I feel almost silly writing an article on this topic, because I can sum it up in one sentence:
Write about your own personal experiences in story form.
That’s it! People love stories – especially true ones – that show you overcame an obstacle, solved a problem, created something positive and so forth.
So if you’re writing a blog post about how to increase traffic, use your own examples of what you did, how you did it, and the results. If you can flavor it with storytelling skills that keep your reader riveted, so much the better.
And who better to show you how to tell a story than professional stand up comics? These guys and gals live and die by the story – they either get it right or they’re booed off the stage, and being booed is not funny or fun.
The steps to great storytelling according to comedians?
Be Brief (don’t ramble – get to the point)
Give Details (the useful ones – don’t bog the story down with useless stuff)
Use Story Twists (surprise is a wonderful thing)
Work the Crowd (or in this case, your readers)
Act Out The Characters (difficult to do in a blog, but I’ve always thought lending your own personality or character to your writing is extremely important)
Practice (write often – the more you write, the better you’ll get)
End on the Biggest Laugh (or point if you’re a blogger)
Get the details on how comedians tell great stories here:
Half of Facebook’s more than 2.2 BILLION active users are on Facebook in any 24 hour period. In addition, the average U.S. Facebook user spends nearly 6 hours a month browsing this social network.
In other words, if your business isn’t on Facebook yet, maybe it should be. And one of the first questions I invariably receive from newcomers concerning Facebook is, “What should I post to get people interested in my business?” Here are some ideas:
Showcase your customers. If you’ve got photos, videos or emails from happy customers using your products, go ahead and show them. Just remember, you’re not bragging about your product, you’re showing what your customers are doing with your product. Keep the difference in mind when choosing and framing content and you can’t go wrong.
Instead of showing a testimonial from Jimmy telling how great your product is, show Jimmy using or enjoying your product, or show the direct results Jimmy achieved with your product. For example, if you teach your customers how to restore classic cars, show Jimmy with before and after shots of his car.
Use humor. Don’t make yourself or your business overly serious on Facebook. Instead, use light-hearted humor whenever possible. This isn’t necessarily telling jokes – most times it’s simply taking a poke at yourself or your day, showing something in a humorous light, being witty or simply sharing that silly thing that happened to you a few minutes ago.
Post funny videos, especially if they’re relevant to your business. And don’t just grab videos from YouTube – make your own quick videos when you feel inspired.
Give them content. Facebook isn’t necessarily the place to offer long winded diatribes about anything. But it is a great place to share cool content – especially the “How-to” variety and the entertainment variety. And it doesn’t all need to originate with you – use curated content to round out your own and keep people engaged.
Let them inside. That is, show off your staff (if you have one) or your family or the inner workings of your business. Engage them by pulling back the curtain and showing what they normally wouldn’t get to see. For example, if you’re a one person business working out of your home, show them your office, your view, and your little dog that keeps you company. If your business has oodles of employees, post pictures of your in-office celebrations such as birthdays, as well as the antics that go on and so forth. By giving them a peak behind the curtain, your friends and fans feel very much included and part of the group. You’re no longer just a business, you’re part of their circle.
Ask questions. Nothing engages other people like asking them their opinion on something, even if it’s as silly as, “What’s better: Baseball or Football, and why?” Posts with questions get the conversation rolling, especially when it’s an easy question to answer. And be sure to respond to the answers you receive.
Use these Facebook “attention getters” to quickly begin bringing more people your way.
Here’s a ridiculously easy business you can run from Facebook using Facebook groups. It won’t take you much time, and it can net you a tidy little profit each month.
Better still, you can create as many of these as you like. Grow them big enough, and you might make far more than $1,000 a month, too.
Plus, you can either do it yourself, or outsource the work – it’s up to you.
Here’s how it works:
First, create a private Facebook group. This is going to be a free group, and you can do it for any niche where money is spent.
For example, if you’re in the IM niche, you might title your group something like:
Shortcut copywriting techniques for non-copywriters
Easy and fast SEO for non-SEO people
Latest and hottest ways to get tons of traffic to your offer
Techniques for doubling and tripling your conversions
Simple methods for building massive emails lists fast
Etc.
