Food Trucks: Thinking Outside the (Lunch) Box

On Wednesday around noon, half of the 10th floor at Ogilvy Washington made a mass exodus to the corner of 20th and L … all in the name of grilled cheese served out of a truck. Not many things make a large group of very busy people suddenly crave the same lunch and wait outside in the cold for it. While gourmet food trucks are nothing new in cities across the US, the excitement surrounding them hasn’t waned. Why? Because their whereabouts are unpredictable, they exude an air of mystery … and you can personally beg them via Twitter to go to your neck of the woods, not Virginia.

Like many of the clients we work with, food trucks’ entire business models are built on social media and word of mouth. It’s their lifeline. But with more mobile businesses staking their claim on street corners, these entrepreneurs can’t just tweet about their coordinates or shortages of bulgogi steak and call it a day. Thanks to new technology and mainstream acceptance of the trend (restaurants and fast food chains are getting in on the action), food truck entrepreneurs are thinking outside the box to keep customers coming back for more. Here are some online and offline tactics we’re seeing:

Online:

•    Mobile Meteor just launched a new app (it works with an existing Twitter account) that optimizes food truck websites for smartphones, so they can reach new customers who may not use Twitter as regularly. A Google map feature with their exact location will automatically appear on the mobile site. With half of all Americans expected to own smartphones by the end of 2011, it will be interesting to see how many trucks go this “route”.

•    Huge corporations see the value of reaching consumers through food trucks — Virgin America worked with Loopt and rebranded two taco trucks in California with specials to market the airline’s new flights to Mexico.

•    Food trucks are joining forces on tracker sites, like Food Truck Fiesta (DC) and Mobile Cravings (which covers about 30 cities), making it simple for fans to get a quick glimpse at the daily food truck scene.

Offline:
•    Trucks are hosting unique events, often with partners, to expand their fan base and build loyalty. Seattle’s Skillet, doesn’t just care about your lunch. They care if you have a hot date, or at least something to do on Valentine’s Day. They’re teaming up with two other local vendors to host a street food style v-day. Unrelated – they sell bacon jam.  Just thought you should know.

•    Rather than let the Twitter-challenged resort to fast food chains, Holton Farms (a farmer’s market on wheels) has a 1-800 number, which provides info on the truck’s location when it’s on the move. So, going “old school” to reach people outside of social networks (lots of offices block them!) isn’t a bad thing.

•    Food trucks are using social media for social good, by getting behind local charities that their followers care about. DC’s TaKorean truck donates 1% of gross sales to local environmental and youth based non-profit organizations – and they write about it on their community giving blog. So, the more tacos I eat, the more I can help people? Done and done.

Although social media is the driving force behind sales — it’s important to work with a mix of online and offline mediums to grow, reach a diverse audience, and continue to build business.

Would you use an app to track your favorite food trucks, or stick with Twitter?

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10 Marketing Strategies You Can Implement Today

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If you run an online business, blog or website you know you need to be marketing. Maybe you aren’t sure where to start. These ten tips are things you can start implementing right away to grow your business and start getting the word out about your product or service. These tips should be used over and over to continually grow awareness of your blog/product or service. Use them weekly, but they are easy enough that you can start using them today.

1. Interact on related blogs & forums. Simply find blogs and forums that are in the same niche or category as your site and start interacting with people. You can leave comments, offer helpful advice and suggestions or just get to know people.

2. Write and distribute to article directories. Writing an informative article is something you can do today. There are many article directories that will allow you to post your article for free. Not only is this a way to give readers pertinent information but you also get a backlink in your bio or resource box.

3. Guest blog. You may not get a guest blogging spot today, but you can write the blog post and start contacting blog owners to see if they are interested.

4. Create a compelling email signature. You need to do this in your autoresponder signature as well as your personal email signature.

5. Create videos and put on Youtube. Videos are getting more popular every day. You can create several short videos, upload them to Youtube and then share the links with your readers, in your email signature, on Twitter and Facebook. Don’t like seeing yourself on screen? That’s not a problem, you can create Power Point Presentations for the visual and then read from a script so all that’s “seen” of you is your voice.

