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Branding Yourself as an Expert in Your Niche

November 25, 2011 By 4 Comments

Branding Yourself as an Expert in Your Niche

Regardless of what niche you’ve chosen, it’s important that you learn how to brand yourself online. Branding yourself in your niche can be as simple as creating a slogan or a tagline that allows others to easily recognize you. You want your ‘brand’ to be viewed as the top authority. You want to be the go to guru in your industry, so choose a brand wisely.

You can start by coming up with a few keywords that people already associate with your business. Look over what words are driving traffic to your site. Do visitors happen on your site after searching for words like ‘dog training’ or ‘caring for pets?’

If you don’t have sufficient website traffic to view the analytics yet, then try asking people familiar with your business what words they’d use to describe it. Once you’ve come up with words describing your online presence, look for an easy to remember tagline.

For instance, if you run a parenting website that also discusses frugal living, you could brand yourself as the frugal mom shopper. Once you’ve come up with a tagline that you like to describe yourself or your business, start sharing it with everyone.

Sign your blog posts with it. Use it on your website. Instead of having an about page, try having a page on your website ‘about the frugal mother.’ This provides you with one more way to brand yourself.

Add your slogan to your email and forum signatures. While you may have heard that no one likes a braggart, in the case of online marketing, it’s not only acceptable to brag about yourself, but it’s a way to rise to the top of your niche.

Businesses use this technique offline as well. For example, you’ve heard the phrase ‘Finger lickin’ good’ used by Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. They wouldn’t say, ‘passably good chicken.’ Who’d want to eat there?

Brand yourself by building an audience that views you as a helpful resource and they’ll help spread the word about you, too. Word of mouth is very powerful in branding, so treat every prospect well.

If you’re pursuing article marketing, make sure that you add a short biography that mentions your slogan and your website. This biography should be the same for all of the articles so that visitors begin to recognize your name and associate you with your brand.

Brand yourself by guest authoring to an already established audience. Find a blog that’s similar to yours and offer to write a guest post. You can use one of your articles as a forum topic as well. Forums often rank high in Google because like blogs, they are continually updated. If you brand yourself as an expert, people will begin to think of you as one.

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: branding, expert, marketing, niche, online

Answering the Question, “What Do You Do for a Living?”

October 27, 2011 By 13 Comments

 

When you make a living online, a lot of people won’t understand what it is you do.  Some of them will think you’re nothing more than a spammer – just because you work on the Internet.  You might even run into people who automatically assume you’re into promoting porn, because they think that’s all the Internet is used for!

You need to be prepared to deal with people like this.  Some of them may even be close friends and family members who are simply ignorant about the various marketing uses for the World Wide Web.

The first thing you need to explain to people is that very few people who work on the Internet are spammers.  Spammers actually make up a very, very small minority of those who make money online.

If you do any sort of email marketing, you should explain that every single person you send email to has signed up specifically to your newsletter, and clicked a link to confirm that they really want to be on your list.

Explain to them that subscribing to your newsletter is a lot like signing up for delivery of the newspaper, or a magazine subscription.  People sign up to your newsletter, and then you send them valuable information, not just advertising.

If you sell eBooks online, you can explain to people that you’re a bit like a book publisher, but all of the books you publish are in digital format.  You can tell them that instead of paying a lot of extra money for the printing, binding, marketing, and shipping of a physical book, you eliminate those costs by selling all of your books as downloadable products.

If people still don’t understand, you could even show them what an eBook is by letting them view one on your computer. If your main business is advertising affiliate products, you can tell people you’re in advertising.

Explain to them that you run a website (or websites) and you place advertising on that website.  Every time someone clicks an ad and purchases something, you receive a commission. If you make most of your money through AdSense or selling advertising on your sites, you can simply tell people that you place advertisements on your websites, and you charge advertisers for that ad space.

If you want to, you could show them some of your sites or blogs to illustrate the point. Some people feel more comfortable just telling people they design websites.  If you’re a decent website builder, this will probably really impress people, but be prepared to get requests from people asking if you’ll make them a site, too.

