Building Your First List

Blogging for Pleasure AND Profit

For many bloggers, their blog is a way of expressing their passion for their subject, attracting and interacting with like-minded enthusiasts.  And that’s the way it should be.  First and foremost the blog is a communication tool – usually expressing personal opinion and often inviting comment.  Blogs should be an interactive two-way street.  What better way to explore and enjoy your interest than by dialogue and an exchange of ideas with people who share your passion?

The key to a good blog is good content.  Unique and relevant content is appreciated by both the search engine spiders and the human reader.  Content is still king but it needs to be interesting, informative, current, practical and useful – and if you can throw amusing and entertaining into the mix, you’ve got it made as a successful blogger.   If visitors are impressed by your blog, word will spread amongst your fellow enthusiasts and your traffic will grow.  Personal recommendation is always the best promotion and people take notice.

Once your blog is attracting some serious traffic you’ll be in the fortunate position where you can start thinking about making some money from your blog – if you’re not doing so already.  A popular blog with its associated volumes of targeted traffic becomes an attractive proposition for advertisers who will pay good money for an opportunity to get a slice of the action.  A blog is also an excellent way of building a list of eager subscribers to help build your trust and credibility.

Some bloggers who start their blogs for the pure pleasure and satisfaction of communication about their passion may have qualms about making a profit out of their passion and feel they may be exploiting their visitors.  However, if you’re recognized as an expert and authority in your field and people are flocking to you for advice and recommendations, surely you’re providing a valuable service, and as long you’re true to yourself and your values, why shouldn’t you benefit.   That way you can devote more time to your blog and provide even better value and content for your visitors.  A win/win situation!

Affiliate Marketing – How to Choose the Best Market for Building Your List

Once you’ve decided on affiliate marketing as your online business model, it’s time to make some decisions about what sort of products you’re going to be promoting.  At the broadest level you’ll need to choose a market area, product or products within that area and a suitable domain name which ties it all together.

Some affiliate marketers make their money by having multiple streams of income coming from relatively small niches in a wide range of different markets.  This does have the advantage of not having all your eggs in one basket when it comes to a possible downturn in the popularity of some markets, but it does make it quite hard work in terms of keeping on top of trends and products in all your different areas.  In this case you will need to be building and running completely separate lists for each of your marketing areas of interest.

Luckily, there is a way to simplify things – and it’s always good to simplify things, at least when you’re starting off in a new venture.  Instead of looking for a load of tiny niches to exploit, you need to look for larger target audiences and offer them multiple, highly related offers.  That way you’ve only got to deal with and keep abreast of developments in one main area of interest – and if that area of interest is a personal passion of yours, then you’re laughing (hopefully all the way to the bank!)

The big question in undertaking any sort of marketing venture is what to promote.  There are three main areas you need to consider to help you make this decision.  Firstly, you need a market which is accustomed to spending money, preferably a lot of money, on their passion or interest.  For example, golfers are well known for having money to spend – not least because this tends to be a sport largely enjoyed by well-to-do enthusiasts.  It’s not a cheap game to practise even at a very basic level.

You need a target audience which can be presented with a variety of offers.  You want a market where you can put together a selection of offers which are all related to the general area of interest of your target audience.  This way you can make the best use of list and provide a comprehensive range of targeted offers to your subscribers.

If you can find a market which meets the above two criteria and is also an area where you have a strong interest yourself, then that’s the target audience you should be concentrating on.  Having a personal interest in the market area is not totally necessary but it will certainly make your life easier and more enjoyable if it’s there.

