A good friend and fellow I met in the “forex era” is a super entrepreneurial type and asks me questions about the web on marketing facets and such. This is the question, at length…
“Do I have to LIKE a product to SELL it? I think if you liked the product you’d be a better seller of said product. But, I’m open to input. ”
My Answer:
“Not necessarily have to like the product.
What it does take, is a goal to make money from a product’s sales result though. It also helps to have knowledge so when you write content on a product, that you have a good idea somewhat of the scope of the product.
If you like the money the product brings, I am sure with an open mind and a drive to make results, there shouldn’t be a problem.
There are some folks who originally were not receptive to selling or promoting sex toys because of a cultural taboo or a stigma that went along.
The anonymity of the web has absolutely quashed this usual roadblock as those who once wouldn’t dare associates themselves with a certain product niche, are pushing product like wildfire.
It really depends on you more or less. Push yourself into a niche and see if you can make it perform over a certain period. The great thing with affiliate marketing is that you do not need to invest in products or secure warehouse space to sell anything. It is all about pushing stuff on the web.”
(DISCLAIMER a small preface, as the Fuckup Autopilot Turbo is in no reference to any Forex product out there such as FAP turbo, even any of the Systems that I have promoted, such as the Funnel, Tracer, or Detector)
Can you pretty much do what the title suggests? Make your own network?
Well, you could probably start some large CPA or CPS network if you really wanted to, but in all honesty, these networks have hundreds of people working for them and have a huge reputation that seamlessly lets them acquire clients from all over the place.
Well, today, we are going to talk about what is going on here at the labs at Vanbrunt Group.
Next week, we are looking to start the breakout of what is going to be an interesting new division here, local marketing.
Now the interesting thing here is, that we are not looking to create the next pepperjam, or clickbank, or anything on a national level obviously. What I am looking to do, is create opportunities for local businesses to get more exposure, and more sales through building marketing campaigns that performance based.
As fellow marketer Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) has said in his local affiliate marketing post, that companies in this tough market and economy are more than willing to give a small piece of the pie of each closed lead or sale, rather than paying some major lump sum for some exposure to the world.
As of next week, I will be assembling a local marketing campaign for a local airsoft gun dealer. The great thing here is that, he had an expectation of pushing a certain level of output, but I told him with the internet, we could quite push their number exponentially.
But always remember, do your research on the product and the demographic that the client wants to reach. There is a reason why they want to sell a certain range of products to a certain range of customers. Open them up to a new possibility or a new demo group once you have heard their side of the story.
Once you have the information of knowing your demographic, then do your research. Look for blogs, forums, groups, and websites that specialize in your niche, and mine as much information as you can.
See what is the most popular product or services, and see what other items go best. It is always said, that a well prepared package of ideas wins the expo, and that the second best, is always the first loser.
Either using a single item or a package methodology of pushing sales, remember who you are trying to market to. The lesser experienced, newbie who is looking to get started in digital photography wants a package deal that comes with the SLR digital camera. They need a bag, a camera strap, memory card, lenses, and a lens cleaning kit and extended warranty. The more experienced photographer might go for a package deal as a bargin, but sometimes tend to look into getting single items as they know more and more of what they want exactly in a product.
The ability to cater to the experience level and budget of each customer demographic is crucial to the survival of your business. If you cannot identify your customer and their needs, then what the fuck are you doing running a business? You have to solve problems with solutions, right? you just cannot be someone who just slings products out to the general public with little or no thought on providing solutions. It is like throwing snickers bars out to kids who could be allergic to peanuts as it could be a complete miss, or a total disaster.
As an internet marketer, you should know by now, or hopefully soon enough, how to identify your market. It is not just about throwing “Fuckup AutoPilot Turbo” and some pointless 350 word mix of jibberish and then a call to action. You need to tailor your words and topic to the demographic that you would know could best benefit to your product solution.
But not only should you make a targeted appeal for such demographic, but also put that appeal in the correct channels.
Use a multitude of different places rather than some throwaway blog or hub site. Firstly, create a blogsite or landing page to “sell” your idea. Instead of using a general topic article site such as Ezinearticles or Squidoo all of the time, perhaps for a few articles or blogs you should concentrate on using a niche based blog, or forum to push your product. So where should you market “Fuckup Autopilot turbo?”, in forex blogs and forums. this provides you more traffic, and visits from a more precisely targeted group of folks, “YOUR DEMOGRAPHIC THAT YOU WANTED IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!”
