Builiding Your List with Giveaways

The Giveaway is Back.  While I feared it may have died last year in a flood of same old events vanilla events it appears to be alive and kicking due in large part to Rodger Hyatt and friends.

He has put together two very successful events in the past few months and has just announced a third which is now open for Joint Venture partners called EZ-IM Giveaway.

The secret to Rodger’s approach is that he has discovered ways to make it worthwhile for people to promote the events.  And he has built a huge following of large and small marketers to participate in the process.  If you are building a list and have a product you can contribute, you too should join as a JV partner.

In his last effort with Gary Simpson and Stephanie Mulac, called the Self Improvement Giveaway I had 130 people download my gift and join my list.

Now these days, I sometimes get that many and more from some of the ad swaps I do, but if you don’t already have a list in the thousands or tens of thousands, a hundred plus people is pretty good.  Had I upgraded, (and I wish I had) I could have offered three gifts and I probably would have easily double that number.

Now I going to repeat the old saying here. Bear with me. The money is in the list.  There I said it.  It’s actually in the relationship you build with your list, but the saying is a truism.  One I heard but didn’t fully understand and more unfortunately did not take action on as soon as I should have.

Once I did, through giveaways and then ad swaps my income has dramatically improved.  If you are relatively new to internet marketing and haven’t focused on list building yet. Start.

And a good way is via Giveaways. What ever your niche, create a short report you can giveaway. Create a Short Squeeze page, and get your product listed in the EZ-IM Giveaway.  It opens on February 5th at 10:00AM EST.  Join today and get your product ready if you don’t already have one.

So why are these events successful? Well in large part because they have been designed to encourage people with lists to actually promote them.  The upgrade money flows to the people who recruit the JV’s, which encourages participation. This increases the variety of products offered so there is even more reason for members to go to the event and shop for gifts they can actually use.

I don’t know what Rodger and his partners, The Mutrie Boys, Charles and Philip, have in mind for this event, but I am expecting some mid event promotions to encourage promotion by the JV’s. This is good for everybody.

In the past on most giveaways the bulk of the action occurred on the first few days and then next to nothing there after.  In the SI event I was getting sign-ups all through the event, and a big burst toward the end. It was gratifying.

I don’t normally write about Giveaways on this blog.  I have another where I regularly post current and upcoming events. http://AskEarlAbout.com/GiveAways

I do so today, because these guys have made a difference that can be of real value to you.  This event will get a lot of traffic, and if you have an attractive report that highlights your niche, I can promise you will get a nice list of prospects.   If you don’t have a report yet, use this event as the reason to create it.  You have a few days to do so.  Get it done.  You can use it over and over again.  Sign up today and get busy.

EZ-IM Giveaway

Instant Fast Traffic – A Review

When it comes to Internet Marketing, there is a lot of material out there that is little more than rehashed ebooks that go on about the same tiresome things.  I was half expecting Instant Fast Traffic to be the same, because admittedly I’ve become jaded to these products that are churned out on a regular basis. I even had the intention to check it out, and then get a refund before the 60 days guarantee expired. Surprisingly however, I found that Instant Fast Traffic was a diamond in the rough, because the strategies covered within all its three modules were intriguing, to say the least.

Instant Fast Traffic

The brains behind Instant Fast Traffic are Joel Chue and Alvin Huang, guys I haven’t even heard much about, but if Instant Fast Traffic is anything to go by, these guys are the ones to watch. Instant Fast Traffic is a 3 Module guide on traffic generation strategies, and each module is guaranteed to give you a free pass to a massive source of traffic from practically anywhere on the Internet. You’ll find strategies covering link building to article directory submissions, and even social networking. Let’s take a closer look at what these 3 modules cover.

The first module, called Search Domination Traffic, talks about strategies any marketer can use to get their websites optimized for search engines through link building. From email signatures to classifieds to web rings, these elements are often overlooked, but surprisingly effective in getting your links out there for droves of traffic to click through. I personally have never thought of using Wikipedia as a source of free traffic, so it came as a surprise when I discovered that I could indeed funnel traffic from Wikipedia to my website.

The second module, aptly named Content Traffic Invasion, covers content strategies and viral strategies. In essence, it teaches you how to optimize your sites and links using keywords, how article directory submissions can give you those much needed backlinks, and how forum marketing can be a highly effective tool in your traffic generation efforts. It also covers strategies that can make your links viral, from using quizzes to giving away free content, and even using Resell Rights Products to generate massive traffic to your sites.  Now I use and preach a number of these, but these guy cover stuff I never thought of.

