This is just one of the many tricks you will learn during our Marketing Your Self Hosted WordPress Blog course coming January 9 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern.  For full information on the course, visit this page.

Sign Up Today for the Marketing Your Self Hosted WordPress blog:

Marketing Your WordPress Blog

Meeting Dates and Times: 01/09/2012-02/13/2012 from 1:00-3:00 PM US/Eastern. This 6-week course will be focused on all of the ins and outs of marketing a WordPress blog that is hosted on your own domain. If you are using another blog platform, you will still benefit from the program, and there will be times when the information will not apply to your platform. The program includes 4 (90 minute) private coaching sessions with Bea Fields. For more information, visit this page for full details.

Price: $375.00

Marketing Your WordPress Self Hosted Blog

Dates: 6 Consecutive Mondays from January 9-February 13, 2012

Location: Phone and Webinar

Course Includes: 4 (90 minute) private coaching sessions with Bea Fields and access to the past Become a Blogging Maniac library.

Cost: $375.00

Calls will be both video and audio recorded for playback.

Please Note: This course will be focused on using the WordPress platform. If you are using another blog platform, you may still benefit from the program, yet we will be focusing on the use os WordPress. This course will not cover how to set up a blog or the technical issues of using WordPress. This course is designed for people who have an existing WordPress blog hosted on their own domain.

Week 1: Writing Your Blog Marketing Plan

During this lesson, we will focus on:

1. Defining your target market. The more refined your target market, the better your chances are of attracting readers to your blog.

2. How to write blog titles so that it pulls your target market to you.

3. Partnering with other bloggers who are also attracting your target market. Collaboration on guest posting is key.

4. Using assessments and forms on your blog which address the needs of your target market.

5. Choosing 10 critical keywords that will draw your market in your direction.

6. Introduction to social networks and finding networks that are filled with people you want to attract.

Week 2: All About SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

During this lesson, we will focus on:

1. How to configure an SEO plugin so that it clearly identifies what your blog is all about and pushes your blog to the top of the search engines.

2. Using your SEO plugin to optimize each page and post for your WordPress blog. The more you optimize each post and page, the more your blog will be found through the major search engines: Google, Ask.com, Yahoo and Bing.

3. Post Headlines to Get Readers Excited and to Jump from the Search Engines to Your Blog.

4. How to link your blog posts to maximize your search engine results.

5. How to use the Digg Digg plugin to invite others to share your blog. The more your posts are spread around, the more you will be found through search.

Week 3 : Using Video and Podcasting to Help Your Blog Reach the Masses

During this lesson, we will focus on:

1. Basics of creating a video and audio (we will not be spending a great deal of time on this subject)

2. Building a YouTube channel for optimizing your blog.

3. How to share and tag videos on your blog to pull your target market to your blog.

4. How to share your videos for free with the top seven video sharing sites.

5. Turning your video collection or podcast collection into a mini “feed” to submit your blog to iTunes.

6. Becoming a radio start using the largest internet radio site on the internet: Blog Talk Radio

Week 4: Social Networking

1. How to choose the social networking sites that will be most useful for your marketing goals.

2. The “Big 5″ Social Networking Sites: The pros and the cons.

3. How to schedule your week for social networking.

4. Connecting your blog to the social networking sites so that current blog posts are automatically sent to the world of social networks.

Week 5: All About Feedburner

1. How to “burn” your feed so that anyone, anywhere can read your blog.

2. How to optimize feedburner for the best results for your blog.

3. How to publicize your feed, including getting people to subscribe by email to your blog feed.

4. How to invite people to add your feed to their favorite reader.

Week 6: Using Your Sidebar to Market Your Blog

1. The most important information to add to your sidebar.

2. Choosing a subscription management system for your business and adding an opt in box to your sidebar using a compelling offer to get people to sign up for your mailing list.

3. How to add social networking icons and “like” buttons to your sidebar to co-market your social networking sites on your blog.

4. Promoting your authored books in your sidebar using the Amazon widget system.

5. Plugins and widgets available for use in your sidebar.

These are just the “basics” of what we will be covering. There are over 100 methods used to market your blog, and you will be given a list of these during the course.

