First of all if you don’t have a lead capture mechanism on your site you’re missing out on potential sales and leads.  A lead capture mechanism can be as simple as an opt-in box to your mailing list.

Now for the technique.  Let’s assume you created an opt-in box to get people on your mailing list.  Why would I want to sign up for your mailing list?  Normal reasons are coupons, exclusive discounts, more information, etc…

In addition to that we can also give out a free report or ebook.  I know you don’t want to write an ebook.  I don’t either.  That’s why I’m going to tell you how to create an ebook in 5 – 10 minutes.

First things first.  Fire up Word or any word processing program you might have installed.

Second go to article directories.  There are tons of them, but here are a few to get you started:

Ezine Articles

Go Articles

Article Dashboard

Third:  Search for your topic.  For example you do plumbing in Wall, NJ, so you search for plumbing.

Here are some of the great articles I’ve found:

Plumbing Basics

A Short Guide for Plumbing Emergencies

Plumbing Tips – From Thawing Frozen Pipes to General Pipe Repairs

Plumbing Problems and Solutions

Inexpensive Bathroom Remodeling Secrets

Electric showers: Making your bath economical

Emergency Plumbing Service: How To Choose The Best

Plus there are literally hundreds of other articles.  I found these articles in literally two minutes.

The good thing about these article directories is you can use their articles, all you have to do is leave the author information in.

Fourth: Create a cover page in Word (make sure to include your contact information).

Fifth: Pick your favorite articles and copy and paste them into Word, right after your cover page.

Sixth: Use a PDF converter to convert your document into PDF format.  Here are a few free PDF converters:

PDF 995

Primo PDF

Open Office

Seventh: Relax and take a nap.  You’re done.  You’ve created a good ebook with tips you can give your future clients in literally five minutes.

You don’t have to use this technique to create ebooks and reports, if you get stuck on what to write to your mailing list or are in a rush to get a mailing out you can do the same thing for your mailing list.

You can also use the articles on your sites for fast, keyword rich, free content.

Here’s a little secret your own competitors might use against you and even if they aren’t there’s no reason why you can’t do it against them.

Basically you are opening up your competitor’s source code and using it to help you.

I use FireFox so the instructions are open up FireFox go to View, then Page Source.

For Internet Explorer it’s View, then Source.

The reason we’re opening up their source code is because there are important factors for each page for example the title, description and somewhat the metatags.

Since most of the content you can view on the page;  these are the three things you should be focusing on.  Personally I like looking at metatags and harvesting keywords off of them.  Of course viewing the title and description will also help you form ideas for your own.

The major search engines don’t put a big focus or even any focus on the metatags, but sites that are ranking usually use some or most of the keywords in these tags.  If you copy them and include them in your current SEO strategy it will help you rank for more keywords and for their keywords.

Press releases aren’t as hard to write as you’ve been led to believe.  They all follow a simple formula.  Press releases can drive traffic to your site and free advertising for your business.

Press releases are short so you don’t have to write a whole book.  Generally they are between 250 words and 500 (usually closer to 250).

They are written in the third person.  So you shouldn’t put, “I created this site to be the best.”  It would have to read, “The site was created to be the best.”

Here’s the way a press release is setup:

Headline.  An eye catching headline.

City, State Date -

Introduction paragraph.  Introduce your company, explain what your company does, the reason for the press release.

2nd paragraph.  Include a quote from yourself, an employee or a customer.

3rd paragraph.  You can finish the press release on the third paragraph or include more information about your company.

4th paragraph.  Write a brief summary of everything you’ve mentioned above and include a link back to your site or some contact information.

Every press release need some kind of angle or hook.  If your press release is boring or looks like a straight out advertisement it won’t be picked up by a lot of sites and the legitimate press.

The press release sites all have a place to add your contact information also.  Usually they ask for name, company, title, phone, and email.

Most of the press release sites are similar so you can submit the same press release to several sources.  Every few weeks create a new press release and submit those.  That increases your odds of getting a popular press release out there.

Press releases are easy to create and should take less than an hour to create and submit.

