See The Light

This post brought to you by Net10. All opinions are 100% mine.

As I was doing some research on new affiliate programs, I came across a niche that really honed in on the fact of how my cell phone carrier is giving me a horrible deal on my plan.  I pay for a 1400 minute cell phone plan, PLUS $30 a month unlimited data and that DOES NOT include text messaging.

What did I learn? I learn that there are so many other virtual network operators whose plans provide great coverage at a fraction of what I’m paying.  Take Net10, as an example. Yes, it’s airtime card based, but so  what?   There are no contracts, credit checks, monthly fees, security deposits, activation or deactivation charges, or age restrictions. And you get nationwide coverage, unlimited talk, text AND data for $50 a month!! :O That’s almost 2.5X more than what I pay! see the Light go on now?

Their phones aren’t Chinese, rinky dink knock-offs either.  You can have your pick from leading manufactures such as LG, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung with the bells and whistles you are accustomed too from the more expensive carriers such as bluetooth, a camera, mobile web, etc.

Oh and if you have family outside the country, say in Canada or Mexico, you can get  a special number for them to call you on. Check out this  real NET10 customer.

Net10 provides an awesome value with little to nothing to lose, hence their slogan No Bills, No Contracts, No Evil. What a great niche indeed

Article Advertising

Article advertising is a technique that enables companies to market themselves by writing brief articles that relate to the niche they are in. Many of my Advertising Agency clients use these as part of their PR marketing strategy. These articles are then put out for widespread syndication. Each article has a byline and a biography field that enables companies to incorporate references to their firm, website or contact information. By crafting well written content and distributing it, businesses can increase their industry creds and hopefully,  their market share.

Years ago, a boutique accounting firm put out an article during tax season in the local newspaper entitled: “The top 5 ways to be audit free”. The benefits were two-fold: a) the firm provided timely and valuable information and b) it positioned itself as a leader in the community for saving you money, time and stress come tax time.  This kept the firm top of mind and helped them to expand their business the following year.

Article advertising moved online right after Al Gore invented the internet Websites that are article-centric are known as article directories. Most are free for the article publishers and readers. Articles in these directories are indexed in Search Engines, and thus become found when someone is doing a related search, providing companies cheap and targeted exposure and traffic – and it doesn’t get much cheaper than FREE. So make sure good article advertising is part of your marketing arsenal and or that your advertising agency leverages this technique. Your converting traffic will thank you for it!

Give Them What They Want

You can’t make everyone happy, right? You’ve heard that before.  And it’s true.  The only people you should care to make happy are your paying customers. And it could be very difficult.  Here are some tips on how to get some.

Conversions happen because the product or service purchased fills a need. Therefore, give people what they want, and they will pay handsomely for it. Start by building a list and trust.  Perhaps give away information for free in the 1st strings of emails. Then on the 3rd one, try asking for the sale.  If you’d helped them before, chances are they’ll feel you’ll be able to assist them again that they’ll want to pay you. Remember, you just so happen to have the perfect solution for their problem.

In order to have the perfect solution, you need to make sure the information you are offering is  relevant to the targeted niche you are going after. For instance, say you are promoting a service such as ceramic tile cleaning tips through a website such as http://www.thesteamteam.com. If a visitor lands on your site and provided info on carpet cleaning instead of tile, it gives the wrong impression. Remember, give them what they want, and they will give you what you want.

So remember, it really boils down to this: making the customer happy and giving them what they want, no matter what. That’s not always pretty, but it does get results.

Get Your Business Started

During these uncertain economic times, many potential business owners are turning to the Web for income. The challenge however, is deciphering the poor opportunities from legitimate ones.

It seems everywhere you go someone is hyping their system to help you “make big bucks while only working less than 10 hours per week!” For those that do not have the experience to tell what a good offer is vs. a bad  one, the situation can become unnerving. So what can you do?

One of the first tests when evaluating a business opportunity is whether or not it sounds too good to be true. Like in other areas of life, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Unfortunately, the programs that sell the most are those that promise a quick buck, even though most folks will never be succesful. Listen to me:  The internet is not a mystical money tree!

Earning money online requires sound business practices and a lot of work. Any business, for that matter, on or offline, requires dedication/time. Though its true – the internet has changed some of the ways people do business – there are some principles that are as true today as they were in the pre-internet days. When you follow those principles and avoid the temptation to take shortcuts, your business will grow.

