enetwal – Page 9 – Micro Business Specialist

Are you in Business without an Auto Responder?

If you are in business and online you need to have an auto-responder. If you are in business and don’t have a web page or any web presence at all, you likely still need to have an auto-responder.

If you had to choose between having a web site and and auto-responder but not both, I think you would be wiser to choose the auto-responder over the web presence.

Why?

Because an auto-responder allows you to develop a relationship with your customers and prospects.

This is especially important in long term sales processes that take weeks or months to complete. It is also important in retail transactions where the customer is in and out. Particularly if you want to develop repeat business.

A restaurant, grocery store, dentist, nail technician or any other business that wants to keep in touch with their customers should be investing in an auto responder. The goal is to follow up with prospects who happen across your web site and are not yet ready to buy, or to keep in touch with existing customers to encourage them to return more often and to increase their purchases when they visit.

For retail businesses, who do not rely on a web site to communicate with their customers, the secret is to put an offer on the sales slip or cash register receipt.

Offer a coupon, or other freebie for people signing up for your message service. Then stock your auto-responder with a series of evergreen messages to drip on them at a proper interval to keep in touch.

Many businesses plan on doing some sort of customer follow-up on a routine basis, but this good intention plan often gets sacrificed to more urgent endeavors. That’s where the preprogramed value of a series of auto-responder messages shines. The messages will go out as scheduled and you don’t need to do anything special once it’s set up.

You can though periodically send a broadcast message to announce special sales, send holiday greetings and similar messages as well.

The combination helps to make the routine messages appear more personal and timely.

In my opinion the premier auto-responder company has been Aweber for many years, however as they have grown I fear they have also raised their rates and shown some growing pains. They are however easy to use, have great staff support (most of the time) and a lot of neat features. While I’ve become less ardent in my support, they are still a top flight company and worthy of consideration if you are looking for an Auto-Responder company.

There are two other choices I could and do recommend however. If you do not already have a hosting company I would suggest you check out UMC the Ultimate Marketing Center. For a low monthly fee you get not only an auto-responder company but also web hosting and many other services such as an affiliate management service. This would be my top recommendation for people in the internet marketing arena. Your get unlimited web hosting on their c-panel run system plus the auto-responder. It’s not as fully featured as the Aweber platform, but darn close.

It took me a bit of time to figure out their system and I would rate the Aweber system a tiche more user friendly, but with a little bit of effort you can master their system in no time, and save a bundle over having both a hosting account and an autoresponder fee to pay every month.

If you have web hosting already, and just want an auto-responder and want to beat aweber’s higher prices I recommend Traffic Wave. They have a $17.95 price point that stays at $17.95 no matter how large your list grows. That may not seem important when you are starting out, but it will in time as our list grows. What’s also worth checking out is that they appear willing to allow you to import names from other lists. I haven’t actually done this myself, so I haven’t checked out all the details, but this would be a huge relief if you were to decide to move from one auto-responder to another.

I actually use all three of the above services. Which is good and bad. Good in that I am diversified against the occasional glitches that affect everyone. And good in that I use them for different purposes and it helps me keep some things separate. Bad in that I sometimes have to loads the same message in multiple places when I am doing a broadcast I would like to go to everyone.

[tags]autoresponder,autoresponders, auto-responder, aweber, ultimate marketing center, trafficwave, traffic wave[/tags]

How To Go From 0 to $50,000

This was a particularly good message from Marlon Sanders today. I not only promote Marlon’s products, I buy them and use them myself. I enjoy his weekly newsletter and this article seems as succinct a how and what summary as I’ve seen lately. I hope you enjoy it.

How To Go From 0 to $50,000 —

Even If You Don’t Know How, Even If You’re Starting From Scratch, Even If You Don’t Think You Can, Even If You Think
It’s Dreaming

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I want to talk today about how to build something from nothing.

The awesome thing about your online business is you get to come up
with an idea, put it out there FAST and see how it works.

