Pow­ered by Max Ban­ner Ads 

In this blog I’ll be adding lots of arti­cles about how to intel­li­gently select video top­ics to pur­sue that have a high prob­a­bil­ity of suc­cess. Choos­ing top­ics is part sci­ence, part intu­ition and, admit­tedly, a touch of good luck. You should pick top­ics that will be prof­itable, but also ones that you enjoy. If you have a topic you are inter­ested in, you’ll be more moti­vated to fol­low through with mar­ket­ing and pro­duc­ing follow-on products.

We’ll go through a lot of good research meth­ods in future arti­cles and in an upcom­ing video. How­ever, today I’d like to tell you about a per­sonal expe­ri­ence that very well may hap­pen to you, too.

Due to YouTube and hun­dreds of other video out­lets, many of them free, there are a lot of video clips float­ing out there in the inter­net cloud. Most are free and some are for a fee. Some are pretty good and some are awful.

My own expe­ri­ence is that a cou­ple of years ago I pro­duced a DVD about car detail­ing. There didn’t seem to be that many com­pet­ing prod­ucts out there, and I felt I had a big name expert to work with. Plus, I let my emo­tions talk me into it because I was tem­porar­ily inter­ested in the sub­ject due to a new car I was enjoying.

My sales have dropped off and I was won­der­ing why. When I started dig­ging around on the net I found sev­eral sites giv­ing away per­fectly good videos on detail­ing. Some were pro­mot­ing their detail­ing prod­ucts, but some were not.

Expert Vil­lage is an orga­ni­za­tion that pays video­g­ra­phers a mod­est fee, I think it is around $300 — $500 per title, to pro­duce short videos for them on a wide range of top­ics. Turns out they have posted a lot of videos on car detail­ing which they are giv­ing away free. (They make their money on adver­tis­ing). I really feel the sud­den abun­dance of free car detail­ing videos has killed the mar­ket for mine.

My mes­sage here is to look around and do your home­work before embark­ing on a new spe­cial inter­est video pro­duc­tion. The inter­net is chang­ing every­thing, and the amount of con­tent on it is increas­ing. Look at places like Expert Vil­lage to see if they are giv­ing away videos like the one you are con­sid­er­ing. The great thing about the inter­net is that search engines like Google do a darn good job of research­ing for you.

Finally, don’t let your emo­tions push you into pro­duc­ing some­thing. Be objec­tive when con­sid­er­ing new titles, and do “due dili­gence” to find out if the is a mar­ket and if the need has already been filled by exist­ing product.

Always keep your eyes and ears open for new oppor­tu­ni­ties, which are around every corner.

Share on Facebook

Some­times we get so focused on earn­ing money that we for­get that the pay­off from our labor often comes in other forms as well.

This morn­ing I received a phone call that made my day. A woman in Florida couldn’t sleep so she got up at 4 am, was flip­ping through her DVDs to find some­thing to watch, came across my DVD that some­one had given her, Patrick Smith’s Florida, A Sense of Place, and popped it in her DVD player. She ended up watch­ing it 3 times in a row.

This DVD is about Patrick D. Smith, a pop­u­lar Florida author. This lady was so excited by what she saw in the DVD that she went out and bought 3 of the books he talks about in the pro­gram. Then she called me because she wanted to per­son­ally meet this author and shake his hand, and thought I could put her in touch with him (I could and did). She was so excited that she could hardly con­tain her­self. It really touched me that some­one had got­ten so much plea­sure from my DVD and that they had taken the time to call and tell me so.

My wife, who pri­mar­ily shoots and edits for the wed­ding and event side of our busi­ness, says that one of the addic­tively pos­i­tive non-monetary ben­e­fits she gets from doing these types of projects is that the audi­ence always loves the video (they are the stars, after all) and expresses appre­ci­a­tion for the work she does. Cor­po­rate clients aren’t usu­ally that effu­sive, and when you sell your DVDs to strangers all over the world, you rarely get that kind of per­sonal feedback.