(AND NO THAT DOESN’T MEAN SPAM GOFOREXTRADE.COM. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE! LOL)
Sticking to the relavence of the topic today, marketing anything, rather it is the fuckup autopilot turbo, or the mobile massage chair 3000, shares so much characteristics for when it comes to marketing. Marketing is not a science of complex ratios, moving averages and stochastics, that is for Forex. Marketing, is just finding a crowd that likes something or needs something that you can provide, and properly finding them, and trading their funds for your product. That is what it’s all about!
Push it on a local business, have them work a system of tracking and for each sale, make a few dollars here and there. You will know if you are successful, when this system reaches critical mass, and the sales are heavy, and then with the funds you made from marketing their product, you can buy that nice new widget you always wanted, a brand spanking new mobile massage chair 3000!
MAKE SOME MAD MOFO’ING CASH FOLKS!!!
Happy Hump Day!
Thomas Howell
Today, is your call to action to get off of your ass and do something!
As an internet marketer, or a business owner, or anything in the world of making money online, you have to have an action plan and a drive, but most importantly, you have to execute.
“Today, is going to be an awesome day and I am going to make an awesome campaign” should be going through your head. With the tools that easily available on the web, from the numerous forums, to my wednesday column, to advice from publishers and affiliate network managers, you really have no reason why you cannot start a success on the internet.
But remember, the most important thing to do, is to do! EXECUTE!!! Do not be an architect who has building plans and doesn’t put them to use! Build that monster of a campaign, and let it all roll out! Make an interesting case for someone to buy that product over the competition.
Why haven’t you been a success in this already? Are you scared? Are you fearful of not making it, or fearful of being a success?
One time, I did a really interesting thing for a friend who wanted to get into internet marketing. Of course he was in another part of the country at the time, and I had to mail him a gift. This gift, was a 4 GB SanDisk Cruzer Mini USB flash drive.
I told my friend, that this thumb drive, has close to $100,000 in educational product inside, and to some, it is quite invaluable. Do you want to know the contents of this flash drive? I know you do!
The funny thing was, that inside the flash drive wasn’t Alex Goad’s hot new “Method of the Month” product, or Ewen Chia’s Blog your ass off to the bank, or any of those types of products.
It was matter in fact only one text file, with one paragraph, lol! A single paragraph, which was worth $100,000, or as much value as you wanted to put onto it.
The paragraph was, as read “Marc, you can only be as successful as your efforts to push yourself. I can give you all of the materials needed for internet marketing, but the real winners in internet marketing do not follow a book or a guru, but instead their drives and passion. Trial and error is the truest method of education and with the experiences that follow, that will make you the success that you want to be.”
He was shocked, but got the message quickly. The key understanding here is that no matter what book you buy, what seminar you take, the real money here, is with experience, and learning each and every time you have a failure or a stumbling block. I know I have greatly covered this last week.
Honestly, if you want to know what I did to get to where I am today, I might have gotten a book at first, and followed the cautious advice of publishers and such, but it was more about being a trailblazer and just thinking flat out of the box which pushed me to my methods of madness. And, Do not forget; GET OFF OF YOUR ASS AND EXECUTE YOUR CAMPAIGN!!!
Have an awesome week, and for my american fans, have an AWESOME Turkey day!!!
Firstly, I would like to apologize for not posting this awesome series of articles for the last few weeks as my life has been consumed with a few “new” objectives and goals which were freshly obtained and looking to be executed shortly. We will hopefully see the fruits of the labor in the short term, as well in a longer range too!
Today’s topic is about not rushing to becoming a superaffiliate and actually taking your time to succeed.
All over the place, you see all sorts of ads from radio, craigslist, random google searches, late night informercials and myspace box ads showing you that you can make money online. They make it seem like it is a fun, crazy, jamboree of an experience with doing the tasks of making money online.
You probably know what I am talking about, in reference to massively marketed systems, but we will not mention the names to protect identities. If you have ever heard the word “There is a sucker born every minute,”.It is the absolute sad reality. The ideologies of most “gurus” that promise get rich quick results as soon as you do one task, in a short amount of time sounds tempting, and of course it always bites the customer in the ass almost every time. For the most part, for the average person, the failure rate is over 90%.
