Don’t Go Broke Trying to Build an Online Business

Posted on October 7, 2010
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Forty Thousand Dollars Later

How often are you purchasing ebooks, strategy guides and software to build you IM business? Are you spending money left and right in hopes of finding the perfect internet business system? Are you becoming an IM product addict, investing your cash in anything and everything that might improve you bottom line?

If you’re spending a fortune on your business, you’re not the only one. Countless people find themselves buying the latest and greatest new systems.

There’s nothing wrong with that, either. It’s perfectly reasonable to purchase new products and information to refine your already-successful business. There’s nothing crazy about acquiring new information and products in order to stay abreast of changes in the business. Spending that money when you’re struggling is a different story.

There’s a significant difference between trying to stay on the cutting edge and gambling on every possible tool in hopes of making a business work.

You want to be the smart investor. You don’t want to spend yourself into bankruptcy before you build a real business.

Buying the Right Way

How do you prevent yourself from unnecessary overspending? It starts by building a rock-solid foundation. If you look at the core of Internet marketing, it’s really rather simple.

You need a product to sell. You need a way to sell it. You need to bring traffic to your the site you’ll use to make sales.

That’s really all there is to it. All of your efforts should relate to one of those basic needs.

So, you must work to create a strong presence on all three of those fronts. When you buy something, it must directly address one of those three foundational needs.

Before you start reaching for details, tweaks, adjustments and tricks, you need to develop your core means of making online money. When you have a foundation in place, you will make money. Then you can start experimenting with new ideas and products.

How to Build Your Foundation

You can start building that money making foundation without going broke in the process. Here’s a great approach to getting the job done.

How and why to build an email list

Posted on September 25, 2010
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You’ve probably heard this common Internet marketing mantra a million times. The money is in the list. Building your own list is one of the last legitimate home based business opportunities. It’s a strategy you can’t afford to overlook.

Why it works

Marketing research reveals that most people don’t make a purchase after one exposure to a marketing message. Repeated exposure is usually necessary to inspire action. The best way to reach someone more than once is by making them a part of your subscriber list.

People are also more likely to buy from those with whom the feel a trusting connection. You can use emails to your list to forge a personal connection. Relationship building creates an opportunity to encourage sales.

How to do it

List building is an easy home based business strategy and it all starts with a squeeze page. A squeeze pages has only one purpose. It should encourage readers to become subscribers to your list. Nothing else really matters.

In most cases, marketers encourage list opt-ins by offering something of value to the prospective customer in exchange for their contact information. This is a proven strategy that you can use to spur the success of your business.

Having a quality inducement won’t automatically make your squeeze page a success, though. You also need to build your squeeze page the right way. There are certain squeeze page strategies that produce the best results. You should adopt those winning strategies. As such, you’ll want to rely on these three strategies.

Squeeze page basics

First, your squeeze page should be free of all outgoing links with the exception of the “submit” button on your sign up form. You don’t want to provide your prospective customers with an “escape route” or distractions that may reduce conversions.

Second, the squeeze page should feature a powerful, brief message. You want to make your offer of an inducement attractive and you don’t want to dilute that point with extraneous verbiage. Don’t forget that your squeeze page only has one purpose – to build a list. You should choose every word with that goal in mind.

Third, you will want to approach the sign up process as if it were as important as a big sale – close that deal! Thus, your squeeze page’s sign up form needs to include an extremely strong call to action. Make it clear to readers that they’ll benefit from the simple, free act of filling out your subscriber form.

Summary

A good inducement and a squeeze page built with these three recommendations will get the job done. That will give you the opportunity to develop an effective relationship with prospects. It will also allow you to reach them with your marketing messages on multiple occasions.

Online list building is a powerful way to improve your Internet marketing performance. The best marketers in the business rely on list building for a reason. It’s true – the money is in the list!

Get indexed, get ranked, get traffic

Posted on September 7, 2010
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There is no doubt that website traffic is critical to your business success. And free traffic beats everything else. So where do we get free traffic? Google and other search engines.

How does Google give out free traffic?

