untrue statement about someone, you’ve committed libel. Speak those words out loud, and it’s slander.

Sadly, the Internet makes both of these very easy to commit, especially after a perceived slight. Take, for example, this report from The Telegraph in the UK, about a freelance typist’s Twitter rant. She complained because a company was allegedly late to pay her. The company sued her for defamation, and battling that kind of lawsuit isn’t cheap. The report notes she could end up spending £100,000 to defend herself.

And just because social media seems to be dominated by the written word doesn’t mean you can’t accidentally slander someone, too. Live-streaming, podcasts, and even Snapchat can capture you at your mudslinging worst and broadcast it for the world to see.

How to Avoid Libel and Slander :

As a web entrepreneur, you probably have all of your social media accounts open and ready for business at all times. That makes it imperative that you…

• Never post in anger. Count to 10. Go for a walk. Take a deep breath. Just make sure the anger passes before you publish a word.
• Check your facts. If you want to publicly claim something is true, make sure it is before you post.
• Make your context clear. What you see as an obvious exaggeration may be insulting to someone else.
• Be careful with hashtags. Adding “#crook” may strike you as funny, but you can’t be sure everyone will take it as a joke.
• Avoid modifying photos and videos. Images can be defamatory, too, so don’t alter them to make someone look bad.

No matter the facts and your understanding of them, it is wise to take a deep breath and think twice before responding.

When it comes to litigation, ignorance is no defense… one throwaway comment could quite literally cost you your business.

Most importantly, be doubly careful when you’re referring to private citizens. While anyone can be defamed, laws are usually more protective of regular Joes and Janes.

Social Media Mistakes #2: Copyright Infringement

Copyright infringement is the use of someone’s copyrighted work without their permission. That seems simple enough, but how do you figure out what’s copyrighted?

An idea can’t be copyrighted, but if someone puts that idea into a tangible medium, such as writing, music, film, photography, or art, the resulting material is automatically copyright protected.

The creator doesn’t have to do anything other than create a work to get that sweet copyright protection. They don’t have to register it (although they can), publish it, or put a © on it. They don’t even have to put much effort into defending it.

So if you grab an online image for your latest tweet or use your favorite song to score your YouTube tutorial, you might have to pay up.

Here are just a few examples of businesses facing legal woes for what may have been unintentional infringement:

• According to a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the owner of an online travel agency was recently ordered to pay $24,000 to a Hawaiian landscape photographer. Her mistake? Using the photographer’s work on her website without permission.
• In 2014, The Verge reported that YouTube star Michelle Phan faced a lawsuit for improperly using music owned by Ultra Records. The company sought the maximum damages: $150,000.

Some entrepreneurs think they can avoid copyright infringement by making changes to the original material, sort of like what artists are accusing Snapchat of doing, according to The Ringer.

Copyright protection means only the creator has the right to:

• Modify the work into something new.
• Reproduce the work in its original form.
• Distribute the work to the public.
• Display the work to the public.
• Perform the work for the public.

Do any of these things without permission, and you risk being accused of copyright infringement.

How to Avoid Copyright Infringement

Use work that you have permission to share or work that belongs to the public domain (see: Shakespeare).

These pointers can help:

• Get familiar with your country’s fair use / fair dealing laws. These make certain exceptions to copyright infringement. For example, US fair use laws may allow you to use copyrighted material without permission for criticism, commentary, parody, education, news reports, and research.
• Look into the copyright of any material you want to share online. Obtain permission from the copyright holder before you publish it to your social media accounts or website.
• Be honest about how you intend to use the material. Make sure the license allows you to use the material for your business.

Finally, when in doubt, you may want to link to the original source rather than publishing the work directly. It demonstrates a good-faith effort to credit the creator.

Social Media Mistakes #3: Misappropriation / Invasion of Privacy

This one may make you scratch your head – how could you possibly invade someone’s privacy via your social media marketing? Let’s look at some types of privacy invasion that might make it clearer:

1. False-light publicity. Privacy laws make it illegal to spread misleading information about someone, especially if it’s highly offensive or embarrassing. Say, for example, you sell diet supplements online. Posting photos of unsuspecting people with the caption, “Another future client,” could land you in court.
2. Misappropriation. People also have a right to control their image and name. Using either to promote your business without their permission is called misappropriation. You’ve probably heard about celebrities suing companies for using their image, such as retired NBA star Tim Duncan suing a San Antonio real estate agent, but private citizens sue over misappropriation, too. According to the Courthouse News Service, five women sued their cosmetic surgeon after she posted their before and after pictures to promote her business.
3. Public disclosure of private facts. Clearly, there’s some information people want to keep private. And if you communicate these facts to a wide audience, like ESPN reporter Adam Schefter did when he tweeted New York Giants Jason Pierre-Paul’s medical records, you risk getting sued for invasion of privacy.

So how could these situations apply to you? Let’s say you want to give a public shout-out to your favorite customer. If you didn’t get permission to use your customer’s name and image in the post, they could sue you for invading their privacy.

How to Avoid Misappropriation / Invasion of Privacy

Perhaps the first thing you want to do is put yourself in the position of the subject of your post. You probably don’t want the world to know your…

• Medical information.
• Employment background.
• Financial woes.
• Sexual history.

So don’t to that to other folks!

Next, be sure to get permission before you share any information about another person on social media. That is perhaps your best defense against a public disclosure or misappropriation claim.

Additional links to help you avoid social media blunders:

• The United States Copyright Office. In particular, you may want to visit its search tool to find out if the material you’re using is copyrighted.
• NOLO.com on Defamation Law. This is a great resource on defamation law. The articles are free of legalese and cover just about every aspect of libel and slander cases.
• The Social Media Law Bulletin. Produced by Norton Rose Fulbright, this site aims to keep businesses informed about social media issues.
• Wikimedia Commons. Go here for free images, sounds, and other multimedia files you can use on your social media accounts (but always read the fine print first).

These tools and the tips outlined above make it less likely to make a mistake, but your second line of defense is insurance.

Consider having General Liability Insurance that can cover your legal expenses when your business accused defamation, copyright infringement, and invasion of privacy – just in case.

Social Media Mistakes – More Reading…

Ignorance is no defence on Twitter and Facebook, warn legal experts

10 things you should know about … libel

A Writer’s Guide to Defamation and Invasion of Privacy

How to Write a Legal Disclaimer for Your Business

Sample website disclaimer

About the Author: Ruth Awad is a content strategist and editor at Insureon, an online small business insurance agency.

The post 3 Social Media Mistakes That Could Get You Sued! appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Even if you’re a beginning online marketer, you probably know about the importance of growth hacking.

It’s become a buzzword in recent years as startups have found unique ways — or hacks — to drive massive growth at a low cost.

As a growth hacker your efforts are focused on more customers, more revenue and specifically in this article – More Traffic!

