Work at Home Based Business

Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category

Darren Rowse and Brian Clark’s Third Tribe Marketing has just hit the airwaves of the Internet. The question in this post is… Is it any good?  This is my short review of Third Tribe Marketing – it’s a waste of money even at the “special” low price of $27/month – soon to go to $47/month. One thing Brian Clark particularly, inventor of Teaching Sells, is not afraid of is charging a lot for his expertise.

So if you sign up for Third Tribe Marketing what do you get – well the promise is – unclear at best. You will get lots of great information from people who have made quite a lot of money mainly by selling stuff to naive beginners in the work at home business world. In some ways its like a paid online networking forum with little defined purpose except to make you feel like one of the cool kids. Most of us were never cool kids at school – and I really dislike the assumption that if you hang around the rich and successful blogging founders of Third Tribe Marketing you will somehow become successful too. It’s hardly going to happen when you look at the facts. Darren Rowse started Problogger long before there was any competition, Brian Clark was a successful off-line sales guy before he went online – do you see the pattern? If you currently don’t have a commercial skill and the selling skills of a successful consultant – this model probably won’t work for you.

Membership sites can be useful – but I pay for just one with an ongoing subscription – I talk about it in my follow up Third Tribe Review which compares the site to the Keyword Academy. The keyword academy has no fluff at all – and very little networking. This is not the place to hang out and compare blogs – instead its a step by step guide for how to make money online using basic keyword selection and SEO.

The beauty of niche marketing is that it really doesn’t matter who you are – whether you are a great writer or an all around personable guy. What colour your skin is or where you live never comes into it. Whether you are on an invalid’s pension in a council flat – or a backpacker at an Internet cafe in Thailand – it doesn’t matter – if you have the skills to pick the right keywords and develop sites and backlinks you can make money. Hell you can even outsource the whole operation if that’s what you want to do.

This is a guest post by passive income expert, Lis Sowerbutts.

If you’re not already an expert, you probably have no concept where to start when considering setting up an email newsletter. And even though there are actually a number of mad geniuses out there, any person prepared to be thoughtful and strategic when it comes to their target market can easily be successful. In your industry, there must be no one better qualified than you. This article is intended to help increase your self-confidence as an email marketer by offering you each of the essential resources you need to master email marketing.

Newcomers to email marketing frequently will say how the process seems impenetrable or maybe magical to them. People get the impression that email marketing is something that only hired gun copywriters with four-figure hourly fees can comprehend. It may be that there is just a little bit of magic involved, but no more so than in any other form of marketing. If you take the time to analyze your market thoroughly, you find yourself making smart decisions, planning your email marketing campaign intelligently, and reaching success faster than you would have guessed.

A good starting point is to look at your campaign’s overarching purpose. What is it for? When people receive your messages, what do you hope will happen as a result? This part is easy if you’re building a list in order to promote a single product. But in other case you may want to consider the long term. Sending out regular messages over a long period of time can be a lot of work. In order to do that, you’d better make sure you know who your audience is.

No matter what you do, the first step is always going to be researching your market. You need to develop a clear assessment of what your market is, what demographics you’re a good fit for, and what specific needs you’re able to meet. But of course no matter how much research you do, you’ll find that things are different in practice than they are in theory. Even within specific geographic areas, populations are increasingly diverse. Over time, you’ll see different segments of readers emerge on the same mailing list. All you have to do is use software such as Active Campaign Email Marketing software to send unique, targeted content to each one of these segments.

Another important factor is the way your message looks. The design elements that you use in your messages should be consistent with the ways that you want your readers to interact with it. For example, in many cases you will want your readers to click through the links in your message and arrive at your web site. In this case, you’ll generally want your email template to be a pretty good match for the design of the actual web site. If they look the same, the reader will automatically know they’ve found the right place.

Next, you’ll want to consider what type of content will be appropriate for your email campaign. For example, let’s say you want to send out an informative newsletter every week. After you’ve done that for a while, you don’t want to just toss out an advertisement to a list like that. It won’t convert. By working your sales pitch into the existing informational format, you make it more familiar and more believable to your long-time subscribers.