I want to look today at a process for going from scratch to $50,000.
I’m going to break it down into stages:

Stage one: Going from nothing to something

Out of ALL the stages, this is the absolute hardest and yet it’s the most
exciting.

When you go from $50,000 to $100,000, that’s not nearly as exciting as going from scratch to $50,000.

There are 3 things you need to go from scratch to something:
Eyeballs, Pitch, Product.

I call this the “Basic Formula.”

The FIRST thing you have to do is figure out your Basic Formula. After that, it’s relatively smooth sailing.

In this issue I’m using some terms you may not know if you’re a newbie. This link is your best friend:

http://www.marlonsnews.com/internet-business-marketing-terms/

a. Eyeballs

You can’t sell something to someone unless you can get your message in front of their eyeballs.

There are two parts to getting eyeballs:

— Figuring out what eyeballs you WANT to reach
— Reaching them

Ask yourself this question: Where do the folks I wanna reach hang out?
What do they read? Where do they go?

Key: Start with the forums they go to. You can almost always find the forums they hang out in. Then from there, you’ll discover the web sites they go to, the blogs they read and the products they buy.

If you own Promo Dashboard, I refer you to row one for detailed info on this step.

Remember those three things. They are key. You sell them what they already buy in places they already go to and read. These sites are where you do Google site targeted placement or where you buy banners or who you approach for joint venture offers.

b. Pitch

Once you find the eyeballs, you have to develop two pitches.

Pitch one is the email capture pitch. The pitch you make that gets people to give you an email address.

Pitch two is the one you make for a product or service AFTER you get the email.

Once you get 250 people on your list, you can start doing ad swaps like Jit Uppal teaches. But you gotta prime the pump by getting some people on the list yourself.

Everything boils down to the pitch.

I don’t care if it’s a webinar pitch, teleseminar pitch, sales letter pitch, video pitch.

And it’s all pretty much the same formula just changed up a little to match the medium.

The urgency step (on my 12-step formula) is different for a teleseminar or webinar vs. a sales letter.

But it’s ALL a pitch.

If you can’t pitch by talking or writing, you better hire someone who can. True story. But once you learn the TRUE 12-step formula and UNDERSTAND it, you’ll see how to do it quickly.

Most people do NOT understand either “The Amazing Formula” nor my
real 12-step sales letter formula. People just grasp at the obvious parts
and miss the REAL guts.

Once you truly “get it” you realize you CAN pitch even if you think you can’t.

Here’s one of the most useful little big picture formulas you’ll ever learn:

Story + {Benefits – cost} x urgency

Another formula I use is:

probability x saliency = expectancy

Maybe I can talk about that in a future ezine issue.

Anyway, you gotta learn to pitch by doing Power Point videos (slides),
real video, webinars, teleseminars, audio or letters. You MUST be able to pitch in one of those formats or hire someone who can.

c. Product

You either promote your own or someone else’s. I recommend your OWN because then you can go out and get your affiliate army.

Theoretically, you could do that with PLR (private label rights). PLR is good for quick cash or for getting started. For a bit longer term solution, you need your own product.

There are so many easy ways to create products fast now, there ARE no excuses for not having your own. Really, there are no excuses. It’s about you and your TV set.

You decide which do you want more? To watch TV shows for a week or to have your own product.

And if the answer is to watch TV shows, hey — no problem. If you want to keep trading your time for dollars, I don’t have a problem with that. More power to you.

If you want to trade products for dollars, you have to create them.

You can even get PAID to create them, which is the best.

People get hung all up on being perfect. I fall into that trap too. We’ve spent about 6 months TOO long creating Traffic Dashboard. It’s a stupid, dumb trap.

Get good content put into a consumable product and blow it out the door with tight promotion.

That’s how you make your first buck.

Everyone for some bizarre reason thinks the easiest part should be going to $1,000 in sales. If you do it right, that’s the hardest part of making it up to $50,000 — and beyond.

Fifty G’s is 4 G’s a month. I have friends who did that their first or second month in the business. That is NOT normal. What I see as normal is people muck around for 6 months a year or however long it takes for them to grasp the basic principles of direct response marketing.

