To be truly successful as an online marketer, you need to make sure that you are increasing your VALUE to your readership.  Sounds simple right?  What have all the most successful business-people done over the years?  They’ve provided something that others value; things that other people value ENOUGH to part with their hard-earned money to acquire.  Henry Ford, Elizabeth Arden, Walter Chrysler, Mary Kay Ash, Thomas Edison, Anita Roddick,Bill Gates………..all of these people created organizations that in turn created products that enhanced people’s lives.

However, most businesses that are started (anywhere in the world) are created solely with the intention of making that business owner wealthy………and most of them fail!  That’s a sad fact.  One of the most basic reasons that this is true is BECAUSE they were started with only one objective……….making money.  An ESSENTIAL second ingredient to the success-recipe is providing REAL VALUE to your customers.

Online business are no different in this respect, in fact, it’s probably true that even more online businesses fail than “brick and mortar” businesses because there are a lot MORE online businesses created than there are real-world ones.  The percentage of these failing is also most likely higher, because there are a lot more fly-by-night operations out there; people who want to set up websites, ad some adsense ads and then sit-back and wait for the money to start rolling  in.

A LOT of the fault IS theirs, but there are some legitimate business people that will still fail initially because the information that they receive from the internet-marketing “guru’s” is incorrect, incomplete or simply just really poor quality.  Often, the difference between making $100 a month and $4,000 a month could be one little thing that the training (ebook, audio or video) failed to tell you about, but more likely it’s several pieces of the puzzle that are missing.

This often isn’t deliberate; some of these marketing-trainers don’t realize they are leaving out something; others probably don’t want the competition so leave it out on purpose.

A lot of the most successful internet-marketers were simply very fortunate; they found a great Joint Venture partner perhaps that already had a large, quality mailing list of current buyers, or they wrote an ebook that filled a nice little gap (”niche”) in the market-place that they didn’t even realize WAS a gap.  They were just in the right place at the right time.  They often then find that they don’t have anything to follow-up with and they disappear without a trace, having pocketed a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

There are some who have stood the test of time and are so well-established now that people will buy pretty much anything that they offer, all of which are “high ticket” items; $10,000 courses, $5,000 seminars or $397 monthly subscriptions to membership sites.  Others are up and coming and will be the next wave of internet marketers.  You might be one of them.  But you MUST provide VALUE for your readers!  Here’s an article I wrote a while back giving an example of how to create wealth.  Creating VALUE is no different.

However, getting that value TO your potential customer is rather more difficult.  You really can have the best product in the world, but if you can’t get people to KNOW about it AND convince them that it will enhance their lives, then you will never have a successful business.

Take a look here and check-out some of the best tutorials that I’ve seen.  Affiliate Millions is a great place to start, but there are also four other tutorials that could easily make the difference between your online business being successful or not.

AD VALUE to the world by CREATING something that others want.  Do what Elizabeth Arden and Thomas Edison did.  You don’t have to do it on a grand-scale like they did, but hey, who knows how far you’ll be able to take your new business? By becoming valuable to your readers, they will one day turn into customers; loyal customers who will keep buying things from you because they KNOW you will always provide them with great value for money.

Luke.

Professionals are very often NOT very good at what they do.  They are professional not because they are good at something, but simply because it’s what they do for a living…….their profession.

Try not the make the mistake of confusing the word ‘professional’ with ‘competent’.  I’ve know MANY people in all walks of life who pretty much just get-by at their job/profession, but have never really learned to do it well.  Like them, most online “professionals” are like this.

Don’t get me wrong, there are SOME very good internet marketers, but these are few and far between.   Those that do a good job use Article Marketing and THEN email marketing to find and then market their products and services to their prospective customers.

Article Marketing is easily one of the best ways to get visitors to your website, and email marketing is equally as good at converting that web-traffic into buying customers. Here I want to discuss how to to properly submit the articles you’ve written to the article directories.  In the next post I’ll discuss the follow-up technique to convert visitors using email marketing.

Most ‘professionals’ who make their money online don’t even realize that article marketing is one of the best ways to get traffic to their sites, so you are in a good position knowing this.  You also need to know HOW to submit your articles properly for them to have maximum and long-term effect.