6. Write a review. You can write reviews on products you’ve tried, ebooks you’ve read, webinars, videos, books you’ve read, affiliate programs. The list is endless on things you can review to help your readers and give you exposure.

7. Tweet to your followers. You don’t have to get on Twitter every single day and bombard your followers with tweets, but you can use Twitter as a strategic source to build your following, set up your personal brand and reach out to others looking for your information.

8. Share your stuff on Facebook. You can set your blogs to post on Facebook through Networked Blogs, you can set up plugins that allow you and others to share your blog posts on social networks. Utitilize these tools for yourself too. Your readers aren’t the only ones who can use them–you can too.

9. Email your list. This one is pretty self explanatory, you can email your list once or twice a week with updates, promotions and other stuff. If you don’t have a list, start a list building campaign and start sending people to your opt-in page.

10. Create a free report. You can write up a report to give away that contains relevant information to your website, product or service. Brand it with your website address in the footer so people know where to go to find more information.

These are all pretty simple methods you can start doing immediately to grow traffic to your blog or website. Do you have any simple solutions not mentioned here that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

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5 Steps to Captivating Readers with Your Secret Message

Every time you publish a blog post or send a message to your email marketing list, your readers learn from you.

But they may be learning something entirely different from what you think.

Your headline might say “10 Tips for Amazing Azaleas” or “How to Change a Tire in 7 Minutes.” And your readers will get some information on that topic from your post.

But readers get more than they bargained for every time they read your content — they’re unconsciously getting an underlying secret message in addition to the more obvious how-to tips.

Each bit of content you write gives your readers a message about who you are.

It’s a hidden message … your headline isn’t “Here’s What I Want You to Know About Me.”

(At least I hope it isn’t.)

But every message in your content marketing is an opportunity to tell readers what you’re about — to convey your personality, your passions, your expertise, and your attitude.

More important, it communicates how all of those things are going to benefit your readers and customers.

Connecting with readers and helping them get to know and trust you is the primary reason for content marketing. You’re hoping when people read your work, they will want to take an action that brings them closer to you — to buy your products or services, subscribe to your blog, tell all their friends about you, or maybe want to collaborate with you.

That’s your secret message. It’s the undertone that permeates everything you write.

If you’re not aware of your tone, you may be sending unintended messages to your readers. Fortunately, it’s not hard to analyze and adjust your tone until it gives off the vibe you want.

Tone problems

Here are a few common tone problems I’ve found on various blogs:

• Schizophrenic — You’re mad as hell in one blog post, then try to be a rational authority in the next, and crack jokes in the following post. Your tone is all over the place. Result: Readers are confused and not sure which one is the real you. They’re not coming back for more.
• Annoyingly formal — You sign your blog posts with your full name (including middle initial), company name, street address, and phone number, like you’re addressing a letter to the IRS. You use words such as “moreover” or “therefore.” Your sentences are five lines long. You’re blogging, but your head seems planted in 1897.
• Speaking in tongues — Every third word you use is industry jargon or an abbreviation, which you never explain. Unless I’m your exact same flavor of tech dork, I’m not reading you.
• Too cute — You’re using five exclamation points at the end of every sentence, and lots of all-caps and bolding. This makes your blog look like a note you passed to your best friend in high school. You could be an expert in nuclear physics, but with this tone, no one is going to take you seriously.

Tonal mistakes drive away the readers you’re trying to reach. Setting a consistent tone that invites readers in — because it fits both your personality and your blog topic — helps build your audience.

Here are two strategies for decoding and changing your secret message:

Decoder ring for your current tone

The first step to crafting your ideal undertone is to map what your tone is now. To do this, take several of your recent blog posts and extract all the adjectives and descriptive nouns from them. Look at them as a group. These words go a long way toward setting your tone.

Applying this exercise to my own recent blogs, I get a string of words like intuitive, strong, start, great, fearless, raves, “no biggie,” terrific.

Together, these help create the tone I want — empowering and positive about moving up to better-paying writing. My word choice keeps the tone informal and accessible.

If you have a list that repeatedly turns up words like: moron, freaking, weirdo, asinine … you’ve got a pretty rude, snarky tone going on. Maybe snarky works for you and that’s how you want to be known. But if it isn’t, you’ll want to change it.

