Internet Marketing Advantage Blog

Today I want to share with you some tips about building and
managing your customer list. Remember: if you have a website
with a customer list, you MUST email your customers to raise
your income. The most common way to do it is by writing
newsletters. Newsletters can be a pain to write, but guarantee a
very good return on investment. Thanks to my experience, I put
together four simple MUST FOLLOW rules that can turn a poor
newsletter marketing into a great success. Enjoy!

1: Broadcast Monthly – As a rule I send out at least one message
per month just to keep communication lines open. You don’t
want to constantly be barraging your customers with sales every
email so in my monthly broadcasts I usually inform my customers
of new resources that have become available at my site. I often
upload free articles that I source from copyright-free places or
websites that I partner with. If you can, try and create unique
resources of real value – writing articles yourself is an option
if you have knowledge about the industry your business operates
in. I inform my customers about the new resources and end with a
small reminder about our services – 10% sales pitch, 90% good
content.

2: Offer Discounts – I have a list of people that have yet to
become customers, my prospects list. For this list I have an
automatic series of responses sent out, first starting weekly,
then turning monthly that offers them enticements to join. Once
a prospect has been subscribed to my list for a long time I have
an automatic email go out offering them a discount to try my
business out. I even cut the price to the point where I don’t
make a profit just to get the prospect to trial the service. I
know if they like it they will use it again so often the act of
converting them into a customer is the final roadblock that a
discount offer removes.

3: Encourage Referrals – One of my favorite techniques is to
offer incentives for my present customers to bring in their
family and friends. The easiest customers to acquire are from
current customers recommending your business. Word of mouth is
always the best marketing method so why not encourage it as much
as you can? Each current customer is potentially the best
salesperson you could ever find and sometimes all it takes is an
offer, like a credit for services/discount voucher or even just
an email suggesting they tell friends about your business. Happy
customers are happy to spread the word, they just sometimes need
a little nudge to do it.

4: Market Research – Are you considering launching a new product?
Maybe you want to know what your clients think of your customer
service? How about gathering statistics about your customer
demographics to help with future marketing efforts? All these
questions can be answered by sending a survey to your list.
Perhaps you can offer incentives to fill out a survey such as
discount vouchers, two-for-one deals or free samples. However
you do it, your current list is a fantastic store of minable
data just waiting to be accessed. Services like SurveyMonkey.com
give you the tools to create online surveys easily, which can be
linked from or included in one of your broadcast emails to your
list.

The secret of web success is not really a secret, but
somehow people always seem to forget it, or make it their
lowest priority. The secret is remembering what’s
IMPORTANT. For all the people who kick the tires, only some
will buy. To succeed, you need a steady stream of potential
customers who are interested in your products. Visitors who
are likely to buy. As I’m sure you know, the missing
ingredient is traffic. Potential customers. Targeted,
quality traffic.

Revisitors gets you targeted traffic! With our system, you
won’t have to wrack your brain trying to come up with
marketing schemes and tricks to bring visitors to your
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thousands of visitors every day. We process this traffic
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is redirect the traffic coming from our network to your
website.

When you make a purchase, one of our specialists will visit
your website and, whether you specified a target or not,
will set up your campaign to send you massive amount of
visitors to your website. It is in our best interest to do
so, if you generate sales or contacts chances are you’ll be
back for another purchase.

Thanks to this manual review process, our online
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There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies.

Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank, you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise.

Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something – experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning.

Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts – there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term).

The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry – the Internet marketing industry – not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people.

Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche – Internet marketing – and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things – email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing.

It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it – making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) – your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

.

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report backYOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion – your stories – and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key isdifferentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something.

The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously, you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey.

I know so many people in my life who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Blogs, and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach.

If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert.

Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog.

In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

How to Booost Your Affiliate Commissions by almost 30% – Eagles Luck.

Affiliate marketing is one tough business. Everyone online today is looking to make or save money in any way they can.