Some­times I sit here in my own office, ship­ping DVDs but never hear­ing from my cus­tomers about how they like them. Sell­ing your own vidoes does give you an income stream, which is a great moti­va­tor when you see those “New Order” emails com­ing in, but every once in a while you love to hear per­son­ally that your video was a light in someone’s life, and that’s a feel­ing that money can­not buy.

What a great way to start my day. I have to remem­ber that feeling.

Share on Facebook

Before the advent of pen­cil and paper and writ­ing, ancient peo­ples depended solely upon sto­ry­telling to pass along the his­tory of their fam­i­lies and tribes from one gen­er­a­tion to the next. Of course, it was an imper­fect method, as we humans tend to skew a story from our own per­spec­tive and add details and nuances that weren’t present in the orig­i­nal story. How­ever imper­fect or exag­ger­ated or sim­ply untrue the sto­ries might be, we all live in coun­tries where sto­ries shape our his­tory. Here in the U.S., we were all regaled as chil­dren with sto­ries of Paul Revere’s ride through Boston alert­ing the res­i­dents of the com­ing of the British, or if you were a Texas kid, of the defeat of Santa Ana in San Jac­into after the tragic loss of life to the Mex­i­can army at the Alamo.

I’ve always rev­eled in sto­ries. One of my favorite pas­times as a child was to hang out with my mom and aunts for the “adult con­ver­sa­tions” that weren’t really suit­able for children’s ears. How­ever, I refused to leave no mat­ter how strongly I was encour­aged to go and play out­side. I just wanted to hear the sto­ries of the “good ole” days” (i.e. back in the olden days, as I glee­fully referred to those times) when they were grow­ing up or when things were dif­fer­ent. Hear­ing sto­ries about them in dif­fer­ent con­texts than how I knew them shaped both my per­sonal his­tory and my fam­ily his­tory and con­nected me to them in ways that I still value to this day. Of course, I l also over­heard much fam­ily gos­sip, but that, then is another story.

You can cre­ate the same kind of con­nec­tion to your cus­tomer base by telling your story or the story of a suc­cess­ful client. Sto­ries help peo­ple cre­ate visual images of what you’re try­ing to get across. I’m apt to remem­ber the story and the image it cre­ated much more eas­ily than a bunch of facts or the­o­ries or sta­tis­tics that just make my eyes glaze over. When I was a con­trac­tual trainer for a vir­tual assis­tant train­ing com­pany, I often told sto­ries to illus­trate the points of a par­tic­u­lar class. About a year after one stu­dent com­pleted this pro­gram, she told me that she often thought of the story I told of how I suc­cess­fully set bound­aries with my “doubt­ing mother” in the startup phase of my busi­ness. My stu­dent was strug­gling with the same issues of doubt in her fam­ily as she started her busi­ness and used my story as a guide for her to set bound­aries with them to keep her­self sane dur­ing this very crazy period of her life. You sim­ply never know how pow­er­fully your story will impact others.

In the tele­classes and coach­ing that I do, I often tell my story of the scary and stu­pid way I started my busi­ness — a way that defied all pro­fes­sional advice and a way that I wouldn’t rec­om­mend to any of my clients — but I suc­ceeded despite myself. I had quit my full-time job with­out any sav­ings, filed for divorce, put my house up for sale, sold my major pos­ses­sions, loaded the car up with my dog and relo­cated halfway across the coun­try, moved in with my mother back into my child­hood bed­room, with­drew money from my retire­ment account to get me through the first few months, and set up shop in my mother’s garage. I was just a fail­ure wait­ing to hap­pen, but I didn’t fail, amaz­ingly enough. I use this story to illus­trate the point that no mat­ter what the odds, if you want to start a busi­ness and be suc­cess­ful, you can do it –and I’m liv­ing proof that any­one can do it — and if you don’t have all of these risk fac­tors star­ing you in the face, you stand a much greater chance of suc­cess than I ever did!

