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Action: Select the method or media you will use to reach your target market. Here are some options: 1) Ezine Advertising. 2) Search Engine Promotion. 3) Associate or Affiliate Programs. 4) Banner Advertising. 5) PPC Advertising. 6) Pop-Up Traffic. 7) Publicity 8) Viral Marketing 9) Co-Regs 10) Online Forums 11) Any Message Delivery Method. |
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Your TM (Targeted Media) Action: Select the method or media you will use to reach your target market How will you reach your target market? You have to get your message or statement of benefits to the right audience. This is the objective of your Targeted Media or TM. In this chapter, we explore how to use the Targeted Media available on the Internet.
The above tier represents the core methods of online advertising and promotion. In my opinion, for most people the Affiliate Program and Joint Venture Offers should be the foundation. Ezine articles, top sponsorship ads in ezines and solo mailings would be next in importance followed by PPC's (pay-per-clicks). In some cases, you may move PPC's ahead of ezine promo. If those words are new to you, don't worry. I'm going to define each one as we move along here. But realize this: The TM factor is NOT just the web. Your TM may be direct mail. Or telemarketing. Or coupon inserts. Or magazines. Or newsletters. Or college papers. There are many TM's available.
Paid Advertising and Promotion to Lists Definition: Solo mailing -- When a list owner sends a stand alone email to their list about your product or service separate from the ezine itself. It's a stand alone advertisement mailing. Many ezines sell the rights to do solo mailings to their subscriber list. A lot of list owners have small subscription bases: 2,000 to 10,000 subscribers. And what's weird is that, in general, the larger the ezine list, the worse the response. In tests that are done, you'll typically see an ezine list of 10,000 or 15,000 people pull in more orders than a massive 100,000 list. The good news: Solo mailings are often cheap ot purchase. This is the reason that dollar-for-dollar solo mailings are usually quite profitable. In targeted ezines, you're reaching almost 100% of your target market. Or in offline marketing, speaking to groups of association members can be highly targeted. You know that nearly every person at the meeting has the same set of problems. So the efficiency of delivering your offer or sales message via your speech is nearly 100%. That is, almost everyone you're speaking to is a prospect for your product, assuming you have a product aimed at that target market. In the OLD DAYS when you talked about solo mailings, it was in the context of an ezine publisher sending an email to their list. But the market has changed and the ezine publishing model became less popular after the canspam laws in the U.S. went into effect. So nowadays, most people don't publish ezines. They just send offers to their list. Many people charge per click. A usual rate is .30 a click ro $150 for 500 clicks. But this is to the lists of smaller solo mailers who built their lists largely via adswaps. To find these smaller list owners, just go to warriorforum.com and look in the joint venture sub forum. Or check out safe-swaps.com. There's a much larger and more expensivive arena of having professional list owners send emails to their list on a cost per thousand basis. You usually pay $70 or so for every 1,000 emails sent. You need a big ticket offer to pay for such mailings. If you go here, you'll lists where you can pay to have emails sent on your behalf.
Search Engine Promotion Definition: Search engine -- A tool that allows you to type in a word and search the Internet for web sites on that topic. Nowadays most people have the Google or MSN toolbar's installed and use that for their searches, but no matter which method they use, you can get your ad in front of them if you're able to afford the cost per "keyword". The first thing most people think about when they think of getting traffic is landing a position on the top of the search engines. This is something you certainly can do. Here's a resource for Search Engine Optimization that I recommend: http://www.inlineseo.com In creating the current UPDATED version of Marketing Dashboard, I obviously edited the section you're reading right now. I laughed a bit because the old advice was obviously dated. Which IS the WHOLE PROBLEM with the search engine game. It's constantly changing. I CAN tell you that the method in the inlineseo product works because I used it to get top rankings for salesletters.com. It DOES take about 6 months of consistent effort to produce results in my experience. Which isn't necessarily bad. I DO have a website we used the inlineseo method on a year or year and a half ago and it's still going strong. But I have a feeling that too will change. So unfortunately, I can't really give you a lot of hot seo tips here because they'll shortly be outdated. I CAN refer you to one of my favorite seo blogs. Rusty is totally awesome at seo and will set you on the straight and narrow path.
