Written on August 23rd, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 09:08 am by Darren Rowse

Amazon aStore in iFrames

Affiliate Programs 22 comments

Two of the main critiques of Amazon’s new aStore (the new beta test from Amazon that allows you to make your own Amazon store) that I’m hearing from publishers are:

• It’s hosted on Amazon’s domain which doesn’t look that integrated with your site
• There’s no link back to your site from the store

One of the more creative ways I’ve seen the aStore used in the last two days (and I’ve seen a few of them) is by John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing who has added a store to his site using iframes. This enables him to put the store on his own domain (see his aStore here) and also to put his own header and footer around the store with whatever links he wants back to his own site.

I haven’t seen anything on Amazon’s site saying that this is against their terms of service but it could be worth checking if you’re going to give it a go.

found via a comment in a previous post by 5 Star Affiliate Programs

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Written on August 22nd, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 11:08 pm by Darren Rowse

Creating Interest in Your Posts - Persuasive Blogging Part II

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 10 comments

Have you ever picked up a novel in a bookstore that just jumped out at you from the display and screamed ‘read me’. Perhaps it was the title that got your attention, perhaps it was the design of the front cover, or perhaps it was a recommendation that some newspaper reviewer had written saying how amazing a book it was.

Whatever the reason - you buy the book and take it home with anticipation of a great read - dreaming of taking the phone off the hook and curling up in bed with the book when you get home and spending the rest of the day there.

You open the front cover and eagerly begin to read…. expecting to be swept away to some wonderful fictional place…. only to discover that despite it’s wonderful title, great cover design and excellent recommendations from ‘experts’ that the author barely knows how to string two words together and that the book fails to interest you at all. It’s not long before you put the book down - never to pick it up again.

Read the Introduction to this mini-series on persuasive blogging.

Getting Attention for your posts is a relatively easy part of being a persuasive blogger but in order to truly persuade your readers you need to go deeper and pique the interest of your reader.

Being an ‘Attention Grabbing Blogger’ is great if you’re interested in simply building up lots of hits to your blog - but visits by people who come and leave again in the blink of an eye is not what most of us are on about.

Without interest in what you’re writing your readers are unlikely to read beyond the attention grabbing title and first paragraph of your post and you have no chance of getting them to take any sort of action what so ever.

Generating interest is the task of convincing your reader that they should ‘read on’ because what you’re writing about is on a topic in which they have some sort of need that you might be able to help them with.

The interest that they have might take different forms or emerge for different reasons:

• it could be a personal/hobby type interest
• it could be an interest out of a work related need
• it could be an interest out of some research that they’re doing
• it could even be an interest coming out of a need for fun/entertainment that they have - etc

Whatever the motivation for or type of interest - you’re unlikely to convince someone to read beyond a few paragraphs unless your reader feels some need to read on.

How to Pique Your Readers Interest:

Following are a number of ways that you can pique the interest of your readers:

State the Benefits

In the early moments of reading a post your reader has not really invested much into the exercise of reading your work and are likely to have an air of indifference to them and whether they should read on or not. One of the key ways that you can convince them that your post is worth reading is to simply tell them what they’ll get out of it.

This can be done in many ways ranging from incorporating it into the title with a ‘How to….’ type heading through to starting with a short list of things that you’ll cover in the post below through to explicitly saying ‘if you read on you’ll get X Y and Z.

Focus on the Reader

Show the reader that you know what it’s like to be in their shoes. Getting personal in this way and showing you’ve been where they are adds a level of intimacy to your post that can be quite intriguing and make them want to know more about who you are (after-all you’re just like them - or were).

State a Problem or identify a Need

While some people aimlessly surf the web just to see what they can see - many people use the web to research or find answers to specific problems or needs. State the problem or need that you’re going to provide answers for early in your post and you’ll definitely pique the interest of those who have that need. You might do this by sharing a direct question that someone’s asked you, by sharing a problem you have (or used to have) etc.

Dave Taylor does this well in his questions blog - every post he writes starts with an expressed need from a reader (a question). People work out very quickly whether it’s a post that interests them or not.

Tell a Story

Story telling is part of being human. People have done it for centuries and while the mediums have changed for telling stories there’s something in most of us that like to hear them - particularly if they are stories of people like us.