Finally, you need to think about how you can get most of your recipients to open up and read the messages you send to them. There’s a little bit of a “secret sauce” factor that goes into this. A lot of things come into play. Any copywriter will tell you that the headline is one of the most important elements of marketing, no matter which medium you choose. The headline sells the message, while the message sells whatever you are selling.

But many people don’t realize that the first line of your message can be equally important. If you go into your email reader and look at the list of new incoming messages, you’ll probably notice that you can see a little snippet from the top of each message. If the teaser snippet is not compelling, many readers will assume the message is not worth their time, no matter what the headline may have promised. Another thing you may want to take into account is the hours that your particular subscribers will be most open to receiving your messages.

One thing you should never hesitate to do with your email campaign is to try new things. The more you do, the more you’ll develop an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Once you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll be amazed by the way you become so in tune with your market that you naturally understand what will or won’t work. It’s like magic.

Guest post by email marketing expert, David Godot.

Direct email marketing is one of the most effective and widely used marketing techniques in nearly every industry. The barriers to entry are very low, and the return on investment tends to be quite high. Some recent research has suggested that the effectiveness of email marketing may even be improving as attitudes change and young people gain influence in the business world.

Here is your quick, seven minute guide to getting starting with email marketing.

Do you market research. Email marketing is still marketing, so do your due diligence in finding out who it is you’re trying to sell to and what types of things motivate them.

Develop an email marketing strategy. Don’t just start hammering your list with ezine articles or special offers. Take the time to develop a plan: how do you get a subscriber from the point of signing up to the point of buying? Build trust, and then capitalize on that trust.

Don’t spam. Don’t buy mailing lists, build mailing lists. Any mailing list you buy is going to be a waste of money anyway, as it won’t convert and most of the messages will end up in peoples’ spam boxes.

Build your opt-in email list. Put together a nice prominent signup form, and display it above the fold on every page of your site. You can even use a slider to overlay the signup form over the rest of your content. Another option is to build a separate signup page or a squeeze page that exists only to sell free subscriptions your mailing list.

• Be sure to describe the benefits of joining the list.
• If you can, collect a little bit of demographic information that you can use to segment your list.
• Remember that if you do business offline, you can get people to subscribe face-to-face. Speaking engagements are a great place to pimp your mailing list.

Invest in an email marketing solution. I know it seems cheaper to pay $15 a month for AWeber or ConstantContact, but those services become pricier as your business grows. Plunk down the money for a software solution that you can keep using forever. I recommend ActiveCampaign’s Email Marketing software, because I work for that company and can personally vouch for the software and the support you’ll receive. It’s far and away the most mature email marketing app you’ll find.

Split-test different versions of your message. Write a few different headlines and see which one converts the best. Play around with different layouts and different calls to action. If you take my advice and use the ActiveCampaign software, you can set it up to test multiple versions at the beginning of a mailing and then automatically pick a winner to send to the rest of your list.

Have you noticed something that all the top Internet business marketers have in common?

Yes, of course they all make a lot of money, and quite a lot of it from affiliate marketing commissions. However, more importantly than that, they have all created their own unique brands and products.

In contrast to the leading marketers, you will find that the great majority of Internet business marketers try to make money exclusively by selling other people’s products. The problem with this approach to Internet marketing, however, is that it puts the cart before the horse. The most successful Internet business entrepreneurs know that it is much better to have the affiliate marketing sales cart driven by the horse of unique products with the owner sat prominently in the driver’s seat for the purposes of personal branding.

You see, the problem with focusing solely on affiliate marketing is that that is what everybody else is doing. You only have two search the web for one or two leading affiliate products to realize  there are far too many Internet marketers out there who think the key to success is selling other people’s info products or business packages. Unfortunately for them, if you want to succeed with internet marketing you have to begin promoting yourself and producing products and services of your own.

It need be no more difficult to produce your own product than it is to write a short report. Anybody who has been working in a particular field any amount of time will have a fund of insights and ideas to offer. Once you have written a report you can turn it into an e-book and promote it as your own product.