Getting one-way links back to your website (or sites) is the name of the game, but ALSO, you will become known as an authority in your field and THAT will get you visitors also, because people will hear of you and try to find you in the search engines.  If you don’t believe me, type Luke Hawthorne into Google.  I come up #1, and my articles are also on the first page.  Now see what happens if you type in YOUR name.  Okay, so you can see that I know what I’m talking about.

Now, back to getting links TO your sites by submitting articles properly.

People use search-engines like the mythical ‘Oracle’ (in fact I’m surprised that their isn’t a search-engine called ‘Oracle’ yet).  They want to ask the search-engines a question and get an answer, so it’s the answer that they want, but the search-engines can currently only find TEXT.  They’re working on speech-recognition, so that will be the next phase of search-engine growth.

First, you need to realize that you need to get LOTS of articles ‘out there’.  Try and submit one article every week, at least to the top 5 directories (these are easily found by using Google or the like).

Don’t EVER worry about giving away too much information.  The more secrets you reveal and the better the quality of your articles, the more visitors you will get to your websites.  Also remember, if you DO have several sites that you want to promote that are on similar topics (or identical subjects), you can submit the same article but with different links.  You can also submit the same articles or very slightly modified versions to the SAME article directories a few months later, after the earlier articles have already been taken and used on other peoples sites.  This way, you’re leveraging the one article into links for several sites.

Make sure that you preview each article before clicking the ’submit’ button, so that you’re sure that the article looks good; paragraphs of about even length and not too long, punctuation right etc.

Be sure the make your articles easy to read.  The sad fact is that the AVERAGE reading level in the U.S.A. (currently the leading power in the world) is age 12.  I’m SERIOUS!  NO difficult words, keep your wording simple.  Don’t say “exacerbate”, say “worsen” or “made worse”.

Check to make sure that the subject you are writing on IS in demand.  As I write this, the ‘hot-topic’ is Social Marketing.  It won’t last, so you CAN write about this, but it’s better to write on subjects of LASTING importance, rather than something that’s currently trendy.  Your PRODUCTS, however, should be aimed at the trendy/fashionable market.

I’ll go into a little more details tomorrow.

Luke.

An online business with a high search-engine ranking is considered to have more credibility; these are often called “authority sites”.  These are sites that have LOTS of links to them.  YOU want YOUR website to become an authority site!  Video marketing is great way to do this.

Video CAN go viral, which means OTHER people will take the “embed code” from the likes of YouTube (don’t forget all the other sites will you!?) and put them onto THEIR site, giving you more exposure.

How easy is it to get started marketing your site with videos?  DEAD easy!  Below is a link to some free software called CamStudio.  It records what’s on your screen AND your voice (if you choose to do so), so you don’t have to buy a video camera and worry about how dorky you might look with a friend filming you. You can do demonstrations on your computer and simply send the resulting video to YouTube etc.

Of course, you may really enjoy being in front of a camera, and if this is the case, then by all means have somebody film you.  Video cameras are VERY inexpensive now and far superior to the ones made just a few years ago. However, if you can’t afford one, you can use a webcam that cost about $15, but nowadays most laptops have them built-in anyway.  A colleague of mine actually films himself walking around town, and then turn his laptop around to face things he wants people to see in his demonstrations.

Of course, don’t forget to add a text link to your website so that people know how to find you.  AND make sure the title and tags you use for each video include keywords that the video is about.  Make it educational and or fun and people WILL come to your site to check it out.

The benefits of video marketing far outweigh any negatives, not that that are many anyway.  Here’s the great FREE piece of software (you know just how much I LOVE FREE STUFF!) from Cam Studio.

Of course, you shouldn’t JUST market with videos.  This should still be considered a supplement to your article-writing and posts on forums and other people’s RELATED blogs.  Keep using the best traffic-building techniques found in Traffic Tactics and other great products, and you’ll have a well-rounded advertising and marketing campaign system working for you, even while you sleep.

Luke.

There are many benefits to marketing your website with emails. It is cost-effective, it has a higher response rate than most other forms of advertising and it keeps communication with your potential and actual customers more personal.

However, you need a list of people to email, and there are a few of ways to do get this list. You can rent a list, borrow a list or create a list yourself.

