Monday, November 29, 2010
About to sign up for http://wprobot.net/ does anyone have an affiliate link they'd like me to use? Might as well give it to someone.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Mark Zuckerberg interview. You should probably watch this http://ping.fm/KthoN {i got a lot out of it}
Facebook Vies To Become Your Homepage – And Why That’s A Big Deal http://ping.fm/YyIW6 {simple and smart}
Monday, November 22, 2010
Just posted a new interview with Ben Stickland from @NobleSamurai . Definitely worth watching: http://ping.fm/rskl9 {smart dude}
Mark Zuckerberg’s College Website Sells for $30,000 http://ping.fm/fxp1Z {sold on flippa.com no less}
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Does having great content equal great rankings? 3 min audio {remember to share} http://ping.fm/UYFVY
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
How does Google determine domain age, & is it important? http://ping.fm/D8nvy {not that important according to Matt but I don't buy it.}
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Does the click-through rate (CTR) of a listing in google effect rankings? 2min audio. http://ping.fm/ihA7K
Monday, November 15, 2010
Here’s How To Start An Online Business
Traditionally, starting a business required a tremendous amount of startup funds, with a significant chunk going to the location of the building where the business would be located. These days, however, many entrepreneurs are finding that an online business can be just as lucrative – if not more so – than a normal brick and mortar business.
This is all well and good, as it can make it much easier to start your own business. But with the sheer number of online businesses people can choose from, how do you get yet yours to stand out from all the others available?
1. Find A Niche
Your niche is one of the most important factors in deciding what type of online business you should build. While it may take a while to find something fitting, it can definitely help you stand apart from the crowd.
Let’s say you’re passionate about sports, so you decide to start up a sporting goods business online. A quick Google search shows over 55 million results if you simply search for the term “sporting goods”. If you’re a small business that’s just starting out, it would be nearly impossible to be found in that kind of competition.
So you narrow it down. You love sports, but which is your absolute favorite? Which sporting equipment are you most familiar with? Find what you’re passionate about, narrow that down, and odds are you’ve found your niche.
2. Build A List
While finding your niche is one of the top factors in your online business, your list may be the number one factor in deciding if your business fails or succeeds. If you build a good list of potential customers, it will become the keys to your kingdom.
Some of the many list building methods out there include free newsletters (both online and print), forums and articles. E-books can also be helpful with list-building, as well as getting your name out there and creating social proof.
Internet marketers are always looking for freebies to give away with their products, and a good e-book on a niche topic can be a wonderful way to let people know that you’re an expert in a certain field; when those people are ready to buy a certain product, they’ll come to you – the expert.
3. Ask The List What They Want
This is one thing that many people who run online businesses often overlook. They make the mistake of offering only what they’d like to sell – and that doesn’t always match up with what people want to buy. Websites such as Pollcode.com and Micropoll.com can help you set up online polls for free where people can choose from pre-designated choices, and some even allow users to input their own answers.
Two way communication can also build a sense of community with your prospects, be it via email, replies to blog posts or even open webinars through sites like Freebinar.com and Dimdim.com. And just like any other relationship, it is definitely to your advantage to know what the other person wants.
4. Market An Affiliate Product
Affiliate marketing is a great way to get started as well as find ideas about what to do with your own online business. Most successful websites have affiliate marketing programs, and you’ll find plenty that will work well with and compliment your own business ideas.
These affiliates will pay you a percentage of the sales for marketing their products for them. You can do this however you want – again, with blog posts, forums, webinars, etc. Generally, you’ll provide a link to your list, and any sales that come through that link will earn you the pre-determined commission amount.
There are plenty of ways to find affiliate programs – a Google search based on a specific topic could probably keep you busy for days. There are also digital product retailers like Clickbank.com that can provide you with thousands of online affiliate opportunities.
5. Create Your Own Better Product
Have a look at the products you’re promoting. Find out which ones work best with your list, and more importantly, why they work. Then when you create your own product, implement the features that are already working; do information products work better than physical products, what type of upsells should you offer – these things will definitely give you a leg up on your competition. And if you use them correctly, they can catapult you to the top of your niche.
This system is the simplest answer to the question, “How do I start an online business?” For more in-depth information, check out the DVD from the latest Melbourne SEO Services Workshop. Visit http://ping.fm/AQXxp today.