If you don’t want to deal with all of the questions about spamming and porn, just telling someone you design websites will usually be enough to throw them off your trail.  If people are particularly persistent with their questions, you can start to point out some examples of people who have been very successful making money online.

Don’t just use examples of famous Internet marketers like John Reese or Yanik Silver! Use some examples with verifiable “proof” in mainstream media.  For example, the famous “make money” blogger John Chow has a number of stories out there about him.

There’s also teenaged entrepreneur Ashley Squalls who has made mainstream news in a big way by making over $70,000 per month with advertising on her site that gives away MySpace layouts. And of course, the infamous Perez Hilton – a celebrity blogger who cashes in on the ad space his blog has.

You should try to realize that some people will just never understand what you do.  Try to explain it the best way you can, and if it doesn’t work, accept it.  Some people just won’t get it. If the in-laws or your spouse are nagging you because your money isn’t yet streaming in, and you feel pressured, put together a simple presentation that answers all of their questions and puts their minds at ease.

 

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Filed Under: Work from home Tagged With: advertising, Affiliate Marketing, email marketing ebooks, living online, make money online, marketing, website

Building Relationships Online

October 13, 2011 By 7 Comments

Well I’m guessing you can guess what this post is about by the title. I’m not talking about the relationships you might develop through sites like Plenty of fish either, (though I’m sure those are awesome as well) but the ones you make with other people just like yourself who are interested in blogging, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, etc.

The greatest thing about meeting all these wonderful people is the fact that many are on the same road towards success, but perhaps at different points along it. Some are just starting their journey, while others might be midway, and still others are all the way along and have reached the level of success we all start out looking to attain.

You can definitely learn something from each and every one of these individuals. Most of us invest time and energy into learning the tactics and strategies that interest us the most. Since we all have widely varied interests we end up with a pool of knowledge that is not only quite deep, but also widely varied.

Even the one’s with very little experience who happen to be just starting out can offer us a fresh insight into things as well as a great opportunity to teach a few of the tricks we’ve picked up ourselves along the way.

Teaching not only reaffirms what we already knew, and helps to establish us as knowledgeable on our topic, but also allows us a chance to give back to the community we’re a part of. After all, it’s likely we learned that very same knowledge from someone else along the way!

Some of us, me included tend to be solitary creatures and have to get out of our comfort zones in order to connect with our peers. For some reason it’s in our nature to try and do things alone and without help. It’s important to realize that any business isn’t going to be built by you alone, but by the community you build around it. Both your customers and visitors will likely determine your level of success to a much greater degree than the amount of work you yourself put into it.

So how do we go about building better relationships while we busily go about building up our own businesses? I mean as much as I want all my online friends to succeed in spectacular fashion, I also know that I have a ton of work to do in order to be successful myself right?

It all comes down to striking a balance and realizing that things we do today may pay off down the road. That programming genius you spend the day helping may come in handy when you decide to develop your own IPhone application a year from now. Even if it doesn’t ever get returned from the person you helped today, chances are somewhere down the line somebody will return the favor and help you out a jam. I know it’s happened that way for me at least!

Supporting your online friends can be as simple as stopping by from time to time, and offering up a word of encouragement, or retweeting one of their posts that is in reality more of a benefit to you and your followers since it’s likely filled with well researched information that is bound to come in handy in your own business.

When you consider the other person likely spent an hour or two putting it together, taking the two minutes to comment or share it really isn’t much at all, and the result will likely end up in even more valuable information being written by that particular person.

For all you bloggers who continue day in and day out regardless of visitors, retweet’s, or shares to write valuable, high quality information for readers like myself… I thank you, and dedicate this post to you. Keep up the great work! We appreciate it!

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Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: bloggers, Blogging, building relationships online, marketing

The Importance of Article Marketing in Your Promotions

September 15, 2011 By 15 Comments

Without marketing efforts, your online business will flop. You have to let the people know you’re online and what you’re all about. One way to easily and inexpensively market your business is by either writing articles or hiring someone to write them for you.

The purpose of these articles is that they can be used to promote your website through the use of backlinks in the articles. Plus, it’s smart strategy for search engine optimization. These articles act as fingers pointing the way to your site and driving traffic there.

