Posted Friday, May 30, 2008 by momscashblog |
In my last post I talked about emotional motivators and gave a list of the ones most commonly used in marketing. Now I will let you know how I’ve used motivators on MomsCashBlog, and how well they worked for me. I’ve only been here a month, but I’ve already seen great results from using them a few times.
The emotional motivator that I chose to use was saving. I know, I know… on the list, saving is pretty boring compared to power, money, romance, sex*, and the desire to belong, but since this is a make money blog, “saving” is to be expected. Saving is part of the making money process. This month on MCB, the “Discount Codes” post was the one that brought in the most new traffic to my site and they pushed buttons and used my ads. The second most profitable post was “Free to All”. After that was the “Wii Coupon”. So, as you can see, the three top posts that brought new traffic in and made money were all about “saving.”
Of course “saving” is not an emotion, but neither is power, money, romance, or sex, etc. They are motivators which means they speak to us emotionally and can make us take action. Just saying the word “saving” might not conjur up an emotion in another person, but using the concept of saving either directly, or indirectly, can attract people to your blog. Think of the law of attraction… only you are purposely attracting people with certain words that hit their emotions.
Retailers use “saving” motivators all the time to get people to buy, or to attract new customers. Everyone likes to get a deal, and no one wants to pay top dollar for something when they don’t have to. But in retail you take a loss when you do this because that savings comes from your own pocket!! You have to give a discount, or give something away (and YOU pay for it) just to attract new business and bring people in with retail. But it works.
Borrow a Motivator
In my top money making posts, I provided discounts (savings) but I didn’t have to take a loss in doing so. Nor did I have a product to discount. I found other sites that had the “saving”, formed a post around it, and gave out information about discounts that someone else had… and I reaped the rewards. I didn’t take anything from those who have the discounts (saving). In fact, I helped them get the word out to people who did not know about that site. It’s a win-win-situation. (more…)
Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2008 by momscashblog |
Technology is very important and without it we wouldn’t be here on the internet. It can also be very helpful in steering traffic our way… but technology can only take us so far with our blogs. We’re dealing with “people” and unless we turn into robots, it takes the human touch to connect with others. The thing about technology is the better it gets, the less you need to know about it! All you have to do is let those smart programmers do the work, while you sit back and worry about sales and marketing.
Those who work in marketing say most of the same basic principals used in “offline marketing” apply to “onlne marketing”. Whether marketing offline or online, the most important marketing tool is appealing to the emotions of your viewers. Emotions are strong… they motivate us to want certain things, and to do whatever it takes to get them. If you have a blog, these offline/online marketing tips can be very useful to you. The internet has more potential for selling an emotion than offline marketing ever had for three basic reasons:
1. it is practically free!! All you need to invest is the cost of a site. (pennies a day)
2. it is text driven… and the easiest, quickest way to appeal to a person’s emotions is thru words.
3. it is easy for people to find what they want, they search for the words.
We usually think of “love” as the strongest emotion and it is a very powerful one that can be used in marketing. That doesn’t mean you have to make people love you to buy from you, but that would work also !(lol) It means you could sell the idea of “love”, or the idea that one will feel loved if they do what you say, or have what you’re selling. It’s done every day on the internet with matchmaking sites, relationship sites, social networking sites, relationship advice columns, relationship E-books, or “How to Catch a Man or Woman” E-books, even astrology and psychic sites are all catering to the emotion of love. And it’s a HUGE moneymaker on the internet (one of the biggest), because they are selling love and that speaks to a human’s most basic emotion of happiness, or “pleasure”. (more…)
Posted Saturday, May 24, 2008 by momscashblog |
You’ve got 3 days off, so why don’t you put up your website NOW. Just use MomsCashBlog’s Free Blog Tutorial and you can have your own website up and ready to go before the weekend is done. It won’t even use up the whole weekend because some say the tutorial takes less than an hour!! (not counting the waiting period for set up….which is ” break time”.) You can do it yourself with the easy step-by-step instructions.
