Study Other Businesses : Non stop learning curve.
Yesterday I talked about studying and evolving your business to another level. Like I explained you have to be student of marketing as long as you live. So today I am going to give you some ideas on how to study other marketers.
Study very carefully how successful people online operate.
1) Sign up or Join things online for the soul purpose of learning from them. You may not necessarily need the product or services offered, but you are curious about how they do that! This can include newsletters, memberships and other programs.
There have been many times, I bought the product or joined a website only because I wanted to know more about sales process. (Oh Yeah, there are some great marketers beyond internet marketing niche, if you ever found one then there’s good opportunity to learn from them)
2) Study Sales Pages and Copy. How are they designed and set up? Not all of them are effective; concentrate on the ones that are. Start what’s called a “Swipe File” where you keep ideas for sales pages… The structure of sales pages are not copyrighted. Just the content is…
Here are how you should find sales pages.
Try out www.earlytorise.com and check out their ads (in the newsletter)
Find some good copywriters and check out their resume (Portfolio) you’ll find tons of good stuff there…
If an ad generates a response from you… it might be good for swiping it for later.
3) Watch people in forums… the people running the joint. I almost fell of my chair the other day when I saw the moderator of a forum come in post and draw attention to a batch of products without anyone suspecting a thing…
This is just the tip of the iceburg, but you get the idea. Just train yourself to recognize or look out for these things. You should learn not only what people are teaching you to do, but more importantly study what people are doing!
Places like Sitepoint.com or warriorforum.com are great places to start out with. But again like I said earlier, Don’t stick to marketing theme. There are tons of other markets with some great marketers… study them…
And not even the Gurus… If you see someone was successful at something or had an idea that worked, try to discover the why and how.
I also suggest picking up some sales books that can teach you these techniques… not from gurus or the online world.
I suggest Robert Ciadlini’s Influence : Science and Practice. This is great book on understanding others..
Takings Clients this week.
We started taking clients for next week for our Ghostwriting for Reports services. Check out Short Report Ghostwriting for More information. We’ll take only 4 clients this week(man power down).
Last Day of Your 30 day challenge.
I haven’t given you any new information or task for last 3 days… The challenge is over… right now you should be reaping some rewards… You have all the information you need to last lifetime in Internet Marketing.
Where to go after now?
First place is this blog, well its obvious. Second, Always Think of growing. Think of growing yourself, your business. I don’t remember who said this.. but its the truth I believe in
“If you are not growing You are dying..”
Learn more ways to market.
Learn more ways to sell.
Learn more ways to research
Learn more ways to leverage your assets.
But here’s the caution.
Don’t go on a learning streak… Learn something, use it, apply it, own it, master it… It’s about doing One thing right… Then adding more right things in your business or yourself (self development). You can read more about it “Missing Ingredient to Your Success”
This is secret of practicing martial arts. You have to learn a technique, Repeat many times and implement it against different opponents and Only then you’ll be able to Own it. Same can be said about Marketing and business.
Things will get easier as you progress…
As you start implementing all these steps and methods I discussed in last 30 days. You’ll find its getting easier. You might think Niche research is hard or creating products is hard… You’d surprised how easier it’ll get after you have done it few times…
Every effort you put into, will produce better results… Its really pleasant feeling…
Of course you’d screw up few times… Every one does… Heck I bet most top marketers are still making more mistakes than all of us can do (that’s why they are making more money than us)
That’s the secret… Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Ahhh… who I am kidding, I still get unnerving pressure when I am about to launch my product or blog or anything, but I still do it…
Well, keep up with this blog as I have lots of stuff to discuss. Some tidbits from here and some from there, things that’ll help you get more traffic, create more connections and build internet business for yourself…
Day 28: Teleseminar - Fastest Way To Create a Product
We have covered a few ways to create products (basically reports or ebooks). But if you have to take the time and preparation in mind, then there’s nothing that can beat a teleseminars.
They are great products because
- They can be sold themselves a product.
- You can sell these teleseminars and printouts even after the event.
- You can use them as a lead generation tool or may be additional entry point in your sales process.
- You can use them as a back-end product.
