Internet Marketing Radio

Viral Collaborative Value (VCV) is the value your content brings to the social community which it serves. With valuable content focused on a specific social community, you will create a viral instinct for the content to be shared. The money will come through building value for your community. The optimization of web site content for social collaboration is about providing value for a community through good tools, portability and aggregation. In the Web 2.0 world, value is derived from social collaboration by aggregating that content into a social community. To achieve Viral Collaborative Value you need to: *Collect Email Addresses! You need to collect as many as possible. Email your list each week. *Be contactable. Put your contact information on every page of your site. *Be active in your web community. Be active everyday in your social community. *Be a giver. Make sure that you are constantly giving value to others without the hope of receiving. *Stay motivated. Make sure you are at the top of your game in positive energy. *Be in the know. Don’t be just active. Be active with purpose. Are you just going through the motions? Have a pulse on this community. *Create content of value. Make sure that the content you are creating is valuable to others. *Make every interaction a valuable one. Every time you interact with someone through a message board, podcast, or blog post your content should be right on. *Have patience! It takes time. *Get off your high horse! Not everyone is where you are, make sure you can bring them there. *Have Integrity. Don’t offer something you don’t believe in. Don’t recommend something you haven’t used yourself. *Have Wow Factor! Make sure people say Wow! every time they hear from you. *Go above and beyond. If it’s as good as the other guys, it’s a loser. Make sure you are adding value above that of your competition. *Make it easy for people to share with others. Add buttons to your content that allow people to share your content with social sites like Digg, Technorati, Furl to name a few. *Make it fresh! Don’t let your content get stale. Go back and read your own stuff, change it. *Submit yourself! Submit your content to social bookmarking web sites and search engines. Be the first to get your content out there. Make sure every time you post to your blog you are pinging the world. *Reward those that link to you! Drop them a bone by either selectively linking back to them or by doing it in some ever changing short list of top linkers to your content. *Reward users who contribute! Create a community points systems. Sometimes being at the top of a list is all a person needs. *Podcast! You should have a podcast running right now. *Blog! Where is your blog? You need one. *Forums! You need forums on your web site. *Make it portable! Your content needs to be portable to others. If you allow others to share your content in the way of podcasts, video, PDF or similar portable formats you will be able to create a viral type marketing effect for your web site. *Make it useable by others! If you provide some type of syndication so others can use your content. One great way to do this is through the creation of articles that others can post of their web site, as long as your BIO with your link remains in tact in the article. Make it easy for others to include your podcasts or videocasts into their web site. *Help others make money! Affiliate program for your products. *Aggregate to infinity and beyond! Become the aggregation source. Turn part of your site into a message board, wiki or other social aggregation platform where the value is in the aggregation of the content. *Tools! Be an active user in your own tools. Drink your own cool aid. Eat your own dog food. Make sure what you are providing is of real value and if it’s not change it. You are the master of your own tools. *Measure! Measure! Measure! Figure out what is being used and what is not. *Try something new! Don’t be afraid to fail. Make sure you get the basics down and start trying new things.

