Monday 21 December 2009

Circle Of Influence

We meet many people in the course of our careers. Some we will get to know casually while others will become close friends and trusted allies. Then there are those I call ‘centres of influence.’

These ‘centres of influence’ people are like the hub of a giant wheel. As you look back, you can see where so very many good things, things like contacts, sales and help just when you needed it most, have come from this one person.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could know that a person was to become a ‘centre of influence’ in your life *before* it happened?

Here’s the good news… you can!!
In fact, we will see today that not only is developing such relationships possible, but that such relationships can be developed without greed or manipulation.
If developing a ‘centre of influence’ relationship sounds good to you, and you want to develop it using win-win methods, today’s article is just for you!

Create a ‘Centre of Influence’
Let’s begin with a short quiz. One question. No pressure.
What is the best type of advertising?
When asked this question many people answer “the kind that works!” While no one can disagree with that, I submit that the BEST type of advertising is the one that is most overlooked.

I’m talking about word of mouth advertising.
While targeted email, banner ads, billboard ads, and even television ads all have their place, nothing compares to the power of word of mouth advertising.

Here’s why.
When one person tells another person about your product or service, the very fact that they are speaking about you constitutes an endorsement. While people might not trust advertising (in fact, they don’t) they do trust people.

If Jane feels strongly enough about what you do to tell Jim, Jim will take notice even if Jane gets the facts wrong. When Jane tells 15 or 20 Jims, she has become a centre of influence.

This is exactly why no serious marketer can afford to overlook social networking for long. Social networking is the perfect place to begin developing relationships – in fact, it’s all about relationships! Unlike paid advertising or article marketing, social sites like Twitter, Facebook and more encourage dialog, not the usual sales letter monologue.

How can we develop a powerful word of mouth advertising campaign in our businesses?
By recognizing, developing and rewarding those people who can become a ‘centre of influence’ in our lives.

It’s done in three steps. Let’s look at each step.

1. Recognition
In order to become a true *centre* of influence, a person needs to be in regular contact with the type of people who can benefit from what you do. This begs a critical question. Do you know what your ideal prospect looks like? Once you know, do this.

• List the type of clients that you would like to have more of. List what makes them an ideal client for you (they need what you do, they are open to change, etc.)

• Find common characteristics. Do these super clients go to the symphony, play golf, visit certain web sites, participate in online forums? As much as you can, be where they are.

• Get to know them on their turf. Let them see you at events they attend. Volunteer to help their favorite charity. Make yourself visible. Before people will buy and recommend us, they need to get to know and TRUST us.

2. Development
This is NOT manipulation, but education. Have you ever had someone you know buy what you sell from a competitor because they just didn’t know YOU sold it? We are not at the top of people’s minds. They have kids, mortgages, college to pay for, as well as work pressures, just like you do.

We need to position ourselves at the top of their minds by being in constant contact. We have so many tools at our disposal for this purpose. Here are three to start with.

* Send them an email once a month to announce something new in your business.

* Phone them to say hello and announce your next big event. Ask them how they are first, and keep notes so you have a point of contact for the next call.

* A personal note works very well for developing this type of relationship. Have you written a new article or been in the newspaper? Write a brief note and send it along. Notes take time, which shows that you value this relationship.

3. Reward
No, I am NOT talking about only money here. This relationship goes much deeper than that. What I am saying is that, while you are getting to know them better and educating them about what you do, take the time to LISTEN to their needs.

When you can meet one of their needs, do it immediately, even if there is no immediate return for you. This person is important to your business. Don’t TELL them, SHOW them how important they are. If this relationship does not include reciprocity, it will degenerate into a ‘what’s in it for me’ situation that will not stand the test of time.

Please understand that these relationships must be open and honest in order to work. People like to help other people, especially those they know and trust.

Develop that trust relationship with people who are well positioned to help you. You must earn their referrals. When you do, your marketing will become supercharged with what is clearly the best form of advertising … positive word of mouth.
And that is a beautiful thing indeed!

Friday 18 December 2009

Blogging For Traffic

Blogging is such a powerful way to creating your Internet Network Marketing business. I am going to assume for a moment that you do in fact have a blog, next thing is to get some rankings so you can get some traffic to your blog.

