Entries Tagged 'Marketing' ↓

Today, in my Inbox, popped a message encouraging me to download a free handbook that would bring me more website visitors, more signups and more money than I would know what to do with! Naturally I had to investigate…

The premise of Simple Profit Setup is, at the outset, quite simple. It follows a variation of viral and network marketing that, if carried through correctly, is often very successful. A good example of viral marketing is 7 Dollar Expert which does, indeed, work brilliantly.

Simple Profit Setup seemed to follow the same mantra, which is where I got interested. The idea is that you promote the free handbook via your own squeeze page and website rebranded with your affiliate links to Simple Profit Setup. When you sign up to the program you’re given all the details necessary to create your site and landing page and how to drive traffic to it. So far, so good.

Where it all falls down, however, is in the detail. Basically the owner of Simple Profit Setup has gotten greedy. Because, to sign up, you have to run through hoops which involve:

1. Registering a domain with GDI ($10 a month – you’re kidding me)!

2. Opening an autoresponder account with GetResponse – (fair enough).

3. Join the New Plan Network – a network (yuk) marketing plan for $10 a month.

4. Join PROFITmatic – (I have no idea why, other than to put more money in the owner’s pocket).

All along the way the emphasis is not on marketing products, providing solutions for people’s problems, giving out valuable information or anything else that could be considered worthwhile.

No, the emphasis, as with all these ‘network’ plans, is to ‘build your downline’. In other words the sole purpose of the Simple Profit Setup is to recruit as many people as possible to 1., 3. and 4. above. Of course, as you build your downline you build in more people under the site owner, and so his income grows.

Now I have one thing to say about network marketing – it is unbelievably hard work recruiting people and it usually fails. The only people making money are the people at the top of the tree who got in early. The ones doing the work are the poor sods who are trying to harness recruits, and that’s tough, believe me.

So, as an example of viral marketing, Simple Profit Setup fails on many counts. My advice – stay away from this one.

In its most basic form Affiliate Marketing is a cinch. You don’t have to create a product, you don’t have to deal with customers, you don’t have to handle payments or order processing. In fact it’s the easiest way to earn online there is!

But, there’s a catch.

You won’t make a penny as an Affiliate Marketer unless you can convert your blog or website visitors into sales. Because, no matter how much you praise a product to the skies, the natural insecurity of those looking to buy is likely as not to completely over-rule any recommendation.

So, just how do you gain the trust of your readers? How do you prove to them that a product really is all you say it is?

One way is to set up a review page highlighting one, two or three competing products. By giving honest opinions about the benefits of several products vying for your reader’s cash, buyers feel they can make an informed choice.

Great, but did you also know there is a right way and a wrong way to set up a review site? This is where Commission Blueprint comes in.

One of the authors behind Commission Blueprint is Tim Godfrey, the guy behind the highly rated Product Praxis, a product I’ve been using and recommending for over a year now. So I knew that Commission Blueprint had a good pedigree!

Nearly all the training in setting up your Affiliate landing pages is through a series of 14 in-depth videos which take you from finding and analyzing the best Clickbank products to promote, thru setting up your pre-selling pages to creating and managing your marketing campaigns.

This series is more targeted than Profit Praxis. While the latter covers nearly every method that successful Affiliates use to pre-sell and market any product, Commission Blueprint is more focused.

Commission Blueprint’s emphasis is on getting you up and running with your own campaigns in as fast a time as possible, even to the point of giving you real review pages that you can cut and paste to your own website or blog.

This means that you can get started with your first campaigns almost immediately and then go on to develop your own review pages, based around the Commission Blueprint formula, for products that you are enthusiastic about.

By giving you review pages to work with, Commission Blueprint neatly gets over the hurdle of ‘getting started’ which is always the block that new marketers face. And if you really feel you can’t be bothered to set up your own review pages for further products there’s an option, when you buy Commission Blueprint, to receive extra pre-made review sites every month.

So now you’ve no excuses left to start Affiliate Marketing! Commission Blueprint hands it to you on a plate – click here to find out more.

In response to the interest in creating Review pages I’ve added a series of videos on this very subject to Monday Madness:

http://monday-madness.com/ReviewBlogs/

This is the simplest way of setting up your first Review Page through the use of a Wordpress Blog and is ideal for beginners, even if you’ve never created a website or blog before.

I also forgot to mention that there’s complete training in using Review Pages, as well as other marketing methods, through the Profit Praxis system:

http://howtofind.info/ProfitPraxis/ClickBankSecrets.htm

Hope you find these links useful!

I’ve just received a question about ‘Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots’ which I felt deserved a longer reply than I could possibly put in a comment. So here’s why Internet Marketing training nearly always recommends the use of Landing or Review Pages.

First, let’s get the concept of ‘Landing Pages’ out of the way. A ‘Landing Page’ is simply a webpage on your own website which your visitors will ‘land’ on when they follow a link in, say, your advert or article.

The reason landing pages are used is two-fold. One is that Search Engine marketing from Google or Yahoo does not give much credence to affiliate links in PPC (Pay Per Click) adverts. For example Google prefers that someone clicking on a PPC link is sent to a page which gives good information about the subject outlined in the ad.

Another use of a Landing Page is to capture the name and email of your visitor perhaps by giving away a short report about the product you are promoting. You can then send out follow-up emails outlining further reasons why the visitor should buy the product. I’d normally call this a ’squeeze page’.

