OK I know. We visually creative folk may shudder at the thought of boooring stuff like copy-writing.  It will be a common theme sung here though. We have got to get in the habit of self-education when it comes to marketing and copy-writing is a biggie.  Here is a piece written by a friend and expert marketer Ann Sieg.   I certainly cant communicate it better and I do subscribe to  the blog that is profiled.  AWESOME! So here is another free tool for you presented by Ann.

… Here’s a little secret for you: While investing money to expand your business and sales know-how is a necessary part of success that can’t be bypassed…

…it is actually possible to get a million dollar education
by consuming a lot of the free stuff that’s out there.

In fact, some expert’s free content and material is so good that it’s literally worth ten times what you would pay for others people’s products.

Which begs the question: If that’s the case, then why even bother buying any-one’s product anyway?

Well, there are some things that you’ll never learn for free. The stuff you have to pay for will always be more complete and more advanced. It gives you the whole story whereas often times the free stuff leaves a lot of blank spaces that need to be filled in. And if someone’s free content is really good, it means their actual products are that much more valuable to you. Plus, they’re usually laid out in a way that’s easier to follow and in a more “paint by numbers” fashion. As opposed to free content where you may have to go through a lot more of it to find the diamonds in the rough.

I can tell you though that many of the strategies I’ve used that have been crucial to my success were obtained directly from free resources. I’ve gleaned ideas, “light bulb” type inspirations and core concepts from these resources that have without a doubt been worth a fortune to me.

The right free content can provide you with much of the groundwork and building blocks with which to build your business.

And here’s why this is true: As more competition develops in any given niche, it means that in order for people to stay ahead, they have to give away more and more info that they may have previously been charging for.

That’s the beauty of competition. It forces people to stay sharp and on their toes. And the end winner of it all is the consumer who gets a better product.

As Marlon Sanders says – If you really want to have a killer offer, just take what your competitor is selling and give it away as a free bonus!

Anyways, one of these free resources that has been absolutely invaluable to me is Clayton Makepeace’s free e-letter ‘The Total Package.’ You can check it out at: The Total Package.

Clayton is known as the highest paid copywriter in America and every Monday he sends out an e-letter issue that’s crammed with some of the best marketing and sales advice you’ll ever read.

Did I mention it’s totally free? I don’t think I could even put a price tag on this if I had to. I attribute a lot of the marketing knowledge I have to reading his material.

His e-letter is geared towards copywriters and some of the issues specifically address how a copywriter can find work in the freelance world, but overall the brilliant marketing wisdom he dispenses applies to anyone and everyone who’s interested in making large amounts of money.

If you do decide to subscribe to The Total Package, be sure to go through all the back issue archives. There’s some 87 past issues at the time I wrote this and you can read each one of them at no cost whatsoever. Every issue is usually well over 10 pages of pure gold content and the whole archive is literally a book in and of itself. There’s enough reading material back there to keep you busy for weeks.

When you get your first issue, just look on the right hand side of the page and you’ll see the ‘archive’ menu button…..

OK Tim back here.  definatly check this out.  It is good information and well worth the time. It is one more component of marketing our passionate brushstrokes or shutter clicks.  

Pinging.  What is it and why is it important?

 Ok,  hopefully you are convinced you need to be blogging.  I will spend some time coming up reviewing some resources and helping those who want to start blogging do so.   I will have the first training vid up next week.  But this is for those who already have a blog up…and are adding solid relevant content for your target market.  

Pinging just means you are going to contact several sources and let them know you have added fresh content to your blog.  When you “ping” these companies they in turn will notify the blog directories and let them know you have new content. 

This was adopted from Wikipedia….

 “In Blogginghping is a push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. A specific signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

Open ping servers, like VeriSign’s Weblogs.com, let other web-services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them. Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly-updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material.

In addition to open ping servers, there are an increasing number of proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers.”

Unlike open ping servers, proprietary servers with their own subscription applications have no incentive to share their received ping data directly with other servers, which may offer competing services. As these servers do not share their data, bloggers have to ping a large number of individual servers to receive the desired publicity. As a result, bloggers have turned to services such as Pingoat or Ping-o-matic, which pings multiple proprietary ping servers.”

Cool names huh?  Ok, so lets take a look at a service called pingoat.  Pingoat is a service that pings services for you.  Rather than you submitting your awesome new blog content to a bunch of ping-servers one by one you decide to leverage your time and have pingoat do it for you.  So you go to pingoat.com, scroll down past the opt-in box, where it says, “get started”, put in the name of your blog, the URL of your blog, (you can skip the XML feed if you don’t know what it is), click on the “general” category and you will see that it checks all of the boxes in that category.  Check the appropriate categories for your  blog.  Then at the bottom click on “go pingoat”.  That’s it.  Pingoat just sent each one of those servers a blurb saying hey “your blog” just updated with fresh new content.  Cool huh?  FREE! I love tools that allow me to leverage, usually I have to pay for them.  Check out the short video tutorial on how to use pingoat…it’s under videos.

Okay if you are really far behind and need to know what the deal is with blogging this may help. Again, the question why.  Why blog…..awww geez do I have to?  No not if you’re willing to slowly let your business slip away.  Many entrepreneurs have stepped up the the use of  webblogs or blogs.  It is a fresh way of delivering your business message in a personal voice.  It allows some transparency of you and encourages the relationship side of things to prosper. Here are some other reasons why blogging may be a good choice for you.

Blogging positions you as a leader.

If you blog regularly and consistently add value to your readers, you’ll begin to develop a readership that likes you.  They begin to trust your musings, thoughts and opinions. This is where you can build your platform for being the thought leader or expert in your specific field or market.

It is Easy to Showcase photo and image galleries.

You have opportunity to profile specific customers, your business location or special event images easily and quickly.  As a visual artist this is cool.  You can show off your latest piece with an image while you talk about it.

There are many ways to add content.

You can use a variety of different means to publish and support your message.  It can be text, audio, video a combination of all of those.

You can do it yourself…no webmaster involvement.

Most of us are time poor.  How about not having to waste time and money on a webmaster.  Many blog sites are template driven and free.  You can log-in from anywhere, write a new page and publish it.

Communicate with your clients and prospects easily.

Would it be beneficial to you to allow your prospects and customers to share their comments, feedback, ideas, and concerns with you? This is the whole, “If you want to know why John Smith buys what John Smith buys, you have to see the world through John Smiths eyes”, thing.  Here is another way to do that. You can accomplish this efficiently through feedback forms on your blogs. Don’t worry about bashing or comments not pertinent to the posts.  You can moderate all the content coming in.

And finally one of the most important reasons: Be “findable” on the search engines.

No doubt you already have figured this out.  If not, here is the scoop. One of the ways to begin driving traffic to your site is by blogging. Blogs attract search engines and blog directories through some built-in notification features.  It helps considerably if you blog frequently. Daily is best. Yea right.  Ok a few times a week then is better than once a month.  I am definitely NOT an SEO expert.  How to be found is one of the hottest topics around. I do know that your blog can be a key component in the whole piece.  I have some articles and tutorials coming that can tell you a few ways to submit your blog posts and articles for a higher search engine rating. But for now, if you don’t have a blog get one.  If you have one, use it to communicate.