We could debate all day long the merits of having a free blog vs paying for a self hosted wordpress blog which I recommend as the only way to do blogging online. Especially if you are in the internet network marketing industry.There really are only a few ways you are going to get traffic to your blog,

A) You can pay for it, using things like ppc, ppv, solo ads,traffic exchanges, safelist

B) You can use all the services I am going to talk about today and get your blog ranked in search engines and create a back linking strategy. (this takes some time before you see your efforts pay off) But the payoff is the fact that you will have highly targeted prospects looking at what you do and that my friends is your pot of gold…….

To really make money in this industry you will have to get massive amounts of traffic, so just because I am going to show you how to get your blog indexed and get a good back link structure going don’t think for one minute that its going to be enough to help you leave your day job. You will also have to suck it up and spend some money on advertising to really maximize the earning potential of your blog. But what I am going to share with you today is a good starting point.

One of the first things you are going to want to do is set up your rss feed, I recommend using Feed Burner its a free service and it will help you keep track of your subscribers and also increases your ability to monetize your blog.
Next you are going to want to submit your blog to these sources.
1. Google Url
2. Live Search Url
3. Pingoat

There are more places to submit your blog to but I just wanted to give you a quick start list…

You can repeat this process for as many keyword phrases that you would like to get search engine rankings for. It also helps to make sure your blog post is optimized by using your keyword phrases in the title and the post.

To get even more Link Juice make sure to submit and join Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog
That my friends is how to get the word out about your blog.

Thursday 3 December 2009

How To Grow Your E-mail List

How to Grow Your Email List

Dear Friend and Subscriber,
Don’t you just get hopping mad every time you spend money to
promote your web site and the results are poor? You hardly get any
new prospects to sign-up at your site and you rarely see sales.

You feel like you’re throwing money out the window with your promotions.
You’ve followed the advice of marketing gurus. You’ve put
up forms to capture the contact information of prospects and you’re
ready to follow-up. The problem is no one’s signing up!
And even though you’re offering a valuable free gift, not enough people
know about it. As a result your new prospect intake is stagnant.

You think you’re following the correct marketing plan, placing payper-
click ads, banner ads, ezine ads and setting up link exchanges.
Your investment, however, is simply not getting you the quality and
quantity of traffic you need. Spending more time and money seems
to only bring the same poor results.

Now imagine for a minute your marketing strategies actually making
sales. Picture running promotions that actually double or triple
your investment. And making more money is as simple as running
more promotions.

Your business would no longer drain your finances but pay your
bills and build your net worth. You would have the money you need
to pay off a house, educate your children and set-up for retirement.
Plus you’d be able to take well-deserved vacations and buy the
luxury car you’ve always dreamed about.
What’s the key to turning around your promotions and making your
business a success? You need your own responsive in-house email list.

The expression, “The Money Is In The List . . .” is absolutely true
and critical to your business profits. Don’t ignore this principle or
stop reading because you think you’ve heard it before.
Interview after interview with successful net marketers tells of how
they struggled online until they started building their own list. What’s
more when you ask them: “What would be your advice to new Internet business?”
They’ll all, YES ALL, tell you to build your list. If you don’t believe
it here are some excerpts from the ebook "Autoresponder Marketing Masters":

Darryl Graham of ISORegister:
“My advice to people just coming online is to get started building
your list right now, today and don’t stop.”

Michael Hopkins of Ebook Times:
“Get started working with your list right away! Even if you’ve only
got 17 subscribers, prepare an email and send it.”

Cody Moya of Resell Rights:
“Build you own opt-in list of people who want your information.”

Rob Taylor of Megastep International:
“So my advice... start building your lists.”

Patric Chan of eSuccess Mastery:
“You need to create a responsive mailing list and the best way to
do that is to create a relationship with your subscribers by treating
them as your friends.”

When you have a responsive in house list, promotions sent to your
list make money. Your subscribers buy from you again and again
and again.So how do you build a responsive in house list?

There are 2 parts to building a good list.
Step one is acquiring a steady stream of new subscribers.

If your current promotions are failing to bring in subscribers you
need to change tactics. First you need to take a look at your marketing
and ask the question – is its main focus on getting sign-ups.
Stop advertising products / services. Start advertising what you give
away so you can build your list.

Next, you need to put in place ongoing subscription sources. These
are marketing tactics that create a consistent stream of subscribers
that build your in house list. You put an ongoing subscription source
in place once and it will then day after day, week after week and
month after month generate new subscribers.

Let’s review 4 ongoing subscription sources you can use to
build your list.