The last module, Underground Traffic Funnels, discusses ways social networking sites can be used to promote your links, and how one can make their links even more viral through these sites. From social bookmarking to using MySpace and Facebook, Joel and Alvin leaves no stone unturned as they discuss practically every aspect there is to know about getting your links out there through social networking, joint ventures, and even offline strategies that you can leverage.

Newbies don’t worry about getting lost in all that information. There are process maps that detail exactly what needs to be done in a easy-to-understand guide for each of the modules, so I don’t see where anyone can’t succeed using the strategies discussed in Instant Fast Traffic. All in all, this is one resource I would recommend if you’re in need of a quick traffic boost.

Instant Fast Traffic

Four Times? He’s Serious About This!

I am impressed with Marlon Sanders.  Now let me be honest, he scared me away with his frentic style the first few times I encountered him. He talks a mile a minute and looks a tad bit crazed, but there is definite method to his madness.

Here’s a short video I created that emphasizes a key point or feature of his current offer for his Marketing Dashboard.

Now Check out his offer:

Marketing Dashboard

Who’s Afraid of Competition?

We have run into a number of competitors during our niche market research process.   Hopefully made some notes about them along the way.

While the initial inclination is to be discouraged by the competitors, the truth is that for the most part, they are a good sign. One you should be grateful for, because their presence in the market indicates that people are willing to spend money in your niche. Thus when you get your product(s) out there you should have a good shot at making money.

If there are a lot of competitors, that means a lot of people are making money.

What you want to do is subscribe to their mailing lists, and analyze their follow-up emails.  You want to go to their web sites and make a copy of their sales pages and analyze them as well.

Make note of the commissions they pay, the % of payout etc.  Figure out how long they have been around. Do they frequently update their web pages? Do they offer bonuses. What types of free offers do they use? And what type of up-sells do they present?  What are their price points?

You want to make a study of the major competitors and then you want to explore what they don’t offer.  What could they do better?

You want to do a SWOT analysis. Swot stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

For each of your top competitors, identify what their strength is, Where are they weak, how can you turn it into an advantage for you, and what will be most difficult to overcome.

Odds are you won’t become the dominant force in your niche overnight. But you can find a toe hold and build from there.  Find an angle of attack keeping in mind everything you have learned during your market research. And then don’t over analyze.

While it’s vitally important to research your niche don’t get stuck in the process.  Get it done, and create a plan and take action.

You have picked a niche, you have researched it and determined that it is vital. You have identified the types of problems people in the niche are looking for solutions on, and have a good idea of who those people are.

Now it’s time to create a product or find one of more products you can represent as an affiliate.

Understanding Niche Demographics

The final free tool we are going to discuss on this series on niche marketing is Quantcast.com.  The more you know about your niche’s demographics the better and this is where we are going to find the best information quickly and easily.

Go to www.Quantcast.com and once there register for free.

Then pick one of the top web sites you have found in your niche.  Quantcast will provide you with information on their site and their demographics.  You may want to check out three or four or more sites to see how the results are the same of different. If they are different you will want to reason out why.

By examining the demographics of people going to the top competitors in you niche you should be able to pick up some solid insights into the audience you will want to target with your site or product.

Quantcast is a tool that you can use to find the demographics of your audience. This tool allows you to gather traffic statistics and demographics data for any existing sites on the Internet.

For this demonstration, we will continue to discuss the Sleep Apnea niche we have covered in past posts.  One of the top sites in the forums was www.apneasupport.org

When we search on it we discover one of the limitations of Quantcast.  Small and moderate sized sites are not as well documented as are major authority sites. That said in this case they do return data which we will review. We just need to keep in mind that it may not be as accurate as we would prefer, but it’s much better than nothing.

Like Google Trends it provides a graph showing their estimate of the traffic to the site.

The Quantcast statistics suggest average traffic of about 14.8K per month.

The above 6 month chart shows a drop off in traffic in the months of November and December of 2009.  In this case the data is from just the US.

On larger sites, you can get world wide distribution as well.

Below the traffic chart is the nitty gritty and why we want to use Quantcast, the Demographics.

With this data we see that the searchers for information on the topic are somewhat more likely to be women, typically 35 or older with the largest group 50+.   Most are Caucasian with no children at home.  They tend to have had a college education with more than an average amount having graduate education, but their incomes tend to be slightly below than average which may indicate a significant portion of retired people.

With this background information, you now have a better idea of who your prospect may be.  To do this right you should as I mentioned check on several other related sights to see what variations in the data you can find.

This will allow you to brainstorm ideas to make your site more user friendly, which in turn should help the success of your venture.  It may also give you ideas on the type of additional products you could offer your prospect.