Then they figure out their formula. Then they sometimes explode overnight. And others just slowly build. Most give up before that because they think it is supposed to be super easy and fast to start with.

They think step one should be easy because it’s step one. No, step one is the hardest of all steps if you do it right.

There are tons of gimmicky ways to make a G or more. But they don’t figure out the Basic Formula for you so you can’t expand, grow and scale your business.

You MUST unlock your Basic Formula to scale up to 50 G’s then 100, 250 and 500 G’s.

I know you’re thinking, “Can’t someone just give me the ‘Basic Formula?’ No, they can’t. Where do you advertise, with what hot buttons, with what email capture page, with what types of follow up emails with what type of pitch?

Those are all elements of the Basic Formula. If nothing else, the way you pitch will be different from how anyone else pitches. So you have to figure that piece out.

People can give you some of the pieces. But you still have to put it all together.

Once you stop thinking the first step should be the easiest and realize that if you do it right, it’s the hardest and after that it gets tons easier, all of a sudden you have the perspective you need to make strides much faster — as ironic as that sounds.

Basically, step one is experimentation and practice. Experiment with traffic sources, lead capture pages, different pitches. You’re unlocking the secrets to your Basic Formula via experimentation and practice.

Stage Two:

Once you have a bit of a list, a product that sales and a pitch that sells the product, you’re ready to go to a thousand or two thousand a month.

Once you hit the right formula for where to find eyeballs, what kind of incentive gets them to join your email list, what their buy buttons are and how to pitch them in a way that gets a response, you move up to the next levels fast.

See, the WHOLE secret is in the first step.

The hardest thing to do is to unlock the initial combination. Now, the next challenge is how to get more traffic.

If you’re running an affiliate program like I do, you might want a contest. Check out my current one:

http://www.promotemarlon.com/june

I’m not really into the huge prizes like a lot of programs offer. But if you’re in a highly competitive space like Internet marketing, I’m not going to blow smoke up your anatomy.

The competition for affiliates in this space is intense and there are a lot of huge prizes thrown around. This isn’t bad. Some of the marketers do a really, really good job at providing great incentives for affiliates to promote.

As an affiliate, you can score great swag as an affiliate. If you’re a product owner in this market, you better be ready to compete for affiliates. Fortunately, in niches the competition is far less stiff — and sometimes almost non-existent.

But I’d STILL rather be the one at the top of the food chain, not the bottom. The product owner with the affiliate army is at the top of the whole entire food chain. Well, above him are services like aweber, getresponse and so forth.

Those are people making the biggest bank. The point of profit flows upwards in the value chain if you’re read Michael Porter (author of the seminal book Competitive Advantage).

Anyway, stage two is about traffic because you’ve already done the hard part. Finding out eyeballs, finding a pitch they buy from, getting them on a list.

Now you just ramp up and 10X what you already did.

Once you UNLOCK the formula, you often hit the vault fast. I see it all the time. Someone figures out the combination and boom. They rocket almost overnight.

In stage 2 you often blow out 2-4 products fast and the profits roll in so quickly it’s almost dizzying.

Stage 3: Consolidating gains and growing more.

At this point you have growing pains. Customer service kicks in. Holy smokes.I need a refund. I didn’t order this. Could you splain to me which of your 4 products I should buy.

The questions never end.

In the beginning you handle these yourself. But at some point it eats into your productivity and you HAVE to hire part time help. This person will make you a small fortune because they let you go back to expanding on the Basic Formula.

Often at this stage you hire a webmaster who also does customer support. That way, they can help with web pages and such.

If you’re lucky you hire someone really freaking talented and smart who grows with you in the business.

For my friend Lee McIntyre, I think James was the best hire he’ll ever make. For me, it was Lisa.

Stage 4: Repeating the Basic Formula

Once you have your Basic Formula down pat, just REPEAT it to grow.
This works up to around $250,000 to $500,000 and then you often have to change your formula.

