It’s The Perfect Business Plan
Membership sites are huge now. Guru’s everywhere are pushing them, offering services for them, there’s some major buzz going on right now. Anyway, we internet marketers think we’re pretty savvy and that we know all the cool ways to make a buck, but here’s something that probably Mike Filsaime never even thought of.
I call it the ultimate membership site. Here’s what you do.
1) Promise to help someone when they need help.
2) Charge them a monthly fee for this service
3) Keep charging them this fee, as long as they don’t bother you at all or ask for any help.
4) Lastly and here’s the important part… When it seems like they may need help in the near future —drop them, just say that you’re worried that helping them may cost you more money then you want to spend.
Do you think this business plan would work?
Well guess what some of the biggest companies’ in the world follow this exact business plan. They’re called insurance companies. And right now, insurance companies are dropping customers like flies, simply because they live in an area that may get hit with a hurricane in the future. Some of these customers have been with their respective insurance companies for years and may have never even filed a claim. Yet, the companies can legally drop them simply because they MAY one day file a claim.
Now …and here’s the really cool part. These same insurance companies have been able to get rate hikes by …and listen closely here… by claiming that they need more money to pay the claims of the people who live in areas that …MAY… get hit by a hurricane. Now, remember, these are the same people from step four of the business plan above, the ones that are being dropped because they live in areas that …MAY… get hit by a hurricane.
Oh… and this is all perfectly legal!
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It’s Affiliate Marketing Not Affiliate Planning
I’ve seen a lot of would-be affiliate marketers spend so much of their time in the research and planning stage that they never actually get to the marketing part. Now don’t get me wrong, things like – learning about your market, coming up with a customer profile and understanding your competition are all vitally important to any business. However, so many people seem to get stymied with some of the minutest details that they never actually get any marketing going.
I’ve seen people obsess about the font they use on their website. Does that matter? Well yes it matters, but not to the degree that it should hold up the launch of the site. My old boss used to say – “Good enough today, is better then perfect tomorrow”. In other words, it’s important to keep things moving along; if a month from now you decide that it’s better to go with Verdana instead of Arial make the change, but don’t hold your site up while you try to decide.
A suggestion I always make, is to create a time line before you even start the research and planning phase. That means that once you’ve made up your mind to become an affiliate marketer, you should pencil out the steps you’ll need to take and the time frame required to get to the launch of your website. This will give you an actionable plan and create a sense of urgency in your mind that will keep you on track. It’s a lot better to build a website and find out that you’ve made some mistakes then it is to spend weeks and weeks worrying about every little issue.
So how long should it take to go from zero knowledge to being a successful affiliate marketer? I wish I could answer that, but I know if you never get your first site off the ground, it will take forever.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Next Steps…
If you’re having trouble getting started, I strongly recommend you review a product by Marlon Sanders called Marketing Dashboard. This brilliant piece of software is actually a “Point and Click” Marketing System. This is an excellent tool for keeping you focused AND moving. Have a look right here!
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Authority Site Building – It’s A Matter Of Trust!
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Authority Sites, Getting Started
I was in the market for a digital camcorder last year. Now, I have a pretty decent understanding of technology in general —but as far as camcorders go, I don’t know that much.
I have a few friends however, that had purchased camcorders several months prior to me, and so I asked each of them about their experiences. It turns out they had both done some research prior to making their purchases, then of course, after buying the camcorders they had used them. This gave them firsthand knowledge of the two different products.
Each friend was able to give me some excellent recommendations about camcorders in general and more importantly about the specific models that they had purchased. Both friends liked their respective camcorders and each was able to give me several pros and cons about them.
I walked away with a mental list of the good and bad features of each camcorder…
When I went into my local electronics store, I had pretty good understanding of the available features and which of those features I wanted in my camera.
I wound up buying the same camcorder as one of my friends. While each friend gave overall positive reviews of their camcorder and while I trust both friends – I weighed their recommendations against what I was looking for and made an educated decision based on what both friends told me. Had I been looking for a different set of features, I may have purchased the other camcorder – but the one I chose was the closest match to what I was looking for…
You see, both of my friends were Authorities on their specific camcorder model. Each friend gave me their honest opinions about their respective camcorder —essentially warming me up to what each camcorder offered.
When I went into the electronics store, I knew what I wanted and was ready to buy – Listening to the salesman was really just a formality – I couldn’t wait to get my new camcorder home…
So what does all this have to do with affiliate marketing? —Everything!