For instance: Is your online venture a business or a hobby? If you’re earning money online as a hobby then you may be quite happy jumping from program to program, following whatever is popular. But if you are serious about operating a business then you need to work consistently at your business. And to grow a business, you need to market said business. Pick a few areas in marketing that make sense and stick with them. For example, you could build a business selling general gift merchandise, home décor, kitchenware and/or collectible items.  SMC promotions could be leveraged for such a venture. You can peruse the SMC catalog and buy (very inexpensively) household supplies, toys and games, garden supplies, and electronics and sell these for a pretty profit. The nice thing about SMC is that a SMC membership can be used not only to start a new business, but also to supplement a pre-existing business.

There are quite a few folks out there making money online. Every day legitimate businesses are finding success by applying common sense and treating their online business like a business. So have it, and watch your online earnings grow….

Don’t Make These Adwords Mistakes

Google AdWords can be an awesome advertising tool to give  your business ginormous exposure if used correctly. If you’ve never tried it, don’t be put off if it seems confusing at first. Because once you’ve mastered the skill of making an AdWords campaign work, you’ll be able to see increased profits. Here are three mistakes to avoid:

When starting out, many simply throw together a campaign without doing much market research, and this is a serious mistake. You shouldn’t start an AdWords campaign until you are confident that you know your market well. For instance, lets say you are in custom labels niche (for industrial purposes, military specification and commercial applications), what keywords could you target? You could target “Custom Labels” or “Custom Label“, but ask yourself – is that going to get you converting traffic? How many times was that keyword searched for last month? Adwords will tell you.  You also want to have a good sense of who your competition is and what they’re up to. You want to see what keywords your competitors are targeting and how much they cost to bid on so you can calculate your own strategy. Fine tune your keyword list with a keyword tool. Taking the time to do your market research allows you to get off on the right foot with your AdWords campaign. Remember to stay relevant and laser-focused with your keywords. If you don’t, this could affect your Quality Score.

Displaying your ads through the content network of Google is another common mistake. This network consists of all those partnering websites that show Google ads through their AdSense program. These ads could prove to be a distraction to people viewing your add, since these sites are not that targeted. In the end you may even achieve a high click through rate, but low conversions. It’s not unheard of  those losing large amounts of money on ads by leaving the content network on, which translates into a poor ROI. So you might consider not using AdSense until you feel comfortable working with AdWords.

When starting out, Test, Test and Test.  Keep learning and not only will you increase your experience but also your profits…

Niche Marketing

As discussed previously, niche marketing is focusing on a specific vertical and creating a marketing campaign for it. You can build a Web site or blog and design a marketing plan around it for a tightly focused niche.  You take a broad category and drill down to long tail keywords that can be targeted more specifically.

What are the advantages? The main benefit of a smaller and more defined vertical is less competition. When building SEO for your sites, you’ll have an easier time optimizing more descriptive and less competitive keywords, thus ranking quicker. And since these terms are more descriptive in nature, they are more targeted and prone to higher conversion rates.

Choosing a niche is easier if the category is something you are familiar with or have a strong affinity to. If you a passion for cooking, you can cater to a specific type of cooking or type of food, says Latin American. You can create a tightly focused Web site with Spanish food cookbooks, ingredients, utensils, etc.  Then get your keyword list created. Research your competition looks like for others on the keyword phrase. Your domain can have the keyword in it.  Then start your optimization and some PPC and watch our niche take off…

SEO Basics

Is your landing page up yet? How serious are you in making it successful? If your answer is ‘Very!”, then SEO should be part or your marketing plan. But if you know next to nothing about it, then here’s the lowdown on SEO basics. If you can master the basics, then the rest will be much easier for you.

Let’s start with keyword research. How can you optimize your website if you do not know what keywords you should be targeting? Which ones are you going use? For instance, the identity theft niche has been hot for a few years now. Suppose you were marketing the IdentityHawk solution. Well, ask yourself: What keyword or search phrase, when typed into a search engine, should display my website as part of the results? Could you use “identity theft protection“? You could. Which keywords get the most traffic? Which ones are “informational” keywords (which may drive traffic but low conversions), and which ones are  ”buying” keywords (conversion-centric)? What is your competition ranking well for? How many inbound links does their website have? The answers to these questions will help you come up with a good keyword list.

After your keyword list is generated, you’ll need to them for your on-page optimization. What this means is that your keywords should be visible in the web copy of your website. You should put your keywords in the title, the H1 tag, the image alt tag, the meta description and of course, in the body of the text. Don’t overdue it (keyword stuffing), as this could get your site de-indexed.

