Archive for August, 2008
How The Average Joe Can Use Blogs In Marketing
It used to be that in order to have an online business presence, a person either had to know how to design a website, or pay someone to do it for them. This prevented many people from starting internet ventures. They either didn’t have the required design skills to build a site themselves, or just didn’t have the funds to outsource the project. But blogs have changed that. Now, without ever having to deal with html code, the average Joe can now have a permanent piece of virtual real estate that they can easily update and grow. This is the main reason why using blogs in marketing strategies has become so commonplace.
Unless you are computer programmer or website designer, looking at the code used to create webpages can be like looking at a foreign language (actually, it is a different language). Learning how to understand this language can be a daunting experience. blogs, which is a contraction of the phrase “web logs”, eliminates the need to understand this code (although some basic html knowledge can go a long way, especially when minor glitches occur). All someone has to do is write the content, and hit the “publish” button. The special coding of the blog takes care of everything else.
Whereas a website can take days, even months to build, a blog can be up and running in a matter of minutes. And this is a marketers dream, especially those new to the game and those who just aren’t tech savvy. A person can spot an opportunity, and then attack it very quickly with a blog.
blogs also are great for marketing because they are interactive (something that your typical static website normally doesn’t offer). By allowing readers of the blog to post their own comments, a relationship can be developed, and the reader is more likely to act in accordance to the blog owner’s suggestions (ie. buying products, opting into mailing lists, etc).
Another benefit of giving readers permission to post comments is that this will grow your blog further, without any additional effort. The more comments that are left, the bigger and more diverse the blog will become. The readers will unintentionally be expanding the amount of content on the blog, and this will make it rank much better in the search engines.
Using blogs in marketing efforts is a tactic that will not be going away any time soon. The ease of use, potential for creating a lasting relationship, and hands-free growth make blogs an ideal vehicle for all kinds of internet income models. All the average person needs to know how to do is write content and hit the publish button.
Author Resource Box:
Want to learn more about how average Joe’s are using blogs in marketing?
Visit my blog at www.meonit.com to get more information on how to successfully use the internet to start making money. Don’t let another day go by without making any significant progress. Learn the techniques and strategies used by more experienced marketers to generate income. Come to my blog today to find out more.
Protecting Your Commissions.
Thieves are a problem out in the brick and mortar world is for business owners and thieves are a concern for cyber space business owners. Out in the brick and mortar world, thieves will take money and merchandise and it isn’t any different online. The real world merchants use locks and alarms to deter thieves. Internet business owners need to use anti-theft software to protect their commissions. Here are some things you can do to protect yourself and your commissions:
1. Use Meta Refresh: A meta refresh is a simple bit of HTML code which automatically redirects your visitor to another page (your affiliate URL). It provides a neat way of presenting affiliate links in newsletters. It probably helps reduce commission bypassing and commission hijacking. A big advantage of using meta refreshes is that if merchants change their affiliate links, you can change links on dozens of pages quickly and easily by altering only one file.
One problem is that some search engines don’t like meta refreshes because they’re frequently used for unsavory purposes. So if you use this technique, use it with caution.
2. Use a URL redirection service. You can use free services or buy a unique domain name for each affiliate program you join. URL redirection makes affiliate links less obvious, so this will reduce some commission thefts.
3. Use a web-based ad tracking service. The ad tracking link initially hides the affiliate link, reducing thefts.
4. Use an ad tracking script. Good ad tracking scripts hide the affiliate link as well as being useful for tracking. It has the advantage that it doesn’t promote someone else’s domain.
5. Use JavaScript redirect. Because this initially hides the affiliate link, it should reduce commission thefts.
Be aware that thievery is a problem for online businesses and take the necessary steps to protect your commissions.
———————————-
Affiliate Short Tips
Brought to you every other day
by Gunnar Berglund from meonit.com
Other Notable Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes.
It is not hard hard to set up a good website and start an affiliate marketing career. It isn’t hard at all to find affiliate marketing opportunities on the internet. However, it is a very simple thing to make deadly mistakes that will insure your failure to thrive at affiliate marketing.
