Why is it that one group of internet marketers make money from their client list with facility and other marketers can barely make a dollar or two?

One element of course is building a relationship with your list. Just because you have a list doesn’t mean your list is listening to you…or even believes you. I’ll cover this in another upcoming article.

Another key is offering something they can’t keep themselves from accepting. It took a great amount of trial and error til I got the formula just right, and getting up in front of an audience and telling about it and the profits I made from emails was daunting.

My record offering to a live audience is over $95,000 dollars on a weekendpretty good for only my list and not with JV partners or any affiliate action.

These are the 3 necessary steps I found for putting together an offer that brings in the orders. Add-ons like guarantees and testimonials can be included but these are the three key ingredients.

First Step: Have a Unique Irresistible Benefit

What will they get out of the deal? What’s in it for them?

Here is the benefit. Make note of the two other points, namely, unique and irresistible. What is it that makes your different from all the others? Why buy yours among all the other choices?

Without an answer to those questions you don’t have a compelling offer.

Even if you’re offering a product by someone else, you must come up with a way to make your offer unique and different. Don’t just pile on bonuses haphazardly. Offer something just a little different from everyone else.

Second Step: Scarcity

Create a reason why people should act right now. Is there a limited number available? Will the offer expire in just a few days? Why do they need to act now instead of in a few days or weeks?

Maybe bonus #1 is limited and will be removed Tuesday. Maybe you only printed 50 copies of this item. If you don’t give people a reason to act now, they will save your email and think about it later. And they’ll forget.

Step Three: Reason Why

Why in the world are you offering such an incredible deal? No one believes you. They all think you’re stretching the truth. All those other marketers use scarcity when they’re lying. Why should they believe you?

What is your motivation behind such a great deal? Did you get more than you needed so you want to get rid of them fast? Have you some taxes coming due and need money to pay it? Is your product scratched or otherwise damaged?

When I did offers in front of a live audience, I told my subscribers. This was why I was offering such an incredible deal. I had to have a quick response, or I’d look stupid in front of 157 people. That’s easy to understand…and easy for people to believe my motivation to make them a great offer.

Posted: April 17th, 2008 under Online Marketing.
Comments: none

How do you do it?

What I want to do here is to strip out all the nonsense, myths and hype that is out there so that you can develop a sensible strategy for promoting your website.

First of all, what puts a page at the top of the rankings?

Through use of top secret algorithms, Search Engines rank sites based on relevancy, accuracy and up-kept status of information. This counters SEO experts whose sole purpose is to get clients at the top of the rankings.

There are two “strategies” for getting top rankings:

“Black Hat” and “White Hat”.

White Hat optimization is designed to deliver accurate, timely, relevant and quality information - essentially working WITH the Search Engines.

Black Hat techniques are ways of cheating that manipulate loopholes and other cheating techniques. These techniques do have the potential to work but do not last for very long as Google programmers are quick to fix the loopholes and ban you at the same time.

No one knows for certain what ranking factors work, but these are the ones that have been well proven, have survived the test of time, and make intuitive sense, given the goal of the search engines themselves:

1. Quality themed content, and lots of it. This goes beyond just stuffing in your keywords as much as possible. The SE’s are getting better at determining themes by means of “latent semantic indexing”, which basically means using artificial intelligence to work out what the site is about, rather than just what keywords are on it. To achieve this you need to provide your keyword, certainly, and also other words and phrases that are linked to them.

2. Links to your site. In general, the more the merrier. But not all links are created equal. Links on themed sites are worth more than on pages that are not related to your theme, ie links to your fishing site from another fishing site are worth more than if they come from a cooking site. Links from “bad neighborhoods” count for nothing. They don’t penalize you for other people linking to you, but they certainly don’t reward you for links coming from link farms, Free-For-All pages (FFA), and any other sites they consider to be bad. Links from “authority sites” are worth more. Some indication of a site’s value is given by the Google Page Rank - the higher the better. In time, the Page Rank will probably become theme specific - ie your site could have a high PR for one theme, and a low one for another.

3. Old sites - ie that have been around for a long time are worth more than new ones - in general your PR will rise with time, all other factors being equal.

4. New sites are also worthy - remember, the SE’s want to deliver hot news, so they will give an initial priority to new sites, and also to new links pointing to sites, as they might indicate that there is some hot, recent, news on that site.

5. Links OUT to authority sites are also worth points. But don’t have too many. While you are not penalized for any bad links coming in, you can be penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.

6. Keywords - Set your goal to get ranked for specific keywords before all else. Tag the name of your area or town to the end of the keyword if you are a local business. Keywords vary in competition. Some much more than others.

7. Unique content. The last thing that search engines want to do is to deliver to the public 20,000 pages that all say the same thing! Duplicate content is quickly recognized and filtered out by the SE’s. Don’t just slap up the same articles that everyone else is using. You need unique content. That applies both to your own site, and also to the pages that are linking to you.

Posted: April 17th, 2008 under Marketing.
Comments: none

A giant fraction of Google searches are local. Advertise your business locally and you’ll get traffic and customers for a fraction of the cost of other media. This may sometimes reach more people than Yellow Pages ads; it’s more traceable than billboards, and it costs you less than mailings and fliers.

The Kelsey group says that as many as sixty percent of internet searches are local. There are estimates that say it is as much as seventy-five percent. If the number was only twenty percent, that would still represent a whole lot of searches. There are millions of searches daily.