Take a look at the Blog Tutorial and make some decisions of about what you want to name your website. You can even play around and put some names in at Step One to make up names and see if YOUR web domain name is available. There are a lot of websites out there so the availability of good names is getting scarce. It’s a good idea to register your domain name NOW! If you don’t have time to finish the whole tutorial in one sitting, you should at least choose your domain name and buy it before someone else gets to it first. Later, when you have more time, you can come back to the tutorial and continue with Step Two and then on to Step Three…and BAM!!…you’ve got your own website registered on the internet! Easy as One, Two, Three!
But the tutorial doesn’t stop there! Steps Four and Five get you going on WordPress, the most widely used blogging/website program on the internet. The Blog Tutorial continues to instruct you on how to set your site up, choose a theme (the look and design), post article, and make space for your ads and widgets!
Remember, with this tutorial you don’t have to do it all at once. You can start the process today and come back to it whenever you choose. Use the whole weekend to leisurely set up your site….take a day, take just half a day, or you can even do it in an hour, if you’re fast on the keyboard.
Fast or Slow…Do it at Your own pace! And once you have your own blog or website, that’s when the fun begins. Come back to MomsCashBlog and you can even make some extra cash by placing ads on your website! Take a look at the Free Tutorial and see just how easy it is to put up a website!
Happy Memorial Day……Support our Troops!!!
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008 by momscashblog |
Have you ever bought something online and at the checkout they ask for a “Discount Code”, but you don’t have it? Yeah, me too. Usually those Discount Codes are on catalogs sent in the mail (or via an e-mail) to regular customers on their mailing list. If you don’t get the catalog or e-mail you don’t get the discount.
There’s a way to get those Promo Codes, Discount Codes, and Coupon Codes even if you didn’t get it in the mail. www.Currentcodes.com has 8 sites to search thru retail stores to find secret deals going on at any given time. Some of these sites for codes don’t have a search within the site, so it’s not as fast as it could be. You end up doing a lot of scrolling in sections of the alphabet (like S-Z) which is probably what they want you to do since it gives other retail stores some exposure on their site. But I think it’s worth a little scrolling to save money.
And there really are some good deals! Discount Codes don’t just save you pennys or a few dollars, if that’s what you’re thinking. Today, while searching for seed catalogs, I noticed Sony laptop discounts of $500-$600 OFF some Vios models! No, I didn’t buy a laptop…but, yes, I did find several discount codes for seeds and garden supplies at UltimateCoupons. I got $15 off my order of $50. or more (with free Express Shipping, thank you very much!) from the ParkSeed Co.
You can also find several “Coupon Sites” with printable coupons to bring to stores in your area. www.Retailmenot.com even allows you to share coupons with users on the site, and I’m sure there are others who do the same. Coupons are a big thing these days….they are being used more than ever before. Why pay full price if you don’t have to!!
Posted Monday, May 19, 2008 by momscashblog |
I’m sure established bloggers have received the e-mail from Entrecard today announcing their exciting new “add a blog” feature allowing blog hosts to add multiple blogs to one account. They also have a new free Official E-book that explains this new feature and other tips for using Entrecard. I know there are new blog hosts here, so if you didn’t get the e-mail you can download the Free Official E-book and get more info at www.entrecard.com.
Not everyone knows about Entrecard. But all bloggers should participate IF they want to be searchable on the net. For newbies like myself, it can be a little difficult to understand why Entrecards are so important to bloggers, but I’ve figured out the concept and it all makes sense. Think of Entrecard as business cards sent from site to site via the internet. It’s a form of networking and getting your name out there, just as you would do with a brick and mortar business.
But Entrecard is soooo much more than just polite networking! Entrecard gets you linked to other sites, and that gets you better PageRanking which gets you noticed in searches on the internet. (If you are blogging for profit, or if you want to be high in the search engines, you must have a good PageRank!)
Here’s Why the Google PageRank and Entrecard are so important for Blogs
When anyone uses Google searches, they are not really searching the WWW as it is at that time. That would take way too long, with the billions of sites out there. So Google does a search by indexing and software called “spiders”. These spiders crawl the internet like a web, going from link to link. They search important sites first. PageRank decides who is of “importance” by how many other sites link to that site. So if you don’t have any links to your site, the spiders will not find it. In other words, your site will NOT show up in a search unless it’s linked to other sites. The more the better!