One of the most notable affiliate marketing mistakes is to think that all you have to do is find the ones that pay the most, sign up, drive traffic to that site through your affiliate link and you’re all set right? Not exactly.
It’s great to choose an affiliate program that pays a high percentage, but that’s not most important thing to consider. It’s much more important to find a quality affiliate program that meets certain criteria. Here are three mistakes you don’t have to make:
1. You want to make sure the product is a proven seller. You don’t want to waste your time and money driving traffic to a site that doesn’t convert. Find one with a good conversion rate.
2. Make sure the site you become an affiliate for protects its affiliates, and has your best interest at heart. Look for one that provides banners, e-mails, and other tools you can use to promote the site. Also, make sure that there is only one payment option. As an affiliate marketer, you need to be sure that you will get credit for your referral. If there is more than one payment method, you can get shortchanged.
3. Do not choose an affiliate program that promotes an e-mail course. Nothing is worse than becoming an affiliate to a site that’s first goal is to capture e-mail addresses, and then tries to make the sale second. As an affiliate marketer, you need to capture e-mail addresses, then to convert that prospect into a sale. Stick with affiliate programs that aren’t focused on capturing leads because it’s simply not in your best interest. Build your own list, not someone else’s.
———————————-
Affiliate Short Tips
Brought to you every other day
by Gunnar Berglund from meonit.com
Why Niche Marketing Works So Effectively
If you have read any marketing book or taken any business class, then you are well aware of the “shotgun” method of marketing. Basically you are just trying to get as many people as possible to see your offer. Statistically speaking, this is one of the least effective (and lowest converting) marketing strategies. A better alternative to this is niche marketing.
Whereas the shotgun method blasts your message out broadly, niche marketing involves laser beam focus by targeting only those individuals who are able to and have the desire to act on your message. Here’s something that will sound paradoxical: you will make more sales by targeting a smaller group of people, than you would be targeting everyone.
The shotgun method wastes a lot of energy. With any product or service you would like to promote, chances are that most people would never be interested in it. And all of the time, money, and effort you are expending on them is flushed down the toilet. niche marketing let’s you narrow down onto a smaller group that would be drawn to your promotional message. Your time and effort are used much more efficiently.
Another advantage of niche marketing is that it allows you to tailor your promotion directly toward your target group. This will skyrocket your conversion rates. How you would market to senior citizen couples would be drastically different than the way you would to college males. Different strokes for different folks definitely applies here. niche marketing is powerful because it makes it much easier to connect with the people you are marketing to.
To make the best use of your time, money, and effort, it is recommended that you choose to follow niche marketing strategies over shotgun methods. By getting targeted traffic to your promotion, you are able to communicate your marketing message more effectively, and thus raise your conversion rates.
Author Resource Box:
Want to learn more about why niche marketing is better than the shotgun approach?
Visit my blog at www.meonit.com to get more information on how to successfully use the internet to start making money. Don’t let another day go by without making any significant progress. Learn the techniques and strategies used by more experienced marketers to generate income. Come to my blog today to find out more.
Making Back-End & Residual Commissions.
Residual income puts money in an affiliate marketer’s pocket without any work or effort on their part. It doesn’t get any better than that. Sales of back-end products allow you to get paid for work that you do more than once. The idea here is to work smarter…not harder.
So what are back-end products? They are products/services you offer to existing customers, i.e. to people who have already bought a first product (front-end product. lead product) from you.
Most online marketers make much more money selling customers the second, third, fourth etc. product than selling their first product. The reason is that people who’ve already bought from you once are much more likely to buy again.
Strategies like back-end offers shifts the focus from the short sighted “take the money and run” strategy that is so much in use on the Internet today. You’ve seen these sites all over. The focus is on getting a massive amount of traffic and then selling visitors an over-priced product that doesn’t deliver what was promised. They might make money in the short run but they will only sell to each customer once and will have to continue spending a lot of money on advertising to get new suckers to visit their site.