Affiliate Marketing – Build A List First

When first becoming involved with affiliate marketing, a lot of budding entrepreneurs simply promote their favorite offer by advertising their affiliate link and sending visitors directly to the sales letter on the vendor’s website.  If you’re lucky, you may get a few quick sales this way, but it’s not the best strategy.  Using this practice, for all your promotional efforts, it’s not you who gets the greatest benefits.  If the visitor doesn’t buy, that prospect is lost to you forever.  On the other hand if the owner of the product you are promoting is any sort of marketer at all, they will have an opt-in list of some kind for visitors to join and whether or not the visitor buys on that occasion, they will get the opportunity to promote to that subscriber over and over again.  Not just their own products but other people’s products as well.  You may get the credit for a delayed buyer who comes through your link and the necessary cookies are in place, but you will get no credit for any of the other offers that the owner of the initial product chooses to  promote to his subscribers.   You need to be able to grab these visitors’ contact details yourself.

An average sales letter will get around 2% conversion on first viewing.  This means that you are losing 98 out of every 100 people you send to the site.  These visitors are lost to you but if they join the list on the vendor’s site he’ll be able to contact them in the future with a variety of offers.  A great deal of your work and effort is therefore being spent to grow the list of the product owner .  Not a good marketing strategy!

Hopefully you’re now persuaded that you need to build your own list.  You might think this is more effort than you want to commit, but when you think about the alternative, you really have no choice if you’re serious about making any money online with affiliate marketing or indeed any other sort of marketing.

The easiest, quickest and most basic way to set up a list is using a squeeze page, the sole purpose of which is to capture a name and email address.  However, a much better way is to set up a list at your blog.  If your blog is set up correctly from an SEO point of view, you will get the added benefit of organic traffic sent from search engines when people search on your keywords.  This is traffic which won’t come naturally to your squeeze page, however good it is.

Whichever avenue you choose, you will then be able to promote your list instead of your affiliate link.  Your primary objective should be to build your own list, not somebody else’s.  You can set up your opt-in list to redirect the new subscriber to a thank you page which includes your affiliate link.  This way you get them on your list but you still get them to the affiliate product salespage.

Blogging – The Best Way to Build A List

We all like to spend time with people we know and like and as online entrepreneurs we need to make it a priority to develop good relationships with the people who visit our websites and sign up for our newsletter.  We need to build credibility and create trust with good quality content.

Our aim is to become a recognized authority and expert in our chosen area and one of the easiest ways to do this is through a blog.  This is one of the best interfaces we can use to put ourselves in front of potential customers and give them the opportunity to get to know us.  It is also one of the best ways to build our list.  Some bloggers are perceived as experts (whether they are or not) solely on the strength of their successful blogs.

A blog, short for web log, is basically a website with a few specific characteristics.  Blogs started as a type of journal or diary (hence the dated articles or posts arranged in chronological order) but nowadays blogs are not all personal diaries although personal reflection and opinion are important elements of many blogs.

To build our credibility we need to make sure that everything we publish on our website is high quality, up to date, interesting, helpful and practical.  In short, we need to provide value and give our visitors an incentive to come back and see us.  One of the great advantages of a blog, and one of its specific characteristics, is that it’s so easy to update and it allows us to make regular posts with minimal effort (and technical knowledge).  Regular updates mean that there is usually something new to keep a regular visitor interested.  And if we can get a reputation for being out at the front with new products and developments in our market, then so much the better .

People seem to trust blogs more than normal websites and this may have something to do with the fact that bloggers interact with their visitors and develop a relationship which other websites do not offer.  Blogs are a very natural communication tool .  Visitors can leave comments which means that the website is no longer a one-way street.  A dialogue can be started and developed.  Others can join in and a community can be built.

If we’re passionate about our subject, it will come across in our writing, and there’s always something very attractive about someone with a passion – it tends to be infectious!

Affiliate Marketing – an ideal online venture for internet newbies

Affiliate marketing is a popular way of making money on the internet especially if you’re a newcomer to internet marketing.  It’s basically a case of marketing (and hopefully making sales) on behalf of a third party vendor and being rewarded with a commission for doing so.  This method of earning income online is so popular because it’s so easy to get started.  Doing this at the most basic level, we don’t even need our own website but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to operate successfully with direct affiliate links to the vendor’s sales page.