By the way, if during this exercise you spot a lot of words like: somewhat, not sure, possibly, maybe, and kind of, you’re killing your authority, no matter what tone you’re trying for. Your unintentional secret message is that you’re a giant wimp. Just strike them out and say what you mean.

Decoder ring for setting your future tone

When I work with small-business clients on their blogs, we always do a short exercise before I write any posts. I ask them to describe, in five adjectives, the message they want readers to get about their company.

Maybe your company is smart, personable, efficient, collaborative, and customer-focused. (I could see web improvement expert Sherice Jacob using these terms.)

Maybe it’s irreverent, industry-leading, groundbreaking, innovative, and snarky. (This sounds more like Outspoken Media.)

Or maybe you’re goofy, funny, results-oriented, challenging, and passionate. (Sounds like Johnny B. Truant to me.)

If you can boil your essence down to five words, you can use them as a quick guideline when you’re writing blog posts.

It has an added bonus too: if you have a team blogging at your company or organization, it can help the blog maintain a consistent tone among multiple authors.

It’s usually a fairly easy exercise to do. You know, in your gut, who you want to be on your blog. Or you know your market’s core values. In my experience, it doesn’t usually take more than five or ten minutes to nail down the words that best describe the impression you want to make.

Once you’ve set your compass for the tone you want, implement it in all future blog posts.

Make a habit of reading each post one last time, just for the tone. Adjust any off-kilter words that express personality traits at odds with your five defining words.

Grabbing readers with an edgy tone

There’s nothing wrong with getting audacious, silly, or sexy with your tone — if it’s who you are, it draws readers, and helps your blog accomplish its goals. Actually, pushing the tonal envelope can be a great way to set yourself apart in the blogosphere.

For instance, over on the funny, frank site Toy With Me (their tag line is “nothing risqué, nothing gained”), the bloggers write just like they’re talking to their best girlfriends on the phone. Toy With Me’s sexually explicit, ultra-casual, confessional tone would be the death of many blogs, but for that blog, it’s a perfect fit.

This tone works for them because the site is all about sex toys (which they promote) and sexuality in general. There’s more to the tone, but I’m keeping it G-rated here.

Contrast this with the attitude over at the blog for the popular email marketing firm MailChimp. This company takes its tone from their chimp mascot, putting out messages that they’re frisky, easygoing, fun, friendly, and fast-moving. They’ve positioned the company as a small-business alternative to the industry leaders, so they say things like “Whew!” or discuss their new app, which they’ve named “Chimpadeedoo.”

For a small business that might be intimidated by a bigger, more “professional”-seeming email provider, MailChimp is sending signals with their word choices that they’re a friendlier sort of place. But their tone may also put off the corporate client looking for what they see as a “serious” provider.

Working with a creative or edgy tone can be a tricky tightrope to walk. It’s easy to fall off that tightrope into off-putting crudeness or embarrassing goofiness. Make sure your tone works for the specific customer you’re working to attract.

How about you?

What five words sum up your blog’s secret message? Leave a comment describing the tone you’re going for on your blog. Be sure to include a link to your blog in that field for “Website,” so your fellow commenters can see if your self-description matches what we think your secret message is.

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Direct Response Marketing – Ways to Crush Your Competition

Every once in a while I will meet someone who is very smart about the industry in one area, but not taking a full advantage of what they have available to them. One of these instances was when I met with Rich Gorman at DK’s ThinkTank last year. Rich is a really smart guy, and he’s making some serious money online. Rich is already fully dedicated to his work at Health Converter, but once I told him about the power and benefits of blogging, he just had to get started. A few months later and Rich is up and running with his own flashy and content loaded blog at DirectResponse.net.

Direct Response Blog – Must Read Content

Rich’s blog is off to a great start. What’s going to be exciting for Rich, is that he most likely has hundreds if not thousands of awesome topics to write about, and since he just started, his blog will be full of killer content for a while. Here are some of my favorite and most useful posts since DirectResponse.net went live.

• Building A Million Dollar Offer – For Less Than 2k

This post might seem like generic information, but once you actually put everything in place and realize how crucial it is to your success and business, you will appreciate the value in this post.