No matter the percentage, local search is without a doubt the unexploited possibility in pay-per-click management.

You want to sell weight loss plans, MP3 downloads, high definition TVs, or mortgages nationwide on Google? You can do it, but you’d better strap on your gladiator helmet and prepare for a fight.

However if you happen to be accounting firm, electrician, handyman, or foot doctor, the battle is easily won. The competitors in your market most likely have no idea what they are doing.

This is a prime place for you to consult, with your neighbor businesses; setting up campaigns for them. Look at this: .

Hundreds of local businesses in your city spend upwards of $1,000 a month just on Yellow Pages ads, so these people are already spending money!

Yellow Pages sales persons help make people more aware of the online opportunities when they sell Internet Yellow Page listings. But that is Google or Yahoo ads.

Google and their ilk are so occupied with handling extant possibilities that the actuality of reps selling ppc on the streets is a distant prospect. (Though there are hints of a venture with Yellow Pages.)

If you are dealing with a category where mail-order in not possible and the items must be gotten locally, then the clicks are cheap. Check this out. If you search for ‘brake shop’ in Chicago only 6 ads will come up, and one is for E-bay. Do I hear a bid for nickel clicks?

Local advertisers that are knowledgeable about the web are quite rare. That most likely won’t be changing soon either. There is a big difference between running an online store and a retail store. The saying “In the land of the blind, the man with one eye gets to be king”, is only too true.

If you can accept the fact that many keywords will only produce a few local clicks a month, the return on investment (ROI) on what you do get is extraordinary.

Posted: April 17th, 2008 under Marketing.
Comments: none

When you are creating ads for your Google Adwords campaign you will need to build them carefully around the right keywords. This seems like commonsense and many marketers have perfected this art. They do the proper research to find the best keywords.

There is another important factor in your pay per click advertising campaigns that does not revolve around keywords. This is to do with the searchers themselves. They rarely look beyond the first 5-10 pages of their search results.

In order to be seen an ad must be positioned within the first 5-10 pages of the search results. How can you do this? By paying more money.

For the savvy marketer this section is merely repeating what you already know. However if you are new to the game you might find this information helpful. Simply put Adwords is similar to a large auction. There is usually fierce competition for a keyword especially if it is popular. Only if you are dealing with very obscure keywords will you have less competition, but you will also have very few searches.

So be aware that you are not the only person utilizing a certain keyword. How can these search engines determine where to place an ad? Because Adwords works by pay per click the highest bidder on a key word will earn the rights to a top position. These high paid keywords are welcomed by the search engines and will always gain top positions.

It can be time consuming finding the right blend of bids and keywords, it might take some profits and losses as you experiment. Not every click will produce sales; in fact conversions are often only 10% of the click ratio. Price of product should be taken into account and of course your budget, when deciding how much to bid.

Keyword research is one of the main elements of your campaign but bidding is also equally important. Without a good position for your ad, you will not gain any traffic let alone sales. Take some time to understand the bidding process so that you can make a lucrative campaign.

While working out the details of your Adword campaign be sure to keep these tactics in mind. Consider this, when you build a great pulling ad it is no good condemning it into oblivion. That is just a waste of time and money.

Posted: April 17th, 2008 under Marketing.
Comments: none

Some Essential Iphone Accessories

Buying your first iPhone is a long process, longer than you could have initially expected. It does not only involve the actual purchase of the iPhone, as the market is designed in such a way that you will always want more, as after buying an iPhone, you have to buy various iPhone accessories, to be able to become the really trendy owner of your new gadget, and in some cases, to protect it, or to maximize its capabilities. Iphone accessories are simply things from which you will always want more.

The Cases

Have you ever wondered why you are actually buying your third iPhone case in half a year? Even these cases, the simplest iPhone accessories are always becoming better, or you always see something new. You can have light and hard cases, leather cases, metal cases, red, yellow, pink and black cases, cases that actually protect your iPhone and the ones that just look good on it or that go with your new dress. Well, it is just natural that Apple as a leading market force and its partners, should offer a wide variety of iPhone accessories, and it is just natural that you will want to own more of these cases, to suit the occasion or your mood, or just to protect you iPhone from nearby children.

Headset and Travel Charger

Your next purchase after a case should perhaps be an iPhone Bluetooth Headset, to be able to answer your calls wirelessly, easily and elegantly and you will also want to get a travel/car charger, to be able to charge your phone even while you are on the move. When you get bored with these basic iPhone accessories, having purchased earphones and perhaps some speakers as well, you could perhaps be interested in what they have on offer outside the realm of conventional accessories for iPhones.

Well, as could be expected, the list is literally endless. You can purchase for example mini windshield wipers for your iPhone, to clear the smudges on your screen. Or to prevent even these smudges, you can buy a pack of phone fingers in different sizes, that you can just fit on your fingers while using the touch screen and it will stay totally clear. You might also want to try the iPhone travel pillow, with built in speakers, this way, you will have a pillow for your flight, and your ears won’t be hurting from the earphones.

Any iPhone accessory could basically come in handy once, though it’s quite obvious that a pair of mini windshield wipers for your screen is slightly less essential than a decent case, so try to grab this latter first. However, buying an iPhone will generally just introduce you to the magical world of iPhone accessories.

Posted: April 17th, 2008 under Communication.
Comments: none