Internet Marketing Promotion|Free Internet Marketing Tools

Added by webmaster on March 8, 2010.
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Tags: free internet marketing tools, internet marketing promotion, internet marketing strategies, internet marketing tips, internet marketing tool, internet video marketing, online advertising business

Internet Marketing Promotion Methods and the Free Internet Marketing Tools available are discussed in this article of Ewen-Chia’s Internet Millionare System| part-4 | Advertising & Traffic and the essential information about the online advertising business.

The Core Traffic Strategy

o you can have a good idea of the big picture, let me give you an overview of what you’ll be doing to get traffic for your website. There won’t be much jargon here, so don’t worry about not “getting” it—you’ll get it fine. What you’re going to do is start by getting traffic to your site without spending money on it. This is a critically important first step. I can’t tell you how many sad stories I’ve heard about people who spent their rent money on advertising, and ended up with more debt but no sales. It’s a little shocking, actually. The way to avoid that is to start by using free traffic methods so you can get the ball rolling. They should be fast, effective and free. Once you’ve done that, and you’ve got some sales coming in, you will have proven that you’re getting the right traffic, and that your sales process converts. That’s the key. Once you know your system works, you can spend some money on advertising with confidence. Then it’s time to spend some money! You’ll have more to spend, so that’s less of a concern. When you’ve got a system that works, and an advertising budget, you can move to strategies that cost some money. This is where you’ll get into things like Google’s Adwords program, which you’ve probably heard about. As you’re ramping up your spending, you’ll also start implementing longer term free strategies. These take a while to work, so you don’t want to start with them. But you definitely want to use them to augment the traffic you’ll get in the long run. Not complicated, right? It’s quite simple, really, and I’m going to show you how to implement each piece. Let’s start with the quick, effective free strategies. 2.0 Free Traffic Strategies

ontrary to popular belief, there’s no such thing as a truly free traffic strategy. Getting any traffic takes at least some initial effort to set up the traffic stream. That said, there are ways to get traffic that don’t take a long time to set up, and that can keep sending you traffic without additional effort. That’s what you’re after. I’ll tell you about seven of those here. 2.1 Affiliates If you’re familiar with affiliate marketing at all (and I told you about it back in Lesson 1), you probably already know what an affiliate is. And affiliate is somebody who promotes another person’s product in exchange for a commission. Now that you’re selling your own products, you can recruit your own affiliates to sell for you. If you’re selling your product through ClickBank or PayDotCom, you get an affiliate program built into your account. Anybody with an ID can promote your product. They can find your product through the product listings (that Marketplace) at either site. But here are two other things you might want to do:

Build your affiliate program into your product. I’ll show you how to do this in just a minute. It’s one of the best ways to get affiliates who are likely to promote for you because they love your product. You’ll include a link to your affiliates page in your ad, and I’ll tell you about that page in a minute.
Let visitors to your site know about your affiliate program. This is as easy as putting a link at the bottom of your site to give potential affiliates information. That link will send them to your affiliates page.

Let me talk about each of these briefly. 2.1.1 Building In Your Affiliate Program Let’s say you’re selling a reprint rights product about setting up a website. It’s actually a course with several ebooks. Inside each ebook, you can put what amounts to advertisement for your affiliate program. If you’re selling through ClickBank, and you’ll offer their standard 60-day guarantee (you have no choice about that), here’s what your ad might look like: Want To Make A Bundle With This Book? You bought it, and now you know how good it is. It’s some of the best practical website creation advice you’ll find anywhere. How would you like to make a money for telling people about it? It’s easy! I’ll give you 65% of every sale (at a price point of $47). I sell the book through ClickBank, so you’ll get your paychecks directly from them every two weeks. It’s rock-solid reliable. Imagine putting just under $30 in your pocket on every sale. How many would it take to pay your bills for the month? 10? 20? It sells like hotcakes, so it won’t be hard. You can sign up for the program right here: [your affiliate page link] If you promote your affiliate program this way, you can actually say the program is an added benefit for buyers. Yes, anybody with a ClickBank ID could promote the product, but you don’t have to list your product in the ClickBank Marketplace, so the only way people will hear about your affiliate program is if you tell them somehow…including telling them inside the product itself. Now, where does the link in your ad point? To your affiliates page. That’s where you give people information about your affiliate program and let them sign up for your affiliates list (I recommend you have one of those). You’ll also give them promotional tools there. Let me give you some examples from the affiliate page that I use for my Autopilot Profits product. In this case, I pitch the affiliate program right on the page where I deliver the product. It’s a convenient place to do it. I start the page by thanking the buyer for his purchase, and I include a Make Money! link that jumps right to the affiliate program section where I introduce the details of the program: Here I tell people about the commission percentage I offer, and how they’ll make money. My program includes commissions on several different levels of products, but yours doesn’t have to. You can offer a simple commission on your single reprint rights product. That’s perfectly fine. But what commission should you offer? That’s up to you, but here are some things to keep in mind:

Most affiliate marketers aren’t impressed by 50% commissions anymore unless the product price point is very high
ClickBank lets you offer up to 75%, but you don’t have to go that high if you don’t want to
65% is a nice place to start, because it gives people a solid commission on even a relatively inexpensive product, and still gives you a healthy profit too