You’ve experienced this process a lot of times. You load up Google or another search engine. Type in something you’re looking for. And then you visit one or more of the sites that show up. That website owner has just enjoyed the benefit of free traffic. So the real question is how you get that free traffic.

You probably only visit a link or two from the first page of results. The truth is that this first page of results receives nearly all the clicks. What’s even more amazing is the the first 3 links get more than 70% of the free traffic.

So, obviously your site needs to be in the first page of results to get free traffic from Google. And this means Google needs to “rank” you as a top 10 result. And this bring us to…

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization means that Google thinks your site matches what people are typing into their search box. The intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. However, we do know a few things that count.

Getting indexed

Before your website can begin gaining ranking, you have to alert Google to it’s existence. This is called getting “indexed.” When your website gets indexed, Google stores information about it in their massive database.

Google needs to actually find your site in order to index it. Getting a link from another site will accomplish this easily. Since some of these site will already be indexed, Google will follow the links on their pages and find you.

Use your Twitter and Facebook updates to get quick indexed links to your site. Because these sites are indexed multiple times every day. So your new link will get indexed very quickly.

Gaining ranking

After getting indexed, you need to work on your search engine ranking. Just getting indexed does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.

There are three components of gaining ranking:

Content strategies

This is the SEO work you do on your page. You need to make sure your content matches the search terms you’re going after. The topic of this article is clearly SEO. Google knows that not just because the words search engine optimization show up. Another reason is because there are related words, like website traffic, too.

You also need to make sure the title tags, outbound links and the domain itself match the topic of the page. These all play a part in helping Google determine what your website is about.

Link juice

Next, you need to pay attention to the links to and from your site. This includes both the inbound and outbound links. It’s very important that you have more links coming in than you have going out. The more inbound links you have the better your ranking will be.

A very easy way to get a lot of links to your site is through article marketing. With this strategy what you do is write an article about the topic you’re targeting. Then you have to create multiple versions of this articles. And post unique versions to lots of websites that accept articles. And quantity is the key here – so do lots and lots.

Getting activity

The last thing we know for sure is that Google likes to see active sites. Static pages that just sit may rank at first, but will fall off over time. Regular content updates to your site are expected. RSS feeds are an easy way to keep your content changing.

But the best way is with active discussions on your page itself. To get comments from others, you need to get others to visit your site. One simple method for doing this is to use forums.

What you need to do is sign up with several forums in your niche. Then become active in the forum. Then put a link to your site in your profile. This will get your more inbound links. And it will also get real visitors to your site.

Conclusion

Each step listed above is critical. However, writing a bunch of different articles on the same topic. And creating a bunch of forum profiles. And posting your articles and comments takes a lot of time. And the bad news is that you probably won’t do it.

However, rank builder software exists. And it automates everything we’ve just talked about. So the best thing you can do is to automate this process. And then you’re sure to get it done. By taking these steps you practically ensure you’ll get free traffic from Google.

Affiliate Marketing Revised

Posted on August 21, 2010
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OK, forget everything you know about affiliate marketing. Everything you’ve been taught is simply out of date. You need to adapt and change or perish.

The promise

You’ve probably heard how easy it is to start an affiliate business. Well, that’s true . . . to a point There’s no doubt it’s easier than starting your own business. But starting your own business is really hard, so it’s all relative.

Here’s the ugly truth

The worst part is that the information you’ve received is all wrong. The first thing you’re taught is to pick some great products. Next to look for easy keywords to target. Then to use these keywords to buy ads promoting the product. And just enjoy the commissions. But this just won’t work!

Keywords are dead

This method worked a couple years ago. But keywords are too expensive now. It’s time for a paradigm shift.

A brand new formula

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Here’s how to win at this game.

Do CPA marketing instead of product promotion

CPA stands for Cost Per Action. It’s far superior to product promotion. Because you don’t have to get people to spend money. You earn a commission for having them perform an “action”. Such as filling in a form. Which is much easier than getting them to buy something.

