List Building – Micro Business Specialist

Traffic Getting and List Building Some New Ideas

Getting traffic and list building are the heart of internet marketing. Traffic equals new faces seeing your offer, a list is the tangible remainder of a lot of traffic.

Traffic is like the drip drip drip of water seeping down from the roof of a cave, the resulting list is the stalactite or stalagmite that remains after time. A visible tangible result of lots of traffic over time.

Not to stretch the metaphor too far, the richer the content the faster the pillars of your list grow. But getting that initial drip going is the key to long term success.

So far in my career online, I have used a number of techniques to get my list to grow. I’ve used pay per click, blogging, giveaways and ad swaps. Each of the approaches have worked, even though I haven’t always optimized my approaches to the tactics.

This past weekend I discovered that I have been missing out on a whole series of other approaches to generating traffic and ultimately list building that I just didn’t know about, or if I did know about them, was not taking seriously enough.

Upon making the discovery, I decided not to kick myself in the pants, but rather to start taking advantage of the new ideas. But first, I felt obliged to share. Now the fact that there is an affiliate commission in it for me is only part of my motivation. I genuinely think most of my readers will discover a lot of new ideas in this package. Frankly, I’ve only made if though the first 3 and a half modules of twenty and I am already blown away.

In fact the very first module called eBook syndication got me so excited, I almost stopped right then and there in and urge to dive right in. It’s so easy, and I already have tons of material I can use to make it work. My guess is that you do as well, if you have been active online for any period of time. What’s even better is that this can be used by rank newbies starting out.

Now I can’t give a full review, cause as I said, I’ve only started to scratch the surface, but there was so much gold lying on the ground, I didn’t need to do an extensive dig to discover enough value to justify my recommending this to you.

Click on the offer below. Get the freebie, but do more than that. Watch her video and imagine what you would do if you were able to grow your list at the rate of 3000 a month.

Frankly, despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to come close to that. With what I have learned so far, that no longer seems like an unreasonable goal. Not without effort, mind you, but not unrealistic either.

The program is called the Traffic Dashboard by Kim Roach. At first glance those of you familiar with my friend Marlon Sanders will see a distinct similarity in look. These tactics may be as old as Marlon as well, but they are new to me, and I think they will be new to most of you as well.

If you end up discovering that you knew them all already, you can ask for a refund, but I don’t think you will. If you are like me, you will be too busy building new traffic resources for your business.

Click on the link above and watch the video. Then do yourself a favor and grab your copy. Don’t worry, the price is extremely reasonable.

[tags]traffic, traffic generation, list building, Kim Roach,traffic dashboard,[/tags]

List Building PLR Pack Released

Doug Champigny just released a quality package of 5 different eBooks you can acquire and use for your own personal education and to sell or giveaway as part of your list building activities.

=> List Building PLR Superpack

This particular set is ideal for anyone in the information marketing niche.

The titles include:
* Article Power
* List Explosion
* Traffic Triggers
* Video Marketing Secrets
* Profitable E-Mail Copywriting

In addition to the five eBooks, you will also get 5 sales pages and 5 squeeze pages. This will permit you to get these set up and producing results for you in no time.

Not only that, but in addition to being able to give away individual pdf’s of these eBooks, you also get rights to resell the package or just individual products.

Now for such a complete package you might expect to have to pay some big bucks, but as you will see when you click on the link below these are priced so that anyone can get started online.

=> List Building PLR Superpack

Grab this set and use them as your freebie offer to get people to sign up to your list. Use them as products for Giveaway events. Use them for ad swaps, use them as freebies to your existing list.

Tear them apart and use them as fodder for your blog. Imagine running a series with one eBook a week featured and broken down into parts.

You have content to use, and you can offer the full report to anyone who opts in for it.

=> List Building PLR Superpack

[tags]Doug Champigny, plr, list building, giveaways, Blog content, PLR Superpack, resell rights, list building plr[/tags]

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

Your Auto Repsonder: The Heart of your Business.

Do you have an auto responder yet?

If not, why not?