After I describe the program, I give people the step by step instructions to sign up for it, like this: I give people a link to ClickBank so they can sign up for an account, and I tell them how to create their hoplink so they can promote. Then I give them some tools to use to promote (more on that in a second). One thing I don’t do, which you might want to do, is require people to sign up for the affiliate program. In other words, I could make people join my affiliates list before I give them the affiliate tools. They can promote the product for free without those tools, and they don’t have to join my list to do it since I sell the product through ClickBank. But I would probably get lots of sign-ups if I required people to do it. If you choose do that, you can put an autoresponder sign-up form on your affiliates page and add people to a separate affiliates list. Okay, back to the tools. I won’t show you all of mine, but here are some things you might want to consider offering your affiliates:

Email templates they can use for promo emails
Forum signatures they can use for niche forum marketing
Lists of keywords they can target with PPC ads
Canned product reviews they can modify and use on their websites, blogs, etc.
Graphics they can include in the product reviews or ads on their site

If you provide nice tools like that, and you offer a compelling commission, you’ll build your affiliate army in no time. 2.1.2 Tell Your Visitors I just told you about the affiliates page you’ll want to have to promote your affiliate program. You can actually use that page in two ways. I described using that page as the landing page for a link in your actual product, sort of an ad for your affiliate program. But you can also link to the page directly from your sales page. You might have an Affiliates link at the bottom of the page, perhaps in the footer. Anybody who clicks will see the details of your affiliate program, and will have the chance to sign up. You’ll want to keep two things in mind:

Don’t link to your product delivery page! You’re probably smart enough to figure this one out, but don’t send every visitor to the page where you actually deliver your product, or they’ll be able to get it for free. Instead, you’ll want to have an affiliates page that only talks about your affiliate program, not a combined page like the one I used in the example. The details of your affiliate program on the page, however, can be the same as what I described.
Decide whether you want your affiliate program to be public. Like I said, if you sell through ClickBank or PayDotCom, anybody who signs up for an account there technically will be able to promote your product. But you don’t have to put an Affiliates link on your site.

In other words, whether your tell your website visitors about your affiliate program or not is a choice, not a requirement. 2.2 Joint Ventures A joint venture (JV) is a partnership. It’s where you partner with another marketer (or service provider, or product seller…whoever it may be) to create a selling opportunity that you both will benefit from, usually by sharing profits. In the Internet marketing world, JVs are usually considered to be the same as affiliate relationships, but they’re really not. I’m known as the World’s #1 Super Affiliate. When I promote somebody’s product to my list, I typically make five figures or more, and the person whose product I’m promoting does too. But that’s not a JV. I’m simply promoting his product. A JV is a true partnership where two (or more) people contribute time, skills, money, products, etc. to a common business venture. Here are some possible examples:

One person creates a product, and another person writes the sales copy. Then the share profits.
One person creates part of the product and another person creates the other part, then they hire a copywriter to write their sales copy and split the profits between themselves.
One person taps his network of marketers to build a huge set of affiliates, and the other person does the work of creating the product and setting up the website.

You get the point—shared effort, shared reward. And the traffic onslaught from a JV can be astounding. If you partner up with somebody who has a big list and/or lots of contacts, you can see an overwhelming avalanche of visitors (be sure your web server is prepared). But how do you do this, especially when you’re pretty much unknown and have no reputation to make you sought after as a JV partner? There are two keys to success:

Creating a joint venture proposal that’s too good for a prospective partner to turn down. Really knock yourself out to do it. Your partner prospects probably get hundreds of JV proposals a week, so you need to stand out.
Finding good partner prospects. This isn’t really a science, but I’ll give you three strategies for making it easier.

Let’s start with the JV proposal. 2.2.1 Your Proposal Your proposal needs a few characteristics to stand out from the crowd:

It has to be a joint venture proposal. If you simply ask somebody to promote your product for a commission, you’re asking for an affiliate, not a partner. There’s nothing wrong with asking for affiliates, but you should know that’s what you’re doing. What you really want to do is come up with a proposal where your partner gets more out of the deal than just commissions for every sale. Can you help him in some way? Can you make his life easier? Can you overwhelm him with value?

For example, you could propose that you write some sales copy for your partner free of charge for his next product. Or you could offer to help him create his next product…or website…or autoresponder series…anything that will help. You can do those things even if you’re not famous! It’s a great way to build relationships, and probably profit at the same time.

It has to be professional. Don’t just slap together a seemingly canned email and expect good results. You need to professional about this. I’ll show you a couple sample emails in a second that will help you come across like a pro.
It has to give your partner enough lead time. Don’t expect an answer overnight, and don’t expect a partner to scurry to help you out. If you propose a JV that launches tomorrow, get ready to be disappointed. Give partner prospects at least four weeks, and preferably 6-8 weeks.