Even if you use it as a free incentive to get people to join your list, the very fact that it is a unique product that you have produced yourself with your name on it will give you an advantage over much of the competition. It will help you to brand yourself as an expert in your field.

But you don’t need to stop there. Once you have turned one report into an e-book, begin to plan your next e-book project, or online training course.

The next step could be to make a video version of your e-book. You can post the first video on your website to promote the whole course.

These are just a few ideas for creating your own unique products if you don’t yet have any of your own.

Now that you have something unique to offer, you will find that you have a more solid platform from which to promote affiliate products to generate extra income for your business. That is a much better way to think about making money with affiliate programs. Your primary income should come from your own product (the horse) and your secondary income can then be much more easily generated from affiliate commissions (the cart) generated from follow-up sales, just as a cart
follows a horse.

Remember, it always pays to promote yourself first and other people’s business second. That is why you need to be visibly in the seat as the driver of your Internet marketing “horse and cart”…

Here’s to your whipcrackin’ success in 2010.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

David Hurley

Best Internet Marketing Strategies

Manual traffic exchanges offer a quick and easy way for Internet marketers to get traffic to their web pages and can be an effective way to market your online business website provided you apply a few key manual traffic exchange secrets.

If you expect to make money simply by posting your sales pages on a few traffic exchanges, you will most likely be disappointed with the results. Instead, think about why people surf traffic exchanges and design your campaigns around those factors. In most cases, they don’t surf them to read other people’s web pages but to earn credits to get their own pages seen. They will be clicking away from your page just as soon as the timer counts down and they’ve earned their credit.

Worse still, a lot of people use multiple browser tabs to surf several exchanges at the same time, which means that they won’t look at your page for more than a couple of seconds before hitting the next tap and clicking on another traffic exchange page.

That is why a simple squeeze page or lead capture page will work much better for you on traffic exchanges – it has a simple message that can be conveyed in a couple of seconds… Using splash pages instead of sales pages is one of the most important manual traffic exchange secrets…

Ideally the message should be targeted at the audience – TE surfers – and include an element of personal branding to achieve maximum effect. It’s simply a matter of squeezing the best possible results out of a cheap method of promoting an online business. You do that by focusing on where your audience is coming from and getting your name and image as well as your offer in front of them. Personal branding is another key secret to success on traffic exchanges.

Typically, a manual traffic exchange audience consists of people who are looking for ways to get as much traffic to their website as possible for little or no expense. Think about how you can appeal to that need when make your pitch on your lead capture page. Think about how you can get seen across several TEs and build up your personal brand at the same time. TE surfers might not take you up on your offer the first few times they see your page, but each time they see it, if it has your photo, or video and NAME on it, you will be impressing yourself upon them as the go-to person in your field… especially if what you offer is UNIQUE and offers a relevant solution to the typical TE surfer’s problems…

Here’s another traffic exchange secret…

**Not all traffic exchanges are equal!**

You need to know how many new members each traffic exchange attracts each week, and how much traffic each traffic exchange delivers. Popular traffic exchanges are capable of attracting a lot of new members every week, bringing hundreds of fresh eyes to your splash pages.

Seek out and join the most popular traffic exchanges because they are the ones that are likely to be growing fastest and will have the largest membership base for you to appeal to. You can find out which are the 100 most popular traffic exchanges by checking the Affiliate Funnel Rank Report.

Finally, you will need to track the performance of your splash pages across the traffic exchanges. If you don’t track your results you will have no way of knowing what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t track your results you can’t systematically improve on them.

That is the “secret” that most TE surfers miss. However, a new development has made it easier for every TE surfer to track their results from now on…

Just recently, traffic exchange experts Paul Kinder, Tim Linden and Jon Olson launched a free service called TE Toolbox which includes a splash page creator, rotator and tracking service all in one convenient place, completely free of charge at the basic level. I have been playing around with TEToolbox and find the free service is perfectly adequate for my TE campaign needs.

If you do your research, appeal to your target audience in a way that suits the medium where they are to be found and track your results, you will have mastered the secrets of manual traffic exchange success and will have set yourself up for TE marketing success!

Good luck!

David Hurley
Grasp-The-Nettle.com