Anyway, first off, let’s take a look at the plus points of becoming an affiliate marketer.

• we don’t need to come up with the idea for a product
• we don’t need to create or develop a product
• we don’t need to put together an effective sales page to market the product
• we don’t have to provide any customer support
• no major upfront outgoings or expenses
• we can market products from any interest area or areas of our choice
• we can quickly drop a product if it’s not successful and move onto something else.

It’s true, there’s serious money to be made for entrepreneurs who are able to both create and market their own products (and possibly also recruit their own affiliates) but as you can imagine, there’s a lot more investment required and a lot more at stake.  Marketing and selling an affiliate product also gives us an opportunity to test the water so to speak.  If we’re seriously considering developing a new product, we can choose to be an affiliate for a product in the same niche and see how it fares.  If we have little success with an affiliate product it may be an indication that we shouldn’t spend too much time and effort developing a product in this market after all!  Research and testing always pays dividends.

We’ve all come across the super affiliate marketers who make millions every year without ever marketing a product of their own.  There’s no doubt it’s a lucrative form of marketing and most top internet marketers will have a finger in the affiliate marketing pie even if it isn’t their main source of income.  The leading internet marketers who have large active subscriber lists can make hundreds of thousands of dollars by emailing out to their lists on the launch of the next great indispensable training course or piece of software.  But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a bite of this pie.

Initially at least, we should stick with reputable affiliate programs where we know our sales will get tracked and our commissions get paid, such as clickbank and amazon.  Clickbank only deal with digital products and this means that the vendors are able to offer far higher commissions than you would earn promoting physical products such as with Amazon.  It’s not unusual for clickbank vendors to offer commissions of between 50 & 70% of the sale price whereas on amazon you may only attract about 5% commission

I’ll be looking at various aspects of affiliate marketing in  future posts.

Until then.

Article Marketing – 10 Top Tips to Success

Article marketing is still one of the most effective free ways to generate traffic and advertise our business on the internet. There’s no substitute for unique quality content that’s interesting, useful and informative.  If we can make it entertaining as well, then we’ve got it made and we should be way ahead of the game.

Writing our own articles puts us in control of our online business.  There may be the temptation to use PLR material we’ve collected over time, but if we use it at all, we should never try to use this sort of content straight out of the can (some of the  lower quality PLR stuff actually sounds like it’s been translated from Chinese – it may well have been!).  I’ve found even re-writing some of this material is tedious and time-consuming and as the content often has little structure or continuity it’s usually easier to start from scratch with a new outline.

So if we’re going to take the time and effort to put together our own articles, let’s make sure we get the most out of them by using the quick and easy checklist below:

1. Use our own name and photo – this will reassure readers that we’re real people and goes a long way to building trust and confidence.  It’ll also serve to brand us and will support any other internet presence we have. If we use the same photo everywhere we appear on the net, this’ll make it more likely people will remember us.

2. Stick to our area of specialisation and make a niche for ourselves. Writing good articles, particularly if we specialize in a subject that we are familiar with will build our authority in that field.  If we’re active in a lot of different areas it’s more difficult for people to recognise us as experts in any given field which is what we want.

3. Avoid posting the same article on article directories that we have used for our own website. Our website may be penalized by the search engines for duplication of content.  Ideally we want to build our own websites with original on-target material which can’t be found anywhere else.

4. Remember we’re writing for human beings – don’t be tempted to compromise the quality and readability of the article by trying to optimise for search engines and trying to include too many key words which don’t naturally fit.  It’s of little value for your article to get good search engine ranking if the result is hard to read and doesn’t provide any real value.  Readers are not going to be inclined to click through!

5. Don’t try to write a book – shorter articles, ideally 400-600 words with concise relevant content, do the best job.  Most article directories won’t accept articles of less than 400 words on the basis that the article needs to be a certain length to have some value – We do, however, need to leave some things unsaid as an incentive to get the reader to click through to our website or squeeze page.