You can populate your groups with free WSO’s, from Facebook itself, as bonuses to other people’s products and so forth. You’re offering a tremendous benefit for free, so it’s not going to be difficult to get members to your groups.
You might even limit the number of members you take, since that will make it seem much more exclusive and valuable.
For content you’re going to do one or more of the following:
Write your own content
Hire outsourcers to write the content for you
Get guests to write your content for free
Use high quality PLR. Not junk, just the good stuff
Whatever content you use, be sure to break it down into brief daily posts.
All you need is short snippets of content, because the members will do the rest of the work for you. They’ll ask questions, respond to questions, give opinions and so forth.
Your group will take on a life of its own, which is terrific. You want to encourage as much interaction as possible to keep people coming back time and time again.
So now the big question is… How do you monetize this?
There are three ways:
First, promote your own products. You’ve got to do this in a very soft, non-pushy way. Done right, you’ll make plenty of sales without turning anyone off.
For example, you might answer someone’s question, then refer them to your product for even more info.
Second, promote other people’s products (affiliate products) using the same method.
Third, if you don’t want to sell products or you want to make even more money, you can sell advertising on the timeline.
If you think about it, you’ve got a highly targeted group of people who are super focused on this one area of interest.
Basically, you have a terrific prospect list of active, interested people.
Whether you are selling your own products, affiliate products or advertising, you’re going to make money.
Let’s talk more about getting advertisers. These advertisers would LOVE to convert your members to their deal.
Limit your ads to just one per day, and call them the “Sponsor of the Day.”
Of course, advertisers can book as many days as they like.
Post the ad in the morning and keep it as the pinned post for the rest of the day.
Charge maybe $50 to display the ad for a day, which compares favorably to solo ads.
If you sell all 30 days of the month, you’ve made $1,500.
Only allow that one ad per day, and don’t let your members post affiliate links.
How do you find advertisers? Many times your best source will be from within the group itself. You can also let your email list know about the opportunity, and you can offer your ad slots to anyone who is in your niche and has a product to sell.
I recommend starting one group and learning the in’s and out’s of running this type of business. You’ll need to invest perhaps 15 minutes each morning for adding content and answering questions, and then check back 3 or 4 times during the day.
Once you get a good feel for what you’re doing, expand to related niches and even branch out to completely unrelated niches, too.
And of course you can outsource the entire process.
While you’re not going to make a fortune from just one group, several groups can yield you a full-time income.
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to make good money online is by doing webinars.
Here’s how it works in a nutshell: You choose a date and topic for your webinar, promote it, give great information on the webinar and then promote a product at the end. It’s like one big informational sales letter, in that you begin by giving away a great deal of awesome info, and you close by offering them even more information or a service or membership they can use to implement what they’ve just learned.
If you either have a skill that others want to learn, or you can interview an expert who has the skill (or information) people want to learn, then you can do a webinar.
Here are the steps to ensure your webinars generate income…
1. Make the webinar an experience. There is so much I can say about this, but it might all boil down to the following: Do NOT be boring. As you put your webinar together, think about your customers and what they want to learn and experience. Make it interesting, exciting and fun. Plan to show major enthusiasm for your topic, and to answer questions. Remember, they can leave the webinar any time they like, so make sure it’s worth staying for.
2. Provide great tools. If you’re partnering or using affiliates, provide great blog posts and emails so they can drive as much traffic as possible to your opt-in page. And provide a good variety – you don’t want every affiliate sending out the same email, since they begin to look like spam. Instead, consider helping each affiliate to write a unique email tailored exclusively for their list.
3. Spend time on your registration page. This is the page you and your partners or affiliates will be sending traffic to, and it’s do or die. Prospects decide whether or not to sign up for your webinar based upon what’s on the page, so spend a little time fine tuning it to produce the most sign-ups possible.
4. In creating the slides for your webinar, try to have a new slide every minute or two with one or more important points on it. This keeps the webinar moving and interesting.