- You don’t have to create a product all by yourself. Its all done by guest speakers.
- They can also be used as sales presentations for higher priced products.
We are going to discuss more about this…
Before you even consider doing your first Teleseminar, be sure you have attended Teleseminars presented by professionals, especially those who provide similar material to what you are considering.
Attend these Teleseminars, read the handouts, purchase the transcripts, and participate in the follow-ups.
After you have attended enough of Teleseminars presented by other presenters that you have an extensive knowledge of the business, you are ready to start putting together your first Teleseminar.
How to Conduct a teleseminar?
Few points to remember before you start creating a teleseminar for your marketing purposes.
- They work best for information-based training.
- When you send out your pre-seminar package, be sure to include the date, time, phone number, and login code if needed. This will prevent last-minute rushing around and also allow you time to resend the information in case someone contacts you who hasn’t received theirs prior to the start of the Teleseminar.
- Since the listeners cannot see the page you are holding, it is important that you number the pages in your handout. This will make it easier for the listeners to follow along and know exactly what topic you are currently covering.
- Either reserve a conference room or pick a quiet room so callers won’t be disturbed by background noise from your telephone.
- Be ready at least 15 minutes before the scheduled start time in case some listeners call in early.
- Be sure to have paper, pens, handouts, cheat sheets, teleconference codes, the list of participants, and any other necessary materials by the phone.
- Do not use a cordless or mobile phone as these may cause your listeners to hear static on the phone line.
- Wear a headset if possible so that your hands will be free to make notes. Because of its tendency to make the speaker sound far away, avoid using a speakerphone.
- Turn off call waiting so that your call will not be disturbed by the beeps.
- Have a clock in the room for keeping track of the time.
- Be sure to check the sound quality of the call at the very start of the call. Ask your callers if they can hear you, and if you are using a headset, be sure the microphone is adjusted for the best sound quality.
- If you have fewer than 12 participants, have each person say their name and location in order to build rapport.
- Stand up while you talk to make your voice sound more vibrant.
- Do not read word-for-word from a script. You want to make your voice sound natural, and very few people can do that when reading from a script.
- To avoid reading from a script, use a “cheat sheet,” with a bulleted list of key points you want your listeners to remember. In this way, you will recall what you want to cover without sounding like a robot.
- Be sure to reinforce your key points frequently throughout your talk in order to keep your audience on-track. This task is much more difficult on the telephone than in person because there is no face-to-face contact.
The attention span on a telephone call is much shorter than that experienced in a live presentation. - Repeat any URL’s and email addresses so that your participants can write them down if they choose. This information should also be provided in your pre- and post-seminar packets.
- During your presentation, be sure to periodically ask your audience if they have any questions. This will give them an opportunity to participate in the discussion and possibly prevent them from losing interest.
- Be sure to manage your time wisely. Your outline should have an estimate of the time that is needed for each section.
- If possible don’t stretch your teleseminar more than 60 minutes at a time. If you can’t do that, Schedule next part of teleseminar in advance.
You can check out my Teleseminar Secrets with Skype Series for More information on how to put up a perfect teleseminar.
This series include…
# 6 Videos showing how to use skype to conduct teleseminar.
# Hold a teleseminar without actually talking to anyone!
# How to make money from your calls without using slimy “hard sell” tactics
# Earn respect, fame, customers and traffic by creating personal relationships
# How to easily structure the content of a call in just a few minutes
# How to profit from your calls “after” it’s over and continue to do so forever!
And much much more… Here are the links to Teleseminar Secrets with Skype Series.
30 Day Internet Marketing Challenge So Far
We are in final stages of this Internet marketing challenge. We discussed quite a few marketing issues in this challenge, like Finding and researching Niche market, creating products, name capture pages, basic and advance sales process, blogging as marketing tool and much much more.
Well here is all the links for this challenge so far. I’ll keep adding more stuff even after we completion of this challenge. So I suggest you to bookmark this page.
From my point of view, you have covered all the process that’ll help you make money using internet marketing. In fact we have covered far more than that… All you need to do is implement them properly.