6. Submit articles consistently. We need to decide our strategy at the outset. We can decide how many articles we want to submit at what intervals and then stick to it. Consistency is key – we get far better exposure submitting regular articles rather than a large batch every now and again.

7. Provide value for our readers – People usually read an article to answer a question or solve a problem and to keep their interest, we need to make sure we deliver.

8. Use a snappy title that’s compelling or intriguing to grab initial interest – we need to stand out from similar articles.  We often only have a few seconds to grab our readers’ attention and we should make the most of it.

9. Develop an informal, easily readable style which helps to keep the reader’s interest.  Again, if we can be amusing and entertaining, that will pay dividends.

10. Format the article with short paragraphs and numbered lists. This will make it easy to read and for the reader to quickly get the gist of the article.  Add emboldened text at the start of each paragraph to emphasise points and draw the reader down the article.

There’s a lot more I could tell you about successful article writing but that’s just 10 quick tips to get you started!

Internet Marketing – Ensuring  Long Term Success

Julie talks today about IM success

A few years ago, when I was first introduced to marketing on the Web, I couldn’t figure out some of the numbers that the ‘Gurus’ claimed to be earning, $50,000 per month, $1,000,000 per year…etc.

Frankly I doubted the truth of these figures because I couldn’t see how they could be achieved month after month.  After all, there are only so many people interested in buying any product and some products have a natural shelf life, beyond which they’re no longer useful anyway.

And if a product’s selling for only $20.00, thinking about how many I’d have to sell to make even $10,000 a month – that would be 500 copies, each and every month – a lot!

What I didn’t understand then was the concept of Multiple Income Streams, (MISs).

The benefit of MISs is having more than one source of income – that much may be obvious, but how?

Well, for instance, it could mean something as simple as creating an ebook, which you sell – that would give you a single stream of income, but if you created an affiliate program which allowed others to sell that same ebook and keep 50% of the profits, the remaining 50% would be a second income stream for you.

Another way would be if you were to sell a product, again as an affiliate, any commission paid would be a single stream of income, but if you were to also sell a second product as an affiliate then that would in effect be a second stream of income too.

(A second string to your bow)!

If you take this concept further still and decide to sell 20 different products, then this would represent 20 different income streams.

One advantage of this strategy is that should any one of these products stop selling, then you’re still left with income streams from the other 19.  And of course there’s no limit to the number of different products you can sell.

This is what the Super Affiliates or Gurus were doing then and are still doing now.

They’re taking advantage of the concept of have multiple income streams.

That is precisely the way to secure your long term future on the Internet – Be fertile and abundant!

Another advantage of MISs is that should a particular product prove to be something less than the ‘surefire’ best seller you expected it to be, you’re not reliant on that single product to put food on your table or fuel in your Ferrari.

Should you decide that you have the talent to create your own products, the concept is the same.  If you produce two, three or more profitable products that are of interest to different markets, a downturn in one sector won’t leave you without an income.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that there are no guarantees, but I also understand that both you and I can increase our chances of success in both the short term and the long by marketing multiple products in more than one marketplace.

We all have our failures, even the very top affiliates or Gurus but we’re all still here.

Some of the top well-known marketers have been around for a long time now and they’ve stayed profitable by being diverse in their product portfolio and maybe even their market sectors too.

Julie Troup

List building requires that we give any potential subscriber something of value in exchange for her email address.

One of the most important things to appreciate, and something many  seem to forget, is that when we’re collecting email addresses, there’s a real person behind that information.  List building should never be simply an exercise in gathering information for our future marketing purposes; we need to respect the people who sign up for our offerings.  And we’ll forget that at our peril!

Once we accept the need to build a list, the next obvious step is to come up with a suitable promotion that will appeal to these people – our future customers.  Even if our visitors are only using a simple throw-away address – we still need to make our offer sufficiently enticing.