Telling your own story can be particularly useful when trying to persuade someone of something - especially stories of change or discovery. Telling other people’s stories can also be powerful as can telling other ‘random’ ones that illustrate a point.

A word of warning though - don’t just tell a story for the sake of it. Choose them carefully, don’t get too wordy with them and make sure there’s some sort of point to them.

Keep in Mind

Your role as a blogger is not to convince every person to read every post you write. I’ve never found a blogger who has a 100% strike rate for writing interesting posts for my particular needs.

What you want is to find people who do have a direct interest in the topic you’re writing about and convince them to read on. This is why I like Dave Taylor’s question blog. I know the instant he publishes something on his blog whether it’s something that I’ll want to read more on because his titles and first paragraphs are so explicit in what they are about. Rather than trying to get me over to his blog on every post to read his posts he writes in a way that gets targeted readers. Filtering his readers in this way is good both for the reader (they only read what they are interested in) but also the blogger (he gets targeted readers on the topics he writes about).

Tomorrow I’ll continue this series on persuasive blogging by talking about moving your readers from Interest to Conviction.

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Written on August 22nd, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 02:08 am by Darren Rowse

Attention Grabbing Blogging - Persuasive Blogging Part I

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 28 comments

Getting eyeballs on your post is the first crucial step in it being persuasive.

Read the Introduction to this mini-series on persuasive blogging.

In order to persuade your reader to take a certain action you need to find a way to get their attention - otherwise they’ll never read your content and find out what you’re attempting to convince them of.

One of the sad facts of blogging is that there are many great writers producing quality posts that just don’t get on the radar. I personally think that this sucks and have been trying to unearth some of it lately - but in doing so have found myself wondering if some bloggers could help their case a little by making a few tweaks to their posts that help to get noticed more.

The reality is that with 50 million blogs in existence and hundreds of thousands of posts being written every day that you need to be intentional about getting your post noticed.

When it comes to writing a blog post there are a number of things you can do to get attention of potential readers:

• Use Titles - the most powerful element of a blog post for getting attention is it’s title. Post titles gain attention for a number of reasons. I won’t go into great detail on why or how to use titles because I’ve covered it extensively on several other occasions but would strongly recommend putting considerable thought into this element of every blog post you publish as it can be the difference between a wildly popular post and a largely unread one.
• Be Controversial - a commonly used technique in blogging for getting on the radar is the controversial post (or the continued use of them). Pick the right fight with the right person or issue and you can find yourself getting noticed by many readers. Of course being controversial is successfully is a real art form and it has a habit of backfiring - being controversial for the sake of it and not being able to back it up can leave you in a worse position than you were in when you started - so be careful with who and/or what you target.
• Make a Bold Claim - there’s nothing like a bold claim to get people’s attention. Of course, like with being controversial, it’s an art form. Big claims that can be backed up are good to make - but big claims that are empty promises could do more harm than good.
• Use Humor - make someone smile and you’re on the way to making an impression. Get them giggling and they’re almost sure to read a little further into your post.
• Ask a Question - I’ve found that one of the most successful ways to get readers to take a second look at your post is to invite them to journey with you by starting out with a question - especially if it’s a question that they’re likely to have themselves. Starting with a question that puts a finger on the need of a reader is bound to make them read on.
• Use a Picture - the web is a very visual medium - as a result when you use an image you’ll often get a second look. Use a visually pleasing image and you’ll be likely to get a third look and use one that is visually pleasing that relates to the topic you’re writing about and you might just get them to read what you have to say (well the first paragraph anyway).

Most (if not all) attention grabbing work needs to happen within the first part of your blog post (in the title or first paragraph). This is key real estate in your post as it is the only part of your post that many people will read and is where the decision is generally made whether someone will read on or not.

Keep in mind that your attention getting efforts need to be consistent with your overall blogging approach. For example using a title that gets attention but has nothing to do with the body of your post will be more annoying to readers than it does good.

Lastly, getting attention is not just about the way in which you write your posts. This mini-series is focussing much more upon the art of writing persuasive blog posts so I won’t talk about other non writing techniques but would suggest a couple of other posts that might help with that here and here.

Read the next post in this series at Creating Interest in Your Posts.

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Written on August 22nd, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 12:08 am by Darren Rowse

Car Salesmen, Preachers and the Art of Persuasion

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 19 comments

Have you ever wanted to be more persuasive in your writing? If so, this is the first post in a series that is designed to help you achieve just that.