Marketing Your WordPress Blog

Meeting Dates and Times: 01/09/2012-02/13/2012 from 1:00-3:00 PM US/Eastern. This 6-week course will be focused on all of the ins and outs of marketing a WordPress blog that is hosted on your own domain. If you are using another blog platform, you will still benefit from the program, and there will be times when the information will not apply to your platform. The program includes 4 (90 minute) private coaching sessions with Bea Fields. For more information, visit this page for full details.

Price: $375.00

If you are unable to check out using the above system, you may check out through the catalog system through the Bea Fields Companies, Inc. website: http://beafields.com/catalog. The item is at the bottom of the page.

Today, Monday, December 19, Dr.  Ron Paul has raised over $4,100,000.00.

His secret?  Online social networking through Facebook, Twitter and You Tube.

He also has a powerful tool in his pocket:  The under 30 voter.  While voter apathy is a concern with this demographic, voter turnout for President Obama showed that the under 30 crowd pushed him over the top.  There are over 78 million voters under the age of 30.  While all are not registered, even 5% of this demographic is close to 4 million voters.  The reason for Generation Y’s support of Dr. Paul?  Generation Y’s biggest value is freedom, and Dr. Paul has been talking freedom for the last 24 years

Just watch this video below, and you will hear more about why the youngest demographic is behind the veteran Congressman.  And…just a side note.  Most Gen Y’s will tell you that they listen more to their grandparents than their parents.  They see wisdom and experience in our more senior leaders.

The point here is this:  You may or may not like Ron Paul, but he has proved to us all that if you are blogging and bombarding online social networks with your name and message, that online social networking works!  As a business owner, you too can make this happen, but only with commitment and a team of people who can spread your message to the masses.  This approach to fundraising worked for President Obama and it is working for Dr. Paul.

Video from the Jay Leno show last week:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMUZIVYuluc

Are You Ready To Blog? Answer These 5 Questions Before You Get Started

Before you begin to blog, you must know your target audience and as much about them.  As a blogger, these are the 5 most critical questions you need to ask before you write your first post.

1.  Who is your target market?  Gather this information:

• Age
• Education level
• Gender
• Do they own or rent?
• Hobbies
• What is keeping them awake at night?

2.  What is your target market searching for online?

If no one in your target market is searching for your topic, chances are pretty good they won’t find you.   If you don’t know what your target market is searching for online, the best way to find out is to ask them.

3.  What does your target market most want to achieve in life, business, family, community or politics?

Everyone has a goal, and as a blogger, it is your job to find out what your target market really wants out of life.

4. As a blogger, are you going to be a reporter or an original writer?

Many bloggers simply report news.  Many write original posts.  I recommend doing a bit of both, yet writing original content is what the public is searching for online.

5.  What is the most current trend circling around your target market?

The attention span of the public is short, so do your best to take advantage of a current trend that is important to your target market.

How Will Google Plus Affect SEO? (readwriteweb.com)

On the other hand, people do want to know that you know your stuff.  So, if you are a business owner, here are the 20 reasons I believe you should blog, and these are all from my own personal experiences of having been a blogger since 2005.

1.   To establish credibility.  Once you learn to blog, your articles can demonstrate your knowledge and your true commitment to your industry.

2.   To repurpose articles, podcasts and video. If you have a library of articles you have written, you can use a tool such as Article Architect or Article Spinner to rewrite an oldie but goody article as a blog post.

3.   To increase your ranking on Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo.  Search engines love blogs, because search engines love valuable, rich content.  If you are truly committed to blogging on a regular basis (at least two times per week), your site will get crawled more frequently and a stronger ranking in the search engines.

4.   Your own work is showcased on your own blog on your own domain. With a blog, your articles live on your own site, not on an article directory or on another domain like WordPress.com, Blogspot or Typepad.

5.   Your blog entries live online forever. Unless you get banned from the search engines, your blog posts will live on the internet for a lifetime (unless the search engines choose to delete old posts).

6.    On a self hosted blog, you can do just about anything to make it look great and function the way you want it to. By using plugins (similar to apps for an iPhone), you can add audio, video, slide shows, photographs, opt in boxes, pop up windows, advertising, your recent tweets on Twitter and scores of other things to make your blog the hub of your marketing.