1) Your Site
Your number one source of subscribers will be from your own site.
You’ll want to use a squeeze page in your promotions to capture
the contact information of all prospects who enter your site. We
discussed this tool in the last article of this series. If you missed the
article you can access it from the autoresponder –
mailto:squeeze@sendfree.com Also, on every page of your site
you’ll want to include a link to your subscription page for people to
sign-up for your list.

2) Write Articles
Writing articles is another excellent technique to create ongoing
subscription sources. Before you say, I’ve heard that before and
skip ahead, STOP and read this . . .

You DO NOT want to write and submit articles to all the free
online newsletters for reprinting in their publications.
Yes, this is the advice being touted across the Internet. The problem
is the typical results from your submissions aren’t worth the
effort. First you end up competing with tons of other articles so just
getting your article selected for publication is difficult. Second, if
published, you then have to hope for good readership of the free
publication, which is not always the case. And finally, and perhaps
the most frustrating aspect of this strategy is if you do get published
you only get a one time hit from subscribers from that publication
and then it’s done.

Using this strategy, each time you want more subscribers you have
to start at the beginning again. Write a new article, submit it to all
the newsletters, hope for selection and then pray for readership.
You end up feeling like a gerbil on the exercise wheel – writing,
submitting, and keeping your fingers crossed - again and again.

Instead, what you want is every article you write to generate consistent
long-term results. One article, week, after week, month after
month should continue to pull in new subscribers.
How do you make your articles work for you instead of you
constantly working to write articles?

Focus on strategically placing your articles where they’ll have the most impact.

Here are 3 article placement strategies you can use.
For these 3 techniques to work it’s critical that you start out by putting
together a truly valuable article for your target marketplace.

Spend time researching and developing the article. (If you think
you can’t write and/or don’t have any clue what to write, the next
piece in this series will help you. So follow along with the tactics
described below and then stay tuned to your email box. You’ll learn
in the next report exactly how to create killer content with little to no
writing needed from you!)

The article you create should be made into a PDF document. Your
PDF document should contain valuable enough information that
you could sell it. You may even want to put up a sales page on your
site to sell it.

Why?
You are going to offer your PDF document for free to certain sources.
The perceived value of your PDF document will be higher to
these sources if you’re selling it on your site. As a result more of the
sources will be likely to take advantage of your offer.

Here are 3 places you should offer your PDF article to:
a) Offer the document to free online newsletters but only as a
bonus for their sign-ups.

Contact the publishers of free online newsletters telling them
of your document. Give the document to them free of charge
and grant them permission to give it away as a bonus to their
new subscribers.

Your article, rather than being published once, now will be given
to all the newsletters’ new subscribers. It will get exposure again
and again, week after week. What’s more it is likely to gain good
readership, as new subscribers of a publication are the most
responsive readers.

Those who read your document and like the information you’ve
provided are going to subscribe to your list. You, of course, included
a tag line at the end of your document that provides sign-up instructions
to your list.

b) Offer the document to non-competing businesses as web
site content.
First research your target audience. Find out what they do on a day
to day basis? Where do they go online? What do they read? What
software do they use?

You want to get into the head of your target audience and know
who they’re interacting with online and who they’re doing business
with. Once you have a general outline of your audiences’ activities,
you’ll want to find the sites that are servicing them.
You can use the search engines to do the research and find the
sites where your target audience goes. You may also want to use
Alexa.com to narrow your selections, so you can reach out to the
more heavily visited sites.

Yes, it will take you time to do the research at first but stick to it. As
you find sites, send a personal email to the site’s contact person offering
your document as free content for their site. Explain how your
document will benefit their audience base and be appreciated.
Keep a list with each site’s information and contact person. When
you create your next document contacting these sites again will be
considerably faster.

Having your article permanently incorporated and featured in the
content of non-competing business’ sites brings in long term results
and is well worth the effort.

c) Offer the document to offline media.
Submit the article you’ve written to offline newspapers, magazines,
trade publication and professional association newsletters.
Subscribers of offline publications usually are “paying customers”
and your article will get good readership. You’ll find offline publications
have a longer shelf life than email publications. A good article
in a print publication will be kept and referenced again and again.
In addition, the quality of subscribers acquired through offline publications
is excellent and worth the time it takes to get published.
What’s more, once published offline by a media source, it will be
easier to get more of your work published.