A classic growth hacking example is AirBnB, which is now billion-dollar business. The platform, geared at facilitating vacation rentals, used a powerful trick to reach their current state of success:

Craigslist spam*

Before they were well known, AirBnB found Craigslist listings of houses for rent, contacted the renters and asked them to place their ads on AirBnB instead. (*Ref Article)

The hack gained them thousands of new users, and the company soon went viral.

The moral of the story is that you don’t have to be a programmer or a tech guru to take advantage of growth hacks for your business. That said, we do not advocate you SPAM – indeed AirBnB did not approve of this and blamed the action on a rogue sales team.

There are lots of easy and legal ways to drive growth, and your blog is one of the best places to start:

=> 70% of customers say blogs influence their purchasing decisions
=> Companies who blog have 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages

Read this post to learn 13 growth hacks you can start today to increase traffic to your blog.

1) Keyword optimize your content.

Blogging isn’t all about developing content that resonates with your audience — you need to make sure it reaches your audience as well.

Search is a great way to amplify your content, bring massive traffic, and even drive sales; 81% of B2B purchase cycles begin with search.

Here’s what you do…

Step 1: Keyword Research

If you have a good idea of the kind of terms your target audience is searching for, you can start keyword research. Tools like SimilarWeb, Google AdWords and others make this pretty simple.

When deciding which keywords you want to rank for, you should consider:

=> Search volume: How many people are searching for the term?
=> Relevance: Will this keyword draw in the right kind of traffic?
=> Competition: Is it possible to rank well for this keyword?

You should prepare a long list of relevant keywords to incorporate into your content creation efforts.

Step 2: Optimize Your Content

Now you can start incorporating keywords into your content. Key areas your keyword should appear include:

=> Title tags
=> Meta descriptions
=> Alt attributes
=> URL structure
=> Body content

And rather than spending your time memorizing SEO best practices, just get a plugin to do it for you. If you use WordPress, SEO by Yoast will show you exactly what you need to optimize for each blog post:

2) Write headlines for people and search.

Upworthy recommends writing 25 different headlines for each post. That might seem like a lot of effort for a small part of your content, but it matters.

Often, the headline is one of the only things people see when they decide whether or not to read your post, so they have to be perfect.

As mentioned before, your headlines should be keyword-optimized, but make sure you’re writing for people as well as search engines. You need to ensure:

=> You have a good balance between word types
=> You have the right word and character length for different promotion platforms
=> Your headline will resonate on social, search, and everywhere else it appears

There are a lot of great tools out there that can help you do this.

CoSchedule has a free headline analyzer tool that will analyze the structure, grammar and readability of your headline. Or if you need help coming up with a title, the Inbound Now Blog Title Generator can help with that.

If you blog with WordPress, a cool new tool you can also try is Title Experiments. The plugin will automatically A/B test several different headlines with your actual audience, and determine which one works best:

The basic version is free.

3) Promote your blog in your email campaign.

This hack often gets overlooked by even the most experienced digital marketers, because many assume that email marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.

It’s true people get a lot more email than they used to, but the marketing efforts still pay off. In fact, emails convert three times better than social media, and can yield an estimated 4,300 percent ROI.

Given those numbers, promoting blog posts in your email campaign is a must. You can feature relevant blog posts or even a series of related posts in an email newsletter. Just make sure you’re encouraging clickthroughs back to your blog.

Don’t have a huge email following yet? It’s easy enough to do with your blog. Here are some methods you can use to get email signups:

=> Subscribe forms
=> Content upgrades — More detailed content about the blog topic

=> Opt-in Incentives — Free eBooks, whitepapers, etc., offered in the post
=> Pop ups
=> Product samples or free trials

4) Market your blog on online forums.

If you do it right, online forms, question and answer sites like Quora, or even Reddit, can be a great way to drive massive traffic back to your blog.

Be on the lookout for topic forums and queries that your blog posts are relevant to.

For example, if someone asked a question about great quotes from entrepreneurs, and you have a blog post titled, “100 Inspirational Quotes from Successful Entrepreneurs,” you could reply to their query and direct them to it.

Just tread carefully with this method. If your comments aren’t relevant or seem overtly promotional, you could get negative feedback.

5) Reach out to influencers.

One of the most impactful ways you can encourage massive growth in blog traffic is by taking advantage of other people’s audiences.

This is done through influencer marketing — or collaborating with powerful individuals in your niche to spread the word about your content. According to Visual.ly, content that influencers share gets 16 times more engagement than content directly from a brand.

The reason?

People don’t trust brands.

No matter how useful your content is, people still know you’re out to market to them, which is why 70% of people consider information from brand advocates better than information from the brand.

So how do you find influencers?

I recommend Buzzsumo.

Just search for keywords related to your blog topic, such as “big data analytics,” then click over to the Influencers tab:

Then, you’ll see a list of influencers who regularly share this kind of content that you can reach out to:

Once you’ve found influencers relevant to your niche, work to build a relationship with them by sharing their posts, commenting on their blog, etc. Then you can reach out for help promoting your own material.

6) Get traffic from SlideShare.

SlideShare presentations are a great way to complement your blog content and drive massive traffic. Ana at Traffic Generation Cafe made a few slideshare presentations for the first time and managed to go from 0 to 243,000 views in just 30 days.

SlideShare presentations can be about just about anything.

Some online businesses, like Wordstream, even use them to create visual summaries of their blog posts:

This is helpful because sometimes your SlideShare presentation will be more popular than your blog post.
Here’s how you drive traffic to your blog from SlideShare:

=> Link back to your blog

Make sure your SlideShare presentation has a prominent link back to your blog at the beginning, end, and in the slide deck description.

=> Suggest related content

Have a blog post related to the slide deck topic? Mention it as a resource in the presentation and link back to the post.

7) Blog more frequently. (No1 Growth Hack for Bloggers!)

Many digital marketers hate to hear this fact, but the more you blog, the more traffic you get.

Research from Hubspot found that companies who published at least 16 posts per month received 3.5X more traffic than those who published 0-4 posts.

Planning to blog 16+ times a month can be overwhelming for many, but if you use WordPress, you can make use of an editorial calendar plugin to keep on track.

For some, it might be worth investing in some freelance writers to catch up on the slack. Writers can be found with nearly all skill levels (and rates of pay) on freelance websites like Upwork or Guru. Consider the cost against the potential payoff for your indexed traffic.

8) Growth Hack – Write long, detailed content.

According to research by Buzzsumo and Moz, the vast majority of online content is fairly short:

It would seem that many bloggers aren’t putting a lot of effort into creating long, detailed content. As a result, the same study also found that long-form, research-backed content have a strong correlation between shares and links.

Research has also shown that long-form content gets better ranking in search.

So if you want your content to really stand out against your competitors, put effort into making it long and detailed.

9) Growth Hack – Cross-link to other relevant posts.

