My Top 5 WordPress Plugins

List Building With Kindle

Have you ever considered list building with Kindle? I’ve just read about this strategy and it sounds very interesting to me because the KDP Select program gives you the ability to enroll your books in a Free Book Promotion i.e. Amazon will get the traffic for you.

If you include links to your squeeze page inside your ebook then you will be able to build a list of people interested in the topic in your book. For example, you could offer a bonus tip or a video tutorial in the book for people who sign up to your list.

As your ebook can be only 2,500 words long, it would be relatively easy to build up a library of books on Kindle.

If you also made all your books in a related niche, you could also cross-sell your other books to existing customers.

Once you have enough books on Kindle, you could be earning a very nice passive income from Kindle.

You may even pre-launch your book in a Forum like the Warrior Special Offers Forum before transferring the book to Kindle so you get access to two market places. (To enable you to charge a little more on the Warrior Forum, you could include the additional bonus content mentioned above because the reader is already on your list, thereby making your book more complete and valuable.)

All the tools for creating and launching this strategy are essentially free if you use a text editor like Google Docs or Open Office. Kindle includes a cover creator so you are golden from start to finish!

I am definitely going to try this strategy as I have a lot of ebooks that I have written on my hard disc.

My strategy will be to use the inch-wide/mile-deep strategy in creating my ebooks.

You may be thinking that you couldn’t possibly write a book. If this is you, then why not head over to a PLR site, buy a PLR book and then totally rewrite the content to make it your own.

Alternatively, buy several books on the topic and mash up the content, or indeed head over to Ezine Articles and research your content there.

Or how about taking some of your blog posts and mashing up a book from content that you have already written – a little bit of editing and you could quickly create something very valuable for others to consume – particularly if you plan your blog content in advance so that a series of blog posts creates a coherent whole.

Using a mind-map to map out the structure of your content is a quick way to sort out your chapter headings and the points to be covered in each chapter.

(WARNING: Do not be tempted to use PLR content, or plagiarize other peoples content, which has not been radically altered, on Kindle! You must make your book unique and original!)

If you could pump out one book a day, then you would quickly build traffic to your squeeze page whilst at the same time earning cash from your book sales.

Once you have built up a whole series of books, you would then be able to create one large book – a compendium of your micro-ebooks – and sell that on Amazon.

List building with Kindle is a great strategy for aspiring internet marketers.

Demo Sites For My Website Design Business

I have created some demo sites for my website design business. You can take a peek by clicking the image below. This will take you to a page where there are links to each site – there are 5 or 6 sites in total.

Story Telling With Email Marketing

I’ve been studying about how to do story telling with email marketing – specifically reading Auto Responder Madness by Andre Chaperon.

At well over 300 pages, it is an ebook that I have had on my computer for quite a while and failed to read properly because of its length – indeed, I refer to it in one of my previous blog posts.

However, it is well worth taking the time and effort of ploughing through it because it gave me clarity about how to upgrade my email marketing efforts.

Your list building efforts will have a pitiful return on investment unless you get your email marketing right – my biggest failure to date is ‘list attrition’ i.e. not knowing how to properly develop a long-term relationship with my prospects and clients even though that was always my intention. ‘Intention’ is not enough unless you deploy a few writing strategies

My email marketing has been relatively poor in the past – lacking proper structure, strategy and, yes, based on what I read in Autoresponder Madness, the content of my emails can be greatly improved.

There are 3 core tactics that are employed within Autoresponder Madness:

List Segmentation – i.e. to ensure that you send relevant messages to your list it is critical that you understand who is on your list and what they want. List segmentation is critical to this. Andre outlines a number of strategies and tools for achieving this. It is not easy to do but it is very effective!
Story-telling – he delivers his content by way of stories in automated sequences – he calls them Soap Opera Sequences – to engage the reader and uses open loops and cliffhanger content to draw his reader through his emails. These stories are in a strategic order to deliver an overall solution to the client but the client can be diverted onto sub-lists with new Soap Opera Sequences depending on which topics they show interest in. Product Launches are delivered sparingly via broadcasts, perhaps once a month. Each email has a ‘hook’ and ends in a cliffhanger.
He uses Jay Abraham’s Strategy of Preeminence in creating a strong relationship with his readers i.e. he works hard to become their trusted long-term advisor, which results in incredible conversion rates from small lists.

A surprising bonus at the end of the book was that he outlined the structure of his working day. His work schedule is two 90 minute sessions in the morning with a 30 minute rest in between and then in the afternoon he works in Pomodoro sessions of 25 minutes each to reflect his shorter attention span in the afternoon. As he lives in Spain, he takes ‘siesta’ time midday.

Within Autoresponder Madness, he refers to a product called Nano Lists which is not officially for sale. I managed to get hold of a copy of this too. This was also an eye-opener as to how well you can do with skilful list-building and email marketing i.e. adopting a smart strategy is crucial for success.

Together, both these products have made me realise that my email marketing needs to be upgraded in both strategic intent and content. I have received a glimpse of how it can be done so much better and I now just need to take action on what I have learnt.

I wish I had read Autoresponder Madness a long time ago – possibly I wouldn’t have realised just how good the content is had I not first ‘failed’ with my email marketing!

This book and ‘Email Slick’ by Lee Murray should be required reading for any internet marketer who wants to get to grips with their email marketing.

If I can just implement the strategy of story telling with email marketing, it would be a massive improvement!