Do demographics research

You’re not even going to use keywords (explained below.) So spend your time doing demographics research. First, select the CPA offer you want to promote. Then hop over to Quantcast.com. And discover the exact demographics of your ideal prospect.

Use image ads

So you know what your promoting and you know who will be interested. You can target these exact demographics on display networks. Using image ads. No keywords required. And you’ll save a fortune. Image ad clicks are much cheaper.

In closing

This is truly a quick cash concept. Because getting started in CPA is free. Image ads are cheap. You can use demographics to target your ideal prospect. And your commission is much easier to earn.

The Grid! How to Become Successful at Anything

Posted on August 19, 2010
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No One Told You This Truth About Making More Money

Posted on August 17, 2010
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Here is another great video by Stephen Pierce that you must check out!

How To Improve Your Life

Posted on August 13, 2010
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7 reasons why you MUST have your own info product

Posted on August 10, 2010
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Think about this: What’s the biggest reason millions of people log onto the internet each day? You probably already guessed that it’s to find information. Google alone serves up 400 million searches per day! OK, so what’s it to you? It means that you have a massive opportunity to give people exactly what they’re looking for – information. And when done correctly, you can get paid for it, too!

What is info marketing?

First, understand that this is the simplest kind of business there is. You take information and turn it into a digital product – like and ebook. And then sell it to people who want to learn the info in it. It couldn’t get much simpler.

How do you make it work?

We’ve established that it’s a simple concept. But to make it a successful business you’ve got to provide information people want. So you’ll need to find out what info is valuable. How do you do that?

A super simple trick is to just to check “answer” sites. Visit answers.yahoo.com or similar sites and see what kinds of questions people are asking. You want to find something a lot of people are asking about. That people are having trouble solving. And solve the problem for them by writing an info product on it.

An encouraging word

If you’re worried about how to write and ebook. Put it this way: An ebook is just a series of articles. So instead of sitting down to write the whole thing. Focus on one article at a time. And when you have a collection, expand and embellish them and voila! You’ve got an ebook.

Why info products? Interestingly enough, we’re back to the name of this article How about 7 reasons why:

1. Simplicity

Once it’s built it runs pretty much on it’s own. And your customers need very little support. So you can just set it up and let it run. It really is like and automatic money machine.

You have no physical inventory. You don’t have to ship anything. Your business is 100% digital.

2. Product combos

After you’ve created a few ebooks. You can just combine them into a more expensive product. It’s a simple matter to merge a few ebooks into one. And you’ll be able to charge much more for this “new” product. There’s greater perceived value in a single big course. Instead of several small ebooks.

3. Private label right

Since it’s your product, you can offer other people the resale rights. This is a very popular topic right now, because people just don’t want to invest the time and money into making their own. And what’s more you get to charge two to three time as much for these rights.

4. Leverage

Leverage your ebook by using the content in different ways. Use part of it to make an autoresponder series. And build your list with it. A list is it’s own reward!

5. More leverage

Don’t stop there . . . break it into several smaller reports. Then use these to generate leads for the main product. They can be free or low prices. Either way, you win because you’re feeding your funnel. And if you’re really clever, you’ll let your affiliate use these reports as marketing tools. Wait, did I say “affiliates”?

6. Affiliates

This is a real power strategy. When you own your own products. Other people can become your affiliates. How would you like to have an army of affiliates selling your products? You can’t do this unless you have your own product.

7. Joint Ventures

Last, but definitely not least… Setting up joint ventures is the fastest way to gain success. Period. So, I’d say this is the most important reason to have you own products. Because if you don’t have you own product, you’ve got nothing to JV.

In closing

If you can’t see the power of info product marketing, then you’ve probably been sleeping. You’ll be the master of your destiny. Because it’s your business and you control it. So, decide to just start:

The steps on how to write an ebook are really that easy. Before you know it, you’ll have your own info product.

Using Web Audio for Success

Posted on August 9, 2010
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It’s undeniable that if you add audio to websites it will increase your results. If you’re not using audio on your sites, you’re making a mistake. Adding it raises your opt-in conversions. Audio increases sales.