• How To Improve Conversion Rates By 2,100%

An excellent post that walks through various ad copies and landing pages. The easier and more direct you make your ad campaigns and landing pages for your customers, the more money you will make.

• How Experts Get Paid For Their Time

This one is a personal favorite, and perfect for anyone that has ever has someone come up to them and say, “I’d love to sit down with you at the show and pick your brain sometime.”. Believe it or not… we really do value our time!

What Can Direct Response Marketing do for You?

Having a blog is all about getting your name out there and building contacts. Rich is now putting his name out there and wants to help others succeed, and build a super networking group around himself and his blog. Whether it means partnering on a new project, or simply hiring Rich for his wealth of knowledge and consulting, I’m sure you will be happy with the results. Just from sitting down with Rich at ThinkTank, I still think back at some of the crazy ideas, insane numbers and potential projects we discussed over breakfast.

Be sure to check out DirectResponse.net and add it to your blog reading arsenal.

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Interview: Corey Bornmann

Corey Bornmann comes to Internet Marketing from a strong programming background. Born an Entrepreneur, he loves to watch anybody selling anything to anyone. Corey is the founder of AffPortal.com, an ever growing Internet Marketing toolkit that is born of tools he developed to build his own profitable campaigns. Corey also has a 1/2 stake in PPVPlaybook.com, an internet marketing forum that teaches PPV, PPC, SEO and general shop talk having to do with making money online.

Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been working in this industry?
I am originally from Doylestown Pa and now live in central Pennsylvania with my awesome wife and super good daughters. I just turned 40 years old this fall, gulp, and have been in Internet Marketing for over 4 years now.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
I am proud of three major accomplishments so far in marketing. 1. That I had made enough in affiliate commissions two years ago to allow my wife to quit her job and stay at home full time with our youngest daughter and run our home.

Second is that I kept working hard to build an income stream that allowed me to quit consulting and work from home full time.

Third is how AffPortal has grown to be a multi national presence in Internet Marketing with long term members from all over the world. When we combined with PPVPlaybook.com last year it completed us to be more than just tools but a killer community as well. I'm very proud to be part of the AffPortal.com / PPVPlaybook.com community.

How did you come to learn about this industry? Why did you choose this career? When did you first realize the full potential in affiliate marketing? When did you first “hit the big time?”
I first learned of making money online when I purchased a book at Borders about Adsense and started down that rabbit hole. Once I gained a little traction I found my account had been closed and I was back to square one. That was the best piece of bad news I had ever received.

It was then that I really dug in and discovered the old forum at Click Consultants. Ironically Jon, you were in the same group as I was if you remember.

I realized the potential in affiliate marketing when one of my first sites started to gain some traction in the email submit realm and dishing out free baby stuff. I hit my first $30 on Superbowl Sunday night and from then I knew I could scale this to MUCH larger heights.

It was that next monday that I wrote my first tool, a keyword permutator, to help build a massive list of city relative keywords. That was the beginning of AffPortal but I didn't know it at the time.

I had initially chosen Affiliate Marketing as a second income and eventually realized with enough work I could build this into a full time income.

I "hit the big time" with a killer funnel I built for the netflix offer using PPV as a paid traffic source. The income from that far surpassed what my wife was making and it allowed her to quit her job and come home for good.

What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
It takes a never say die attitude to become a successful affiliate along with realistic expectations. It's not easy, won't always work, will be challenging, will keep you from sleeping your full 8 hrs and will test your creativity. But most of all it takes a Village. Seriously, if you're an island in IM, you won't reach your potential because by talking things out with others in the industry you get insights and new ideas you may not have.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
My biggest failures in IM has been that heart breaker of a niche, dating. I have promoted about every offer and only found one that made a profit for me. THEN, that one, mature dating, switched up their lander and never converted the same for me because I was direct linking and the automation on their new lander wouldn't get approved by my traffic source. Geeze that's a frustrating one. I'm gonna get that niche eventually though, you'll see…

What is the single toughest problem you've had to face, and how did you get through it?
The single toughest problem I had to face has been when I was working full time consulting and learning Internet Marketing in the evenings and super early mornings. Up at 4am for 3 hrs of IM work then off to work at 8. Pick up the kids, make dinner, wife comes home, have dinner with the family then down to my office from 7:30 PM until at least 12 midnight or later.