12 Smart Ways To Increase Website Conversions

My Daily List Building Routine

It’s important to have a system or routine when building your list.

That’s why I’m sharing mine – it may just help you.

Step #1 –
I start my day by checking my stats for the previous day. I can get immediate feedback on number of clicks, optins and sales through my link tracker.

This is important because it MOTIVATES me to take further action, and that action is influenced by what is working best for me already. (Try to avoid taking any action that you can’t measure – measuring the results of your actions is critically important to your success – you must, must, must find a way to do it!)

Step #2 –
I open up my auto-responder and create my daily follow-up and broadcast emails. Sending value and promoting products is how my business makes money so I need to do this and get good at it. (I track all the links I put in my emails so I can see what is working – see Step #1 above.)

One of the most helpful products on email marketing is Lee Murray’s Email Slick – it pays to invest time in getting good at email marketing.

Step #3 –
I make sure that I implement AT LEAST one traffic strategy each day.

In truth this is where you need to spend 80 to 90% of your time if you want to build your list quickly.

Again track all your links to see which traffic sources work best.

Step #4 –
Research affiliate offers and apply for affiliate links. (If you are are PRO member of List Spark (see below), the research part has been carried out for you.)

You need to do this in advance to ensure that you have offers to put into your daily emails to your list (- it may take time to get approved as an affiliate for some products so you need to plan out your promotions schedule in advance.)

Step #5 –
Ideally you should be creating your own products/content to offer to your list – these can be free or paid offers or a combo of the two.

Preferably your products need to be part of an extended sales funnel but it quite OK to build your sales funnel over time i.e. get your squeeze page converting and then add an upsell and a downsell and then later add another offer on if those are converting.

One of my biggest mistakes in the past was trying to create products that were too big, and therefore difficult, to make and consume. I advise creating products that can be consumed in one hour or less i.e. concentrate on quality rather than quantity.

Step #6 –
If you rinse and repeat this 6-step process daily, I don’t think that you will go too far wrong 🙂

This daily list building routine may seem too simple to you but I promise that if you can execute this simple SYSTEM with focus, you will be doing a lot better than 95% of the IMers out there!

If you need help implementing this, then my top suggestion is to join the FREE viral list building system called List Spark. Most of the work involved in setting up squeeze pages, sales funnels, researching offers and link tracking is done for you and you get video training on how to drive traffic too.

I will also support you with my follow-up email sequence where I reveal some more traffic tactics.

List Spark is where you can put the above daily list building routine to great use and I recommend it highly because it is working like gang-busters for me.

What Is List Spark?

What is List Spark?

List Spark is an all-in-one viral email list building system. It combines absolutely everything you need in order to start making money online. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never made a dime online, you don’t have any money to invest, you have no previous experience in the field and that you have no clue how to run an online business.

List Spark contains everything you need to start your home-based business.

The best part is – you can get started without spending a single cent.

That’s right!

You can choose between two membership levels:

List Spark Standard (100% free, and always will be)
List Spark PRO ($19.95 / month)

In order to get started with List Spark you will need an email autoresponder. Currently List Spark supports AWeber and GetResponse. I recommend using AWeber (you can sign up for their 30 day trial for only $1), or if you want to go for 100% free approach you can register with Get Response and get their 30 day trial (no payment or credit card required).

Inside List Spark you will find everything:

Squeeze pages ready to be used (to build your email subscriber list)
Training how to drive traffic (both paid and free traffic)
Software that will allow you to get access to hundreds of thousands of high quality clicks
Support that will give you a hand if something is not clear
Cloud hosting – for ultra fast and reliable pages
Link tracking software to monitor your marketing campaigns
And more…

To learn more and get started go here:

http://marksalmon.link/?i=2258

To learn more and get started go here:

http://marksalmon.link/?i=2258

List Spark – A 100% Free Viral List Building System

I joined List Spark today – this is a 100% free viral list building system with an optional PRO membership on the back-end. This is my initial List Spark review.

I was introduced to List Spark by Ed Newman, one of my online colleagues, who I know is very good at list building. He tells me that List Spark is working well for him right now.

When you join List Spark for free, before you can start building a list for yourself you have to bring 5 subscribers to the person who brought you in to List Spark. After you have brought in 5 subscribers, you have bought your way into the free system (see what you get below) and all other subscribers are yours and they too will build your list exponentially.

After you bring in 5 subscribers – you are going to start getting viral traffic as well! Every subscriber you bring after that will need to bring you 5 subscribers before they can start using the system.

This video explains the List Spark viral engine – Video Link: http://player.vimeo.com/video/117095116

If you are a List Spark PRO member you can get commissions as well! If you are a free member – if someone decides to upgrade their account to PRO, you will NOT receive commissions (they will be passed through to the person above you which is a major reason why you should get a PRO membership).

With List Spark PRO you will be able to make money WHILE you build your list. Not only that, they will teach you how you can be using multiple streams of income (affiliate marketing, selling solo ads, ad swaps etc) to make money with your email subscriber list.

Here’s what you get inside List Spark:

List Spark Standard Membership (Free in return for 5 subscribers)

Proven to convert squeeze pages – tested with conversion stats shown. They include optional exit pop-ups as well!
New squeeze pages are provided monthly.
Conversion numbers are shown in real time
Training on list building topics – especially how to drive free and paid traffic
Link Tracker to track how well your traffic is converting
Support
Viral leads

List Spark Pro Membership ($19.95 p.m.)