Day 1: Mind Food: 30 Days to Online Profits
Day 1: Action Resources: 30 Days to Online profits
Day 2: Marketing Mindset & Niche Research
Day 2: How to choose a Hot, rabid niche - I?
Day 2: How to choose a Hot, rabid niche - II?
Day 2: Big Goof Up With Videos…
Day 3 : Keyword Research Premier - Sink Or Swim Right Now
Day 3 : Relation with Themed Keywords and Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA).
Day 3: Mining the Goldmine (Long Tail Keywords)
Competition Research For Organic Traffic on Day 4
Competition Research for paid listing Day 4
Day 5: Jumping Into Internet Marketing Bandwagon…
Day 6: 4 Step Method of Capturing Leads with Name Squeeze
Day 7 Generating Traffic To Your Website
Day 8: Working on Your first product.
Day 9 : How to get tons of traffic for free?
Why Affiliate Income is better than adsense - Day 9
Day 10: Writing Articles and Other Boring stuff
Day 11: Create Multiple Streams of Traffic
Your Blog as Power House Tool for marketing
Web 2.0 and Why You should be Concerned About it?
My 4 Step Method to Online Marketing
Day 16 Your Basic Sales process
Sales letter writing 102 : Advanced Basics
Day 17: How to Create More Exposure to Your Website
Case study : What Makes a GREAT blog?
Day 19: Marketing is Not Linear
3 Key Elements of Writing Good Sales letter
Day 20: Why I hate Internet Marketing
Day 21: Don’t Be One Hit Wonder
Day 22: Simplifying Your Complicated Sales process
SEO Your Blog The Right Way
Link building 102 : An outrageous concept for blogs?
Tag & Ping : Is This the Secret Behind Getting Traffic?
Day 25: Why Your Bum Marketing Sucks
Do You Deserve it?
Why Having a Pretty Face can give you income raise?
I was reading few of the articles in my local magazine. Often times I see this article or discussion about how pretty face can help you getting that increment or that special privileges that you wanted.
Kind of sick when we are talking about equality and stuff… Where do we without pretty face can go?
I gotta agree with that too… there are more than just a few times when I chose my girl friend based completely on how she looked. In fact I can bet you have made some of these decisions based on how other person looked.
But there are few things you can do….
Do You Deserve it?
First impression or How you are being perceived by another person is very important for you in social life and in professional lie. We do judge people from our first impression. Of course sometimes they help, sometimes they don’t.
People have this unconscious hierarchy they follow. They allow some people to lead their lives and they’ll stone others to death. Its all about how you present yourself.
It takes lot of discipline and conscious thought process to avoid these kind of impression disasters. That’s why Only very few people succeed.
So what all this hafta do with marketing or Online business?
Creating Perceived Value for Yourself or Your products.. It’s all the same
Think of the time when you sold something for less value than it deserved. Or you thought a product you created wouldn’t sell unless its really low ($5 or $7) or something.
This is one of the biggest pit that many new marketers fell into. In fact almost everyone of us is prone to this mistake. I made it, some of marketers I know made it too…
Marlon Sanders (one of the few marketers I admire a lot) wrote a thought provoking blog post recently. So if you are interested in Making a Powerful First Impression when you don’t have a pretty face, you should read Marlon’s Post.
It’s an interesting read. You should go over that website and print it out..
For more info on “How to play the leading role in your marketing “movie” - so you always “get the girl”…and the sale!“
Day 25: Why Your Bum Marketing Sucks
Or rather,
How to Dramatically Increase The Results
You Get from Article Marketing…
Bum marketing is another fancy name for article marketing. Of course the focus is on long tail keywords. Before I can explain How you can put your article marketing on steroids.. You have to first learn about bum marketing.
Here are the basics of bum marketing (Marketing with articles).
1. You write articles based on Long Tail keywords: Keywords that have 3 or more words in them are basically your long tail keywords. If you focus on these keywords you’ll have less websites to compete with.
2. You direct all the traffic to your affiliate page (Basically a review page for affiliate products you are promoting). You use top article directories like ezinearticles.com or classified ads site like usfreeads.com
3. You bank your commission.
This is your basic Bum marketing method. Of course you can other factors into play like Using classifieds to craigslist to yahoo answers. There are tons of ways you can use to bring traffic.