With that, here’s how you can go about pitching a JV… Your first email shouldn’t mention a JV at all. Use this email to weed out people who aren’t seriously interested. You might say something like this: Hi [prospect name], I wanted to drop you a quick note to say that I love [something nice about his site, a compliment on his newsletter, etc.] You seem like somebody I would like to work with, so I’d like to send you a proposal for something a little unique. Can I send you an email about it? If you’d rather get my proposal by snail mail, tell me your physical mailing address and I’ll send it out right away. Let me know either way, and I’ll be in touch. Thanks. [your name] There’s nothing necessarily wrong with pitching your proposal in the first email, but remember, people get a ton of those. If you lead with a short, to the point email, you’ll probably get better response. When you get a positive response, your follow-up email (or snail mail…but you won’t get too many requests for those) can make the formal proposal. You might say something like this: Hi [prospect name], Thanks for your interest. I won’t take much of your time. I’m sure you get a ton of JV proposals, so I hope to make mine stand out a bit. I’ve just created a new product called [your product name]. You can see a draft of my sales page here: [link to your sales page] And you can download a copy of the product here: [link to download your product] I’m going to sell the product through ClickBank, so you can promote it as an affiliate, obviously. But I’d like to propose something beyond that. If you’ll work with me on promoting this product so we can both build our lists and share profits, I’ll help you create your next product using the same approach I did (I based my product on PLR material). I can set everything up for you so you don’t have to do any work. All you’ll have to do is share the ownership with me (both of our names will be on the product), split the profits 50/50 and share the joint list with me. Does that kind of arrangement interest you? Give it some thought and let me know either way. I look forward to hearing from you. This could be a solid opportunity for both of us, and I’d love to work with you on it. Thanks. [your name] That’s just an example. Your proposal should fit your specific situation, but that sample gives you a feel for the kinds of things you should say—and offer. Remember, put some serious thought into it and make your proposal stand out. Once you get somebody to say yes to your proposal, all you have to do implement your JV plan. Be a nice person to work with and deliver what you promise. If all goes well, you could have a long-term relationship with this partner, and probably make a lot of money. 2.2.2 Finding Prospects Where do find prospective JV partners? Like I said before, when literally hundreds of proposals come in every week, it can be extremely difficult to get noticed. So I suggest a different approach that targets some lesser-known partners, and that uses tools you can start using right away. First, it’s smart to hang out in marketing forums like the Warrior Forum (http://www.WarriorForum.com). This is where lots of potential JV partners hang out. Spend time there. Contribute to discussions. Develop relationships. And then when an opportunity comes up, send a prospect a private forum message or email to make your proposal. I’ve made some excellent business contacts this way. Second, don’t forget Google! As a more general statement, don’t forget to keep your eyes open when you see other products for sale. Take a look at the sales pages. Note a couple things:

The person selling that product. That’s a potential partner right there. If the product is good, the sales copy is good and the marketer has a style you like, it might be worth pitching your JV to him. See if you can find a way to contact him on his site (an email address, a contacts page, etc.)
Look at the testimonials on sales pages. These people are pretty advertising that they promote products as affiliates, and possibly that they participate in JVs. Note their websites and visit them. See if you like their style, and see if you can find a way to contact them.

Third, join a JV network. A good one to check out is Mike Filsaime’s http://www.JV-Network.com: It’s free to join, and you can see a listing of product launch announcements and other “JV” opportunities. You can make your own JV proposals there as well. If you propose something other than just a simple affiliate relationship, you might get some serious interest. 2.3 Content Strategies The two strategies I just described are about partnering with people to promote for you. But you can also promote for yourself. That’s what the content strategies are about. I’ll describe two that work very well, and that are easy to get up and running fast. 2.3.1 Article Marketing Article marketing has been around a long time…and it still works great. Your goal is to:

Write an article that targets keywords in your niche
Get that article posted on one or more sites that are likely to get your article ranked well on Google for those keywords
Include a link in your article to your site (which gets you a nice one-way link to boost your Google PageRank, and also could get your some traffic directly through that link)

The articles you write are up to you, and the content will vary according to which niche you’re targeting. But here’s a simple strategy to use to write a killer article:

Make your article about 500 words. It doesn’t have to be very long. Include an introductory paragraph that introduces the topic, then several paragraphs to cover it, then a concluding paragraph to remind the reader of the key points.
Include your keyword in your title. Article directories will often use your title text in their HTML <title></title> tag for the page…which will help you rank better on Google for that keyword.
Include your keyword at least a few times in the article. In particular, include it once in the opening paragraph, and probably once in the closing paragraph. Google seems to reward that.
Put a link to your site in your author/resource box. That’s the bit most article directories let you include at the end of an article to identify yourself, advertise your site, etc. Here’s an example from one of my articles at EzineArticles.com:

Your resource box might say something like this: Article by [your name]. If you liked this article, you’ll love the free content you’ll find at his site: [link with your keyword]. The link to your site should have your keyword in it, because it will help you rank higher for that keyword (it’s a link Google rewards because it includes your keyword in a contextually helpful way). As a slight variation on this, you can also pitch your free squeeze page offer in your resource box, like so: Article by [your name]. Did you like this article? Then I’d like to offer you my free report on [your topic]. Just the first tip in this report can put $1,000 in your pocket in the next 60 days. Grab your free copy here: [link with your keyword in it]

Don’t tell the entire story in your article. It’s much better to tell part of the story, and then direct a reader to your site to get the rest. You might do that by, for example, giving 5 tips in your article and saying there are 5 more free tips at your site. You can say that in your resource box, like this:

Article by [your name]. If you liked this article, you’ll definitely want to get the 5 additional free tips you’ll find right here: [link with your keyword in it]. But which article directories should you submit your articles to? Good question. What you want to do is target directories that give you lots of “bang for the buck”. That’s why I strongly recommend that you submit to at least these two:

Google loves those, and so do information publishers who want to use articles from article directories. Watch the video showing you how to submit an article to EzineArticles.com, which is likely to get you the best traffic results. Submitting articles manually to the major article banks is fine, but to be honest, there are better uses of your time. What you really need is an article submission service which automates the process of submitting your articles to multiple article sites (meaning hundreds of them). But you need to be careful. To be blunt, some article submission services aren’t any good. But I’ve found the ultimate article submission service available today, and they’ve recently made it even better. You’ll find it here: http://www.InternetMillionaires.com/ultimate They call their new technology Article Leverage™. Here’s what they say about it: They’ll have you set up and distributing your articles within an hour. They make everything push-button simple, and their new technology lets you leverage the work you put into creating an good article and reap exponential rewards from it. I’ve never found a better service. This one has been around for years, and as you can see from the new technology they offer, they’re constantly improving the results you can get. If you’re going to use article marketing to drive traffic, be smart about it. Automate as much of the process as you can, and turn a little bit of writing into a whole lot of traffic. But don’t forget to publish material at content sites other than article directories. One of those sites is Squidoo. This site is absolutely loved by Google, and it’s extremely popular with Internet marketers. The biggest reason (other than Google loving it) is that they owners of the site want marketers to advertise there, as long as the content is good. All you need to do is set up what Squidoo calls a lens, which is a content page they host for you (it’s entirely free). It takes five minutes to set one up, and they’ll walk you through the process with a simple wizard: You’ll add content modules to your page, which can include a text module so you can type any text you want. When you write a new article for your article marketing efforts, you can post a blurb about it on your Squidoo lens and link to your site! That gives you a nice link that Google will pick up, and will get your site some targeted traffic. When you set up your lens, you’ll get the chance to “tag” it with keywords. Plug a couple or a few of your main keywords in there and you’ll be all set. Then all you need to do is update your lens at least once a week to keep it fresh and get the search engine benefit. 2.3.2 Blogging I just told you about Squidoo. When you think about it, Squidoo is really a blog (short for web log, in case you didn’t know). Blogs have taken the online world by storm, and marketers have found a great use for them—getting targeted traffic. Blogs can cover any topic you want. They can also link to your reprint rights product site. And yes, Google loves blogs. Why? Because search engines like Google love fresh, updated content that will help searchers find the information they want. That’s what blogs are. Setting up a blog isn’t hard no matter how you do it, but I recommend starting with Google’s Blogger. It’s a quick, easy, free way to put up a blog. Over time, you can move your blog to your own server, and maybe use a blogging tool like WordPress to maintain your blog. Blogger really makes the setup process easy. You’ll find a button on the home page to start the simple blog creation wizard: It’s so simple that you don’t even need a video to show you how to do it! Just follow the wizard. Here are couple things to keep in mind as you do:

Tag your blog with your keywords. This is similar to Squidoo. If you tag your blog, you’ll improve your rank for those keywords.
If you can include a keyword in your blog name, do it. Don’t fret about this, however. If the keyword fits naturally, and the name is available, it can give you some extra Google benefit when people link to your blog by the blog name.

Once you have your blog set up, post to it every time you update your Squidoo page, or add an article, or update your sales page offer…or any time you can find an excuse to post. Keep the content fresh and active is how you’ll get the most traffic benefit. And don’t forget to link to your product site! This is the critically important thing to do. When you link, put a keyword in the link text. You also can consider linking to your blog in some of your article resource boxes, instead of to your product site. That will get your blog more popularity, and improve the value of links to your product site on your blog. Once you have your blog set up, I suggest posting to it at least 2-3 times per week to keep the content active. 2.4 Social Media Social networking is one of the most exciting new online trends. You’ve probably heard of sites like MySpace. These sites are places where people can connect, chat, and otherwise relate to each other. But they’re also places where savvy marketers can get some exposure for their businesses and grab some free traffic. There are lots of social media sites out there, from social bookmarking sites like Digg.com to more “meet up” type sites like MySpace. You can probably get traffic from all of them in one way or another, even if some of those sites frown on marketers using them as a traffic source. But two sites in particular will let businesses be businesses and jump on the social media trend:

Facebook
Twitter

Let me give you a quick overview of how to use both. 2.4.1 Facebook Facebook doesn’t really publicize their business side very much, but it’s there. You’ll find it at http://www.Facebook.com/business: Facebook lets you create ads that will show up when people are browsing Facebook to connect with their friends. But you’ll have to pay for that, either when people click your ads or when the ads show up, up to the limit of your daily budget. The free option is to create a Facebook page for your business: This is similar to what an individual does when he creates a Facebook page for himself, except you’re creating a page for your business. Then people can become a “fan” of your page and tell their friends about it. with over 53 million Facebook users out there, this can be some powerful word-of-mouth advertising. It’s easy to create a page for your business, and like I said, it’s free. Click the Create a Facebook Page button and you can walk through the very simple page creation wizard. Here are a couple things to keep in mind:

You don’t have to cater to people under 25. The fastest growing Facebook demographic as users 25 and over. These are young (and not so young) professionals. It’s not just about kids discussing teen television dramas.
The key is getting fans. This isn’t hard to do. You’ll need a personal account at Facebook (it’s free too) before you set up your business page. When you set up your page, you’ll become its first fan…and your Facebook friends will see a message on their home page that you just became a fan of your business page. They might check it out, tell some of their friends, and then you’re off to the races!