5. You can do the webinar by yourself or with a partner. The nice thing about having a partner is you can have a give and take of information, adding in bits that the other might overlook. Of course whoever the expert is will do most of the talking, but the second person can ask questions and add a different dynamic to the call.
6. Promote the webinar. Begin promoting no more than a week in advance because frankly, people have short memories. And as the webinar gets closer, promote it more often with increased urgency.
7. Send reminders. The day before the webinar is the time to send the first reminder, preferably in the early evening. Send the second on the morning of the webinar, and the third reminder 30 minutes before it begins. “Did you forget?” Is a great subject line for the last minute email you send out. Also remind them that there are far more people signed up than there are open webinar slots (assuming this is true, which it usually is.) Suggest they get on the webinar early to ensure they get a “seat.”
8. Start the webinar on time. Don’t wait for stragglers, you’ll just irritate those who bothered to show up on time.
9. Give some of your best stuff. Seriously, you want to majorly over deliver, because the more you give, the more your listeners will want to know. If you hold everything back then not only do you run out of things to talk about – your listeners also wonder if you know anything at all.
10. Be a tease. Seriously, while you’re delivering great content you will also be inserting teasers here and there for the pitch that comes at the end. For example, you’re telling them how to do “a, b and c,” and of course they’ll need “d, e and f” which you don’t have time to cover here but you’ll give them a chance to learn all about it at the end of the presentation. For example: Your webinar is on traffic, so you teach several basic methods on the call and allude to the many advanced techniques they can also use – when they know how.
11. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your audience. If your webinar system allows questions to be typed in (such as GoToWebinar) then the person who isn’t doing the talking can keep track of the questions and make sure they get answered. Great trick: Imagine you are a new listener hearing you for the first time. What do you want to know? What isn’t clear? What questions might you have? Always keep your listeners in mind, and even periodically check in with them to see if they’re following what you’re teaching.
12. Make your offer deliciously irresistible. The entire webinar should flow nicely into the offer you’re making, and the offer itself should be as irresistible as possible. Pile on the benefits, make it clear what this will allow them to accomplish, and back it with a super strong guarantee. Place the URL of the order page on the screen and tell them exactly what will happen when they order.
13. Give a bonus to the first “x” number who grab your offer. This is a great way to get them off the fence and moving fast. Depending on the price point and the number of listeners, limit your special bonus to the first 10 to 50 people who sign up.
14. Stay on to answer questions and give order updates. If one person has a question there’s a good chance others have the same question. Plus you can be there in case they have a problem ordering. And as the orders come in, update the listeners on how many of the bonuses are already gone. This provides proof that others are buying and they should as well. You might even close out the webinar by letting them know you’re confident the bonuses will sell out this evening.
15. Follow-up. Send an email thanking them for attending and reminding them of the URL to order if they haven’t already.
16. Post the replay online for a few days and inform all those who did not attend to listen to it before you take it down.
It’s fairly common to make several thousand dollars from one webinar, depending of course on your offer and your listeners.
What if you don’t have a product to promote? Then you’ve got a couple of options:
1. Choose an affiliate product and ask the product owner to do the webinar with you, splitting the profit between the two of you.
2. Make your product a series of teaching webinars. These are additional webinars that they pay to attend to learn the rest of what it is you’re teaching. Record them and get transcriptions, and now you’ve got a product you can sell on future webinars.
So, are webinars for you?… If so, these tips will help you get started on the right track!
I see new marketers all the time who have a goal of $100,000 per year or even a million dollars per year. And how are they getting their traffic? They’re happily submitting articles, writing blog posts and commenting in forums and blogs.
Now, if your goal is to earn an extra $1,000-$2,000 per month, then these methods are great. But if you want to earn far more, you’ll want to change the way you get traffic.
No one that I know of is making large sums of money using only these methods. Instead, they are doing either SEO, PPC, Facebook Ads, or creating their own products and affiliate programs.
Or they have a HUGE list. But how do you get a huge, responsive list? Generally by using SEO, PPC or some kind of advertising.
So the real questions to think about when it comes to not only traffic but also any issue regarding your business is:
A) What is your goal?
