Choosing a Voice that Resonates with Your Subscribers

When you start a list and people join it, it’s the beginning of a bond that can last for years. This connection between yourself and a subscriber will be a two-way street. You will provide value for them and they, in turn, will purchase products from you or through your link.

But many marketers feel intimidated about the concept of communicating with their list. They’re not sure what to say or how to say it. You want to choose a voice that represents you well and that is well received by your readers.

However, keep in mind that you won’t be able to make everyone happy all of the time. There will always be someone who doesn’t like the way you communicate. And that’s okay.

You yourself probably don’t like everyone’s personality online. That’s why we get to pick and choose who we learn from. One voice that you may choose to use with your subscribers is educational and informative.

This is akin to a news broadcaster or teacher who educates their audience with facts and data. It’s a little sterile, but in some niches, it’s perfectly acceptable and almost preferred.

Some marketers choose a tone that is motivational or inspirational in nature. Think of a personality such as Tony Robbins. You will provide them with life lessons and the nurturing tone that leads them to make positive changes in their life.

Another tone that you may choose to use in your communication is that of a butt kicker. This is someone who helps eliminate excuses that often overwhelm and prevent a subscriber from achieving their goals.

Not everyone will enjoy this type of tone, but there are many who do. Humor is another way that you can connect with your audience. You’re still providing value and insight, but it’s done with a lighter touch that is relatable and enjoyable by many.

Don’t worry if you’re not a stand up comedian. Humor can be expressed in a variety of ways. You can choose one or a many of these voices for your audience. Just as you don’t have the exact same personality at all times, every day, you can choose to mix it up with your subscribers, too.

The most important thing is that you weave a little of yourself and your personality into the mix. For your own personal satisfaction, you want to be able to express yourself in a way that is natural to you. Plus, it comes off more genuine when you do it this way.

Putting Effort Into Pinterest for Free Traffic

Pinterest is a different kind of social networking site that can deliver free, targeted, organic traffic to many niche marketers. It doesn’t have the same engagement that other social networking sites do in terms of comments and private messages.

Instead, this site is all about making good ideas go viral. That viral concept can funnel traffic to your blog or products as well as landing pages where you can build a targeted list.

Consider Pinterest a content curation site for consumers. It’s almost like a digital vision board that contains a myriad of images and hyperlinks to products and leaders that consumers want to learn more about.

This site works better for visual niches, but it isn’t exclusive to those. For example, food, fashion, travel, and parenting are all popular niches that you will find on Pinterest. However, you can also turn a niche such as success or finances into a Pinterest-worthy niche as long as you pair good ideas and quotes with images that can be shared.

Before you open a Pinterest account, you want to manage the blog side of things first. When you go on to Pinterest, your goal will be to send people to your blog so that they can get on your list and learn more about your products and services.

Your blog posts should be highly valuable in nature so that consumers want to share it with others and bookmark it for themselves. Aside from text, you’ll want your blog post to include a good image for Pinterest.

Usually, the best images are vertical and eye-popping. The image should be embedded in your blog post so that when you pin it on the site, it shows up as the image that will represent your blog post.

You also want to include your URL in the image itself so that you get added branding capability with your social marketing efforts. Then it will be time to begin socializing on this site itself.

You’ll want to create a mix of pins on your boards that include your own blog posts as well as pins from other people. This is more ethical and organic in nature. You can pin several items per day on your account, and you want your boards nicely organized according to topic so that people can subscribe to them.

You may also want to participate in group boards. This is where you will share your own pins as well as other people’s in an effort to help all of your fellow marketers generate free traffic from the site. You can even launch your own group board for people to participate in.

Finding a Following on Facebook

When it comes to getting free traffic, social networking sites are a great place to begin. While Facebook may not appeal to millennials and the younger generation as much, it still has a healthy base for you to tap into as a niche marketer.

The first thing you may want to do after setting up your personal profile is to set up a Facebook page. This is a place where you can brand your business and share value with your audience.

After you have a page devoted to your business that details all that you have to offer, you may want to launch a group on Facebook to engage with your audience. With a group, you can make other people admins who can help you manage the group.

In a group setting, everyone can share ideas and open discussions with one another if you allow them to. This gives you great insight into the needs and personalities of your fans and followers.

You may also want to join other groups that have been started by someone else. Your goal here is not to go in and spam the group with links to your site. Instead, you should show up and contribute value to those participating in the group so that they organically seek you out online with the goal of learning more from you.