The reality here, is despite all of the bullshit and crap that you see online, television, print, radio, etc. is that there is a core of tried and true internet marketers that know that all is possible, but it doesn’t come overnight. A statement of success that is truly contrarian at best compared to the “gurus” ridiculous slapstick bullshit that they have been pushing.
If you want to be successful, first of all, you have to realize that nothing is easy, nor does it arrive overnight. I once saw a statement from an affiliate meetup group organizer in the NYC area, which read “First, we have to push as much failures as we can before we can start the success path.” At first, I was scratching my head with his thoughts on trial and error. But his message became absolute gospel to me after thinking a while over why we need to fail in order to succeed.
I also ran this thought with my brother Josh while doing chinese food the other day. Josh tells me and I have to agreed wholeheartedly, that failure is when you really your learn your lessons in life and you happen to configure yourself better, to become the better, more organized, well experienced person than before that failure.
It is kinda like Failure connotates a level of experience that helps decide a better track, on a road less traveled, or a thought that could somewhat solves what the problem originally was. This is the end of my failure explanation.
Next, realize with having so many failures, maybe instead of saying “fuck everything” and dropping the ball, keep the ball and keep dribbling the rubber sphere until you can get past the guards and make a better attempt to score a point.
Having the persistence of having the goal in mind, and willing to put up with the cycle of adventure that lies within once more could quite possibly be just enough to score that goal. I remember two and a half years ago, when I started learning php/mysql that I was getting really frusterated with technology, and just wanted to drop everything.
I realized that i have accomplished just about everything that I wanted to do with programming php. What I didn’t realize was, that I was sans a Quotation mark in the SQL string, and because I saw my failure and persisted to learn how to properly write SQL strings, I actually caused a small, but to my mind a freaking huge succcess! I was able to store, and manipulate content data! MAN I WAS PSYCHED!!!
The same remains true for Internet marketing, or whatever goals that you want to accomplish. If you are seeing a line of zeroes in your stats report on clickbank, cj, azoogle, adsense, or whatever affiliate network. Or maybe that you are seeing no sales or conversions with what you are trying to sell, maybe there might be a glitch or two.
Think of the product that you are trying to sell, or the service that you trying to promote. Are you not hitting the correct demographics? Are you not putting out enough content and linkages to create enough traffic? Just think that there is some reason, which with a little hard work and effort, and a drive to say “fuck you” to failure, and hello to completing goals, you shall, and can make it!!!
And as I mentioned earlier, it is not about making the quick buck. Write a blog post and two hours later expect sales to beat your weekly income at your day job. DREAM ON!!! It is about making persistence and pushing yourself to place many links, many reviews, some landing pages, test test test and test, and then repeat.
That is my two cents for now. Now you are probably thinking that I am some type of hypocrite when I mention folks such as Alex Goad and a good pal of mine, Norb Czufis from NC Media. let me tell you from personal experience, that NEITHER of these guys are of the get rich quick type. They are not multi-super-fucking millionaires, and for what they do, they have busted ass for years in marketing strategies and failing on occasion.
If you think all they do is push a button and look pretty, this is absolutely not the picture that you should be painting. They just know how to hide the trial and error, but show a great level of passion and love for the game of the internet dollar.
This week on Adventures in Internet Marketing, I want to cover something that might just give you another edge in this game we call internet marketing – Channels.
Channels, being different traffic methods to bring traffic to your landing page, and/or have such traffic convert and make a sale or lead.
Being in the internet marketing game seriously about 7 months now, I have been looking at different ways of generating traffic throughout the internet. Believe it or not, there are some affiliates who stick to one form of traffic building, and actually eat pretty good off of the “Digital Traffic.”
And then there is some, who happen to split their campaign into different channels to get the neccessary traffic. For example, the vertical that is being marketed, probably benefits from not only adwords or other PPC marketing strategy, but also a Viral market strategy such as You Tube Videos.
I am going to cover five different ideas for you to build traffic. Hopefully some of the self professed “gurus” will not hang me for this one! lol!