Share all of your sto­ries with your clients–the good, the bad, and the ugly. It will make you much more human and much more approach­able with your clients. A coach with whom I have done some train­ing, Chris Bar­row, shares the story of his dev­as­tat­ing bank­ruptcy when he was thought of as one of the most suc­cess­ful finan­cial plan­ners in the UK. I admire Chris for shar­ing the fail­ures in his life and busi­ness as well as his successes–it lets me know that he’s human and he can eas­ily relate to what­ever I’m going through at any moment in time.

Come up with a fairly short, 1–2 minute story state­ment of how you got to where you are today and how that impacted why you do what you do. Make it inter­est­ing, share the ups and downs and put your sto­ries on your web­site, on your busi­ness card, in your brochure, on your blog, and incor­po­rate them into your ele­va­tor speech. I guar­an­tee you’ll start devel­op­ing fans right away!

Copy­right © 2008 OnlineBizU.com

About this author

Online Busi­ness Resource Queen ™ and Online Busi­ness Coach Donna Gunter helps inde­pen­dent ser­vice pro­fes­sion­als learn how to auto­mate their busi­nesses, lever­age their exper­tise on the Inter­net, and get more clients online. To claim your FREE gift, Tur­boCharge Your Online Mar­ket­ing Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.OnlineBizU.com . Ask Donna an Inter­net Mar­ket­ing ques­tion at http://www.AskDonnaGunter.com .

Share on Facebook

Design­ing your first web­site is a stress­ful under­tak­ing. It requires you to dig deep into your busi­ness in order to write the copy for your site. You need to work with a designer and go through the process of cre­at­ing a site that looks unique and works well. Plus you’ll end up invest­ing a lot of time, energy and money. And finally, after all that, you’re fin­ished and it’s time for the site to go live. What a relief!

Many busi­ness own­ers go through this same process. By the time the process is fin­ished, many entre­pre­neurs are very glad that it’s over — and don’t want to do it again any time soon.

Unfor­tu­nately, web­sites don’t last for­ever. Even if you plan your site to work for the cur­rent vision for your busi­ness, you can’t accu­rately account for the entire future of your business.

Even­tu­ally you’ll have to make some changes to your web­site. Some of these changes can be accom­plished with sim­ple main­te­nance, and by mak­ing updates to your site. But there’s only so far that patch­ing and revis­ing your cur­rent site can go. If your site is par­tic­u­larly out­dated, or if it’s not work­ing well for you, it’s prob­a­bly time to con­sider a full-scale site redesign.

Some signs that it’s time to redesign your site include:

- Your busi­ness has changed or grown. If your busi­ness is no longer the same as it was when you designed your site, chances are that you should redesign your web­site to reflect that. If you’ve only had a few small changes, you might be able to just update your cur­rent web­site. But if you’ve changed your busi­ness direc­tion, decided to offer new prod­ucts or ser­vices, or if your com­pany has grown sig­nif­i­cantly, it will pay off to redesign your site. Recon­sider how the changes to your busi­ness should be reflected or addressed in the struc­ture, design and strat­egy behind your website.

- Your site looks like it was designed in 1995. Some signs of an out­dated web site include: chunky, slow-loading graph­ics, old-style “framed” cod­ing, where the site is divided up into panes that load sep­a­rately, lit­tle ani­mated car­toon clip-art through­out the site, and text cre­ated as images instead of in HTML. Hav­ing any of these on your site could reflect poorly on your busi­ness, mak­ing you look ‘behind the times’. It can also make you look like you don’t care enough about your busi­ness or about tech­no­log­i­cal advances to keep abreast of them. Keep­ing your company’s web­site look­ing mod­ern will increase its credibility.