How Spending 5 Minutes extra in your Bum Marketing can Double your results?
Interesting claim that, isn’t it?
Well, there are many ways you can improve your results. People have written and sold few reports on these techniques. Techniques like using squidoo, or use different classifieds lists or using blogs.
Of course all of this helps in one way or another. Moreover if you consider following a simple plan as this it’s great way to make some money without spending too much.
Well I am not going to talk about all these techniques.
I want to give you some food for thought. Something that you can use to build your marketing with your skills…
Lets say if Writing article takes X amount of time and it produces Y results.
X= Y
What if we add few changes which you can finish in 5 minutes and it has potential to double your results
X+5 = 2y
Now if you spend 5 more minutes, You can literally tripple your results.. Isn’t that right?
X+5+5=3Y
Now of course they are other variables and factors that will be counted. But we are taking it as bigger picture. This is the kind of thing that produces powerful results if you can apply it properly.
Your 5 Precious Minutes
You are going to write an article anyway, so what harm is in spending an extra 5 minutes. Ok ok, I won’t create more suspense.
Here are the steps you can follow on daily basis.
1. Write your articles based on long tail keywords.
2. Now use other long tail keywords based on the article and re-write 40% of article. Now I don’t believe in duplicate content but according to some SEO experts 40% of content changes will take care of all this duplicate content problems.
In this I suggest you to target different keywords based on same article. For example, Once I wrote an article on “how to lose your beer belly”. I found after some researching I can use “How to lose your gut” and other variations like “how to lose tyre around the midsection”.
Now this helped me target 3 different keywords variations with one article. All I needed was to change my keywords and some of the content tone.
How much it took me? Less than 5 minutes.
So think of ways to implement this idea which doesn’t take much time anyways. You are create more articles, targeting more keywords and create more ways to get exposure to your website.
3. Here you can submit these articles and implement the rest of bum marketing method as you wish. I know some people use squidoo or craigslist to add some omph in bum marketing… Implement those steps.
4. Do this on daily basis. In just few minutes per day you can get 3 times the result of your hard work. Isn’t that better?
In fact if you think of this technique, You can implement something like this in quite a few of the marketing process. That’s why I writing such a big post to explain something as simple as this.
We talked about leverage, this is one of the ways you can get leverage on your existing content. Can you implement in other ways? YES, you are only limited by your own imagination.
Now, What you are doing? Go and put some OMPH in your marketing.
Earn $150 per sale with My Affiliate Program.
I Just launched an Affiliate Program for my service on Ghostwriting Small reports. You can earn $150 Per sale.
This service will provide small reports (25 pages) which clients have complete rights to in 8-10 days. We are proud of our content quality and speed by which we deliver results.
Small reports are great way to start your Information business online.
You can sign up for affiliate program through Paydotcom. Here is My Paydotcom Affiliate Sign up Link
Tag & Ping : Is This the Secret Behind Getting Traffic?
Day 24 Is here… Today, we’ll look at Tag and Ping Secrets.
There is a very good chance you might have heard about this and scratched your head about it. About a year ago, tag and ping was touted as “The Secret” to getting loads of traffic. Now like always, tons of people tried this game of tag and ping without understanding anything about it.
If you think tag and ping is your untold secret key to truck loads of dollars, think again. Why? Because all of these people who thought like you bought into this trend and tagged and pinged the heck out of their blogs. All of them ended up over abusing this simple technology. Exactly same happened with blog and ping when it was made it to local marketing news.
So today, I’ll break lots of myth surrounding this secret and enlighten you. Tag and ping started with the thought of sharing, Yes, its about social bookmarking. What you can do is choose n pick your keywords and then save it under your social bookmarking websites.
It helps with these sites organize and check out which keywords were tagged recently or popular.
So to make it short, the definition of tagging is “The act of tagging a web site or blog with one of the services like technorati, del.iocio.us, flurl etc”.
Now let me explain what exactly is tag and ping. I’ll try to make it easy for you.