1. Bum Marketing/Article Marketing. Simply, writing 300-500 word articles indirectly and directly promoting products. From what alot of so called gurus state on their sales pages, they make it sound like this is easy and that within a month, you can make $200 a day.
Not to let you in for a Rude Awakening, but there is alot that has to go into bum marketing. Believe it or not, there are internet and affiliate marketers who are extremely successful doing this, but it is just not about writing an article with affiliate link and throwing it up to see if it sticks.
What is going to make the difference between making no sales, getting discouraged, and potentially making sales? First of all, a strong level of SEO is needed to take into consideration. For a while, you would think, just throwing an article, with the product’s name and some silly phrase would be good enough to attract traffic.
If the product is new, it will not catch the grasp for customers at first. When you write an article, you must have a consideration of a general topic that this product fits into, and use that keyword. Usually for higher competition products, pick a longer tail keyword that gets at least 20 searches and has a phrase match (search term with quotes on google, i.e. “Forex Systems”). That would help a bit with traffic, and also help increase the conversion too!
300-500 words tops. Just enough wordage to engage the reader to click on your link and sell them on the product’s purpose. Let’s cover the next traffic method, twitter.
2. Twitter. A social microblogging website, which I have been a member for some time, and I have seen some benefits with using this service. Twitter is a free service, and allows you to type to your “followers” (kinda like myspace friends) and send them not only public directly messages, but also private messages to your friends directly, or to everybody on your list!
The beauty of Twitter, is that it hooks up to an SMS service, which lets you receive and even send tweets (twitter messages) away from the computer. The rise of Adobe Air backed apps, such as Spaz and Twhirl are now bringing social media to a software level, and even the iPhone has a twitter application to send tweets. How convenient.
Marketing with twitter is probably going to have the same feel as marketing with email. Now considering the fact that you can only have 140 characters per message, you need to have an intriguing, “fast to hit the gut” type message, and also contain a link to the landing page. As time grows and Twitter goes to more stable ground with advances in their site development, I believe Twitter will be the next frontier in marketing.
3. Email. List marketing is a long standing, highly profitable, highly coverting, and highly successful form of internet marketing. Being used for many, many years before bum marketing, and viral marketing even took their first breath, List marketers have been making some serious bread.
Lists are great for when product vendors, publishers, or service providers are about to launch a product, and are a potential goldmine. Alex Goad’s “Four Tier Annihilation Method” had earned him on clickbank, close to a quarter million on launch week, then the sales kinda dipped afterwards, but was sustainable! List marketing is what is usually responsible for a huge part of the launch success.
To have a successful list, you need to make sure your list members are laser targeted to the niche/vertical that you are promoting. Do not try to push a Forex product on a list that is geared for the Making Money Online niche.
How do you build the list? not easy but then again not difficult either.
A successful method, is called a giveaway. Getting ebooks and other goodies to giveaway could be acquired by finding PLR or Private Label Rights material geared in the targeted niche. Just change the names on the PLR ebooks to your name (which is perfectly legal for PLR), which will help you become more credible and gain authority, and even increase conversions!
To get the email addresses to build lists, Just place a landing page on a domain geared for your product or niche. Next, get a form from an email subscription service such as Aweber or GetResponse, and place right on your landing page.
I would suggest joining a service such as aweber or getresponse, because these are email list marketing services, and can be configured for giveaways, multi-day courses, and now blog broadcasts! They also make sure that the email message can be delivered and bypass spam filters as well! the cost might be around $20-$50 a month, but look at how fast you can get that back through sales!!!!
Also another way to gain people to your list, is doing mutliple day courses. For example, “Free course on how to gain 5 pips in 5 days by learning a new way to Forex Trade” will attract list subscribers, because you are basically giving them information to help better themselves in one way or another. This will not only create authority to your list message, but when you place a launch ad for a new product in your niche, the conversion factor increases!
4. Adwords. PPC marketing is great, and if you know some of the major players in CPA network marketing, such as Shoemoney, John Chow, and Uberaffiliate to name a few, these guys are BIG on cpa networks.
All of them are hardcore on the aspect of using PPC networks such as Adcenter, YSM, and Adwords. Of course there are plenty more networks, but those are the big three, and everybody is the most successful with those. With a properly targeted campaign and a landing page to boot, the conversions could be very profitable.
