Internet Marketing Q&A - Issue 13

I’m sorry that I’ve been out of touch for a long time. But what I was doing is very likely to be a BIG help you to in the long run. Let me explain…

Most of my readers are trying to make a serious income online. They’re at different stages of that process, and some are farther along than others.

Everybody who gives it a shot needs to learn a huge lesson. There are lots of ways to say it, but I like to describe it this way.

If you don’t invest some time into organizing and planning, you’ll get buried and lost.

You MUST organize and plan your business. If you don’t, your business won’t last.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for literally a couple months. I won’t bore you with the details, but I will tell you that I dug into my business from top to bottom to figure out what I really want to be about, and how to do it.

The result is that I’ve renewed my commitment to helping YOU. That’s what it’s all about. And the results are going to be great! There will be lots of exciting things coming. Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know.

Part of that process is continuing to answer questions from my readers.

I don’t have the time to respond personally to the hundreds of emails I get every day, but every now and then I like to collect some of the excellent questions I receive and answer them for everybody in an email.

I DO care about whether you succeed or not, and I remember how terribly frustrating it was like not to have anybody to get straight answers from.

So here’s another batch of reader questions with what I hope are helpful answers that will move you closer to success.

————- CURRENT ISSUE ————-

Internet business is similar to any other business. If you don’t have prospects, you won’t sell anything. And if you don’t sell anything, you’ll go out of business.

So in this issue, I’ll answer some questions about building your subscriber list (that’s your prospects) and boosting your sales.

1) What I can do to increase my sales? They have slowed down in the last few months and I want to turn that around soon. (asked by Arthur Broyles)

ANSWER: This is kind of the BIG question in Internet marketing.

Honestly, sales rise and fall. You’ll rarely, if ever, have two months in a row with exactly the same income.

That can be a little unpredictable, obviously, but when you see several months of declining sales, it may be time to make some changes, assuming the decline isn’t just a normal seasonal variation (yes, those happen in lots of niches).

What you need to do is give your site a “power boost.” Here are some things you can do:

* One of the easiest (and most powerful) things to try is transforming your old sales letter into a video. Video sells, often better than written words. Fortunately, this isn’t hard to do.

At a minimum, you can READ your sales letter and record it! If you want to get fancier, you can hire somebody to make you a really nice graphical video with cool transitions.

And regardless of the path you take, you can definitely add a shorter video to your existing sales page to get some video benefit.

* Another thing to try is releasing a version 2.0 of your product. You’ll want to make it genuinely “new and improved” so people will recognize the additional value and be happy with it. But you don’t have to work yourself to death.

One of the best things to do is add one or more new components. For example, if you’ve been selling an ebook, you can add a video.

* Another great tactic is to ramp up your appeal to affiliates. If you do that, they can get excited about your product and really boost your sales.

You can give them new graphics to use, which is usually pretty cheap for you. You can give them new keyword lists to use when they buy advertising. You can even give them sample ads to use, whether that’s for Adwords or classified ads or even forum signatures.

And don’t forget to add ways for affiliates and others to tell others about your product on social media sites like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg and Delicious. Those can go viral VERY fast. Don’t forget Facebook either. You should probably set up a page for your business and regularly update the content there.

Once you’ve got those things in place, tell your affiliates about them! Then consider running a sales contest to boost affiliate activity. That might sound scary, but it’s really not. All you have to do is give affiliates some incentive to promote.

For example, let’s say you sell a $47 product, and you give affiliates a 50 percent commission. That means you’re getting about $20-22 for every sale, after merchant fees. If you offer a $250 top prize for the person who sells the most, and (this is important) you set a sales minimum, you can make out like a bandit.

If you say somebody has to sell at least 12, you’ll know you have enough to cover the prize. If he sells more, you’ll be getting some serious profit. And remember, you’ll have multiple affiliates chasing that price, so your profits can be huge.

2) I don’t want to wait forever to build my list. What can I do to get subscribers right now? (asked by Rachel Williams)

ANSWER: There are probably as many ways to build your email list as there are marketers to make suggestions. But I have a personal favorite that tends to work FAST…

Ad swaps.

These are the fastest way I know of to get highly responsive subscribers who actually open and read emails. Those are the people you’re looking for, not folks who just sit on your list and do nothing.

An ad swap is what it sounds like. You and another marketer agree to promote each other’s squeeze pages to your lists. Simple.

The great news is that you do NOT need a huge list to start doing this. Even a list of 25-100 people can be useful. True, it’s tough to start with a list of zero, but you definitely don’t have to have a massive list.

Finding partners isn’t all that hard either. All you’re looking for is somebody with a list roughly the size of yours, even if it’s small! Here are few places to try:

* Post in places like the Warrior Forum. You can usually find some ad swap partners there.

* Use Google to find other marketers who have complementary offers. Don’t target folks with competing offers, or they’re less likely to want to swap ads with you.

* Search article banks like EzineArticles.com to find people who write about your niche. You can find some great partners that way.

When you find an ad swap partner prospect, send him a brief email something like this:

“I love [his free offer] and I think people who like that will love [your free offer] too. So I suggest that we do an ad swap.

I’ll promote [his free offer] in to my list and you can promote [your free offer] in an email to yours. We’re both offering something of value for free, so our lists grow to trust us more. And we both will have larger lists at the end by doing this.