This offer should be something that our visitors will see as useful and interesting. It needs to be something of value and obviously something related to the theme of our website.  There’s no point in offering a report “10 easy ways to improve your fly fishing” when our website is about setting up an online business!

Remember, the the underlying reason for collecting subscribers’ email addresses is to build a lasting relationship with them.  We want them to know us, and in time to like and trust us.  Online or off, we’d all rather do business with those people or companies we’re familiar with.  We tend to shop at the same supermarkets or food-halls, week after week; we might socialize regularly at the same bars or cafes.

As individuals we’re all creatures of habit, and a habit isn’t formed after a single visit or experience.  We prefer to feel comfortable with the people we deal with whether in a business setting or in our leisure time.

One easy way to do this is by giving our subscribers great value – we over-deliver on their expectations.  If we’re offering a report, we’ll make it a quality report with really useful and practical information in it.  We shouldn’t be tempted to use some freebie that’s of little real value, one that has simply been thrown together – remember this is our business we’re building and therefore our reputation too.  Our reputation will be a reflection of our character and our exploits (good or bad) may follow us for years to come. We should aim to impress our subscribers with the quality and value of what we’re giving away for free.

Even better than a one-off report, we could offer a good quality email course which can then be mailed out over a matter of days or weeks.  This regular contact offers us an ongoing opportunity for our subscribers to get to know us and it helps build that ever important relationship between us.

Better still is if we can also persuade our subscribers to interact with us, get a dialogue going with them.  We have a real opportunity to become friends with our subscribers if we enter into a conversation with them.  These relationships shouldn’t be simply about looking for potential customers, the reasoning should go deeper than that.  Remember, when we’re building a list, we’re really building relationships with real people.

Building your List With Email Marketing is Still Effective

Despite rumors to the contrary, email is still a successful channel for sales and marketing. It’s true to say that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are much fussier with what they’ll let through their SPAM filters and the recipients themselves are more discerning with what they’re prepared to read.

One shocking fact to any marketer using email (that’s most of us), is that it’s now been shown that as many as 20% of permission based emails are not even being delivered.  That means for every 100 email subscribers who go through the process of opting-in to receive your offers or newsletters, 20 of them will never see your email.

One way we can improve our chances of having our emails delivered is to suggest to our subscribers that they ‘Whitelist’ our email address.  Of course it’s asking them to perform yet another small task and many won’t bother but it can help our delivery rates.

Maybe we could offer them an incentive of some sort to Whitelist our email address.

It’s often said that if your subject line isn’t tantalizing enough, the intended recipient will delete it anyway, but to find that our message never even finds its way into her inbox is worrying.

I’ve written a few thoughts here that can improve the success rate of your email campaigns though.

• People like to feel privileged and part of an exclusive clique, so you can use terms in the subject line like: Exclusive Offer, For Insiders Only, Private Event, For Our Select Customers, For Insiders Only.
• A time limit in the subject line such as: Free Shipping Ends Tonight, Only 2 Days Left Before a Price Increase, can work.
• Many marketers falsely believe the word FREE in the subject line will trigger SPAM filters, it shouldn’t if the rest of the email is well written.
• The timing of an email’s receipt is important.  If you imagine getting to your office early in the morning, you’re more likely to have a few minutes to read your emails before the workday starts.  Whereas, if an email doesn’t reach you before you’re well into your day, you’ll probably not have time to read it and if you put it away to read later you’ll likely get it mixed with the next day’s email anyway.  Have your email delivered between 5.00am and 5.45am Eastern.  Yes Eastern does matter as many activities are geared to this time zone.
• Your “Landing Page” we know is important, but have it support a single offer. Multiple offers confuse people because they end up unsure as to exactly what they’re signing up for.  You can always put another offer on your “Thank You” page.
• If you use graphics in your emails use the same graphics on your landing page and all subsequent emails.  People are getting wary about putting their email address out there.  If we can demonstrate our professionalism by using the same graphics throughout it shows continuity and people are more likely to recognize us and confirm their email address.
• How much information do we really need to collect on our optin form?  If we ask for the Zip Code/Post Code do we really need their State/County?  The more information we ask for, the better our reasons need to be for people to supply it.