The PPC market is great for any vertical, and any type of product, rather it is a $2.00 CPA for a zip code submit, or a $97 Clickbank Forex Expert Advisor. You can convert only in a few conditions though.
One is, where you take the PPC traffic to a landing page. No more is it acceptable to direct link to a sales or submit page, because Google will not allow more than one advertiser to direct link, plus, the conversions happen to be way better with the use of a landing page.
Two, Do not worry about being ad numero uno when it comes to bids. Sometimes, the first bid might cost $5.00 and it may price you way out of your Projected EPC (Earnings Per Click) budget. But, the second bid, might cost dramatically less. As long as you can keep yourself within the top two of three ads on a certain keyword, you will have clickthroughs, and conversions if your landing page is in sync with the message of the ad and the product in particular.
Three, Just like with Bum/Article Marketing, do not shoot right for the product name as a primary keyword. Shoot for a more general term, as brand awareness might not be wide enough by recognizing a product’s name.
If you were, for example to market the “Forex Profit Bomb”, instead of using the product’s name, look into using a more generic, long tail word i.e. “Forex Expert Advisor” or “Forex Automated Trade Software.” You can get some clicks, and be surprised when someone purchases said product.
Also get familiar with the google conversion tracking software. You will be able to find out more about tracking conversions, and knowing when to hold campaigns and when to fold them and go somewhere else!
5. YouTube. Awesome way to get traffic to your landing page. Viral video is the way to go, especially with doing raw and candid product reviews, making the appeal to purchase personal, and giving exposure to a newer, previously unobtainable audience.
Now, you don’t just have to do personal webcam shots and plead people to buy or sign up with your product or service, but you can also use a montage video of stills, stock videos, and do voiceovers with product reviews or boardwalk pitches to get people to click on the links or type in a certain website url.
Usually tell the viewers about the product, and point them to the affiliate link or landing page link, which is usually put in the description on the right hand side of the video.
Now that is only for You Tube. There are tons of different video networks out there. Google has one, Vimeo, Veoh, DailyMotion, Blip, MyspaceTV, are a few prime examples of websites to upload videos and gain exposure, and traffic. Not to mention the links to your site add to your backlinks count! Great for SEO!!!
Well, there is my piece for this week’s installment of Adventures In Internet Marketing!
Good luck and make the money!
Tom Howell
GoForexTrade.com
For those who are looking to build content to promote a certain product of service in the world of affiliate marketing, there is plenty of ways to write different blocks of content or articles to either get traffic, entice purchasers to pull out their wallets, and rank better in google and other major search engines.
The following are a few good sorts of information to get you on the way to seamlessly creating content and wordage for promoting products and services…
1. Learn about the niche that you are promoting: Building information about a niche that you are trying to promote takes knowledge and all the better, experience! At the least, research the niche through a wikipedia article, and if possible read an ebook or try to devote some time to get to know more about the niche.
2. For each product or service that you are promoting, find out the numerous reasons why someone would want to take advantage of such product or service. If you take a certain product found either on clickbank or paydotcom, or any of those affiliate networks, you are going to realize that you are seeing at times THOUSANDS of angles being used at promoting a product.
For example, in the forex niche, i promoted the forex brotherhood which is a currency trading/forex trading community which is spearheaded by Jason Alan Jankovsky. Now, the attack method of marketing this product could be numerous. There are ways where you can attract any level of forex trader. Which the newbie trader needs counseling and support to become a trader who can make a livable income, and extends to the more experienced trader, who wants to know how to get an extra few pips out of each trade, and also want a better edge in their trading style.
3. Use one tiny facet advantage of such product or service and believe it or not, you can make a 400-700 word article on the issue. The facet issue can actually be used as a keyword and should be used liberally in the title, first, and last paragraph of each article/post.
4. First greeting paragraph should be inviting, and addressing the issue of why the person clicked for the article in the first place.
5. Final paragraph should give the person the ideal that this product is the one to purchase, and give them a call to action in purchasing such product now! Then place a Strong Call to ACtion with a link to whatever affiliate link or portal site that you are using!
6. Between the first and last paragraphs, keep speaking about the facet topic at length, but start injecting references to the product or service, and start framing a “transfer of ownership” and make the person think how the product would benefit the problem or facet situation.