Next comes Link building. Links are the most important factor in search engine optimization. Your goal should be to get as many quality links as you can. Quality being subjective, think of links that are surrounded by fresh, unique, relevant content on pages with adequate page rank.

These are just some of the SEO basics that you can do for your own website. Practice these and you can see great results within the coming months.

The Power of Blogging

It seems like almost everyone today blogs. Anyone trying to build a business should consider having their own blog. But just what exactly is a blog?

Well you are reading one now.  Blogs (short for WebLog) is a site that shares information. This particular blog you are now reading is about Online and Affiliate Marketing – but, my friend Matt, who manages a computer store, mentioned that the techniques found here can be used by his business too.

Matt could begin blogging about how frustrating it is to have a slow computer – he mentioned his customers have this problem and most don’t know much about optimizing, maintaining and defragging their computers. His business helps customers remove junk files, fix registry errors, protect their privacy by removing history tracks, and defragment their disk drives for better disk access speed. They call him their speed up computer guy!

How does this apply? Matt could share his experience on the subject on his blog and others who follow his blog may know and comment on something of value others may find useful, thereby providing a resource center on computer issues and how to address them.

The basic premise of a blog is to supply the reader with something of value. How? Chances are if you found something of value and shared it with like-minded people, they would find it valuable too. So start sharing! Blog good content and see how you now can connect with people – your trusted and engaged audience.

So if you want to establish and grow relationships with clients and add value to their lives, start blogging; your community will thank you for it…

The Delicate Art of Preselling

When doing affiliate marketing it’s imperative that you keep your eye on small but important details.

No. 1 in my book: Please avoid the conversion-killing mistake of trying to hard sell. Take a look at your bounce rates: if site visitors are only at your sites for a few seconds, could they feel as if you be trying to hard sell? Your responsibility as an affiliate marketer is to “presell” your readers before they get to the actual sales message from the vendor.

No one wants to read a sales pitch, and they don’t want to see anything resembling it on a website. So keep in mind that you only presell, and the person who made the product does the selling part. Your presell efforts will create a desire to know more and also make the person feel comfortable about clicking through to read more. You’ll discuss the benefits of the product in an objective manner and even talk about the negatives. Be honest – it’s critical that your readers feel and believe they are reading someone’s objective and unbiased review of a product.  Remember: your visitors want help making a decision, and if you do that then you’ll help enough people to decide to buy from you.

The better affiliates build a sense of community with their sites. You can too. Try to have your target audience participate at your site. Make your site interesting so that your visitors stay longer, perhaps with some video production. Add a cool voiceover, perhaps a female voiceover.  And don’t forget social links so that visitors can tweet or share something from your site on facebook. Remember, preselling is giving valuable info to your vistors so they can decide to buy something they need.

So give value –  and receive value in return…

Adwords Copywriting Greatness

Many things go into successful PPC campaigns; however we must say that ad copy is extremely important. You could say that it is the cornerstone of your entire PPC campaigns. Here are just a few Adword ad copywriting tips that you can turn around and use later today.

When you’re at the end of your ad copy, don’t ever forget that little jewel known as the call to action. Yes, of course some people either don’t know it or don’t do it for some reason. It’s just that a call to action has been tested over and over for decades in direct response advertising and has been shown to produce higher conversions. Never forget to put your strongest benefit in each and every ad you create – people need to know that. Unfortunately, no one cares about you or what you want or like; it’s all about the reader. So if you’re aiming at taking him away to another page, you will have to make sure you give him a strong reason to click on your ad. For example, let’s say you’re an affiliate for http://www.thesteamteam.com and are promoting geo-targeted cleaning keywords.  If the searcher is thinking about organic carpet cleaner austin,  then he needs to get to a landing page where he gets exactly what he’s looking for. If there are any surprises, the reader will click away, never to return.

When writing copy, make sure that you remove any common words such as “in, an, it, on”; since they will take up a lot of space. There is just no getting around it that all letters and words really count a lot with PPC ads. You will be putting yourself at a handicap by using unnecessary words.

If you read about writing good classified ad copy, then you will learn about the importance of including the strongest benefit you can find in your ads. So try making a list of every benefit you can think of, and then choose a group of the best ones to test. You need to offer the benefit that speaks the loudest to your target market. Don’t know the difference between features and benefits? No problem, go to Google and do a search on it and learn.

Hopefully after reading this article you have a better idea of how to write Adwords ad copy that is compelling and powerful. If you’re new to Adwords, or PPC, then you just need to get more confidence in your abilities, and that is where practice comes into play.

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