- The infor­ma­tion on your site isn’t user-friendly. If you cringe when you read your site text, or if you reg­u­larly get ques­tions on your site text from vis­i­tors, re-structuring your copy or rewrit­ing it can help to fix these prob­lems. If you’ve been adding to your site over time and the nav­i­ga­tion has become unwieldy or con­fus­ing, restruc­tur­ing your nav­i­ga­tion could be another press­ing rea­son to redesign your site. You want vis­i­tors to be able to eas­ily find their way around your site and to be able to access all the infor­ma­tion you have within a few clicks. Lay­ing out your site to make that pos­si­ble can make your visitor’s expe­ri­ence on your site a lot easier.

- You apol­o­gize for the site when ref­er­enc­ing it or hand­ing out your busi­ness cards. Your site should be a source of pride. It should offer your clients and prospects an easy way to get a lot of infor­ma­tion about your busi­ness. And if you have to apol­o­gize for out-of-date infor­ma­tion, bro­ken images, poor design, dif­fi­cult nav­i­ga­tion or any­thing else on your site, it makes you look unpre­pared and unpro­fes­sional. Make sure your site is in top shape and looks impres­sive, so your clients believe your busi­ness is in good shape too.

- You’re not get­ting good results in the Search Engines. Poor rank­ings in the Search Engines can be a result of not opti­miz­ing your site well. Poor search engine rank­ing can also be a result of bad design choices or cod­ing on your site. Make sure that your site isn’t designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more dif­fi­cult to opti­mize for Search Engines.

- It’s not bring­ing in inquiries and help­ing you to make sales. If your site was designed long ago, then there’s a good chance that it was designed as “brochure­ware”. This means that the site was designed just to act as an online brochure. This was very com­mon a few years ago, when web­sites were new. But recently busi­nesses have real­ized that a web­site can do a lot more than just imper­son­ate your brochure — it can help you close sales, bring in new prospects and make your busi­ness eas­ier to run. To bring in more inquiries and make more sales include the fol­low­ing when you redesign your site:

- Calls to action to encour­age your vis­i­tors to take spe­cific actions — like pur­chas­ing some­thing, con­tact­ing you, or sign­ing up for a newsletter.

- Forms, scripts, or pro­grams to make your busi­ness eas­ier - like con­tact forms, project esti­mat­ing tools, and an autore­spon­der email series that can help you keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Includ­ing a shop­ping cart or Pay­pal but­tons on your site can also help you to make more sales with­out any addi­tional work.

–Down­load­able infor­ma­tion pack­ets, arti­cles, ques­tion­naires and white papers can answer a prospect’s ques­tions about your prod­ucts or ser­vices and help them to move closer to buy­ing. And if you require the prospect to enter their email address or other con­tact infor­ma­tion, it can help you to grow your prospect list as well. These are just a few of the func­tions that your site can per­form for your busi­ness. To get ideas for other ways that your site can help you increase your busi­ness, look at the other sites that you visit and note the func­tions they perform.

- Your site is cost­ing you a for­tune to update. If you’re rack­ing up huge bills because of changes and still have a lot of to go, it might be time to con­sider a whole site redesign. Make a list of every­thing that you want to do on your site and to con­sult a web designer about redesign­ing your site with those changes in mind. Often, if you have exten­sive changes to make to your site, it can be less expen­sive to just start over.

If your site is designed in Flash or coded in such a way that you can’t main­tain it your­self redesign­ing and re-coding your site could allow you to do so. Hav­ing the abil­ity to make changes and update your own text will let you make revi­sions quickly, at no cost. And you can play with your site and make revi­sions to see what will work best for your busi­ness and clients.

If your site has any of the prob­lems men­tioned here, it’s time to redesign. The steps needed to update and revise will dif­fer depend­ing on the prob­lems and issues that your site has — you may not have to start from scratch. But, do make sure that you address all of the prob­lems that your site has so that you won’t have to redesign again any time soon!

About this author

Erin Fer­ree is a brand iden­tity designer who cre­ates big vis­i­bil­ity for small busi­nesses. Her work­book, “Design a Web­site That Works”, will walk you through all of the ques­tions that you need to answer in order to cre­ate the best pos­si­ble web­site. http://www.elf-design.com/http://www.elf-design.com/products-webWorkbook.html

Share on Facebook

It always sur­prises me how much money you can make by sell­ing other people’s stuff on the Inter­net. Eight years in and the num­bers still shock me. Always.

