Some of you may know that I am into the self-help niche. I have been a self-help geek since high school and recently came across what I consider to be the most effective Law of Attraction program ever produced-”The Secret Behind The Secret”. Click here to see my special offer.
Over the next couple of weeks I am going to be posting info on Building your business with social networking. I have always written all of my own posts but in this case I am not. I am always willing to give credit where credit is due and Bob the teacher has come out with a free mini-course on Social networking. Not only that it is also an affiliate program. If you are interested, you can view the course here or if you also want to become an affiliate and receive the course in your inbox go to: Discover more ways to power your business with social networking at www.DiscoverSocialNetworking.com.
Here is the deal. If you have a shoestring marketing method or tips that you like to use, write up a 300 to 600 word article and send it to stanpontiere@internetbizops.ws The winning entry will be published on my blog. At the end of your article, you get to put your signature along with a link to your website or blog. Only a couple of rules. No plugs or links can be included in the article only shoestring marketing tips or content. Second, we expect you to put a link to your content website and/or blog but you may not link to an affiliate sales page. You may ask “Whats in it for me?” Easy you get to prove your expertise in shoestring marketing, published forever on my blog and you should pick up some traffic by having your link being displayed here. Please leave separate contact information with your entry, email subject should be contest entry and then just simply email: stanpontiere@internetbizops.ws
On your blog and on your website one way to get repeat traffic is to run a contest. I have a website called “The Digital Photographer” and each month, I run a Digital Photo of the Month contest. If you are into digital photography, just hop on over to “The Digital Photographer” and click on the contest page and submit your best photographs. The winning photograph will be published at the first of each month, receive a certificate suitable for framing and be entered into a yearly contest with a cash prize. Not only that but if you are available for assignments, we will publish your contact information if you so desire.
In fact, I am now going to run a contest on this blog. Send in you best traffic tip and the winner will be published on this blog and also on my “Marketing on a Shoestring” website. You may ask, what is in it for me? Simple, at the end of your article, if you win, you will have a signature file that may contain links to any websites or blogs that you have. Please send all entries to:
stanpontiere@internetbizops.ws
I hope that you can see how this can help you get repeat traffic if you also run a contest on your blog or website. It is really simple. It costs you virtually nothing and anyone who enters will be returning to your site or blog to read or view the winning entry.
It really is a win/win situation, you get repeat traffic and the entrant get a chance to be published with links to their website or blog. Try it and see how it builds your traffic.
As you may know, I am a big believer in Shoestring Marketing. But there are so many things that you can do that you have to make a decision as to how to spend your limited time. Certainly, advertising has it’s place but, Shoestring Marketing has much better long term results.
The problem is that some Shoestring methods produce a ton of traffic but it is not targeted on the other hand, some Shoestring methods produce a lesser traffic volume but it is quality traffic and if they like what they see, you will see much better repeat business.
Tops on my list of producing quality traffic is article writing. The people who read your articles and then click on your link are very likely to join your list and make many repeat visits to your blog.
Second place is shared by making entries to my own blog and also making forum comments. These people tend to also become repeat visitors.
YouTube can produce a lot of visitors of moderate quality. They may or may not become repeat customers but in sheer numbers, this is still an important method of Shoestring Marketing.
At the bottom of my list is Social Networking (Squidoo, MyFace, etc). This method of marketing will produce a ton of hits to your website and or blog but, they are typically one-time visitors. They will take whatever you might be offering for free and then be gone forever. They might even sign-up for your list but when you look at your stats, they have a very low open rate of your newsletter.
If you have your own product and affiliate program, this is one of the best ways of receiving quality traffic. They come to your sales page and the affiliate has already pre-sold them. The only problem with this method is that you must have produced a quality product and that does take time to produce.
All in all, you have to make a decision. You can spend your time on quality traffic or spend your time on creating a ton of poor quality traffic. My choice will always be go for quality and you can’t go wrong. Quality traffic is looking for help in building their business. The other way to go is to do things that produce a ton of traffic but, they are usually just freebie seekers.
To your marketing success
Everyone knows the value of Article Marketing. It displays your expertise, builds trust with your readers and builds great natural back-links to your website. However, there is one fatal flaw that I have been making which destroys everything that I have been working for.