In every blog post, you should look for opportunities to insert relevant links to your other blog content. This is good for SEO because:

=> It encourages click through
=> Google considers internal links when indexing your pages

Cross-link the right way, and you’ll see a boost in SEO and increase traffic to your blog.

First, find relevant posts related to your new content. Excellent social media and web monitoring tool. You set up alerts based on keywords, and content related to those keywords is displayed through the Mention application or sent to you via email or social media. LikeAlyzer is a very simple (and free) tool to assess your Facebook Page and provides suggestions to improve it.

Then, look for key phrases in your new post to serve as the anchor text for the links. These should be related to the current post’s topic, since Google will use this information to rank the post.

10) Encourage engagement with social media campaigns.

Hosting a competition, sweepstake or giveaway on social media can be a really effective way to drive more traffic to your blog and get new email signups as well.

Giveaways or sweepstakes don’t have to be costly for you — they can be small prizes such as products you offer. Or if you offer a service, you can giveaway some one-on-one consulting.

The tweets and shares your campaign gets can drive massive traffic. A great example of this in action is Namecheap’s Twitter campaign. They posted a simple series of Christmas-related trivia questions to launch the new Twitter account. If you were one of the first three @replies with a correct answer, you won a one-year domain registration (if you set up a Namecheap account).

The campaign resulted in a 10% website traffic increase in one month, and a 20% increase in domain registration.

A great tool you can use to run your social campaigns is Rafflecopter. Use it to set up a giveaway page, and then you can embed a Javascript snippet into your blog for people to opt in.

11) Repurpose written content to visual.

If you want to have a powerful blog that brings in the most traffic, it needs to have more than just written content.

Image via Quicksprout

Some ways you can repurpose written content to visual include:

=> Infographics
=> Videos
=> Illustrative stock photos
=> Annotated screenshots

If you create a great video, it opens the door to many other platforms that can help drive traffic back to your blog, such as YouTube, Vimeo and Yahoo!

Here are some helpful tools for DIY visuals:

=> Pablo and Canva — for editing and designing images
=> Awesome Screenshot — for editing and annotating screenshots
=> Infogr.am — for creating your own infographics and edit videos

12) Submit to content curation communities.

There are quite a few platforms out there that are looking for bloggers to submit content that they deliver to their audience. This is another great way for you to get your posts in front of new eyes, but only if the content is truly exceptional.

Content curation communities are pretty competitive, so make sure you’re submitting your best content to get strong traffic.

Here are a few content curation communities you can submit to:

=> Triberr
=> BizSugar
=> Blog Engage

13) Growth Hacks Multiplied – Get featured on high traffic niche websites.

Finding opportunities to guest post on high traffic niche websites can give your own blog a boost as well.

For one, getting backlinks from high authority sites is great for your own website’s SEO. Also if the website is related to your niche — e.g., has an audience that would also be interested in your blog — then you can also get a lot of traffic from the post directly.

Many high authority blogs offer guest posting opportunities. Some may not want you to link back to your blog in the post you write, but they almost always will give you a link back in the byline.

Not sure where to find opportunities? Just turn to search.

Think of a keyword related to your blog or a topic you’d like to write about, and then use it to find sites that might accept related content by searching for:

=> Keyword “write for us”
=> Keyword “guest post”
=> And other relevant terms.

Many will have published guidelines on how and what to submit. Just make sure you aren’t pitching posts to your direct competitors. Example: Write For IncomeDiary

There you go — 13 growth hacks that can drive massive traffic to your blog.

Which growth hack are you going to implement first?

Author Bio: Since selling his company Tapdog to Similar Web in 2014, Noam is blogging at HackingRevenue.com where he writes on monetization channels and how to grow the revenues of your online business. Check it out!

The post 13 Growth Hacks to Increase Traffic to Your Blog appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Read this short interview to hear how Adam Linkenauger went from Olympic hopeful to moving back in with his parents, coming up with an idea for a business, only be told by a ‘friend’ that it was not going to work. Read on to see how his friend was way wrong!

Here’s why you should listen to Adam:

250,000+ FREE Leads from Youtube

Verified on Facebook which has served as leverage/credibility in the market.

1,000,000 Facebook Fans
180k YouTube subscribers
114,000 Google+ Followers
36k on Instagram

Hopes of scaling GetMoreViews quickly due to a goal of having two separate
7 figure companies by the end of 2015!

If you want to get YouTube and Facebook traffic then read this first!

Introducing Adam:

1. Tell us the story of how you became an online entrepreneur. How did you go from trainer offline to trainer online?

I built my first website at 16 years old. It was an online portal for local track and field teams in Roanoke, Virginia. It was a place to share pictures of events, discuss training tactics, and plan upcoming track meets.

The runner’s parents loved being able to see pictures that were actually taken on the track versus from the stands. We had over 100 athletes throughout the district taking pictures and uploading them to the portal.

This is where I found a real passion for building online communities.

“LinkTrack.com” (the portal) unfortunately faded once I went to Clemson University for high jumping. But, the desire to create a new online community was always in the back of my mind.

In fact, I put the wheels in motion for Freak Athletics in 2006 as I began writing my first training manual. I wanted to use that training to help athletes all over the world get better results. But, due to the time constraints of school and college track, I was unable to continue with the project.

After a successful high jumping career at Clemson (winning 7 ACC Championships :)) I decided to high jump professionally. I had reached qualifying height for the 2008 Summer Olympics and I was finishing my degree in Sport Management.

Training was going phenomenal, and I was poised to have a big meet at the Summer Olympic Trials. But, two weeks prior I strained my hamstring during a routine warm up.

My sponsors immediately fired me and my professional career was over.

That summer, while watching some of my friends compete in the Olympics, I interviews for a few college track and field positions.

I realized that wasn’t the career path I really wanted to take. My perception of coaching was laughs, success, and FUN. It’s what I had observed from my coaches over the years.

A cubicle, paper pushing, NCAA eligibility tests, and countless rules and infractions.

So, that summer I made a very ballsy/ DUMB decision to leave Clemson withOUT my degree, move back to Virginia, and give up on track and field all together.

I was back at my parents house, living in my old room, depressed, scared, and uncertain of whether running from what appeared to be the rest of my life was the right thing to do, or the worst decision of my life.

One night, I was thinking back to LinkTrack.com, and then Freak Athletics came to mind.

I remember getting out of bed with excitement thinking Freak Athletics was IT!

It was how I was going to live. Even if I just made enough to survive on, building a community around jumping higher was how I was going to do it.

And, it’s all I’ve done since that moment.

2. What’s a day in a life of Adam Linkenauger look like? (interest in diet, sleep, work hours, gym etc)

My typical day is not typical for most.

I actually sleep in until 10am typically, as I prefer the solitude of working late at night.

Once awake I’ll drink a protein shake and ride a stationary bike for roughly 30 minutes to an hour. No set time, just enough to “feel it”. I read marketing and business books on my Ipad while riding to pass time as well as educate myself without taking away “actionable” time from my day.