In the good old days when internet marketing was in its infancy, most of the people who clicked on your affiliate links used to purchase without a second thought… but, now as times are getting tougher, and visitors getting more cynical, you’ll be amazed at the number who won’t!

Just one flaw in a system and you will find dozens of unscrupulous people waiting to exploit it. Same goes for affiliate commission tracker systems. People who know how to manipulate the system will replace your affiliate ID with theirs and “hijack” your commissions.

Most affiliate links are some form or the other of http://www.thesite.com/?YOURID

Where your affiliate id is passed as a parameter. A thief has to simply change the “YOURID” part to “HISID” to put your money in his pocket.

In other cases, there are visitors to your site who simply can’t stand the thought of you “making money off them” so they bypass you by simply chopping off the end of your affiliate link that contains your ID.

Instead of buying from http://www.thesite.com/?YOURID — the bypasser will simply “chop off” the affiliate ID at the end and simply buy from the plain URL http://www.thesite.com/ –without your affiliate ID attached!

Bam! you just got cheated out of your rightful commission.

Studies have shown that this phenomenon causes about 30% lost sales.

By following some of these simple tips you will be able to, if not all, at least confuse most hijackers and, in many cases, often disarm them completely.

You might notice i said most and not all. This is because if the hijacker is well versed at html and javascipt he will be able to eventually get to your affiliate link. However, most hijackers are just opportunists who will only act if they see an easy buck and its this segment that we can beat

The simplest way to hide your affiliate links is using a javascript redirect page.

This is where you hide your affiliate link in a page on your site using a simple javascript that redirects people to your affiliate link.

This way your “naked” affiliate link is not exposed in your actual email messages and ezine ads, but, once people get redirected to the true affiliate link.

One possible drawback of this method is that some affiliate programs, like clickbank for example, expose the affiliate link along with your ID in the browser address bar.

So if the viewer is eagle-eyed he will notice that hes been redirected through and affiliate link.

A safer method to hide your affiliate links is using a zero-frame or “invisible” frame that masks the affiliate link by making it appear you are sending people to a page on your website. In reality, you are actually sending them to your affiliate link.

This technique is also used by many domain redirection service sites.

Unfortunately is the user views the source of the page. He know whats that youve loaded an affiliate link.

The solution is to use javascript encryption to scramble up the page code.

Even though there isn’t a 100% perfect solution to this problem, if you want to get paid more often through your affiliate links, make sure it’s not obvious you’re referring people to an affiliate link.

If they can’t see that its a affiliate link, lower the possibility of you getting stiffed of your commission.

If you are looking for a tool that lets you do all this plus earn affiliate commissions even from those folk who dont click your affiliate link then do check out Covert Affiliate

Satyajeet Hattangadi is the Owner of Novasoft Inc, a software solutions provider, who specialize in affordable customized software solutions.

A year ago, I began reading about real estate and residual income.  My desire to become an entrepreneur was born. As I read, the term network marketing and its synonym multi-level marketing (MLM) kept popping up.
The authors of these buzz words didn’t bother xplaining or defining them. They assumed that I, their eager reader, knew their meaning.

I asked around, but no o ne had a clue as to what network marketing was. Thus began my quest to discover what I could about MLM, since its proponents boast that anyone could start a business for as little as a
few hundred dollars.

Finally, I struck gold.

I stared open mouthed at my computer screen. The name of the network marketing company jogged an old memory. In high school, I had known a young man who belonged to this company. A couple of times, he came to pick me up for a date, and before we left, he would clean my mother’s stove or refrigerator, showing her the miracles of his product.
His goal, I assume, was to make money and dazzle me with his entrepreneur qualities. I was humiliated because my mother was taking advantage of him to get her kitchen cleaned and because this boy was embarrassing me – I wanted to go to a  movie or to a party, and he was cleaning my mother’s appliances. I had the holy grail in my hand, but I felta pprehensive. I told my colleague what I’d discovered.  He shrugged and said,“It’s a pyramid scam.”