The most basic requirement for success online beyond the prerequisite decision to start an online business, is to acquire a professional auto responder service. This is the second of my series of break through posts. Getting an auto responder set up is a critical break through step in building a successful internet marketing campaign.

You can’t spend much time online without coming across one of the basic mantras of online success, the “money is in the list.” While there can be exceptions, it is for all practical purposes a truism.

The surest prescription for long term success online is to build a list of customers and prospective customers. This is true whether you are marketing from a brick and mortar setting or exclusively online.

I farted around for some time before I finally caved in and agreed to spend $20 a month with my auto responder company http://buildrelationships.aweber.com . While I learned stuff during that interim period, I squandered a lot of opportunity.

If you are just starting out, and are serious about building business online but have not yet acquired an auto responder service let me advise you to do it today.

There are hundreds of things you need to learn before you will be truly successful online. You can’t afford to wait until you know everything to take the preliminary steps essential for success.

There is nothing as fundamental to your success as having a tool to house and manage your business list. You can get by without a web site or blog better than you can get by without an auto responder. It won’t be the only thing you need but it is so basic, you cannot afford to let time slip by.

Once you have signed up you will need to learn how it works. That will take some time. I taught myself with the tutorials on the site. And that was fine for then. However, I discovered a lot more about the advanced features of my particular service when I took a formal course offered by Bob the Teacher some time later.

While everything I learned in the course I could have learned in the tutorials on the site, the discipline of taking the course forced me to actually do so step by step. And so I do recommend it, although it’s not necessary if you do your homework on the site. I used to recommend Bob’s individual courses. The autoresponder course for example was $67 but it’s now cheaper to join Bob’s Internet Marketing Success Library even if just for a few months to take advantage of the auto responder course and the many others he teaches.

Now understand that having an auto responder doesn’t get you to your destination. It’s just one of the essentials. You will still need to learn how to drive people to your auto responder, entice them to sign up and then learn how to effectively communicate with your list members.

Anyone who told you internet marketing would be easy lied to you. But it is possible, and it is worth it, but you must make the decision that you are going to go for it, and then prove that step to yourself and the world by seting up your autoresponder and putting it to work.

We will discuss additional steps in future posts.

Do You Need More Than One Web Site?

Within the internet marketing world, people have ten’s and hundreds of web sites. Each with a different URL and each targeted to a specific niche or purpose. That permits each web site to be addressed to a particular audience. And since the site is targeted, so too are the keywords, which means these sites tend to rank higher than if they were attempting to be all things to all people.

Off line businesses and those firms operating online in niche arenas should consider whether or not they too would benefit from multiple web sites.

I will once again use my friends in the Home Staging Industry as an example of a situation where two web sites may make a lot more sense that one.

If you go to most home stagers web sites you will see that they are primarily directed to the home owner. But if you were to survey home stagers as I have done, you will see that most of them market not to home owners but to Realtors, who they hope will refer home sellers to them.

This means the Home Staging company has two different marketing objectives. One is to convince realtors that they can help sell a home faster and for more money, and the second is to convince the home owner that they can help sell a home for more money and faster. While it appears to be the same objective, it’s not.

For the home stager, the sale to the individual home owner is critically important, but represents just one sale. The sale to the Realtor, might not in itself win any direct business, but represents a series of prospective future business.

Home stagers offer two primary benefits to their customers, faster sales and higher price. While both are important to home sellers and to Realtors, the relative ranking between the two vary. A home owner is more likely to be impressed with the prospects of a higher price, as any such higher price will help pay for the services they are being asked to cover. For a Realtor, the higher price may mean a marginal improvement to their commission. More important to them, is the speed with which a home sells, so they can go on to the next.

Now while both share same objectives their motivations differ. To be most efective, the sales pitch to either market should lead off with their primary motivation. That in turn calls for two web pages, and two marketing pitches.

This is going to be true for any business that markets to distributors as well as final customers. And probably many more circumstances as well.

How about your business. Do you have multiple audiences you are marketing to?