This is all well and good, as it can make it much easier to start your own business. But with the sheer number of online businesses people can choose from, how do you get yet yours to stand out from all the others available?
1. Find A Niche
Your niche is one of the most important factors in deciding what type of online business you should build. While it may take a while to find something fitting, it can definitely help you stand apart from the crowd.
Let’s say you’re passionate about sports, so you decide to start up a sporting goods business online. A quick Google search shows over 55 million results if you simply search for the term “sporting goods”. If you’re a small business that’s just starting out, it would be nearly impossible to be found in that kind of competition.
So you narrow it down. You love sports, but which is your absolute favorite? Which sporting equipment are you most familiar with? Find what you’re passionate about, narrow that down, and odds are you’ve found your niche.
2. Build A List
While finding your niche is one of the top factors in your online business, your list may be the number one factor in deciding if your business fails or succeeds. If you build a good list of potential customers, it will become the keys to your kingdom.
Some of the many list building methods out there include free newsletters (both online and print), forums and articles. E-books can also be helpful with list-building, as well as getting your name out there and creating social proof.
Internet marketers are always looking for freebies to give away with their products, and a good e-book on a niche topic can be a wonderful way to let people know that you’re an expert in a certain field; when those people are ready to buy a certain product, they’ll come to you – the expert.
3. Ask The List What They Want
This is one thing that many people who run online businesses often overlook. They make the mistake of offering only what they’d like to sell – and that doesn’t always match up with what people want to buy. Websites such as Pollcode.com and Micropoll.com can help you set up online polls for free where people can choose from pre-designated choices, and some even allow users to input their own answers.
Two way communication can also build a sense of community with your prospects, be it via email, replies to blog posts or even open webinars through sites like Freebinar.com and Dimdim.com. And just like any other relationship, it is definitely to your advantage to know what the other person wants.
4. Market An Affiliate Product
Affiliate marketing is a great way to get started as well as find ideas about what to do with your own online business. Most successful websites have affiliate marketing programs, and you’ll find plenty that will work well with and compliment your own business ideas.
These affiliates will pay you a percentage of the sales for marketing their products for them. You can do this however you want – again, with blog posts, forums, webinars, etc. Generally, you’ll provide a link to your list, and any sales that come through that link will earn you the pre-determined commission amount.
There are plenty of ways to find affiliate programs – a Google search based on a specific topic could probably keep you busy for days. There are also digital product retailers like Clickbank.com that can provide you with thousands of online affiliate opportunities.
5. Create Your Own Better Product
Have a look at the products you’re promoting. Find out which ones work best with your list, and more importantly, why they work. Then when you create your own product, implement the features that are already working; do information products work better than physical products, what type of upsells should you offer – these things will definitely give you a leg up on your competition. And if you use them correctly, they can catapult you to the top of your niche.
This system is the simplest answer to the question, “How do I start an online business?” For more in-depth information, check out the DVD from the latest Melbourne SEO Services Workshop. Visit http://ping.fm/AQXxp today.
Do you need to update your homepage everyday to maintain rankings? 2 min audio. http://ping.fm/HULAn
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Split Testing Landing Pages For Better Conversion
Internet marketing is all about the successful promotion of products or services. If we take an example, it is an interesting and useful exercise to go through that process of setting up the landing page, the pre page, then deciding if you’re going for a name squeeze or if you’re going to be sending them straight to the sales letter and it’s a little bit of a pre page.
I did a promotion for a weight loss supplement a while back. What we did was test three different landing pages. This was an affiliate product that a friend of mine had put together. It was a consumable. The commission was pretty high. I was a direct affiliate and I got high commissions. There was no fraud or any of that sort of thing; it was a really solid gig.
I wanted to find the highest possible conversion rate, so we took the traffic and sent it straight in to the sales page. We also took the traffic and we sent it into an enormous banner. I think it was 550 x 750. It was a big banner with headlines on it and it had copy on it and all that other stuff. Then we also sent it into a squeeze page. We rotated the traffic so we could see which one not had just the highest conversion but where people were engaged most.
The very first day it was really clear that the banner was not working. We were getting a couple of sales from the actual sales page but nothing from the squeeze. Over time, as the squeeze started to collect more and more names, over the course of a week, the squeeze actually beat it.
