Last Sunday, I had some time to kill till the English premier league weekend action started. I picked up this book from the book shelf and started skimming it again.

The book is about a young boy in India named Govind, who along with two of his best friends Ish and Omi, opens a cricket shop. The story goes on to explain everything they face in their life: love, politics, religion, success, failure and so on.

If you have free time, read this book (non-affliate link). It is a good story and there are many hidden lessons too.

Talking about hidden lessons, this post is about what 3 mistakes of my life teach you about selling. And no, I won’t give away the story. So you don’t have to worry.

Before I begin, some of what you are going to read might already be known to you. If you have been selling products or services for quite some time, you will find a couple of new points and some known fundamentals. But if you are completely new to selling, you will learn a lot in this post. Keep reading.

Now, let’s take a look at what you could learn about selling from the book. I have listed the key 10 lessons about selling:

1. Sell what people want

In the story, the three young boys open a cricket shop and sell cricket equipments. In India, cricket is the most popular sport. Every kid, as soon as he starts to walk, grabs a cricket bat and starts to play. And in the district these guys lived, there weren’t any good local shop that sold cricketing equipments. So it is very obvious that they decided to sell those.

You can sell your product only if there is a need for it. Before you start putting in hard work to create a product, analyze the market for the needs of people. The product that solves the problems of people will almost always sell well.

So whatever niche you are in, search all the places where people talk about your niche and find the most common problems and needs. Then create a product to solve the problem.

2. Be passionate about what you are selling

The guys in the story were complete cricket addicts, just like millions of other people in India. But they knew more than an average cricket fan. They were so passionate about the game that they would even go for a fight when someone disturbs them during a game on TV (an incident detailed at the start of the story).

In order to sell a lot of products, you need to be passionate about what you are selling. You should know more than your average customer about the topic. If your product teaches how to get a six pack ab in three months, you should know more about the exercises and the effects more than your customers.

When you are selling something, you should expect a lot of questions from your customers. Unless you are passionate about your niche, you will find it difficult to answer your customer’s queries.

You can outsource the work of answering questions, but surely it won’t help you in the long term.

3. Give free information

Out of the three guys, Ish is extremely knowledgeable about cricket and he is also a school level player. Anyone who came to buy equipments got free advice. Ish would teach them how to grip the ball when bowling and what is a perfect stance when you are batting. These kind of advice made everyone in that place, buy from these guys’ shop.

This is another reason why should know more than your average customer. People love free information. It helps you build trust. You start to build a connection with your customers. These are clearly evident when you see top bloggers sell so many copies of their books or ebooks or even membership programs using their blog alone. They get the rewards for offering solid content for free over a long period of time.

4. Do Cross-Selling

Cross-selling is a technique where the seller usually offers something related to a product the buyer is buying or has just bought.

The boys were smart, especially Govind. He always had innovative ideas to improve their business. In fact, the idea of opening a shop was Govind’s. He had everything a good entrepreneur should have. He also knew how to cross-sell.

Cross-selling is totally fine if you do it the right way. If you over do it or do it wrongly, your customers might get frustrated. But it often never happens.

The best thing about cross selling is that it is easier to sell a related product to a customer since they already have interest in the product. At the same time, it also makes them happy because they would have otherwise not found the products you just cross sold to them. How many times have you decided to buy something from Amazon and ended up buying more than what you decided? I have been there many times myself. I decide to buy a book but end up buying one or more related books. And the important this is, I feel happy for buying the extra books as it is very useful to me.

Image Source: discounts by TheTruthAbout…

5. Give deep discounts

Govind knew that if he gave discounts, people would buy more. The parents in the district would buy equipments for their kids whenever there was a discount on products.

You always see in day-to-day life, companies giving discount on their products for short period of time. If you are giving a discount, make sure you do these three things:

# Offer only for a short period of time
# Give a good reason for why you are offering the discount
# Make the offer irresistible

Bloggers do this all the time when they sell their books. You can offer discount for Christmas or for reaching a milestone like 10,000 sales etc.

6. Make use of trends

As I said before, Govind is a really smart guy in the story. He is innovative and can spot a trend. In cricket, when a player performs well, it is obvious that equipments related to that player will sell more.

Likewise in your business, spot the trends. Check out sites like Google Insights to find what is trending and try to make best use of it. Products based on these trends will perform much better than the normal ones.

7. Invest to grow

In the story, a conversation between Govind and his mother (who also runs a small business) goes like this:

‘If I have a good *Diwali season, I will get you a colour TV,’ mom vowed.

‘No need,’ I said. I removed my shoes to get ready for a shower, ‘you need a bigger grinder urgently, the small one is all wobbly’

‘I will buy the TV if only the business makes extra money,’ she said.

‘No. If you make extra money, put it back in the business. Don’t buy useless things. I can always see the match in colour in Ishaan’s house’.

*Diwali is a popular festival in India, also known as festival of lights.

Every month, calculate your profits and fix a certain percentage of it to invest back into business. I know a friend who invests one-third of the profits back into his business.

You can invest money back into business to achieve many things. It can be to improve customer service or outsource work or even buy niche related books to improve your knowledge and stay up-to-date.

8. Be prepared to face failure

Govind, Ish and Omi faced failure a couple of times. They started the business by opening a shop in a temple. Later they rent a shop in a mall. This mall, before they move over, gets destructed by the Gujarat earthquake.