More than the num­bers, what really amazes me the most is the lifestyle one can achieve from online mar­ket­ing. You can be your own boss, work your own hours, carry out your busi­ness from any­where in the world you want to live. You can cre­ate auto­matic mar­ket­ing sys­tems that work 24/7/365 days of the year. Earn money even when you’re sleep­ing, vaca­tion­ing or out enjoy­ing a gourmet meal at your favorite restau­rant. Total freedom.

So is it any won­der then why I am con­stantly ana­lyz­ing my whole mar­ket­ing struc­ture to fig­ure out what is work­ing and what is not work­ing? Find­ing out just what strate­gies are giv­ing me the best returns on my efforts and time. And I am con­stantly try­ing to dis­cover ways to increase my affil­i­ate sales and online traffic.

It basi­cally means break­ing down your online mar­ket­ing into its core ele­ments and exam­in­ing each one with close scrutiny. What can be improved? What can be elim­i­nated? What needs to be redesigned? Any seri­ous online mar­keter must be actively work­ing on these core ele­ments to stay com­pet­i­tive in the affil­i­ate game.

With these thoughts in mind, here are some sim­ple mar­ket­ing strate­gies that can affect and con­tribute to your suc­cess for sell­ing affil­i­ate prod­ucts on the web. Mar­ket­ing fac­tors that should always be at the back of your mind, influ­enc­ing your every move.

Qual­ity Content

Peo­ple use the web to find qual­ity con­tent or infor­ma­tion. Always remem­ber this fact and apply it to each step of your mar­ket­ing plan — give your vis­i­tors qual­ity con­tent and you will suc­ceed online. There are no iron­clad guar­an­tees, but get this one step right and you will prob­a­bly make money online.

Design your web­site and your web­pages around qual­ity con­tent. Use­ful, rel­e­vant con­tent will give peo­ple a rea­son to come to your site and also give them a rea­son to return. Pro­vide good infor­ma­tion first and let the sale or sell­ing be sec­ondary. Peo­ple do not like a pushy sales­per­son, not in real life and not on the web. Develop a friendly, help­ful rela­tion­ship with your poten­tial cus­tomer and you will succeed.

Key­word Driven

The Inter­net is key­word dri­ven. These are words or phrases peo­ple type into search engines to find what they’re look­ing for on the web. They are also your keys to online suc­cess if you’re going the SEO route, pick­ing the right key­words will be your main start­ing point.

Pro­fes­sional mar­keters use key­word soft­ware like Brad Callen’s Key­word Elite to research and find their prof­itable key­words, but there are many free tools/sites which you can find online to help you do your key­word research — Seobook.com is a good one. Daily mon­i­tor­ing of your major key­words is also impor­tant to keep­ing them in the top posi­tions. Any move­ment down­wards should spark more link and/or con­tent build­ing immediately.

Keep in mind, Google, which con­trols 60 per­cent of the web’s search traf­fic, is also a great source of infor­ma­tion on your key­words. Use Google to search the sites in the top 10 spots for your key­words; also check Google for the Paid Ads related to your key­words and mon­i­tor these ads over a period of time to see which ones are prof­itable. Do your key­word home­work and your affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing will be a lot easier.

Niche Focused

If you’re into affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, you must con­cen­trate your efforts on small niche mar­kets where the com­pe­ti­tion is not too stiff. Choos­ing the right niche mar­kets is vital to your affil­i­ate suc­cess. Demand should be high and/or you’re sell­ing a high-ticket cus­tom item.

Once you have cho­sen your par­tic­u­lar niches, con­cen­trate on dom­i­nat­ing these in all the search engines. But don’t for­get that the fastest and some­times the most prof­itable way to tackle a niche is through PPC (Pay Per Click) adver­tis­ing — espe­cially if there is lit­tle or low bid­ding on your key­words. Google Adwords, Yahoo Mar­ket­ing, MicroSoft AdCen­ter… should be explored and tried.