A lot of what we do is, we use the rotation scripts. This is the best thing I can say. Use your rotation script. Get a HyperTracker account or get a split testing software script or use your 1ShoppingCart tracker or you can split test a couple of different landing pages. See what is actually going on. See whether people are interested in your product. Drive the traffic into four or five different competing sites, competing processes.
What a lot of the guys I know are doing now is, they’ll run these supplement ads for instance for muscle booster. They’ll get a bunch of traffic sources and then they’ll get a bunch of different offers and they’ll just rotate them. They’ll see whichever offer comes up number one in terms of conversion and they’ll take that one. Then they’ll take that and they’ll test the direct offer versus the banner on the landing page versus the squeeze landing page. Then they’ll actually start split testing that stuff.
It’s really just a matter of seeing what’s working and seeing actually for yourself what is going to convert. I did a banner for a product where the guy was selling a dog cancer book. He’s a vet and he’s written a book and he’s a good friend of mine. He really knows the dog cancer situation and he knows the dog cancer market and it looked like a really good product.
So we decided to help him out and promote it. What we were doing was we were promoting two different pages. We actually had a page that popped up on dog sites, since about half of all dogs apparently die of cancer. It’s a huge problem. We were popping that up. We were also popping it up on dog cancer sites.
What we found when we did this was that, first of all we tested two banners. One had a picture of him and one had a picture of a dog. The dog won! People didn’t know him but they all wanted to see the fluffy, cute dog. We learned that the dog picture worked better than his picture.
I said, ok, now we have intelligence for your sales copywriting. Put this picture of this cute dog up at the top of the page and take your picture off. What we found was with the dog cancer traffic, it was a lot more targeted. There was a lot less of it, but it was a lot more profitable.
Once we found the banner that worked better, we decided to target the different targeting mechanisms with the campaign. We were able to determine we got a lot more traffic on just the general dog stuff, and we got a lot less traffic, almost no traffic on the other. We were getting, for the general dog traffic, something in the neighbourhood of 10,000 visitors a day. For the dog cancer traffic, the more targeted traffic, we were getting about 200 visitors a day.
However, what is most important is that we were making more money off the two hundred than off the ten thousand.
Listen To This Jonathan Mizel Interview To Learn More About Internet Marketing. Visit: http://ping.fm/wHx9n
I did a promotion for a weight loss supplement a while back. What we did was test three different landing pages. This was an affiliate product that a friend of mine had put together. It was a consumable. The commission was pretty high. I was a direct affiliate and I got high commissions. There was no fraud or any of that sort of thing; it was a really solid gig.
I wanted to find the highest possible conversion rate, so we took the traffic and sent it straight in to the sales page. We also took the traffic and we sent it into an enormous banner. I think it was 550 x 750. It was a big banner with headlines on it and it had copy on it and all that other stuff. Then we also sent it into a squeeze page. We rotated the traffic so we could see which one not had just the highest conversion but where people were engaged most.
The very first day it was really clear that the banner was not working. We were getting a couple of sales from the actual sales page but nothing from the squeeze. Over time, as the squeeze started to collect more and more names, over the course of a week, the squeeze actually beat it.
A lot of what we do is, we use the rotation scripts. This is the best thing I can say. Use your rotation script. Get a HyperTracker account or get a split testing software script or use your 1ShoppingCart tracker or you can split test a couple of different landing pages. See what is actually going on. See whether people are interested in your product. Drive the traffic into four or five different competing sites, competing processes.
What a lot of the guys I know are doing now is, they’ll run these supplement ads for instance for muscle booster. They’ll get a bunch of traffic sources and then they’ll get a bunch of different offers and they’ll just rotate them. They’ll see whichever offer comes up number one in terms of conversion and they’ll take that one. Then they’ll take that and they’ll test the direct offer versus the banner on the landing page versus the squeeze landing page. Then they’ll actually start split testing that stuff.
It’s really just a matter of seeing what’s working and seeing actually for yourself what is going to convert. I did a banner for a product where the guy was selling a dog cancer book. He’s a vet and he’s written a book and he’s a good friend of mine. He really knows the dog cancer situation and he knows the dog cancer market and it looked like a really good product.