But by that time you’ve blown WAY beyond $50,000 obviously.

Somewhere between 1/2 million and a million in sales a year a major
shift has to be made in how you create and promote products and run
the business.

This is less if you run a continuity-based business.

Now, let’s go back and look again at how you make it to 50 G’s.

Fifty G’s a year is 4 G’s a month. That’s a G a week. Or $200 a day. Sell
a front-end report for $7 to $27.

Back end it with $100. Get 100 to 300 visitors a day and depending on the quality of the visitors you’ll be there. Later you add on a $500 product after the $100.

Pop two 500’s a week and there’s your G.

50 -100 front-end sales should pop you two 500’s a week, all depending on your market, positioning, demand and a bunch of other stuff.

This is how you make it there.

Best wishes,

Marlon Sanders

Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Amazing Formula That
Sells Products Like Crazy and the KING of Step-By-Step
Internet Marketing.”

Join me on my new Round Table where for 6 intense weeks I’m going to walk you step-by-step, blow-by-blow through my Basic Formula revealing what it is, how it works, why it works, how to do it, mistakes to avoid, how to pitch, how to find or create products, how to get eyeballs and so much more.

http://www.marlonsanders.com/roundtable

Check out all my products here:

http://www.getyourprofits.com

(SIGN UP AS A RESELLER, put YOUR reseller URL and ID where
the above link is, post this on your web site and make some
dough for spreading a killer guide everyone will want to
read.)

//////////////////////

REPRINT RIGHTS: You have permission to use the above
article without omission and including the resource box.
You have the right to insert your reseller URL for any
products I mention

[tags]Marlons Sanders,product creation, basic formula, Amazing formula,[/tags]

Practically Perfect Products To Promote

A week or two ago, I wrote a blog post I called a Provocative Suggestion in which I promoted a new system called Affiliate Silver Bullet. In addition to my blog post, I have been emailing people who have opted in to one or another of my auto responder lists. Actually, I have the message queued up as one of my follow-up messages.

Today I got a message from one of my readers who wondered if it would be effective for new people who don’t have a large list to mail to. A fair question.

And my answer was that it certainly is easier to promote things when you have a large list, but that you can’t let that get in the way of identifying a product or series of products to promote while you are building that list.

One of the benefits of the Affiliate Silver Bullet is that they have already chosen quality products for you to promote. That’s a bit more important than you might realize at first. The product they have included are proven winners, with quality you can be proud to present to your list, and with sales material that actually converts.

But what do you do, if you don’t already have a sizable list? You start building one.

The primary advantage of Affiliate Silver Bullet that makes it so much more desirable than its predecessor “Clickbank Pirate” is that you can send people to your own auto-responder list.

I have a separate list in my Aweber account for each of the five Affiliate Silver Bullets I have set up so far.

That means you can build your list by promoting the products in Affiliate Silver Bullet. Each bullet has a freebie associated with it that you can promote on safe lists, or by any other means. When people opt in for the freebie they join your list.

Once they are on your list, you need to send them emails. Writing quality follow-up emails is a skill in it’s own right. This is also handled by Affiliate Silver Bullet. With each bullet you get a series of professionally written emails that will drip on your new list members until they buy, automatically.

Combined that means you have a selection of quality products, a series of valuable giveaways to offer to prospective members to get them to opt into your list and a series of professional emails to follow-up with them. All of which you can set up each week in just a few minutes.

Your job is then to concentrate on how you will drive traffic to the free offers. Now granted if you already have a large list, it will only take a few emails to promote the individual offers. So yes, someone with a large list will have an initial advantage.

But for those without a large list, you now have all the back end pieces you need to allow you to focus on learning how to and then driving traffic to the free offers.

It does take traffic to be successful. There are many ways to drive traffic. Article marketing is just one that I use. I am writing articles relevant to each of the Affiliate Silver Bullet products. Not about the products, and not pitching them but about the topic. If the silver bullet is on bloging, I write an article about blogging and put one of the two links in my resource box to the freebie for that Silver Bullet product.