Pro training (advanced strategies – affiliate marketing, selling solo ads etc)
Power emails daily – new high-converting products to promote with unique email swipes are provided daily.
Unlock the List Spark Sales Funnel (i.e. you get 90% of $19.95 p.m.) – with List Spark Standard/Free you can only collect subscribers, but with List Spark PRO you can make money while you are building a subscriber list. Every time your subscriber decides to upgrade to PRO you will get 90% of $19.95 monthly charge. If your free subscribers are making sales – those sales are getting passed to you! So you will be making sales even when you will not be driving any traffic at all!
Unlock system – don’t have to send the first 5 subscribers to the person that introduced you. Every subscriber (and buyer) will be yours to keep!

I have purchased PRO membership because I think this is a great system for getting paid to build your list.

This video explains List Spark PRO – Video Link: http://player.vimeo.com/video/118124861

Once you are set-up on List Spark you need to generate traffic to the squeeze pages that they provide.

You can either use free traffic sources or paid ones – but which methods to use?

Here are the pros and cons of each general method but in reality you will probably have both types of traffic generation running and track the effectiveness of each campaign using the excellent List Spark link tracker that is provided for free.

Free Traffic V Paid Traffic

Free

Free (+)
Slow (-)
More work involved in making content (-)
Not that targeted (-)

Paid

Paid (-)
Very quick (+)
Less work (+)
Targeted (+)
This is what the IM gurus use (+)

Why I Like List Spark

you can get started with your list building completely free of charge
you get free high-converting squeeze pages that are updated regularly (and the sales funnel if you get Pro membership)
you can easily monitor your numbers using their free link tracking tool
it builds your list virally – it’s a very leveraged way of building a list.
one of the problems with email marketing is finding and researching good products to promote and then writing the email campaigns – this is all done for you if you get PRO membership. This is a true copy-paste money making solution.
if you want to generate traffic to your squeeze page by buying solo ads (traffic is the ‘spark’ needed to get the viral system working), there is a very useful solo ad vendor rolodex included in the PRO membership which normally costs $47

The List Spark system reminds me of the MLM business model i.e. it gets other people to help you to build your business using the viral list building system. At the moment the system is built for the ‘make money online’ niche but it could be adapted for other niches if you ignore the power emails provide in the PRO system and simply plug in your own email campaigns.

If you join List Spark through my link, I will share my list building strategies and results with you – in particular which traffic sources I am using.

Every online business needs to build a list and the 100% free viral list building system that is List Spark is a very clever way to leverage your list building efforts.

The 7 Core Pieces of Every High-Converting Sales Funnel

This article covers the 7 core pieces of every high-converting sales funnel. This is a brief summary of a webinar that I listened to following the purchase of Funnel Trax which is an app for recording and tracking your sales funnel stats that has just been launched by Mark Thompson.

I thought long and hard about buying Funnel Trax because in circumstances where your funnel is set up on JVZoo, or one of the other affiliate platforms, your stats are already recorded by the affiliate platform. But I thought that in circumstances where your funnel pages lie outside such a platform this app could prove useful. It also enables me to run A/B split-testing using this same app (quicker than Google Analytics) and also to carry out link tracking for marketing campaigns.

Funnel Trax looks to be very simple to set-up and use. Within the Funnel Trax training there was also a very useful video showing how to plan out a sales funnel using a mind map.

The webinar about the 7 core pieces of every high-converting sales funnel was presented by a sales funnel specialist and was a lengthy presentation. I jotted down some notes below and hopefully you can get the jist of what was discussed.

The off-putting thing is that there was a whole list of other things at the end of the webinar (- see under ‘Additional Elements’ below -) that he didn’t discuss because the presentation segued into a pitch for more training which I declined. Hopefully, from the headings below you can get an idea of what was likely to be covered.

Apart from Point 6 below, I pretty much agree with the main points listed below being the critical factors for sales funnel success. Instead of Point 6, I would have included monitoring and tracking as being crucial to sales funnel success – hence my purchase of Funnel Trax!

1. Big Idea/Differentiated Hook

Goal is to prevent prospect mental opt-out
Idea behind marketing is new, interesting, compelling, and different.
Enter into the conversation already in your prospects head.
You must know your markets sophistication level – when market is sophisticated introduce a unique mechanism or process that produces the result
What are the dominant appeals, claims and benefits being presented in the market right now?
You need to differentiate yourself from the market
What is the most surprising thing about your content
Present something unexpected (contrarian perspective)
Simple education-based sales funnel: Squeeze page – 3 content videos – 1 sales video
Power of metaphor language – instantly accessible
Tangible and concrete
The power of emotion

2. Single, Unique Big Promise

Stems from understanding the market
Must resolve an urgent problem
Powered by the unique results delivery mechanism
Understand the deeper benefits behind obvious benefits
Show, don’t tell
Turn the promise into a picture
Picture touches as many of the 5 senses as possible
Appeal to mind, heart and wallet
It must appeal to feelings, beliefs and desires
Power verbs not hypey-adjectives
Recommended Book: The Synonym Finder by J.I. Rodale

3. Education-Based Pre-Selling Content

Everything you say in the funnel should ‘further the sale’ (strategic)
Create rapport and trusted authority based relationship whilst leading them to buy, rather than trying to sell… all giving them a sense of freedom of choice/decision.
What do prospects need to believe to buy? – about themselves, you, your product
Linear progression of claims and benefit statements to establish those beliefs
Turn a want into a need
Don’t over teach – educate in a way to create more desire and demand
Hit emotional benefits
Contrast – emotional benefits of what you are offering
Demonstrate results, role performance, relief, relaxation, recognition, remuneration
Goal is to make selling superfluous