My articles have been widely published and have created substantial traffic to my opt-in site for my newsletter and that in itself becomes the problem. My signature file was a link to my newsletter opt-in page. Thanks to an email from EzineArticles, I have stopped that practice.
Let me explain, you go to all the work of writing a good content based article to display your expertise and build trust and the first thing I was doing was sending my readers to an opt-in site that offered no content and it immediately destroyed the trust that I was trying to build.
Today, my signature file sends my readers to a content rich website where they learn even more about my niche and helps them to build their online businesses. Yes, there is a prominently displayed link to my newsletter opt-in but, there is plenty of content rich business building information on my signature site to further display my knowledge and build reader trust.
So, think about this when you build your signature file. Are you giving your readers more content and building expertise and trust or are you cheating your readers by giving them just another opt-in page?
Another thing that I am doing (and this could be a separate article) is that I no longer offer a free ebook to sign up for my newsletter. I found that too many people were signing up just to get the ebook. Now I offer a free ebook with no sign-up required just to read my opt-in page. I then offer my newsletter to those readers who are seriously interested in building their business. I don’t need a massive list of people who just signed up for a freebie, I only want readers who are serious about my niche and will actually read my newsletter for it’s rich content. Sure the freebie created a massive list but not a learned and responsive list. I know the gurus all tout giving away a freebie to build your list but it does you no good if the only reason they signed up was for the freebie. I don’t need freebie seekers, I need readers who have a serious business building mindset.
Enough of my rant for today, just make sure that your signature file leads your readers to content rather than the fluff of an opt-in site. If you are not receiving the newsletter from EzineArticles.com, sign up-it is well worth the time invested in reading it.
There are many great methods of marketing your online business but there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest-your own affiliate program. If you create a good product and pay a substantial affiliate fee, you could not only make some money from sales but, you could possibly build a massive list for your newsletter. While there is some cost involved, it pales in comparison to the benefits that you will receive. If you have dozens or perhaps hundreds of affiliates promoting your product, think of how this could build your business.
If you look at the sales page of any big-hitter in marketing, you will always notice that on the sales page they offer a free short content report to promote their product. This does two things. First, it gives the reader more reason to buy the product and secondly, it is an opt-in form to add them to your newsletter. Think now in terms of massive business growth.
Of course, the first step is to build your product. At first, this may seem to be an overwhelming project. It doesn’t have to be. If you have been article marketing for any period of time, you may have a massive amount of material that you can now reuse. It is a simple matter of taking your articles, rewriting as necessary, put them into chapter form and then write an introduction and summary. Voila, instant product.
The next step is to produce a 7 to 10 page special report that you can use on your sales page to encourage sales and of course opt-ins. The report should be of the highest quality, content rich and it should answer common problems in your niche that would help your prospects.
Over delivering should be a key concern when developing your sales page. Not only should your product over deliver but you should add as least 4 or 5 special reports, software or Ebooks as bonuses that support you primary product.
Probably, the next step should be to get your product listed on Click Bank. When you do that, offer a full 70% affiliate fee. The purpose of creating the affiliate program is not to try to make a fortune off of this product. The primary purpose is to garner the power of having your affiliates doing the advertising for you and as a result building your list. You know the old axiom, the gold is in the list.
While this method is not free, the results of having possibly hundreds of affiliates helping to build your list is massive. This is probably
the most overlooked method of internet marketing available and could move you up into the ranks of the super affiliate.
In the Beginning, Edison said Let their be Moving Pictures. Well, not exactly, there had been several attempts at creating moving pictures, but, in 1896 Edison invented the Vitascope-the first commercially successful movie projector in the United States. Virtually overnight, moving pictures became a success. Today, we call it video and if used properly, is virtually an untapped source of website traffic.
You can put up marketing videos on any number of video sites like You Tube and if the content is good, it might be viewed by thousands of video fans and result in massive traffic to your website. Not only that, video has become so easy to produce that when they get to your site, they could be greeted with video right on your site and if you don’t think that this will improve your website conversion statistics, you are living in the past.
If you think that it might be too expensive, think again. Almost any digital still camera will produce professional looking videos that you can use on the web. Not only that, there is plenty of video editing freeware that will help you produce professional quality results.
I don’t know what is going to be the wave of the future in internet marketing but, I do know that video is the wave of the present and if you are not using it, you are giving potential customers just one more excuse to visit and buy from another marketers site.