Similarly, in your business, you have to be prepared to face failure. It might not be in the form of destruction. It could be no sale for 15 straight days or it could be your site going down just on the launch day. It happens. You have to accept it and live with it.

Image Source: It’s a long time to grow young by nattu

9. Everything Starts Small

The guys start in a small temple and have very few sales every day. They never really made any profit in the first month. But as they kept on working hard, they started to see results.

Everything starts small. You cannot expect a million dollar day in sales if you are just starting. John Reese didn’t achieve the million-dollar-day with his first product. You will make only a few sales at the beginning but don’t worry. As time goes on, you will start making more sales. Surely you’ll have more sales for your second product than the first (as long as it is at least equally good) or you will even see more sales of your first product as you work on your brand.

10. Delegate Work

Govind does a brilliant job in delegating work. He knows the positives of each of the three guys. He knows he is good at marketing and he takes care of all the marketing work. Ish is really good in cricket and has played for his school team. So obviously he is the one who knows a lot about the game and can offer a lot of tips for his customers. Omi is a guy who does the physical work well. They all perform only those works which they are good at.

If you are not good at copywriting, you will be better off hiring a professional copywriter. You could also hire someone to do the design work for the product. Delegating work gives you more free time to do what you are good at and also results in a better end product.

3 mistakes of my life is a really good book and it has many other hidden lessons. As I said before, if you have time, try to find a copy of this book and give it a read. Chetan Bhagat explains a lot about India and the story is also quite good.

These 10 lessons about selling are important for success. Do you agree with these? Do you have any other fundamental selling tip that you feel to be very important for success as a seller? Please share your views in the comments. And also let me know if you have any questions.

What matters the most in twitter when it comes to followers? Quality or quantity?

This question has been there for quite a long time. If you are a normal blogger like me who follows the School of Quality where bloggers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan etc preach that quality of followers is what matters the most, you won’t give a second thought about quantity. I also did not, until I read this thought provoking blog post by Justin Kownacki where he says “Sorry guys, when it comes to your audience, size DOES matter”.

After reading that post and doing a small research, I found that there are actually two types of successful twitter marketing methods people follow (I’ll tell about the third type after explaining these two). Well, I knew it even before but I never knew there were as many people following the second method of twitter marketing (a.k.a Mass following) and doing it “successfully” too. And this is what I call School of Quantity.

Side note: I don’t recommend the second method to anyone. It might get your twitter account suspended.

How do these two “Schools of Twitter Marketing” work?

1. School of Quality or School A:

This is the school which you are probably following now. Best examples of people who preach this method are, as I said above, Gary Vaynerchuk and Chris Brogan. They say quality is more important than quantity.

Here are some qualities of the students/people who belong to this school:

– They follow only those people who they already know or who interest them
- They don’t use twitter auto follow tools (although some people auto follow)
- RT their very close friends and popular marketers
- Occasionally send out links to their blogs
- Don’t post affiliate links
- Interact with a selective bunch of people

These are some of the qualities and I’m sure you can relate to it somewhat. I used to belong to this school.

2. School of Quantity or School B

There are many people who follow this method and some are very successful. As I said, I don’t recommend this method but this method does exist.

I know a lot of internet marketers who use this method. I don’t want to name names here. You might already know some of them. I’m sure at some point of time, people belonging to this school followed you and few days later unfollowed you because you did not follow them back.

Here are the qualities of people belonging to the school of quantity:

– They follow anyone and everyone they find
- Follow people based on keywords
- Use twitter auto follow tools
- Don’t RT that much
- They (most of them) automate the process
- Post lots of affiliate links
- Some people post only links
- Don’t interact much

You can tell a few more qualities but these are the main ones.

Do you belong to this school? If yes, I hope you will read the twitter terms and stay within limits.

Both these methods, as I said before, work while the first method is better one to choose. BUT…

I would like to explain about a third method of twitter marketing, which I would like to call “School of BOTH Quality and Quantity”.

Why do we need a third twitter marketing method?

Justin says in the post I mentioned that when more number of people see your message, the higher your success will be. I totally agree with this.

When you have very less people to notice your message, your amount of success will be limited. By following school A, you focus only on quality and by following school B, you focus only on quantity. But the third school requires you to concentrate on both. You should give equal importance to both quality and quantity.

According to the Dan Zarrella’s hierarchy of contagiousness, you need these three important things to succeed with your message:

1. Exposure
2. Awarness
3. Motivation

Now the above three helps us prove the flaw in both School A and School B.

Defect in Concentrating on Quality Alone (School A)

When you concentrate on quality alone, the number of followers you have is very less. The exposure your message gets is limited.

Now check the hierarchy of contagiousness. The first requirement is exposure. When less people are following you, you don’t get exposure to your message. As a result, your message has very less chance of being successful.

Defect in Concentrating on Quantity Alone:

By concentrating on quantity alone, you are not getting any quality. How does this affect your success?

What is the second requirement in Zarrella’s hierarchy? Awareness

Your followers will pay attention to your tweets only if they know you (or if they are bored). Well, let’s stick to the ‘knowing’ part. Most people are not bored when they tweet.

So how do you make them know you? Answer is: By doing what the third type of people in twitter does and that’s what brings us to the third school of twitter marketing.