I’ll drive around 30 minutes to my office (when I’m at home in Roanoke). I’m also going to be working out of an office in Baltimore with Brian and Scott Moran (SamCart.com) and splitting the time between Baltimore and Roanoke.

Once I’m at the office, I’ll check emails and business KPIs before talking with Rocky Ullah, President of both Freak Athletics and GetMoreViews.

From roughly noon until 5 pm I work. Our team has an all hands on deck approach, therefore we all roll up our sleeves and get work done, no matter what the job entails.

Though we all have areas of work we specialize in, everyone in our office is capable of doing any other job necessary. That’s been BIG in our success.

After 5pm, I try to hit the gym to play basketball or shoot around, but admittedly, I put my job first – so a lot of time I skip the gym in order to keep working.

After the gym, I’ll grab a quick dinner at a local restaurant in Roanoke and head back to the office to work until around midnight.

My job is my absolute passion, and the process of growing businesses is what I truly love to do. So, although the hours sound long, it’s that way because there is nothing else I’d rather be doing.

When I get home I may watch something on Netflix if I’m not too tired, or read a bit more, but typically I go straight to bed to do it all again the next day!

3. 1 Million Facebook Fans or 180k YouTube Subscribers. If you had to delete one of your accounts, which would it be and why?

GREAT Question.

I’ll go with 180k subscribers on Youtube 100% of the time.

With Facebook continuing to throttle organic reach, those 1 million fans aren’t as valuable as they used to be. The ability to boost to the Fanpage yields solid ROI for us, but it’s not like the good old days where one post could bring us 1000+ leads.

I love Youtube because you actually get the opposite effect as any other social media platform. For example, a Facebook post may lose relevance in 24 hours. A tweet likely will lose relevance within an hour…

A Youtube video will generate MORE relevance over time, bringing you more leads, subscriber, and customers on autopilot.

We have 3-4 year old videos that are still bringing in 1000’s of leads a month to Freak Athletics. It’s truly incredible.

Youtube also allows clickable annotations, the ability to get paid for posting videos with in-stream advertising, and a ton of cool tools for branding.

It truly is a marketer’s dream when used effectively.

4. What kind of commitment is required to become successful with YouTube? (how often do I need to post, how long do the videos have to take etc)

It used to be HELL to maintain a Youtube channel. I use to have to post a video three times a week with slow dial up internet that would take hours a day per video!

Nowadays, you can actually upload all of your videos at the same time, and then schedule them.

This addition makes running a Youtube channel a BREEZE.

We have a “video day” where we shoot a month of Youtube content in under 2-3 hours.

Our videographer edits the clips and adds effects that night.

We will then upload, headline, describe, and tag all the videos the following day.

We dd our video annotations and BOOM… we are done for the month, and the videos will bring us leads for years to come!

5. If you could only make one video ever, to get you the most traffic possible (good quality traffic, not viral), what would that video look like?

I would make an extremely HIGH QUALITY (in content and appearance) addressing the BIGGEST pain point in your market.

If you could only shoot one video to get the most traffic possible, it would need to blow the socks off of anyone watching. Why? it’ll increase the average “Watch-Time” per viewer (how long a typical viewer watches this video).
With cold viewers (non-subscribers), you’ll want to immediately go into the content as soon as the video begins. Don’t do a 30 second introduction highlight film, or even a 15 second stinger for your logo.

That can all come later.

Instead, over deliver on CONTENT, and have direct Call To Actions to “Like, Comment, and SUBSCRIBE” to the channel.

6. We’ve had a lot of views on our videos but when I look up YouTube in analytics I get no traffic from them. What don’t we know that you have mastered?

I’d first check your Annotations to make sure they are “clickable” and that you linked them to an optin page.

I’d make sure these annotations appear at the beginning and end of every video on your account, and your offers are 100% congruent to the subject of your video!

For example, if you were creating videos to teach people how to become bloggers, you wouldn’t want to offer a free “Facebook fanpage blueprint”. Instead you’d want to offer something like “Blueprint: How I built my Blog to 1 Million viewers a month” (give them the END RESULT)!

I’d then recommend that moving forward, you should include a VERBAL and PHYSICAL Call To Action in each video you create. The call to action will point towards the annotation location and SAY “Click Here to get a Free (Whatever)”

7. What sells best often depends on where your visitors come from. What’s the ideal product to sell to YouTubers?

I love Youtube because your subscribers already trust you PRIOR to opting in. You can establish yourself as an authority before they ever hit your site.

In most business models using other forms of traffic, a squeeze page, or Ad is the first connection in business. That makes for a lot of “questions” in the mind of the lead.

“Is this guy legit?”
“Can he truly do what he says?”
“Am I going to get spammed?”

With Youtube, anyone who opts in to our mailing list and is offered a program has already seen PROOF, CREDIBILITY, TRUST, SOCIAL PROOF, and looked into our eyes and heard our voice.

This of course is all done through our videos.

Saying that, I recommend all sales materials, and product training to be video specific if and when possible.

There is a disconnect if your traffic comes from Youtube videos, but your first product is a pdf download.

I’d recommend sticking to video training whenever possible.

Saying that, from a product standpoint:

I often get the question: How much do you give for Free on Youtube vs paid within a product.

My answer to this is always…

I can show basketball moves, and drills for free FOREVER.. same with Youtube tips and tricks. People aren’t paying for that…

…people are paying for a trusted step by step PROCESS that they can follow to get results.
Simple as that.

Someone could hand me a lifetime of wood, hammers, and nails.. but I’ll never build a house until I have a step by step, easy to follow plan to do so.

8. People still are buying Facebook likes! Is it even possible to game social media in 2015, is it ever worth it?

I’m sure it’s possible to “game” Facebook in 2015… but you will LOSE. NO it’s not worth it. Facebook (and same with Google/Youtube) will ALWAYS win, and you WILL be punished.

Whether it comes in 2016..17… or 18. You will be punished, and it WILL destroy your business if you try to “pull one over” on these companies.

Facebook and Youtube offer us an INCREDIBLE sea of potential leads, clients, and customers, and all we have to do is provide quality content our market enjoys!

Stick to it, use ethical tactics, and good things will happen.

A good story here is when one of our competitors assumed all of our success HAD to be because of our large Facebook following. So they apparently paid for likes, and shot up 50-75,000 likes in a matter of days…

His page quickly became one of the top locations online for pornography links, knockoff shoes and handbags!

NOT good when your market is 13-16 year old basketball players.

Saying that, his page was either removed by him, or deleted by Facebook less than a year after this incident occurred.

9. You are an athlete first. How does that influence your business? Do athletes make better entrepreneurs?

My athletic background has taught be how to fail. I’ve failed more than anyone I know, young and old, and because of that experience of failure… I know how to succeed.