Of the three ways, the very best is to create your own list, but there is a drawback to this; it takes quite a lot of TIME to get a good sized list.

Renting a list is hit-and-miss and I wouldn’t recommend it.  You might get lucky and find a good broker who has up-to-date lists to rent you, but it’s unlikely and in my experience, it’s mostly a waste of time.

Creating your own is great mostly because of the quality of the list.  You KNOW people are interested in what you have to offer, because you created it yourself AND you can keep this list updated by emailing it yourself and keeping a note of any emails that are returned (or if somebody unsubscribes, which is never a good thing).

To do this, you need to use an autoresponder service, because you simply don’t have the time to do it manually.  The one I use is GetResponse, but there are other good ones out there.

To get people onto your list, offer them something of value at no cost.  Don’t be cheap!  Give them something of real use.  An ebook, and audio or some video tutorials perhaps.  You’ll need an opt-in form on your main website, but GetResponse will provide that for you for no additional fee.  Their cost to you is about $15 per month.

Make sure that the initial message that is sent to them, once they’ve signed-up for your freebie, informs them that they are now on your email list, and let them know that they can expect some more free things from you over time.  This is so that they don’t unsubscribe once they get your free gift.  Oh, and DO send them some things once every other month or so.

Make sure the subject line reads something like “Here’s the free e-book you requested” so that they don’t delete it because they forgot that they actually DID subscribe to your list.

Email them about twice a month with updates, and always remind them to come and visit your site to read your latest materials or see your more recently added products.  Make the emails short and to the point.

Don’t use HTML, just use plain text otherwise it may not get delivered, because not all autoresponder services can deal with HTML.

Make sure that you include your name and contact details in case they want to email you back.  This is also good practice because they may have trouble buying something from your website and you DO want to help them buy from you, don’t you?

The third way is to borrow a list.  To do this you need a JV or Joint Venture partner.  In effect, you are offering your partner a large percentage of the sale price in exchange for her to promote your product to her list. Once somebody from her list has bought something from you, they are then on YOUR list.

You can find a partner at:

JVNotifyPro

Finally, ALWAYS BACKUP your lists! Your list is a goldmine if you know what to do with it.

GetResponse does a great job at backing-up, but the final responsibility is YOURS.

Happy emailing!!!

Luke.

If you’re keen to be seen on the internet to market your products and websites (unlike me),
then there a few things you should consider before making your first movie.  After all, you
don’t want your video appearing on YouTube or Viddler and frightening people AWAY from you
site! The name of the game is ATTRACTING visitors to your website, right? Without traffic to your site, you simply don’t have a business.

There are several common mistakes that people new to video marketing make and they can
easily be costly AND lose you web traffic.  For example, make sure you have the right
camera.  Sounds trite I know, but if you don’t use a camera with a high-enough resolution,
you’ll fail from the outset.  Don’t do what a lot of people do and use your cell-phone to
shoot footage.

Don’t use the wrong person (like me for example) in the movie.  I don’t have a great voice
I’m going bald and I COULD do with losing a few pounds.  You think it doesn’t matter?  Well
people are NATURALLY drawn to good-looking and nice-sounding people. This is one of those
sad facts of life.  If you don’t fit the bill, get one of your friends to be in the movie.

If you don’t know if you look and sound good enough, film yourself and let your friends (who won’t be truthful because they won’t want to hurt your feelings) show the movie to THEIR friends (who WILL tell the truth).

Market the video properly.  Write a catchy title (’How To’ titles are always good) and make
sure that you use keywords that you KNOW are being searched for.

Edit the footage.  You think you can make one shoot and it’ll be perfect?  This almost never
happens.  When editing you can add music during the introduction and ad text where needed
(you could add some text showing your website address).

Choose a good location.  If outside, shoot on a sunny day, unless you’re trying to make apoint about how miserable something might be, in which case make sure it’s gray and rainy.
If filming inside, use a white background or something like a comfortable looking sitting-
room.  Don’t use your garage or wash-room!

Write a script ahead of time and PRACTICE.  Don’t just wing it.  Very few people can just
get on camera and do a good job.  These are the TV anchor types who are paid VERY well to do
this, and even THEY practice.