3. Qualities of People Belonging to “School of BOTH Quality and Quantity”:

– They follow people who interact with their followers (unlike school A people who follow only those they know)
- Most of them don’t auto follow people
- Track keywords and answer questions people ask based on those keywords
- RT people who post interesting tweets (not just a close group of people)
- Tweet links to their followers’ interesting blog posts
- Interact with all their followers whenever possible
- Post interesting tips to show their expertise in the niche

This type of twitter marketing helps you get more quality followers who will actually listen to what you say and act on it.

Now let us go back to Zarrella’s contagiousness hierarchy and see how our third school of twitter marketing performs.

1. Exposure? Check
2. Awareness? Check
3. Motivation (call-to-actions)? Check. Every successful marketer will know this irrespective of which group they belong to. If not, check out posts on call-to-actions and also read Copyblogger’s post on writing magnetic headlines.

Which school of twitter marketing do you belong to? In my opinion, it is no more a question. If you want to succeed big time, you should try to be in the third school of marketing. Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan and the likes have both quality and quantity even though they preach school A type of twitter marketing.

So, it is not quantity or quality. It is BOTH. Please share your views in the comments.

P.S.: I use to belong to school of quality. But now, I’m working on joining the third school of twitter marketing (a.k.a school of both quality and quantity).

Image Source: Crowd (Colour) by Wayne Large

Without spending thousands of dollars for advertising, you can get free word of mouth marketing if you listen to your customers and care about them.

This post is just one of the many successful examples of social media word of mouth marketing.

Justin Bieber, the 16 year old Canadian singer, flew out on Air New Zealand flight and had a very good experience. Just like how everyone these days are tweeting everything they experience in their life, Justin also tweeted about his flight experience as below:

This is one of the best things Air New Zealand can ask for. The interesting thing is not the tweet but the after effect.

More than 600 people Retweeted (RT) the update (according to twitter search)

If you see the stats from Tweet Reach, they are much more interesting.

The starts are for the latest 50 tweets.

As you can see, the latest 50 tweets alone have reached 14,763 people. Now I wonder how many people the 600+ retweets would have reached. Easily 100,000 I would guess.

And I’m sure many more twitterers (and Bieber fans) will RT the update for a few more days.

Media coverage

Air New Zealand not only enjoyed the benefits from twitter but also from online news. Many of the blogs have written about Justin Bieber’s tweet.

Air New Zealand’s Reply

The CEO of Air New Zealand, Rob Fyfe, thanked Justin Bieber just in time. He sent him the following tweet:

Air New Zealand provided great customer service and they got the reward that they deserved. So if you run a business, concentrate on providing great service and have a social media presence. Justin Bieber might not use your service and tweet about it. But to improve your brand name and recognition, you don’t need Justin Bieber, just a couple of people with 500 followers would be enough.

P.S.: All the businesses and individuals out there, who think twitter is just a waste of time, think again.

Checking your feed reader first thing in the morning is counterproductive.

That’s what most bloggers say. Although there is some truth to it, if you use it the way I’m going to show you now, you will have no worries about productivity. In fact, it will (in most cases) boost your productivity.

Side note: This is NOT the only known productive way of checking blog feeds. This is the method I follow and it works for me. And I’m guessing it will work for you too.

For this guide, I’m going to use Google reader for explaining. But I’m sure you can follow this method on most feed readers. I use Google reader for its simplicity. I have used a feed reader called snarfer before which is also pretty good. Anyway, which feed reader you use doesn’t matter as long as there are options to do what I’m explaining in this post.

When you get up and decide to go through your feeds as soon as you turn on your computer, you cannot spend a lot time on it. Obviously, you have got other higher priority jobs that need to be finished. So it isn’t easy to check your reader first thing in the morning and yet stay productive throughout the day. BUT it can be done and here’s how:

Organize

1. Remove the Clutter

That’s right. If you want to be productive, you have to remove the clutter. Clutter, in your feed reader, indicates the unwanted feeds. They are the ones which you rarely read. Or sometimes never. It occupies extra space. So remove them from your subscription list.

One of the best ways to manage online information overload is by subscribing to less blogs. Take some time and go through all the blogs you have subscribed to. Unsubscribe from blogs you no longer read.

I used to subscribe to many blogs (over 150). But the main problem with subscribing to so many blogs is that you will miss important information in the bulk of not so important ones. Whenever I used to take a holiday and return home, I had 300+ items unread. It is not humanly possible to go through all the feeds quickly and yet not miss any information. That is the reason why you should remove the clutter.

Right now, I’m subscribed to 45 blogs (which is still quite a lot). Most of these blogs publish one blog post every two days. So I never end up with many unread items.

2. Group the Feeds into Folders

Google reader has an option to group the feeds into folders. Snarfer (feed reader) also has that option. This is very useful and many of you have would have probably already done it.

This makes it easy to save your blogs under different labels. It’s just like how you store games, music, books and movies separately. You are simply organizing all the blogs under different labels for easier reading. I group the blogs according to the niche. I have folders named blogging, social media, productivity, copywriting, technology and brand monitoring. Brand monitoring is not blogs but the feed of searches for my name, my blog name etc.

By grouping, you can choose to read the content you want. When I feel down or stressed, I browse through the productivity folder. Depending on your mood, you can read the content you want at that particular time.