This finishes my tour of free research tools you can use to identify and develop profitable niche markets.  In my next post in this series we will discuss competition.

Puzzle Piece Pi

Pi is a printers term for when a job case full of individual letters used for setting up a page to be printed is spilled and all the a, e, i, o, u’s together with all the consonants both lower case and capital are mixed together. A frightful mess.

Internet marketing can be like that as well.  There are a lot of ways to do internet marketing and a lot of individual pieces.   Because internet marketing is not a single thing, but rather a system of multiple pieces put together in an ordered sequence.

What makes it most confusing for people is that there are a lot of different models you could follow.  And many of the different models use some of the same parts, but none require that you use everything.

This causes confusion for people when they are trying to learn the business. They are often tempted to buy a product for a part that they don’t really need, or maybe will need, but not until they have mastered another part of the puzzle they may not even be aware of yet.

My family likes puzzles and we got three new ones for Christmas, all of which were 500 piece puzzles from the same maker and very similar in the way the pieces were cut.

Unfortunately, while everyone was busy visiting my grand daughter dumped the contents of all three puzzles on the floor creating puzzle piece pi.  If putting one of the puzzles together was challenging, imagine how challenging it was to do three at once.

We tried to create borders to frame the puzzle, but pieces from puzzle A seemed to fit with pieces from Puzzle B and C. It was a real nightmare.

Eventually over a week, the dinning room table, the kitchen table and a dresser top, we were able to get it done, but it took much longer than it should have.

My guess is that same thing is happening with your internet marketing education. You are spending time leaning stuff you don’t need right now, trying to get it pieced together with a different strategy you think will work for you in the long run.

Why do I think that, because that’s what happened to me. I bought a ton of stuff, and found myself going in a half dozen different directions. It wasn’t until I accidentally ran into Doug Champigny at the right time. He was putting together a mentoring group he called Team Champigny. That was a little over 15 months ago.

It’s made all the difference in the world to me.  Before I was spending more than I was making online. I lost a small fortune trying to make pay per click work for me.  My only understanding of one time offers, was that I hated them because I kept buying them. I had no idea how to connect the dots.

I’ve broken through many barriers since then, learned to create my own products, learned how to promote other peoples products, built a list and much more.

Now I’m not where I want to be yet, this is an ongoing journey and always will be for me, and for you if you are going to be truly successful. After all success is in the journey.  But if you are going to step up and start that journey, you really and truly need to have a solid coherent game plan.

Next month, my mentor and friend Doug Champigny is starting a new professional internet coaching sequence, a 4 week high intensity power-start.

Now Doug is definitely a high intensity fellow, so be aware that you will need to be prepared to take action. But if you are, if you really want to break through and make this internet thing a source of wealth for you and your family, then you owe it to yourself to grab this opportunity.  If on the other hand, you are looking for someone to molly coddle you forward, and hand you wealth on a silver platter, save your money.

When Doug say high intensity he means it. And if you are up to the challenge, you will succeed a lot faster and go a lot further if only because you will be putting together one puzzle, and better yet a puzzle that has all the pieces you need, if you know what I mean.

Doug has made a real difference in my life and he will yours as well.

Get your decade off on a solid footing with Professional Internet Marketing Coaching

PS: The next post in my niche marketing – market research series will be posted on Sunday.

Creative Use of Clickbank as a Free Marketing Intelligence Tool

Clickbank is the largest affiliate network for information products. As such it is an ideal arena to research your competition and spy on existing products for virtually any specific niches that you want to pursue.

If there isn’t already at least one or more products in you niche, it may well mean that your niche is not economically viable.

If you are still searching for the right niche, you can browse through the category section to find some markets, which could potentially interest you.

With the Clickbank tool, you can identify the existing products in the market and see how many players are in the market. You can also check out their offers and see what price points they are hitting. You can evaluate their sales pages, and buy their products to determine whether or not there are any holes in the market they are missing.

Once you signed up for and logged into Clickbank you want to go the the Marketplace tab.

In the market place, you can do your research by going through the categories listing. There are a total of 9 broad categories. Next step is to then select the sub-categories and click Go.

Clickbank will then generate search results of the products under your selected category listing.

Other ways to use the Clickbank tool is to make use of the keywords search bar or sort your search by product type, popularity and languages as well.

For this demonstration, we ran through the search term, ‘Muscle gaining’.

You can see from this search, there are a high number of products that is under the niche, ‘Muscle gaining’.  You may want to play around with a variety of keywords to get a full selection of products in your niche.