Athletes are great with leadership and dealing with adversity, as well as possessing the unique ability to have others put trust in them, and to put trust in others.

I do believe my athletic background plays a huge factor in the way I run my businesses.

10. The first time I met you, you were at a workshop, learning about business. How important has it been for your growth to invest in your education?

I will never go a day in business again without being in contact with a coach AND mastermind group. Education in this business is extremely important.

Saying that, I urge readers to limit education to 2-3 sources TOPS and take on the mentality of TRY first and ASK LATER.

I see people in mastermind groups asking TOO many questions… questions about their every move.

I understand they want to do everything correctly, but it’s important to spend most of your time IMPLEMENTING and acting without fear.

Failure is learned, it’s the best education you are ever given.

The post Get More Views – Adam Linkenauger Interview appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Creating a quality video tutorial doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s actually possible to create an adequate tutorial in ten minutes, no video editing required.

I’ll teach you how to do that below, but I’ll also give more in-depth information for those who are re­ady to dig in and really create a top-caliber video. That means how to prepare for your video, tips on recording, getting your audio right, and how to best edit, upload, and publish your video online.

You can jump right to the beginning of the guide by clicking here or by using the table of contents above.

Example of a Video Tutorial

I made my first video tutorial a few weeks ago for PopUp Domination. I learned a lot through the process and it inspired me to write this post for you. You can watch that video tutorial here.

Expert Video Advice:

Throughout the article, I’ll be sharing exclusive advice from Gideon Shalwick of Rapid Video Blogging. He’s had huge success through video tutorials so I’m really happy to be including his insight in the article.

All of these Gideon Shalwick quotes are from Income Diary’s own book of interviews with top online entrepreneurs, Web Domination 20.

Now, onto the guide.

Before You Press Record

Know Your Stuff

The first step to making a good tutorial is to know all of the ins and the outs of the subject you’re teaching. Hopefully, you’re already an expert on the process you’re teaching. If not, you should probably run through it a few times to make yourself as knowledgeable as possible.

I also suggest looking around on forums and blogs to see what problems people are having commonly and the types of questions that they are asking.

Write a Bullet-Point Script

I don’t recommend writing out the entire script of your video, because it’s better to be in the moment and to sound natural (this is called an ‘extemporaneous’ delivery). But having a few key bullet-points in front of you on a piece of paper or electronic device can help make sure you don’t miss anything important and remind you what’s coming up next.

Create a Clean Environment

Keep in mind that if you’re recording your computer screen that may include recording your desktop background, programs you have running, browser windows you have open, your bookmarks, and more. Before you press record, make sure that your computer’s display looks professional and won’t show any overly personal information.

Choosing Video Recording ‘Screencasting’ Software

You can spend your time downloading and installing any number of free screencasting options. But I tried this and was met with unacceptably low-quality video. If you’re absolutely set on using free software, then the highest ranked free screencasting software (according to Wikipedia’s comparison) is VirtualDub.

But in my experience, you get what you pay for. If you want the cream of the crop, go with $299.00 USD Camtasia. Personally, I chose the $49.95 Snagit and I couldn’t be happier. It’s easy to use and it has all of the options that I wanted (plus a few more).

If you’re not ready to part with real money, both Camtasia and Snagit offer free trials. Download one for a month through the links above, make a few tutorials with it, and then you can decide whether or not to invest with a purchase.

Audio Recording

The Right Mic

With Snagit, you can record your voice through your computer’s microphone simultaneously. This is an easy way to do it, but the audio quality may be thin and full of static. If you speak loudly and clearly, your audio will likely be okay.

If you’re going to be doing this a lot, you’ll probably want to invest in a quality USB microphone, like the Yeti. Gideon offered us microphone advice for the professional:

“My microphone that I currently use with my Canon 60D is a wireless microphone from Sony, the UTX-B2. So that plugs into my camera and then I can have a very nice, little, wireless lapel mic on me when I record the videos. They’re a bit more expensive, $700 bucks or so.”

And the budget-conscious beginner:

“You don’t need to start with the UTX-B2. I actually used a $30 Audiotechnica microphone that I got from an electronics store. It provided near professional quality audio and the only drawback was that it was not wireless. It came with a four meter cord. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to get a great result.”

An Optimized Acoustic Environment

Turn off any fans, heaters, or other devices that produce ambient noise.

Also look out for flat, uncovered walls and hardwood floors that may create harsh, reverberant echoes. If the room that you’re in is producing too much reverb, you can cover the floors with rugs, the walls with blankets or paintings, and place pillows or comforters in the corners.

Or simply record in a different room with better acoustics.

The Sound of Silence

After you’ve finished recording your voice walking through the video, record about 30 seconds of dead silence. When you’re editing the video later, you may need to separate parts of the voiceover and you can use that “white noise” to fill in the gaps without the audio cutting out entirely and distracting the viewer.

Background Music

There’s a variety of sites online to find licensed music for free in the creative commons. I’ve had good luck with ccmixter.org and that’s what I used to find the background music for the PopUp Domination tutorial video.

If your voiceover is difficult to understand for any reason, then you may want to consider skipping the music altogether. In any case, keep the volume down so that it doesn’t distract from what really matters.

Cleaning Up Audio

Cleaning up noisy, static-filled audio is easier said than done. You can use advanced software like ProTools or capable freeware like Audacity, and they all have ‘noise reduction’ tools and equalization, but the truth is that it’s usually impossible to cut out static or noise without also cutting out important frequencies of the voice itself.

For that reason, I recommend most people just try to get the best audio quality to begin with and don’t count on any audio editing magic to bail you out.

Recording the Video Tutorial

If you know the process that you’re teaching and you’ve familiarized yourself with your screencasting software, recording the tutorial should be a piece of cake. Just press ‘Record’, then walk your viewers through the process.

Striking the Right Tone

It’s good if you can be personable and maybe crack a joke or two. Your personality can make your video stick out and encourage people to feel the type of personal connection with you that will get them to want to come back for more tutorials.

But if you’re taking a lot of time with your humor and theatrics you’re just going to frustrate your viewers. For a video tutorial, I would rather have someone be dry and to the point then overly colorful. Of course, the best option is to find the happy medium.

Recording a Video So You Don’t Have to Edit

When you click ‘Record’ with Snagit, they give you a three second countdown before it starts recording your screen. That’s enough time to switch windows to the screen you want to start the video with. In most cases, that can simply be the software or web page that you’re going to be instructing the viewer on.

If you want to get really fancy, you can design a special title screen to welcome your viewer and inform them about what you’ll be teaching. In that case, you can make that image your desktop background or have it up in a photo viewing program.

This is the welcome screen for the PopUp Domination video that I designed in Adobe Photoshop. I used graphic design that had already been made for PopUp Domination’s website in order to give it a professional, branded look.

If you like, you can make another such image for the conclusion of your video. With Snagit you can press Shift+F10 and exit the video promptly without any wasted seconds at the end.