Each of these 3 article tactics works to create ongoing subscription
sources. While at first reading the process of getting your articles
well placed may seem tedious, in reality there’s a simple tool you
can use which will cut your work in half. A SendFree account makes
contacting and re-contacting publishers faster and easier.
At SendFree you’ll simply create a database for each of your contacts
lists. As you find contacts you’ll enter their information into the
appropriate database and automatically a personalized email will
be sent. Plus when your next document is available sending out a
notification to your entire list of sources is easy. A couple of clicks
and your done! To experience how SendFree can help your business,
go here now: http://www.sendfree.com

Write an article once a month or every other month. Then use
SendFree to notify your publication contacts that you have a new
document available. When you:
• Regularly research places that will accept your articles
• Add those contacts to your database
• Write new articles
• Offer those articles to your sources
You’ll get exposure and your list will grow. You just have to do it.

3) “Word Of Mouth” marketing tactics.
90% of Americans cite word of mouth as one of the best sources
of ideas and information. 75% of consumers feel most comfortable
when purchasing a product if a friend recommends it.
The online marketplace is built around communication. Forums,
email, blogs, instant messaging all allow users to share their opinions.
Internet users like giving word-of-mouth recommendations or
warnings - About Everything!

Your marketing should capitalize on this phenomena. All of your
email communication should encourage users to “Tell-a-Friend”
about the email. Either forward the email on or direct them to a web
page where they can drop a note to their friends.

All Your web-site pages should have links allowing visitors to “Tell a
Friend” about your page. When a friend emails a friend your information,
you are handed a hot lead without any effort. You have an
incredible opportunity to easily convert the friend and make a sale.
Don’t skip the “Tell-a-Friend” links! They work and they create
ongoing subscription sources.

An easy way to add “Tell-a-Friend” links to your site and emails
is to use the services at http://www.sendfree.com You’ll find
our web forms, email broadcasts and autoresponders all have
“Tell-a-Friend” links built in. Get started adding those links today
by using SendFree.

4) Establish Partnerships
Create a co-registration network of partner sites and dramatically
increase your exposure.

What is a co-registration network?
A co-registration network is simply a group of sites that are partnered
together. When you are part of a co-registration network you
agree to show the offers of your partner sites on your site’s “Thank
You Pages” so long as they agree to show your offer on their
“Thank You Pages”.

The goal of a co-registration network is to give your offer more exposure.
You are sharing the traffic of your partner sites and growing
your business. To get the extra exposure all you have to do is put
on your “Thank You Page” the offers of your partners.

Keep in mind by the time your visitor gets to your “Thank You Page”
you’ve already gotten the sign-up or made the sale, so you’re not
losing the visitor to another site. Rather you’re turning unused
space on your “Thank You Page” into a tool to get more sign-ups
for your offer.

Are co-registration leads any good?
Over 60% of marketers surveyed say co-registrations names
are as responsive or almost responsive as names generated
from their own site and well worth getting.
The trick to an effective co-registration network is finding partner
sites to exchange “Thank You Page” offers. An easy way to find
partner sites is to use SendFree. When you use the “Thank You
Page” tool provided with your SendFree autoresponder you instantly
have access to over 15,000 partners who can display your
offer. Now is a great time for you to act on this and get set-up with
SendFree!

Putting a co-registration network to work for your businesses is an
easy and effective way to build your list. It’s a terrific ongoing subscription
source.

If you haven’t done so already sign-up for a SendFree account today
and get a free 30 day trial at - http://www.sendfree.com
Your SendFree account will make incorporating these 4 ongoing
subscription source strategies into your marketing faster and easier.
You’ll be able to:

• Set up squeeze pages and collect the contact information of
your visitors.
• Create contact databases of publishing sources for your
articles.
• Add “Tell-a-Friend” links to your site and emails.
• Place your offer on 15,000 partner sites!
Before you know it you’ll be building your in-house list. And I
guarantee as your list grows your sales will rise.

Once you have the sign-up, all you have to do to start making more
sales is have your SendFree autoresponder deliver the valuable
gift you promised in your offer and follow-up. Good follow-up is the
second step to building a responsive in house list.
Now you just need to know how to follow-up!

Stay tuned to your email box for the next piece in this series. Discover
7 techniques to creating killer content, with little to no writing
needed from you, that will make your prospects eager to hear back
from you!


This Free
e-Course is
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If you enjoyed reading this free ecourse,
please share the PDF file with friends or
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10.
Talk to you soon!
Abbie Drew
DEMC Publisher
Copyright by DEMC 2006, all rights reserved.