B) Is what you’re doing going to get you to that goal this year?
And if it’s not – look for another method.
I will say there are of course always exceptions to the rule. If you’re really good at a particular marketing strategy like blogging, or direct sales using Facebook chats and other social networking engagements AND you sell products that can pay you high commissions, it IS possible to build a 6 or 7 figure income with free marketing.
But for the average person, paid advertising can be a faster path to the higher income tiers. Either way, choose a strategy that works within your current budget and commit to learning how to execute that strategy at the highest level possible if you are in the online marketing game to make a serious and life-changing income.
Success is great, but failure is EASIER! Come on… I know you can do it. Here’s how:
1. Be filled with doubt. Cultivate it at every step, looking for reasons why you will fail, why your business plan won’t work, why effort is fruitless and hopeless. People who are successful want that success, they dream about it, breathe it, live it in their minds over and over before it happens in real life. When successful people feel doubt trying to creep in, they stamp it out faster than a cockroach in their kitchen. No wonder why they succeed. If you’re going to fail and fail big, you’ve got to be sure you’re filled with self-doubt from the time you get up until you fall asleep at night.
Whatever you do, do not listen to or read positive messages, do not become enthusiastic, and try your best not to be happy. Just sit in the corner quietly with your milk and a giant box of cookies (or your beer and burritos) and don’t come out of that corner until you’ve convinced yourself that you’re a big fat failure who will never succeed at anything. Remember, negative self-talk is crucial to your failure. If you let positive self-talk creep in, you may accidentally succeed, and then where would you be?
2. Be a vacillating slick willy. Don’t stick to one plan. Do NOT make any decisions. Do not move in one direction – move in all directions at once. Buy every ebook and program out there on how to be successful online, and then don’t even read them. If you do read them, bounce from one to the next without doing anything. Change your mind every week on your course of action. When you’ve mastered this, begin changing your mind every day. Aim to change your mind hourly, because this is the pinnacle of failure.
Here’s the monkey mind chatter to strive for: “Should you do this or do that or do this and that or that other thing or what about this hey I could do the thing over there but whoa, what’s this? Maybe I should do this – what do you think?”
Go ahead and second, third, fourth and fifth guess yourself silly and until your mind is numb and all you can do is veg out in front of the TV. Above all else, do NOT make one plan and stick to it – that’s the kiss of success and you do not want that.
3. Turn your obstacles into failures. Those stupid successful people are always taking their obstacles and turning them into triumphs. When their new website isn’t cutting it, what do they do? Fix it until it’s making sales, or start over and find a way to make it successful. That’s crazy! And it’s also more work, and who needs that? If you should accidentally actually DO something like build a new website, hope that it just sits there and gets moldy. That way you can heave a big sigh and say that “you tried” as you drown your sorrows in hops at the local pub.
Above all else, when you run into an obstacle do NOT take a step back and decide on your best course of action – this often leads to success. Do not decide that if this way didn’t work, there must be a better way. And do not tell yourself that you just found one way that doesn’t work, and you’re that much closer to finding a way that does work. Instead, throw up your hands, say that Internet Marketing doesn’t work because it’s all just a big scam, and give up.
4. Reinvent the wheel. If there is already a proven method for accomplishing something, ignore that method and go invent a new one. For example, there are all sorts of ways to successfully drive targeted traffic to websites, and these methods are used everyday by millions of online marketers. Do NOT use these methods! Instead, invent an entirely new method. This will take up lots of your time and probably lots of your money, too.
Plus the odds of it working are miniscule to none, so you’re almost guaranteed to fail. See how easy it is to avoid success? Simply thumb your nose at anything that’s proven to work and strike out to find an entirely new method to fail. (I have this traffic idea, by the way, which involves 3 dairy cows, a radial antennae and a photo of a Topeka Taco Stand – I’ll let you know how it works out.)
5. Indulge in plenty of delusions of grandeur. Your product is going to be the biggest thing since the iPod only it’s going to be BIGGER because even the tribesmen of the rainforest will be buying this up faster than blow darts and you’re going to get so much free publicity that Oprah is going to do a 1 hour prime time special just on you and your product and cripes, even your own MOTHER will love it, and she hates everything!