If so, you really should be thinking in terms of multiple rifle shots rather than a blunderbust shotgun spread.

Most businesses try to accomplish this with multiple pages on one web sie. And this may be an adequate compromise in some cases, but it is always a compromise, and an opportunity for a competitor to step in and out compete you.

One objection has been the need to buy multiple domain names and hosting accounts. And while this is a pound wise penny foolish objection, the fact is that with the right hosting service there is no need to pay any more to host a second, third, fourth, or even twentieth web site.

It would take me a while to sit down and even count the total number of web sites I have. And they are all on one account. And that account costs me less than $25 a month. I use HostGator

They offer me the opportunity to have an unlimited number of web sites on one account and enough bandwith to cover my needs and that of most small business people. These can be readily stepped up should my increased use of video require a future adjustment.

I mention the hosting problem, as just one barrier to having multiple sites. A second site, probably means reworking the first and then adding the second. This will take some site design work and of course that entails a one time expense. But the final result is a more clearly targeted marketing campaign, and better marketing results.

I would have two “ethical bribes,” one each on each of the two new web sites to build a separte email list of prospective home owners and Realtors. Using my home staging example, I might offer a report on how to de-clutter your home on the web site directed to homeowners, and a different report on how to discuss home staging with your clients on the Realtor Oriented Web Site.

The prepackaged follow-up messages would be distinctly targeted as well.

It’s important to clarify your marketing objectives, and then to develop approriate marketing tools such as web sites and autoresponder porgrams to meet those objectives over time. If you need three web sites, you should have three.

What do you need?

Marketing in a Recession – A plan for offline businesses

2009 is here, and the reality of a bad economy sits heavily on most businesses on and off line.

For many of us, it’s time to regroup and either come up with new strategies or wither on the vine. While I am optimistic that Barack Obama will lead the nation forward in a positive direction and infuse the economy with significant stimulus, it won’t happen overnight.

As business people, we recognize that we can’t count on help from government, although we may welcome it. As small business people, we know we arn’t in line for the big bailouts the corporate giants get. Instead we need to do what we do best, be quick of foot. We need to make changes and we need to do them now.

I don’t have all the answers, heck, I don’t have half the questions, but I do have a few.

When times are good, we tend as business people to go with the flow. Now that they aren’t so good we need to look closely at things we shrugged off in the past.

This past week I did a study of all the businesses in one zip code, 55417 where I live.

Mine is a residential area with relatively few businesses, so my conclusions may not be reflective of the entire country by any means. That said, I suspect my underlying conclusions hold fairly true.

Less than half of the businesses had their own web pages. When doing a Google search many of these showed up in various directory sites, and many others were probably too small or part time to even do that. While these companies could thus be found online, they were not effectively competing for business. When times are good, maybe they could get by just being there. If they are to survive they are going to have to compete or they will loose out to those who do. For many, that means they need to take the plunge and finally put up their own web page. But lets hope they do it right.

Of those that had web pages, virtually none had effective lead capture capabilities. Maybe that’s why so many others don’t have web sites. They have learned that having a web site doesn’t really do that much. That’s because of those I looked at, almost none of the web sites were anything more than a billboard on a dusty dead end road on the internet. Some were very attractive, but few were business getters.

The purpose of a web site is to get new customers.

Most web sites are brochures. In my zip code I even found one web site development company who advertised their service as creating web brochures. This is not what you want to do if you are in business. You want your web site to be a prospect gathering machine, not a brochure.

I could probably increase the businesses for those with web sites annual sales by 10-30% in less than a month or so, just by setting up a lead capture system coupled with an effective follow up system.

For those without web sites, I’m inclined at the moment to refer them to http://www.davidgoesonline.com There at least they would get a top ranking web site and a video to capture their viewers attention. A hard to beat offer at less than $800.

But the real way to improve ones business isn’t just by capturing new customers, as important as that is. It’s by getting more business from your existing customers. And that is where I intend to focus my offline business consulting.

And that’s one of the key topics I intend to focus this blog on this year.

Stay tuned.

