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So I decided to download the Windows live writer Beta.  I’m writing this from my computer, rather than logging into blogger.

This certainly could be useful

Every post you make should absolutely 100% have a purpose to it. A purpose that will directly and/or indirectly achieve the results you are looking for, and the goals you have set. Everything you do should work towards achieving your clear vision that you have set.

As an affiliate you are trying to sell a product, but that does not mean that every post has to be designed specifically to sell. In fact, if it is, you probably won’t sell.

There are many things that are important when it comes to running a successful blog, and there are many things that you want to accomplish.

You want people to either buy from you, or buy from the people you reccomend.

In order for that to be possible, people must trust you

One of the things that must happen for people to trust you is for you to have a good name that everyone knows that people can associate with someone they trust. You want everyone in the world to know your name and associate it with something great. That’s branding, and it’s important.

In order for that to happen, you have to have people talk about you and/or visit your site. So you also want everyone in the world to come to your site consistently.

But in order for all of this to happen, you must initially have traffic growth, and you must also have repeat visitors. You must first set up the systems, and lay the foundation for self perpetuating traffic.

A lot of times, you can accomplish a lot of those at once. For example, I have begun the process of slowly but surely developing trackbacks from all the major sites. That’s great because it helps me leverage other’s traffic, and attract traffic from different groups of people that may find my blog interesting. But don’t think for a second that that’s the only reason I am doing it.

You see, I am eventually going to create a post that lists the top bloggers, and a brief description of who they are, and what they do. This will of course be a great piece of linkbait, which I’ll be talking about later.

But regardless of how it brings traffic, none of that matters, unless it’s useful to you, the visitor. As this is a blog that teaches you how to get traffic, how to develop and grow a business, I have to find a way to teach you that.

Well what better way to do that then to actually show you what people have done to become successful? If you can’t do something, find someone who can and model it.

Also, I’m probably developing your trust, because I’m showing you that I am aware that I don’t know everything, and I’m certainly not the absolute expert of the field. I’m also showing you that I know what people are saying because I actually take the time to read it. I’m going to constantly be referring to what other people that are much more well known and more respected by the community then myself.

In addition, I’m learning as I’m teaching. I think you remember what you learn like 4 times more when you teach it, and teaching is the best known strategy for learning.

Aside from all of that, I’ll be showing you what I’ve observed. That all the major successful blogs get a large percentage of referrals, from one way or another. Whether they utilize social bookmarking, or widgets like blogrush… whether they get traffic from traffic exchanges, or other blogs, whether they have the RSS feed clearly visible, or sticky content that keeps people coming back, whether they have a free viral ebook, an interactive forum, or something innovative, whether they use pictures to keep attention, or they constantly have new quality content, or whether they linkbait all of the time, or utilize SEO, they’re all doing things that not only bring in traffic, but that keep that traffic going, and having systems in place that convert that traffic into more traffic.

If you don’t have at least 5 “purposes” that your blog post accomplishes in one way or another, you probably shouldn’t even bother posting it.

What does this post accomplish?

1) Adds Value to the reader that’s always going to be #1

2) Develops a relationship and gets the reader thinking on the “same page”

3) Adds quality content that could possibly be linked to

4) increases the chances of being linked to due to plugins

5) Adds another chance for someone to take an action such as clicking on blogrush or signing up for my newsletter (not currently up)

6) Creates another page for the search engine

7) Gives me something to refer back to later which will add another backlink as well as a trackback from myself.

Provides a backlink to the post “Develop a Clear Vision – Start With The End In Mind, and also the 21 steps to business automation.

9) Makes you read over the post twice as you realize #8 is actually incorrect as “21 steps to business automation” was not linked to in the actual post… but it is now in #8

10)Makes you wonder if I’m telling the truth in post 9, and reinforces that you read over the post again, and glance back noticing 2 links, even though they are both different one is about traffic.

11)etc

You’ll also notice that because of plugins added, it gives people the opportunity to click on widgets, download the PDF version of this post and refer to it later or pass it around, it gives them the chance to check out a blogrush post, it gives them a chance to look at the “related posts”, and it gives them the chance to add this post to social bookmarking sites.

You should always be looking for additional ways to post with purpose, and reviewing pluins that you can install to instantly add purpose to all of your posts at once.

What if you had traffic that not only was able to sustain on it’s own, but was able to grow on it’s own? Would it really matter if you had to sacrifice a significant amount of affiliate income per user, if in exchange you got this unlimited, self perpetuating traffic?

With Self Perpetuating traffic, you have more and more traffic  from all sorts of different directions.