Quick Tip: Go add yourself to wikipedia. Add a page about yourself. Add links back to yourself. Add information about your products. So Chris, What is it that you do? I create search engine optimization software that allow me to promote affiliate programs through search engines by creating highly optimized web pages. I also create information products and I promote these products in the same way. So Chris, How did you get started doing this? That's very easy. Back about 1999 I was working at a very large mortgage company, who is now a household name now, you see their name on TV alot now. They were paying $10 per application to affiliates for anyone who was referred to their web site who would complete a mortgage application. I didn't know anything about Internet Affiliate Marketing back then and it sort of supprised me that we ended up owing a guy $100,000 for the month. He had referred 10,000 people at $10 a piece who completed a mortgage application. So the marketing people within the company came to me and asked me if I would investigate how this person was able to do this. So I went out and found at what this person had done. He had submitted thousands of web pages to MSN search for different keywords. All these web pages redirected the web surfers back to a 5 page web site. At the time Internet Explorer always defaulted the home page to MSN search. Unless someone installed another web browser on their machine or manually changed their home page, they were using MSN search for search results. So what happened was for personal loans, auto loans, mortgage loans and lots of other searches this person was the first 100 links in MSN search for those keywords. When anyone searched for these terms they would end up on this person's web site. He had cornered the market on MSN search. So the mortgage company asked me to put this system in place. We did and started making alot of referrals to our primary web site. We ended up getting alot of traffic and people filling out mortgage loans for free. The affiliate income was never a steady income I could depend on, so I kept a full time job and did affiliate stuff as a hobby. I made $189,000 from a one page web site. So how do you know if Internet Marketing is for you? The only thing I can say is to try it. One of my favorite things is from Dan Kennedy's book on direct marketing. He has a list of things that every direct marketing system should have. Everyone should own his book "No B.S. Direct Marketing". But basically it follows the path of lead generation, making offers, how to respond, tracking conversions, cross-selling, upselling and follow up. If you send someone a letter, somewhere in that letter should be an offer. You don't want to just send someone a letter and educate them and then say by. You should always make and offer in every item you produce. So that customers can keep the conversation going by taking action. It always easier to sell to someone who has purchased products from you before. So market and measure responses. Keep following up with your customers. One of the techniques for selling is going out there and creating copy for customers who are close to buying a product. But they have a few questions in their mind. You want to cater to their emotional brain. They probably want to know if the product can produce the results that it says it can or if others have seens good results by using the product. Is this product a scam, is it for real, etc... One of the thing that you need to do if focus your copy to the emotional brain. If you were going to build an affiliate page for mortgages, you want to sell the vision. If someone is looking at getting a mortgage are they getting one to have an extra payment every month? Of course not, they have some underlying want or need that is causing them to pursue this product purchase. You want to cater to that emotional want or need. Are they buying this home to pursure the American dream, is their family growing etc... Surround your offering with pictures, the big house, the green grass, the white picket fence, two health adults with two healthy kids, nice car, nice neighbor, etc... That's what these people want. They are looking to make a deposit in their emotional bank account. You want to tell that person hey, I have what you are looking for. People will make an emotional decision twice as fast as they will make a logical one. They will get to the logical part sooner or later, let them make that logical decision after they have left your affiliate page. You want to cater to their emotions and get them on and off your site as fast as possible. People will act on emotion twice as fast a logic. What are the top 5 areas you should focus on in Internet Marketing? 1. Blogging - focus on creating real value everyday. Write several high quality blog posts each day. If you can't create good content, goto elance.com and find someone in India who will write the stories for you. You can usually get an 400 word article for $3 each. It might cost you a couple hundred dollars but it will be well worth it. 2. Podcasting - variation of blogging, different medium. Audio or Video. People learn in different ways, so it's important to offer some options. Some people will buy all versions because they can't get enough of you. Some people will learn better listening driving their car to work, some will learn better by reading your PDF in peace and quiet. 3. Create yourself an information product - Put together a comprehensive information package about a particular topic. You know people who know stuff. Make a list of all the people you know and what they know. Write down their occupation, find out what that means, what things do they do on a regular basis. Find a couple experts and sit down as ask them some questions. Just pretend you know absolutely nothing about the topic of interest. Make them tell you everything. You want to create and information product that is soup to nuts. Transcribe the conversation and revisit it with them for additional information they may have forgotten to include on the first interview. 4. Help other people make money with your product - the long term success of Microsoft has been built on this principle. Microsoft allows other companies to use their products and make money by building customized solutions for their customers. 5. Find a Joint Venture partner - Get your product exposed to other people's customers. Find someone who will promote your product to their email list. If they don't have one, move on. You want to get your product in front of as many people as possible who are interested in the types of products you sell. So what mistakes have I made? The first thing I would say is that I should have got started a a lot sooner. I started back in 1999, but I really should have started in 1995 or 1996. Having those 3 years could have made a huge difference for me. So what is the difference between myself and all the other people who are doing the same thing that I am doing. I would prefer to thing that there are not alot of people who are doing what I am doing. But besides that I think I bring alot of value to my subscribers and listeners. Giving away value builds credibility in the marketplace. I would say that alot of people out there who are doing Internet Marketing are teasing their customers into buying their products and once the customers buy the products they read them and say "Wow, that makes sense", well of course it does, because these products are usually just common sense ideas. If you would have