Every marketer knows that the more traffic a website receives, the higher the likelihood that sales will also increase. You can’t sell your products if the population isn’t made aware of what you have to offer to them.

If you were to simplify article marketing, it could be defined as advertising. That’s what article marketing does for you. Advertises your business – but it does it a lot cheaper than traditional methods ever could.

Once the articles are written and edited, the next step is to submit them to article directories. Always make sure you use fresh content, because the same article with a few words switched around won’t pass some directories with stringent article approval rules.

When submitting to more than one directory, what happens for the website you’re promoting is that a larger net is cast into the sea of traffic than there would be if you didn’t promote this way.

People searching the Internet find your article, read the content (make it relevant and engaging), and they feel they’ve learned some important information that will help them so they follow the link to learn even more.

Different article directories will have different rules concerning backlinks. Some won’t allow them in the middle of an article and only want them in your signature while other directories don’t care where you put them.

Submitting articles to directories should be an ongoing process rather than a “submit and forget it.” The more well-received articles you submit, the more your reputation as an expert will grow and the higher you’ll rank in search engines.

When you write the articles (or have them written) you want to use a specific strategy. For example, if you’re writing about how to make money selling eBooks, you can write articles on the popularity of eBooks, why people buy them and the steps they can take to write their own.

You want to be careful that you give them enough information to make the reader interested and want to click on the link to head over to your site. If you write the articles in an informative way that gives value, then you’ll drive traffic to your site – but if you write it as a hard-hitting sales letter, you’ll end up pushing people away.

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Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: article marketing, Business, marketing, promotions, traffic, website

The Traffic is in the List

September 4, 2011 By 4 Comments

We’ve all heard the phrase “the money is in the list” and while that is true, it still gets overlooked or placed on hold while marketers focus instead on other aspects on their online business. If you aren’t yet sold on the financial benefits to building your email list, then perhaps you’ll be open to the idea of an additional traffic source.

We readily invest in search engine optimization techniques, spend countless hours leaving comments on other blogs, and share our content on social bookmarking sites in the hopes of generating a few dozen more visitors each day. So why is it so many bloggers ignore the traffic potential that a personal email list holds for them?

When we build a list, we also cultivate a relationship with those subscribers by offering up valuable information in exchange for the privilege of also marketing to them from time to time. Often that valuable information will come in the form of a blog post on your site, and those readers who are interested in that particular topic will click through from their email account over to your blog.

If you take a look at the following graphic you can see that the visitors who arrived at my site via Feedburner stay longer, visit more pages, have a much lower bounce rate, and are generally much more engaged than any other traffic sources including Google.

(Click to enlarge)

Since you’ve actually taken the time to develop a relationship with these people, they are much more likely to spend time there, and interact in some way. They are more inclined to read more of your content, or perhaps even make a purchase from your site if you offer something that can help them in some way.

Using an email service like Aweber, it’s a simple matter to set things up so that your readers are automatically sent either a preview of your blogs most recent updates, or even a full text copy that they can read within their email client. I personally prefer to send them a weeks’ worth of blog post updates at once with a snippet that they can then follow through to my site.

By limiting these contacts to once a week the reader isn’t continually being bombarded by emails from you, but at the same time isn’t very likely to forget about you. As you continue to grow your list, the number of visitors who click through to your site will continue to increase, and your daily visitors will continually grow higher, and higher.

Having a responsive list holds value for you in so many different ways, and traffic is merely one of them. Should you launch a new Facebook fan page, new product, or simply wish to drive traffic to a new website, you have access to thousands of people with no more than a click of your mouse.

Yes, the money is in the list, but so is the traffic, so are the relationships, and so are the many opportunities that a marketer decides to make of it!

 

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: aweber, blog, email list, email marketing, launch, marketing, relationships, subscribers, traffic

How to Make Mobile Marketing Work for You

July 26, 2011 By 12 Comments

mobile marketing
Remember the days when making or getting a phone call meant having to track down a landline phone because they were the only phones available? Those days also meant that business didn’t take place in the car or on the plane or sitting at the airport because the communication methods weren’t as advanced. We no longer live in a stationary world.