These articles will be referring prospects within days of being accepted by the directories and will send traffic for months and years to come.

I’ve also set up some simple blogger blogs, often using the same content as my articles with links to the freebie. Here I’ve found that the Blogger SEO Annihilator script I got from the first month of Jeff Dedrick’s Automated Traffic was a great value. It helps get them optimized for search engine results.

I’ve then built on them with Squidoo lens and Hub pages to send high authority back links to the blogger posts. I get some traffic from the Squidoo lens and hub pages, but more importantly raise the blogger posts to the top of the search engines for my keyword terms.

This combination is just the start, but a powerful start, to driving a ton of free traffic to these Affiliate Silver Bullet products. Add to that any safe list, traffic exchange or other traffic you can generate and you have a system that will send you traffic and ultimately revenues for years to come.

Don’t expect miraculous overnight riches with this approach. But by concentrating on building the traffic generation aspect and linking it together using multiple tools, you can develop a cash machine that send you clickbank checks on a weekly basis.

The bottom line from my point of view is this. You need a quality product to promote, with sales materials that sell. You need a freebie to get people to opt into your list, you need quality follow-up email messages to get the whole thing to convert into dollars for you. You could do it all yourself, or you could let Affiliate Silver Bullet do it for you. If you let Affiliate Silver Bullet solve your product, freebie and follow-up needs, you can focus your attention on the key skill you need to learn to be successful online and that is traffic generation.

That’s why I think Affiliate Silver Bullet is an appropriate starting place for may new and intermediate level affiliate marketers.

[tags]affiliate silver bullet, aweber, squidoo, hub pages, clickbank, [/tags]

Using a Blog As Your Affiliate Marketing Web Site

Today’s Joan and my 35th wedding anniversary, so I am trying to cut some time free, so I am posting an article today instead of writing a post. But don’t think I am throwing any old stuff at you.

My mentor, Doug Champigny recently wrote an article on using a blog platform for affiliate marketing. I do, and thought I would share his article with you. At the end of the article Doug has a link to two of his excellent products. I highly recommend both.

Using a Blog As Your Affiliate Marketing Web Site

One of the most powerful tools for affiliate promotion is your affiliate marketing web site, and with today’s interactive online technologies a blog is usually your easiest and best choice to use as your home base online. Regular posting to your affiliate blog will help you to build a loyal readership, as well as build a stable of permanent links to the products and services you promote, all of said links containing your specific affiliate code, of course!

Self-hosted WordPress blogs are easy to set up, easily updated and can be indexed in many directories beyond the traditional search engines automatically. You can also easily add audio and video to your blogs, which open up podcasts directories too as well as help you put a personal touch on your messages to your readers. This makes doing SEO for your affiliate marketing web site much easier and lets you focus that much more of your time on other affiliate promotion strategies. With time, you’ll find the proper balance that works best for you online.

Building a money-making blog using affiliate opportunities involves everything from proper choice of the ads in your sidebar to the careful selection of the topics you write about. By keeping all your posts targeted to the particular audience you’re targeting you can build a following and start to warm them up regarding the products and services you’ll be offering them in your affiliate promotion. Further, as you build an empirical amount of information about your topic within your blog you’ll be building a reputation for yourself and demonstrating your expertise within your niche. And again, remember that every new item you add to your blog gives the search engines and directories one more possible link back to your online presence.

Further, you can use ads and posts to drive targeted traffic to your squeeze pages and opt-in forms, thus building your affiliate marketing list at the same time. Building a targeted list of prospects lets you contact them again and again, both for your current promotion and for those you’ll do down the road as time goes on. This dual purpose – building your list and demonstrating your expertise within your target niche, will constitute the bulk of your affiliate marketing work online, and can go a long way towards making affiliate marketing pay for you. And after all, that’s why we’re doing all of this in the first place, right?