Associate or Affiliate Programs Definition: Associate, affiliate or reseller program. These words are used interchangeably. They are a means by which you can promote other people's products in exchange for a commission on sales. More about how this is done later in this product. What's odd is that most of the people who promote products with "magic" search engine positioning methods use AFFILIATE PROGRAMS to sell the product. If search engines are so great, why don't they use them to promote their product? That's proof to me that associate programs still rule. Now, the AWESOME thing about what I just said is I originally wrote it in the first version of Marketing Dashboard years ago. And it's STILL TRUE today! There aren't a LOT of methods you can say that about. For most beginners, the highest probability of success is to start an associate program and then network like crazy to find others who will promote the product or service on a commission basis. If you only have one chance to generate traffic, this is the one. You pay people a commission for selling your products. It's proven and works. There are several advantages of affiliate program marketing, such as:
The bottom line is that for a really small amount of money, for something like AutomateYourWebSite you can have an affiliate program that has a very high upside potential in comparison to what you’ve invested. Think about this: The current cost of advertising via the PPC engines or paying for Search Engine Optimization just keeps going up and up, but when your model is "affiliate marketing", all you need to do is generate 1 or 2 sales a MONTH to cover your monthly fees. Once you've made that you'll have broken even on the costs and everything over and above that goes towards your overhead, labor and profit! What most people won't tell you about affiliate program marketing: When I originally wrote my "Amazing Formula That Sells Products Like Crazy!" (http://www.amazingformula.com), setting up the affiliate program software was a royal pain. I had to get a lot of stuff custom programmed. And then there was the non-stop customer service from affiliates. But nowadays, the biggest issue I'm facing (and I believe this applies to most everyone who promotes an affiliate program) is simply trying to keep affiliates interested and on board. I've put together a whole Dashboard on this topic which is available at www.affiliatedashboard.com What very few people talk about is that only a very small percentage of your associates will sell anything. Out of 1,000 associates, you might have 10 to 40 who sell any significant volume. But you may have to put up with a bunch of people who continually contact you to find out why they aren't making any sales, most of which are implying it's "your fault", when the actual truth is, they only had 10 hits in the last month and they think they should've sold a truckload of your products! Fortunately, any problems you encounter like this are counterbalanced by the good people who go bonkers selling your product for you. I love that part! You have to do everything in your power to get your good associates to sell more. You have to provide tools, support, motivation, emails, training, maybe even conference calls. It's important that you get people on track with your program within the first few weeks. After that, they're already on to the next program. Pretend it's your sales team and you're the sales manager. Because that's the way it is. Also, one big advantage of associate programs is branding. You get your name out there. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll talk about that more in the bonus section. One secret strategy people use with associate programs is to use them as a marketing ploy. By signing up as an associate, the customers get to buy the product at a discount. Therefore, they think they took advantage of the situation and made out like a bandit. But what they don't know is, MOST marketers have it planned that way all along. He or she knows that everyone has a little larceny tucked away in a corner somewhere. And when it's perfectly legal, the temptation can be quite appealing. So the slick marketer prices the product at a point where he/she is perfectly happy to sell it at the discount price. No big deal. It's part of the illusion and the game. I don't do this. But I know people who do. When someone signs up for my associate program I tell them right off the bat that I don't pay commissions on their own orders. So that weeds out the people just trying to sign up to get the product at a discount. And that's fine with me. Here's another dirty laundry secret: What some marketers do is hype up how much money their resellers are making. In other words, they take the 5 people who are making big money and tell their stories as though everyone makes that kind of money. But you and I both know most of the people aren't making any money at all. Now that isn't the fault of the person running the associate program. But to act like everyone is making big bucks is a trick. Why would someone do this? To get you in the mood to fork over the money to buy the product. If you think you're going to make a million selling the product, you're a lot more likely to buy it. Plain and simple. I'm not anal about this. In other words, it's OK if people talk about resellers who make a lot of money. That's totally legit because it's the truth. The deception occurs when this is represented as being what everyone makes as a way to get you to buy the product. Now you know the dirty laundry no one talks about. I don't want to play that game. That's why I give my reseller program as a free bonus to people who purchase my product. You can see the complete details on my reseller program with 70% (and higher) commissions at: http://www.promotemarlon.com
Making Money With Blog Advertising In the first version of the Marketing Dashboard, written back in October 2003 I recommended advertising in ezines and in some business niches, ezine advertising is alive and well. But overall, it's my observation that the market has moved away from ezines to blogs and other concepts. The best way to use blog ads is to exchang with others in your niche who publish blogs. I don't have a lot of friends buying blog ads and making money. But exchanging ads is a good idea. There area several sources of blog ads that have a chance of working for you:
Before you jump right in and start working on your ad what you need to know is that blog advertising isn't like banner advertising of the 90's. Technology has come a long way since then. So what type of ads work best on blogs? When I think of a blog ad I immediately visualize the type of ads that Google's "Ad Words" program displays on the blogs I read. Or on the right hand side of my search results. like these:
Although those seem to work well for Google AdWords, what seems to get better results (from what I've read at the time of writing this) are blog ads that are edgy, eye catching and rich. Unlike the text ads that work so well on Google, blog ads are very graphic rich and colorful. If you go to http://www.adbrite.com you'll find a very helpful resource there that sorts the blogs accepting ads into various categories, like:
I really like the way they give you the Alexa rating on the blogs in addition to so many other options to drill right down to a specific category, number of hits, number of unique visitors, price per day, cost per click and so forth. If you need help to design a graphic ad for your blog advertising, I recommend either RentaCoder (http://www.rentacoder.com) or Elance (http://www.elance.com). I also gave you a list of designers on row 1. If anything happens to the links here in this section, go to www.google.com or your favorite search engine and look there for the resources by typing in "Blog Advertising".