Here’s one I made earlier:-

http://howtofind.info/ProfitPraxis/ClickbankSecrets.htm

Far better, then, to advertise a link to your Landing Page. This page can be very short – perhaps a video about the product or just a Name and Email form for your giveaway report. Your affiliate link can then be put on the Landing Page and/or in your follow up emails.

But why not take advantage of a Landing Page to ‘presell’ the product? Product sales pages have a far higher rate of conversion of visitors to sales if those visitors have already received a recommendation for the product.

And the best type of recommendation is a review. So turn your landing page into a review page – either a lengthy ‘presell’ or with two or three competing products on it  – and you’ll make more affiliate sales than you ever would using a plain link to the salespage.

Simple, really, but a concept that works so well that there is now a market for review pages! For example Google Ambush (http://jonathanpaston.com/google-ambush-review.html) will set up review pages for you but, in my opinion, these types of pages are too simple to do the job effectively.

A superior alternative is Presell Review Templates which provides, each month, a full ‘review’ website template for suitable products that you host on your own domain. I’ve been a member for some months now and here’s one of my latest landing pages:-

http://www.howtofind.info/SiteRush/

Of course just putting up a review site isn’t enough – you then need to drive traffic to it.  Which is why you’ll be relieved to know that every Presell Review Template comes with a set of articles and promotional emails that you can use to send people to your review page.

You can find out more about Presell Review Templates by clicking here.

Then there are comparison review sites like this one (yet another of mine):-

http://howtofind.info/wealthyreviews/wealthyaffiliatereviews.html

This one was set up in a matter of minutes using the Web Builder system that you get free when you join Wealthy Affiliate University (click for more details). That you’ll also learn everything there is to know about Affiliate Marketing is just part of what Wealthy Affiliate has to offer. Maybe I’ll meet with you in the forum?

Has your Inbox been bombarded this week with promotions for Niche Blueprint? Are you sick of Niche this, Niche that? Or are you wondering why all this fuss about Niche Marketing anyway?

I hear and read a lot about Niche marketing and it constantly surprises me how many people talk about it without actually defining what a Niche really is. So here’s my take on Niche Marketing.

First of all the reason Niche Marketing is hot right now is because the Make Money niche itself is becoming overpromoted. So many marketers are teaching how you can sell successfully outside the Make Money niche and that, to my mind, can only be a good thing.

Good because learning how to find a Niche has the prospect of turning you into a real marketer rather than just sucking you into becoming yet another affiliate amongst thousands battling in the Make Money market.

So how do you go about finding profitable Niches? To begin with let’s look at exactly what a Niche is – and what it isn’t.

A lot of people will claim that, for example, ‘Pet Food’ is a Niche. It isn’t. It certainly is a Market, but I wouldn’t describe it as a Niche. Narrow it down to ‘Dog Food’ and you’re getting closer to the concept of a Niche, but even that wouldn’t be profitable in my mind. However if you were to dig deeper and find ‘Organic Dog Food’ or ‘Natural Dog Food’ then you are on the road to finding a profitable Niche Market.

You see you need a big marketing budget to compete successfully in the broader marketplace of, say, Pet Food. What you really need to look for is the person who is looking for something special for their pet. Maybe their dog has a diet problem. Perhaps it has an irritable bowel and requires superior quality dog food. Owners of pets will often spend lots of money on products that will keep them healthy and happy. So solving this problem could be a money spinner.

But first you need to find out how many people are searching to solve problems like these. There’s an easy way to do this. One is to search keywords at Wordtracker (you can use the Free Wordtracker tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ .  To get an idea of what keywords to look for check the questions arriving at, for example, Yahoo Answers at http://answers.yahoo.com .

If you just enter ‘dog food’ in the Yahoo Answers search box you’ll see questions like this pop up ‘What kind of dog food is best for a dog that farts a lot?’ and ‘Is there a natural dog food free of contamination?’. Now let’s see if these could be profitable.

Check the results for ‘dog fart’ and ‘natural dog food’ at Wordtracker. ‘dog fart’ gets 1 search daily. ‘natural dog food’ gets 120 searches daily. Wordtracker breaks this down even further so you can quickly build up a set of keywords in your niche.

What do you do with these keywords? Well that’s where Niche Blueprint comes in. But I’m not going to recommend Niche Blueprint because, if you’ve read this far, chances are you won’t be that familiar with Niche Marketing. And Niche Blueprint, from everything I’ve seen so far, is best aimed at those, like me, who have a basic understanding of Niche Marketing. Also it’s expensive!

So, with the all the fuss there is about Niche Marketing at the moment, I’ve looked for an alternative. A course that will get you into profitable niches and start selling, even if you’ve never, ever thought about Niche Marketing before.

Just launched today is NicheQ – a system of getting you started on the road to profitable niches by providing a new niche every month filled with PLR articles, keywords, pre-written emails and products you can use for list building. The best part is that NicheQ comes free as part of the Wealthy Affiliate training program.

So you not only get everything you need to start your Niche Marketing off to a great start but you also receive all the training you could ever want to become a wealthy affiliate. To find out more about NicheQ and how it could help you become an affiliate niche marketer, as well as to download your free copy of ‘Niche Hunting Strategies’ click here – http://jonathanpaston.com/presents/NicheQ