More successful sites focus on building a strong relationship with their customers. Your main goal shouldn’t be to just make sure your customers are somewhat satisfied…you want them to be extremely satisfied. If you deliver the goods, your customers will trust you more. If you have their trust, you can sell them anything. When you send your very satisfied customers an email offering another product that they would be interested in, they will flock to your site to buy it because they trust you. Trust is everything.
———————————-
Affiliate Short Tips
Brought to you every other day
by Gunnar Berglund from meonit.com
Is Affiliate Marketing for You.
affiliate marketing offers many opportunities to make money working on the Internet. Becoming an affiliate marketer is a great way of having your own online business. Whether you will be successful at it depends on many things but it mostly depends on you. If you are considering doing affiliate marketing, you have already thought of all the ways that it could improve your life like; being your own boss, high income potential and low operation costs…among many other things. Like everything else in life, however, the devil is always in the details.
Being your own boss sounds so wonderful but what kind of boss will you be. Will you be a slave driver who insists that work be done every waking hour including weekends and holidays or will you be so laid back that you won’t start work until late afternoon and be so disorganized that nothing is accomplished? Either extreme will make you a very bad boss.
The high income potential sounds great, as well, but the key word here is POTENTIAL. Potential only means that the high income is a possibility and not a certainty. How high your income will be is directly proportionate to how much you are willing to learn and how hard you are willing to work. Becoming an affiliate marketer doesn’t mean that bags of money will drop from the sky without any time and effort on your part.
The low operation cost of affiliate marketing is a very attractive point for becoming an affiliate marketer. It’s true that it is low cost…but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any cost. You will still have all of the usual living expenses that must be met while you get your affiliate marketing business turning a profit. You will have advertising costs, as well. You must be sure that you can meet your financial obligations before you launch your business.
While affiliate marketing offers a good start for many first online money makers, it can still prove to be a powerful source of income but your ultimate goal should be that of having your own product, membership site or at the very, your very own program in your rights.
That said, I wish you all the best with your new-found knowledge!
———————————-
Affiliate Short Tips
Brought to you every other day
by Gunnar Berglund from meonit.com
Identifying an Existing Hot Demand.
Every small business owner knows that competition is tough, but he or she may not be able to pinpoint exactly what changes are needed in order to get to the top. Conducting business as usual may no longer be sufficient. Investing in the technology that is now available can be a great help or a bank breaker. It seems that most small business and home based business are either starving (they don’t have enough technology) or they are obese (they have everything piece of new technology that comes down the pike).
There is, however, some fairly new technology that every small or home business owner needs. It can answer questions like; how can small businesses identify noteworthy trends, Identify an existing hot demand and make better decisions faster? Answer: business intelligence software. Business intelligence is the crystal ball of the 21st century.
Purchasing business intelligence (BI) software is one of the most strategic investments that a business can make. Using data mining, reporting and querying, BI helps businesses understand, monitor, manage and respond to specified situations. This software empowers decision-makers — and staff — to connect the dots around key business numbers in a way previously unimaginable. BI helps you figure out:
• Which customers are profitable?
• Which customers appear profitable but aren’t?
• Are you close to — or far from — reaching critical milestones?
• When is the best time to launch a marketing campaign?
• What was the best performing product or service last quarter?
Business Intelligence software may be more of an investment than small businesses can bear. It can certainly be pricy. Small business or home business owners, however, can subscribe to BI services on the Internet at a fairly reasonable cost. There are several to choose from.
eBay also published a “Hot Items” list the first week of each month. It gives valuable information to eBay sellers who use drop shippers.
———————————-
Affiliate Short Tips
Brought to you every other day
by Gunnar Berglund from meonit.com
3 Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing Is Perfect For Newbies
Even with all of the technical advantages that the average person has available to him, it’s still pretty hard to
make a buck online. This is especially true for internet marketing novices, also known affectionately as “newbies.”
Fortunately, affiliate marketing may hold the key to helping these newcomers successfully learn how to use theinternet to generate income.
Why affiliate marketing over other methods? There’s actually three very good reasons why IM rookies should reallyconsider the affiliate marketing model.