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Definition: Advertising that is performanced-based. You don't pay for the advertising itself. You only pay for clicks to your web site from the ads. Google and Facebook have largely taken over the pay-per-click game. PPC or pay-per-click advertising is in vogue at the moment. One of the issues with pay-per-click traffic is getting a volume of traffic. The other issue is the conversion of the traffic. The more specific the key words, the higher the conversion of visitors to sales, as a general rule. You CAN get a lot of traffic with this method. My own personal experience is that my traffic didn't buy. I needed to experiment with it more. I got too many clicks on words that didn't convert. I needed to weed out those low-performing words and focus on more targeted words. There's an art to making money with pay-per-clicks. It isn't my speciality. I want you to know about it. Know that it exists. Especially if you're in a business where you can be on the first page of Google through Ad Words for a reasonable price per click, then it could be a good deal for you. The good news is you can get started for almost nothing. You can test. Try different words. Find out what works and what doesn't cheaply. It's a good way to get traffic if you're just getting started. All you can do is know your numbers, test and track the results. You can do this with the ad trackers in Automate Your Website. I use a software program that is a one-off fee called AdtrackZ Gold. A lot of hard core ppc people use Prosper 202. It's a robust program and recommended for serious ppc people. Or, if you have associate program software, which you should, you can just create a reseller URL and use that to track your hits and sales. On Google, what you do is buy "Google Ad Words" which means your ad will be shown in the search results on the right hand side of the page. When someone searches using the google toolbar or by going to http://www.google.com, if you're buying that keyword and you're paying enough for it, your ad will show up like this:
In the past they used to show the sponsored links (those are the people who are paying to be listed there) in green boxes but now they blend a little more into the page. The advantage of pay-per-click advertising is you can target specific words and only pay what you can afford based on your known conversion ratios. In our screen capture, I searched on the term: Amazing Formula, so anyone buying that keyword or combination of keywords will appear in the sponsored listings. Interesting enough, since the launch (actually the private beta test launch) of Gmail (email from Google), these same sponsored links also appear when you've got a Gmail account and you're checking your mail. Here's an example: The image below is a screen capture taken from my Gmail account.
It shows an email sent to me from our own autoresponder (it was a test for a promo email I sent out about one of my products, "Video Blogging Secrets Revealed" and what's interesting is, now the end user doesn't just see YOUR ads when they're searching for something... See the "sponsored links" on the right hand side? Those are paid ads, just like what we're talking about right now. If they have a Gmail email account, you can actually see relevant ads every single time you're reading an email! Just imagine how many more eyes you can get your ad in front of now, compared to before. I bet the average person checks their email 10x more than they use Google to search for something on the Internet! The BIG SECRET of pay-per-click is this: You use what are called "sub-id's" to track your sales down to the specific keyword they came from. A friend of mine went to Bing and bought clicks on 50 keywords. He used keyword-level tracking and found only THREE of the keywords made him sales. But those sales amounted to $7500 a month or something like that. Prosper 202 can track to the keyword level.
PPV traffic is mostly Pop-up Traffic What happens is people download screensavers or games to their computers and agree in the terms of service to have a few popups displayed on their computer each day. The GREAT news about this traffic is there tons of it available and it's cheap. You'll need to purchase specialized training on HOW to use it and it's beyond this scope of this product to cover it in detail. What I CAN tell you is that mediatraffic.com and trafficvance.com are several of the popular services. Gauher Chaudhry sells a very good course on PPV advertising. There's also a product at affplaybook.com.
Publicity At http://www.prcash.com, I lay out a strategy for using the media to publicize your product or service. This is called "free publicity" in that you don't pay for the publicity. But there is a cost in terms of writing your press release, distributing it and so forth. So it isn't free in that sense. Publicity works best for products with a news angle, although a clever pr person can create a news angle for your product out of thin air. The disadvantage of publicity is it isn't easy to quantify or know in advance the results you'll get. Yet, for certain types of products, it works great. I've seen other marketers write and distribute press releases to the free online websites that you can post press releases to. By posting releases regularly, they're able to generate affiliate sales. One guy I know used to write a press release and distribute it to 40 free press release sites per week. Just by having his release appear on those sites and linking to affiliate products, he made good money! I doubt that method will continue to work. But what I DO know is that there are many opportunities to make money with press release traffic for the person who wants to specialize in it and learn all the tricks.