In the affiliate marketing world, my two friends could have been two separate Authority Websites – each one was trustworthy, had first hand experience with the product they were promoting and each gave me good honest reviews (what I call “warts and all” reviews) about those products…
Other things I’d expect from an authority site:
If I had follow up questions about the camcorders, I’d be able to contact the website owner to get more specific answers…
I’d also expect to see both of these sites linking out to other good sites within their niche. They may even be linking to each other. Why? Because each website would have their visitors best interests in mind. They would know that while they may be AN authority in their particular niche, there would also be other good sources of information—even though they may be direct competitors (no one site can be all things to all people!).
I would also NOT expect to see banner ads promoting, toothpaste or shoelaces or other odd products. I’d expect that all advertising on the site would probably be pretty closely related to camcorders…
I would probably have both of these websites bookmarked and would probably recommended those sites to other friends, if they were in the market for a new camcorder.
So you see a successful affiliate marketer knows that credibility is everything – They understand that their website needs to reflect their commitment to their visitors. Those visitors in turn are happy to listen to what they have to say and will also happily let others know about them. That’s the power of The Authority Site!
NEW: See my companion video “What is an authority site?”
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Affiliate Marketing – Five tactics for getting the most out of your traffic
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Getting Started, News
Affiliate marketing is tough, there’s no denying it. Especially if you’re just starting out; you first have to build your website, then, you have to get traffic to it (that’s a whole different can of worms). Finally, after weeks or probably months, you start getting a steady stream of visitors to your site. Now, it’s time to start selling to them.
Yes, I know, “selling to them” is an ugly term, but let’s face it –it’s what we’re here for. Whether you’re trying to build a business that will allow you to quit your day job or simply trying to make a few extra bucks – affiliate marketing (promoting other peoples products and services) is the quickest way to get started. Here are five ideas to help you start earning those commission checks:
1) Become an authority – Whatever your niche is, regardless of how large or how small it is – visitors come to your site with the assumption that you know what you’re talking about –you have the upper hand, don’t disappoint them. Give your visitors good, original content, keep your site fresh, report about what’s going on in your niche and your visitors will come back to your site again and again – this is called authority site building and it’s one of the most powerful techniques for building web success.
2) Know what you’re selling – Don’t sign up for every affiliate program you see and fill your site with every banner and every offer you can find. This is counter productive and goes against the authority site building process described above. Sites like this (often called banner farms) have been around since affiliate programs began and they’ve NEVER sold anything! If you’re an authority within your niche, then you really ought to have first hand experience with the products and services you’re recommending. Banners won’t sell to your audience, thoughtful (warts and all) reviews will.
3) Don’t sell it PREsell it – As affiliate marketers, it’s NOT our job to sell. We’re in the business of recommending products and services and sending interested visitors to their sales pages. This is called Preselling, it’s the process of warming your visitors up to an affiliate product (For more information, read Ken Envoy’s free ebook “Make Your Content PREsell”). Let the affiliate programs landing page do the high-pressure selling, you’re just recommending a product you like to your visitor.
4) Always include a call to action – This is a very subtle technique and one that is often overlooked; you need to tell your visitors what you want them to do. If you want them to fill out a form and hit submit – tell them! If you want them to go to the sales page for a particular product –tell them! It sounds pretty simple but it is a basic selling technique that is often the difference between being a good salesman and a great one. Here’s a few call to actions to give you a better idea of what they are: “Click here to learn more” or “Check out their website now”
5) Be Patient, don’t quit or get discouraged – This is the big one. Only a fraction of the visitors you send to the sales page ever buy and of the few that actually do buy, most will NOT buy on their first click through, it can be days even weeks or months before today’s visitor, actually hits that buy button and plunks down their credit card number. In other words, even if you do everything right the odds are you won’t see your first sale for at least a month after you start getting traffic to your site. You have to just keep plugging away; you never know when success is just around the next corner.
In conclusion, the five ideas above are by no means the only things you’ll need to concentrate on to make your site successful, but in my view they are up there very near the top of the list. Re-read this list whenever you start to get discouraged! Oh and pay special attention to number five – if you can fully digest that one, you’re well on your way to being successful.
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RPM Institute announces Headache free Authority Site building.
Filed under: Authority Sites, Getting Started, News
Recently the RPM Institute (RPMi) unveiled a very clever way of handling the headaches that invariably arise when designing a new website. How? By simply taking all the technical issues of setting up a new sight away from the membership and putting this burden squarely on the shoulders of the more technically adept site design department. With the new and improved system, we (the membership) simply request a new site; fill out a few entries on a form and the support staff takes care of the rest. The entire build process takes less then a week (often much quicker).
Included with the build are all of the tools, plug-ins, widgets and graphics you need to create a content rich authority website. The designers create a professional looking site that just works —You simply have to add your content.
So what do you actually get with your new site?