4. Unquestionable Proof

Every single claim and/or benefit statement must be backed with at least one proof point
Always be specific
Strong reasons ‘why’
Vivid compelling pictures
Strategically placed customer testimonials/case studies – outcome-based – proactively generate the right type of testimonial. Survey that elicits testimonials.
Dimensionalise facts and figures

5. Unique Delivery System

The unique method system or process behind your product/service that brings the outcome they desire
Truly unique versus ‘not being talked about’
Explain the unique mechanism for getting them results
Present the mechanism as the catalyst of results (pluralise the verb – strip body fat v strips body fat / put music in your life v puts music in your life)
Explain why the unique mechanism works (remember proof)
Establish the value of the unique mechanism

6. Multiple Engagement Paths/Sequences

Never arbitrarily move your prospects through the funnel
Conditional content
Behavourial triggering

7. Irresistible Superior Offer

List, offer, copy – order of importance
Hard offer v soft offer
Proof of value
Damaging admission
Objection resolution
Scarcity – time-based and quantity-based. Give a reason why.
Risk reversal – creative guarantee
Why now?
Repeat, reinforce and summarise the main benefits
Outcome scarcity/urgency v offer scarcity

Additional elements

Lead magnetic creation – strategically created to pre-sell
Opt-in page creation
Conversion optimization
Funnel content
Funnel flow and retention
Multi-media follow-up
List segmentation
Data collection
List management
Segway into offer
Offer structuring
Overcoming objections
Split-testing
Metrics and tracking
Stick strategies post-sale
Testimonial acquisition
Refund reduction

That concludes my notes on webinar about the 7 core pieces of every high-converting sales funnel… I hope this was useful, if only because I gave you a link to the new product called Funnel Trax!

Powerpoint To Video Promotions

Today I’ve created some Powerpoint to Video promotions for my web design site at Salmon Web Design.

Whilst you can view them on that site, I thought that I would also add them to this site as it represents yet another method of creating animated style videos for video marketing purposes.

Here are a few of the other methods with which I create videos for my web properties:

web cam videos
screencast videos
Google Hangouts
green-screen videos i.e. replace the background
animated videos
sketch-style videos
Powerpoint videos
freestyle videos with my camera
Adobe After Effects logo stings

The 3 Powerpoint to video examples above were created from the content already on my computer just to test the format. I hope you enjoyed watching them. If so, head over to Salmon Web Design and take a look at some of the great content I have on that site to wow prospective customers.

How To Build Your List Of Subscribers…Fast

In this article I will discuss how to build your list of subscribers quickly and why this must be your absolute #1 priority as a business.

The business of internet marketing is about putting people onto lists, sending them emails and them clicking on the links in our emails, purchasing products and services that we recommend, in return for which we receive money/commissions.

The important thing is to focus on list building as your goal – the size and quality of your list is key to the size of your income and success.

Building a list is simply a question of maths.

It requires traffic/visitors to a your website or landing page to click on an offer (free or paid) to join your list and for you to then follow-up with them to develop a relationship and make offers.

The number and quality of subscribers you get onto your list depends upon a number of variables:

the volume and QUALITY of traffic i.e. how targeted it is for your offer
the conversion % of your landing page(s) (which can be increased by testing variables)
the quality of relationship that you develop in the follow-up process.

These are the key metrics that Ryan Deiss works on:

$1 per subscriber per month i.e. 1,000 subscribers = $1,000 per month

20% email open rate = 200 opens 30% Click Through Rate from his emails = 60 clicks

@$1EPC = $60 x 4 emails per week = $240 per week

There are 4 weeks in a month = $960 per month from a list of 1,000 subscribers

These metrics give you a guideline to work to. In practice, the numbers will vary from niche to niche and marketer to marketer so they are merely a useful ‘rule of thumb’

So how do we get, say, 1,000 subscribers?

We first need to offer ‘something’ to a subscriber in return for their email address – either free or paid. The offer needs to be relevant to the reason they visited your web page.

(Having a free offer is not an essential pre-requisite for list building – you might simply have a squeeze page with a headline that piques the visitors curiosity and then redirects them straight to the sales page of an affiliate offer e.g. ‘This guy generated 1,000 subscribers in 2 hours at zero cost – register to find out how’ – as soon as the visitor opts in they are redirected to a sales page with that headline to their main offer.)

If we make a good squeeze page, we could convert perhaps 30%/40%/50% or more of our targeted traffic to subscribers (compared to perhaps only 5-10% if the offer is a good paid one to warm targeted traffic.)

Most marketers choose to make a free offer and then immediately follow this up with one or more paid offers in a sales funnel, supported by a follow-up email marketing campaign to maximise conversions.

Another popular tactic in the internet marketing niche is to make free and paid offers via the Warrior Special Offers Forum, which naturally has a lot of people looking for information in that niche. This can be supported by affiliate traffic i.e. affiliates drive traffic to your offer in return for a commission.