We now have the benefit of taking business anywhere we are, which means that technology has advanced the way business is run and created a wide open space for anyone smart enough to put mobile marketing to work.

Mobile marketing is basically marketing that can be done on the latest technology such as mobile phones, blackberries, Google Android, iPod devices and more. Mobile marketing means that you have better access to potential customers and they have better access to you.  Mobile marketing gives you, the marketer, the gift of accessibility that you can unwrap to increase profits. How can you do that?

Potential customers can sign up to receive messages via their mobile devices. They sign up for these messages because they get some kind of benefit out of it. By using SMS (short message service), customers can get news about the latest product launch, deals that you’re about to offer, webinar alerts and more. If they decide they don’t want to receive anymore communication from a particular marketer, then all they have to do is opt out via an SMS message.

If you’ve ever seen the words ‘text to win’ in an advertisement on television, then that’s a form of mobile marketing. You might have seen a message flash that reads, “Text ABC Company to…” (followed by a string of numbers).

Those numbers are assigned to a company’s device in order to be able to send or receive SMS messages. You might think this advance in how you can conduct marketing will cost you more than you can afford, but there are monthly programs out there that can work even for the beginning marketer.

Keep in mind that mobile marketing isn’t just limited to text or codes. You can utilize a mobile marketing campaign that includes the same media style you’d use from a home computer such as video, audio and even pictures.

Some of the phones equipped with the latest technology advances have the capability to communicate via mobile marketing platforms. There is too much potential with mobile marketing for you not to join the throngs of marketers who are already putting this method to work and seeing the results.

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: Business, customers, marketing, mobile devices, mobile marketing, SMS, text

Do You Need a Marketing Mentor or Can You Go It Alone?

July 8, 2011 By 7 Comments

marketing mentor
Some newbies to the Internet Marketing world feel like, without a mentor, they’ll flounder online and won’t be able to make headway in this type of business. But that isn’t always the case.

The last thing you want to do is have a mentor whose only goal is to make money – for himself. You want someone who can look at your individual strengths and weaknesses and help you find a business model that will satisfy you personally and financially.

You may need an overall mentor for your efforts, or choose to hire a mentor who has experience in one specific area of Internet Marketing, like Search Engine Optimization or Pay Per Click Marketing.

Marketing can’t be summed up into one tiny, neatly wrapped package because there are too many aspects of marketing to make it that narrow. Don’t expect to learn everything in one session with a mentor.  It’s not a topic where mastery happens in one sitting.

You don’t have to have a marketing mentor if you want to run your own online business or even several online businesses. You’ll make mistakes (even the top marketing gurus still make mistakes) and you may even have some total failures, but that helps you learn what to avoid next time.

Hiring a marketing coach isn’t cheap and you could expect to pay thousands over time for help from some of the best coaching experts. If you’re just starting out, or you’ve been in business awhile and it’s not taking off the way you’d like, you might not be in the position to afford a coach.

That doesn’t mean you can’t find free expert help to guide you on the path to marketing well. There’s a great deal of advice and guidance online for marketers in any stage of their business and it’s all free of charge.

You can find this advice and guidance online through marketing blogs, forums and even articles written by marketers who have already been where you are now. You’ll learn about which marketing tools to buy, which ones are a waste of time and money and what the hottest niches are today. All this will cost you is your time. Find a marketer who keeps a regular blog and covers the information you need to know. Check out the blog archives, too.

Having the ability to read is the only qualification you need to make your marketing business a profit puller. Put the effort into researching and studying what you don’t know but need to learn.

So many marketers have graciously shared the wealth of their knowledge online for free, but you have to do the work of unearthing the nuggets you need to succeed.

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Blog or Business

March 2, 2011 By 3 Comments

Blog

When you’re first starting out in the world of blogging it can be confusing as to whether or not you should be treating it like a mere blog, or something more that could potentially someday make you some money, or perhaps even replace your offline income altogether as mine has, thus allowing me the freedom that comes from working from home, and owning my own business!

If you happen to be fine with keeping it strictly as a creative outlet where you can express yourself and you have no intention of adding in ads like Google’s AdSense, or banners or anything of that nature, and you really don’t care if anyone other than yourself reads it then by all means treat it as a blog.