7. Remember, with article marketing, the more articles you write and release, akin to fishermen casting their nets, the more fish, or more sales rather that you would manifest.
8. Do not forget to place articles, and pages on the website where your landing page is located at. Google loves relevant material, and will rank you higher for having more relevant, keyword heavy articles.
For the website where the landing page is, I would seriously recommend taking a few sub-domains, or sub-folders, and rolling a wordpress for them each. If your host has a one button solution for this, AWESOME! if not, just upload using an FTP the latest version of Wordpress.
9. After the install and selecting an appropriate theme, plan to write an article or two a day, just for these blogs. Using these methods mentioned above, you should be on the way to creating a successful campaign. As you are creating content, do not forget to link back to your landing page, and also link your landing page at the very bottom to several of your blog posts. The long wordpress permalinks will even be more beneficial.
10. More to come! make some money and kick some ass with these current methods and you could very well be on the way to making some serious damage with affiliate marketing!!!!
No matter how you promote products on the web or in offline formats, you have to realize that content is king, and that it is the words and actions that your content has, is what is going to determine if you are going to have a better chance of converting more eyes to a sale.
For the longest time, Content was only an issue for bringing in the masses and having them read the content to pre-sell them into a certain product or service. Now, the content question has extended another variable, Google.
Now how did Google get into the mess with content? Google and now other search engines have coded and configured their search algorithms to now give higher kudos to sites that have more content. Either in the form of more wordage, more pages, more relevant keywordage to a certain extent, search engines are taking that extra step to filter simple landing pages, that offer only a few bulleted points and a call to action.
Now do not only take into account what the SERPS have in store, but also look into the Search Engines that also sell advertising services, such as Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and other similar services. Using such advertising services used to list clicks on certain keyword terms depending on the highest click bidder. Now that is not much the case anymore, as now not only the bid price for each keyword comes into play, but also the content in your page.
I decided to look into some offers on a certain CPA network and look into some landing pages for “chris brown ringtones” and do content, and keyword research. I have noticed, the top sponsored links on google, not only had a landing page, but also a “web” of content links on the bottom of the page.
I decided to click on some of the links on the bottom of the page, and the links led to something I have never seen on a landing page before: pages of content, not selling the product, but listing pages that were relevant in content, and maybe had a link or two to point back to the main landing page.
Why are the big players doing this? Because simply, content is king. If you want an advantage over the competition, you need to write some articles, not for ezine, or squidoo, but maybe for your own site instead.
Now how can you build content for your site? I will leave that one to you, being the successful internet marketer, you could conjure an idea up and not break a sweat, hopefully!
Have an awesome week! and keep rolling in that cash!
This one will not be the usual pep rally speech as you are used to! Actually this is a blog for when you have to cut and run on the hype machines and decide ultimately for yourself if you need to take a plan of action.
Being in the Clickbank arena for a few months, I have done so-so, and maybe now able to pay some bills and actually survive off of the income Clickbank could provide me. The problem is, that no campaign is perfect, and sometimes, despite your best of efforts, there could be more competition, there could also be Google throwing your ass in the Sandbox, rendering you clueless why you are not making sales, and also it could be some other issues aside from it all.
Is it easy what us internet marketers do? Yes and No. Easy for those who know what the heck they are doing. But that is never the case for anybody, despite how much experience any Internet Marketer has. Google always changes their algorithms for search, new rules for PPC, and habits of each internet user and regulations passed down from other countries are always having us changing up the methods and techniques that we use on a daily basis.
For the folks at the very top, they have done quite a huge amount of trial and error and know what the heck is going on most of the time. They have been able in their core groups to chameleon themselves into newer formats and plans of action and go to the next best thing.
For you, the sole internet marketer that is hearing a ton of hype from someone, who perhaps is pulling their hair out when their campaigns go south. You have to ask yourself, when can you accept defeat and change your strategy? The problem, is that either you are not putting enough effort, or maybe hitting the wrong keywords or niches, and maybe the affiliate network is not working out for you. With affiliate networks, there is no one trick pony out here, and I strongly advocate that to anyone. There is no demigod network out there, not one network is the highest of the high and the next tier down.
You can be an affiliate of some shithole CPA network, and make your living where rather you wouldn’t make shit on some major CPA network. It depends on your comfort level and how well you can sell their product.