List Build­ing

The power is always in the list. Make sure you col­lect the con­tact infor­ma­tion of your site’s vis­i­tors. Offer free ebooks, guides, spe­cial deals or bonuses… to get your prospects to opt-in to your AR follow-up sys­tems. Stud­ies have shown that peo­ple usu­ally don’t buy until the six or sev­enth follow-up.

I like build­ing hun­dreds of micro-lists for all my major pro­moted affil­i­ate prod­ucts. These follow-ups with spe­cial­ized infor­ma­tion and spe­cial deals, coupons and bonuses will increase your sales.

Traf­fic

Obvi­ously, traf­fic is one of the key ele­ments to earn­ing money online mainly because with­out traf­fic you’re dead in the water. You must explore all avenues to gen­er­ate tar­geted traf­fic to your affil­i­ate links. These sources are always chang­ing; blog­ging and social book­mark sites are very impor­tant now. So too are video and audio for­mats so make sure you use them in your marketing.

Arti­cle mar­ket­ing has worked extremely well for me and it is, along with search traf­fic, the main rea­son I can earn income online. A sim­ple mar­ket­ing tech­nique that still works because arti­cles will bring tar­geted traf­fic to your site or sites.

Con­ver­sion Rates Are Crucial

In affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing or in any kind of mar­ket­ing, your con­ver­sion rates are cru­cial to your suc­cess. You can get all the tar­geted traf­fic you want but if you can’t turn those vis­i­tors into a sale, it’s game over.

Your sales pages or con­tent must con­vert into a sale in order for you to suc­ceed. With affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing it is a lit­tle trick­ier because not only do your pages have to “pre-sell” the affil­i­ate prod­uct but the land­ing page/site where you send that traf­fic must also con­vert into a sale.

How­ever, I have dis­cov­ered one of the keys to high con­ver­sion rates has noth­ing to do with land­ing pages, sales pitches, etc., but has to do mainly with which prod­ucts that you decide to pro­mote. You must thor­oughly research your affil­i­ate prod­ucts and ONLY pro­mote the top qual­ity brands in your niche and you will have much bet­ter suc­cess. Also choos­ing prod­ucts that are only avail­able online will increase your con­ver­sion num­bers; so too will pro­mot­ing prod­ucts that offer spe­cial dis­count coupons and deals.

Mul­ti­ple Streams & Resid­ual Income

Any seri­ous online mar­keter will lever­age their traf­fic and mar­ket­ing by pro­mot­ing many dif­fer­ent prod­ucts and ser­vices. They will develop dif­fer­ent sources of income from their sites with affil­i­ate links, Google Adsense, paid adver­tis­ing, part­ner­ships… are all used to develop mul­ti­ple streams of income. It one should dry up, there are count­less oth­ers still pro­duc­ing income.

I have found the major third-party affil­i­ate net­works like Com­mis­sion Junc­tion, Link­Share, Shar­easale, Affil­i­ate Win­dow, Ama­zon are really good for find­ing and pro­mot­ing prod­ucts online. These sites will han­dle all the record keep­ing and sales stats for you. Plus, they send your monthly checks to you like clock­work. All you have to worry about is pro­vid­ing qual­ity traf­fic to your affil­i­ate links.

How­ever, like any pro­fes­sional mar­keter, I save my spe­cial pro­mo­tions and efforts to affil­i­ate prod­ucts or ser­vices that will give me a high return on my mar­ket­ing efforts. Mainly, I only pro­mote high-ticket items or prod­ucts that will give me resid­ual income. Make one sale; get paid time and time again. I also like form­ing part­ner­ships with com­pa­nies so that I get a per­cent­age of the sales for the life of any client I refer. Those arrange­ments have spe­cial pri­or­ity for the obvi­ous rea­son they give me long-term resid­ual income.