So we decided to help him out and promote it. What we were doing was we were promoting two different pages. We actually had a page that popped up on dog sites, since about half of all dogs apparently die of cancer. It’s a huge problem. We were popping that up. We were also popping it up on dog cancer sites.
What we found when we did this was that, first of all we tested two banners. One had a picture of him and one had a picture of a dog. The dog won! People didn’t know him but they all wanted to see the fluffy, cute dog. We learned that the dog picture worked better than his picture.
I said, ok, now we have intelligence for your sales copywriting. Put this picture of this cute dog up at the top of the page and take your picture off. What we found was with the dog cancer traffic, it was a lot more targeted. There was a lot less of it, but it was a lot more profitable.
Once we found the banner that worked better, we decided to target the different targeting mechanisms with the campaign. We were able to determine we got a lot more traffic on just the general dog stuff, and we got a lot less traffic, almost no traffic on the other. We were getting, for the general dog traffic, something in the neighbourhood of 10,000 visitors a day. For the dog cancer traffic, the more targeted traffic, we were getting about 200 visitors a day.
However, what is most important is that we were making more money off the two hundred than off the ten thousand.
Listen To This Jonathan Mizel Interview To Learn More About Internet Marketing. Visit: http://ping.fm/wHx9n
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Google announced Instant Preview. Watch this 2 min video to find out what it is & means to SEO http://ping.fm/3NYvS (reweet)
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Optimizing And Driving Traffic To Your Landing Pages
The employment of affiliates to drive traffic is an essential part of many online businesses. Affiliates out there are so busy, and working so hard to generate traffic, promoting your website, doing some SEO marketing, that you just leave it to the affiliates, and just pay more.
We’ve started to see in the CPA business people paying 150% commission, 200% commission. A well known one was Eben Pagan with his Double Your Dating book. I don’t know if he’s still doing it now, but for a while he has paying a $45 commission for a $20 sale. The reason he does that is his offer converts like crazy and he’s got all sorts of ways to make money on the back end. So I think people really need to look at their sales process no matter what they’re doing and make sure that their metrics are acceptable.
When people say, hey, what’s acceptable, I say, look at your competitors, see what they’re paying, see where they’re running, buy their product, go through their process and see what they do.
I break it down and find out how much that client is worth to me and then do a little bit of optimization to try and get more value out of that client and make sure that they’re all converting, so I ultimately pay more to acquire that customer. When you’re in the optimizing phase, a big part of it obviously has to do with the landing page.
Once I’ve figured out what my offer is and I’ve got a good product that I’m happy to promote, and proud of and adds value to someone’s life, that’s all a given. When I’ve got that, the next task is to actually build the landing page.
There are so many different variables that there is not really one that really clinches the deal so to speak. Stephen Mahaney and I have a little saying. He’s the guy that runs Planet Ocean, the search engine newsletter, and he said, there are ten things, and if you mess up one of them, you don’t make any sales. So if the headline’s great and the opening’s great and the bullets are great and the guarantee is great but the price is wrong, you don’t sell anything and vice versa.
Really what I like to do, I like to look at other people who are in my niche. I like to go to ClickBank or just the top advertisers in Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN. I like to look at what their offers are and how they’re actually putting stuff together. Generally on the Marketing Letter website, I have a Marketing Letter website, I don’t have the exact address of this article, but I’m sure if you Google it, Marlon Sanders has done a How to Write Ad Copy. It’s a ten to fifteen page report and I still, to this day use that report to create my offers.
In terms of landing pages, I want to talk a little bit about the testing strategy that may also involve some search engine optimization techniques. One of the things that is really critical, is that no matter what you’re doing, you have what we call a sales process. The sales process basically looks at who the customer is and where they’re coming from. It creates what we like to call this contextually relevant, cohesive message. Rather than saying, write a good headline or test a bunch of landing pages, what I’ll tell you that has been so helpful for us, is looking at what you’re doing to generate traffic.
If you’re going to be generating traffic through SEO, make sure the page, Google does a good job of this anyway, make sure the page has on it information about the thing that they searched for. Learn some ways that webmasters should optimize their sites. If you’re going to be using paid media, a lot of these people didn’t come in through an affiliate, they didn’t come in through a recommended link. A lot of these people are new customers, and what they are, are strangers. With paid media, whether it be Google, whether it be banner ads, whether it be any other things, is you really have to warm them up.