Your affiliate blogging also gives you a powerful home base online, a great place to drive targeted prospects to from your article marketing, podcasting and affiliate marketing video efforts. While your site is designed to be a traffic magnet on it’s own, sending additional web site traffic to it using these techniques and the various Web 2.0 sites that allow business networking will help a lot for making money affiliate marketing.

Using affiliate marketing to make money online, especially with your own affiliate marketing web site, is one of the most common ways to start a home business – and setting your site up right, hooking it into the various Web 2.0 sites and using strategies like Twitter affiliate marketing to drive targeted prospects to your web site should make your affiliate efforts pay that much sooner. And by using an interactive platform like blogging for your site, it’s now easier than ever to get started online!

Super-affiliate mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny is the author of Advanced Marketing On Twitter (http://www.AdvancedTwitterMarketing.com) and the creator of the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program available from http://www.affiliate-marketing-powerstart.info – let Doug teach you to make money online in just 8 weeks – enroll today!

Generating Free Traffic

No matter how good your product is, if no one sees it, it won’t sell. The key to internet business starts with putting the offer in front of peoples eyes so they can decide whether or not your offer is worth their time and money.

When you are new to internet marketing getting that initial traffic flow is one of the hardest things to master. Until you start having at least some traffic coming to your offer, you really can’t evaluate the effectiveness of your squeeze page, sales page or product offer.

When you are new, or broke, it’s difficult to afford pay per click traffic. In this situation you need to focus on how to generate free traffic. Once you have mastered generating free traffic, you may want to stick with it, even later when you could invest in pay per click or other forms of paid traffic.

There are many ways to generate free traffic. These include search engine optimization, article marketing, and joint venture tactics such as giveaways and affiliate marketing.

Because so many people need to generate free traffic, there are a lot of would be guru teachers pushing methods to generate free traffic. Some are good, others are rehashing private label rights ebooks with little practical knowledge of their own.

While there are certainly some secret methods out there, most of what you will discover online are well known tools and techniques. That said, if you are new to internet marketing, you need to familiarize yourself with these as soon as possible. A a modest investment in traffic generation will often pay significant dividends, if you are careful to pick a reputable resource.

You can pay thousands or even tens of thousands for a content packed course on free traffic methods. The front end cost however kind of defeats the “Free” concept. But note, it remains true that you tend to get what you pay for. That said, I’ve found that you can get a lot of solid information and coaching if you look around for it.

For example, I recently came across a couple of young fellows who have put together a free report that points people in the right direction. They also offer a solid coaching program for an extremely low entry price of just a dollar. Now of course, they want you to buy into their ongoing program, which I recommend, but you don’t have to.

I recommend you grab their free report, and sign up for their $1 trial and learn what you can, as fast as you can. Then you can decide whether their teaching style and content meets your needs. If it does, stick with them, if not go elsewhere.

There are many pieces to the internet marketing puzzle. Traffic generation is one of the bigger pieces.

Get their free report called, “Our Little Traffic Secret.” When you sign up for it, they will offer you the deal on their coaching program for just $1. It’s well worth checking out. If you decide you don’t like or want to continue, you can cancel and not have to worry about any additional obligation. To promote this concept I have set up a new blogger blog called Generating Free Traffic

[tags]free traffic generation, free traffic generator, free traffic methods, free traffic secrets, generate free traffic, generating free traffic, traffic generating[/tags]

Steps to Establishing a Profitable Blog

Setting up a profitable blog isn’t nearly as simple as setting up a blog. While there are of course many similar steps, the trick to establishing profitable blogs requires a series of additional steps, not the least of which is identifying profitable blog topics.

My personal blogging mentor is Mike Paetzold. He has written extensively on blogging for a number of years and is a go to guy when it comes to setting up and then monetizing blogs. If you are interested in profitable blogging, I can think of no one more suited to be of assistance.

He has just released a new product called Profitable Blog Steps. In it he will walk you through all the steps you need to take to create a profitable blog. Now there are a number of steps, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But once you learn the steps and actually set up two or three of your own profitable blogs you will be well on your way.