I would show you a video for this but unfortunately you actually have to create a real business page when you walk through the wizard, and I don’t want to create a junk page. Don’t worry though, it’s a very simple process to create a page, and the Facebook help is pretty good. 2.4.2 Twitter Twitter admittedly sounds like a silly idea…you sign up for a free account, then other people start “following you” on Twitter, meaning they’ll be updated when you make a Twitter post. If you talk about what you’re doing in your business, your followers will get updates about your business! Signing up for a Twitter account is simple and free. Here’s the home page: Click the Join the conversation! button to sign up. Once you’re signed up, all you have to do is sign in and type short messages (140 characters or less) that you want your followers to see. Really, it’s that simple. So what’s this mean for your business? Simple. It means you can have a bunch of people who get updates about what you’re doing, which can include updating your blog, publishing an article to an article bank, and so on. You can include links to your site or blog in your Twitter posts, so people can head right there…and give you free traffic. As with most social media marketing, the key is getting contacts. In the case of Twitter, that means getting people to follow you on Twitter. Here’s a quick way to do it:

Put an invitation on your blog for people to follow you on Twitter so they can get a quick notification whenever your blog gets updated (that’s convenient for them)
Announce your invitation in forums, on Facebook, or wherever else you can
Offer helpful information on your blog and update your Twitter followers every time you post

That’s all there is to it. Twitter is really a buzz-building tool. You don’t do much direct marketing there (with only 140 characters per message, it’s tough to say too much), but keeping people informed can keep your traffic flowing. 2.5 Viral Marketing You may have heard the term “going viral” before. That’s a way of saying that something has really caught on. People are talking about it, and it’s spreading like wildfire. The marketing for your reprint rights products can go viral like that. There are probably too many viral marketing strategies to count, so I’m going to give you two that work quite well. You can expand your arsenal of strategies over time. 2.5.1 Viral Reports The point is, you’ll create a free report that you (or anybody else) can give away. Inside the report, you’ll have a link to your site and probably a direct promotional pitch for the reprint rights product you sell. That will get you free traffic. If this sounds familiar, it should. This is essentially what the report on your squeeze page is! That means you don’t necessarily have to create a special viral report—you can just reuse what you have. Then the only question is how to publicize the report. Here are few things you can do:

Offer it for free in forums. That’s right, just give it away. I’ll talk about forum marketing in a minute, and that’s how you’ll do it.
Publicize the report in giveaway promotions. You can give your free report away in one or more of the various holiday promotions that come along throughout the year. If you do this, you’ll definitely want to make sure your report offers some real value, instead of just a commercial for your product (people expect some genuine value in giveaways).
Publish the report on sites that offer giveaway rights. That could be sites like http://www.SureFireWealth.com, like I showed you back in Lesson 1.

That’s all there is to it. When your report goes viral, you’ll end up getting traffic from sources you couldn’t even have dreamed of…and that’s the point. It’s like getting traffic without working for it. 2.5.2 Viral Videos YouTube can be a goldmine for marketers, if you know how to use it. The easiest thing to do is to create a brief video that offers some helpful information, and include a link to your product site at the end. You can use the video creation tools I talked about in Lesson 2:

Provide some helpful “how-to” information, or some other information that people will like, and then publish the video at YouTube. Watch the video that shows you how to do it. 2.6 Forum Marketing Remember when you investigated niche forums to get market and product ideas? Now it’s time to use forums to sell your product. This is remarkably easy to do. The key is to promote your product in what’s called your forum signature (or “sig” for short). You might say something like this: Make more money in your pajamas than you do from your current job…starting in 30 days! Get “Work” In My PJs now. Just like with articles, blogs and Squidoo, you’ll want to link to your site from your sig, and you should try to include your keyword in the link text. So you might say something like this: Make more money in your pajamas than you do from your current job…starting in 30 days! Let “Work” In My PJs show you how to start working from home. Every forum is different, so you’ll need to check the rules about whether you can promote your own site or products in your sig, but many forums will let you do it. That’s especially true of marketing forums, like the Warrior Forum (http://www.WarriorForum.com). Once you have a sig that can attract attention, make a few posts a week to 3-5 of the most popular forums in your niche, and include your sig. That will get you some high-quality links to your site to improve your rank for the keywords you’re targeting, and will also get you some direct traffic when people click the links. 2.7 SEO SEO stands for search engine optimization. If you use the strategies I’ve talked about so far in this lesson, you’ve actually been doing some SEO without even knowing it. SEO refers to optimizing your site to rank well in search engines for the keywords you target. There are two primary factors that influence your rank:

Onsite factors. These are the characteristics of your site itself, like where you use keywords, how you organize your content, etc.
Offsite factors. This refers to the links that point to your site, either on other sites you own or on other people’s sites.

When you link to your product site from your blog, or from your Squidoo lens, or from a resource box in an article you publish at an article directory, you’re influencing the offsite factors that will help you rank well in Google (or other search engines). But you can do things on your site to improve your page rank even more. Here are a few quick things you can do:

Include your keyword in your home page title tag. This is easy to do, and here’s a quick video to show you how to do it:

[video] You’ll probably want to use a particular format for your title keywords, like this: keyword 1 | keyword 2 | keyword 3 Extensive experience by people who know a lot about SEO has shown that Google in particular likes this format. Put the keyword you want to target first (probably one of your long tail, two- or three-word phrases) as the first keyword in the list. Then add another one or two that you’d like to target in the long run.

