Archive of ‘Internet Marketing’ category
The newest monthly update for my internet marketing strategy site is up, and the topic is on product creation.
Some of you will be thinking “Heck no, I’m happy as an affiliate, I don’t want to have a product and deal with bad customers and worst yet, customer service!”
Hold up a second. True, there’s more effort involved in planning, research, creating and marketing your own product. The upside is that you’re building an asset that you can continue to benefit from for a long time to come, especially if you treat your customers well and implement emailing strategies effectively.
While I know some marketers have some “churn and burn” reports, videos and other products that pre-sell leads to a some shady rebills which subsequently burns the lead shortly, I’ve found that the customers on some of my lists going back to 2006, have continued to purchase the products and services I’ve recommended over the years.
On some of my lists, the average value per customer is in the $400-600 range (from a combination of affiliate products and courses/services that I own). The traffic source has primarily been through social media, forum and blog traffic, so the lead acquisition cost has been pretty low.
One of the reasons I’ve been moving increasingly into paid traffic (PPC, PPV, media buys) since late 2008, has been increasing the number of leads into the sales funnel. Moving from a situation of:
[modest leads] x [high value per lead] to [high volume of leads] x [high value per lead] is one of the strategies I’m focusing on this year (so you might see less frequent posts on here].
If you’d like to check out the update on product creation, be sure to visit the: Internet Marketing Cookbook. (the content will be available till end March, after which it’ll be replaced with fresh content]
My recent post “The Truth Behind Amish Shah’s Magic Bullet System” has had some affiliates riled up about the security of your campaign data being stored on someone else’s system. I think it’s a lot more than that though, it boils down to this: Do you trust the people you’re working with.
If you don’t trust your service provider, affiliate manager, affiliate network, then fine, don’t work with them.
At the same time, anyone with mediocre skill in using any of the search engines, or who’s subscribed to keywordspy, spyfu, keycompete, or have adware installed on one of their computers can see what you’re promoting.
Granted, they may not have your analytics and conversion data, but anyone with 1-2 years marketing/affiliate experience will have some ways to figure it out.
When I was a regular visitor to internet marketing/affiliate marketing forums, there was always the fear that showing your campaign data to a network, affiliate manager or service provider would give them the means to steal your campaign.
Having been in the role of consulting for networks, service providers and affiliates, as well as being an affiliate manager/backend ops for a couple of merchants, I’ve had access to campaign data. I’ve also critiqued an affiliate’s campaign, given them advice on constructing a sales conversion funnel as well as advised them on building email lists, which would have been used to promote competing offers too.
Although I could’ve gone to replicate their campaigns, there isn’t any point to. First, stealing/cloning/copying is (more…)
One of the side benefits of the 20+ hour commute to the US from my home in Asia is buying stuff which costs much more when I buy it at home. Take for example, the Windows 7 operating system. It costs $179.99 for the home premium edition from Amazon, while buying it here costs about $280. Since Singapore’s average per capita income is $51,600 (2008 estimates, CIA WorldFactbook), compared to $47,500 for the US, I don’t see why there should be such a fat premium involved. So you can be sure I contribute to the US economy by buying a bunch of stuff from Buy.com, Overstock,com, Amazon, Geeks.com when I head over.
I probably get one of the highest returns in expertise investing in books and courses to help grow my business and this coming trip is no exception. If you see a guy with a big box of books at LAX or Las Vegas’ McCurran Airport, that’s probably me.