In profitable blog steps, Mike takes you step by step as the title suggests, through ten modules with great videos to show you as well as tell you how.

http://profitableblogsteps.com/?rid=7

If you are interested in setting up a profitable blog look no further. Grab this now, as Mike is offering a special launch week discount to those willing to take fast action. This special deal expires on June 9th, so do yourself a favor and grab it now.

[tags]a profitable blog, profitable blog, profitable blogs, profitable blogging, profitable blog topics, Mike Paetzold, profitable blog steps[/tags]

A Provacative Suggestion

The secret to success in any venture online or off is to understand that persistent focused action pays. In internet marketing circles that is as true as anywhere else, but in few fields are the temptations to wander from one thing to another as strong or as ever present.

If you are interested in supplementing or replacing or greatly surpassing your current income, I invite you to listen in on the following video I put up on Youtube.

I was on my way out of town to attend a family wedding a couple of weeks ago when Affiliate Silver Bullet launched. As a result, I did not promote it, but since returning I joined myself, and after a few weeks I’ve decided that this is one of those programs I really should promote.

Do yourself a favor and join it yourself and then take persistent focused action to drive traffic to your affiliate silver bullet sites.

Go here to learn more: Affiliate Silver Bullet

[tags]Affiliate Silver Bullet, Affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing tips, affilate marketing tools, [/tags]

Yearlings Interview with Earl Netwal

Yep, it’s Earl Netwal interviewing Earl Netwal on my progress to date in internet marketing. My scheduled guest was unavailable today so I interviewed myself. Thought it might be a good idea to do what we call an Ice Breaker in my Toastmasters Club.

Ideally, I would have spent some time pre-planning the presentation, but due to the last minute idea of doing the broadcast myself, I did not adequately plan my content. Nonetheless, I did pretty well and think you may find it interesting.

I discuss some of my successes and failures in internet marketing.

In the presentation, I suggest that you contact me by email to get a couple of freebies. Since I sell these, I don’t want to put a free link here, but if you listen and decide you want one of the freebies you can just leave a comment here and I will get the links you want to you.

Listen to internet radio with Earl Netwal on Blog Talk Radio

[tags]Earl Netwal,MicroBusinessSpecialist, Yearlings,Bob the Teacher, HTML in Simple Terms, [/tags]

Interview with Lonnie Amirault

Well I ran into technical difficulties yet again with Blog Talk Radio this week, so I recorded my scheduled interview with Lonnie Amirault off the air. It turns out that it was perhaps the best interview to date, although a number of my others were pretty good as well. This one runs about 45 minutes long since we didn’t have to deal with the 30 minute time limit I set up for Blog Talk radio.

I highly recommend you listen to this interview. It has some real meat in it, whether you are brand new to internet marketing, have been at it for a while, or are fairly advanced.

Lonnie Amirault Interview
Click to hear Lonnie Amirault Interview

[tags]Internet marketing Interviews, Lonnie Amirault, MicroBusinessSpecialist, Yearlings[/tags]

Affiliate Marketing Secrets

One of the easiest and fastest way to make money online in through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as you commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

The benefits of this are

You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
You have almost no investment of time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

The downside is…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a pre-sales page in between.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
You’ll be pre-selling them by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
One or more content-rich Pre-Selling Pages
At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your pre-selling pages after they subscribe to your email series.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your business.

[tags]Affiliate Marketing Secrets,Affiliate Marketing Strategies,Affiliate Marketing Tools,Affiliate Silver Bullet, Affiliate tools,affiliate marketing services, how to do affiliate marketing,[/tags]

Internet Marketers Can Help Oil Spill

I spent this past weekend at my niece’s wedding in the Tampa, Florida area, and took the opportunity to go fishing with my brother a couple of days later in the Gulf of Mexico.

While the oil slick is still a ways away, the fear of disaster was evident everywhere. Now I have heard of an interesting way you and I can help. By getting a hair cut!