If you had the choice to have made $100 per visitor with 1,000 visitors a year and shrinking, or .01 cent per visitor with more and more visitors every day, which would you choose? I don’t know about you, but I’d take the .01 cent per user with guaranteed unlimited traffic. That way I can leave the site and go onto the next project, and set up another one, and when I come back, I’ll have more earned overall anyways. In the long term, it would be way better. although setting your traffic up to receive money first and traffic second seems like it would be the same, the order matters.  Growth is necessary.  You cant earn from 0 visitors, and you will only have a limited blog if you aren’t using your traffic to grow.

You may have heard of the question, “Would you rather have a penny that doubles every day for 30 days, or a million dollars?” Well the doubling penny would be worth 5.37 million at the end of 30 days.
This should be a major lesson to you, in the long run a small company with consistently large growth, a website with increasing amounts of visitors, is better than a large one with small growth, a somewhat major website that’s losing subscribers.
It also should stress the importance of developing a strong foundation, a base, for your virtual empire. Traffic in the end is the only thing that really matters. At some point or another, you have to have traffic. Sure there’s some sites that can have membership sites, and get a ton of traffic and a ton of lifelong members, but slowly after time they will unsubscribe, and in the long run although you will get quite a bit more vs someone who sold one time products, your revenue will go down to zero eventually. No site can ever survive without traffic legally. Even people that do a lot of JV deals and collect royalties for developing products need traffic. They might not need it to their site, but they still need traffic.
But revenue on your site? You don’t really need it. This is a shock to most people, but it’s true. Look at youtube… they gained no revenue at all, then they turned around and sold it to google for 1.6 BILLION dollars.

Youtube didn’t have any of this cash comming in until after they grew like crazy.  When they sold… BAM! HUGE cash windfall!

Youtube was one of the highest, fastest growing companies there’s ever been, but it had absolutely no revenue… however it had millions of daily viewers, and had billions worth of potential. The other major “growth” web based company that youtube rivaled at the time for accelerating growth is myspace. This grew like crazy and at first they didnt use ads yet were able to sell their site for a huge sum of money.
The facts are simple. If you can build a large base of potential clients, customers, and people that other companies will pay for, you can earn massive amounts of money. It’s up to you on whether or not you want to ever sell anything to the people on your site. If you want to focus on growing your business as large as you can until growth slows and then sell it and take the huge windfall of profits, that’s totally fine. For me, I like the idea of eventually owning an asset that pays out money monthly, and I’d rather hire some consultants to help me generate profit streams and increase my profits once I’ve grown the business to a size I’m content with.
Unfortunately most people are going to have to have SOME money coming in to pay for hosting costs and other things. But if you can at least pay a years worth without collecting revenue, you may want to consider it. You should probably consider using a strategy that involves building up one part of your site for traffic, such as a blog for unlimited traffic, while you collect revenue from your home page. I have created a plan to build up this blog, develop it, add all the plugins, track my traffic, add several sources of traffic, and really focus a lot on building the systems that will help my blog grow.

Aside from buying a site that has already developed and shown that it can grow on it’s own, the initial startup method for a successful web business should ALWAYS be something very similar to…

• Build traffic streams
• Build Content
• Lay Foundation for Repeat Traffic
• Build more traffic streams
• Convert traffic into more traffic or as some say “go viral”
• Continue to increase rate of growth
• Leverage other’s traffic
• Profit

Profit should essentially be the last priority. I know that a lot of people will think that this is crazy, but keep in mind before every great economic boom people were considered crazy.  Donald Trump was considered nuts to keep building in the 80s when everyone was going bankrupt, People who said that the dotcom bubble would not last were nuts, people who worried about a great depression would have seemed absolutely looney, people that thought the titanic could sink were “crazy” It takes a little bit of a “contrarian” attitude to REALLY succeed big time. The fact is, although profit is nice, and for some it is neccesary in order to maintain the operating costs of their business, every bit of space on your website can be used for either traffic or growth.  Either one is better than nothing, but until you’ve grown large enough that you can leverage your profits, in the long run, it’s best to focus in on growth and building systems for the website to expand.
This can mean several things, but just what, exactly?
In the next post I’ll talk about more of the specific things you can do to lay the foundation and grow your blog, and use your growth to increase the rate of growth

1)Wordpress Plugins – You need to have the right plugins that make it possible for you to keep your traffic comming back. Having the right site layout with the right plugins is crutial to obtaining this.  Think of installing the wordpress plugins as building the foundation for a large skyscraper.  After you’re done, you still have a long ways to go, but if you screw up the foundation, your whole building is going down!

2) Monotize Your Site For Traffic, Not Income – although many of the top earners have monotized their sites for income, they succeed because they work hard, and they hire others to work hard.  But even so, they have already layed the foundation for repeat traffic anyways.

 3)Build Backlinks – If you want to maintain search engine results, you’re going to have to build links directing people to your site.  And if the search engine changes it’s algortihm, you should still be collecting traffic from these links. One great place to put backlinks is internet message boards aka “forums”.  There are several other resources to build backlinks. Trackbacks is a great way to appear on prominant blogs

 4)Set Up RSS Feed Subscription Buttons - This is mostly part of your plugins, but you should have buttons that people can use to open up and save your RSS feed into an RSS reader.