Whew. In your quest for Internet marketing failure, feeding these festering frenzied fantastic feats of glory will take up a major share of your time. After all, if you’re daydreaming you’re not working. You’re also not looking at the real world issues of whether or not there is actually a demand for your new discount concrete billy bob beer and crumpet party statues. One of the fastest ways to fail is to devise a product no one but you desires – and then spend your time daydreaming about the fortune you’re about to make.
Besides, this is all about failure. What are you dreaming about making fortunes anyway?
6. Be careless. Sure your ghostwriter just submitted the new product to you – just go ahead and launch it without reading it, right? Of course! How else are you going to miss the glaring error on page 42, or the fact that she omitted the entire key section people are dying to read?
Look, if you attend to details and make sure everything is in order prior to launch, you might actually be successful. So when your programmer sends you that new software, don’t check it, don’t click any links and do not test it. Just assume it’s good enough and start selling – you may do enough damage to your reputation to ensure future failure on a permanent basis.
7. Be lazy. Go watch TV, stay in bed, play video games, whatever. Just do NOT go to work on your business because you might actually accomplish something. Pity all those successful people who spend hours upon hours working on their business – no wonder why they are confined to making money, getting accolades and being successful. If they only knew how easy it is to fail they would just stop accomplishing stuff.
8. Be sick. That’s right – how can you succeed if you’re sick all the time, right? So go ahead and eat that junk food. Stay up all night. Drink until you puke. And above all, do NOT exercise. Exercise is shown to increase your health in a thousand and one different ways, including making you THINK better.
And if you’re thinking better, you’re probably realizing this entire article has been utterly ridiculous – after all, you already know how to fail. Everyone knows that. And while it does take some effort to fail, it’s well worth it. How else can you lay on your deathbed one day, wishing you’d achieved your goals instead of being a doubt-filled, vacillating, failure seeking, wheel reinventing, delusional, careless, lazy, sick, almost-was Internet marketer?
Yes, there is a #9 – and that’s to go do the OPPOSITE of all the opposites I just wrote about. Success isn’t hard – you just need to get busy NOT doing all the things we’ve just covered here.
Over and over we hear how to succeed, how to achieve our goals and dreams, and so forth. And yet, somehow most people are falling far short of those goals and dreams…
Now why is that? Perhaps it’s time to do the opposite. In a famous episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza was a perennial loser who one day decided to do the opposite of what he would normally do in every facet of his life. Result? Success!
Another example is contrarian investing – that is, going against conventional wisdom to buy when others are selling and selling when everyone else is buying – has been known to build fortunes. And this holds true for not only investments, but also in real estate.
Another example of the opposite working: Over and over we’ve been told to do affirmations to improve our outlook and our outcome. Result? If we do them a million, billion, gazillion times, they absolutely do work. But who wants to repeat the same phrases over and over 50 times a day? Not me.
Now I hear that if we simply rephrase our affirmation as a question, we only need to say it a few times here and there for it to work. So instead of saying, “I’m a success. I’m a success. I’m a SUCCESS!” we now ask ourselves, “Why am I so successful?”
Go ahead and try it and see if it doesn’t feel different than simply telling yourself you’re a success. Powerful, isn’t it? That’s because by asking the question, you are telling yourself to find all the reasons why you are successful. In other words, rather than just hearing words over and over, you are now actively participating in the process, and putting your subconscious mind to work helping you find the answers. What a difference!
I was going to write an article tomorrow on how to be successful, but I think I’ll scratch that. Instead, I’m going to write about how NOT to be successful, and we’ll see what happens. My tongue is firmly planted in my cheek as I write this, so let’s have some fun!
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment where I share with you “9 Ways to Be Certain You’ll Fail in Internet Marketing”… Be sure NOT to come back tomorrow to check it out, ok! 😉
You don’t have your own product yet and you want to make some money promoting affiliate products. But if you promote affiliate products via email, there is a better than even chance that you are making at least one of these mistakes and it’s costing you money. Imagine if every time you promote a product, you make more money with no more effort because you stop making these mistakes – wouldn’t that be worth exploring?