Regardless of whether you use special screens for the beginning and ending of your video, if you go through the process clearly, quickly, and you don’t trip over your words too much, you can record a video that is completely functional without having to do any further editing.

If you want to add text or interactivity to the video, you can add those through YouTube annotations. I recently wrote a guide on how to use YouTube Annotations if you would like to learn more.

Nevertheless, if you want the highest quality of video tutorial, you’re probably going to want to do some basic editing.

Editing Your Video Tutorial

Choosing Your Software

As with screencasting, there are a bevy of video editing software available, both free and paid. In fact, most computers come with perfectly capable video editing software and many screencasting programs (such as Snagit and Screenflow) also feature video editors tailored to the needs of someone editing a video tutorial.

For WebDomination 20, Gideon Shalwick walked us through his process of selecting video editing software:

“I started with iMovie, worked my way through to Final Cut Express, and I ended up settling with ScreenFlow.

“Once I started using ScreenFlow, I thought, “Why bother with Final Cut?” ScreenFlow did everything that I wanted it to and it was much easier to use and gave me amazing results.

“Even to this day, if I want to get a video done really quickly, just something with simple cuts and very simple editing, I use ScreenFlow. Just record, get it on ScreenFlow, export, upload, done. It’s just so good.”

I use Adobe Premiere to edit my videos for work and you can get a free a trial of that through Adobe’s website. But generally the more advanced video editors have a higher learning curve and they won’t provide casual video editors with anything that they really need for most videos.

Edit to Save Your Viewer’s Time

One of the principle benefits of editing your video is using transitions to save your viewer’s time. If there’s a process that takes a while in the middle of your video (like a loading screen or an upload) then you can simply cut that part of the video. It’s also a good opportunity to fix slip-ups or pauses in your speech.

Adding Text to Guide Your Viewers

By going through the process and talking to your viewer, you can convey most all information necessary. But if you want to help the learning process further, adding text is a great way to add further clarification for your viewers.

I added text at the top and bottom of the PopUp Domination video tutorial with a template that I created in Adobe Photoshop. The text on the top tells is like a header, identifying the larger goal we’re accomplishing in the video. The text below identifies the individual step in the process that we’re currently completing in the video.

Branding and other design elements add to the professionalism of your video and help your viewer to remember your name. As you can see, I incorporated the PopUp Domination logo directly into the design of the text bars.

Outsourcing Editing

Hiring someone else to edit your videos for you can result in a more professional video and free your time up to focus on other activities. Gideon Shalwick put in his time editing videos himself but he explained to us that he now mostly outsources:

“Currently, I don’t do much editing myself anymore. My business has progressed so well now that I can afford to have a team of video editors to do all my editing for me. That’s really helped me take my business to heights that I couldn’t have even imagined. My videos look so much more professional now than I could have ever even tried to do on my own.”

If you decide to go this route, you can create the tutorial yourself and outsource the editing or you can hire the entire tutorial created, as Michael did when he recruited my video service.

Wrapping Up

Choosing a Video Service

There’s no shortage of ways to get your video online and for the most part they all work fine. But if you want your video tutorials to be found and viewed freely by as many people as possible, YouTube is the way to go. Gideon Shalwick explains:

“Really it’s all about traffic on YouTube. That is the short answer. Last time I checked, YouTube is the second biggest search engine, after Google. Three billion views a day is pretty impressive. Personally, I can’t really fathom the number three with nine zeros next to it. It’s just incredible.”

Uploading & Optimizing

There’s a host of things you can do to optimize your video so that it will show up in more sources. That’s not really the subject of this article so I’ll be brief.

The title is the most important part for SEO, but it’s also important to fill in the keywords and description area. You can use the list of bullet points you created earlier to fill in the description area in a breeze. Don’t forget to add a link to your website in the first couple lines of the description area so that people will be able to click on to your site.

Make an Accompanying Blog Post

If you really want to do it up, write a blog post that also walks through the process and embed the video at the top of it. Now you’ve created a complete educational resource that’s likely to be favored by Google’s search engine spiders.

That’s a Wrap!

You can rest easy knowing that every day someone, somewhere is learning thanks to the time you spent putting together a quality video tutorial. That’s a pretty cool feeling.

If you want to learn more about video, you can check out my articles on the top YouTube channels, profiles in viral video marketing, and my 21 ways to dominate YouTube.

Check out this website if you want to create great videos using Screenflow.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Making Online Video Tutorials appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

That’s how many people visit YouTube every month. The site’s extreme popularity is why we’ve highlighted YouTube in the past with posts like How to Go Viral on YouTube and The Top 10 YouTube Channels.

But we’ve never written about YouTube annotations – and how they can greatly improve your videos by adding an interactive element. This post is all about delving into interactivity on YouTube:  why to do it, how to do it, and what you’re capable of doing once you master it.

Why Make Your YouTube Videos Interactive?

More Views to More of Your Videos

The most basic reason of all — who doesn’t want more views?

YouTube annotations allow you to create links from one video to another or to a playlist. The right link will turn a one-time viewer into a serial viewer. And since YouTube allows you to make a link to your subscribe page right in the video, interactivity can boost your subscription rate as well.

Up-to-Date Messaging

After you publish a blog post, you can return to it and edit it whenever you want. A YouTube video isn’t so malleable:  once it’s up there, it’s up – and if you want to make substantial changes you’ll have to take it back down and re-upload it (losing all of your views and comments in the process).

That’s a problem because the world keeps spinning and so too will your message.

That’s where annotations come in. Since they’re tacked on after you’re video is uploaded, they’re easy to change in just a minute or two. That means you can keep your YouTube videos with whatever is new with you — whether that’s a list of upcoming events, your newest products, or your most recent blog posts.

A good YouTube video will continue to amass thousands of views for years and years after it’s posted. Design a video with YouTube interactivity in mind and it can still be working for you decades from now.

Easier to Navigate Videos

Have you ever been watching a tutorial video and had to skip around for minutes trying to find the one part you need to learn? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to skip right to the part you need?

With YouTube annotations, it’s possible. You can set up a series links in your video with titles referring to its different “chapters” — just like a table of contents. Your viewer will be able to read through the list, click on their desired chapter, and — poof — the video skips ahead to that exact location on the video.

Get Started with YouTube Interactivity in 3 Steps

(1) Access Your Video Manager

Log in to YouTube and click on the gray arrow next to your name in the upper right corner.

From there click on Video Manager in the ‘YouTube’ Column.

(2) Access Annotations Area

From the list of videos you’ve uploaded, select one to add interactivity and click on downward arrow next to edit. Select Annotations from the drop-down menu.

(3) Add Annotations to Your Video

Click on the Add Annotation button to the right of your video, then start working down the list. You’ll have the option to add text, adjust its placement within the video, and make it link to other pages or videos.

I’ll dive into these features in the next section.