At the bottom of each result, there are some useful statistics, which provide a quick insight into what the merchant is offering. So in this case, for ‘No Nonsense Muscle Building’, the product vendor pays their affiliate an average of $62.30 per sale with a possible future payout of an additional $40.97 and offers a percentage sale payout of 57%. For the ‘grav’ column, this product is at 109.08.

This gravity simply indicates the number of affiliates that has made a sale over the past 8 weeks. The higher the gravity number, the more affiliates have successfully marketed this product, which also implies that this niche is profitable!

So from here, you can gather some great information to see what are the existing products that these merchants have. You may even click on ‘view pitch page’ to spy on the merchant’s sales page to see exactly what they’re doing! If they are profiting already, there is no need to re invent the wheel.

Learn from your competitors.  This will save you a lot of time and research.

Affiliate Marketing PLR Package

I will return to my ongoing series on market research and niche marketing on Thursday, but I wanted to share a worthwhile opportunity I just grabbed for myself.

Since I am in the midst of creating an 8 module project right now, I will pass on how you can grab this cheap, rather than resell you the package now.But I expect I will be working them into a product of my own by the end of the month.

Doug Champigny has just finished uploading a new PLR bundle, and to help us start the new year he’s priced it really low for 1 day only:

http://askearlabout.com/PLRInterviews.php

This PLR bundle consists of three powerful interviews, one with Rosalind Gardner, one with Ken McArthur and one with Josh Peak.
Now you may not be familiar with these names, so let me tell you that they are each top notch affiliate marketers.

If you are doing affiliate marketing or plan on doing affiliate marketing, selling other people’s products, you will find these interviews extremely valuable.

If you have been setting goals to start the year, these interviews will give you a clear idea of where the finish line is. As any sea captain will tell you, it’s a good idea to have a clear notion of which port you are heading to, before you chart your course.These interviews will help you clarify your goals like nothing else I know of.

Now in the spirit of the new year Doug’s leaving it under ten bucks until Wednesday night, to help those who take quick action  -then it goes to $27… which would still be a good price.

So, if you want to save over $17, head over now and grab your copy.

http://askearlabout.com/PLRInterviews.php

Remember, there are 3 separate products you’re getting in one bundle,  Don’t miss out: And while just listening to them is well worth the price, you are getting more than that. You will be getting the transcripts for the calls, so you can read along. And most importantly you will be getting private label rights which means you will be able to resell these and recoup your money over
and over again.

Think of it, you will have three separate products you can offer to your growing list. Products you will be proud to share and which will be well received by your list members. In addition to selling these, you can modify the content, add to it, subtract and make it your own. You can pull sections and create articles for the article directories, or take sections and create a series of blog entries and a lot more.
This is a powerful package, that’s why I grabbed it. I highly recommend you do the same thing.

P.S. These interviews are worth more than Doug is charging just for the information they provide. Add in the ability to create 3 more products for your marketing funnel and this is a must have.

Customer Intelligence – Let the Forums Tell You All

Forums are a great place to find out what exactly your audience are thinking and talking about. This is the place where a community hangs out, discusses and share their problems and experiences.

So with forums, you can leverage on the community to find out what are their desires, lacking and needs. With these real market insights, you can brainstorm the kind of possible solutions you can provide for them.

How you use this tool is to start by going to the Google search engine and typing in the niche you have in mind and add in the keyword ‘forum’ after it.

In this demonstration, the example we’ll be using is, ‘Insomnia Forum’, where insomnia is our niche.

Under this ‘Insomnia Forum’ search results, it will display several pages of forums.

Click on one or more of the search results and research deeper into one that is most active, that means there are a lot of recent posts and replies within the forum.

When exploring the forums, it’s probably best to spend some time getting an overview of the top half dozen or more forums and then focus on those that are most active.

Initially, you want to familiarize yourself with the types of conversations going on with special emphasis on the types of questions most frequently asked.  Take note of these and start building a list of hot topics.

While you are doing this, pay attention to those people who are most active responding to other people’s questions.  These are influence leaders.  In the long run, you will want to get these people on your side. They may be possible joint venture partners and or advocates for your product.

As you gain a greater understanding of your niche, you will want to participate in the forum, and start answering other people’s questions yourself.  Many forums frown on commercial activity, so do so carefully.

Establish yourself as a reliable source of useful information by actively commenting for a considerable period of time.

Remember that forums are like icebergs.  Many people will lurk on forums and never post themselves or only infrequently.  A consistent presence will establish you as an expert in short order, and will arm you with the critical insights to target your products to people’s most pressing needs.