The way that you warm them up is, you just talk to them in the fashion that they would want to be talked to. You give them the benefit that they want. Eben Pagan calls this moving the free line. What he’s done, he’s taken the free line, where something becomes from a paid product to a free product. He’s taken that paid product and he’s actually taken a mini version of it and he’s encapsulated the benefits and he gives that away for free. Right away when someone comes into his sales process, they get all warm and fuzzy and comfortable.
Listen To This Jonathan Mizel Interview To Learn More About Increasing Your Traffic. Visit: http://www.podcastinterviews.com
We’ve started to see in the CPA business people paying 150% commission, 200% commission. A well known one was Eben Pagan with his Double Your Dating book. I don’t know if he’s still doing it now, but for a while he has paying a $45 commission for a $20 sale. The reason he does that is his offer converts like crazy and he’s got all sorts of ways to make money on the back end. So I think people really need to look at their sales process no matter what they’re doing and make sure that their metrics are acceptable.
When people say, hey, what’s acceptable, I say, look at your competitors, see what they’re paying, see where they’re running, buy their product, go through their process and see what they do.
I break it down and find out how much that client is worth to me and then do a little bit of optimization to try and get more value out of that client and make sure that they’re all converting, so I ultimately pay more to acquire that customer. When you’re in the optimizing phase, a big part of it obviously has to do with the landing page.
Once I’ve figured out what my offer is and I’ve got a good product that I’m happy to promote, and proud of and adds value to someone’s life, that’s all a given. When I’ve got that, the next task is to actually build the landing page.
There are so many different variables that there is not really one that really clinches the deal so to speak. Stephen Mahaney and I have a little saying. He’s the guy that runs Planet Ocean, the search engine newsletter, and he said, there are ten things, and if you mess up one of them, you don’t make any sales. So if the headline’s great and the opening’s great and the bullets are great and the guarantee is great but the price is wrong, you don’t sell anything and vice versa.
Really what I like to do, I like to look at other people who are in my niche. I like to go to ClickBank or just the top advertisers in Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN. I like to look at what their offers are and how they’re actually putting stuff together. Generally on the Marketing Letter website, I have a Marketing Letter website, I don’t have the exact address of this article, but I’m sure if you Google it, Marlon Sanders has done a How to Write Ad Copy. It’s a ten to fifteen page report and I still, to this day use that report to create my offers.
In terms of landing pages, I want to talk a little bit about the testing strategy that may also involve some search engine optimization techniques. One of the things that is really critical, is that no matter what you’re doing, you have what we call a sales process. The sales process basically looks at who the customer is and where they’re coming from. It creates what we like to call this contextually relevant, cohesive message. Rather than saying, write a good headline or test a bunch of landing pages, what I’ll tell you that has been so helpful for us, is looking at what you’re doing to generate traffic.
If you’re going to be generating traffic through SEO, make sure the page, Google does a good job of this anyway, make sure the page has on it information about the thing that they searched for. Learn some ways that webmasters should optimize their sites. If you’re going to be using paid media, a lot of these people didn’t come in through an affiliate, they didn’t come in through a recommended link. A lot of these people are new customers, and what they are, are strangers. With paid media, whether it be Google, whether it be banner ads, whether it be any other things, is you really have to warm them up.
The way that you warm them up is, you just talk to them in the fashion that they would want to be talked to. You give them the benefit that they want. Eben Pagan calls this moving the free line. What he’s done, he’s taken the free line, where something becomes from a paid product to a free product. He’s taken that paid product and he’s actually taken a mini version of it and he’s encapsulated the benefits and he gives that away for free. Right away when someone comes into his sales process, they get all warm and fuzzy and comfortable.
Listen To This Jonathan Mizel Interview To Learn More About Increasing Your Traffic. Visit: http://www.podcastinterviews.com
Monday, November 8, 2010
davidjenyns: Google Goes After YouTubeSocial For Trademark Infringement http://ping.fm/mrxdw {don't build a business heavily reliant on external parties}
If you run an online business you must download this free mp3 interview with @brianjohnson_sp http://ping.fm/rxcdM {amazing}
Sunday, November 7, 2010
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