Making and Adjusting YouTube Annotations

There are five types of YouTube annotations. In the example above, we’re using the Spotlight style of annotation. A spotlight is a just thin outline of a box, so they are useful when you want to use an existing part of the video and turn it into an interactive element. In this case, we’ve incorporated a short clip of another Income Diary video and put a spotlight around it’s edges, essentially turning the video clip into a link to the full video.

I’ve made an image with an example of the remaining four types of annotations:

Titles allow for the largest font size; the Speech Bubble creates a playful cartoon speech box; Notes make a simple, useful rectangle; and Labels look a lot like spotlights, but they reveal text when you hover over them with your mouse.

Adding Text and Color

Use the white box to write in the text you want to appear with the annotation. You have a choice between four font sizes (11, 13, 16, and 28) unless you’re using a Title (48, 72, and 100). If you increase the font size but you don’t notice a change on the video, then you likely need to make the annotation box bigger.

Text must be either white or black, but you have an assortment of 34 colors to choose from for your annotations — including transparent. Your first priority here should be clarity, so make sure that there is a high amount of contrast between the text and the background color. You may also want to consider using colors associated with your brand or using attention-grabbing colors (e.g. red, orange, yellow) when making a call-to-action.

You also have the choice between two styles, Normal and Impact. I prefer the simplicity of Normal.

Positioning Annotations

When you make a new annotation, it will appear over your video. You can adjust it’s position by placing your mouse over the middle of the annotation, clicking, and dragging. It’s usually a good idea to place annotations on the periphery of the screen so that they don’t distract from the video, but in some cases you may want the annotation to be the focal point – front and center.

You can adjust the size of an annotation by clicking and dragging any of the black rectangles that are on each corner. YouTube limits the size of the annotation so that it cannot take up more than 30% of the screen.

Annotations in Time
Once you’ve added your annotation, it will appear in the dark gray area underneath the video. By putting your mouse on either side of the annotation, you can extend it longer or make it shorter. By putting your mouse in the center of the annotation, you can move the whole thing forward and backward in time. You can also make these adjustment with the Start and End time fields to the right.

Choosing the right duration for your annotations is important. Too short and the viewer may not have time to read your message or click on your link. Too long and the annotation may distract from the video and overstay its welcome. Give your best guess at how long an annotation should stay up (probably about 5-7 seconds) and then watch the video from the beginning with the annotation. That will give you the best idea of whether or not you’ve chosen an appropriate length.

If you’re having trouble fine-tuning, you can use the magnify bar in the bottom right to get a closer look.

Turning Your Annotation into a Link

Here’s where we finally get to add interactivity:  YouTube allows annotations to link to other Videos, Playlists, Channels, Google+ Profiles/Pages, Subscribe Pages, and Fundraising Projects. 

Types of Interactive YouTube Links and their Uses

Videos

This allows you to link to any other video on YouTube. This is the type of link that we use in the example video (Will Smith Explains How to Bend the Universe). Use it to link to one more related videos.

Since you can start the linked video at a second-marker of your choosing, you can select very specific portions of videos or even link to different parts within the same video. That’s how you make a table of contents for your video:  a series of video links to different times in the same video.

Another use could be to allow the viewer to go back and re-watch a particularly tricky part of the video:  “That last part about SEO was pretty technical, so click the button in the bottom right to go back and hear it one more time.”

Subscribe Pages

This is one of the most powerful links, since every subscriber you get is another long-term viewer. When someone clicks on a subscribe link, it takes them to a special landing page for your channel with a big button saying ‘subscribe’.

I see no reason why you shouldn’t put a subscribe button in every video you post on YouTube. It’s as easy as putting a note in the bottom left corner that says ‘Subscribe’ in 13 pt text.

Channels

Your channel page is like the home page for your YouTube channel. This is a great stepping-stone for viewers who are interested in learning more about you and your videos but who might not yet be ready to subscribe.

Google+ Profiles/Pages

You can’t link a YouTube video to your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram — but you can link directly to your Google+ page. If you have an active YouTube channel and a social media presence, then this is an awesome opportunity to start building a relationship with your viewers.

Playlists

For audiences, a playlist can mean more entertainment/information queued up for them without them having to bother with browsing for the next one. For you and your videos, it can mean the difference between getting one view or ten views. If you have a series of videos that make sense being watched in a particular order, you make a playlist and put a link to it in each one of those videos.

Fundraising Projects

YouTube recently started allowing users to link to their fundraising projects on 18 approved websites, including Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. This makes YouTube a great place to promote your campaign

If you’re thinking about crowd funding, you can check out our Ultimate Guide to a Successful Kickstarter Campaign.

Can I Link from a YouTube Video to My Website?

This is the one interactive elements that my video clients ask for most — and the answer is yes:  but you must first link your website to your channel using YouTube’s Webmaster Tools.

Once this process is complete, your website is officially an Associated Website of your channel and can be linked to with annotations. For an in-depth tutorial, click here.

How to Design Your Video from the ground up for Interactivity

When I set out to make interactive videos for Income Diary, I made a special 1920 x 1080 px background in Photoshop comprised of branding elements taken straight from Income Diary’s site (above).

The focal point of the design is the spot in the center for a previous Income Diary video. When I finish each new video, I import the above template and the previous video file. Then I scale down the previous video so that it fits in the box and speed it up so that there’s more movement. After the video’s uploaded, it’s as easy as putting a spotlight around the miniature video and linking it up.

Another aspect of the above template is that there’s room in the bottom center for another annotation. That’s a prime spot for a note that says ‘Subscribe’.

How to Add Interactivity to an Already Uploaded YouTube Video

If you want to add interactivity to videos after the fact, don’t fret. You don’t need a fancy template and you don’t need to have planned anything in advance.

I recommend keeping it simple. Try putting a note in the bottom left that says, “Previous Video” and a note in the bottom right that says “Next Video”. Or simply put a note in the bottom center that says “Subscribe” and links to your subscription page.

In most cases, the bulk of the action will be in the center of the screen so it won’t be particularly distracting if there are notes discreetly placed at the bottom. Nevertheless, I don’t recommend putting these links up until the last 30 seconds or so of your video.

Conclusion

Do you have any questions about interactivity? I would be happy to answer them in the comment section.

Furthermore, if you have any insight into using YouTube annotations please share with our community below.

Finally, if you want to learn more about how to succeed on YouTube check out our 21 ways to Dominate YouTube.

The post Ultimate Guide to Making Your YouTube Videos Interactive appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I’ve been lucky enough to have in-depth interviews with 20 of the world’s top online entrepreneurs.

Today, I’m sharing five really important and totally exclusive insights from five of these big online entrepreneurs.

What You’ll Learn:

• The most important web design trend right now
• How Matt Wolfe makes $20,000 per month
• How much it costs to outsource a full-time virtual assistant
• Why social media is like a party
• The one thing that will never change about online business

The Five Insights

#1 Responsive Web Design is the Future

When we asked Jacob Cass about the ‘future of web design’ he said, “responsive design would be at the top of my list.”