I averaged about 4 hours of sleep every week day for about 2 years and the only way I got through it was with the encouragement of my wife and friends online that were doing the same darn thing… clawing forward and burning the midnight oil.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I'm not crazy about writing content. I don't like to write about things that don't interest me like recently, Wedding Favors. So I have a girl in the Philippines that I outsource content writing to. She has been with me full time for a month and it's working out better than I ever could have imagined. It was hard to find someone I trust and that could deliver content that I didn't need to edit but the search was worth it.

What is the future of marketing?
Internet marketing is never going away. It grows every year and I'm looking forward to the day that we can build campaigns for automobiles. Now that would be a fattie commission.

If it’s possible for you to share, are there any particular niches that you currently favor? Or that you aren’t necessarily in right now but that you would recommend?
I favor niches that I see that are popular around me. I watch what my kids like, what my neighbors and friends are up to and what I see on TV. This Christmas I got into promoting popular stuffed toys because my daughters like them and there was a good search volume online for this particular toy.

I really recommend evergreen niches and to stay away from fad products if you are looking for sustainability. If you can bring traffic fast and furious for any keywords, then get into fad products but I like long term assets b/c we spend quit a bit of time on our campaigns here.

What niche has worked best for you?
My favorite niche to date has been Netflix. The checks coming in from that campaign and the dollars being spent on PPV traffic was big. I have yet to find one like that again.

Which methods of promotion do you favor?
I like a healthy balance of diversification. For affiliate products currently I am splitting my time 50/50 between SEO niche blogs and PPV traffic. However my partner and I are developing our own front end adware and private PPV network using a very interesting open source (not free) script that we are helping to expand on.

How have you made those promotion methods successful?
SEO is new to me and I love a challenge so have tried just about everything out there and let me tell you there's a lot of crap advice and techniques. So with SEO I have a back to basics approach of solid upfront research and strive for exact match domains (but not always possible). I rely HEAVILY on my google suggested keywords scraper inside of AffPortal to find kw phrases that translate into available domains in the .com, .org and .net range.

Next with SEO is consistant content creation and for back linking I employ a strategy that we discuss in length inside of PPVPlaybook lead by a long time SEO expert that goes by DanTheMan.

What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
It's no secret that I love making and selling things online to anyone and I also use PLR a lot of the time as a foundation for those products. So what I'm doing is building a searchable PLR library of all my PLR material at www.PrivateLabelRights.cc. I'm still adding content every day and it's open for foundation members for less than $10/month but it's a ways from where it will be. This is a long term project.

The key with PLR is to group several products together so you can pick and choose pieces of each to use, rewrite and combine together to make your own product or content. This site, with it's searchability will allow that once the products are all loaded.

What problems have you had with those new projects?
It takes FOREVER to go through mountains of PLR material and sort the crap from the good stuff that's going into my library. Setting up the membership system, DAP, is a little tricky too to make sure the content is locked down enough but still shows enough to get indexed well.

Also I put this on a .cc domain really as a test to see if I could get substantial rankings over time using a .cc domain. So far we have luke warm results but it's still a new site.

Do you think anything particular in your past prepared you for this industry? Your education? Jobs you’ve held before?
I know being a programmer has helped me BIG time to prepare me for this career choice. Not only for myself but for my partnership with David Ford at PPVPlaybook.com as well. We compliment each other like yin and yang. I'm a stronger tech guy and he's a stronger marketer and together we are a solid one, two punch.

What are your greatest strengths?
I am not afraid to fail. This enables me to try things that some people may not try for fear they will fail. I am also naturally technical minded so the more technical aspects of this industry do not intimidate me. I see a lot of opportunity in the tech aspects of IM.

What are your greatest weaknesses?
I have general anxiety disorder so sometimes even though things are solid business wise, I find myself worrying about the future and if this or that falls apart, what will I do. This is where I try to rely on my faith.

