BCA

By Ernie J. Geeting

Every day thousands of people decide to enter the world of internet marketing. They have heard the stories of others earning fortunes online and hope they might be able to get a piece of that pie themselves. Most have no previous background in sales or marketing. Some will succeed but many will fail. In this article I will expose the main reason people fail and then I’ll reveal to you the single most important thing you must do before promoting any product or service online.

Here’s the most important thing you must know about internet marketing…it is all about the MARKETING. Forgive me for stating the obvious but most people really don’t know what marketing really is or what it involves. So what is it exactly? Marketing is the process of promoting a product from a producer or supplier to a prospective customer in a manner that persuades the prospect to buy. It’s about matching products and services with people who want, and will pay for them. The marketing process requires study of the product itself, researching the potential market, testing, presentation, and promotion. Most people who want to make money on the internet know nothing of the process of marketing, fail to do proper research and are unwilling (or too broke) to do testing. It has been said over 95% of people who try doing internet marketing fail. Now you can understand why. You wouldn’t try flying an airplane without proper knowledge and hands-on training but yet hundreds try to start a home business in marketing without having a clue as to what to do. They are destined to crash and burn.

Making money on the internet comes from making sales, nothing more. This is done by advertising. The NUMBER ONE REASON why people fail as internet affiliate marketers is that they have insufficient knowledge and experience in selling and advertising. The cause for their lack of success isn’t the product they represent or the companies they choose to affiliate with, the problem is with the prospective marketers themselves. If you want to succeed online you need to understand the sales process and need to be willing to always be learning sales and copy writing techniques. While there may or may not be such a thing as a ‘born salesman’ (or copywriter) there most certainly are personality differences that allow the concepts of selling to come easier to some than others. However these concepts can be learned and applied by anyone desiring to do so. I urge you to seek out good books and courses about selling and copy writing. This knowledge will be extremely helpful to you when writing the content for your advertisements, capture pages and sales pages. Fortunately, most publishers or network marketing companies will provide you with a professionally written affiliate sales page and advertisements. However….

A frequent temptation newbies fall into is taking the shortcut of using a publisher provided affiliate sales page as the landing point for their visitors. A sales page is the main website page for a product that contains the advertising copy (aka: sales pitch). This is a grave error that will cost them untold wasted hours and advertising dollars. Never link directly to a ‘stock’ sales page. Did you get that? This is an important key to success: DO NOT link directly to an affiliate sales page. Why not? Because that sales page is the exact same sales page that everyone else is using. You offer no more than anyone else advertising the same page so customers have no reason to buy from you over someone else. This is the most important thing you must do before you try to market anything online. Fail to do this and you will sabotage your chance to succeed. The same goes for ads and for the same reason. Never use company provided ads exactly as written, but rather reword or rebuild them while keeping the main points emphasized

So what should you do? Here are some options…

1. Make a Capture Page. On you capture page offer a free report series or e-book about a topic closely related to the product you wish to sell. The idea here is to give away some useful information, not a sales pitch. Deliver it via autoresponder in a series with each installment having a recommendation at the end (with a clickable link) for the customer to purchase the item you wish to sell. That link can be to your company provided sales page (embedded with your affiliate id). This approach works the same way for network marketing. Give first, sell second.

NOTE: Sometimes a product you might sell might be from an online store with multiple products. Always link to the sales or catalog page specifically for that product. If you are promoting a business opportunity such as MLM, link directly to the recruiting presentation page.

2. Build Your Own Sales Page. If you are savvy at website creation you can create your own sales page. Sometimes companies will allow you to copy and paste, or even provide you with images of their product or components of their sales page for the purposes of building your own sales page. Sometimes publishers of digital products will offer a Resale Rights package you can buy that contains all the essential graphics and ad copy for creating your own pages. If you do create your own sales pages reword the advertising copy and somehow personalize your pages so they are ‘branded’ to you. Finally, make sure the finalized page is in compliance with the publisher’s rules for such pages.

3. Create a Review Page. This has become a popular way to promote products. You simply write a review (or do an audio or video review) of the product you are selling from your own perspective and then link that page to your sales page. This can be done as a stand alone website or even a a blog. Just a caution here the FTC is really cracking down on sites like these because of their covert approach. You need to make it clear to the reader that you are an affiliate and will profit from the sale of the products reviewed at your site. Be sure to visit the FTC website for the details and play by the rules. Don’t turn your ‘review’ into a sales pitch. The only reason people will read your review is to get an honest opinion and some further detail about the product. While you want to be careful not to give a detailed description of every facet of the product, you do want to give the reader enough information so they will know whether this is the type of product they are looking for and would like to see the sales page on. By the way, it never hurts to also put a link for your autoresponder capture page on your review site, perhaps you could send them review alerts when you’ve done a new review or listings of other products you’ve reviewed, etc.

4. Use Lead Capture Drop-ins. Drop-ins are nifty little tools that allow you to turn any web page into a capture page. You simply use this tool to create an opt-in form that ‘drops in’ on top of the web page you are promoting. You then link the request form an autoresponder for follow up emails. You can use these much as you would a capture page, offering a free report, ebook or just ‘further information’. These are much faster to create than capture pages and work great with company provided sales pages as they allow you to offer something personally that others aren’t while also helping you build your contact list, just like the gurus do. They are the closest thing to a short-cut.