If you are driving traffic to your blog, the number of subscribers may depend upon:

the quality of your content
whether you are asking for their email address frequently throughout your blog – sidebar, in page, footer, header, in content links, exit etc
what you are offering in return for their email address
the quality of the traffic to your website i.e. how targeted it is

Conversion %

Conversion percentages are driven by a number of factors:

how targeted your traffic is
the relationship and emotions, you can create with that traffic
the quality of the offer
how much information you ask for at optin – you will get better conversions asking just for an email address than asking for more complete details like name, address and telephone number (although leads that do give this information may be more qualified and therefore more likely to convert to a sale.)
the clarity of your offer i.e. no confusion.
the quality of your copywriting – why it’s important (the hook), what it does for them (benefits), how they can do it and where they can get it NOW!
the optin mechanics and how frequently you ask for the optin – pop-overs, two-step optins, exit popups, page load speed etc
the size and quality of your sales funnel – you can increase conversions by making a variety of different offers in your sales funnel. (I include your follow-up email marketing as being a part of your sales funnel strategy.)
testing and tweaking your offer pages with A/B or multivariate testing.

Defining Your Target

Throughout this post I mention the need for ‘targeted’ traffic. This means that you must have some understanding of:

who you are targeting – demographics, newbies/intermediate advanced etc
where you can get these people from e.g. Facebook advertising, solo ads, Warrior Forum, etc If you cannot identify where to get targeted traffic from then you have a problem and may need to reassess your entire list building strategy.
why your offer is attractive to them – does it entertain, educate or solve a problem for them?

The more focused and defined your market is, and the more you understand it, the more likely it is that you can make an offer to appeal to that particular market. It is difficult to get good conversions by trying to appeal to everyone.

Earnings Per Click

This is an important metric for all internet marketers. Affiliates may not mail your offer to their lists if they cannot earn $1 or $1.50 per click minimum on average from your offer.

If you are offering only 50% commission, the affiliate only gets $0.50 per click which may not be sufficient for them to mail their list. You can rectify that by offering 100% commission on the basis that you may be able to earn commissions either from the offers made in the immediate sales funnel or from email marketing.

Earnings per click = sales revenue, divided by the number clicks or unique visitors to the sales page i.e. if sales revenue is $2,000 from 2,000 unique visitors that is $1 per click.

If you want to make a profit, the cost per click (CPC) needs to be lower than the earnings per click (EPC).

When you know your EPC, you also know how much you can afford to pay for traffic. Traffic does not become a problem when you can achieve higher EPC’s than your competitors because it means you can afford to pay more for your traffic.

If you are offering your products through a sales platform like JVZoo or Warrior Plus then your metrics (other than CPC) are calculated for you and it is easy to monitor your conversions and EPC. Alternatively you can use Google Analytics or paid services like MyClickBoss, Hypertracker, Adtrackz Gold, Quality Click Control etc.

The Purpose of Creating Your Own Products

When you create your own products, as opposed to just being an affiliate marketer, it puts you in the position of:

earning 100% from sales that you generate from your own traffic sources as well as building your list
you have potential for affiliate marketers to drive traffic to your product offer to generate profits and build your list
you control the terms of the offer – price, period of the offer, quantity offered etc
you have an asset you can leverage to grow your business further e.g. offer your product as an affiliate bonus to get more people on your list

If you do not have a product, then you need to master traffic generation so that you can earn a commission from other peoples products.

Ultimately, the best traffic strategy is to build your own list and then send them emails that direct them to whatever offer you wish. With your own list you have an asset that you can readily turn into cash.

Sources of Traffic

There are many sources of potential traffic but here are some of the most popular:

affiliate traffic i.e. other marketers drive traffic to your offer in return for a commission
forum traffic e.g. WSO or signature link in forum comments
list traffic – if you have an existing list you can email them to send them to your new offer
solo ads – drive solo ad traffic to a free offer then offer your paid product as an upsell
Facebook Ads – highly targeted – or other PPC traffic
banner advertising on niche websites
media buys – you can buy traffic from many media sites
ad swaps – I’ll mail for your offer if you mail for mine
adding your product as a bonus to another marketers download page or membership area – the buyer has to opt in to your list to get the bonus
video marketing – a lot of marketers do ‘launch jacking’ by ranking their videos for new product launches.
blog traffic
social media traffic
and so on…

If your product has a good EPC, you will find that traffic is relatively easy to attract or acquire.

You are Running A Business

In internet marketing it is easy to forget that you are running a business and that your ability to generate sales and profit is what will ultimately keep you in business.

This being the case, you need to run your business as a business i.e. monitor, tweak, tune and know your numbers – traffic volume by source, CPC, conversion %’s, EPC’s, # on your list, email open rates and click through rates, sales revenue, costs and profit.

Once you know your numbers, then you need to work on strategies for improving your numbers. If you can master the mindset of running your business by the numbers, then you will be well positioned to build your list of subscribers fast.

Classified Ads Website Completed

I’ve just completed a classified ads website for a client.

The site is called Homestay Pals and is specifically to enable anyone with a spare room in their house to advertise for paying guests – a small home business opportunity which is quite common around the world.

The difficulty in creating this site was creating a secure registration process that enables both Homestay Hosts and Homestay Guests to upload their own information and contact each other through the website.

Rather than hire a coder, I’ve used an off-the-shelf solution called Classipress Theme. This has a lot of settings and functionality which makes it quite difficult to configure but it is far easier than starting from a blank piece of paper and coding the site from scratch.

My main concern, which has been voiced to the customer, is how he intends to get traffic to the site and how does he get the site up and running with a critical mass of ads that will drive and engage visitors.

Also, there are clearly security issues in inviting strangers into your home as a Homestay guest but Homestays are quite a common business model around the world.