If on the other hand you’d actually like have the posts you write read by as many people as possible, and you might one day like to have this exciting hobby of yours start contributing to your income then you should start out early on treating it as you would any other business, with goals, plans, budgets, and clear ideas about what it is you are trying to achieve with it.

While the decision to treat your blog like a business should be started at the very beginning in order to maximize the effect on all aspect of your blog from the domain name choice and theme topic, it is really never too late in the process to start. By making a conscious decision to treat it as you would any other business you are effectively telling yourself you are going to take it more seriously.

Here are some things you can do to start treating it like a business and get yourself rolling in the right direction, don’t worry you’ll add to this list as you and your blog grows into something of its own. We all have similar but different lists because we all want different things where our blog is concerned and we all bring different skills to the table. Build on your strengths, develop the skills you’d love to have, and outsource the ones that you couldn’t be bothered with, or have no aptitude for. Just because I’m bad at coding html or php doesn’t mean I can’t find and use someone whose passion happens to be coding websites.

Passion for your Topic

The very first thing you should have, and I’m assuming you do so I won’t spend much time on it, is passion for the topic you are looking to write about. Hopefully it is something you bore the relatives with during the holiday meal because you just can’t seem to stop talking about it, and the excitement you feel comes out in your voice. It is this passion that you will tap into when things are tough, progress slows down, or halts all together, and you wonder what you were thinking in 6 months when you realize you still only have 100 readers coming to visit on a daily basis. Passion is an amazing revitalizer, and is great to have on your side.

A Clear Focus

You need to set out exactly what it is you wish to achieve with this blog of yours. By having a clear set of ideas in hand in the beginning, you’ll know just where it is you are trying to go with this blog business of yours. You’ll need a clear focus before you move onto the next one.

A Roadmap or Checklist

Ok so you know what it is you want, and where you’d like to see your blog in five years, now what? Well we need to map out the steps you need to take in order to get you there. If you said you want 1000 visitors a day reading what you write then you know you need to focus on traffic generating techniques each and every day alongside of writing that great content you intend to write. This will quickly branch out into other areas as you’ll soon see, such as developing a social network, and setting up a Facebook fan page, or Twitter profile in order to capitalize on the traffic they can send. Your roadmap will be long and daunting to look at, and in the beginning it will seem impossible and overwhelming. Don’t worry though, with each step you take forward you’ll be one closer to your goal, and you’ll soon realize that it isn’t arriving at the end result that is the best part, but the journey along the way.

Tracking Methods

I don’t know too many businesses that don’t bother to track progress on the different metrics they’ve deemed important to their business. If traffic is important to you (as I’m sure it is) then programs like Google Analytics are a great help, but you’ll need to dig deeper, and take a look at where and why these visitors are coming to your site in order for you to tweak and improve it in order to make that 1000 visitor goal you set out for yourself.  Tracking keeps you focused on what’s important and allows you to see if you are making progress, stalling out, or perhaps slipping behind and need to redouble your efforts, or perhaps explore new options regarding that particular method.

I recommend using a calendar to track when you need to enter your tracking data. It generally isn’t hard, but is often forgotten or left to slide. Adding it to your calendar will help keep you on track, and also make you more productive at the same time!

Separate your Income and Expenses

Most people don’t see the need for this in the beginning because the blog either isn’t bringing anything in, or it has such low expenses it doesn’t warrant the time needed to keep track of. Nonsense! It takes very little time, and gives you an accurate reading on what your business is costing (or making) you in a day, week, month, or year, and goes a long way toward making you feel like this is an actual business rather than just a hobby to be financed out of your back pocket. While some people will go as far as opening a separate business account specifically for their blog you don’t have to go quite that far (unless you want to) and can easily add $1000.00 into the running of your business, and track the results that way.

This also focuses your attention on the income streams that are most profitable to you and perhaps warrant a little extra attention in order to provide you a 3% return over a 2% return which can be huge at the end of the year. I personally recommend diversifying your income into at least five or six streams, and preferably into ten or twelve in case anything ever happened. People were making killings off of single websites until Google made a simple change in their algorithm that dropped their traffic, and hence their earnings down to zero. Those people were left scrambling to find a new method of earning money while they had to then learn a new way to drive traffic, and make money online.