What motivates you?
I am naturally an entrepreneur from a very early age. I used to dig through dumpsters to gather out wine bottles that my brother and mom and I would decorate and sell back to the residents at our complex when I was in 3rd grade. I made candles to sell every Christmas and I LOVE infomercials.

On top of that, my family motivates me. I want my wife to be able to spend her days with our youngest while she is still young.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle"…. yea Ryan!

Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
My partner David Ford. He's always there to bounce ideas off of and is not afraid to tell me if an idea is good or bad. He's also not afraid to tell me when I spout off a little too hard in our forum. We're in the same phase of life, live on different ends of North America, partners to the end and have yet to shake hands in person.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
I can work with pretty much anybody that is genuine. I have worked with a few guru's and some are impressive and I consider friends, and some others, well… they are matchstick men.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
My long term goals include a solid portfolio of aged niche blogs selling physical products on auto pilot using only SEO traffic that provides for all my family expenses.

I want to write a SEO Scheduler program to track an SEO project from conception to managed maintenance and all points in between.

I am building a private PPV network for myself and my partner to test out which could develop into a much larger network for PPVPlaybook down the line.

If money were no object I'd be making niche blogs and snowboarding to keep in shape at least 3 times a week.

Where do you want to be ten years from now?
I would like to be back to working 40 hours a week and get in some of those snowboarding days back into my life. Living possibly in Sedona AZ with a large portfolio of my own products and seo niche blogs.

How do you like to spend your free time? What doe work-life balance mean to you?
Now my free time goes to my family. My daughter Araella is 13 now and I am trying to steer her into her teen years as smoothly as possible. My youngest Greta is 5 and I'm savoring every little girl thing she does while I'm still bigger than life in her eyes. Finally I'm working on building a strong marriage stronger with my lifelong love Carrie.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
I would pursue programming and wait around for the internet to be unleashed from Arpanet.

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
My greatest achievement outside of work was probably being an all conference center in college playing football for Shippensburg University in PA.

I have an unfulfilled dream of cruising on a power boat for a year all over North America.

What is your favorite quote?
"Look beyond the Battle"

Do you have a Twitter account or Facebook “Like” page?
I can be reached at AffPortal.com, affportal@gmail.com and on skype at "affportal"

Using BlamAds Content Gateways to Convert Site Traffic

When it comes to affiliate networks and competition, BlamAds is doing what it takes to stay ahead of the competition. BlamAds was created by Ryan Eagle, who also founded the very successful affiliate network EWA. (Sidenote: EWA is now accepting applications on their network again!) Through EWA, Ryan and his team have learned how to kill it with affiliate offers and know how to make them work. Using that same concept, BlamAds was created for incentivized marketing and the use of gateway portals. For anyone with a gaming, entertainment or high traffic web site, you need to try this out!

For anyone new to incentivized marketing, it’s simply getting rewarded for signing up to an offer or completing an action. One of the most popular ways to explain this, is through the use of Farmville on Facebook. When playing Farmville, if you want more coins or dollars, you can signup to an affiliate offer. The consumer gets the service they signed up for, plus the bonus of some free virtual currently. The advertiser gets a new customer, and most importantly, you as the content site or affiliate, would receive the commission.

Creating BlamAds Content Gateways & How They Work

I was just inside BlamAds creating a few new content gateway ads for a few of my sites, and a lot of new features have been added. It only took a few minutes to select which campaigns I wanted to display, change around the customized look and throw the tag up onto my site. Here’s a screenshot of my end result.

As you can see, this gateway was created for “gaming” related web site. In the background you can see a preview of what the user would have access to on the web site after completing an offer, in this case. There are currently 15 different themes you can choose from, or you can create your own. You can also select the offers you want to appear, or BlamAds will automatically test and rotate different creatives and only show those that are performing best.

How content gateways work is simple. Instead of simply offering up your web site content for free, you now have the option to offer your site visitors a free survey or offer to complete to view your content. This is much easier to set up than trying to charge for your content, and it will also take your site visitors only a few moments. In reality, a lot of people will probably leave your site once seeing this option, but you will have to test your new revenue numbers and compare them to the value of your site content and visitors.

