Tag Archives: Internet Marketing

Friday Podcast: Web Design That Increases Conversions With Ryan Jackson

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ryan jacksonOne of my resources that I’ve mainly been keeping to myself over the past 2 years is a talent web designer who lives in a small (population 10,000) Australian town of Maryborough.

Ryan Jackson AKA DesignGuruRyan, developed the template for this blog and designed and created almost all my product and affiliate sites too. (I take credit for the ugly ones…)

Besides my sites, Ryan’s also been involved with the site design for Mike Filsaime’s 7FigureSecrets and Chris McNeeney’s DayJobKiller product websites.

During our discussion, we talked about:

  • Offline design vs online web design
  • Incorporating direct response marketing elements into your web design
  • The rise of “Web 2.0” design elements in websites (and how to incoporate them)
  • Bootstrapping design resources for marketers on a budget

You can find out more about Ryan at:

The resources he mentioned during the call:

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

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Do You Have Adequate Risk Management Policies In Your Internet Marketing Business?

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thinkingOne of the takeaways from my friend, Tyler Project managing partner Leonard Lin’s experience of having his Facebook account suspended this past week, has been to manage your risk, especially in the area of technology risk management.

Failure to do so could mean a disruption in your business activities and in a worst case scenario, a stop in your income generation capability.

What’s Risk Management?

It’s a means to control the uncertainty and unknown elements in your business (typically referring to the negative elements). This could range from dealing with the latest Google slap, having a website get hacked into, being at the receiving end of unethical business practices by service providers or even partners.

Let’s be realistic, it’s not possible to totally eliminate risk, but you can take a leaf out of Wikipedia’s stub on Risk Management and look at the 4 options:

  • Risk Avoidance: actively avoiding all risk doesn’t do much for me, because the risk-reward maxim dictates that great reward is usually accompanied by greater risk. Go too far to avoid risk and you significantly reduce the potential returns from your business venture.
  • Risk Transfer: typically done through insurance. In the tech arena, even if insurance was available, it’s likely to be prohibitively expensive. If anything, being able to outwit, outlast and out-innovate your competition might be a stronger solution.
  • Risk Retention: Part of your market research process and due diligence should involve being ‘market aware’. Knowing your competitors and their web presence can help you better develop countermeasures and devise your business strategies accordingly. Operating in an information vacuum where you’re unaware of the business environment is a surefire recipe for disaster.
  • Risk Reduction: This is probably the best solution provided you reduce your risk in an intelligent manner. Call it having a “Plan B”. A comprehensive strategy where you’re continually being proactive in your market space is going to provide better results than being reactive (ie seeing what others do then following or improving on what they’re doing). Diversification, building up multiple streams of income works, provided you have generated critical mass in your business. (critical mass = reaching a comfortable income target). Diversification if you’re only generating a couple of hundred bucks in a niche is silly, you should instead focus on achieving critical mass.

Overall, being “market aware” is probably the best solution for dealing with risk in your business.

And yes, I have activiated “Plan B” on more than one occasion.

The Price of Internet Marketing Success…

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It’s do-or-die time for one of my projects that I’ve been working on for a couple of months. How do I decide if a product is ready for launch?

If you’ve developed your own product or service, you’ll realize that the development process can go on forever, as you’re adding enhancements, updates, tweaks to it.

But if you take a page out of the Microsoft book, you should launch a product when you feel it’s ready and launch the service packs later.

Listening to the audio version of Donald Trump’s “How To Get Rich” helped echoed the lessons I’ve learned over the years, you can’t expect to please all your critics, not everyone is going to become a rabid fan. Just go for the ones that matter.

project planning

There’re a number of factors why budding marketers don’t see success from their projects, and in extreme cases never get round to launching their products or services.

Here’re a couple of principles to get things done:

  • Have a goal

You may not know what exactly you want when you start out, but you need a general direction. As you continue in your efforts, you Continue reading →

3 Princples on Writing Content That People Want To Read

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Unless you’ve got a desire to be a loner hanging out on the internet, most bloggers, marketers and casual users want to build some sort of following.

A large part of your success will lie in building a loyal and large readership. And it’s not as hard as it might seem if you follow a couple of principles.

internet crowd

Principle 1: Pay It Forward

At the risk of sounding like a new age “Law of Attraction”/destiny manifestation proponent, I’m going to say that Law of Reciprocity determines the success of your written content.

If your content sites or affiliates sites are going beyond merely the hot/long-tail keywords, and strive to help people solve a burning issue or problem, you’re starting on the right track.

You’ve probably heard my constant refrain on the Friday Podcast about surfing for information before making a buying decision and landing on page after page of scraped manufacturer specs. If you can build the expert authority of a Tom’s Hardware or a Cnet, you’re moving in the right direction.

Principle 2: Positioning And Incremental Marketing

Here is the part that kills me…Why would you spend time writing great content and then fire an update on twitter or facebook or one of the other social networks and publish an update “New Blog Post: <URL>”

It’s like buying a set of new clothes and then have spinach sticking between your teeth – completely blows everything else.

An incremental marketing means Continue reading →

Will Your Social Marketing Efforts Ripen And Product Fruit?

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Social marketing has quite an organic flavor to it and the garden analogy applies well.

If tended well, your social marketing efforts can take off virally and yield a bountiful harvest with social goodwill being generated, credibility being established and the positive buzz grows at a quantum rate – everything having to do with having provided value to the community and becoming a key member of the community.

spring flowers

But like an good gardener, if you don’t watch over your garden – whether it’s a blog, forum or content website, it can be overgrown with undesirable weeds – spam, massively out-of-topic discussions and trolls.

The Chinese/Japanese art of bonsai culminates in miniature trees cultivated to aesthetic perfection – these same principles apply to Continue reading →

Kung Fu Panda’s Secret To Internet Marketing

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It’s a covert message and if you didn’t know that DreamWorks Animation’s recent hit Kung Fu Panda which raked in more than $60 million in the box office, pushing out Adam Sandler vehicle You Don’t Miss with the Zohan, also contains the internet marketing million dollar formula, you should rush out and watch it now.

kung fu panda

Protagonist Po the Panda sets out to follow his passion for Kung Fu and inadvertently is chosen by the master tortoise Oogway to become the Dragon Warrior and master the secrets of the Dragon Scroll to become the ultimate KungFu master.

The analogy is that new internet marketers also set out to become masters themselves and are looking for their own “Dragon Scroll” to become the ultimate (fill in your preferred internet marketing specialty – affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, etc).

The same secret contained in the Dragon Scroll applies Continue reading →