Include your keywords in page titles. This is just like your home page, and it’s the reason you should include keywords in the titles of your article at article directories. When Google sees a link from an offsite page with a given keyword in it, and that link links to a page on your site with the same keyword in it, Google assumes there’s a tight contextual relationship between the article content and the page content…so they reward that with improved page rank.
Use your keywords on pages. Don’t overuse the keywords and “stuff” the pages, but use your keywords several times where you can use them naturally. This helps search engines know what your page is about, and they’ll rank you better for those keywords.

When I say those are “quick things” I mean that it’s quick and easy to do those things…but seeing the results can take a while. That’s why SEO is a strategy you’ll want to defer until after you’ve done the other things I’ve described so far. It’s more of a slow strategy that you’ll want to build on for a long time. And if you’re looking for a step-by-step, just the facts SEO manual that shows you exactly what you need to do to see solid SEO results within 30-60 days, I can’t recommend Lucid SEO highly enough. This course makes SEO easy to understand and implement, and it walks you through all of the steps without confusing jargon. It doesn’t matter if you barely know how to spell SEO! These guys show you what you need to do. It’s truly top-notch. 2.8 Offline Methods When most people think about getting website traffic for free, they completely ignore offline methods. That’s a potentially big mistake. There are still lots of people who don’t get most of their information online, and even for people who do, people are still people and offline methods can attract them to your website very effectively. Here are a few methods I like to use, and that you might want to consider using in your own business. 2.8.1 Event Networking Events (like seminars) that attract people in your niche are a great place to find folks who might want to visit your website. This is old-fashioned handshaking and meeting people, plain and simple. You can Google something like [your niche] event or [your niche] seminar to find events you might consider attending. For example, scrapbooking is a common niche you see in ebooks about online business. If you Google scrapbooking seminar, you’ll get results like this: Before you attend an event, make sure you have a bunch of business cards ready to hand out (you can buy these for relatively low cost at someplace like FedEx/Kinko’s). You might even consider getting some one-piece fliers printed up to advertise your product. Emphasize the free item that you give away on your sales page so people will have a great reason to visit your site. Here’s an example ad I’ve used to advertise my business: It’s actually an ad for my own seminar, which should give you an idea… 2.8.2 Conducting Your Own Seminars Don’t be intimidated by this at all! Sure, if you go full-bore and rent a huge lecture hall, you’ll probably have to spend a lot of money and attendee expectations will be very high, maybe tough to live up to. But you don’t have to do that. You can start by putting on relatively cheap webinars or teleseminars. For example, you can use a service like http://www.voxwire.com to set up a web conferences for something like $37 a month for a 10-person “room” (a website where people can hear your voice and watch a slide show you upload to the Voxwire server). When you have your room set up, you can advertise your webinar on your forums and draw a crowd. You can charge a small fee if you want, or you can charge nothing. The point is to get leads, meaning email addresses, so you can promote your site later. 2.8.3 Car Stickers and Mailers Do you get junk mail in your physical mailbox? Do you see bumper stickers on cars? Well, that’s advertising, and there’s a reason advertisers use those methods—they work. And you can use those methods yourself. You can use companies like http://www.BestDecal.com to get bumper stickers printed in various sizes. Then you can hand those out at live events you attend, at work if you have a day job, to friends in your neighborhood, in shopping mall parking lots…anyplace you might find good prospects. That’s not free advertising—you’ll have to pay for the bumper stickers. But the prices aren’t crazy. You might pay $75-100 for 100 stickers (as with most bulk printing, the more you buy, the less you pay per sticker). For the physical mail side of things, you can have postcard mailers printed up by an outfit like http://www.PostCardMania.com. You can get 5,000 of them for $300, for example. That’s only $0.60 per postcard—not free, but it’s what some people pay for each click on an Adwords ad! 2.8.4 Fax On Demand Fax on demand made its debut in 1989, and it’s still a popular way to deliver information on demand. The way it works is that somebody calls your phone number and requests information that you’ve stored in faxable documents. Then your fax on demand system automatically sends them a fax to the fax number they specify. It’s almost like browsing a website and clicking on something to see a web page about the topic…but doing via phone and fax. All you need is the service to get this done. Google fax on demand service to find options. How much does it cost? This varies based on the service and service provider you choose, but you could get a fax on demand solution for around $20 a month from multiple companies. 3.0 Paid Traffic Strategies

nce your free traffic strategies are giving you a nice traffic stream, you can choose to start buying some traffic. At that point, your free traffic should be converting to sales of your reprint rights product. If it’s not, do NOT start paying for traffic. If you can’t make the free traffic convert, paying for traffic is just going to waste money. There are lots of ways to buy traffic, but I’m going to stick to three that I’ve used myself, and that I know work very well. Let me walk through each of those. 3.1 PPC Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a simple idea. You pay the company hosting your ads a small fee when people click on your ads. The best known PPC platform is Google’s Adwords. You see Adwords ads every time you search for something on Google. They show up to the right of the search results, and possibly at the top: Setting up an Adwords account is free and easy. Refer back to the Lesson 2 video if you need a refresher about how to do it. Once you have your account, you’ll need to set up your first Adwords ad, which you can do through the ad wizard. Watch the video that shows how to use the wizard to set up a sample ad, including how to bid on keywords. You’ll hear lots of horror stories about people losing their shirt with Adwords, and I have no doubt that most of those stories are true. But Adwords isn’t anything to be afraid of if you’re smart about it. Here are some simple guidelines that should help you avoid the horror stories:

Keep your keyword bids low to start. I suggest bidding no more than 5-10 cents. You won’t get a lot of traffic that way, but you also won’t spend a ton of money for each click. If you find decent long tail keywords, you should get enough traffic to find out if your landing page (your reprint rights product sales page) converts or not.
Target a few tightly related keywords with each ad. Don’t load 300 keywords and expect to get good results. Pick two or three tightly related keywords for each ad. That will keep your traffic laser focused on related keywords, and give you much better insight into whether your ad is working or not.
Set a daily budget of $25. This simply keeps you from spending too much. You can ramp up your spending later when you know your ad is performing. Your initial daily budget is up to you, and if you can afford $50 per day, that will probably get you better results faster, but whatever the number is, keep it “low” for you.
Test two ads at once. When you set up an ad, you can have two versions of the ad (Google calls them variations) and tell Google to alternate which one shows up. Change one important thing to make the two versions different (such as the text of the first detail line in your ad). You’ll also want to tell Google not to turn off the version they think isn’t performing as well—you want to make that decision yourself after you get some results you can be confident in.

Watch the video that shows you how to set up your simple Adwords ad split test.

Include your keyword in your ad title. This is the first line of your ad (also called the headline), and it shows up as blue text. If your title contains your keyword, it’ll show up as bold text, like you see to the right in an ad that showed up when I searched for “make money online”. That bold text will attract attention and probably get you more targeted clicks.
Focus on using psychology triggers in your ads. These are things that reach into a reader’s brain and compel him to act now if he’s the right target for your product. Using your keyword in your ad title is a simple example of this. But you can do more. This can include using words like “new” and “now”, and action verbs like “get”. It also could include asking a question in your ad title (meaning you use a question mark), which tickles the brain and makes people want to click.

Adwords is a huge topic, and entire books have been written about how to write good ads and improve conversion. One of the best I’ve ever seen is Perry Marshall’s the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords. Perry is recognized as one of the world’s biggest Adwords experts, and his guide has just about everything you need to know to create Adwords campaigns that pay off. At the link I just gave you, go ahead and sign up for Perry’s free 5-day Adwords email course—it’s excellent, and it’ll show you why his guide is the best out there. 3.2 Banner Ads and Ezine Ads Banner ads and ezine ads are some of the oldest paid online advertising methods, but they still work very well. Here are some tips for using both effectively. 3.1.1 Banner Ads Banner ads used to be more popular. Back in the early days, any colorful flashing banner was likely to get attention and get lots of traffic. Now, however, people are little more jaded. They don’t respond as much to flashy ads—they respond to good ones. If you create good banner ads, you can still get good traffic. Here are some guidelines for creating good banners:

Make your ad visually attractive, not gaudy. Don’t include dancing hamsters of other silly things. Keep it professional, with nice colors and attractive graphics. Some animation is fine, as long as it’s attractive.

Here’s an example of a banner ad on my blog:

Make sure your ad fits the page context. Buy ad space on pages that show content related to what you offer. If your ad “fits” well, you’ll get higher quality traffic, which will translate into more income.
Lead to helpful content, NOT to your sales page. Take people to a page that pre-sells them on your product. It could be an article about why your product is necessary, or describing the problem it helps people to solve. Then link to your sales page inside the article, probably at the bottom. If you offer helpful information, you’ll be helping yourself. You’ll pre-qualify people who visit your sales page, and you’ll get them in the right frame of mind to buy.

But where do you advertise? You have a few options:

You can approach individual site owners. Search for sites you like and see if they sell ad space. This is sort of a grunt work approach, but it works, and you might get a great deal.
Use Adwords image ads. You can create an image ad instead of a text ad. When ad publishers say they’ll allow image ads, your ad will show up on their pages. You’ll still pay only when somebody clicks your ad, and you can control how much you bid for those clicks.
Join a banner exchange. Sites like http://www.Free-Banners.com let you swap ads with other site owners for free. You might have to display a couple ads for every one of yours that gets displayed (that’s your end of the deal), but it’s a great way to get some free traffic with banners.
Use a banner ad broker. These folks sell the extra space on people’s websites. You can find profiles of sites, find some good targets and buy ads on those sites. You’ll typically be charged based on how many times your banner ad shows up (it’s called Cost Per 1,000 Impressions, or CPM). CPM rates of $1-15 are pretty common. A good example of a banner ad broker is http://www.BannerSpace.com.