People are getting more protective towards their email addresses now, and rightly so.   Even with the likes of Google offering almost instant email accounts with Gmail, people are still getting more reluctant to pass on their details to legitimate marketers.

When we’ve worked so hard to collect peoples’ details it’s frustrating to know that such a high proportion of our emails never get through, but it would be crazy of us if we didn’t make it as easy as possible for subscribers to receive them.

‘The Money’s in the List’

If you’ve been involved with (or simply thinking about) online marketing for any length of time, you’ll be aware of the axiom, ‘The Money’s in the List’.

Hi and welcome to my newest online adventure.  This is where I’ll be recording my (many) successes and my (very rare) failures in the world of Internet Marketing

My name’s Julie, (although most call me Jules), I live in the UK and I’m going to be scribbling about the many aspects of online marketing but with a special emphasis on List Building.

I’ve heard this slogan ‘The Money’s in the List’, so often I want to scream now whenever I encounter it.  It’s a ‘throw away’ expression that’s often used but seldom adequately explained to new marketers.

So before I say “That’s the last time you’ll hear that phrase from me”, maybe I’d better explain, for those new to marketing, exactly what we mean by it.

So here goes.

Imagine you’re surfing the Internet and you come across a website that’s promoting a product that you might be interested in.

Do you buy it, or do you hesitate and maybe ask yourself the following questions?

• Do I really need it?
• Can I afford it?
• Will it do what I want/need it to do?
• Will my financial details be safe?
• Can I trust the person who’s promoting the product, (after all I don’t know who’s behind the site, do I)?

If, as a potential buyer, you’re unsure of your next move, the chances are you’ll simply carry on surfing and maybe return later.

But, realistically, the chances of you returning later are slight because you might forget the web address, or you’ll simply decide you don’t really need the product after all.

That’s human nature:  When in doubt – we don’t commit!

Because of these reservations, few of us will buy from an unfamiliar website on our first visit.  It’s been demonstrated that we may need as many as 7 prompts from a Web retailer before we’re ready to go ahead with a purchase.

Knowing this, if we reverse roles and put ourselves in the position of a website owner with a product to sell, we’ll realize that our visitor is unlikely to buy from us on her first visit and as such, unless we can do something, we’ve probably lost her for good.

So what’s the answer?

The answer, my new friends, is simple.

We set about collecting our visitor’s email address on her first visit.

In fact, ‘We’ll start building our list’

Once we’ve collected our visitors’ email addresses, we’ll have an opportunity to develop a relationship with them over the long haul.  Any sense of urgency we may feel about making a sale on this first visit has gone.  Now our visitors can get to know us over time and learn to trust us.

Another well known truism is that, ‘People will buy from those, they know, like and trust’.

As such our job, as a marketer, is to become the person our visitors want to buy from in the future!

Not every website owner employs the most effective methods of driving traffic to her website, but then not every webmaster appreciates the importance of collecting their visitor’s details either.

As such they’re missing an opportunity to improve their bottom line.

Understanding our visitors’ behaviour when they land on our site, and their initial reluctance to buy from us, leads us nicely to the purpose of this blog.

• To increase the number of visitors to our websites and once there:
• To persuade more of them to leave their contact details before they leave.

Because the Internet’s always evolving, we need to as well.  We need to improve the methods we use to attract new visitors and then use the most effective approaches to persuade them to part with their contact details.  Often this means offering them something of value.

I’m going to enjoy passing on tips about what’s working for me now and any new ones that prove to be effective in the future.

So stick around while I get this puppy’s walking boots on.

Until next time

Jules