Article writing is an easy way to get targeted traffic to your site.  The only bad thing is you actually have to write the articles or pay someone to do it for you.  There are several article sites with high page rank that will let you submit your article and add your link in the resource box.  With articles you are building authority and looked at as an expert in your topic and you are doing off page optimization (it’s even more powerful if you add anchor text to your hyperlinks).  Another good thing is you can sell your articles if you’re a prolific writer for quick cash.

Article marketing will get your website ranked quickly for a lot of keywords, for the price of an article.  You don’t only have to stick to article directories you can also use social networking sites and build web pages (on sites like blogger, squidoo, wordpress, etc…) based off of your articles and include anchor text links back to your site.  These are authority sites and give you that needed boost to get your sites ranking.

You can use the same article over and over again, but the best way to rank for many keywords is keeping each article unique.  It will maximize the amount of keywords you’ll rank for.

You can also use article marketing if you’re an affiliate for products and link them right to your cloaked affiliate link.  People actually do buy from reading a good article and a related affiliate product with a decent sales page.

A fast way of creating articles for those out there that aren’t good at typing or talk better than they write is using a speech to text converting program.  With a program that does this your article can be written as fast as you talk.  Arguably the best program out there for this is Dragon Naturally Speaking.  You train it to recognize your voice and words and the results get more accurate the more you use it.   Usually a few edits and fixing punctuation and you’re done.

Article marketing is really a way of reiterating that content is king on the internet.  Good content will get you ranked for a lot of the terms you desire.

Everything can’t be free but it sure is nice when it is.  When you want to get new clients/customers you have to hit them from every angle and look for new business in as many places as possible.  Have you ever bought something or visited a business because you saw there ads and things that reminded you of them plastered all over the place?  I know I have.

Here are some low cost techniques that can get you more exposure:

Fliers – You can print these out yourself by the hundreds and pay someone $10 per hour to hand them out for you.  If you go to Manhattan or any major city a lot of times you see people handing out fliers.  There’s a reason why they do this…it works.

You aren’t limited to just handing out fliers in front of your business.  You can have the person walk around handing out fliers.  As annoying as it is they can place them under windshield wipers (check your local laws first).  You can drop stacks off at businesses, post them on bulletin boards, and the list goes on and on.

They are cheap to make and the main thing is giving them out to as many people as you can.

Business cards – Just about everyone has these made already so now you have to give them out.  Give them out to everyone you meet, drop them off at stores, post them on bulletin boards.  You can do almost the same thing with a business card as you can with a flier but a business card is much smaller and doesn’t fit the same amount of information.  A business card is appropriate in a lot of scenarios where you can’t use a flier.

Yard signs – You can get small plastic yard signs very cheap if you buy them in bulk.  Just pay someone to stick them all over the place and you’ll have an advertisement for as long as the sign is up.  In a lot of places as long as it’s public land or you ask permission you can stick your sign up.  These have an advantage over fliers and business cards because each sign can be potentially seen by thousands of people.

T-Shirts – Create a stylish t-shirt with your company information.  Everyone that you give these to will be walking billboards.

Here’s a little tip:  If you don’t know anyone that travels a lot in public, try going to a local bus or train station and handing out your t-shirts.  These are people that are using public transportation and a lot of times they travel all over the place.

If your business targets young people hand out your t-shirts to young people, if your business targets older people hand them out to older people.  Also if you see someone that wears a suit all day, they might not be your best target to give out free t-shirts.  Look for people that normally wear t-shirts.  If your t-shirt is visually appealing people will wear it.

Tell everyone – Simple and free.  Tell everyone about your business.

Tell everyone to tell everyone – Also free.  Ask people to tell their friends and family about your business.  Something as simple as, “I really appreciate your business, if you have any friends or know anyone that would be interested in my services or products, please let them know.  I would appreciate it.”  When you tell someone to do something for you, they realize they are helping and a lot of times will oblige.

Give something away – Give out something that costs you close to nothing to buy.  Word of mouth spreads when there is something free on the table.  A lot of companies have loss leaders; where they give something away or sell something at an incredible discount because they know most customers will buy something else.