Read

Image Source: love read by luis de bethencourt

3. Go through Each Folder

As soon as you open your feed reader, go through each folder separately. Don’t use the “all items” option. You will a hard time understanding the post from their headline. When you go through each folder separately, you can easily find out what the post is about by just reading the headline. This saves you lot of time.

4. Read the Headlines

As you go through each folder, read only the headlines. If you are going to read each post, you will never finish your important works. Read the headline and understand what the post is about.

Once you know what the post is about and if the headline is very enticing, click on the link.

5. Skim

You liked the headline and you have clicked on it. Now it’s time to read/skim. Learn how to skim effectively. Skimming is quite a hard process. At first, you might miss some main points but as you keep doing it, you will get better at it.

There are many tutorials that teach you how to skim. I normally read the bolded parts, opening lines of paragraphs and quotes. If the opening line is interesting, I’ll read the paragraph further.

6. Star

This is the most important part. Once you skim the post and find it useful, “star” the post. Google reader has this option. It works the same way as the star option in gmail. When you click on the star like button to the left of the headline, it will get starred.

This is normally done for future reading. Since you are checking your feed reader first thing in the morning, you will not have time to read it completely. You star it for future reading.

You can find all the posts under the option called “starred items”.

How do all these increase productivity?

I’ll get there in a moment.

7. Brainstorm

At mid day or whenever you have free time, open your feed reader. Do you remember that we have starred the posts that are informative? Go to that list and read the posts.

Now when you are reading these posts, have a notebook and pen to jot down all the important points you come across. These points can be very helpful when you are writing a post. Some points could actually start up a debate and you can write a series of blog posts about it.

Read the posts in other niches also. As Chris Brogan says, you can get ideas for blog posts by reading things that have nothing to do with your niche.

Increase Productivity

As I promised, here are few ways how it increases productivity.

1. Less posts to read

When you organize and star the posts that interest you to read later, you significantly reduce the number of posts you have to go through. By having lesser posts, you can concentrate on each post for a longer time.

2. Early inspiration

You could actually do the skimming and starring part even in the evening instead of first thing in the morning but why do I insist on doing it as soon as you wake up? And how does that increase your productivity?

It gives you inspiration. The posts in the productivity folder will give you the much needed motivation for the day. Skimming a post quickly can provide this inspiration.

Ideas for blog post. You might start a day with some ideas for a blog post to write that day. When you skim through your feed reader in the morning, it will give more ideas on how you can improve your blog post which you are going to write that day. You might even find something relevant to what you are going to write on that particular day.

3. Lesser distractions

Since you have already checked your feeds, you won’t have the urge to check it at the middle of work. How many times have you opened your feed reader when you were working on something very important? I know I have done a couple of times. But when you check feeds as soon as you get up, you are not going to get distracted in between.

This is the way I use Google feed reader and increase my productivity by checking it first thing in the morning.

This might not be for you. But it is surely worth giving a try.

P.S: I don’t recommend checking feeds as soon as you get up if you easily get affected by what you read. Sometimes people read about a new application and they quickly jump over to that instead of completing their work. Follow this method only if you think you have a control over your mind.

The joy of doing what you love and getting paid is second to none. Really. Think about it. Do you love to write about productivity? Have you been following a club from your early age and want to express your opinion? Love designing? Are you skilled in marketing and advertising? The best thing is that you can do these and get paid for it.

That is the job of a freelancer. You get paid to do what you love.

Image Source: i_do_graphics by Brent Nelson

Okay. You have decided to become a freelancer. So the next question that pops into our mind is “How do you get clients?”

I’m giving you three tips that you can act on right now and get a client within a week. That’s a guarantee if you really do what I say and do it well.

1. Guest Post

This is the best method. I don’t understand why people don’t rate guest blogging. It should be on top of their list if they need to get clients.

Of course, there are other uses to guest blogging.

How do you get clients by guest blogging?

Find a blog in your niche. When I say your niche, I mean the one that will suit you the best.

Are you a copywriter? You can write a guest post at Copyblogger.

At the end of the post, in the author byline, promote your service.

“XYZ is a blogger at ABC.Com and a freelance writer. You can see his sample works here. If you are hiring him, say “123 blog referred you” to get 20% off.”

Replace XYZ with your name, ABC.Com with your blog url and “123 blog” with the blog where you are guest posting.

By the way, this is how I got started.

2. Forums

Most people don’t visit forums when they need to find a job. The thing is there are quite a lot of job availabilities advertised in forums but very less takers.

Go to Warrior Forum and you will see thousands of marketers who are in need of a writer or designer. In warrior forum, you pay $20 to post about your service. But trust me, if you promote your service properly, you will get a lot of work. Lot more than you can handle.

The pay that you get for your work might be less but for starters it is a great place. Why not charge a couple of dollars when you are starting out instead of doing work for free to get testimonials?

If you are short of money, then you should read this lengthy post that I wrote about getting freelance work using forums at Freelance Folder. You can read it here.

3. Video Marketing

Video marketing is the next big thing. Or it already is. You have inspiration in the form of Gary Vaynerchuk for video marketing. When a person can build a huge business using video marketing, of course after a lot of hard work, you should be able to get a job using video marketing. Although I haven’t tried this, I know people who have done it successfully. I might give it a try in future.

Create a video explaining about yourself and your service. Post it on every video site. The only negative about this method is that you might get a lot of negative comments. If you are a person who doesn’t mind that (just like me), surely this method is for you.