Entrecards are a great way to link your site to other blogs and get your blog into searches. The more Entrecards you drop… the more your site is linked and noticed by the spiders… the better the effect on your PageRank… the more searchable your site becomes!
Here is the link to Entrecard new free E-books http://entrecard.com/static/entrecard_official_ebook.pdf with the “add new blog” features. I’m downloading mine tonight to learn about all the new features that they have.
On that note, I’d like to say that I will be getting around to dropping my Entrecards soon… hopefully this week. We still have a few accounts that have not been changed into my name yet, and I can’t seem to replace K.s Entrecard with mine in the MCB account if anyone knows how to replace an image in Entrecard,please email me at jj@momscashblog.com. I have received around 20 cards and have accepted them all (well, all but one!). I can’t wait to get into the game.
Posted Saturday, May 17, 2008 by momscashblog |
As some of you know, I tried to do surveys online before and never made anything! On top of that, I think I even paid them to give me surveys to fill out and tell me how to do it. A couple of weeks ago I signed up for Survey Savvy to see what it’s all about and I MADE some MONEY with it! I also referred a friend (you get $$ for doing that also!) and she made money too!
All you do is Join ( it’s free…you pay nothing ), give the info they ask for, and after that they send surveys via e-mail for you to fill out. I filled out 3 surveys…one paid $3.00, another paid $5.00, and the other was $4.00 and $1.00 for referring a friend…a total of $13.00. If I added all the time it took for all three, I would say it was just a little over two hours. Not bad for working from home… in fact I think it’s great ! (but they don’t come in all at once..you have to wait for the e-mails.)
I also just got a survey e-mail from Vindale Research. I did what they said, and I will be getting a check from them. $5 for using the Accellerated Training Tutorial and $2.00 for filling out the Profile. So there’s $7 before you even start the surveys with them. It says I have $7.00 in my account and that I can have them send me a check now or save it up as I do surveys. I will keep you posted if I don’t get the money from that one.
I hope this works out for everyone else who tries it! Happy Surveying!!
NOTE: You can join Survey Savvy right here on Momscashblog by scrolling down in the ad section to the right of this post.
Posted Thursday, May 15, 2008 by momscashblog |
In my earlier years I had a few jobs in data entry type work just to get thru school. After that, I didn’t have to worry about technical stuff because I wasn’t in that field. As the years went on, I became spoiled with “Tech Help” wherever I was employed, and even at our own business, the accountant and other employees used the computers… the only tech skills I needed was using e-mail and cruising the net to order merchandise from wholesalers and keeping up with trends. I didn’t even have to think about how things worked, I just expected them to work.
Since I bought MomsCashBlog, I’m learning new tech things every day… and it’s fun, but frustrating at times. One of my good friends is a neurologist and she says it’s great for the brain too, so that’s an added bonus. The more “new” things you learn, the more cells light up in your brain. But there’s a down side to being too technical…… studies have shown that people who use only the technical parts of their brains can be lacking in creative thinking and social skills (and we all know if you don’t have social skills, you’re screwed!!) lol
So, if you’ve always relied on your secretary, or the college interns at your work to come running the minute you need them, maybe it’s time to try it yourself. I know how easy it is to just step aside and let them load that software, fix that spreadsheet, or even change the ink jets in the printer, but if you continue down that path, you become a tech-dummy. I can tell you from experience, there will come a time when you’ll wish you had paid attention and tried to become more proactive in the tech process at the office.
Challenge yourself every day! Try something new with your computer, or online. Instead of reaching for the phone to have someone help you……take a deep breath and try it yourself. You will feel good knowing that you’re using both sides of your brain.
On the other hand, if you’ve been immersing yourself too deeply into the world of all things technical you should try something artistic for a change. It is that side of the brain that provides us with great ideas or enables us to solve problems without even trying. Einstein called them “Eureka” moments….and he had plenty of them because he used both sides of his brain at the same time.
P.S. I meant to send a shout out to Geo at www.tipsformommies.com and www.mommieshome.net. Happy Mother’s Day !!