Work with other businesses – A lot of businesses compliment each other.  You can create an exclusive discount for customers of another business and have that other business hand them a flier or card with your discount.  Your best bet here is using businesses that compliment yours, not competing businesses.  If the other business wants you to reciprocate, then you do the same for them.  That way you both leverage your clientele and help each other.  It’s like having double the traffic for almost free.

Mailers – You can mail your ads/fliers to potential clients.  If your client is a certain type or age group you can find lists of your target demographic and send them a mailing.  Most successful mailings are multi-part, so one mailing won’t always get you the best results.  Make sure to give a discount or offer a compelling reason to buy from you.

The list can go on and on.  Be creative and spend a couple of bucks to build your business.  Not everyone uses the internet and the one’s that do it’s not guaranteed they’re going to find or look for you.  Sometimes a surprise ad will remind someone they need a service and it can help you find the impulse buyers.

A common problem people have is not reading between the lines and taking things as they literally appear.  If you are creative in your thinking you can actually expand off of every idea you read and the potential for each tiny idea can be extravagant.

On this site I give you ideas on how to improve your business, website, life, and anything else I can brainstorm.  I give you a seed but it’s your creativity that can turn that into a full harvest.  Some of the stuff I write about can be used for good or evil purposes, it’s up to you how you use it, but you have to take advantage either way.

If you see something interesting that you might be able to use try to expand on it, see how you can make it better, even if you think you can’t use it try to expand on it and see if somehow you can make it work.  I’ll give you some examples from past posts I’ve made.  I’ll expand a little more just to give you an idea of how expanding can be used for good or for nefarious purposes .

Here I mentioned the Chilton Library and how it’s great for mechanics.  Now what if you targeted mechanics, auto shops or mechanics could use your services or product?  What if they never knew about this resource or didn’t have access to this or a similar resource?  That’s right you point them in the right direction and maybe the law of reciprocity will kick in and they’ll give you business.

Here I mentioned local directories and yellow page type sites.  If you were into doing evil things you could grab someone else’s listing, change it up and take all of their traffic.

Here I mentioned a loophole for WikiAnswers what if you created a program that automates this and literally post on thousands of questions?  Or instead of just using WikiAnswers now you have an idea that there are tons of other sites that have a similar setup where you can just slap your link in there.

Here I mentioned Yahoo Anwers and how you can use it to get indexed.  Really you can use it to market yourself and your products or services.  I’ve made a lot of money with affiliate products and for my services through Yahoo Answers.  You could also search for an answer and copy and paste the answer right in there so you don’t even have to waste time writing anything out.

Here I mentioned Youtube and video sites.  It’s actually a primer to video marketing.  You can make a lot of money with good videos.  You can even make a lot of money stealing other peoples copyright videos.  It’s up to you how you use the information.

These are just a few examples and you can expand on everything much more.  Let your imagination run wild when you see something new or think you might be able to use something.

Have you found a niche you feel is a good opportunity to make big money?  No nothing about the topic?  No problem as long as you have spare time for research you can become a “expert” in just about anything.

There are several ways to go about this.  First let’s pick a topic.  I’m interested in body weight exercises.  So the first thing I do is go to google’s own keyword tool, and see if there is any traffic for body weight exercises.

I already know it’s a money making niche because you have guys like Matt Furey literally making millions off of this niche alone, you also have the Iron Gym commercials on TV all day.  Plus their are several other programs out there and people are buying them because let’s face it weight loss is a big money maker world wide.

I type in bodyweight workout into google’s keyword tool.

bodyweight exercise keywords

As you can see “bodyweight workout” had about 6300 searches in December.  Not bad, but we’re looking for a bigger crowd right now.

Now what we do is scroll down on the page and we’ll find other suggested keywords/synonyms for our search term.

Bodyweight workout

Now we’re getting somewhere.  Now we’re into the millions of monthly searches.  And google also gave us over 100 choices most of them getting tons of traffic.  What we can do now is save all of the keywords.  From the first list and from the second list.  I save them as .csv for Excel so that I can manipulate the files later and sort them to my needs.

