Ruthless Accountability

In my quest to bring my own costs down and also find "new" things to share with with my readers and "earn extra money" list subscribers, I recently revisited the wonderful world of finding free web traffic.

There are some great free things you can do out there, and many of them that I've been learning about myself lately center around the concept of blog promotion. While I've converted most of my own web sites to blog publishing platforms of one type or another, I've never really gotten into the learning about RSS feeds, content promotion through blog rings, pinging, and that sort of thing. Now that I've started to implement it, I'm really fascinated by the possibilities, and have added some blog feed based marketing methods to my list of things to always do. Speaking of which, if you don't have a marketing playbook or checklist of things you do regularly, then I encourage you to adopt one.

Content is, and always has been, the king the any media source. This includes television, newspaper, magazine, radio, Internet, and any other medium. The only reason that people tune in to a medium is for the content. With that in mind, you'll notice that most of my basic, free marketing methods in my playbook revolve around providing content, and using that content to build my lists (the money is in the list!).

Without further ado, here is my marketing matrix of free methods:

1. Ads on free classified ads sites, such as Backpages, Craigslist, and Kijiji.

2. Posting articles on article directory sites, such as EzineArticles.com
(a) Corrolary: All articles are blog posts, and most blog posts are articles!

3. Creating educational YouTube videos and putting URL in the video and link in the description text.

4. Posting content to industry hubs and networking sites. For example, ActiveRain.com is a very popular blogging and online networking community for real estate brokers, in much the same way that Facebook.com is for college students. Networking with other people expands your sphere, also.

5. Discussion board participation. Pick forums related to your industry and site, and put links in your signature line so it appears in all your posts. These can be stand-alone sites, or "groups" on sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

6. Comment on related blogs, leaving a link behind.

7. Automatically submit your content to aggregators. The easiest way to do this is to burn your feed to FeedBurner and enable the feature to distribute your feed to blog aggregators.
8. Place links in your blog posts to allow readers to submit them to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Fark, and other such "best of blogging" sites.

And last, but definitely MOST important, the number one web traffic generator of all time...

9. Build your list! Get people to subscribe to your email list or blog feed to receive announcements of blog updates, product promotions, tips, tricks, secrets, and anything else your readers might want to know about.

I recently became a huge fan of Feedburner.com, a Google product. It allows you to automate several functions listed above, as well as BUILD A LIST for FREE! You can add a "Get email updates" subscription form on your blog and they will be automatically notified whenever you put up a new post. While lacking the significant power of a sequential autoresponder, it's a great way to build a list without subscribing to a service. Feedburner will even let you export your subscriber list in Excel format, so you can take it with you if you move beyond it's capabilities.

These 9 free marketing methods should get you thousands of unique visitors per month to your site, which is sufficient to generate a small but significant Adsense or affiliate revenue stream.
To your marketing success,

Jassen Bowman

I have been basically blogging all the RA related stuff on my Learn To Be Rich blog, so until I eventually break that blog off into a separate marketing blog, the RA blog will be located there until further notice.

Until my next post (on the other blog or here),

James

Today I put out my feelers for couple more people to help find deals for various cities we have in our network of Real Estate Resources websites.

We are looking for enough people to collectively get through about 280 of these per day, 7 days a week.

This page has some links to some resources for the people researching and finding deals.

First, here is a video overview of how to research the deals using the more difficult system. The new system is much simpler.

Once you've seen that, you can register for your own Analyzed Deals account. There is a video on that page too that will walk you through how to register and how to submit deals as well.

Important Note: You will need to submit your full contact info to do these jobs AND, and this is the important part to be able to do the jobs, while you are filling in your contact info, you will need to keep "researcher" as account type. By doing that, the system will tell you which city to research a deal in next and allow you to get paid for finding deals. If you fail to do that, you won't be able to do the work.

We currently have about 280 US cities that we service. If you are applying for the job, I will probably ask you to do a paid test run of 10 cities.

Another Important Note: Here's how you should do the paid test of 10 to avoid getting frustrated. Do 3 and wait for Tammy to check your work. She works Monday through Friday. She will either Publish your work as is which means you did the 3 fine and can do the rest of the 10. Or, she will reject them as either incomplete or delete them.

• Deleted means you will not be paid for that one and you should not resubmit it.
• Incomplete means you need to fill in EVERY field and then click on "Save and Done" again.

If the deal already exists in the system because you used a non-standard address, she will very likely delete it as we already paid someone to research that one (that's why we require you to use the standard address formating that we outline below).

You must research deals in the order we give them to you and in order to see this order you must have selected "Researcher" as your account type when you filled in your contact information on the Analyzed Deals website.

Please note that the video above was made a while ago, and since then we have added a queue to tell you which city to research next and submit a deal for. Also, the system is much more simplified asking for much less info for you. You will see the city name, highlighted in yellow, at the top of the page where you enter deals ONLY IF you have selected "researcher" as your account type. I can't stress enough that you will be wondering what you are supposed to do if you don't select "researcher" as your account type when you enter in your contact info.

Do only one deal per city. Some cities are very hard to find deals for. If you can't find something, please use the skip it feature. You are not paid for ones you skip, but it will allow you to move on to the next paid one.

Here is the priority order of where I prefer to research to find deals:

1. HUD (see the video for how to find homes there)
2. If you can't find homes in that specific city on the HUD site, try suburbs of the main city as the next best option from the HUD site above. Note: Please choose suburbs that are 45 miles or less away from the main city. There is a link on the deals submission page to Google Maps to check the distance if you aren't sure.
3. If you can't find any in the city or suburbs on HUD, then use the final option which is Realtor.com for deals. Try to select good deals. If you don't know what that is, this may not be a good job for you.

Some important notes when submitting deals:

• Title Case (NOT ALL CAPS, or all lower case, but Title Case)
• Abbreviate street names. Street= St, Road= Rd, Lane= Ln, Avenue= Ave, Circle= Cir, etc. This is how we avoid duplicate deals. When Tammy goes through your deals, she will standardize street abbreviations as indicated above and any duplicate deals will be deleted and will not be paid. NOTE: Tammy is nicer than James. If James happens to be checking your work and you do not use the standardized addresses, they will be deleted and you will not be paid. He says it is THAT important.
• If you get an error message or a message that says this deal already exists after saving the street address, then you cannot do this property because it already exists in our system. Please move on to select a different property for this city.
• You must complete all the fields I discuss on the video.
• As noted above, you must follow the order given in the queue at the top of your deals submission page. Only submit deals for these cities, in this order.

If you have questions, please ask.

Until my next post,

James (with some additions and revisions by Tammy)

Here is a screen shot of some traffic to various subdivision pages on the Fort Collins By Subdivision site.