On Facebook, you want to show up to serve the people who are interested in your niche topic with helpful responses and insight. Doing this will allow you to see more organic traffic as people begin to Google your name and look for other advice from you on the Internet.

You want to utilize the various media options that Facebook allows so that you can acquire a bigger following. You are no longer restricted to text only on this social media site. You can use a variety of text, images, and video to convey your message.

In fact, it’s been proven that Facebook posts with images get more engagement and are shared more than those with text only. You can also share links to audio files or to your blog posts or landing pages on the site.

When you’re using Facebook to generate free, organic traffic, you want to build genuine friendships with others online. Don’t make it all about you. Your prospective buyers need to know that you care about them, too.

If you befriend people on your personal profile, make a concerted effort to visit other people’s profiles and engage on their posts to show that you are genuinely interested in how their own life is going.

Using Instagram to Attract an Audience

Instagram is a highly visual site where you can brand yourself as a leader in your niche. It implements a variety of images, video, and text. You can use a mixture of these, but every post will need either an image or a video to accompany the text.

This social networking site is a great way to get free traffic to your blog and offers. The best niches for Instagram are those that are visual in nature, such as food and diet, travel, and inspiration.

An image that you post doesn’t always have to be of some thing or someone. It can be of an inspirational or motivational quote or a cartoon or meme that people can relate to. While posts can’t be shared as easily as they can on Facebook, there are tools that can allow people to re-post your Instagram shares.

Therefore, you may want to brand your URL on the images themselves. Make sure when you post to Instagram, you are using hashtags to help your posts get found and shared among the population.

Hashtags are strategic keywords that people use to identify a topic, person, or place. When a consumer wants to find posts on the topic, they type in a pound sign and the keyword like this: #keyword. You’ll want to use a variety of them related to your topic in each post.

For traffic purposes, you’ll want to have a link in your bio. This is shown directly below your image on your profile page within the site. Instagram does not allow you to post links with every single post that you share. Therefore, you can change the link in your bio periodically if you wish.

One thing you may want to do is have a link in your bio to an opt in or landing page. This way, you capture the consumers’ name and email address and can contact them in the future and send them to your blog and offers.

Instagram also has another feature known as stories. Here, you can engage with others on a different level. Using the story, you can share images or videos as well as stream live from within the site.

Regular images and videos will be shared for 24 hours with your audience. But when you go live, you get to choose whether or not you want the video to stay up for 24 hours. Make sure you are branding your domains at this time so that you can reap the rewards of the free traffic potential of the site.

Tapping Into YouTube Search Traffic

If you’re looking for free, organic traffic, you’ll want to rank high in the search engines. But one thing many marketers overlook is the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

Next to Google, it’s one of the best ways to generate traffic that won’t cost you a penny. People love watching videos - sometimes more than they love getting information from text.

You can find videos on YouTube in just about every niche online. This is a great place for you to generate a following and send traffic to your blog and product offers. When it comes to video creation, many people are intimidated at the thought of putting themselves out there.

But you don’t have to record yourself on screen unless you want to. You can use a simple screen capture tool such as Camtasia or Camstudio to capture the screen and record a PowerPoint presentation or other items as you talk in the background.

When you make your videos, they don’t have to be long, drawn out presentations. Most consumers prefer bite sized information instead. That means keeping your videos between 3 to 5 minutes in length.

You may have too much to say in that short of a time span. If this is the case, then you can create a series of bite-size videos that cover the span of one larger topic. Make sure you brand your videos with a URL that links back to your site.

In addition to the wording on the screen, you also want to verbally invite your viewers back to your website by mentioning the domain name. Instead of just telling someone to visit your website, you can encourage them to go to the site for a free download offer.

Send them to your landing page and get them on your list so that later, you can funnel them to your products, affiliate offers, and blog posts. YouTube videos come in handy because they don’t simply stay on that site.

You can embed them into your blog post and allow others to do the same. Many of your competitors will grab your video to embed into their own blog posts, giving you free traffic.

You can also share the links on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. When people watch and enjoy your content, and their friends and family members see it on their accounts, they can then share it with others and the video you produced will go viral. 

Leveraging Forums and Blogs for Free Traffic

Your desire for free traffic comes at a cost where you have to put in the time and effort to make it happen. Very few people will send you traffic without anything in exchange, such as money.

However, if you share good information with an audience, you can see a spike in the number of visitors to your site. Forums are where people group as a community to discuss issues that are important to them and find help from others who are like-minded.