Don’t live in the past, get on the video bandwagon and reap the benefits of this new and effective form of internet marketing. Hey guys, it is the 21st century and video rules.
I started out with the idea of forum marketing but, somewhere along the way, I have found that I am now in the midst of a love affair with the forums. There is much more to the forums than just forum marketing.
Yes, I will admit that I still use the forums. By starting good threads or making appropriate and educated responses to other’s comments, I have been able to promote my image as a knowledgeable professional internet marketer. But, that is only a small part of the story. I have found that by spending time on the forums, I have been able to glean the combined knowledge of the best internet marketers in the world. I have learned more about internet marketing from the forums than from any other single source.
For example, I am currently in the process of working on my own Ebook that I plan to market on Click Bank. Fortunately, one of the discussions that was started today was about recent rule changes that Click Bank has made which will dramatically affect the way in which I both write my book and in the sales literature that will accompany the book.
In an effort to stay in compliance with FTC (Federal Trade Commission) regulation on advertising, Click Bank no longer allows you to make claims that you can make specific dollar amounts with any given product. The FTC considers this to be false advertising and the last thing that Click Bank needs is trouble with the FTC. For example, you may say if you can substantiate the figures, “I made $10,268 dollars on a single day with this product.” The key to being able to say that is that you can prove it. On the other hand, you may not say, “I made $10,268 dollars in a single day and now, you can too.” If you were to use that comment, you would run afoul of both Click Bank and the FTC. The difference is that you can prove the first statement but, the second statement is pure conjecture and will be labeled as false advertising.
It is an important lesson and one that I might not have known about had I not been reading the marketing forums. Even if I were to stop forum marketing, I would still visit them everyday. There is just so much information that you can learn from the professionals on the forums that you are truly doing yourself a disservice if you don’t visit them on a regular basis. Knowledge along with it’s application has always been and will always be your key to success on the internet. No matter how expert you think you are, there is always someone out there with even greater expertise. Visit the forums and learn from the best.
Time Flies and Then You Die. You only have three basic things that you can use to build and market your business-money, knowledge and time. You can always get more money,you can always study and build your knowledge but time can not be created. You have a limited amount of time and if you don’t use it wisely, you can kiss your hopes of internet success a sweet goodbye.
Right now, you might be thinking, “Oh no, not another lecture on time management.” You are right. You can control your time and use it wisely to build your business or you can waste it on any of a myriad of distractions and lose it forever. It is your choice-use your time or lose your time. Either way, it is the one thing in marketing that you can not create more of.
There are many methods and systems that you can use to manage your time and in order to accomplish anything on the internet, you must adopt one of them. It is far too easy to start reading your email in the morning and get sidetracked and end up clicking on numerous links, wasting many non-productive hours on the internet and the important things that will build your business get passed over.
Then you look back at your day and wonder how you could have been so busy and still didn’t get anything accomplished. The answer is simple, you did not put a priority on the things that build your business and spent your valuable time doing essentially nothing.
Personally, I sit down each evening and plan out my next day. It goes something like this.
0600-0620 Check email and read and respond to emails that are urgent or might help build my business. The rest are set aside for my slack time.
0620-0700 Write 2 to three articles and submit them to the article directories. At this time, I also add them to my blog and on Monday, I select my best article of the week to send out it to my list.
0700-0800 This hour is devoted to blog and forum commenting. It is important that you comment daily as the blogs and forums are very important in building your online reputation.
0800-0900 At this point in the morning, I spend my time in the social networking circles-My Space, Myface and Squidoo. These social networks are becoming increasingly important in online business building. Although I have started these just recently, I have found them to be an important adjunct to my other marketing methods.
These are the most important things that I do and I have accomplished them by nine in the morning. The day is already a success and now I can go back and look at my emails, surf the net and scope out new and interesting business opportunities. You may have more that you have to do, if so, put it in your schedule.
This method works for me. You may find some other method of time management. It really doesn’t matter which method you use as long as you can look back at your day with a feeling of accomplishment. Our time on earth is limited. When Mr. Death knocks on your door, he is not going to give you the time that you need to write one more article or make a blog/forum comment. Your time has run out. The only question is did you make good use of it or did you fritter it away surfing the net.