Despite these reservations, my client wanted to proceed as he intends to put his own house on the site and invite friends and family to join him.

He is a Christian and believes that prayer and goodwill will assist him in his endeavour to help other people to earn an income from the spare rooms they have in their homes. It also provides the guests with cheap and affordable accommodation so that everyone is a winner.

If you would like to see this classified ads website that has recently been completed, then click this link or you can view some of my other website projects at Salmon Web Design.

The Law of Averages

This article about the law of averages was inspired by a recording by Jim Rohn that randomly cropped up this morning when I was listening to my ipod whilst walking the dog.

If you do something often enough a ratio will appear.

It’s amazing.

Once a ratio starts, it tends to continue.

This information is hugely important to business success.

In baseball or cricket its called a ‘batting average’.

Talk to 10 people and you get one.

Talk to 10 more and get another one and so on.

If you get 9 out of 10 and I get 1 out 10, I can still compete with you.

How can that be?

If you talk to 10 people and get 9, I’ll talk to 100 people and get 10. I beat you.

You will learn more from losing than you do by winning.

I make up in numbers, I lack in skill.

Anybody can do this.

The law of averages can be increased.

The fourth time you talk to someone you get 2.

Why?

You’re getting better.

In baseball if you only hit 3 out of 10 balls you make $4m per year. That means that you can win big by missing 7 times out of 10!

It’s the same in internet marketing. I’ve found that from affiliate traffic, on average I can get a 10% conversion rate when I sell a digital product.

That means that 9 out of 10 visitors don’t buy!

Once you know these numbers you can work on strategies for increasing your conversion rate through strategies like split-testing, improving your sales funnel, using exit pop-ups etc.

The point is that you don’t have to ‘bat a thousand’ to make big money.

When recruiting people to his network marketing business, Jim Rohn knew he could recruit 3 out of 10 people.

His invitation to listen to his network marketing presentation went something like this:

‘I normally recruit 3 out of 10 people. I don’t mind if you come to my meeting as one of the 7 that don’t join. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you just listen. As one of my friends, I don’t want you saying in a years time, when you see my success, why didn’t you pick up the phone and call me and tell me about this opportunity. At least if you listen now I can say I gave you the opportunity.‘

The story of the sower from the bible & how it relates to the law of averages.

The sower was ambitious. He had excellent seed (opportunity).

The sower goes out to sow the seed, some fell by the wayside and the birds got some of the seed. (Some people will not make it to your meeting – the birds will get some.)

You have two options:

chase birds – if you do this, you will leave the field i.e. distract you from your main purpose.
or just say ‘Isn’t that interesting’ which is the preferred option.

The sower kept on sowing.

There are only 9 or 10 miserable people in the world – they move around a lot. When you bump into one, remind yourself that there only 9 more like you in the whole world (i.e. you need to be persistent in the face of adversity.)

Now the seed falls on rocky ground where the soil is shallow but it is not of your making.

The seed begins to grow but, with the first hot day, the seedling whithers.

(These are people that don’t show up to the second meeting.) The hot weather will get some – not an easy thing to watch.

Just say, ‘isn’t that interesting’ and don’t bother asking why.

Some just don’t stay or get put off by the first obstacle. You can’t change that – just take it as it comes.

If someone says ‘why does the sun come up in the east?‘ – don’t sign up for the ‘why is this’ class – it’s the law of averages!

He kept on sowing – he had to discipline his disappointment.

Some are not going to stay but in the normal course of things this is the way things are.

Some of the seed falls on thorny ground.

As the seed begins to grow, the thorns strangle the seedling. These are the little things that get in the way of making progress. Little things cheat people out of big opportunities. It’s just the way it is – like winter following fall.

The sower keeps sowing the seed.

Finally the seed falls on good ground

If you keep sowing ‘it always will’. Some of your ‘seed’ will fall on good people – it’s the law of averages working again!

Some of the good ground did 30%, some did 60% and some did 100%.

Why? Don’t sign up for that class – it just the way it is!

If you try to get the 30% to do 60%, you’ll just hit your head against a brick wall. Just let the 30% do 30% and 60% do 60%.

Learn the law of sowing and reaping because it directly relates to the law of averages and your success in life and internet marketing.

Salmon Web Design – Web Design Stratford-upon-Avon

Web Design Stratford-upon-Avon.

I have just created Salmon Web Design specifically to sell my web design services in Stratford-upon-Avon. However, my services are not limited by geographical area as I can design websites for any English speaking customer.

I have created a website that showcases some of my web design talent at http://marksalmon.biz.

The reality is that I can take any WordPress design template and configure it for a client. That’s not really the difficult part, although some themes can be complex and fiddly to configure like the one I am using on http://marksalmon.biz.

In my experience, it is creating the graphics and content that is the most time-consuming aspect of creating a website design.

I am able to source and edit photographs and images – whether creating 3D marketing collateral like ecovers and product images, or indeed stylising photographs. Some of my stylised images are showcased at http://mark-salmon.com/images.

One of the innovative things I have done on my web design site is to create almost 1,200 blog posts from one post using a plugin that swaps out keywords so that each article is unique in respect of those keywords. I am using this technique to target each town through out the UK with my web design service. I used this technique for another client and it worked surprisingly well in attracting search engine traffic.

Take a look at Salmon Web Design and tell me what you think. Do you think my web design is good enough to get clients in Stratford-upon-Avon?