If you feel the need to go try out a new offer, do not limit yourself or stick on a product if it is not converting for you. Some products just don’t convert for everybody! Come to think about it, if everybody was able to convert everything and work off of every CPA network, then everybody would try to make money off of the internet, and that is just not possible.
There is my two cents! Talk to you next week!
Tom Howell
Hello! Welcome to another edition of Adventures in Internet Marketing. Just a quick reminder, I will have my special post for my weight loss campaign later on, for those who view my weight loss monday posts here at iliveinsuccess.com.
This week, my core focus is going to be Time Management, and what to do with your time. As in all business, one area that really could help you in getting more productivity in a short amount of time, is working on your time management.
Alot of businesspeople believe it or not suck at it. How come some people are good with it and some are bad?
Well, some folks are good at timing and run around like chickens with their heads cut off. Some just do not properly budget their time and do not have a clue where to start with making a time management solution.
The most important deal with time management, is planning your time. Of course we will touch on making plans on how to do other aspects of the internet marketing game, but for right now, you need to have a core focus on setting up a time during the day, to do your bidding.
Just like you have a work or class schedule, you need to follow a routine with scheduling. A routine is not as bad as it sounds, because you can build a solid strategy and marketing campaign if you know that you have a block of time, and then the core tasks for that time period.
Let’s say you are a 9-5er who wants to set up 3 hours a day from 6-9pm/1800-2100 three or four days a week, and keep that schedule for four weeks. Ok, also set up one of your weekend days, perhaps Saturday day, for three more hours. Why wouldn’t I schedule on Sunday? Because for some, it is a day of rest, fasting, for me, it is formula one racing and American Football with the guys.
Saturday, is when everybody wakes up, and either laxes around, or calling up their buds to get wasted later on that night, with having of course a few hours to spare.
Use those hours, and follow a formula to work around your marketing strategy. Let’s use a hyptothetical routine for marketing purposes…
The three hour slot starts at 6pm with checking emails and your numbers from marketing, which will take about 10/15 so minutes.
After doing the emails and checking numbers, you would spend the rest of the time doing what is needed for your campaigns and research. Try to have a certain flow, rather you have a set of time blocks doing research for 45 minutes, backlinking for 45, and maybe for the rest do some PPC work or article marketing.
Now you could also set up your schedule on this 3-4 schedule, such as Saturday for research, and Monday for Links, then squidoo wednesdays and Wednesdays for ezinearticles or PPC analysis.
You do not have to follow any of the two, but as long as you have a time management formula that helps increase productivity and increases overall profits, then you are golden!!!
More in planning to come up next week!!!
Make the Money!!!
Tom Howell
www.iliveinsuccess.com
Welcome to another crazy, awesome installment of Adventures in Internet Marketing. Before we get into today’s topic, I want to get a message out for those who are actively affiliate marketing and are inspired to tell their bosses to go somewhere and start earning a living online.
Of course, you know Norb Czufis, of NC Media who has branded and published the Forex Tracer, Forex Funnel, and Other fine products, has opened up a great blog for those who are serious about making some damn good coin in this game. You can check out his forum By Clicking Here. As soon as you join, please introduce yourself, and let us know what your intentions are in succeeding in internet marketing.
I of course post a couple of threads occasionally, and usually I put some good tidbits of info as well!
Now to the meat of the article. The Bum Marketing Strategy.
It’s been known for a while within the internet marketing community, a nom de plume for a no/low cost promotion strategy that most internet marketers will use to generate their first dollars.
Why is it called bum marketing? Well, Marketing Guru Travis Sago had originally came up with the term, because his wife jeanne had stated “The method is free, and that a bum off of the street with minimal education and learning curve could make money.”
Well, the above to a strong degree holds true. You see, This is a great strategy and all, but a few more pointers will make the process a bit more complex, but with these few added points and theories, you can make the most out of your bum marketing strategy….
1. A key to being successful, is looking at the priorities of a successful bum marketing campaign.
My first priority is traffic. If you cannot point and throw traffic in anybody’s direction, then what good are you? You need to focus primarily on how you are going to bring traffic to a product sales page. Are you going to use a link farm, squidoo or other hub lenses, article directories? comment links from more relevant blog sites. There are many different methods for bum marketing traffic generation, the big one being article content that sells with a resource box call to action and link.