Oh, and NEVER pick your nose!

Luke.

Better than extras and free gifts, is additional help to use the product that is being sold. You can offer a telephone training seminar at no cost for those who buy the product.

Try and persuade the product-owner to speak on the teleseminar, or maybe interview him over the phone for your customers. People really like teleseminars because they feel more involved with the product, you and the product producer.

What usually happens when an affiliate marketer goes to Clickbank or Commission Junction and signs up as an affiliate marketer for a particular product? The first thing she does is usually place a link for the product on his website and send out a marketing email to her list with the same hoplink in it, talking about the value and benefits of the product, asking the potential customer to please ‘click here’ and go and take a look for themselves.

She will then, probably sit back, cross her fingers, and hope to make a few sales.

If this average affiliate marketer happens to get lucky and be included in the launch of a new product, she will do pretty much the same thing. She notifies her list of the upcoming launch (the average affiliate marketer usually only sends one preparatory email) and then he sends out the marketing email at the actual product launch.

She will no doubt make a few sales…very few. Of course, she won’t be working very hard either and maybe she is happy being an average affiliate marketer. There is a problem, however, with being average. Average is a very crowded place, and average won’t make you much money.

Why would anybody want to settle for average? Average means ‘common or ordinary…nothing special’? If you are not happy with being an average affiliate marketer, then you need to do what is required to become an EXTRAORDINARY affiliate marketer.

Being an extraordinary affiliate marketer means being unique.

Being unique is a quality that sets one apart from all of others. If you want to be better than just average, and you SHOULD want to be better, you will need to develop some uniqueness in your marketing techniques AND your personal image, that will set you above the average affiliate.

Average affiliate marketers don’t understand the idea that in order to sell a lot of each product, their offer needs to be more valuable than the offers that their competitors are making. Most affiliate marketers won’t offer any incentives to their lists for buying a specific product from then rather than buying the same product from someone else.

Some affiliate marketers will offer some bonuses as incentives, but they will be quite ordinary things that aren’t of much value, or are actually unrelated to the product that is being promoted.

The extraordinary affiliate marketer will offer bonus incentives that are BETTER than anything that is being offered by any other marketer and ones that are directly related to the product that is being promoted. The bonuses can actually sometimes be as good as (or even better than) the product being promoted, perhaps an older product that still has value in the current market.

The whole idea of offering better incentives to customers is just common sense. If you can get 3 products for the price of one, why not get the free bonuses?

Let’s say that there is an E-Book about Email Marketing that you want to promote It’s a great book (you know this because you bought it AND read it!) that has been written by an Email Marketing expert. It is selling for $97 and your commission is going to be $50 per sale. There is a very elaborate launch for the product. Your competitors are offering an additional E-Book or two as bonus incentives.

How can you get an edge in this situation? The only way that you can possibly get an edge is to offer something that your competitors aren’t offering. You could have set up a teleseminar that will take place a few days after the launch for those who buy from you. Or perhaps you could offer a free 30 minute downloadable audio tape that further explains certain points in the E-Book.

The people who buy from you will be getting a better deal than they could get from your competitors. The product will always be the same…but the bonuses that are offered is where you get the edge.

NEVER underestimate the power of FREE! Everybody loves getting something for nothing. They especially enjoy getting something that everybody else is not getting.

And that brings me to another, finer point of offering bonus incentives. If you can offer something such as a free teleseminar that is related to a product launch, you need to limit the number of people who will receive the bonus. That makes it more exclusive and thus more desirable. The more difficult something is to obtain, the more people will value it.

Luke.

PPC, or Pay Per Click, done right CAN make you good money online (is there such a thing as bad money????).  However, if it’s done wrong, you can easily end up losing money……….good or bad!  Using the correct keywords is essential and bidding on them must be done with care.  Bid on keywords that are sought after by lots of others will be expensive. The law of supply and demand still applies, as it ALWAYS does.  The more something is in demand, the more costly it is, especially if the supply is low.

You need to consider the keywords you use in your ad carefully, and form them into sensible, persuasive copy.  There’s no point just using three keywords that don’t make any sense.  The words must be crafted to make people WANT to find out more about your offer.  You only have three lines available of course and this in unlikely to change any time soon.  Monitor space is at a premium, and the folks at Google want to use it wisely.