It appears that hair is a natural oil absorbent, and may actually be an extremely effective way of helping protect significant areas, but its going to take a lot of hair. Its being stuffed into panty hose like material to create oil absorbing booms that will help soak up the oil. With luck and a lot of hair, it may be possible to save many natural areas.

As internet marketers we can help spread the word to our lists, and that would be good. The link to publish appears to be: http://www.matteroftrust.org/

But here’s one more idea for those of you taking your skills as internet marketers to main street. Talk to your barber or hair dresser. Ask them to consider how many people they could draw in for hair cuts if they had an email list of past customers, and were to send them an appeal to get their hair cuts so they as owners could ship the hair to fight the spill.

If nothing else, it would give you a talking point to bring up the topic, and perhaps land a new customer for email and auto-responder services that you could manage for them.

[tags]Oil Spill, Gulf Coast Oil Spill, Hair Booms, Hair Cuts, Barbers, hairdressers, main street marketing[/tags]

Information Product Creation: Ghost Writers

Getting a ghost writer to create your information product for you is a great idea if you do not have the time or skills to do a great job yourself. In the video below I provide some practical tips on the process.

[tags]Product creation, information product creations, internet marketing, Earl Netwal, Micro Business Specialist, Internet marketing intensive, ghost writing, [/tags]

Info Product Creation: Interviewing Experts

One of my favorite ways to create a product for sale or giveaway is to do an interview with experts or others with a special point of view. If you have been following my Blog Talk Radio series caller Yearlings, you will know that the interviewee need not be world famous. Yet if you try you would be surprised how many famous people you can actually get to participate in an interview – if you ask.

[tags]product creation, information product creation, internet marketing, [/tags]

Yearlings Interview: Singing Steve Bermann

Today I had the pleasure to interview Singing Steve Bermann of Las Vegas, Nevada. While what happens in Las Vegas Stays in Las Vegas, Steve let a few secrets slip out. Listen below to the interview.

You can listen to past shows here:

[tags]Singing Steve Bermann, Steve Bermann, Information overload, Mentors, safe swaps, internet marketing swaps, yearlings [/tags]

Yearling Interview with Saj Subudhi

Last Tuesday I had another of my ongoing Yearling interviews on Blog Talk Radio. Been caught up with some extraneous issues and did not get a chance to post the interview here till now. I promised to post Gaj’s web site here: So here it is: www.superstarsmarketing.com/ibmb

Next Tuesday I will be interviewing Sing Steve Bermann at Noon EDT on Blog Talk Radio. Join us if you can.

Better Than ClickBank & PayDotCom?

If you sell digital products online you are no doubt aware of the two most popular affiliate networks, ClickBank and PayDotCom.

While these are great and I use and recommend both of them, I came across a brand new service today that really caught my attention.

It’s called PaySpree and the reason it caught my attention is that ALL its members get paid for their sales instantly by PayPal. I like quick payments.

Even affiliates get paid for their referred sales instantly by PayPal.

I expect it to become quite a hit as the lure of ‘instant commissions’ played a big part in the massive success of products such as RapidActionProfits and the 7DollarSecrets script.

As soon as you become a member you can start promoting any product in the marketplace, and you can add your own products so affiliates can promote them for you. All commission payments are handled automatically by PaySpree. I like that too. It’s one of my minor complaints about paydotcom. There you need to manually make payments to your affiliates and on occassion, I have had to remind others to pay me.

I’ve just signed up and had a look around the site and it seems pretty simple and non cluttered, check it out at the link below and let me know what you think:

http://cli.gs/bX8g4L

[tags]PaySpree, ClickBank, Paydotcom, affiliate networks, Instant commissions[/tags]

How To Go From 0 to $50,000 —

Even If You Don’t Know How, Even If You’re Starting From Scratch, Even If You Don’t Think You Can, Even If You Think It’s Dreaming

The benefits of this are

The downside is…

What’s the solution?

Even If You Don’t Know How, Even If You’re Starting From Scratch, Even If You Don’t Think You Can, Even If You Think
It’s Dreaming