You can participate among these men and women and contribute to the conversation in order to generate traffic to your site. You may want to find forums that allow a signature file.

This is a block of text or image that is hyperlinked back to your site. Every time you make a helpful comment or post, this signature file is shown to the audience directly below your comment.

That way, if someone finds your contribution beneficial, they can follow the link to your site to learn more about you. You can also start your own forum to attract consumers in your niche.

This is time-consuming and requires moderation, but it does allow you to capture the name and email addresses and present your links to a wide audience. You can even assign members to moderate the forum for you if they want to.

Blogs are your own digital real estate. They assist you in branding your business, positioning you as a leader in your niche, and presenting offers to your visitors. The best thing about a blog is that because it’s your site, it’s your rules.

That means there are no restrictions on what you can say or present to your audience. Of course, you never want to spam your visitors with low quality content or hype. You want your blog to become known as the go to place to get information in your niche.

When you launch a blog, it will pull traffic into your site from search engines. It will also be linked to from outside sources such as competitors and consumers. But first, you have to create valuable content. If the content is thin, not only will consumers ignore it, but search engines will as well.

Always practice good search engine optimization, including research and utilization of strategic keywords that will help your blog get found in searches. When you pull traffic into your blog, make sure you are building a list of those visitors. Have an attractive opt in offer that will allow you to communicate with them time after time.

Fear Is the Biggest Single Deterrent to Your Success

If there’s one thing just about every online marketer understands, it’s that feeling of fear that can overwhelm you as you try to get your business off the ground. There are many things that frighten an entrepreneur, and most of it is in your own mind.

Fear can make you nervous about the niche that you chose. You’ll start to question your selections with everything. You’ll wonder if you know enough to even be guiding an online audience toward their goals.

You have to be confident about your choices and understand that as the owner and boss of your business, you have the right to change course anytime you like or need to. So nothing you choose to do now is set in stone permanently.

Fear can trick you into believing that there’s too much competition. You’ll wonder if there’s any way to earn a living in a niche when there are dozens of other people already in it.

This is a common concern for most newbie entrepreneurs online. The truth is, there’s no such thing as too much competition. Every leader in your niche brings a unique set of skills that include personality and style in the way they convey information and motivate their audience.

Besides, most people enjoy learning from more than one individual, so you may be one of several that they choose to follow. Fear can prevent you from using multimedia tools. Most people feel comfortable and safe using text, although there are a few who feel nervous about their writing skills.

But the use of audio and video tools is more daunting for most online marketers. You may worried that your voice sounds awkward if you try to do a podcast. Or, if you’re doing video, you may worry about your personal appearance.

When you’re leading a niche, the thing you want to remember is that people are coming to you to help solve their own problems. The sound of your voice and your looks are the least of their worries.

Fear can make you procrastinate on projects. You will always be filled with self-doubt. If something isn’t perfect, you’ll either abandon it completely or shove it to the backburner so that you don’t have to think about it anymore.

The great thing about online marketing is that everything you put out there is editable. If you make a mistake, you can fix it and re-publish the content. Again, most people are turning to you to solve their problems, so they’re not very concerned about little mistakes you make along the way.

To combat fear, you have to face it head on. Everyone is afraid to some degree. It gets easier over time as you put yourself out there. You have to learn to take action in spite of your fear so that you can deliver on promises to your niche audience.

Frustration Levels Are High in the Beginning, But Lessen with Time

When you’re starting a new business online, frustration might be the biggest emotion you feel on a regular basis. You need to understand that your days will be filled with frustration as you learn new concepts and skills, but they won’t always be like that.

Things do improve over time. Technical issues are one of the biggest and most frustrating obstacles you will encounter as a new marketer. For example, you may hear someone tell you to set up your own site, and you instantly feel flustered because you don’t know the steps it takes to make that happen.

Add to that any bloopers that happen along the way, such as an installation gone wrong for WordPress or a hacker getting ahold of your site and you’re calm and cool nature will disappear in an instant.

What’s worse is that sometimes there’s no one out there to help you figure it out. Occasionally you can find a video or a kind person to walk you through the process. Other times, you have to carefully try to do things on your own until the problem is resolved.

It helps to make friends in this industry so that you can reach out to them and ask for advice or tips whenever you encounter a technical issue. List building is another area of frustration for new marketers.

The minute they create a landing page or opt in box, they cross their fingers and hope subscribers will flood in overnight. But then they wake up the next morning and see that no one has joined their list.