1. No financial risk. The potential of losing money has stopped many people before even starting. With affiliatemarketing, a person can be the virtual owner of thousands of products without ever having to spend a penny to createthem. No paying expensive copywriters, content writers, programmers, and graphic designers. Everything has alreadybeen done. And the craziest part is that there is no charge to be an affiliate. All it takes is a few minutesregistering at an affiliate directory like Clickbank.com. Now, part of the profits will be taken by the affiliatedirectory. But this happens only when a sale is made.
2. Focus mostly on marketing. Because all of the product creation is completed, all the newbie basically has to worry about is marketing. Specifically, getting as much targeted traffic to his affiliate sales link as possible. That’s it. The affiliate owner will even take care of the payment processing and any customer service issues that arise. That leaves the IM newcomer to concentrate on internet marketing. And with so many different things tolearn already, it makes sense to concentrate on marketing first.
3. More opportunities. affiliate marketing allows individuals to act quickly, and this will give them the ability
to take advantage of many more opportunities that will arise. Think about the time involved in writing the contentof an ebook. Also include the time the copywriter will need. And of course you can’t forget the person designingthe website or the one coming up with cool header, footer, and ecover graphics. All of this takes a massive amountof time and effort.
If a marketer wanted to have a product ready for sale in a week’s time, he’d be pretty hardpressed. Since affiliate products already have all of that taken care of, the newbie can have a product ready in aday, hours, and sometimes even minutes. This doesn’t even include offering multiple affiliate products to the samewebsite visitor, profiting from backend sales, or having residual payments.
The best thing a newbie can do to help him really understand internet marketing concepts is to follow the affiliatemarketing model. By being able to solely focus on marketing techniques and strategies, the IM newbie will be ableto better grasp the incredibly important skill of traffic generation. Consider that affiliate marketing alsorequires no financial investment and allows IMers to jump on more opportunities, there’s no question why it’sperfect for internet marketing novices.
————–
Want to learn more about why affiliate marketing is ideal for internet marketing newbies?
Visit my blog at www.meonit.com to get more information on how to successfully use the internet to startmaking money. Don’t let another day go by without making any significant progress. Learn the techniques andstrategies used by more experienced marketers to generate income. Come to my blog today to find out more.
How to use Auto Responders for Maximum Benefits.
With the goal of profitability in mind, the most important question a web site owner must address is
how to maximize the value of visitors once you get them to visit the site. One important element of
the strategy is to make use of an auto- responder.
One of the best marketing tools on the Internet is the auto-responder. This widely used marketing tool
responds automatically to any email message sent to it. They are triggered by a blank email sent to
the auto-responder email address.
For example, when someone sends an email to an auto-responder, the person receives an already prepared
email message with the requested information. This happens automatically and almost instantaneously,
depending on the Internet and email servers.
If you have properly set up opt-in plus an auto- responder series, you aren’t personally involved in
follow up. The auto-responder contacts the prospect with the initial reply and beyond, becoming in
effect you’re constantly at work, automated sales force. All you have to do is set it up one time.
Write the follow up messages, program the intervals at which you want your messages sent, then the
auto-responder set-up works for you again and again on autopilot.
Always keep in mind that the visitor isn’t interested in your objectives. They only want to know what
is in it for them. They’ve given their email address mainly because they want to get information, not
so they can read your advertisements.
So give them what they want: accurate and useful information on a particular subject. Earn their
trust. Then, you can tell about how your products and services could benefit them. If you don’t give
good content, prospects won’t keep opening the emails in your series. Make it a win-win. They get good
information and you get a well-qualified prospect thanks to your auto-responder messages.
———————————-
Affiliate Short Tips
Brought to you every other day
by Gunnar Berglund from meonit.com
The Benefits of Niche Blog Marketing
If you are involved in making money online, then niche blog marketing is something you should seriously consider incorporating into your business plan. Basically, you start a blog (or several blogs) and use it as an advertising platform for a specific niche, just as you would with a regular website.
The advantage of it being a blog is that first of all, blogs are 100% FREE to get. You receive your own domain name (web address) and everything. You can literally set up your blog and be up and running, promoting products and MAKING MONEY within under an hour.