7.    With a self hosted blog, you can invite other people to become guest authors for your blog. Once you get into guest authoring, those authors will link back to your blog, giving you more visibility and more strength on Google

8.    With a self hosted blog, you are in control of your site…not someone else. Many business owners complain that their assistant or webmaster holds the keys to their websites, and they are often left stranded without a way to get into their websites to make changes or update the site.  With a blog, it is simple…you log in, find your page you want to update, and in five minutes, you are up and running.

9.    To post upcoming events. With a blog, you can host an events page and place a nice events logo in the sidebar of your blog.

10.  You automatically get a link building structure. With a blog, you can categorize posts, use a search feature and a recent posts section to make it easy for visitors to find the information they want to find.

11.  With a blog, you can syndicate it using something called RSS (Real Simple Syndication). With RSS, people can download your blog into their reader, subscribe by email to read your blog or add it to their desktop reader in a snap.

12.  Each time you blog, you are adding one more content rich page to your blog for Google to grab. With a website, you may have 10-20 pages,  With a blog, you can have 1,000 content rich pages.  In one year alone, if you choose to blog every day, you can build 365 new pages with rich content that Google will grab and pull into their system.  By adding strong keywords to each post you write, people who may have never heard of you can find you by using unique keywords designed for niche audiences.

13.  You can design pages to include content that is unique to you. With the newer WordPress templates, you can build a blog that looks just like a website, which includes pages which look just like static pages.  The only difference is that once again…you are in control of what you put on your pages and how you update and change those pages.

14.  Each time you write a post, you can optimize that post for Google and the other big search engines. Studio Press offers templates which come with an area to fill out all information for the search engines, including the Title of your blog, description and keywords.  The same mission can be accomplished using a plugin by the name of the All In One SEO Pack.

15.  You will become a much better writer. If you blog on a consistent basis, trust me….you will become a better writer.

16.  You will become a more creative thinker. With a blog, it is often hard to think of “what to write about”, and with some creative thinking, you can pull a subject that is indirectly related to your niche and tie it back in to a topic your target audience will want to read.

17.  You can make money from blogging. For more on this topic, read our post 12 Ways to Make Money By Blogging.

18.  You will expand your network. In the last four years, I have met over 500 people that I either did not know or only knew by name.  I now feel that my network is stronger and more personal.

19.  You can use your blog posts to jumpstart a strong profile and posts on the social networks. With a few tools added to your blog, your posts can automatically be sent to Facebook,  Twitter, Linked In and about 20 other social networking sites.

20.  Hosting a blog can either be no cost or very low cost. To operate a self hosted blog on a hosting company like Host Gator or Blue Host can be as low as $6.00 per month.  To build your blog, you can use free templates or buy a template for about $59.00.  This is so much cheaper than a website designed by someone for $2500-5000.00.  I know…I’ve been that route, and I felt like I really was not getting what I truly wanted from this process.  Because blog templates are so inexpensive, I can change my look whenever I want it without feeling the pinch in my wallet.

Sign Up Today for Become a Blogging Maniac

Amazon S3 is a great storage system, and it is very, very inexpensive.  I pay about $2.00 per month for them to back up 4 blogs and about another $2.00 if I upload large videos.  So, it is a wonderful service for anyone wanting to back up and store large websites, blogs, video, power point presentations or audio presentations.

Sign Up Today for Become a Blogging Maniac

Just click on her link above to read it…has some great info in it.

1. Write great content and sell coaching, consulting and technical services.

2. Sell your own digital products.  Pdf white papers, research reports, podcasts, tutorials, e-books, powerpoint presentations, assessments and video presentations are top sellers.  Just make sure the content is yours (written by you), valuable, original and beautifully presented.  The internet is saturated with digital content, so make sure it is worth selling.

3. Sell other people’s products for an affiliate fee. When selling other programs for an affiliate fee, make sure you have purchased and/or used the product and that you feel great about endorsing and selling the product on your blog.  Also, add a line to the page which states that you are receiving an affiliate fee by endorsing this product (required by the Federal Trade Commission).   You can start the search for affiliate products by going to Clickbank, but I would be more inclined to contact the people you know to see what types of affiliate fees they pay and more about the programs you can sell for them.