For example, if I am writing this post under tags “tag and ping”. I’ll create a tag with “tag and ping” keyword and the social bookmarking sites will know about it’s activity with tag and ping method. Now if you check that particular bookmarking site and click on the tag, you’ll find all the posts and webpages that are saved under that tag.
Now blogs have an inbuilt facility which is called pinging which basically alerts blog search engines about its updating. If you include tagging with this facility you’ll get Tag and ping. This is what it’s called tag and ping.
These posts can be belonged to you or anyone else who have shared the same tags.
The after effect of these techniques is that you can get your blog pages indexed faster. Plus you can create an authority site network just by tagging. More tag that links to your blog page, higher the authority of it will be for search engines. In non geek talk, this basically means lots of links back to your website and good rankings.
Now The question arises how can you utilize the information?
First of all what you can do is use few keywords that you want to target. Now you have to create tags for bookmarking websites. You can target either just a couple of those or may be use all of them. My recommendation is to select only couple of them (social bookmarking sites) and target them.
For example here is code for tagging technorati.
Marketing.
Here is a way to tags using your blog URLs:
<*a href=”http://www.yourblog.com/[tagname]” rel=”tag”>[keyword]<*/a>
(remove asterisks in actual code)
Example:
<*a href=http://www.Yoursite.com/Internet+marketing rel=”tag”>Internet Marketing<*/a>
You can do like this for almost any number of social bookmarking sites or keywords. There is no such restrictions on that, but you can always go overboard. So keep that in mind. Don’t tag spam.
Any ways if you think coding is headache then you can use either http://www.keotag.com/tagger.php to create tags for you. This little tool will help you if you don’t have plug-in for tagging.
Or you can use wordpress plug-ins if you use wordpress blog platforms. Wordpress has Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin: This plugin will help you create tags for your major sites like technorati, icerocket etc. Again this is a must have plugin for your blogs.
You can download this plugin at http://www.neato.co.nz/archives/2007/06/30/ultimate-tag-warrior-fin-the-end/
Now armed with these tools you can easily create back links whenever you post a new posts. My strategy is to focus on couple of keywords per post and update my blog more often. Normally I don’t like to go after Highly competitive keywords.
Use these tools and strategy to increase traffic. Don’t tag spam otherwise you’ll be just adding to existing problems. I’ll share some ideas in other article on tagging.
Bloggers: Do you makes these Design mistakes in your blogs?
There seems to be a trend developing lately.
I don’t even know where to start this. With the advent of computers, fat internet connections & latest web design technologies (remember WYSIWYG anyone?), it seems like every Tom, Harry and his mother in law is getting online and expressing themselves in rather unique way.
The worst part is it shows in their Websites, blogs and journals. Sometimes I even think “The ability to be creative” should be outlawed. Most of us in order to create something magical, gets it quite wrong.
Lets us test your blog… Go to your blog and notice how many color it has.
Done? How many colors does it have? If it has more than 3 colors, you might be one of the Tom, Harry or their mother in law
The First Golden Rule: My first golden rule for designing (that goes for websites, brouchers, blogs etc) is that it shouldn’t have more than 3 colors. The accessibility of 10,248 colors doesn’t mean you have to use’em all… Direct marketers understand this point very effectively.
Why because they don’t want their visitors to get distracted by anything. And the reason is 3 colors is easy to process for your brain. It gives enough breathing space to receive the message you have been trying to send…
Remember, more colors, more confused brain, less sales or conversion.
Second Golden Rule : How many fonts you have? Again the Rule of 3 applies to fonts too. When you change the size of fonts, it becomes different in shades and effect. Do not use more than 3 different fonts in your blog.
Lets understand our fonts a little bit.
The one Font I am using right now is Serif font with 12 point font size
This one is called sans serif with 12 point font size.
This one is called sans serif with 12 point font size with bold.
Notice how different all three lines look. It looks like they are completely different font. So you can avoid confusing your visitors with having 3 stable font list.
Don’t forget, in designs simplicity is the key to success. You don’t want your marketing message to be buried with your design.
For example. Check out Brian’s Copyblogger.com or problogger.net they have their main colors picked up right. Best of all they are not drowning their marketing message in their design.
Syndicate
