Pinterest SportsClone Update and WSO Coaching

Published: Sat, 06/21/14

Two Big Topics Today
Happy Summer, everyone!  I was melting in Arizona so taking a nice break in the cool NE USA and enjoying some wonderful rain.  (We don't see a lot of that at home!)

The rain must have energized my brain because I've got two things to share with you today.  Jump to whichever one interests you the most (or read both).  

FIRST TOPIC:  There's a NEW coaching opportunity (NOT review sites) available with limited spots. I'd like to work with a group of folks who are interested in creating their own products to sell on the WarriorForum.  

SECOND TOPIC: An update on my SportsClone site and some tips for getting more out of that strategy through Pinterest.  These tips will be useful even if you didn't get SportsClone or if you got one of the other clone stores like ToyStoreClone.
PRODUCT CREATION COACHING
Many of you know that I have several income streams.  Amazon is one but I also write and sell ebooks.  I enjoy testing strategies, finding what works, documenting the process and making it available to others to replicate.  

I KNOW that there are many of YOU who would thoroughly enjoy (and financially benefit from) being able to create and sell your own products on the WarriorForum.  

Maybe you've had ideas for your own products but you're afraid they've already been done, that no one will buy because they don't know you, or you think you don't have the skills to pull off promoting your product.  

I felt the EXACT same way when I started.  

When I launched my first ebook I had no affiliates, no plan for promotion, and no email list.  Today, I have a thriving ebook business and have sold 19,161 ebooks for a net profit of over $200,000 in just over 3 years.

I have contact with a lot of you.  I can't tell you how many times I've felt so sure that I'm speaking with someone who could do the same but there's always an excuse for why they aren't giving it a shot - fear, doubt, uncertainty, lack of knowledge about how to proceed.  

Is that you?  Are you sitting on an idea, an ebook, a thought for a business that you've just not been able to push forward?  

It's really hard to take action when it's just you and there's something holding you back.  The same information overload you feel as an affiliate marketer hits us as product creators, too.  

One myth that stands in the way is that you think if you're not making money online you have nothing to offer.  That is so not true.  

Internet marketers need to know how to DO certain tasks - create videos, write better, make great images, use certain tools, do keyword research, create ads, generate traffic, design plug-ins, make WordPress look good, make Blogger look like a professional site, find topics to add to their sites, and master SEO.  They need tools to complete repetitive tasks. The list is endless!

You probably know how to do something really well that other people want to learn more about.  You may know how to create tools (or have already created tools) that make your internet marketing life easier that others would love to have.   

It's time to take action and profit from that knowledge.   

There's a limited opportunity for 15 people who want to launch their own products and need a guiding hand.  

If you sell your own products and promote them on the WarriorForum there are HUGE benefits:

  • No waiting for money to show up from a commission check - payment is instant
  • Products can generate income for years
  • You can build an email list - significant protection against anything Google might do to your sites or affiliate income
  • Instant interest from a forum with huge membership

One-on-one coaching is available for 15 people for a six week course that will help you get from idea to product launch.

The coaching covers:
  • Idea generation
  • Product creation
  • Creating your sales tools
  • How to set up your email list
  • Creating the sales page for the WarriorForum (and getting that page approved)
  • Establishing your buy buttons
  • PayPal payment processing
  • Getting, reviewing, and approving affiliates
  • Launching your product
  • Promoting your product
  • Post sale customer service
  • Leveraging your product for more income
  • Planning future products
  • Managing your email list

I will be reviewing everything you create along the way, providing step by step instructions for each step of the process, and helping you make necessary contacts as needed to take your idea from start to finish including the actual launch of your product.

There are some requirements you MUST meet to be eligible for this program:
  • Must be able to write proper English (this is mandatory)
  • Must have a verified PayPal account that can take payments from multiple countries
  • Must have or be willing to get an email service like Aweber
  • Ability to purchase a few tools to create sales pages if you do not already have some of these available to you (photo editing tools, convert to PDF tool, ebook/ecover creator) - estimated cost if you have none of these is <$100 if you'll do these yourself (more if you outsource)
  • Your own domain to host some pages for your email list
  • Ability to pay for a WSO thread and buy buttons (est cost $40)

The six week course starts July 5th. 

Sign ups will be taken on a first come, first serve basis.  Only 15 spots are open.

Payment for the course locks in your spot.  

The cost is $1197.  I have spoken to PayPal and they've explained that for anyone who has seen the Bill Me Later option in PayPal that you should be able to use that to pay over six months if I invoice you for the course (which I'll do).  

If you are interested in this course, let me know as soon as you can as I will not be able to expand beyond the 15 spots.  Overseeing every detail of 15 product creators will require a great deal of time on my part and I'm committed to insuring you produce a quality product.  

Email your questions or interest to me at erica@extremereviewer.com
SPORTSCLONE PINTEREST UPDATE & TIPS
In the last email I had just set up my SportsClone site and had not yet started working on Pinterest.  I've since built up my Pinterest profile and started to gather followers and pin items from the site.  You can see my Pinterest profile here:   http://www.pinterest.com/esportsdeals/.  I think seeing that example will give some of you a better understanding of how to set up your own profiles.  