By doing this we’ve done a ton of research already.  In literally 5 seconds.  First we have some keywords we probably want to rank for.  Second we have keywords that can help us search for more information.

Next step find information that can help us.  A quick and easy way of finding anything about just about any topic and for free is to visit forums.  Forums are great they are filled with tutorials, tips, opinions that can help us decide if the information is good or even valid.  Let’s go to google, just the regular site this time.  Type in “body weight exercise” forum.

Body weight exercise google results

There are 9,220 results for the search term.  Remember if you don’t find what you’re looking for you still have a ton of other search terms because of the lists you created from the keyword tool.  And we haven’t even searched calisthenics which are just that, body weight exercises!

Of course taking a quick glance I can see there is some great stuff to be found on this search term in the first 2 pages of results.

I’m not going to get into too much detail, but basically once you’ve found a site/forum that talks about your niche, actually search that particular site. With most forum scripts you can even find the most popular topics by the most posts or view counts.  By doing this you can find exactly what aspects are the “hot” topics for your niche and start to pin-point what you want your article, book, video or whatever it is you’re trying to create.

Another couple of quick research techniques are Wikipedia, which is great if you are looking for definitions and more resources.  Yahoo Answers is good, but you have to sort the spam from the good.  There are several other similar sites out there.

Remember if you’re already visiting the forums and you have specific questions you might even want to ask on the forums you’re using to research your topic.  I’ve seen countless “gurus” and wannabe “gurus” find a hot topic on a forum, re-word what was discussed in the “hot topic” and then sell it right back to the same forum members or at the very least use that forum as a launching pad for their product.

Remember you don’t need to get fancy.  We used a free keyword research tool to get the results we wanted and got all of our information for free.  You don’t need to buy the $200 software program to do your research, you can get more accurate results by querying the search engines themselves.

Good luck with your research.  See you tomorrow.

in your niche.

By using forums and blogs you can easily become an authority in your niche or whatever business it is you are into.  If you are an attorney for example and you’re just starting out a free and easy way to get your name out there is by posting on forums and blogs.  You can use your real name as your username or you can just make up a username.  I’d suggest just using your real name since when it comes to being a lawyer having your name out there is very important.

Giving out free information is very important because nowadays people search for people by name and the easiest way is just typing your name into the search engines.  If they see your name all over the place helping out, you’ll instantly be recognized as someone who knows what they are talking about and you will become respected amongst your peers.

There are some do’s and don’t’s though.

Do’s:

Do be courteous to everyone if you’re trying to build a name for yourself.

Do help out when you can.

Do make sure you have a signature in the forum or blog that links back to your site, in case someone wants to contact you for more information.

Do make intelligent posts.

Do check the rules of the site you are posting at and make sure to follow and respect the rules.

Don’t’s:

Don’t spam.

Don’t be an asshole to other members, unless that’s part of your persona.

Don’t post direct links to your site or affiliate sites unless it’s allowed in the rules.  Usually you’re allowed to post your site links in your signature.

Don’t make useless posts.  You’ll just look like an idiot.  If you have nothing good or constructive to add to a post, don’t bother posting.

Every forum/blog has different rules so stick by them and play it safe.  I have thousands of posts amongst many sites and I’ve only been banned a handful of times (usually for spamming, but it was done on purpose to get backlinks or people to buy my product).  I go by many usernames and I’m a member of exclusive sections on a few of the major forums I go to because I’ve always helped out when I could.

Forum posting is probably one of the easiest and best ways to earn yourself a good long term reputation.  It can work for any business.  Just find a forum in your field/niche and start posting what you know.  Solid, free information always gets people to recognize you.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a lawyer based in Toms River, NJ or an antique dealer in Lakewood, NJ, if you provide good information people will look for you when they are ready to spend money.  For the lawyer part of course due to licensing you might not be able to practice outside of New Jersey, but you might be able to do some consulting on the side or be able to provide referrals ($$$) to other lawyers that are familiar with the law in the potential clients area.  The antique dealer can ship out pieces or have the client come to their shop.  If someone trusts you and views you as an authority they will come to you or work out an arrangement where you can provide your services or goods to them.