First, you get free web hosting. The hosting includes the full range of services you expect – unlimited emails, traffic stats and log files, file manager, cpanel, fantastico and more…
Next, RPMi sites are blog based. They’re built using an SEO enhanced version of the Wordpress blog system. The blog system is further extended with a suite of plugins, some of these publicly available others proprietary. Finally, two stand-alone applications, ContentPress and PheedPress are included and configured with each site build.
ContentPress (CP) is a system that automates the posting of content to your blog, this is NOT a site scraper, or some other black-hat site builder, CP is a tool to help automate the process of getting content on your blog. Among the uses of CP, is the ability to have the system automatically post content at random days and times. You just add your articles to the CP database, set a few calendar options then go about your business. CP then posts your articles at the intervals you selected.
The next tool, Pheedpress is an application that allows you to configure custom RSS feeds for your sites. Feeds can be created by you and listed on your blog, there is also an interactive tool that allows your users to create there own feeds of your content (very innovative). Pheedpress is an awesome tool for getting your site noticed by potential users all around the world.
Both of these tools, CP and Pheedpress are proprietary and available only to RPMi users.
What I like about this new set-up is that they’ve removed ALL the old road-blocks to building your sites. Now, there’s no more excuses, you simply request your site, wait a few days for your new Authority Site to be hand-crafted by the RPMi sight building team, then start posting content. It’s that simple!
Have a look at the RPMi, It’s a great system and one I fully recommend to anyone who’s looking for a headache-free way to get their website live.
Learn More Here: RPM Institute
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Web Site Marketing Strategies
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Getting Started, News
Ask five different web marketers to list their top web marketing strategies and you’ll probably get five different answers. That’s okay, because there are lots of different ways to skin a cat. With that said, here are my three favorite web site marketing strategies.
1) Choose a blog or other Content Management System (CMS) over old fashioned static html pages. Blogs especially have a big advantage as they are inherently well organized and search engine friendly. Also with a CMS global changes and updates are usually accomplished by making a change to a single file —In the not so good old days, I can remember putting up marketing materials on every page of my site(s) – individually, only to have to go back and remove them all a few days later when the offer had changed 
.
Another reason to choose a blog is that it removes most of the design issues that arise when building a site. With a blog/CMS you often only need to select a particular “skin” for your site, then customize it with a single unique header graphic and you’re done. Remember, it’s all about the content – people really aren’t that impressed with fancy site design anymore. Today web users want the meat and potatoes, not the piece of parsley on the side of the plate.
2) Build a focused, content rich web site not a collection of banners. Newbie’s often start out signing up for every affiliate program they can find. Then, they just start adding pages and pages of banners to their sites (this never really worked, and now that the internet is starting to mature a little – it’s absolutely useless). Remember, people use the internet to find information. They want to find out about everything from the latest celebrity news to the latest science breakthroughs. To succeed, you need to find a niche and become the authority site for that niche. This sounds pretty simple right? Well it is and it isn’t – it’s not rocket science, but it does require a few things; good old fashioned work, time and a lot of patience.
So how do you go about building an authority site? You do that by frequently adding fresh content to your site. Content can be articles, videos, podcasts, user forums or just about anything else you can think of. Just make sure it’s accurate, relevant and interesting. You can either create the content yourself or have some or all of it ghostwritten. Consistency is the key.
3) Build a list – There’s an old web marketing adage (well I really don’t know if it’s old or not, but I have seen it in a few different places 
) that goes something like — A guru without a list is not a guru at all! That’s because there is nothing as powerful as face to face salesmanship –car salesmen know this, that’s how they get us to add all those expensive options that we really don’t need.
Anyway, promoting to a list is about as close to face to face selling as you can get on a global scale. You can personalize your messages; you can speak to your prospects like the individuals that they are, and you can really build a two way communication with your list. It’s all in how you manage it, treat your list well, treat it as the collection of individuals that actually make up the list and you’ll be rewarded with a loyal group of readers who will listen to what you have to say.
Well, that’s my Marketing Strategy for any new niche I want to target. Once I have this foundation in place, I know I’m well on my way to having a successful website. These basic issues allow me to build my credibility with the surfers who visit my site.
In a nutshell here’s how these three elements work together:
1) Using a blog/CMS gives me a straight-forward, platform that I can quickly modify as necessary.
2) Thinking in terms of building an “Authority Site” as opposed to a website, keeps me focused on what is important to my niche.
3) Having a list of people who are interested in my niche allow me to get to a more personal level with them. I’m not just some guy who’s trying to sell them something; instead I’m trusted because I have a personal relationship with them.
Very Powerful Stuff!
Here’s some related resources:
How to build an Authority Site
Inexpensive Article Ghostwriters
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