Web Designer Occupational Hazards

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Work With Your Client

In this article I want to discuss web designer occupational hazards. This is prompted by the fact that I have just completed a difficult project that measurably increased my blood pressure by 30 points.

Right at the planning stage of the website we established the colour scheme that we proposed to use. Having completed the website, a flyer, a business card and various other marketing collateral, I was then informed by my customer that her mother had inadvertently changed the whole colour scheme by ordering the shop signage etc in a different colour of green!

I hate having to do the same job twice, particularly when the work involved is boring and a waste of my time! Hence, the rise in my blood pressure!

I regard myself as a digital artist and I took great care in selecting the colour scheme – to have it completely overturned directly impacts on the pride and care I take in my design work. I take satisfaction in the artistry of my work and I don’t do it just for money like an ordinary labourer. I do it because I want to create something of beauty.

Anyone can throw up a website but not everyone can create something that is aesthetically pleasing. This takes skill and hard work to achieve.

Truth to tell, I don’t create many website for other people and this is why. I want to retain full control over the artistic integrity of my work.

Also, having studied this stuff for literally years, I am the expert! I don’t mind constructive feedback but the final decision as to what, and what does not, work must remain with me. Otherwise, why employ me at all?

In fact, if my client imposes restrictions upon me and my creativity, I would prefer that they find another web designer because ultimately I am responsible for the end result.

This does not mean to say that I should not keep my client fully informed and involved in the process of building their website. On the contrary, communication and asking for feedback is critical. It would be disastrous to work in a bubble without communicating with the client, only to find that the final product is not fit for purpose!

One of the problems with web design is that everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks they have some level of expertise just because it is a visual medium. It is therefore very easy to keep finding things that you would like ‘to tweak’. I don’t mind tweaking if this is on the clients own time i.e. that they are paying me for the extra work. For this reason, it is important that there is provision for only limited revisions in the initial contract to build the website. After these revisions have expired, then the client needs to pay for any additional revisions.

With regards to completion deadlines, it is always better to under promise and over-deliver. Don’t accept work where the deadline is difficult to meet. One customer showed me a quote for a 5 page website from another web designer when negotiating the initial price for the web site, little realising that by having an ecommerce store they would need many more than 5 pages – it turned out to be 17 pages!

Failure to realise exactly what you are taking on can lead to the setting of unrealistic deadlines for completion. Better to walk away from the job than find yourself having to absorb a penalty for late completion of the site!

At the outset of accepting a commission to build a website, you really need to agree the following:

a plan for the scope of the work. This includes, what the client has to do and by when as well as what you the web designer has to complete. The client to understand that failure by them to meet their deadlines may impact on the website completion date.
Within the project plan, agree interim milestones.
These milestones are ideal points for asking for and accepting feedback – agree how this feedback will be given – email phone and/or meeting.
Advise the client of your working hours and when it is best to contact you. Design work is difficult – particularly if you get interruptions – for this reason, I like to block out my peak working hours so I can work uninterrupted and my client should respect this.
Agree a budget for carrying out the work and the rules for making payment
Understand the clients expectations and deadlines – manage these appropriately. If their expectations are unrealistic, explain why and explore these until a mutually acceptable compromise can be agreed. It is better to hammer this out at the start rather than half way through the project.
Understand and agree, who owns what i.e. the license details and conditions.
Agree the scope of website revisions and communicate when these revisions are being utilised so the client understands that they will face more cost if the persist in additional revisions outside the scope of the contract.

These conditions are there to protect both you and the client, so do not be shy about discussing them and the consequences that apply if they are not observed.

These are just a few of the web designer occupational hazards – oh and high blood pressure, of course!

The Process Of Creating A Website For A Client

In this article I am going to outline the process that I use for creating a website for a client.

This is the process that I have used to develop a website for Astles of Nottingham – this is a new florist and greengrocers shop based in Nottingham that also wishes to establish an online shop for both parts of the business.

Choosing the Domain

Rather than base our domain name around keywords, we chose to use the name of the business – Astles of Nottingham.

We decided not to include the ‘of’ to slightly shorten the domain name to make it easier to put into the browser. Also the keywords are ‘Astles’ and ‘Nottingham’ – these are words that customers will put into the search box when the business is established.

We decided to use the ‘co.uk’ suffix because it is a UK based business but we did also buy the ‘.com’ and redirected this to ‘co.uk’ just in case customers put ‘.com’ into the browser (or a competitor decides to buy it and divert the traffic to their site -this actually happened to me in a previous business!).

Hosting

Establish where the website is to be hosted. I own Reseller Hosting so in the majority of cases I set up my clients on my web host but it is important to ask first!

Hosted Emails

It is important for both branding and professional reasons to set up hosted email addresses and to forward these to my customers normal email inbox as appropriate. (This is in addition to their Google Gmail account which is set up when they create their Google account below.) This is important for the Contact Form on the website.

Competitor Research

I asked my customer who the top 3 competitors are to her business and she gave me about 10 names. Most of these businesses have relatively poorly-designed sites although we did pick up some great tips from one or two of the sites!

It is a great idea to scope out the competition and in particular check out what keywords they are targeting so that you can get more ideas for your keyword list – see below.

Choosing The Theme

My customer wants to make alterations to the site i.e. input products and also blog posts. I needed an easy interface and WordPress is ideal for this.

We decided to use the Avada Theme because this is the top-selling theme in Themeforest.net which means that it will be well-maintained and supported, most of the glitches will have been dealt with and it has loads of design options so the site can be created exactly as my customer requires.