Viral Marketing: Viral marketing means you create something that others will WANT to pass along wo their friends. Your product or service gets promoted virally by the pass-along traffic. Here's the link to the "back door" where I have a whole slew of rebrandable PDF's. The customer version just looks like a regular PDF report, but the version given to my resellers was brandable using a tidy little program called: Viral PDF (http://www.viralpdf.com) It's extremely simple to use and inexpensive. What you do is create a special report or article in Microsoft Word. Then you add a couple snippets of code to the page, save it, turn it into a PDF, use the PDF Signer to create the brandable version then issue that to your Resellers to use. Offering reprint rights to a product that others can then sell is a form of viral marketing. Placing a lot of content or articles on a web site that others will tell their friends about is viral marketing. Here's a nifty viral ebook that shows you another awesome way to set up viral info products. This method is NOT new or high tech but it really DOES work. My friend Jason Fladlien produced 40 viral PDF reports that STLL bring him considerable traffic. If ALL YOU DID was take the method in the Ultimate Super Tip ebook and really applied that method every day, day in and day out, I bet you'd be SHOCKED with the results you get. Viral marketing is great when it happens. But it can be difficult to come up with a winning viral marketing idea. Let me explain: With viral marketing you create something that people will want to pass along. This can be a funny video, a list of jokes, or a really touching video. If you want to see the worlds BEST example of viral marketing, go to: If you watch the video, I promise you'll send it to two or three people, even if you're not religious. It's just one of the things that everyone passes along. When your viral marketing campaign is ready, whether it's a video, joke, or whatever, what you need to do that's absolutely crucial is to track your results. If you don't track the results of your campaign, you'll never know if it was directly responsible for any boost in your sales. So always track the results. The way I do this is by registering a new domain at NameCheap.com (http://www.namecheap.com) I use the URL redirect to send traffic THROUGH an Adtrackz link which tracks clicks, actions and sales. The Adtrackz Gold URL is set to resolve to the actual domain where the viral item (video, jokes, etc) is located. Using a set up like this, you're able to track the exact results of the campaign. I also recommend that you have your web site statistics tracking on the page so you can see where the traffic is coming from. This also lets you see return and repeat visitors so you can see how popular the item is. For more ideas on viral marketing campaigns, go to your favorite search engine and type in "Viral Marketing Ideas" or "Viral Marketing Campaigns." You can also check out ViralMonitor from http://www.viralmonitor.com. They have an opt-in list you can subscribe to and every day (at least from my experience) any viral videos, games or other "pass along" items have been created, they'll email you the URL to check it out. This is a GREAT resource for picking up on some good viral marketing ideas! One of the awesome things you can use now are the new breed of blog plugins that let you unlock additional content, reports or videos after people spread the word about your url. This is a tremendous form of viral marketing and costs you almost nothing. You can even use a service like Klout to see if your viral marketing efforts are taking hold. One that I have used is called Reward Button. Every Saturday I publish my ezine issue called Marlon's Marketing Minute. And I did a whole special issue showing how I used Reward Button. You can read it here. I love Reward Button. It's reall slick! There are other plugins. One is called List Eruption. There's one called Good Karma. Different ones have different benefits. The thing I like about Reward Button is it's super fast and simple to use. Imagine if you have BRANDABLE PDF's and on the download page ALSO have a reward button where people can share it on Twitter and Facebook. There are so many possibilities with viral marketing. In my own personal marketing system, I put out content every week in the form of my ezine and encourage people to change the links with their affiliate link. Then I turn these ezines into viral PDF's.
Online Forum Promotion You can promote your web site by participating in online forums and listing your URL on your posts. The thing you do here is very simple. You find 5 or so good forums and post in the 3x daily. You just go in and HELP people. Then in your signature line that many forums allow you to use, you have a link to your email capture page. That's all there is to it. You go into the forums and help people. Now, you can turbocharge that by posting a mega useful cheatsheet on a topic that a lot of newbies ask questions about when they come into the forum. You'll find that all the oldtimers refer newbies to your cheatsheet because they're tired of answering the same questions ALL newbies ask when they come into the forum. A derivative of this is FACEBOOK GROUPS. You can start your own Facebook group and interact with people there. Think about this: If you posted INTELLIGENT comments 2x or 3x per day in onliine forums and spent time helping out others then included a link to your email capture page. And then on the download page made THAT a re-brandable PDF AND also included your Good Karma link or reward button or List Eruption. If THAT is all you did, and you did it every day and spent say 15 or 30 minutes a day making intelligent posts, you might just be surprised how you build your list and start making sales when you sound out email offers.
Any Message Delivery Method Virtually any method that will deliver your message to the members of your target market is a potential Target Media. So, for example, offering free magazines (with your ad pasted on the back) to doctor's offices would actually be a Targeted Media. A list of new domain filings would be a Targeted Media. Any method that allows you to reach your audience with your message can be a Targeted Media. |
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