Tip: Try to add humor. This video might help you with that. (:P)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let me know what you think about these methods in the comments. Once you have done that, take action right now. Any one method will do. Sit down and think which method will suit you the best and go for it.

This blog post is inspired by the post over at Freelance Folder written by Laura Spencer on Five Ways to Start a Freelance Business Right Now. Make sure you read that too. The points in that post are completely different.

If you are blogger, I’m sure you would have come across the word “duplicate content”.

Image Source: Fight Club by Polina Sergeeva

You are either a blogger who is writing informational blog posts or one of the very few who scrapes content from other blogs. There are only those two categories. You can’t be in between.

As long as you belong to number one, you don’t have to worry about Google penalty. Of course, there is another problem for you. You have to worry at the nights about those who scrape your content and make money while you are writing quality original information and still waiting for the huge paychecks to arrive.

You have the choice. You can ignore them and let Google handle them or you can take a step forward and do what you can to get the site down. The choice is yours. There is no wrong in letting Google handle it but there is going to be more and more blogs stealing your content if you don’t take action.

Now let me take you to the world where bloggers steal content. I’m talking about bloggers who are doing it on purpose. I’m not targeting the bloggers who have writers that scrape content without their knowledge. Although I should warn you to do a test for most of your articles at Copyscape soon else you are risking your brand.

Side Note: If you are a Kumbaya blogger, you won’t steal content.

Mighty Google

First we’ll start with why you should not let the giants of the search, Google, handle content thieves.

Though Google say that they will penalize the sites or blogs that has duplicate content within or across domains, you can see many blogs doing it and escaping from the penalty.

There are about thousands of websites that has the same article going.

Ever heard about article directories? That is one of the biggest examples of duplicate content. I’m not blaming the article directory owners or the article marketers who do it the right way. But there are always people who try to game the system.

Pick up an article that is doing very well in a particular article directory and put it at copyscape. What do you find? Duplicate content. Or go to Problogger and copy a headline of one of the posts and search for it in Google. You’ll find all the blogs stealing every single post written at Problogger. Darren Rowse has written about duplicate content before. His blog is very popular and is naturally a target for blog scrapers. I have had my content copied before. Kevin of Blogging Tips has written about content theft a few times before like: Social Rank – The New Breed Of Blog Scraping and Don’t Get Stressed About Blog Scrapers Stealing Your Content.

The worst part is, these scrapers still get their blog posts indexed in search engines and receive traffic. The main reason is there are millions of sites that have duplicate content and Google cannot take action on everyone of them.

So I don’t think Google can do much about duplicate content, at least not till they come with a new idea to stop this.

For the bloggers who work their sweat off to write articles only to find it in some other blog word for word copied using RSS feed of your blog, here is a way to stop RSS feed scrapers from stealing your content. I don’t know of a way to stop copy-paste method using a plugin. Let me know if you have a solution for it. If you don’t like to take action, at least get something out of their work. Install RSS footer plugin and get a backlink from them. This will at least let Google know that your content is the original one (Thanks to Daniel for this tip).

I personally don’t like people who do it and normally advice everyone not to do it. But when Google cannot stop people, I don’t expect the world to change by listening to me.

Now comes the best part…

What YOU And I Can Do About It?

You have every right for your content and you cannot let others use it as their own.

Most people steal content to earn money from AdSense or sell affiliate products. Report to the owner of the product which these scrapers are promoting and get their affiliate link invalid. That way they won’t earn money. If they use AdSense, you can get their account banned by contacting Google. But still your content remains in their blog. Now what you can do is, report to the hosting provider where the blog is hosted. You can find where the blog is hosted using this site – WhoIsHostingThis.

Once you find the host, go and complain to the host. Show them the proof. Most likely they will bring the site down. You can also follow any of these 10 ways to fight back content thieves.

I can’t believe why people are not using social media sites like twitter for this. Seriously, all it takes is one tweet. Everyone is ready to help you if you need it. (Side Note: I like how Jonathan Fields starts his day in twitter every morning saying “Morning, great people. Who can I help today?”)

If you take a moment to get help from your followers to bring down the site, you can pull down the site faster. I’m sure Darren Rowse can get all the sites that steals his content in a single tweet. Think about it. Almost every hosting provider is there in twitter. If someone can tweet something like “@hostprovider This blog at Loser.com is scraping my blog’s content at Rockstar.Com” and many people retweet the message, you can instantly get in touch with the host provider. Sometimes you don’t even need your followers to retweet. Now all you need to do it prove them that you are the real owner of the content.

It only takes a minute to do this. Don’t let others to steal your content.

Have you had your blog content scraped? What did you do about it? Please share your views in the comments.

Thanks to pettre (no link) from Authority Blogger forum for the idea for this post.

If you found this post to be useful, please share it with your friends and tweet it to your followers.

If you have no idea what forum marketing is, let me explain.

Forum marketing is a technique where you post in forums, help people, gain trust and convert those people who you helped into your blog readers.

How do you find forums that are related to your blog?

If you know how to do this, I suggest you to skip this paragraph and start reading the next. For others, go to Google and do a search for “your niche forum” without quotes. If you want clearer explanation, see this post I wrote sometime back on how to find forums in your niche.

Once you are done with finding forums, read this post for the common mistakes people make when posting on forums. To those people who are already using forums, you might be making these mistakes. It is never late to correct your mistakes.

