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Today I posted my 275th blog post. I posted the first one on 10/02/07. However it wasn’t until this past October that I started getting any significant traffic. In fact, I’d almost given up the ghost on this blog. I’d spent 2 years writing, and no one was reading. I’d done just about everything I’d read to do to drive traffic to this blog and yet nothing.

I had decided to get out of the internet marketing niche and work on building an authority blog in another area I was interested in. I was working steadily on that blog when I decided to just give away some information on how people could capitalize on the upcoming holiday traffic by using Squidoo lenses. Quick, easy, free. I just wanted to give back, and make it simple enough people would use it, and make some money over the holidays.

I wrote up a quick 17 page outline of how I use Squidoo to create product lenses and gave it away. I had a bit of a list so I sent it to them, and posted it on twitter and facebook. I also sent a copy to a  friend blogger who also does a lot of squidoo work. She ended up sending it to her list, and from there it was a hit.

I almost immediately had a huge increase in blog traffic. I literally had 50 page views a day if I was lucky before I gave away this report. My page views went to over 1000 a day for a while and have stayed consistently much higher than they were before.

What’s more is all of my posts are getting comments. Some in the hundreds. I am getting tweets sometimes 50 or 60 for a post.

So how did I capitalize on the traffic that came my way from the free report?

I stopped worrying so much if I was going to make money off of it and decided to just help them.

That simple.

I am following Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind program, so my focus had changed from making money from every single post, to getting enough traffic to entice advertisers to my site. I no longer felt the pressure to make the sale on each post so it became very easy to just answer questions, help people, and CELEBRATE with them when they succeeded.

And what was REALLY fun was… they DID. I have had so many people come back with a story of the first sale they’ve made online after trying for years. It is very exciting.

People can’t believe I’m giving this much information away.

But here’s the deal. It’s the minutiae that I’m giving away. The stuff no one will tell you because they think you do or should already know. It’s the stuff that is assumed knowledge in any product sold (of course product owners can’t go into every minute detail of how to do something or their products would be a million pages long) but I can. Simple stuff like how to create a clickable link. How to create a visual call to action on squidoo, how to upload a photo, how to come up with content for an article, how to do backlinking, how to do good keyword research. It’s not theory ~ they can read that anywhere, but how to actually take action!

All the things real beginners need to know I give them.

And let me tell you … they are grateful. I have not only increased traffic to my blog, but I’ve created a tribe of raving fans. Every day they send emails thanking me for helping them. Not only that, when they decide to buy a product they send me emails and ask for my affiliate link to buy it through whether I’ve ever mentioned the product or not). They say it’s the least they can do for all that I have done.

Am I making money from giving it all away?

You betcha. I only promote products I personally use and love. I can write about them from that vantage point. I can give help to people who get confused, because I actually use it. People love it, and they buy from me now.

This is amazing to me because for the years before I started this I hadn’t made much from clickbank, a sale here or there, but nothing exceptional and nothing consistent. My sales had come from my own personal products, but now my clickbank account competes with them, and money is deposited into my account every week.

Now I Make Money from My List too!

But probably not how you would expect. I write a post for my blog 3 times a week now. Each time I write a post I send an email to my list letting them know. (remember my tribe is very new and many don’t understand RSS yet) I also remind them to keep taking action, something is always better than nothing. I do not sell anything in my email series. I simply point them back to the blog, back to the new post. Each broadcast I send I then add to the back of the autoresponder series, so people will keep getting the emails as they join the list.

This doesn’t make me money up front, but what it does is continue to build my tribe of raving fans. People can NOT believe I am not selling them stuff. But … when I talk about something I use you can bet I make sales. When people ask questions about what will work, when I recommend something, they buy it.

I have created a trusting relationship with my readers. I have put their success first, and put my income second. This seems counterproductive, but I’ll tell you I’m making more money now than I ever have before, and I’m enjoying it all a HELL of a lot more.

I read a quote by Zig Ziglar years ago, and it’s finally starting to become clear to me.

You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.

Jackie Lee
Internet Marketing Strategy for Beginners

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