The second priority, is quality of content. The better quality and engaging content is, you can make the difference between having a click through, or someone hitting the back button to google. The ideal content, for those who are marketing a product, should point out a problem that such product solves. Make a title stating the problem, because everybody always buys on a problem.
Then make the content with three valid points about the problem, and frame an ideal situation where the problem is resolved with the site visitor framed into the product experience. for example, imagine this mop with the extendable wand, which let’s anybody use the magic mop and watch as the magic mop takes up 45% more liquid than the leading competitor. Make this a 300-400 word article.
Then make a compelling call to action. This should be done in the resource box, and a strong time-constraint call too. For example, Don’t waste your time, mopping up with an old mop, buy the magic mop today!!! This will get great click through ratios, and increase potential sales.
Third, The more the merrier somewhat applies. Most successful internet marketers will spend 8-10 hours a day building campaigns and writing tons of articles, using keywords and relevant content to close sales. The more articles, or points of exposure with relevant, quality content will get you tired for the first few weeks, but the rewards are quite awesome!!!
Think about it as a fisherman, who has one rod and reel, at the shore, and a fisherman with a boat out to deep sea with a net or a bunch of rod and reels. Who do you think will catch more fish? the fisherman with rods and a boat, who can access the offshore areas that have pockets of fish. So the relevance here is working hard, and finding the right places to place articles and hubs, and making the right content will help you succeed, and should be a priority.
Now why is this the third and not the first priority. The realisation of the first two, are important, and are needed to see the importance of priority three.
2. Yes, you need a landing page that converts. Marketing gurus will highly confess, that having a landing page, which has features and benefits, and a driving hard, compelling call to action, will convert way better, than trying to drive traffic directly to a publishers sales page.
Look, .info domains at Godaddy.com go for $2.00, and a properly worded domain for the product that you are promoted will get you further in this game. Try to place the product name with such words as review, scam, test, and I am sure you could come up with words to place along for the perfect landing page domain too.
Look into cheap hosting. At first, you can find a decent multiple account hosting package for $10.00 which includes cpanel and all of the things you need to build a landing page minisite. You wouldn’t go wrong with a reseller or multiple domain account. If you have a bit more money, I would look into a VPS or Virtual Private Server, as these have more benefits and I currently use one for my blogs and such.
You also need to get the landing page designed and uploaded. Some publishers for affiliate products have landing pages made already, and downloadable for affiliate use. All you need to do, is place a compelling spiel, and a few case studies and a call to action to buy. Have all of your articles linked to this, as it will increase google ranking, and SERP scores for keywords pertaining to the niche and product. On the call to action on the bottom of the landing page, put a “buy now, or download now” graphic, and link it will a cloaked affiliate id.
3. Know your niche. Nothing is more embarrassing than having an article promoting a certain niche product, and you making an ass out of yourself, because you do not know what the heck you are talking about. At least checkout a few wikipedia pages on the subject, and check out some authority websites on the niche as well! This will leave you a bit more educated, and more confident of promoting and selling visitors on a product.
4. Persistance and trial and error. Being uber persistant and not giving up because of a bad campaign, is a big plus in this game. There are time when the chips could be down, the product just sucks, the competition is killing you or the niche is not big enough to make money. There will be several times, when you do alot and barely make anything from it. Do not get discouraged: either switch your niche, or product, or just do another plan of attack. Remember, the most persistant will succeed no matter what!
5. Have a plan. Build a plan that you will easily follow and something that will work with your current schedule and lifestyle. At first, put a few hours aside 3-5 days a week. Get comfortable, and taste some minimal success, then add more to your plate. Eventually you will replace your job with this.
Either your fail to plan, or plan to fail. I would rather plan to fail, because if you plan, you will have some type of success from getting sick of failure!!! Keep the chin up and kick some ass!!!
6. Conclusion. Follow these steps, lather, rinse, then repeat. Give it a month, and you will start seeing income generating. Maybe you might see income generate in a week! It depends on how hardcore you are, and what you want out of internet marketing!!!!
See you on the success side of things!!!! AND go the Niche Choppers forum and sign up!!!!!
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