Test­ing Will Show You The Money

Per­haps, like in those multiple-choice exams, there is one stick­ing point. You can check-off “None of the above” if you don’t apply one thing for all of the “suc­cess strate­gies” listed above.

You Must TEST Everything.

You must con­stantly test and track what is work­ing and what is not? Which traf­fic is con­vert­ing? Which key­words are con­vert­ing? Which prod­ucts are con­vert­ing? Which niches are prof­itable… you sim­ply must TEST and KNOW which fac­tors are work­ing in your online mar­ket­ing struc­ture? Unless you test and track every­thing you will be mar­ket­ing blind, and that’s no way to run an online business.

I have found Google Ana­lyt­ics to be extremely help­ful for test­ing and improv­ing your con­ver­sion rates. I am also a firm believer in the daily read­ing of your traf­fic logs and stats… these places will show you where the real money is hid­ing. Use this infor­ma­tion to improve your traf­fic and sales.

Like any endeavor, the more knowl­edge you have, the more suc­cess­ful you will be in reach­ing your goals. This is espe­cially true for affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing on the web. And always remem­ber, affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing does take some work and time to set-up, but the rewards are extremely reward­ing. I hope you will use some of the mar­ket­ing tips I have given you so you can expe­ri­ence these rewards for yourself.

Copy­right © 2008 Titus Hoskins

About this author

The author is a full-time web mar­keter who owns and runs numer­ous web­sites, includ­ing two sites on Inter­net mar­ket­ing. He con­tributes his online affil­i­ate suc­cess to using the best Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Tools: http://www.bizwaremagic.com and his proven strate­gies at List Build­ing: http://www.bizwaremagic.com/opt-in.htm 2008 Titus Hoskins.

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook

by Trevor Ganderson

While you are think­ing about using a spe­cific list build­ing tech­nique, make sure that you are gen­uine in your approach. You should never do any such thing that may be taken by the sub­scribers as an abuse of trust.

Essen­tial Ele­ments There are the two essen­tial ele­ments that are the must haves for every list. One, your list must have value. It means that what­ever you offer, it must be valu­able to the sub­scribers. Two, it must be free. This means that besides being use­ful, your offer­ings must also be free for the sub­scribers. Do not try to sell some­thing through such lists. These attempts are not likely to be taken in the right spirit. No mat­ter whichever list build­ing tech­nique you are using, make sure that the list has both these elements.

Write Down The Ben­e­fits Of Join­ing The List While you are using dif­fer­ent tech­niques to build the list, do not for­get to tell your poten­tial sub­scribers the array of ben­e­fits that they can enjoy by becom­ing a part of the list. This descrip­tion must be pre­sented in an impres­sive way. Irre­spec­tive of the list build­ing tech­nique, make sure that you are able to offer the fol­low­ing ben­e­fits for your val­ued subscribers.

The sub­scribers will be able to get news and impor­tant announce­ments right in their inbox in a timely manner.

They can even get work­shop and train­ing videos, free of cost, through email. You may also attract poten­tial sub­scribers by offer­ing them sev­eral dis­counts and spe­cial deals.

You can also offer free but valu­able con­tent, spe­cially for the opt in subscribers

Make The Ben­e­fits Of Sub­scrib­ing Your Main Sell­ing Points In fact, it is not an exag­ger­a­tion to say that you can even make these ben­e­fits your sell­ing points while you try­ing to develop a list. This way, we can say that the best list build­ing tech­nique is to offer the ben­e­fits in an allur­ing way so that the vis­i­tors are con­vinced to opt in. How­ever, never try to mis­use the trust of the sub­scribers. When a vis­i­tor sub­scribes and per­mits you to send emails, they expect that they will be able to enjoy all the ben­e­fits men­tioned by you. If you do not ful­fill what you promised, you may not be able to make the best use of such lists.

In order to find the best list build­ing tech­nique, it is very impor­tant for you to under­stand the emo­tional aspects asso­ci­ated with such a list. Most of the peo­ple want to be involved with cer­tain top­ics or causes. You can use such emo­tional needs of the vis­i­tors to turn them into your val­ued subscribers.