So far, I've had 171 clicks over to Amazon.  No sales yet, though. Clicks however, are the first goal and a win in my mind.  That's what leads to sales so I'm certainly getting closer.  

I spent the initial few days building up the boards and followers so until a few days ago I'd only pinned 5 items from my SportsClone site to my boards.  A couple of days ago I ramped that up to 21 items shared.  

Getting clicks is a function of having targeted followers who are seeing your pins and the number of pins from your site that you share.  Just remember not to pin ONLY items from your site or your visitors are going to lose interest.  Spread it out so that you're pinning other kinds of content from other sites, too.  

I'm using a combination of strategies to pin my site posts to Pinterest.  I'd had a discussion with Amazon about pinning their images to Pinterest.  I'd believed (or read or been told) that you could not pin Amazon images from your site to Pinterest.  However, I had a discussion with Amazon Associates support recently that said the opposite.  I saved the details of that chat discussion.  I am NOT suggesting you do the same.  I'm not 100% confident that the Amazon Associates support rep really knew what he was talking about.  However, I have documentation to back me up should anything happen.  I am only suggesting that you may want to have your own discussion with Amazon Associates support to see what they say while you work out your own image pinning strategy.  

I'm pinning some posts using the Amazon image but also creating my own images with http://banner.fotor.com.  For some of them I'm following the tips I found on this site:  
http://christianmommyblogger.com/pinterest-worthy-graphics/.

Banner.fotor does have an editing option that lets you increase the transparency of items in your images.  On a couple I've used stock images as the background but for others I've used only the clip art and tools inside Banner.fotor.

Once I've created an image, I do a search in my list of posts inside Wordpress to find the post I'm working on and insert the image into the content.  Then I use the Pin It button in my browser to pin that post using the image I inserted.  Sometimes I've noticed that the image I inserted disappears from my post after the cron job has run.  That's okay - the image is still in Pinterest with the proper link back to my site.  I don't reinsert it - the image is in Pinterest doing what I want it to do.   

Getting followers is easy but I'm sure you've noticed not all of the people you follow are going to be interested in your topics.  Don't follow people who seem to be all about fashion if your topic is sports.  Find active, sports-related boards and focus on following the people following those boards.  

At the same time, you want people who seem to pin or repin a fair amount.  Don't follow people who only have a handful of pins. Chances are good they're never going to repin anything you share.  

The other thing you run into with followers is that many won't follow you back.  I think profiles that have 1000 followers but are following 20,000 people look "desperate".  Maybe that's just me.  But following people who don't follow you back means you see all of their pins and they don't see any of yours.  Those people are never going to be of any value to you unless you're specifically following them to find items related to your own boards so you can repin.  

I use an Excel spreadsheet every few days to help me find people in my Following list who have not followed me back (and who I have not purposefully followed because they're pinning sports topics) and unfollow them to keep my proportion of Followers/Following more in line.  

To do this, I bring up two tabs in my browser.  One tab shows my list of Followers and the other shows my list of Following.  

I then use the End button on my keyboard to get to the very bottom of each page.  

Right click and Select All on your list of Followers.  Paste into Notepad.  Copy that list and paste into Column 1 of your spreadsheet.

Repeat the above for the list of Following but paste the results into Column 2 of your spreadsheet.  

I give people a few days to follow back. If they haven't followed back by then I assume they're not very active.  To make sure I don't unfollow someone I've JUST started following who hasn't had a few days to follow back I delete the top few hundred people in the Following column of my spreadsheet.

Now, the spreadsheet shows a couple of lines for each follower but if you sort each column separately from Z to A you'll have all the names at the top and all the other data at the bottom.

I then run a CountIf formula to compare the names in Column 2 to the names in Column 1 so that anyone in the Following list who is not also in the Followers list will have a 0 next to their name.  I then manually copy each of the names with a 0 and use my browser's Edit/Find option to locate that person in my list of Following and unfollow them.  

Over time, if you're building good boards people like you'll find that you have more Followers than people you're Following.  I think this gives new possible followers a better impression about your profile and boards.  

Pins have a short shelf life so you can't just pin posts one day - you've got to pin some every day while also growing followers and building your boards.  Just make sure not to pin ONLY posts from your site.  You can remove pins that didn't get a lot of attention and repin them to a board or test them with a new image.

These SportsClone sites can have thousands of posts.  I don't plan on pinning every one of them to Pinterest.  I choose items that look interesting, solve a problem, are cool, unique, or new and might become trendy.  

I've also found a Pinterest-like site that focuses on sports.  I have NOT had a chance to check this site out other than to use it to find sports related items to pin to my own boards.  I scan the items in the sports section, follow the link back to the source, see if there's a pin it button and then pin interesting items to my Pinterest profile from that original source.  

However, it may be that you could use this site to create a profile and mirror the Pinterest strategy for your SportsClone site and gain exposure to a whole new group of very sports-interested followers.  READ THE TOS BEFORE DOING SO and explore the site to see how it works.  The site is http://lockerdome.com. 

Good luck and, as always, let me know if you have any questions and have a great weekend!


Sincerely,

Erica Stone
erica@extremereviewer.com