Why does it work?

There’s no real mystery. Most of the web is cold and impersonal. It makes your site more “human”. And adds the feel of a real live person. Audio literally breathes life into your website. Which fascinates greater interaction from your visitors.

Here are the benefits

There are actually two profit boosts from using audio. You will close more sales. And second you’ll save money on the sales letter. Instead of having to pay a professional to write you a great sales letter. You can just add your own audio. Your honest message about your product will sell better than a professional copywriter.

And you will increase your subscriber opt-in rate. People need to be told exactly what to do. Just add a short audio message saying: Enter your email address in the form. Just this one simple thing will boost opt-ins up to 315%!

Some ways to use audio

A welcome message on your homepage. A warm welcome can be the deciding factor. Your welcome message could make them stay when they would normally leave.

Step-by-step instructions. The same principle the we used to boost opt-ins applies. Use an audio message to lead your visitors through a process. That includes filling in your order form!

Product testimonials are great. It’s good to get written testimonials. But an audio testimonial is better. It’s pretty easy to fake a written testimonial. Audio adds a level of higher believability. And will definitely increase your results.

Here’s a bonus tip

Did you ever think of making a product just by recording some audio? This is by far the easiest content to produce. And your customers will be very happy with the product. The great thing about audio products is people can take them with them on the go. And you can get someone to transcribe them for very little money. This much easier than writing the eBook yourself!

How hard is adding audio?

It’s not hard at all. There are quite a few audio streaming software programs out there. There’s no knowledge required on your part. The software records the audio, creates the button code, etc. Just paste the code you copy from the software. There’s nothing to worry about.

Summary

Just a reminder of why you want to start using audio. Setting up some web audio will do wonders for all your results. You’ll enjoy more customer sales. And your opt-in rate will increase. And you can quickly produce products and website sales copy. You’ll be one of the few you use these strategies. But you’ll save a lot of time and money. Start using it today and you’ll be glad you did.

Sneaky Affiliate Tricks

Posted on August 8, 2010
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Yes affiliate marketing rocks, but it’s really hard to get started. This is because there are already a lot of people doing it. In order to survive you have to beat your competition. There’s also a lot of information out there about how to do affiliate marketing, so it can be confusing. Well, here’s on simple thing you can do that will put you ahead of the game.

Video marketing

You can’t deny that video is powerful. Video online is everywhere because people love it. Keeping people’s attention is so much easier using videos. So why wouldn’t you use it in your affiliate business?

Here’s how to use videos for affiliate promotions:

Testimonials

This one is super simple. Just click record on your web cam and start talking. It does not need to be polished or pro. Listening to your honest endorsement makes your viewers feel comfortable buying. In truth, mistakes and mess-ups just make it more believable. You can literally just press record and talk. And if you don’t want to show your face, use one of the next ideas.

Do a video walk-through

This is a great way to promote something without selling it. Basically you’re doing a tutorial on how to use the product. And in the process you’re actually selling the product. If it’s useful, then what you’re teaching just makes people want it. So pick some really helpful aspect of the product and show how to use that.

Do an ordering video

This technique is super powerful. Do a screen capture of the ordering process. There is nothing more motivating than watching someone buy something live. First, it’s social proof. People will feel more comfortable buying after seeing you do it. This also makes your viewers trust you. People believe you’re giving them good advice if you take that advice yourself. And finally, it creates envy. It’s simple – you have it. Now they want it. You can add some extra punch to this by ending with: In order to get to see the inside, you gotta buy the product.

Record a preview of the members area

Here’s an easy way to show the value of the product. What you do is record a tour of the back end. You show them the entire contents of what they get. And it helps soften the skeptics. It’s much easier to trust they’re getting something if they actually seen it.

Anyone can do it!

No special skills are required. Anyone can create stunning videos with some easy-to-use software. Really, the software does all the work. So please don’t let technical worries slow you down. Just focus on the benefits:

Get started right now and take your affiliate marketing to the next level. Not using video is detrimental to you business. So do it!

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