 5)Set Up Social Bookmarking Buttons – This is an absolute must. people need to be able to get your content out in front of everyone else regardless of whether you do or not. You should be using some sort of wordpress plugin that does the job for you. This is crutial in turning your visitors into people who will in a sense, recruit others to your website.

6)Set Up An Autoresponder. -2/3rds of your autoresponder is providing content to your readers, letting them know about everything that’s going on in your blog, and telling them the information that they want.  The other 1/3rd is where you will reccomend a product.  However, so you don’t scare them away before they have a chance to learn to like your writing style, you want to start out more like 80% being valueable content.

7)Establish Your Network Of Trackbacks And People Who Request Them And Accept Them- Basically you want to trackback several people, develop your blog, expand into as many different blogs and audience as you can, and start getting trackback requests with every post you make.

8)Add Blog Community Widgets Like Mybloglog, And Blogrush.  These will help your traffic convert into more traffic.  It will also widen your influence and increase your “network”

9) Add Social Network “AddMe buttons” – This allows people to get to know you on a more personal level, and communicate with you in a more interractive way.  Your links to social communities should also be setup in a way that allows you to get traffic to your blog, and to your other social communities.

10)Add Interactivity – I’m not even sure if “interactivity” is a word, but if not, it is now, I could simply goto wikipedia and invent it… Anyways, your blog should be interactive as possible.  Add videos, and allow users to add video comments. Add audio, add a podcast if you want to take the time to do that.  Add links to posts that you’ve made in forums.  don’t restrict your users ability to interract to just your blog.  They will appreciate it, and they will return again and again.  The amount of returning visitors and repeat traffic you gain will make up for the ones you lose.

11)Start Doing Occasional Reviews For Various Products.  This will be where some of your affiliate income comes from, this and your autoresponderare basically your only sources right now, that and your autoresponder.  Grow first, earn later.

12)Free Report – Give away a free report for people that sign up.  Make sure your link is on every page, and people can click on the ebook link to access your site. Now give people the rights to giveaway or sell that report.

13) Refer People To Traffic Exchanges – your referral links will gain you advertising crdits.  The traffic is low quality, but the people that see your site are all interested in  getting more traffic. Give them a chance to download a free report on how to get more traffic, and reccomend that they check out your list of traffic exchanges.

14)Use The “Get Google Free” Ads Method… more on this later

15)Start Guestblogging, And Invite Others To Do The Same – Allow people to guestblog anytime they would like.  Let them know that if they get out of hand and spam your customers, you will block them and take away their ability to post.  Start to guestblog on popular blogs and share those blog networks.  Now you can promote your blog post on someone else’s blog, and reap the rewards, and your guest poster will want to do the same, which will also help you. 

16)Hire A Ghost Writer – This ghostwriter will eventually replace you completely allowing you to move on, but you should hire him before you actually do.  You might hre a few before you decide on which one you like, and you might even let multiple ghostwriters write for you.

17) Set Up RSS Feeds On Your Blog - these will act as content generators.  They will be promoting other people, but the constant content creation will usually be worth it, and keep your visitors comming to your site.

18) Hire An Editor – This person will edit the posts made by the ghostwriter, and submit them.  He will also be responsible for linking your posts to other posts.

19)Hire A Website Manager – This person will watch all of your traffic stats and clickthroughs and will make sure everyone else is doing their jobs. He will also find new people if the people who have done it in the past quit or need to be fired.

20)Hire a Team of Marketers and Affiliates.  This one is optional.  You could very well go through the process of creating another product and building your network of affiliates, but that’s only if you find this niche that you’re working in to be exceptionally profitable.  

21) Next blog! Since you don’t know what niche is the most profitable, I think it’s better to use whatever monthly income you have remaining, except for a little bit leftover on the side to automate your blog and move on to the next one.  Your revenue should actually go up after doing that, but the important thing is that it’s automated. After creating several of these automated blogs, you will be able to figure out which niche is the most profitable, and if it’s a niche that will maintain it’s popularity rather than being a dying trend, you can spend all of your time adding products and reccomendations and backend offers.

If  you learn how to follow these steps, you will be on your way to having an awesome automated business.

There are countless amount of ways to automate your business.  But the key thing is, that you set up systems to automate your income for you.  You don’t want to always depend on yourself to run a successful blog if you don’t have to.  You should still be able to step in at anytime so you’re not dependant upon anyone or anything either.

The entire idea behind automating your business is saving yourself the time.  If you can’t walk away from your business for an entire year and come back still earning the same amount you were before, you really are working in a business, rather than truely owning one.

So what are some ways you can automate your business?

I have made a brief list of 21 Steps To Business Automation here

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