What is Responsive Design

A website is ‘responsive’ when its design adapts automatically depending on what device the site is being viewed on. “For example, a website will change its look when you’re viewing it on a mobile device, versus a large screen,” Cass explained.

Why Responsive Design is so Important

The Internet used to be just on computer monitors. Today, it’s being viewed more than ever on phones and tablets. A May 2012 study from comScore predicts that smart phone owners will become “the new mobile majority in the US” by the end of the year (see chart).

More and more people around the world are browsing the web on small, mobile screens and if your website doesn’t look good on an iPhone or iPad then you’re losing ground with this rising wave of users.

The Insight:

If you’re a web developer, it’s time to learn how to create responsive websites.

If you’re a website owner, make sure your next redesign includes responsive design.

If you want more insight from Jacob Cass, you can check out his blog or get Income Diary’s book of interviews. Cass also identified “HTML 5, CSS 3, web fonts and parallax scrolling” as hot web design trends on the rise.

#2 Membership Sites may be the Best Way to Make Money Online Today

Broadly, a membership site is a website that restricts access to most of its content to members only. Many membership sites are free to join, but others cost anywhere from $1 to $100 per month.

Why Membership Sites are so Profitable

Matt Wolfe made $1,615.63 in January 2012 from selling 12 different affiliate products. He made a little over $62 with Adsense. Between his two membership sites (The WordPress Classroom and The Marketer’s Classroom), Wolfe raked in about $20,000 in just one month:

The best thing about this type of revenue is that it tends to be recurring. As Ryan Lee explained to us, “instead of always having to get new customers, your job becomes taking care of the customers that you already have.”

The Challenge of Creating a Membership Site

The biggest obstacle to success with a membership site is making your exclusive content incredibly valuable. As Wolfe explained to us, “There’s a lot of information out there for free, so you’ve got to figure out what makes your information different.”

Once you’ve convinced people to pay monthly for access, then the challenge becomes continuing to provide value to your community of members so that they’re getting their money’s worth. That could be a full-time job – but if you’re making $20,000 per month from subscriptions like Wolfe does, then you can justify the hard work.

The Insight:

While selling ad space and products are still perfectly viable ways of earning a passive income online, creating a members-only community is more lucrative right now. If you’re willing and able to provide massive, exclusive value to your members, your reward will be a fat, reliable monthly paycheck.

#3 Low Barriers to International Business mean Huge Opportunity

A couple decades ago, the idea of hiring a personal assistant who lived in another country was ridiculous. Today, the Internet has made it possible for a team of people to work on a project simultaneously from their computers while living anywhere.

In 2005, Tyrone Shum started a business selling Dragonboat paddles online. Business was almost too good and Shum was working 60 hours a week. After reading Timothy Ferriss, Shum started outsourcing and brought down his workload to just ten hours per week.

Shum has since sold his Dragonboat business and now spends his time teaching people how to outsource work effectively.

Why Outsourcing Works

Every business owner could use a bigger staff. But if you live in The United States (like me) or in The UK (like Michael), then a skilled full-time employee will no doubt cost over $10,000 per year.

Outsourcing works because it allows a business owner to hire a staff in a country where the cost of living is much lower.

How Much Does Outsourcing Cost?

Where to Hire

Obstacles with Outsourcing

If you’ve ever had a staff, then you know managing a team is a lot of hard work. Unfortunately, if you don’t do it right, outsourcing a personal assistant or a team may be more trouble than it’s worth.

Shum recommends talking to a potential employee “face to face” via video call before hiring to get an idea of their character. Another important step in effective outsourcing is to develop efficient systems for managing and training your staff, which Shum details in his interview.

The Insight:

There’s nothing more valuable to a business than a dedicated employee. If your business could benefit from a staff (or a larger staff) but you don’t yet have the funds to pay someone locally, outsourcing offers an incredible opportunity.

#4 Social Media is a Party

We mostly talked with Pat Flynn about his hugely successful blog on earning passive income.

But Flynn is an expert on social media – as testified by his 58,000+ Twitter followers and 26,000+ fans on Facebook… and he told us that social media is like a party.

What to Do on Social Media

According to Pat, your goal on social media should be to develop a trusting relationship with your audience.

What not to Do on Social Media

Many people make the mistake of trying to use their social media pages as a platform for selling. That’s a big mistake.

The Benefit of Seeing Social Media like a Party

Flynn says that “Facebook and Twitter have been amazingly successful at bringing in returning traffic to my site.” He also mentioned the increased brand awareness that comes with being on a site that people are on “all the time.”

But social media is even more valuable to Flynn as an ongoing social event, an interactive community: “It’s great because I can post questions on there and people answer. It really brings a community feel to the brand and that’s a good thing about social media. If people have questions, other people can answer for me before I even have to go there. So that really helps a lot.”

The Insight:

Even businesses should keep social media social.

#5 Business will always be about Solving People’s Problems

Derek Halpern is one of the world’s foremost experts on the psychology of blogging. We interviewed him to find out more about his popular blog Social Triggers and how to benefit from understanding what makes people “tick” online.

But one of my favorite parts of the interview came when Halpern wasn’t talking about psychology at all. He was discussing the way people often miss what really matters when it comes to running an online business.

The Shiny Object Problem

There’s always something new to talk about on the ever-changing web. New features, new software, new sources of traffic. All of these things matter, but by their very nature they tend to be short-lived.

It’s a good idea to pay attention to opportunities afforded by the latest trends, like how Josh Dunlop has capitalized on Pinterest’s popularity to grow his photography blog. But when keeping up with the latest trends becomes your priority, you’re foolishly ignoring what really matters.

The One Thing that Will Never Change about Online Business

Some people think that you can trick people into giving you money online. Others seem to think that money will just fall from the sky after they set up their website.

The truth is more difficult but also simpler and, I think, much better:  people will give you money online when you solve their problems.

The Insight:

If you’re not making money online, then you’re probably not doing much to solve peoples’ problems.

If you are making money online but you’d like to make more, then it’s time to start looking at how you can create systems and processes that solve those problems better and more efficiently.

One Last Insight

These five insights came from the first five interviews of Web Domination. There’s 20 interviews total, so we’re just scratching the surface here (this may become a series if well-received).

As I read through the book researching this post, I was again impressed by the advice these successful entrepreneurs were willing to share. They all seemed to share the attitude that they would be better off sharing their knowledge than keeping it all to themselves.

So that’s my last insight for today: when it comes to the secrets to your success, be an open book. There’s more to gain from helping others than from selfishly holding onto a strategy for yourself. If something in this article struck a nerve with you, please share it with your network and in the comments section below.

The post Don’t Ignore these 5 Insights from 5 Big Online Entrepreneurs 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.