Here are some example income streams for you to focus on. Now depending on your chosen theme, or topic these may or may not fit, but they should give you an idea of what you can expect.

Advertising

If your blog receives traffic then you can make money with advertising other people’s products and services to the people visiting your blog. If you have higher traffic levels this can result in this being your primary source of income as it is for many of the top blogs out there. Also if your blog is quite specialized you might be able to fetch a higher than normal price based on that fact alone. If you blog about the Bugatti Veyron (a high end car) then chances are you’ll be able to ask a higher price of a local Bugatti dealer looking to advertise on your site than if you were discussing something more common such as 4×4’s or pickup trucks!

Affiliate Income

Affiliate marketing is where you earn money for promoting someone else’s product or service. This is different than advertising in that you will seek out products and services that fit in with the topic of your blog, and also have an affiliate program in place. Then you can promote those products or services to your visitors, e-mail list, Fan page members etc. in exchange for a commission on the sale. Affiliate marketing is great because it allows you to choose the very best products from the very biggest names in any industry without having to create the product yourself, or even build the relationship for that matter.

Affiliate Income (as a vendor)

Having your own product goes a long way toward establishing yourself as an expert in your field and allows you to showcase your knowledge while also making a profit. Even better if it’s a product you can sell through an affiliate network. Digital products such as e-books, software, audio recordings, and video courses work extremely well, but can be just about anything you can think of.

If I have a $20 dollar product and I sell one a day then I can make $600.00 a month. If however I have 5 affiliates selling one a day at a 60% commission (leaving me 40% or $8.00) then I’m able to make double that. If I want to increase my sales it is now a simple matter of adding more affiliates to my network, or by adding more products for them to sell for me!

E-Mail Marketing

You’ve heard people talking about the money being in the list for a long time now, and it’s because it’s true. Having a group of people who are interested in the topic you write about and promote is more valuable than you can believe. One of the hardest things in business is to acquire the customer in the first place, and having a pool of people that you can access whenever you want will go a long way toward the profitability of your blog/ business. Growing your list and developing a relationship with them should be something that you start right from the beginning. I personally use Aweber and love their service and will be a customer for life!

Here is a special discount if you’d like to sign up. (Affiliate link)

www.plrinternetmarketing.com/aweber

Selling a Service

If you have a specific talent that you can market to your peers, or others who might be interested then this will probably be one of the quickest sources of income you’ll experience. You can literally hang out your shingle this morning, and be working this afternoon if you try hard enough, and there are enough people needing your service. Say you are a better writer than marketers, perhaps offering to write quality articles at a discounted price for other people would be a great place to start. People are always looking for quality writers. Even if you haven’t yet developed your writing skills to the point you feel you’d like to start selling them you could offer a blog commenting service or something similar where you go out and write relevant, quality comments for blog owners on blogs within their industry using their website as the backlink. I know I don’t have time to do as much blog commenting as I should, and I’m sure there are millions of others out there!

These are just a few sources of income and there are many more out there waiting for you to implement them, and develop them into being profitable. Even the one’s listed above can be broken down further. There are thousands of affiliate programs out there with even more products. Instead of focusing on finding just one or two to promote, you could develop ten or twelve of these into their own separate income stream sources.

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Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: advertising, Affiliate Marketing, blog, blogger, Blogging, Business, checklist, develop, email marketing, focus, goals, income streams, marketing, multiple sources of income, passion, product, roadmap, selling a service, succeed, success, targets, visitors

Building Your Sales Funnel

January 27, 2011 By 7 Comments

Probably the biggest earner on your blog or website will end up being your sales funnel, and that’s why it’s important to start building it right from the beginning. Later on you will find that it needs to be tweaked here and there, as well as monitored in order to ensure that it’s performing to the best of its ability.

So, what is a sales funnel? Simply put it’s a funnel where you put all your leads into, and it spits out all the paying clients out the other side. Ok, that might be a slightly simplistic explanation so I’ll go into it a little further.