Having read this article you now know why so many fail online and exactly what you must do to set yourself apart from everyone else. Start putting this information into practice today and you will be positioning yourself for internet marketing success.

Ernie J. Geeting is an internet marketer and writer. He loves helping people to experience more success in their lives. You can see his blog and get a free course with insider secrets to internet marketing success at http://earnonlineincomenow.info

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ernie_J._Geeting

A majority of consumers think technology has made life better in every area except personal relationships, according to the Philips Center for Health and Well-being.

Communication, information and medical treatments topped the areas of their lives that consumers felt were improved by technology. In addition, 64% of respondents said the Internet in particular had made life better, but only 26% said the same of social networking services such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Durability Top Consumer Concern

Consumers’ biggest concern was that technology be built to last, followed by good quality and the best price. Women were more interested than men in tech that could make life easier, save them time and let them express themselves through personalized features.

Just under one-half of consumers reported that technology was easy to use, and a further 32% felt it had a good mix of advanced features and basic functions. In 2004, only 13% of respondents thought technology was easy to use, indicating a dramatic increase in users’ comfort level.

Respondents ages 18 to 24 found technology easiest to deal with, while those ages 55 and up were most likely to say it was too complex to operate. Men also reported more ease of use than women.

Respondents Believe Tech Companies Understand Their Needs

Growing comfort with technology has come hand in hand with an increase in respondents who believe tech companies understand their needs (37%). Still, a majority of consumers said companies make what they think will sell, and 39% thought manufacturers simply fell in love with their own ideas.

One-third of respondents reported a substantial disconnect with tech marketers, saying companies had no idea what their lives were like or what they would use. Notably, women were 7 percentage points more likely to say so than men.

Printed with permission of E-Marketer; for complete data charts, go to E-Marketer.com

By John Riley

The thrill of participation, the engagement with others and the reward when one of your articles sparks a positive reaction to your product, your company or your blog, that’s what motivates today’s enterprising bloggers.  It’s what most of them will tell you. Bloggers relish their freedom to comment on the issues of the day, or for that matter, any subject at any time, to the Internet world and beyond. And they do. Politics, gardening, praise and criticism of products, companies, education, sex, etc. Nothing is off limits.

 Blogs have become part of the social media sweeping the country. This community of teenagers, Gen X and Y, boomers and seniors have evolved into what is now referred to as the blogosphere and it grows by the day. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and other such vehicles for building online relationships interface regularly with blogs. Companies have found blogs are an excellent way to promote and sell their products, reduce their cost of selling, and strengthen their customer relationship management efforts. Additionally, companies can monitor customer’s  reactions to their products and services and provide early detection of customer or government issues that could adversely affect their business. 

 After belatedly accepting this phenomenon, Rileybiz.com, now .org, entered the blogosphere a few months ago.

Blog History

 While browsing in the Barnes and Noble bookstore one summer day in 2006, I came across a book entitled, “Blog” by Hugh Hewitt. Intrigued with the prologue on the flyleaf touting the success of his blog that had attracted over ten million visitors in four years, I bought the book.

I had to find out if this Internet phenomenon had any serious applications for business.

 As I read the book, I learned the first blog appeared in 1999 and by 2004, there were over 4 million sites. According to Hewitt, the key to attracting visitors was content… the better the content the more visitors you could expect. The power to interact with the Internet world was heady stuff and it was easy to understand it’s appeal. That day in 2006, I concluded blogging definitely had potential as a business tool, but it would take several years to mature. Needless to say, my timing was way off.

 Currently, eMarketer says there are 27.9 million blogs in the United States. The decline in newspaper readership and television viewing is evidence of the impact of blogs and the Internet.

 “Blogs are now mainstream media”, says Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati, an Internet search engine for blogs.  “You’re also seeing media coming in the other direction by adding media content.” There’s a good reason. eMarketer estimates that in 2009, U.S. Internet users will read a blog at least once a month. By 2013, the estimate is 128.2 million people, or 58% of all U.S. users will do the same.

Want to Start Blogging? Here’s how

 Blog platforms are ‘lost leaders’. A number of Internet organizations offer free blogs in the hope you will want to later upgrade your blog or add more functions to expand its capabilities.

 1)     Blogger.com, WordPress.com and Blog.com are three good operators. After you sign up for the free blog, you receive a ‘turn key’ operation…a robust blog with excellent functional capabilities.

 2)     You can then use your host assigned URL, WordPress in my case, or go to GoDaddy.com and buy a domain name. The name of your blog can be your URL/domain name or  something different. Next, develop a clear idea of the subject you want to focus on. It can be politics, marketing, gardening, orchids, food, movies, nursing, whatever.

 3)     When your blog is in operation, your primary task will always be preparing content. That is what attracts visitors, but it needs to be refreshed regularly. I try to post two new articles each week and occasionally include guest authors. While content attracts visitors, there are other traffic building techniques you can also employ.

 4)     From there  it’s simply a matter of becoming more familiar with how the blog operates. Its not complicated. The best documentation I have found is, “Wordpress for Dummies” by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, but you can Google articles on the Internet that can also provide information.   

 After gaining experience with your basic blog, you may decide to upgrade to a more robust blog. That’s more challenging and will be the subject of my next article.