Other Improvements to BlamAds Content Gateways

• Gateway automatically displays the top offers based on CR% and EPC (Best Update!)
• Setting up Gateway is accomplished in three easy steps, then your on your way. (Very Easy)
• Adjust how the offers appear on the gateway, you decide the order which they appear.
• You can change the title and description of the offers, you have complete control.
• Live search feature, makes looking for offers simpler.
• Cloning Gateway Feature
• Store unlimited templates
• Split test multiple gateways, and track them by sub id
• You can decide how many offers must be completed before gateway releases
• Mobile Gateway, optimized for smart phones.
• Global IP Bypass: The gateway will not appear to IP’s you designate.
• You can customize which countries you want the gateway to appear.

How to Make Money with a Content Gateways

So now that you know about BlamAds new and improved content gateways, how can you make money with it? First you will need a web site, and a reason for people to visit and want to see your content. This is where you can get creative and really make things happen. Celebrity pictures, gaming arcades, free downloads, how to guides… your options are limitless. You also have the option to buy an established site with lots of content and traffic, then adding a gateway to the site and see how it performs. What you want to do is get a lot of cheap traffic to your site and try and convert them on your gateway intro, then replicate the process to build new niche content sites to get more traffic and leads flowing.

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Let a Launch Buddy Help Boost Your Blog

This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!

While I write blog posts, I don’t really refer to myself as a blogger. I’m just someone who likes sharing my experience to those who want to listen (or read), hoping it will help you in some way. My real passion is in sales and marketing, online and offline, and in all honest.y I’d prefer working with a designer to craft a set of optimized landing pages, or spending an entire morning massaging some email copy, than figuring out how to best communicate the result to the world.

I know that it’s a bit of a contradiction, but I write because I like helping people, and more than that, I like helping people I trust and respect. I don’t get paid for these posts; I post under a veil of secrecy so there’s no impact to my personal brand; and, most importantly, I don’t expect anything in return. And as a result of my willingness to help, I discovered something last week:

When it comes to launches, two heads are so much better than one.

Two heads…

A friend of mine—let’s call him Bob—was preparing to launch his first product of the year: an ebook. He’d reached out a couple of times to get my feedback on things like the title, cover, and interior design. A long time ago, I’d offered to help out where I could, to help him build a framework for his product launches. So as the launch loomed, we caught up one evening and went through the plans. We were able to cover a fair bit of ground in a short period, and we didn’t change the entire approach—just tweaked things here and there.

Instead of describing the what, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the why. Why did this collaboration help shape something good into something better?

• I was able to take a first-impression viewpoint of the product and promotional messages.
• I was able to read at the copy as someone who might buy the product, not someone who’s intimately involved in it.
• I was able to add layers from my own experience to the launch, from a foundation that was already strong.
• Collaboration on thoughts and ideas resulted in progressive, actionable outcomes.
• We were able to validate or question each others’ unsubstantiated opinions.
• We were accountable to actually put things into a documented plan.

I hope the launch goes well for Bob, and that in some way, my contributions will help him achieve his goals.

Break the isolation

One thing I’ve learned from being closer to bloggers than ever before is that while you’re a well-connected group, when it comes to launches, product development, and money, a lot of bloggers work in isolation. I’d like to see that change.

To me, launching a product is a critical step in your blogging journey—one that turns all your hard work into your reward. Having a buddy who not only brings objectivity to your approach, brings fresh ideas so something you’ve been probably obsessing over for months (or years)!

It doesn’t need to be a money thing—it’s a favor thing. You help them, they help you.

Finding a launch buddy

Finding your launch buddy is not about finding the most experienced marketer or product launch expert you can. It’s about finding someone you trust, and are happy to open up to.

All your challenges, your strengths, your weaknesses, all your commercial agreements, targets, traffic, audience, your ability to pay expenses—you need to be able to share them all. You also need to find someone who’ll respect that as the product owner, you get the final say, and someone who, when your opinions differ, will let you both move on quickly.

My anti-technology Mum, given the full picture, would be able to help you more than the best product launch expert in the world if you only gave them half the story.

So if you don’t have one already, for your next launch—or perhaps your first—consider adding a launch buddy to your team. Or have you already used a launch buddy to help perfect and finesse a product launch? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

Stay tuned for more posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger.

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