Trevor Grander­son is a Mar­keter that has been mak­ing a liv­ing online since 2005. Trevor has used the http://www.duvetcash.info/) Duvet Dol­lars sys­tem to make money online. He also owns a mem­ber­ship site that pro­vides online mar­keters how to info from var­i­ous http://www.netpromarketer.com/) inter­net millionaires.

Share on Facebook

by Trevor Ganderson

Google has designed a very effec­tive inter­net mar­ket­ing strat­egy in AdWords adver­tis­ing. Based on the con­cept of “key­words”, the idea involves “intel­li­gent” place­ment of Ads on rel­e­vant web­sites, so as to ensure that only the most highly tar­geted traf­fic is directed your way through those Ads. You have the option of both text Ads as well as ban­ner Ads. Google has spec­i­fied cer­tain size para­me­ters, and your Ad units must abide by those para­me­ters. Text Ads must con­sist of 2 lines of text, along with a header line.

Qual­ity Is The Key­word! No mat­ter what you even­tu­ally sell on your web­site — whether it is a com­plete prod­uct range regard­ing some­thing, or some ser­vices, or even a sim­ple affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing plan — you must have qual­ity con­tent on your web­site. The qual­ity of your web­site con­tent deter­mines the price of your AdWords adver­tis­ing. It also deter­mines the amount of rev­enue gen­er­ated by the “hits” result­ing directly from this advertising.

It might seem like a good idea to use a mis­lead­ing key­word phrase in your Google AdWords cam­paign in order to direct more traf­fic towards your web­site, but always remem­ber one thing. Net surfers are not stu­pid! They know what they are look­ing for. And if your AdWords adver­tis­ing says you are sell­ing car­pets, but there is not a sin­gle men­tion of car­pets any­where on your web­site, your vis­i­tors won’t con­vert into your cus­tomers just because they have reached your web­site, so they might as well buy something!

On the con­trary, such kind of mis­lead­ing AdWords adver­tis­ing can have the very oppo­site effect! It can com­pletely destroy your brand rep­u­ta­tion and mar­ket cred­i­bil­ity. It can cause the search engines to hate you. It can even lead to a “Google Slap”, which is what hap­pens when Google increases your bid prices for the AdWords because of irrel­e­vant web­site con­tent and low page ranks on search engines.

Tar­geted Audi­ence The impor­tance of rel­e­vant AdWords adver­tis­ing can­not be empha­sized enough in mak­ing your Google AdWords cam­paign a suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing ven­ture. Inter­net surfers like web­sites that pro­vide what they adver­tise. Even more impor­tant is that your Ads should be rel­e­vant to the par­tic­u­lar mar­ket seg­ment you are tar­get­ing at. For exam­ple, if you are sell­ing health prod­ucts related to asthma, men­tion some­thing about the dis­com­fort expe­ri­enced by asth­mat­ics — such that it touches an emo­tional chord inside them some­where, com­pelling them to check out what you’ve got to offer.

Most Inter­net mar­keters are still not able to make the opti­mum use of AdWords adver­tis­ing. As a result, they sim­ply end up pay­ing unnec­es­sary costs with­out suf­fi­cient con­ver­sions into rev­enues. More­over, the bid prices of the AdWords also go up if the land­ing page of your web­site is not com­pletely related to the key­words used. But if you make use of the tips pro­vided above, you can eas­ily gain a pretty decent advan­tage over your com­peti­tors, with increased rev­enues and reduced cost of advertising.

Trevor Grander­son is a Entre­pre­neur that has been mak­ing a liv­ing online since 2005. Trevor has used the http://www.duvetcash.info/) Duvet Dol­lars sys­tem to earn money online. He also owns a mem­ber­ship site that pro­vides online mar­keters how to info from var­i­ous http://www.netpromarketer.com/) inter­net millionaires.

Share on Facebook