But I found that the lure of residual income far outweighed my apprehensions. Today, I’m a proud network marketer, ready to give anyone, who is as clueless as I was about network marketing, my fledgling expertise. Here’s the scoop.

DEFINITION: Network marketing is a business that markets a line of products or several lines of products through independent salespeople. An independent salesperson is recruited; she, in turn, recruits other people; these people recruit others, and so it goes. Each representative builds her own business with her recruits and their recruits under her, and she makes commission o n the sales volume of her team. The people under the independent salesperson are called the downline. The potential for increasing the downline and earning money is exponential.

SCAM or LEGIT  BUSINESS: When I was in high school and amorous young men were cleaning appliances, many fawned upon these companies. Let’s face it. There were lots of jokes. Most people didn’t make much money; they pestered their family and friends, and horror of horrors, they had garages filled with unused products that they had to buy to meet their quotas (a certain amount of the products a salesperson or team has to buy).

Times have changed. Today, major corporations and Fortune 500 companies, like AT&T, MCI, Citigroup, and IBM, have multilevel sales forces.

The difference between network marketing and a pyramid scam is easy to explain. Network marketers sell products; they run  businesses. A pyramid scam is a con. People give someone money in hopes that they can get other people to give them money. The claim is that anyone can get rich just by finding other people to do the same. There is no product, no business. The
people at the top make lots of money. The scam falls apart. This is illegal. People get arrested.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY: Not all network marketing companies are created equal. There are some excellent ones, some okay o nes, and some down right awful, ugly ones. If you are looking for a network marketing company, you have to do your due diligence and make sure that you find an excellent o ne. Remember that you are investing in your future.

RESIDUAL INCOME: What network marketing offers is a way to create residual income, while working part-time. Network marketing is not a “get rich quick” scheme. Those who succeed work hard, but they are creating something magical: residual income.

You go to work, and you get paid. If you don’t go to work, you don’t get paid. This is linear income. Residual income doesn’t depend o n you working. Think of an author, who writes a book and gets a royalty check year after year. Residual income, like royalty checks, keeps coming and allows people to retire, have the freedom to travel, and do other wildly pleasant things.

Typical methods of advertising-newspapers, radio and television are effective if used properly, but there are other, less expensive ways to get your company’s name out.

Local or cable television is an inexpensive alternative to the traditional forms of advertising. Even if you have no experience advertising in this medium, there are companies who specialize in lending a helping hand. Even if finances are a concern (as they are for most of us), you’ll be surprised to discover a 30 second spot television ad can cost as little as a few hundred dollars.

Many areas have public auctions on local stations that will advertise your product, if you donate up to a certain dollar amount. The number of advertising spots will depend on how much you donate.

Remember also to send press releases to your local television and radio stations. Many times they will come out and do a story on you, if it is of interest to the public.

We volunteered to do resumes for people out of work and sent releases to all the radio and television stations. One of the three major networks in our area, sent someone out to interview us, and we were on the 6 and 11 o’clock news.

As for radio advertising, check your local stations for rates. You’ll be surprised at how low some of them are. Again, if you send press releases to the stations, sometimes they will call you as an expert in your area, or for an interview. We sent releases to all the stations in our area when we started our support group, and this generated three times the number of people we expected for our first meeting.

Since most major newspapers are expensive to advertise in, check with the smaller local papers. You can advertise in many of these for as little as $25 a month. You could also offer to write a column for these publications, as an expert in the area, if appropriate.

We all need to advertise in one way or another. Which medium you choose will depend on your particular business.

Copyright DeFiore Enterprises 2000

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I was in the fine city of Chicago this week to speak at a marketing conference. And I learned some interesting things:

1 – Traffic in Chicago is much worse than the allegedly bad traffic in Atlanta where I live. We left the hotel downtown at 3 p.m. and were parked on the “highway” a few minutes later.