Banner ads might be an “old” strategy, but they can still get you great traffic for a relatively low cost. 3.1.2 Ezine Ads Ezine advertising is one of the simplest paid advertising methods around. The best way to do it is to subscribe to an ezine and see if you like it, then contact the owner to see if he sells advertising. You can always ask for a free ad, but odds are good most established ezines will charge for ads. Your ad fee typically will be based on where your ad shows up in the ezine, like you see to the right. The closer your ad is to the top of the ezine, the more you’re likely to pay…because ads higher up in the email are likely to convert better. You can also buy what’s called a solo ad, where the promotion for your product is the entire email. That’s the most expensive option. You should test a smaller ad first to see if this ezine gets you good sales. If it does, it’s probably worth investing in a solo ad based on proven results. Ad writing is an art like any copywriting is, but here are some tips for creating an ad that’s like to get clicked:

Use a compelling headline. This is like the main headline on a sales page. It has to get attention. You can do that by shocking the reader (if it’s tasteful), asking a question, etc. Emphasize your main product benefit, just like you do in a sales page headline.
Keep it short. Make it about 3-4 lines of 60-65 characters each, very similar to an Adwords ad. Shorter ads tend to get read more, and they also let you use some mystery to get clicks (people want to get the rest of the story you didn’t have room to tell in your ad).
Build in some urgency. Don’t lie and claim there’s urgency when there’s not, but if you can create som, that will help you. You could include a time limit on bonuses, or threaten a near-term price increase, etc.
Ask for the click. You can’t tell people to “click here” in an Adwords ad (it’s against the rules), but you certainly can in an ezine ad.

Finding ezines that might be good targets for your ads isn’t hard. You can Google “[your target niche] + ezine” or check out http://www.new-list.com to find prospects. 3.3 Offline Classified Ads Remember Craigslist? That’s the online version of classified ads. But if you’re over 30 years old, you can probably remember when the only kind of classified was offline, in newspapers and magazines. Newspapers have had a run of bad luck, and they’re reaching fewer of your potential customers these days, but print magazines are going strong. That’s because they can target niche markets, which can be a great advertising tool for you. All you have to do is

Go to your local bookstore and look at their magazine rack (places like Books-A-Million or Borders or Barnes & Noble are good places to check, because they have HUGE magazine sections)
Look for magazines in your niche market, and see if they have classified ads (write down their classified ad contact information)
When you find some good candidates, narrow them down to a few that look the best to you and come up with an ad to run
Include a URL in your ad that points people to your squeeze page, and promote your free item (report, audio, or whatever it is) in the ad

When people go to your squeeze page, just like when people get there from an online traffic source, some will join your list. Then you can follow up with them through your autoresponder and sell to them later. This is a classic direct marketing technique, and it still works great. 3.0 Conclusion

ow you know how to find great reprint rights products to sell, and how to prepare them for sale. First, I showed you how to get traffic for free. Here’s a quick review of the methods:

Getting affiliates for your product, and I showed you how to promote your affiliate program so people will sign up
JVs, and I showed you how to propose a JV so you’ll hear “yes” a lot
Article marketing, and I gave you two places you’ll want to publish
Blogging, and I showed you how to set up a free blog with Google
Facebook, and I showed you how to set up a page for your business so you can get “fans”
Twitter
Viral marketing, including using free reports and viral videos on YouTube
Event networking, such as attending seminars for people in your niche
Conducting your own seminars, which you start doing for cheap with webinars
Creating bumper stickers and postcard mailers, which you can distribute anywhere prospects might be (parking lots, work, etc.)
Fax on demand

Then I showed you four simple paid advertising methods:

PPC, specifically Google Adwords
Banner advertising
Ezine advertising
Offline classified ads in targeted niche magazines

Now that you have your business up and running, it’s time to learn how to transform your efforts from rapid money makers into a long-term business strategy. I’ll see you in the next module! Recommended Resources This book is full of great resources, so I wanted to collect them all in one place for easy reference. http://www.ClickBank.com – The web’s most popular affiliate product marketplace. It’s free to sign up for a nickname which will let you promote any of the 10,000+ products they host. http://www.PayPal.com – The most common way to accept credit card payments online (remember, you’ll need at least a Premier account to do that). http://www.WarriorForum.com – The most popular marketing forum online. A great place for forum marketing, finding JV partners and developing other relationships. http://www.JV-Network.com – Mike Filsaime’s resource for finding high-quality JV partners. http://www.EzineArticles.com – The most popular article directory online, and one of the two primary directories you should target for your article marketing campaigns. http://www.GoArticles.com – Another great article directory, and the second primary one you should target for your article marketing campaigns. http://www.Squidoo.com – A free site that lets marketers set up pages to promote their businesses. Google absolutely loves this site, which can help you get nice traffic for your keywords. http://www.Blogger.com – An excellent free blogging platform owned by Google. It takes literally a few minutes to set up your own blog, tagged with your keywords, that’s ready to drive traffic to your site. http://www.Facebook.com/business – The page where you’ll find Facebook’s business resources. There’s a link there to set up a Facebook Page for your business. http://www.Twitter.com – A very simple tool to get more traffic to your site or blog by telling people what you’re up to. SureFireWealth – A great source for free reprint rights material, and some truly excellent material at the Silver and Gold paid levels. The site is fully searchable. http://www.CamStudio.org – An open source (free) tool to create your own screen capture videos for products. http://www.Slide.com – A free tool to create your own slideshows, which are essentially a simple video you can offer as a product. Lucid SEO – The best SEO course I’ve ever seen for the money. This is truly step by step, and you can do everything these guys say you should do in a few hours. You’ll start seeing results in 30-60 days (if not sooner). http://www.Free-Banners.com – You can swap banner ads with other marketers here. http://www.BannerSpace.com – You can buy banner ad space at this site for reasonable CPM rates. http://www.new-list.com – A great list of ezines. Most accept advertising.