1. Promoting A Product Without Knowing Much About It
Just because other people are promoting a product doesn’t necessarily mean that you should, too. If you don’t know what it is that you’re selling, it makes sense that you’re going to do a lousy job of promoting it. “Hey, buy this product because other people are buying it so it must be good.” What kind of a recommendation is that?
That’s why you want to either get a review copy from the merchant prior to launch, or buy the product yourself. Then spend time actually using the product. Pick out 3 to 5 things you love about it and highlight these in your promotion.
BONUS:
By reviewing the product prior to promoting it, you’ll discover if it’s something you want to stake your reputation on. After all, if you recommend a shoddy product, your list isn’t going to be happy and your reputation will take a hit. Promote enough shoddy products and you’ll need to change your name and build a new list.
2. Using The Same Promo Copy Everyone Else Is Using
It’s the day of the big launch and you copy and paste the same email a hundred other affiliates are sending to their lists – do you really think your readers aren’t on some of these other lists as well? When they see you’re just a cookie cutter of everyone else, they’re going to recognize your emails as junk and hit the delete button. Even if they are interested in the product, they’re going to find someone else to purchase it from who’s already used the product and can give them the insider’s perspective on what to expect.
When you write your own emails, you stand completely apart from the crowd. While the cookie cutter emails are being ignored, yours are getting read and receiving clicks. Write your own promotional emails with your own unique personality and slant, with sincerity and belief in what you are saying, and you will outperform other affiliates with lists larger than your own.
3. Not Adding Value
Always think of what you can add to the product to produce more value. For example, you can add a product of your own as a bonus, or do a coaching call for everyone who purchases. You might start a mastermind group to help the buyers implement what they learn in the course, or even create a new product to give them as a bonus (which you can then sell to others.)
Always think about how you can add value. Many times it can be as simple as adding a 10 page report or 5 minute video on how to do something step-by-step that is called for in the product. And be sure the value you add is directly related to the product you are promoting. If the product is how to grow magnificent roses, then a report on the best places to buy rose fertilizer would be perfect, while a video on how to plant asparagus wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
4. Sending Nothing But Affiliate Offers
If you want your emails to get open and read, you’re going to want to mix a good share of content in with your promotional emails. No one likes to be sold to over and over again, yet everyone enjoys getting news, how-to’s and insider advice from a trusted friend. Be the friend, and make sure at least 2/3rds of your emails contain great info. This will build a relationship between you and your readers and also get your promo emails open and read.
5. Hard Selling Instead Of Pre-Selling
As an affiliate, your job isn’t to sell the product – that’s the sales page’s job. Your job is to get your readers warmed up to the idea of what the product can do for them, so that 2 things happen: First, they click the link in your email that leads to the sales page. Remember, you’re selling the click, not the product. And second, when they click that link they are interested, eager and possibly even excited to discover more.
6. Not Being Memorable
We touched on this earlier when we spoke of delivering lots of value to your list in the form of content. When you’re known for delivering value, your emails are much more likely to be opened and read. But just having great content isn’t always enough to make you stand apart from the crowd. You also need a hook: Something that makes you memorable to your readers so that each time they see an email from you, they remember exactly who you are and why they should open the email.
If you’re like most marketers, you probably assume you already stand out because you know how different you are from other marketers – but do your readers know this? From the day they join your list, you should in some way differentiate yourself. It could be by using a nickname, such as Mr./Mrs. Overdeliverer. Or it could with your own brand.
If you have another profession, you can use that as your hook. One fellow I know was a school teacher and he still refers to himself that way even though it’s been years since he stepped inside a classroom. Another marketer is known as being unorthodox (to say the least) and yet another is known for his hair and his barefoot running. These are all hooks or associations that make them stand apart in their subscriber’s minds from all the other marketers sending them emails.
Employ some of these hard-fought lessons in your own marketing, and you’ll save yourself years of trial and error, and quickly get on the fast-track to higher profits in your affiliate marketing business.