Warning - Tangent Ahead

Lessons from a New Car Salesman

A few months back, in the lead up to our little Xavier’s arrival, we decided we needed to upgrade our two door hatchback for a larger ‘family wagon’. Outside of buying our home the year before this was the largest purchase I’d ever made and so I entered it pretty cautiously and wanting to find the best deal. As a result I did a lot of research and visited a lot of car show rooms.

Over a few weeks I met and interacted with quite a few car sales guys and was fascinated by the different approaches that they used in attempting to convince me which car to buy and that I should buy it off them. Their attempts to persuade me to go with them were wide and varied - some did great jobs while others were in the vicinity of appalling.

Of course as I shopped around I couldn’t help but draw what I was observing back to blogging and think about how there were some similarities (and differences of course). While most bloggers are not in the business of selling cars to their readers - most of us are are in attempting to be persuasive in one way or another.

Persuasive Blogging

This goal of persuasion varies a lot in intent from blogger to blogger depending upon their topic - for example:

• political bloggers might attempt to argue cases on that front
• corporate bloggers might attempt to persuade people to give their company a go
• entrepreneurial bloggers might attempt to convince people to buy affiliate products or hire them as consultants
• personal bloggers might attempt to convince readers to see their favorite movie or read a certain book
• religious bloggers might write hoping to convince people to a certain way of living or belief - etc

Sometimes we are very intentional about arguing a case - but sometimes it happens almost subconsciously.

Lessons from a Preacher

I don’t talk a whole lot about my days as a Baptist Minister - but before I was a blogger I’d been working in churches as a youth minister for almost a decade. My weekly rhythm had all kinds of things in it but one of the favorite aspects of what I did was preaching.

I loved working up a sermon in the lead up to giving it. Researching, looking at what others had to say on the topic, piecing together thoughts, looking for illustrations and examples (tangents) and then practicing giving it and making the last minute tweaks and additions in the day before Sunday arrived.

In many ways it was similar to blogging.

No one ever taught me to ‘preach’ as such. I was largely self taught from observing others and having a go myself. The only ‘training’ I really had was a number of sessions with a group who did some teaching on public speaking.

The Five Challenges of Communication

Part of what they taught was what they called the ‘communication wheel’ - a tool that identifies five stages that those people communicated to go through and the corresponding challenges that communicators need to tackle along the way.

I’ve written about this process before (two years ago) but have wanted to retackle it as my previous posts didn’t quite click for me (or my readers by the lack of interaction there was around them).

Over the next five days I’ll tackle the five stages/challenges. While some readers might not feel each of the five challenges are completely relevant for their particular type of blog I hope that in walking through the process we’ll all learn a thing or two about the art of communication and the task of persuading our readers.

I invite your comment and participation over the next five posts.

Read the rest of this Series at:

• Attention grabbing blogging
• Creating Interest in Your Posts
• Moving Readers to ‘Desire’

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Written on August 21st, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 08:08 pm by Darren Rowse

Amazon aStore First Impressions Review

Affiliate Programs 29 comments

Amazon have in the last day released a new beta test for their associates to try out - aStore.

Put most simply - this is a way to add a shop to your blog (similar to Chitika’s shoplinc - the main difference being that Shoplincs are CPC (cost per click - you get paid if someone clicks) and aStores are CPA (cost per action - you get paid if someone buys something) The payment amounts and methods are the same as normal for Amazon associates.

The other difference is that you can host shoplinc’s on your own domain and aStores are on Amazon’s.

Here’s one I quickly set up a few minutes ago as a enternetusers bookstore. It took me three minutes to make (I’ll need to customize it so don’t be too harsh) so it’s obviously a very quick and easy set up. There are options for different templates and customizations as well as the ability to include virtually any product in Amazon’s database.

There’s the ability to add different categories and pages to your blog and a variety of widgets that you can add to make it more your own.

First Impressions

My first impression is that it’s pretty good. Very simple to set up, nice to look at, easy to navigate and not too hard to integrate into the rest of your blog in terms of how it looks.

It’d be great to be able to run it on your own domain name (I haven’t seen any ability to do this mentioned) and to have even more control over the look of your page (as I’m sure once everyone has one that they’ll look a little common.