Source: Authority Blogger Forum (one of my favorite forums) owned by Chris Garrett.

Okay. You are set now? Let’s see the mistakes bloggers commonly make.

7.Not Posting Regularly

Confession: I don’t post regularly in forums and I want to change myself when it comes to consistency.

People will forget you if you are not posting regularly. Many people (including me) post to forums like crazy for the first few days after joining. After a week, they completely forget about the forum. Bad marketing.

Building trust doesn’t happen in one day or one week. It takes more than that. I know people in some forums who are regular posters for 3-4 years. These people are trusted by everyone in the forum. If they have a product and they say one word about it, everyone will buy it. That is the power of building trust in forums. You can even sell your service easily once you build trust.

How to fix it: Make a commitment to posting certain number of replies in forums or have a fixed amount of time you want to spend in forums.

6. One Line Posts

One line posts are same as one line comments. You cannot build trust or convey what you want to say in one line. Unless you are thanking someone or congratulating someone for what they have done, you can’t help in one line.

If building trust in one line was possible, people would start using twitter more. If you are representing a company and you are answering a quick question, one line is fine. But most companies would send email detailing their one line answer.

How to fix it: When someone asks a question, elaborate on your answer. You don’t have to write it very big. Elaborate till you feel the other person will understand what you have written.

5. Copy and Paste

Some people create threads by copy and pasting the same message in different forums. Just like you, the people in your niche visit many forums and if they see you creating the same message over and over in all the forums, they’ll start ignoring you. I don’t see why you want to ask the same question in all the forums unless it is not answered.

How to fix it: Always create a thread in only one forum. If it is not answered, start a thread in another forum. Even if you are giving a valuable tip, please don’t copy paste. Make small changes to the post and the headline. Make it look like you have written again.

4. Irrelevant Posts

There is no better way to destroy your personal brand than by writing irrelevant posts. This is not very common but I know some people make this mistake. Why in the world do you talk about a method which pays you a huge one cent for every ad you click in a golfing forum? I understand it is a lot of money. If you are making one cent for every ad click, then you will be living an “internet guru” lifestyle. I can see that you want others also to be rich like you, but please, not in a golfing forum.

How to fix it: Stop posting irrelevant things and start contributing to the quality of the forum.

3. Affiliate Links

This is the most common mistake people make. When you go to forums and have affiliate links in your signature, it will mostly lead to your profile getting banned. Read the TOS of the forum before you start using it. Some forums allow you to use affiliate links in signature but when you have affiliate links in signature, you cannot build trust. If you link to your own product, it is different and there is no wrong in doing it. Only when it comes to affiliate links, the problem starts. See forums as twitter. In twitter, will you post affiliate links? If you do, how many people unfollow you?

You can also imagine a real life situation. You talk to a stranger. He asks you a question and you say buy this product under my referral and it will solve your problems. What are the chances that the stranger will buy the product? Zero possibility unless you are an extremely good sales person. But then if you are a good sales person, you would obviously not need these tips.

How to fix it: Instead of posting affiliate links, send the people to your blog. Give them loads of free information and then sell.

2. PM Spam

You already know what PM spam is and there is 99.98% chance that you are victim of PM spam if you are a member of the digital point forum.

What is PM spam? (for those who don’t know or not a member of DP forum)

PM is short for private messaging. When you register in a forum, you are given an inbox without email ID. Anyone can send you private message in a single click. This makes it easy for people to spam.

When you send me a PM selling your product, you are helping me by filtering yourself out of people who I trust.

How to fix it: If you have a product and you want to promote, contribute quality posts to the forum and have a link to your product (not affiliate) in your signature. This will help you sell your product. Don’t waste your time sending a PM to all the members. No one will buy it. Period.

1. Being Rude

I see arguments in forums very often. Arguments are fine as long as they are within certain limits. If you are rude, I’m not going to click on your signature link and come to your blog. You may think I’m the only one who is not going to visit your blog. But mind you, almost everyone who is reading it will lose the trust they have in you slowly.

Thanks to the forum scripts, most of them don’t allow swear words. If you use them, it won’t get published. But hey, we are people who have been using internet since it came into existence. We know how to bypass everything. So what we do is, we use asteriks. Simple. Let me tell you again, being rude is not good for your personal brand.

How to fix it: Simple. Care for everyone in the forum. When you care, you won’t be rude.

I suggest you to use forum marketing. It not only gets new readers to your blog but also helps you become a better blogger.

Do you make any of the above forum marketing mistakes? I feel guilty of not regularly posting in forums. I have been working on it though. Please share your views and also some other mistakes people make in forums.

First, what is live tweeting? (scroll to the next sub-heading if you know this)

It is tweeting something that is going on live. You normally have a #hashtag for every live event. For example, the Izea event which took place few days back used #Izeafest as hashtag. People use hashtag to make it easy for others to follow the tweets about a particular event.

I love Copyblogger and I’m a big fan of Brian Clark.

Benefits Of Live Tweeting

What? Can you get extra benefits by posting live tweet? Yes, you can.

1. New And Strong Twitter Relationships

Twitter is all about relationship, conversation and did I mention promotion? Now, the last one should be done carefully and within limits. Anyway, you’d be knowing that by now.

Normally you tweet about conferences live. When you do that you will be following other tweets about the conference using the hashtag assigned for that particular event. So you have a chance to find new people and form a good relationship with them.