The Lesson Learned:

I am thankful – as I know many of you are – that I don’t have to leave home and fight through this terrible traffic on a daily basis. Life’s too short to
suffer like this regularly. The stress level of doing this would take years off my life.

2 – Despite the traffic, I arrived at the airport early enough to rebook my ticket (by paying the $25 fee) on a flight leaving 90 minutes earlier than my original schedule. That was the good news.

The bad news turned out to be that this flight would leave 45 minutes late so I didn’t gain very much for my $25.

Obviously, I can afford the $25, but that’s not the point.

The Lesson Learned:

It’s not about the money. It’s about the perception of value received for the money. When I made the deal with the airline to book the earlier flight, I did so with the specific understanding that I was investing $25 to buy 90 minutes.

But, I ended up only getting 1/2 that time – 45 minutes. So, I felt like I’d gotten screwed in the deal.

People – like us and our customers – invest money with us based on the perception of the value they’ll receive in exchange. If you don’t deliver on your promise, then the customer is not going to be happy with the deal.

If you deliver more, the customer should be ecstatic. That’s why you’ll usually find extra – unadvertised – bonuses when you purchase my products.

It doesn’t matter that I probably would have spent the $25 to get the 45 minutes anyway – that’s not the deal I bought.

3 – When I booked my hotel reservation, the website promoted the fine history of the property. When I was standing in the lobby, they had an interesting wall display listing the famous people and many presidents who had stayed there years ago. And they specifically mentioned how they had upgraded the hotel with the latest in electrical, plumbing, etc.

I’m not sure how long ago someone wrote this fiction, but it must be at least 30 years ago – maybe longer. Perhaps the reference to Diamond Jim Brady should have clued me in.

I won’t bore you with the sordid details about the sagging mattress and matted down carpet, but it was depressing to enter my room. Especially when I opened the curtains so I could look 15 feet across the air shaft at other rooms.

The Lesson Learned:

Next time I’m booking a reservation in a “historical” hotel, I need to be certain to ask if they’ve stayed true to their history or entered the new millennium.

Of course, for $39 a night, I might have expected something like I got. But, when I’m paying $120 for the discounted conference special rate, I’m not seeing the value in the deal.

For many products and services – like hotel rooms – we have an understanding of what we think we should get for the money we spend. It doesn’t matter whether our preconceived notion is correct – we’ve got it in our heads already.

As marketers, we have to deal with the public that has these preconceived ideas. When we’re not going to fit with them (like charging way too much for a crummy room), we should be fair and make that clear. But we’ll obviously want to do this in a fashion that will show why this is a still a fair, if not great, value proposition.

4 – But this story gets even more interesting…

I was chatting with Paul Hartunian (the PR expert who once sold the Brooklyn Bridge – legitimately) and mentioned that I was not happy with my room. He remarked that other people had also voiced similar opinions, but he loved his room.

Turns out he had asked the hotel about upgrade options and, for $20 more, you could get a completely updated room with a wonderful view of the city and Lake Michigan.

Of course, no one volunteers this when you call to make reservations. And it’s not mentioned at all on their website.

But I’ll bet the people that work in this hotel are wondering why more people don’t choose the upgrade option.

The Lesson Learned:

Don’t hide your light under a bushel basket!

Think about this…the hotel could have turned many unhappy people into raving fans simply by mentioning the $20 option. Plus, they could have been grabbing an extra $20 a night from dozens of people for doing absolutely nothing.

Sure, we’re sitting here in judgment thinking how stupid this is. But…unfortunately, we occasionally make the same kind of silly mistakes and don’t make the really fine benefits of our product or service crystal clear.

To sum up:

1 – Don’t play in traffic. It’s hazardous to your health.

2 – Explain the value in your offers and deliver what you promise (preferably more).

3 – Don’t hide your best benefits and offers. Put them right out front so your prospects will become happy customers.

Yours in success,

Shawn Casey