What do you think? Drop me an email and let me know if you want to do it. If I don’t hear back from you within a few days, I’ll follow up.”

Don’t expect to hear back immediately. Sometimes you won’t hear back at all. Follow up like you promised to, but don’t bug people. If you get a couple people to say yes, your list will start to grow. Then you’ll have a better proposition to pitch to future partners.

I’ve found ad swaps to be extremely effective. You can add hundreds of subscribers to your list in literally a day or two.

3) What high-value free things can I offer on the front end to grow my subscriber list? (asked by Gary Trechet)

ANSWER: There’s no right or wrong answer to this one. All you need to do is find something of value you can offer for free. It doesn’t have to be HUGE value, although bigger is better. Really, anything of value to people in your niche will do.

Ebooks and videos work very well. I’d say they’re the most common on the web today, and for good reason. If somebody in your niche is looking for information, a targeted ebook is a perfect offer. But you can spruce that up a bit.

Video tends to excite people more, so if you can add a video to your ebook, people will see it as more valuable. At a minimum, you can record an audio version of your ebook. That boosts perceived value too, because people can load the audio onto their MP3 player and listen to it anywhere.

The cool thing is that you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch for your offer. You can use private label rights (PLR) material for your ebook, and then add audio or video on your own. Or you might even find an ebook AND video PLR you can use together, which means virtually no work for you. Just Google “[your niche] plr” and you’ll probably find lots of material.

A simple newsletter can be a good offer too, as long as it gives readers real value. If you just send out affiliate promotions, they won’t be happy.

Your “newsletter” could be your thoughts about various topics in your niche, even a time-limited ecourse about something in your niche. Either one can work great.

You also can offer more than one thing on the front end, such as an ecourse to visitors from syndicated articles and an ebook or videos to visitors from an ad swap. That gives you the chance to grow your list from multiple sources.

4) I don’t have any affiliates right now, even though my program is public. How can get more? (asked by Susan Lipton)

ANSWER: I think the best place to start is by posting in forums like the Warrior Forum, or in forums specific to your niche.

Relationships you develop in forums can turn into affiliate partnerships naturally. And some forums, like the Warrior Forum, even give you a place where you can ask for partners (just be sure you follow the rules).

Another route is to use JV sites to tell other people about your product and your affiliate program. JVNotify.com is a good one to look into.

JV partnerships are often more extensive than simple affiliate arrangements, but they often START there.

One often overlooked way to recruit affiliates is to find complementary products using ClickBank and Google, then contact the product owners and propose a cross-promotion. It’s not the “easiest” route, but it can be effective.

It’s actually simple to do. Dig into the product site and find some contact information, usually an email. Contact that person and say something like this:

“I found your product today while I was doing some research and I LOVE it! I think it would be a good fit for my customers. Maybe you can take a look at my product and we might do a cross-promotion? Here’s the link [link]. Let me know what you think.”

That’s pretty easy to do. All you need to find is one person who likes your product enough to promote it. If he does well with the promotion, he might tell some friends, and your affiliate army can really take off.

5) My squeeze page isn’t converting. How can I boost my conversion rate? (asked by Charles Gutfreund)

ANSWER: The biggest problems are usually the headline and the perceived value of the offer. Fix those and conversions should go up.

For example, if you’re offering an ebook, maybe people in your niche think they’ve already read enough about the topic. Use your headline to tell them you’re offering something new (assuming you are)!

And if everybody else in your niche is offering ebooks on the front end, consider offering a video instead. If you can differentiate yourself, you’ll probably get more sign-ups.

Here are some other things to try:

* Adding some higher quality graphics to your page can help. Lots of people try to skimp on their graphics, and it makes their offer look cheap. Don’t do that. Spend a little more on nice graphics that complement your product. That will probably pay off.

* Shorten the page. Ideally, it should all be “above the fold”, meaning somebody shouldn’t have to scroll to see it all. Have a solid headline (see above) and a few bullet points about why your offer is great. You don’t need a sales page here.

* Consider using a video squeeze page instead of a text one. Like I said before, video can sometimes outsell text. It also lets you say more without making your page long, which is a real plus. And yes, it can look more professional.

* If there’s no direct call to action on your page, add one! Don’t suggest, just ask. You might say, “Click the button to get your FREE copy today!”

Remember, a squeeze page is about enticing somebody to sign up for a free offer. You don’t have to convince him to buy anything. All you have to do is overcome his resistance to giving you his email address.

———-

All right, that wraps it up for this time.

If you like getting answers to questions like this, ask your own question! You can submit your question by filling out the simple form at:

http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/questions/

Every couple weeks or so, I’ll go through the questions and pick out 5-6 to answer in an email to people on my lists.

Your questions are what will make this email helpful, so please keep them coming. I can’t guarantee I’ll answer your question, but if the same question gets asked several times, I’ll try to answer that one. So don’t think, “Somebody’s probably asked that already.” Maybe so, but it’s worth asking anyway.

All the best,

Michael Rasmussen
CEO, BulletProof Marketing, Inc.

P.S. If you know any Internet marketers who would enjoy this article, just send them an email with this link: http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/internet-marketing-qa-issue-13

About the Author

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU! Go to http://www.MichaelRasmussen.com

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