If you are in the conference, you can talk to them directly. But if you are not in the conference and watching it in a live stream, you cannot do it. What you can do is, tweet those who are tweeting about the conference and talk to them about it first. Second , take the conversation to the next step. Don’t flood your twitter timeline with many @ messages. Send them in DM or chat in skype or whatever you like.

People who attend conferences are often those who are serious about business and willing to invest time and money to improve themselves and take their business to the next level. Forming relationship with these people is the best thing you can do in twitter.

Image Source: Trust by ?o??ƒx™

2. Learn

Every event has some of the industry’s experts in their list of speakers. These experts know what they do and clearly know what works. When they say it out for you in a conference, listen to them and learn. I hear you. You go to conference only to learn and form new relationship. But wait, according to a Edgar Dale:

10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss with others
80% of what we personally experience
95% or what we teach others

So why not hear it in conference, write it down as a tweet, favorite the ones that are really good and read it, discuss with others and teach them? It takes 21 days according to a research to save anything to your subconscious mind. Is it not easy to read the best tips that you have saved in your favorites everyday for 21 days till it gets installed in your subconscious mind?

Image Source: Learning to Walk by Tela Chhe

3. Help Your Followers

There will be many people in your followers list who want to take their blog/business to next level. How about helping your followers with what you learn from the conference?

People might have missed the conference due to some reason. Some would have missed it because they are in a different part of a world. Some of them cannot watch it in livestream because of slow internet connection/dialup. They all have one thing in common? The eagerness to learn.

By tweeting the important points of a event, you are helping your followers. Believe me on this. I have trusted few people in twitter who I follow because they teach me something new. It is a fact. You trust people who help you.

Let me remind you that you can even tweet about live games. I have live tweeted about football (Soccer if you are from USA). You don’t educate your followers in this case but you keep them up-to-date with live scores.

Note: It is better to keep your tweets within limits. Don’t tweet a lot about anything within a short period.

So when you live tweet, you not only learn and move your business forward, you also help your followers. Is there a much better way of using twitter? I’ll let you decide.

Please share your views on live tweeting, be it positive or negative. I’d like to hear your opinion on this. I’ll write a follow up post and include the best comments. You can add me on twitter here- @Ramkarthik.

Many bloggers miss out small touches to their blogs. This may cost a lot. In this post, I have summed up 5 small(and often overlooked) things that can improve your blog a lot:

Image Source: Bright Angel Point by Wolfgang Staudt

1. Adding Subscription Options

When readers comment, they expect a reply from you. Subscribe to Comments is a great WordPress plugin that can add this option below your blog’s comment form. This will increase reader participation. After all, getting a mail saying “A new reply” is much better than making someone check your blog again and again in hope of a reply! (But hey, isn’t it great way to increase Page Views? )

RSS subscription is another things bloggers tend to overlook often. Make sure that you add a RSS Subscription link/image at a visible spot. Some great areas are top of sidebar (like ProBlogger) or Top Right Corner of page (like Daily Blog Tips).

2. Participating In Community

No one likes to comment on a dead blog. If you do not reply to comments and participate in discussions, no one will bother to come and comment. You should try to reply to every comment on your blog. If you do not have time, make sure that you reply to at least all the questions asked in comments section.

Note that this applies specifically to small blogs. Many other factors(traffic, exposure and SEO) come in to play when people comment on bigger blogs like ProBlogger.

Image Source: Happy Our Birthday by Hamed Saber

3. Adding Social Bookmarking Icons

Bookmarking sites like Delicious, Stumble Upon and Digg are a great source of traffic. But hey, you will not get any traffic if you do not give readers the options/tools to share your posts.

You can use Share This Widget below your posts or add custom social bookmarking icons so that it becomes easy for readers to share your content. You should enable Feed Flare in your Feedburner feeds so that RSS readers can also share the posts.

Image Source: 50 Social Media Icons by Ivan Walsh

4. Proofreading Your Posts

No one likes half baked posts that many bloggers churn out! If you want readers to take notice, you should spend some time proofreading your posts. If you use WordPress, After the Deadline plugin is great for spotting spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Note: Remember that no plugin or dictionary can make up for human editing. Spell checker can not catch many small grammatical mistakes(e.g. their in place of there).

5. Including Calls To Action

So, you are doing everything right but not getting results! Not including “Calls To Action” may be the reason.

Even a small call can do wonders. Just try including “If you liked this post, please consider subscribing via RSS” or something similar after your post. You will yourself see results.

If you are using WordPress, here’s how to add a call to action to bottom of all your posts:

Go to Appearance -> Editor. Select “single.php” from the right menu. Look for the following line of code:
<?php the_content() ?>

Enter the desired message(using HTML) after this line. Note that the tag may not be same for every theme. If you can not find it in single.php and need help, just leave a comment here.

Referrer Detector plugin is another good option that you can use for you calls.

These were just 5 small things that can improve your blog a lot. I am sure there are many more. Please share your tips/suggestions in comments.

This is a guest post by Ishan from Blogging With Success. Liked this post? Check out his post How To Sell A Dead Horse For $500.

Richard Saul Wurman said in his book, Information Anxiety, that:

“There has been more information produced in the last 30 years than during the previous 5000″

This applies for the blogosphere too to certain extent. In the blogosphere, lots of information has been written today than a few years ago.