Also I’d love to be able to have multiple aStores per affiliate account so that those of us with multiple sites could have multiple aStores.

Lastly I’d love to be able to choose products in categories and sub category pages. While you do have some control over this by picking keywords there’s no way of selecting specific products on these pages like you can on your front/featured page. This means you could be seen to be recommending products that you might not want to promote.

I suspect it’s early days for aStore. Hopefully they’ll continue to develop it. It is only in beta so I guess it’s not too bad for a start from Amazon.

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Written on August 21st, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 11:08 am by Darren Rowse

Speedlinking - 21 August 2006

Pro Blogging News 7 comments

• The Get Rich Project writes a post on 5 Ways to Improve Your Affiliate Sales.
• Liz has taken the links from our group writing project and is making a story out of it (definitely in the ‘fun’ box).
• Instabloke writes a post with 10 Reasons Why He Doesn’t Like Your Blog.

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Written on August 21st, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 10:08 am by Darren Rowse

How to Set Up WordPress - Step by Step Video Tutorial

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 16 comments

Rachel’s posted a great video titled Wordpress Quickstart Screencast Tutorial which is well worth looking at if you’re at the start of your WordPress journey. She covers:

1. Installing a free FTP program and connecting to your website
2. Creating a database for Wordpress.
3. Installing Wordpress.
4. Configuring Wordpress settings.
5. Setting up permalinks.
6. Writing and editing a post.
7. Uploading images.
8. Creating a blog roll (list of links).
9. Setting up an about page.
10. Installing a plugin.
11. Setting up a contact page with a contact form.

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Written on August 20th, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 09:08 pm by Darren Rowse

Meez

enternetusers Site News, General 20 comments

A little weekend fun….

What do you think of the likeness?

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Written on August 20th, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 06:08 am by Darren Rowse

Even the ‘Big Boys’ Call It Quits At Times

Blog Networks 29 comments

I was just doing my rounds of other digital photography blogs and discovered Weblogs Inc’s offering in the niche has closed up shop (although it hasn’t been moved to their ‘retired’ section of their network list yet).

I have to say I’m not too surprised by the move - from what I’ve seen the blog never really found it’s place in the wider niche and looking at their stats the seven months that the blog has been Active haven’t put it among the most trafficked blogs at WIN (although ironically this month will be their biggest).

It was always a blog that wrote good quality content but that never really stood out as being terribly unique or ground breaking.

The blogger from the blog, Andrew Barrow, reports in comments that it could have been to do with the lack of response in their numerous calls for new bloggers.

I generally advise bloggers to go a little longer than 7 months to see how a blog goes (particularly in terms of Search Enginge rankings which can take 12 months to really settle) - but I guess in the scheme of things at WIN an underperforming blog is more trouble than it’s worth to maintain (sometimes it just comes down to business sense which I can understand having retired some of my own poorly performing blogs).

I wonder also if it’s difficult having a related blog living in the shadow of a blog like Engadget which has such a presence in the tech blog scene.

As usual with their retired blogs WIN are keeping this one live as an archive (and it’s archive will continue to generate some income for as long as it remains online via SE traffic).

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Written on August 19th, surf Active Apparel website earn money app zone.at 03:08 pm by Darren Rowse

How To Achieve Your Goals - Hint #1

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 32 comments

Friend - ‘Darren, I never seem to reach any of my goals.’
Darren - ‘What are your Goals?’
Friend - ‘…ummm….. ‘
Darren - ‘Do you have any goals?’
Friend - ‘Yes - at the start of the year I worked some out’
Darren - ‘So what are your goals?’
Friend - ‘….ummmm…. I don’t remember them exactly - there was one about making more money…. I think there was another one about going on a trip overseas….’
Darren - ‘Did you keep a record of your goals anywhere?’
Friend - ‘No - I thought I’d remember them.’
Darren - ‘Did you remember them?’
Friend - ‘Sort of…. Not really….’
Darren - ‘Do you think that remembering your goals might help you achieve them?’
Friend - ‘Hmmmm…..’

“Only goal setters who are goal writers are truly goal achievers.”

Quote from Darby Checketts’ Leverage: How to Create Your Own “Tipping Points” in Business And in Life (aff) which I’m currently reading (so far it’s making some sense).

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