A sales funnel starts with your blog, or website and the visitors who arrive there through the different methods you employ to drive traffic, whether it be Social Media, SEO and the resulting search engine traffic, or perhaps you keep them coming back with the killer content that you keep writing. Regardless it’s important that you have a way of reaching out and communicating with those visitors and you achieve this by capturing their email addresses when they visit.

People ask all the time when they should start building their list and the answer is a resounding NOW!!!

If you aren’t already building your list, you’re losing money. Stop losing money, head over to Aweber now, and sign up for an account, it’s only $1 for the first month, and $19.00 after that until your list starts to grow. Don’t worry that it gets more expensive after your list gets bigger, because as it gets bigger so will the income stream coming in from that list.

You need to offer people a reason to sign up with you, and allow you permission to contact those regarding updates, promotions, or offers that you feel would be a good fit for them. Typically blog owners will invest some time in writing and EBook, or having one outsourced for them. Another popular offer is a free course that they can then set up to drip feed out to each subscriber, perhaps a 7 day course on increasing traffic to your blog by 60%. Whatever it is, make sure it’s somewhat unique and holds some value. You don’t want to start your relationship off with these people by sending them junk.

After the person signs up for your offer, they have effectively entered your sales funnel, now it’s time to convert those leads into customers, after all they signed up for your free EBook, or ECourse, perhaps a more comprehensive traffic program would benefit them?

Since it is so important for you to grow that list, it’s important that you employ multiple ways of converting that traffic into subscribers. I currently use five different methods to accomplish this. First I implemented a signup box offering my visitors my EBook E-Business; “The Insider’s Edge” and located it prominently in the top right location on my blog.

Second I built a squeeze page with a sales letter (yes a sales letter to give away a free eBook) telling the people who visit it how it will benefit them, and why they need to download it. You can see the page here. http://www.plrinternetmarketing.com/e-business/

Next I implemented a light box hover that is available from within your Aweber account (if you decide to start building your list and need help implementing this, please let me know and I’d be glad to help you.)
My light box hover fades into the screen similar to a popup (though a little less annoying) and shows up one time for each visitor. This light box hover receives the most subscribers of all the methods I employ.

Next when a visitor arrives at my Facebook Fan page, the first screen they are presented with is an optin offering my free eBook in exchange for their email address.

And finally, can’t ignore the Twitter factor, so I’ve elected to make use of the DM feature that comes with a free Social oomph account, and whenever someone new follows me, they are automatically sent a message offering them my free eBook, and sending them to my squeeze page.

By using these 5 different methods of gathering subscribers, I’m able to grow my list by 10 to 20 people each and every day on autopilot. That’s 3650 to 7300 each year without including any extra promotion I might do.

Capturing the lead is only the start. After you’ve got that email address you need to build a relationship with that person, and build trust with them, people would much rather buy from someone they know, than a total stranger. The way we do this is by sending them content that will help them in some way, now since you already know they are trying to drive more traffic to their blog, you might try sending out and email with a list of 100 free ways to increase the traffic going to their blog. You don’t want to sell these people, you want to help them with the hope that in return when it does come time for them to make a purchase, and they will consider making it through you. If you go into this with the mentality that they are just there for you to sell to, they will quickly be unsubscribing from your list.

A great way to effortlessly start building that relationship is to employ the use of an auto responder, which of course is built into Aweber. You can pre-write a series of email messages and then have them sent out at a predetermined time to your subscribers. I have six in mine, and each one goes out after one weeks’ time allowing them time to complete the various steps within my eBook, and reminding them who I am. I also send out my weeks blog posts every week so that they are getting some valuable information to help them with their business, or website.

Now I’ve started off building my sales funnel by giving my readers a valuable resource for free, in this case a 79 page EBook that took 3 months to write, this also helps build in something called reciprocity with my subscribers. After that I continue to email them to keep them on track with the goals that are set out in the book, as well as with information that will help make things easier on them. Within these emails I’m also suggesting services that they may or may not choose to avail themselves to, but if they do, my affiliate links are embedded within, and I’ll earn a commission from the referral.