done the research for a few days you would have received the same answer. For example this podcast is some good value you are receiving from me for free. What makes the difference between a good and a great Internet marketer? A good Internet marketer has a good product, with a good sales page and they make some sales. A great Internet marketer has a good product in many formats. PDF, Audio, Video. They have a blog. They have user forums so users can answer questions. They provide a lot of value in every interaction. They post all their contact information on every page of their web site. They answer the phone when you call. They are highly available to interact with their customers. They have an email list, they send regular weekly emails with good value. They have a podcast. They regularly cross-sell and up-sell. They follow-up all the time with their customers. They have a customer relationship management system in place. They have lots of good systems that make the whole process work. Who can you call at 2am? Who do you do business with that would not mind receiving your call at 2am. They have enough trust in you to know that it's important and they should listen. This is a very powerful statement. If you have customers that you can call at 2am, you are doing something right. It's important surround to yourself with like minded individuals who are your power team. What is the favorite part of your day as an Internet Marketer? Freedom. You can do Internet marketing whenever you want to do it. You have alot of freedom and control. What is a little known secret of Internet marketing? It's easy. It's easy to do. Alot of people get analysis paralysis when it comes to Internet marketing. For some people there will never be enough answers, for others they just do it. Just go get started, do something even if it's wrong. Sit down and organically grow your business. Always watch your purse strings. Don't do stupid things that turn a quick buck. Use the family factor, does your product have enough value that you would sell it to your family at the price you charge for it? Would your brother, grandmother, uncle find enough value in your product for what you are charging? So what were some of your goals when you got started? I wanted to make a million buck

Google is offering a new service that allows individuals to create their own custom search engine. YOu can customize the look and feel of this search engine. Google provides an interface to change colors and other aspects of the results. This search engine can filter the results down to searching only a specific list of sites. Sites and/or specific pages can be included or excluded from the search. The search criteria is defined in terms of regular google search criteria. One very easy to over look feature of the site is the ability to embed the results into your own web site. At first glance this system looks a little hokey and not very appealing. But if you dive into it, it has alot of power. I was able to create a complete new web site in about 20 minutes.My web site consists of just 2 web pages. The first web page is the search box. You type in a query and press search. The second page is the search results page. Customized to my specific settings. You can see this site that I setup at torrentdigger.com The search engine also has a built in capability for adding adsense advertising to your search results page. SO if you have an adsense account this can be a good way to make money with custom niche search engines.

Episode 3 How I made $189,000 from a single page web site. This week I bring you some real world experience in how I made money using the Internet. You will learn the techniques I used and you can use them too. Let's start with how I learned about Internet affiliate marketing. I worked for a well known Internet Mortgage company based here in Charlotte, North Carolina. That company offered an Internet affiliate program. I had no idea what an Internet affiliate marketing program was. But one month we had an affiliate who we owed $100,000 for one month. We had the marketing people come to me and ask how is this guy doing this. I investigated this and what I found was amazing. I found that this particular person was getting all his traffic from MSN at the time. At that time all Internet Explorer browsers defaulted their home page to MSN as the default search engine. So this person had alot of web pages in MSN that pointed to his 5 page web site for loans. He was getting lots of traffic from MSN and sending that traffic to this affiliate program. I thought this was amazing, I never thought that a person could earn this much money so easily. For those of you that don't know, Internet affiliate programs are great for all parties involved. It's good for the manufacturer because they get lots of exposure through web sites that they would not otherwise get, it's good for the affiliate because it allows them to make money, it's good for consumers because it does not cost them any more to buy the product through an affiliate that it would if they purchased the product through the manufacturer. So the first thing I set out to do was create my own web site that did the same technique, but in a more automated fashion. I created a one page web site that had all the content about the program and had my affiliate link to the affiliate program. I first added code to the web page to allow the page to be unique each time it loads, every time the page loads it generates a random string of keywords that it uses as the TITLE, DESCRIPTION, H1, etc... for the web page. So when this page is indexed, it will rank highly for this random set of keywords. The second thing I did was set my default 404 page to be this page. So each time my several receives ANY url, it will return this page and will return this page with a HTTP 200 ok. Which means 200 OK. Or the page is normal. All web pages on the Internet generally return HTTP 200 OK to a valid web request. So by doing this, any URL you type in on my server will return the same web page and it will always be a HTTP 200 OK. It will not return a 301 redirect, 302 redirect or 404 file not found. It will appear as if this page is real and exists on my server. The third thing that I did was add code to this page that created 10 random links. These links use a random string of keywords from my list of keywords that I am targeting. By having keywords in your domain name, path and file name, your page will rank higher. So every time a page loads on my server, it will have 10 pages that it links to, but these pages don't exist on my server, or do they. Since I changed my 404 page to be valid content, any URL is valid content. So you can imagine what this does for the search engine spiders, it generates page after page of unique high ranking content. When the search engine spider comes to your web site, it will act like a pyramid. It will load the first page that points to 10 other pages, those 10 pages know about 10 other pages and those 10 pages know about 10 other pages, to infinity. So eventually the search engine spider will give up. But before it does, it will have indexed lots of on topic keywords related to your product or service. It's important to remain on topic, don't just use any keywords. Make sure that you are in a very vertical space and that all the keywords you are promoting are related to your product or service. As always, use a domain that you don't care about for this method as it probably will be frowned upon by the search engines.