The Omega and the Alpha

Normally, the phrase is alpha and omega, but as we approach the end of a year, I prefer to reflect on the end and then the beginning.

This has been a momentous year, for the nation, world and for me. For me it has been a transitional year, from one where my focus was on my collectibles business, and the journey I have taken to migrate out of into a new internet venture.

The beginning of the year was taken up with the Marty Estate, by far the nicest accumulation of philatelic material I have had the privilege of handling in my almost 30 years as a part to full time dealer. Toward mid year, I focused on the home staging industry. I designed and conducted a significant survey of home staging professionals from around the US and Canada.

It was, if I may say so myself, a well done survey that focused on the individual needs of home stagers as small business people. I created a significant report that clearly set out the circumstances and obstacles faced by home stagers. My hope was that I would be able to follow up and create some products to assist them as a group. I did conduct one teleseminar on the need for opt in forms on their web pages, which was well received by the handful of people who caught it. I was less successful in selling my report on the survey results.

During the year, I discovered Bob the Teacher. I took about a half dozen of his online courses, and credit him with my breaking through on many of the critical skills essential to internet marketing. The break through course for me was his teleseminar course, but not so much for the teleseminar part, but rather a piece of it that gave me a glimpse of how to use my Cpanel. I eventually took his Cpanel course which did a lot to demystify much of the barriers that had gotten in my way previously.

By accident, I chanced into a relationship with Doug Champigny which has turned into a godsend. Doug is leading a group of marketers who are helping each other out, for free. Now we do promote Doug’s products as well as those of others in the group, which is certainly not a difficult thing to do, as they are generally low price and high quality.

As the year progressed, I have learned more about blogging, article writing, traffic exchanges, and more importantly realized that my home stagers were not alone in their individual plight. I shared it, and so to do thousands of other small business people.

We may as very small business owners know one or two things quite well, and many others pretty well, but for the most part we all have arenas where we don’t know diddly squat. What’s often a problem is that that’s where we either spend too much time, or not enough time.

If we spend too much time trying to figure things out ourselves, we are taking time away from what we are good at. If we spend too little time, it’s because we have decided to live without. Neither is optimum.

For my home stagers, it was clear that for many of them, the area they left out was marketing. Almost none of them had any form of lead capture. I suspect this is true of many people in other businesses as well. This fact was so obvious to me, I focused my first teleseminar on it. And so it seems, this earlier work I did with home stagers will become my focus for the future.

The vast majority of offline businesses do their web pages wrong. They have web pages created by their children or even by first rate web designers, but as good as many are creatively, they fall flat on a critical understanding of what the potential value of a web page is for a business.

And that is my plan for the coming year. I have decided to all but abandon my philatelic pursuits. Instead I will focus on assisting small businesses move from their static web sites into a more aggressive format that will reduce their existing advertising costs while building their customer base.

This blog, MicroBusinessSpecialist will become my flag ship for the coming adventure. I know I can help hundreds of businesses do better. I can do it cost effectively for them, and yet make a good fee for myself. This is my Alpha for the coming year.

I will succeed, because I have to. But additionally, I have a solid set of knowledge I can offer that will make a difference for my prospective customers. I learned a long time ago, that you make money by helping other people make money. I guess I was too into my hobby to not recognize that I wasn’t actually doing that there.

My plan is to focus on offline businesses, in my own area, although much of what I have to say and do can be done for businesses wherever they are located. So I will maintain an active web presence.

And while I will focus on this key function of helping businesses develop more aggressive web sites, I will continue to develop my own skills as an information marketer. Through this process, I will learn to keep up to date on new techniques. Afterall, the “how to make money on the internet” arena is probably the second most competitive arena on the internet after porn. This is where the cutting edge tools are most aggressively taught and experimented. By building my skills here, I will be all the better equiped to assist those for whom learning internet “how to” is boring, or confounding.

This is my Omega and Alpha. A transitional year is ended. A building year is ahead. If I can be of any assistance to you. Let me know. It’s going to be a blockbuster of a year.