Or, people simply trickle in a little at a time. List building is one of those online tasks that takes time and effort. You have to attract or send visitors to your landing page. You have to have an offer that is irresistible.

And you have to build an earned a reputation as someone whose list people feel is worth being on. You may feel frustrated about not being able to get any affiliates onboard for your launch or only seeing a few sales during your launch.

The key to easing your frustration about these issues is to plan ahead and not try to rush a launch at the last minute. What often happens with newbies is that they create a product quickly out of desperation and ask a few people to promote the day before or the morning that it goes live.

Good affiliates will need time to review your product and create a bonus for it. You might even get some sales and get frustrated about getting refund requests. If you get refunds, don’t automatically assume that the person simply wanted a freebie.

Instead, analyze their reason for their request and work on improving your product to prevent future refunds. You want to keep a level head when you’re in this business. If you feel frustration coming on, walk away and do a different task. Understand that this is a career where, over time, these types of problems fade.

Regret Is What You’ll Suffer from If You Quit on Yourself

When it comes to online marketing, more people have quit the business than have followed through to success. Follow through is essential. There are a million reasons why people give up.

You have to accept the fact that success doesn’t happen overnight. It can take months and years to build a formidable business online. This is not the business you want to get into if you are desperate for cash and need financial help immediately.

You need to make a decision as to whether or not you’ll keep a full or part-time job while you’re building this business. Some people have quit their job and launched an online career successfully.

However, it usually takes time, so unless you have the savings to keep you afloat financially, it’s not recommended. It’s hard to work two jobs at once, so you have to be patient with yourself as you find time to build this business from a side hustle into a fulltime career.

You want to go about this the smart way. It’s not a race, and even though you may have a lot of drive and determination, it will still take time. Before you make the decision to quit, revisit the reasons why you wanted to work online in the first place.

Did you think it would be fun and rewarding? Did you always have a desire to be your own boss? Do you love the fact that you have unlimited earning potential? Sometimes it helps to look back on why you started to pursue this career initially and reignite your motivation.

Ask yourself what you could do differently to ease your frustration. For example, maybe you’re frustrated at the money you’ve spent trying to get your business off the ground. Instead of simply beating yourself up about it, see what you could do differently.

For example, what free tools or bartering could you do to get the same results? Whenever you feel frustrated in this business, give yourself a break. Entrepreneurs work harder and work longer hours than most employees.

You need to come back fresh with a new pace so that you don’t get burned out with your efforts. The one thing you don’t want to do is continually stop and start this career. You will lose all of your momentum, branding, and loyalty from customers if you keep popping in and out of their lives. It’s better to work slowly and see progress than to quit periodically. It’s not the sign of a true leader.

Pessimism Serves as a Boulder Blocking Your Path to Success

When you first launch your career as an online marketer, you’re probably brimming with optimism. You’ve seen what can be accomplished through hard work and determination and what others have achieved in terms of personal satisfaction and monetary gain.

You have no doubt you can enjoy the same. But some people quickly allow negativity to take root and their once optimistic outlook turns dark and hopeless. Negativity can hurt your progress because you will always be down on yourself and others.

That doesn’t help you succeed or help you guide your audience to success with their goals. You have to change the wording you’re using during moments of pessimism. For example, you probably talk about what you can’t do or what you should have done.

Turn that wording into positive verbiage. Be honest about what you can and can’t do and don’t over dramatize the situation. Maybe the truth is you could do it, but you feel intimidated by it or the process is overwhelming.

If you should have done something, ask yourself if it’s too late and if it’s not, get it done. If you don’t believe in yourself, how can your audience believe in you as a niche leader? The customers will sense your hesitation and pessimism and turn to someone else who exudes an optimistic and positive point of view.

You may want to enlist the use of positive affirmations or the law of attraction. Or, choose another type of motivation to help keep you inspired. You may have a favorite mentor who can help power you through to success during times when your outlook has gone dark.

There is no one in this business who will boost your morale for you. You may be inspired by a few people, but it’s different than a company that provides you with a team to help support you.

You have to learn to do this for yourself. That’s probably one of the hardest things to do in a career where there are many ups and downs. But if you can learn to push through these moments, you’ll be pleased with what you can accomplish in life.

Not only will your pessimism hurt your own level of success, but it will impact those around you. You will worry your family and friends, dampen the spirits of your target audience, and cause your colleagues in this industry to avoid you as they try to keep their own positive mindset intact.