Sales-copy is very different in the bricks-and-mortar world, because they can use almost as many words as they need.  For example, a bill=board is huge so they can write pretty much whatever they want to on it (though the general rule is “white space sells”).  In a magazine, you can devote an entire page or more (I’ve seen single ads go over 10 pages!) to persuading the reader to go to a website or phone a number.  You simply don’t have that luxury with your pay-per-click ad.

As is often (but NOT always the case) the 80/20 principle can be applied with reasonable accuracy.  About 80% of the clicks your ad will receive comes from the HEADLINE you use, which is about 20% of the space in your ad, so when you’re crafting your ad, spend a lot of time on the headline (80%???)

Remember to use some utilities like Good Keywords or Google Keywords Tool to help you find those ideal words to use.

Luke.

PS. I’m traveling across country to my new home state of Arizona, so please be patient with me! I may not be able to write as frequently as I like to.

When you are one of hundreds of marketers trying to sell the same product to the same customers, you had better have a plan to get your fair share of the market (or more!).

Every niche-market on the Internet is competitive, some more so than others of course. If it isn’t competitive then there can’t be much of a customer base to sell to anyway. That is just the nature of Internet marketing.

Maybe you do have a long list of paying customers. That’s excellent! It means you have already won several of the affiliate marketing rounds. The problem is there are always those up and coming marketers who want your customers to be on THEIR mailing lists.

Your list and your competitor’s lists will very likely contain many of the same names and email addresses. Just having a list will not be enough to assure you of ever increasing sales when selling a product. You have to create some ways that will assure that the people on YOUR list buy from you and not from your competition.

So what is it that I can do that will assure that my customers will buy from me? Nothing! Really, you won’t get ALL of the business; some WILL buy from other affiliates, no question about it, but you CAN do some things to ensure you get a good percentage of the business.

What might one of those things be? Be UNIQUE!

You HAVE to be different from all the others. You have to offer something that sets you apart from all of the other affiliate marketers out there offering the same products to, potentially, the same lists of potential customers. Even if the lists are completely different (unlikely but possible), you still have to ACT as though the lists are identical. This way, you’ll be certain to make yourself and your offers good enough to motivate people to buy from YOU.

There are several ways to achieve uniqueness. One way is to have established yourself as an expert in the field for which the product (or service like a membership site or insurance policy) is being sold. You have to have become credible. This credibility is not easily achieved. It takes a lot of time, effort and diligence.

Credibility is established by taking such measures as writing and marketing articles (like this one) and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums, appearing as an expert on webinars or interviewed by somebody who is already established as an expert in your field.

The fact is that when people know you and trust you, they will buy from you. They will buy from you even if your competition is offering a better deal or more incentives. Why?

Because people do not like to buy from people that they don’t trust, and people don’t trust strangers. It’s a basic human survival tool. The Internet is a big and impersonal place to many people, and to make these people become consumers is no easy task. They want to feel like they know and trust the people that they are considering buying products from.

The time, effort and energy that you put into creating your credibility will the best time, effort and energy investment that you can make. Your reputation is EVERYTHING in the world of Internet marketing. Credibility will be one thing that makes you unique.

Another extremely important thing that you can do to ensure that your customers buy a product for which you are an affiliate is to give them a very good and compelling reason to make the purchase from you. Offer some extras that will enhance the value of the product that you are marketing. If it’s software, then make the product more easily used, perhaps by offering a pdf eBook that you created to guide a first time user of the software.

If you are marketing an E-Book about Internet marketing, you could add one or two other E-Books concerning different aspects of Internet marketing.

Another free gift that people can’t ever seem to get enough of is free software. There are many on the Internet and you can be sure that there are some that will fit right in with whatever product or service that you are promoting. Just because YOU know of some great free utility, doesn’t mean that your potential customers know about it. Point it out to them with a free hyperlink.

While other marketers promoting the same product simply send out marketing emails that recommend the product to their lists, you will be ADDING VALUE to the product for no extra cost to your customer.

I’ll talk more about enhancing the value of your offer in Part II.

Luke.