Here are some of my top picks this trip:
Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life by Donald Trump: You might not be interested in real estate, you might even think the Donald is pretty arrogant and possibly wear a hairpiece. But there’s no denying that he’s among the top businessmen who ruthlessly and efficiently promote their business (Richard Branson and Steve Jobs are also among the top for me). I’ve made it a point to get ahold of every book by the Donald and this book which came out last year is no exception. The best way to get value out of this week is not to read it and expect some secret to pop into your head. Instead, if you read the book, and figure out the reasons/motives/motivations behind what gets the Donald fired up, you’re halfway there already. If you can’t figure it out, then you’re fired![Amazon is current running a $7.02 promo on the book, usual retail price $24.95]
–
Uncensored Sales Strategies: A Radical New Approach to Selling Your Customers What They Really Want – No Matter What Business You’re In By Sydney Biddle Barrows and Dan Kennedy: Sydney Barrows might not be a familiar name, unless you’ve read her 1989 book, Mayflower Madam, which was one of Fortune magazine’s best business books of the year. She’s known for applying business management principles to the world’s oldest profession, having run Cachet, New York’s most elite, premium escort service, catering to rich, powerful and prominent men. Dan Kennedy is one of the thought leaders in direct marketing and copywriting circles. Put the two together and it’s an instant add to my shopping cart.
–
Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth By T. Harv Eker: This is motivational/self-improvement expert T. Harv Eker’s seminal book on rewiring your mindset to set yourself up for success and wealth building. Comparing him against his nearest peers Robert Kiyiosaki and Anthony Robbins, I feel that Harv has more depth and more actionable strategies, especially when it comes to planning for a successful business and building your wealth. This book is coming to 4 years since it was first published. But if you don’t already have a copy, it should occupy a place in your library to give you some business building ideas.
–
Although none of these books make the promise to grow my business, I expect that like in the past, getting a couple of ideas from each book to implement in my lead generation, sales funnel or conversion process can easily grow the business by another 10%. Compound the effect of continually refining the business system and you can make your business work for you.
If you’re using Avast’s Anti-Virus solution on any of your home computers, you may throwing the program is throwing up reports of your .exe files being infected by “Win32:Delf-MZG [Trj]”. This threw me for a loop, because I’m pretty careful when it comes to data mangement.
Before you start deleting .exe’s or putting them into a chest, you should know that the latest anti-virus definition update is said to contain some bugs which is causing false positives to register.
The word from those following the anti-virus industry is to avoid running Avast for now, till another definition update is released to fix this issue. Hopefully this is done in the next 24-48 hours.
PS: It might be a cause for a freakout if you see a string of trojan/malware warnings, but you are regularly backing up data on your desktop/laptop, aren’t you?
Update: Blackhatworld forum post with info on the situation.
If you’ve been following my earlier posts like “Looking for a few lazy affiliates“, you might come to the realization that there’s no “secret sauce to internet marketing success“, at least in the early stages of your business. Here are some tips to help you get your business to the point of being able to operate when you’re not there (my definition of being a business owner, rather than have your business “own” you).
First you need systems in place. If you’re new to this game, you’ll probably be doing a lot of things on-the-fly.
- Offer selected? Check
- Landing page/creatives in place? Check
- Keywords researched, screened, sorted, bid prices loaded, campaign uploaded? Check
- Campaign live and running? Check
Conversion tracking in place? Oops. Now go back and fix it.
I was speaking to a new affiliate yesterday, and explaining that there’s a lot of fire fighting in the early days, and even more screw ups.
Have you ever sent $200 worth of PPV traffic to a blank testing page? I have.
Kept a YSM campaign going, sending traffic to a domain that has since expired and been registered by another affiliate going to the same offer? Yeppers.
Making mistakes and “wasting money” are part of the game. In my opinion, you’re not “wasting money” if (more…)
Looking for the secret sauce to success in internet marketing? Look, no further.
It came out in 1967’s “The Graduate”. Aside from probably one of the first instances of the MILF being featured in a Hollywood film, it also featured the seminal line: “I just want to say one word to you – just one word…. ‘plastics.”
Likewise, though being plastic will not get you very far in internet marketing, another word will probably get you where you want to be. That word? Prioritization.
As you’re probably aware, there’s tons of things you can do yourself:
- install a script
- come up with a custom designs
- write the content
- set up the traffic campaign
- work on the conversion element
- optimize your traffic/conversion/monetization
- set up an opt-in/popup box to collect leads
- write an email sequence to follow up and make a 2nd attempt to close the sale if you weren’t successful
- set up an A/B split test
- access/download your analytics data
- retain the better performing element, set up a new test element
Repeat the cycle again.
As you might realize, trying to (more…)