Niche blog marketing is all about finding a profitable niche market. Weight loss is great, but there is lots of competition…just make sure you have a good product to promote. Whether you have your own product and/or service OR you promote one as an affiliate, blogging is an excellent (one of the best) way to market any niche online.
People write product reviews, articles, press releases and regular ‘blog’ type content on their blogs and put a link to the product they are promoting at the end of the review. This is a time tested, proven system that works wonders for many bloggers worldwide. Some people earn $70,000+ a month just from one blog!
Using your niche blog to market products is just ONE way to monetize your blog. There is also a great load of money to be made from Adsense revenue. You can place ads very easily on your blog that you earn money for anytime someone just as much CLICKS on one of the ads! Most of the time this is done with Google or Yahoo ads.
It is very easy and FREE to sign up for ads to be placed on your blog and you don’t have to be super special or have a really popular blog to do it either. You can literally create a blog right now and be displaying Google ads and making money within a few hours!
I wish you all the best of luck with your niche blog marketing efforts!
Gunnar Berglund
www.meonit.com
Have you started your Social Video Marketing yet?
Unless you have been really blind to trends, you should know that videos are very HOT!!!
The best thing since sliced bread, baby!
I agree, video is THE marketing tool to use right now
Seriously, more and more people are not only watching videos for their information, but more marketers are starting to use them as well to get their messages to the end user…and if you are not using them, well, then you are missing a great opportunity to capitalize on this growing market.
Here – go read these for starters:
www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1529
www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/06/13/online-video-ads-lead-to-sales
www.online-publishers.org/media/131_W_opa_online_video_study_mar06.pdf
publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=62634
blog.compete.com/2007/09/06/video-market-share-july-2007/
blog.compete.com/2007/04/26/online-video-market-share-google-youtube-maniatv/
So, are you convinced you need to start using video?
The only logical answer is YES! 
“But, you reply: I don’t know how to create a video!”
Oh, come on…I have a solution for you…and it’s free!
Basically, you can create a video using screen capture tools – from capturing you surfing websites,
to making a video screen capture of you going through a PowerPoint presentation
(relax, I have a freebie for that as well!), to a video screen capture of you using Notepad!
And really, it is not very complicated.
What you will need is a video screen capture program, a cheap microphone, and if you want to create videos of PowerPoint / Word / Notepad presentations, you will need those programs as well (fear not, I have a free option for those as well!)
A few Video Screen Capture Programs:
Not Free:
Camtasia ($300) is without argue, one of the best screen capture utilities available – but it is also $300!
If you can afford it, I would highly suggest you get it. But it is not necessary
BECAUSE…..
Here are some alternatives – some completely free and one that is VERY CHEAP for what it can do!
There is a free version of Camtasia available for download.
Camtasia was actually created from a program called Cam Studio….
it is free for personal use.
You can download it here:
www.camstudio.org
CamstudioPro – this is not free, but VERY, VERY cheap for what it does!
it was only $29.95
last I checked on August 19 2008
It is also based on the original Camstudio, but has been greatly improved …
by a programming nut, Dave Guindon.
Dave has created a very cool alternative to Camtasia and has priced it so that just about anyone can afford it!
Please, you owe it to yourself to at least look at it … I think you will be VERY impressed with what it can do!
You can check it out here:
http://www.camstudiopro.com
Another free option is called The Jing Project.
The Jing Project is actually made by the creators of Camtasia, but is free and is super easy to use!!!
Check it out at:
www.jingproject.com
Ok .. now if you are a Windows XP user, you already have a built in video creator …
it’s called Windows Movie Maker!
If for some reason it is not installed, you can get it here (and learn more about it):
www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx
Two more free options to look at:
www.smallvideosoft.com/screen-video-capture/
www.virtualdub.org
Now, as far as a Microsoft Word / PowerPoint alternative, one of the best ones available (and also FREE)
is a Suite of “Office-type” tools called Open Office!
You can download it here:
www.openoffice.org
So, go get those videos made!
Gunnar Berglund
