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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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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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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Anatomy of a Revolution – SEO And the Long Tail (Part Two)
Filed under: Content Sites, Getting Started, Search Engine Marketing
Remember the example I gave in the first installment of this article (SEO And the Long Tail), about the music industry and the changes that the Internet and digital delivery brought about, well we saw how the long tail of music was the tens of thousands of, (often independent) artists many of whom self-produce their music without the benefit of a record label or promotion, or really any chance of ever having their music displayed on the shelves of Sam Goody –and yet people are able to find and download their music, and in fact itunes and others like them are profiting nicely because of it.
Well lets move the scenario to our world, the website. Let’s say that instead of the music industry, we’re using a given website as the industry, or more specifically the content on the website, that is about to be redefined by the long tail. So, in this scenario, the web content is the industry, the process of SEO is the old-style brick and mortar record shop.
The old-school process of SEO usually involved trying to guess how potential web surfers might find the site. You’d do this by looking at the site and what it was trying to sell or accomplish, then come up with search terms that seemed to fit the theme of the site. So, a site that sold sun glasses may come up with key phrases like:
Men’s sunglasses
Women’s sunglasses
Children’s sunglasses
Then once the “best” keywords were chosen, web pages would be developed around each phrase – usually one phrase per page. Once the optimized pages were indexed by the search engines, their placement in the SERPS would be measured; tweaks would be performed if the pages weren’t ranked high enough. After several months (often times much longer), the pages would (hopefully) rank in the top three or five for each of their respective phrases. Then guess what, you’d be getting a few hits each day from each of those terms. Would you sell many sunglasses? Probably not, terms like “Men’s Sunglasses” are far too broad to bring in any qualified traffic. No, more then likely you’d need hundreds, even thousands of these hits to make a single sale.
Let’s take a closer look. Who do you think is further along in the buying process, the person who searches for:
“Men’s Sunglasses”
Or the person who searches for:
“American Chopper Sunglasses black with blue lenses”
My guess it would be number two – he seems to have a pretty good idea of what he wants and now just needs to find someplace to buy it.
You see the flaw with traditional SEO is that the really good keyphrases, the long tail key phrases, really didn’t exist. When you’re optimizing a webpage for a specific keyphrase – like say “Children’s Sunglasses”, you’re trying to keep the page extremely focused on that particular phrase, so you consciously avoid straying from the focus of the page. In other words, those great long tail key phrases simply don’t make it to your page. Remember, in this scenario, the old-school process of SEO is the brick and mortar record shop – you know the one with the severely limited amount of shelf space –that can only house the most popular records –the records that everyone wants. Well the “records” in this case are the key phrases; traditional SEO can only fit so many key phrases on their shelves (the web pages).
So what changed? What caused the Long Tail of SEO? Well, people started blogging! A blog by definition is kind of an anti-SEO environment. You see, the blog is designed to give anyone who wants to, the ability to publish on the web. With the advent of the blog, anyone who had something to say (or thought they did), could start publishing, quickly and cheaply. These new publishers gave no thought to SEO (many wouldn’t even have known what it was) – they’d simply say what the wanted to say, the way the wanted to say it. So now, all the richness of language that the old-school SEO’ers had squeezed out of the internet was now being dumped back in and the search engines devoured it. Suddenly these web sites started showing up in the SERPs – for those long tail keyphrases that no one was optimizing for.
Up Next – The art of Long Tail SEO
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Content Artist
Content Artist is a new piece of software due to release on Friday December 1 (2006). The software claims to take a pre-existing article and perform a re-write. The resulting article is said to be unique and both machine readable (easy to do) AND people readable (not so easy to do).
Now if (and it’s a big IF) this software works as promised the line between Blackhat seo and whitehat seo will become much harder to see.
I read the press release today and visited their sales page —no example articles were given so it remains to be seen just how people-readable the articles are.
So what good is software like Content Artist?
Well, the search engines love to see fresh, unique content on websites and they reward sites that do this with good results in their SERPs. The promise of this software is that it can create huge numbers of unique articles that can be uploaded to your site periodically, making it look to the search engines that a human being is actually writing all these articles and posting them. If Content Artist works as described, it will be an excellent value that will more then pay for itself in a matter of days.
Lastly, I haven’t tried the software – it hasn’t been released yet, so I can’t vouch for how effective it will be. If you’re interested, check out their site —oh, and if you sign up for their email list, they’ll send you a couple of decent ebooks – at no charge.
Have a look and let me know what you thing!
Click Here to visit the Content Artist website
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Review: Need An Article
Most professional webmasters realize that the best way to be successful is to add good, informative content to their sites on a regular basis. Doing this creates a win-win situation. Site visitors get to see fresh, “up to the minute” content and search engines will pay attention because they like to give their users what they want to see. Of course the problem is where do you get all this content?
Well there’s a smart new service called “need an article” that might just have the answer. Need an article is a membership site that boasts an automated system and a pool of writers available to create web content for you. There are several big benefits with the system…
Convenience
First unlike hiring a ghostwriter through Elance or some other service, you don’t have to deal with reviewing bids, comparing feedbacks and all the other details of having to hire a writer for a single job. All of these things have already been done. What you’re getting is a pool of writers just waiting for your requests.
Automation
Next, their automated system makes it a breeze to make article requests. You simply supply a title for your article, add a few sentences about what you’re looking for (here you can include things like “Please use the phrase “buy blue widgets” three times in the article”), and supply resources that you may want the writer to work from. Lastly, you include your resource box, click submit and you’re done.
Speed
For me, the biggest benefit is the speed with which the articles are completed. All of the articles I’ve requested have been completed within 23 to 29 hours. Imagine this, you find an under exploited keyphrase at 4AM on Saturday morning, you can have a 300 to 500 word article, that has been optimized for that exact phrase, posted to your blog Sunday Morning. And all you had to do was find the phrase and make a simple request. Very Cool!
Other features…
The site also has a Private Message feature (PM) that allows for communication with the writer. On occasion the writer may have a question for your or maybe you decide to add additional keyphrase to the article, this can be accomplished using the PM feature.
Not happy with the article you received, the system allows you to request one set of changes free of charge.
Their is also an article “Rewrite Feature” allows you to take an existing article that you own the rights to and generate a second, unique article from it. An interesting idea!
Costs
The service itself currently costs $9.95 per month, this gives you access to their system. Once inside you need to purchase article credits, here’s a breakdown of their current article rates:
300-500 words $5.42 per article
750 words $9.00 per article
1000+ words: $12.50 per article
Rewrite: $4.50 per article
Press Release: $14.50 per article
Conclusion
This is a great service that provides decent articles for a decent price. Just know what to expect. For $5 a pop, you’re not going to get deeply researched articles, however what you will get are unique articles that can be used to add content to your own site(s), and can be syndicated to provide low cost backlinks.
Have A Look Here: Need An Article
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