Now while the visitors that you can convert through your own website might be free, it’s also important to know the cost of acquiring new subscribers so that you can then invest in acquiring even more using methods like PPC.  By calculating the cost of subscribers and knowing what your subscribers are worth to you, you can then determine at what point you are still profitable.

You should probably wait a year before you start trying to figure out what your subscribers are worth, because until that point you may not have made a consistent amount on a month to month basis. After that though it’s a simple matter to figure out if you’ve got a list of 2,000 people and after a year of marketing to them you’ve made $20,000 dollars you know that each subscriber is worth about $.83 a month, or  per year, or almost $10.00 a year. After that you can then determine just how much you’re willing to spend to acquire new ones. If you are spending less than $.83 cents each you will start making a profit in the first month of having them, however most will stay with you for some time, so you can probably afford to pay a little bit more.

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: aweber, blog, capturing the lead, cost per lead, ebook, ecourse, email list, internet marketing, list building, marketing, sales funnel

Take Into Consideration The Medium’s Limitations When Advertising Online

January 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Only twenty years ago, the Internet was still getting its footing in the world. Not many companies looked to the World Wide Web as a means of marketing and advertising their products and services simply because not many people had access to it. But right now, with most people, almost in all places, logging on to the Internet, it will be irresponsible to your business enterprise interest not to market online. Internet marketing has become one of the significant method of getting people as well as your services or products together.

Due to the specific experience of a user of the world wide web, the reality that it really is borne by a computer monitor or display screen, with interactive ability, and that the screen is finite, in standard dimensions, several restrictions apply. Here are a few.

An online page, which can cover your entire computer screen, is not really a billboard. Internet advertising which treats a webpage as a billboard may indeed catch a visitor’s attention, but it is rarely that a user of the Internet is looking up ads. As you want your own ads to be recognizable, demanding the whole computer screen suggests that the exact same advertisement is not going to fit so well in a smaller space where it might have to share the webpage with some written text, or even other advertisements. Your advertisement must thus be scalable, keeping the same branding signals as your billboard advertisement, but able to fit into variable space sizes.

The magic of the World Wide Web is its multimedia capabilities. Internet advertising could include not only textual content with variable, expressive fonts and other textual frills. It could showcase digital photos. These photos could be anything from your company logo to an elaborate and fine painting type image. The dilemma with using fine photos is that users have their screens set to different resolutions so that a picture that may appear accurate in an 800×600 display screen resolution is going to appear blotchy in 1280×768 image resolution. When making Internet marketing photos, you would want to look at them under various resolutions as well as modify them accordingly in order to appear pleasingly under a range of the standard computer screen resolutions.

The Internet likewise allows advertisers to make use of sound, and that is definitely good if you expect most your consumer base to be running on a high-speed Internet connection. Dial-up connections, that are considerably sluggish, do not push sound fast enough through the connection to prevent stops as well as interruptions. If your client base is apt to have dial-up connections, never deny them. Put it in words.

The exact same dilemma of Internet connection speed conditions the use of video in Internet marketing. Indeed, you could make your own video clips and this, needless to say, is the consummate way of introducing your products as well as services; however, in case a lot of your client base is on a slow dial-up connection, they will not be getting that video clip in any continuous way. A movie player might collect the movie file, playing it piecemeal, and once collected, the potential customer may play it again, this time continuously, but never count on it!

Effective Internet marketing is going to take into considerations the medium used. The Internet and your personal computer may be a power tool for the transmission of data in several formats, but it has its restriction. Create your advertisements with an eye on its restrictions and your advertisements might work for you and get those clients who are, after all, not looking to ads to entertain them, but for solutions.

Author: Phillip Guye

<a href=”http://www.mindgamemarketing.com”>Video Marketing</a> is a concept that helps and motivates individuals to pass along marketing clips about goods and services. This could be done through <a href=”http://www.mindgamemarketing.com/social-media-marketing/”>Social Media Marketing</a>, an effective approach that will give you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic by advertising your site or business through social media avenues.

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: Business, computers, ecommerce, internet business, internet marketing, marketing, SE optimization, SE positioning, SE tactics, seo, site promotion, viral marketing, web design
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