How will you manage online information overload?

Firstly, what is information overload?

According to Alvin Toffler, who coined to the term information overload, it refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information.

Image Source: Information Overload by cambodia4kidsorg

How does this affect you in blogging?

Due to tons of information available online, which is increasing at a rapid rate every day, you have no time to process the information. As a result, you will neither learn a lot nor act on what you have already learned.

In whatever niche you are, there are already hundreds of good blogs if not thousands. To update yourself in your niche, you have to follow all these blogs. But following all the hundreds of blogs is merely impossible. Even if you subscribe to all the blogs, you are not going to read every post from every blog.

A year back, I subscribed to as many as 127 blogs. At times I used to go offline for a couple of days. Whenever I take short breaks and open my RSS reader after returning, I used to have at least 200+ unread items. I have heard people say they have 1000+ unread items. Is it possible to go through all of them and still have time to act on what you have learned? If you said ‘yes, it is possible for me’, consider yourself gifted. You won’t find much helpful information in this post. You can contact me and let me know how you do it if you wish. I’d be happy to learn from you.

But if you are like me, who cannot read hundreds of useful articles a day and act on whatever I have learned, this post is for you.

I’m going to share with you the exact techniques that have worked for me to avoid information overload. I have been using these methods for nearly 6 months and it has worked very well for me.

Image Source: New Controls in Google Reader
by Yandle

1. Subscribe to Less Blogs

If you want less information, subscribe to less blogs. Simple. If you are going to subscribe to 100+ blogs, you will come across the same thing I experienced (the above example). Be selective when subscribing to blogs. As I said, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of good blogs in your niche.

Here are some tips for selecting the blogs to subscribe:

A. Authority

Subscribe to all the authority blogs in your niche. If you are into blogging, subscribe to Problogger. If you are into community and social media, don’t forget to subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog. These authority blogs will always deliver quality information. They are authority blogs for a reason. They know what they are saying.

B. Quality

This is the most important factor when you are looking for blogs to subscribe to. Read the recent posts in the blog, go through the archives and do all the research you want. It will not take more than 15 minutes for you to do the research but it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

C. Topic

Subscribe more to the blogs that belong to your niche. Subscribing to blogs that are not in your niche will not help you much. Of course you can subscribe to productivity blogs or technology blogs if you are interested. But I would recommend you to limit them.

Don’t subscribe to blogs just because your friends are subscribed to it. Think for a second or at least half a second if the blog will help you in achieving your goals. I used to do this. When my friends used to say that they have subscribed to blog A, I used to do follow them. Now I don’t do that though. Never subscribe to a blog that will not help you move forward in your life.

2. Learn to Speed Read

Take some time to learn how to skim. There are so many books out there that teach you exactly that. Grab a book and read it. Don’t mind about the time it takes you for learning how to skim. It will help you throughout your life. The best investment you can make is investment in yourself. If you spend a couple of dollars and a few hours, you can learn the art of skimming information.

Here are some articles that teach you how to speed read:

How to speed read – Boing Boing

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

3. Using Social Sites

Social sites like StumbleUpon will help you a lot in avoiding information overload if you know how to use it. There are many social sites out there. There are also niche based social sites like Sphinn. If you are a SEO blogger, you should check out Sphinn.

How to use social sites to manage information overload online?

Go to your favorite social site. My favorite is stumbleupon. So I’ll tell you how I use StumbleUpon to process information.

I search for stumbleupon users who continuously stumble articles related to my niche. You can get a RSS link of each user’s stumbles. I add this RSS to Google Reader.

Tip: Don’t subscribe to the ‘likes’ in stumbleupon. Subscribe to ‘reviews’. StumbleUpon users stumble many sites every day. You don’t want 1000+ items in your reader. SU users review only selected articles.

You can find me on StumbleUpon here. I review mostly posts related to blogging and social media.

Small Niche Based Social Sites

You can find a list of niche based social sites here.

My favorite is Sphinn. Though sphinn is a famous social site, the number of front page articles per day is low.

Create a list of social sites based on your niche and subscribe to the front page of these sites. This way, you will only read the best content in your niche.

4. Content Aggregators

Content aggregators are sites which gather the top news in all the niches or all the social sites. The popular ones are Popurls and Alltop.

Popurls

This site gathers news links from social sites and top blogs. You can customize the content which you see in the homepage by creating an account.

Alltop

Alltop gets links from top blogs and categorize it into different niches. There are plenty of niches. You can make your niche alltop as your homepage and glance through the new posts in all top blogs. You can also create your own alltop page with blogs of your choice.

5. Using Twitter

Twitter is useful in many ways. It is not just about updating what you are doing. Twitter can be used to find useful information online.

Follow people who share useful links to articles in your niche. If you are interested in social media and tech, you should follow mashable. Once you have created a list of users who share valuable content in their twitter stream, add them to a group and create a column for it. You can use a twitter client like tweetdeck to do it.

You can find me on twitter here – @Ramkarthik.

These are the techniques I use for managing online information overload. I suggest you to take this as a base and form your own techniques. What works for me might not work well for you. This is the concept. Understand it and develop your method till you find yourself managing information efficiently.

If you liked this post, please give it a stumble and/or bookmark it in del.icio.us. I appreciate it.

As I promised, here is the link to download the pdf version of managing online information overload (Right click -> ‘Save As’).