4. Sell advertising in your sidebar. In order to sell advertising in your sidebar, you are going to need to prove that your site is receiving a very large volume of traffic (thousands of new visitors every month) .  You will want to look at your Google Page rank (a rank above 5 is a strong selling point), your Alexa ranking and then see what your competitors are charging for their ads.  To get an idea of what blog ads are going for these days, visit, BlogAds or Digital Point to get a ballpark idea on selling advertising.

5. Write book reviews for authors. When you become a well known blogger, everyone and their grandmother will be asking you to “read my book” and endorse it.  This could become a full time job.  I recommend that you ask for a chapter of the book, look at the website connected to the book and who is already endorsing the book and then make the decision if you will write the review.  This forum answer on Kindle will give you an answer as to how much to actually charge…basically what you feel comfortable charging.  You can also simply go to Google and type in “How much should I charge for a book review?” and see what pops up.

6. Sell text links inside a blog post. If you have a “links page”, there are not many people who will visit that page or have any interest in it.  But, if you are writing a blog post and insert a text link inside the post, then the chances of that link getting clicked goes way up.  I recommend starting with $10.00 per link and see where that takes you.

7. Promote public speaking with a media and public speaking page. I am amazed at how many people do not have a media page on their blogs.  In today’s world, this is critical if you are a trainer or public speaker.  For more information on what to include, you can view my media kit on my Bea Fields Companies blog.  You will also want a speaker one sheet, so check out how Nathan Brown designed mine:  Download Bea Fields’ Speaker One Sheet. To see more about what to include in your press kit, visit PressKit247 to take a peek at what other people are adding to their kits.

8. If you offer ANY free services, extras, comp sessions, add a Pay Pal donation button to your sidebar. Add a Pay Pal donation button and a call to action that reads something like this:  ” If you feel you have received benefit from our complimentary consultations or content you have received from our blog, we do accept donations if you are inclined to donate to the blog.  Our commitment is to continuing to provide value, and your donations are greatly appreciated.”  WordPress offers a plugin to add a Pay Pal donation button to your sidebar or you can build your own.  Here is a great article on eHow on the process for adding a donation button to your blog.

9. Sell your blog on Amazon using Kindle. With Kindle Publishing, you can now add your blog as an item to actually sell on Kindle.   Just head over to Kindle Publishing and start the submission process.

10. Sell your services on Craig’s List.  This is a bit of a long shot, but if you are someone who offers say a one time service like blog set up, sales letter writing, copywriting, graphic design or the like, you can post an ad on Craig’s list and send people to your blog to view your portfolio.

11. Offer a recurring monthly membership fee on your site. I have to say that this approach is not as popular as it once was during a booming economy.  People are shying away from recurring monthly fees.  Having said that, if your content is truly unique, valuable, attractive and cannot be found anywhere else on the internet, then go for it!  I would recommend that you have at least 50 items in your digital library before you begin selling a monthly fee and then add 10 items every month, or you will lose subscribers.

12. Sell other products using Google Adsense. Many people sell on their blogs using Google Adsense.  With correct programming, Google Adsense can automatically populate ads on your site each time you write a post.  As with point 1, you will want to make sure that your content is really strong and valuable and that it is optimized for the search engines.  Otherwise, people will not be clicking on your Google Adsense ads.  There is also one tiny catch here…you cannot really determine what ads will show on your site.   If you are a business consultant, an ad for pet products may pop up, so just know that before going down this road.

In closing, here is what I would recommend.  If you are going to use the above 12 points, I would highly recommend opening a blog about internet marketing, running an online store, how to make money on the internet or anything related to making more money.  Then, use the above techniques as a way to not only make money but to model to others how to use this approach.  If you are trying to position yourself as someone who markets to high level executives, the world of academics or an elite professional audience, the above sales-oriented approach with banner ads, advertising and Google adsense may (may is the operative word here) turn your target market away.  Just know that hundreds, if not thousands, of people make money using the above approaches, and if you are dedicated to this on a daily basis, you can make money while you sleep.

So, if you are ready to start making money by blogging, Sign up today for Become a Blogging Maniac