Behind every great marketer is a great library. There are three great books that every Internet marketer should have. These books are geared to old school mail order but they have some great information in them. I personally refer to these books over and over again. "101 Great Mail-Order Businesses" by Tyler G. Hicks "Mail Order Success Secrets" by Tyler G. Hicks "Money in Your Mailbox" by L. Perry Wilbur All these books are awesome. The value in these titles is enormous. They are really geared toward direct marketing with mailing lists, flyers, information product creation, classified ads, advertising all to fill up your mailbox with checks. The information in these books is priceless, you can easily translate these ideas on to the Internet. Everything around you was at one time someone's idea. Everything around was not created automatically, someone had to come up with the idea, and through hard work their vision was realized. Where do good ideas come from? Alot of the things about a good idea are caught up in the science of the brain. There really are 2 brains inside your brain. There is the Amygdula which is your primitive brain, it thinks about all the basic necessities in life, it focus on sex, food, shelter, creativity, spirituality. The other brain you have is the Neo-cortex or the prefrontal cortex brain and this brain thinks about right and wrong, learns from past experiences and makes decisions based on potential outcomes. The primitive brain is the emotional brain. Have you ever heard someone say, "Don't let your emotions get the best of you", well it has some basis in science. Alot of times you fast acting reactions are caused by your primitive brain taking over. Your primitive brain will make a decision in 12 milliseconds with limited information. Whereas your Neo-cortex will take 24 milliseconds and require additional information to make the decision. When we are selling products we want to cater to the primitive brain. The Neo-cortex takes twice as long to react to a situation than the primitive brain. The primitive brain reacts quickly to inticing offers of improving ones sex, food, shelter, creativity, spirituality. Products that cater to these needs will always be best sellers. Weight Loss, Making money, etc... fall into this category. I will cover emotional marketing at sometime in a seperate podcast. Interesting topics for the primitive brain. -Having Fun -Being Attractive -Being Popular -Being Health -Reducing time for tasks -Reducing physical pain -Being clean -Being attractive -Making Money -Saving Money -To be in style -Fill secure, security -Making you feel Approved -Making you feel important -Creativity -Feeling successful All these things feel some basic need in a person around sex, food, shelter, hunter, gatherer, creativity or spirituality. Being current in your topic selection. Current topic information is always popular. -Podcasting -Video casting, video is popular -Web 2.0 -Energy, Gas prices, alternative fuels, ethanol, solar, -Armageddon, end of times, christianity -Terrorism -Child safety -School safety -New software, Vista, IE 7, Firefox 2.0, Ubuntu, Fedora -Open source software, Audacity, Paint.NET Being on the current edge of the social or technical news. Sources for current news -ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN -TV -Blogs -Newspapers -Trends in the world (news for the moment), digg.com, bluedot.us, google news, techmeme.com, techcrunch.com, spotback.com -Forums on the web, search good for your keyword and the word forum -Competition -People, ask someone what things in the world today concern you? -Radio, XM, SIRIUS Find someone quite and sit down to yourself. I mean by yourself with no distractions in complete silence. What are the things that you know about or you know someone who knows about it? Do you know someone who knows about something? Find 5 or so people. Sit down and create a list of questions. You want to ask alot of questions, do your homework here. Ask intelligent questions. Sit down and interview that person. Everybody knows something!!!