I went through some of the demo design options, of which there are many, before we opted for a simple, clean design that is totally different to that of any of their competitors.

The downside of this theme is that, because it is fully-loaded’ set-up is comparatively complex and time-consuming as you need to track down the correct settings – and there are a lot of them.

Logo & Font

I then discussed the required font and logo with my customer. As luck would have it, they had an old photo with a font on it that they wanted to use. This related to a greengrocery business that had been in the family many years ago.

It is quite hard to track down a font from a photograph because there are literally thousands of font variations!

We eventually settled on ‘QTCoronation’ which has been used to created the ‘Astles’ logo. This took quite a bit of time but was well-worth the effort.

With regards to font size, I increased all the default font sizes in the theme to make the site easy for customers to read.

Colour Scheme

We wanted a colour scheme to run throughout the business. The shop is very ‘green’ in colour so we settled on green. However, I recommended a ‘light’ feel to the site so we decided to use white, light grey, and green as our colour palette but use the green as an accent colour.

The important thing is to find a colour palette that is aesthetically pleasing (- there are plenty of colour-palette sites that can help -) and that the colour palette is used consistently throughout the business to reflect the brand.

One of my favourite sites is the Robert Welch cutlery site which simply uses white and black and shades in between!

Graphics & Icons

Websites are a visual medium and graphics are an incredibly important element of website design. I therefore spent an afternoon with my customer trawling through graphics sites to find a home page graphic that reflected their business and my customer approve of. The home page is critical because it is the most used point of entry for visitors.

The best converting websites are those that do not have a lot of distractions and the customer can easily navigate to find what they want.

For this reason, the front of the website is a simple graphic that reflects what the business sells – vegetables, fruit and flowers. The customer can then do very little else other than to find out ‘About’ the business or visit either the ‘Greengrocers’ shop or the ‘Florists’ shop which is the whole point of the site.

From the website developers point of view, a significant amount of time can be spent on selecting and customising graphics. It is important that graphics are optimised for the web i.e. compressed and sized correctly to improve page-loading speeds.

This aspect of web-design is a major time-consumer and possibly not well-understood or valued by the customer.

Pages Required

I discussed the basic page structure for the site with my customer and we came up with a relatively simple starting structure. Also, with the addition of the online shop, many of the pages created relate to the efficient operation of the shop.

Keyword Research

This is the area where most of the competitors fall down and the reason why their websites receive less traffic than they might otherwise do – poor keyword research. As a result, their websites are optimised for relatively few keywords and often for keywords that they can never rank for.

For businesses servicing a local community, selecting keywords can be systematic as follows:

City Keyword
Keyword City
City State Keyword
Keyword City State
City State Abbreviation Keyword
Keyword City State Abbreviation
Keyword in City
Keyword in City State
Keyword in City State Abbreviation
State Keyword
Keyword State
StateAbbreviation Keyword
Keyword State Abbreviation
Keyword in State
Keyword in State Abbreviation

Using this methodology, and selecting the business name and products and services offered, and even suburbs of a city, it is possible to develop a more comprehensive keyword list with which to work with.

When I showed the keyword list that I developed for ‘Astles of Nottingham‘ to my customer, they expressed surprise at the size and scope of the list.

Google, Social Media and Traffic

Each business needs to create a Google account. Why? Because around 85% of the search engine traffic is generated through the use of Google.

Also, I integrate my clients site with Google Analytics and Google Web Master Tools to keep a handle on traffic and to optimise the site.

Also, for local businesses, it is important to create a business profile in Google to get page one rankings in Google. Businesses need to verify that they own the business and fully-complete their profile.

The same process of creating a business profile needs to be followed for Bing because there are still many users of Bing as a search engine and it is important to pick up the additional 10% of traffic.

In addition to Google+, my customer has opted to connect her site to a Facebook page and a YouTube channel so that she can drive traffic through these media. She opted not to use Twitter and LinkedIn may be added in future.

It is important to consider a strategy for getting traffic to a clients website – possible options include:

SEO
offline promotions driving visitors to the website
social media
PPC – including Google Adwords and Bing Advertising

In addition to SEO and social media, my customer will be running a monthly draw for a free bouquet or box of vegetables for new subscribers and registrants to her online shop. Once she has their contact details, she can then send them an email to bring them back into her website or store.

Selected Plugins

Plugins add additional functionality to WordPress. Using the Avada theme meant that I needed to download 4 plugins to make it function properly at the basic level – this included 2 slider plugins, Contact Form 7 and the Woocommerce plugin for the online shop.

The Woocommerce plugin is quite complicated and time-consuming to configure as there are a lot of potential settings to consider. For this reason, it is important to run through the settings with my client to ensure that they understand and agree with the settings that I have applied. For example, some products are zero-rated for VAT and others are not.

In addition to these plugins, I am adding the following plugins:

‘Regenerate Thumbnails’ to resize thumbnail graphics (free)
‘SEO By Yoast’ to SEO optimise the site – this is currently the best free SEO plugin available in my opinion but it takes some time to set up properly.(free)
Backup Creator – this is a premium plugin by Robert Plank that enables me to automate the process ofbacking up the site on a regular basis.
WP Sonic Defender – this is a premium plugin that moves the -wp-admin’ page to a new location to defeat brute-force attacks and has a number of addional security features.
WP Legal Pages to create the legal pages for the site (premium)
Google XML Sitemaps (free)

Plugins need to be selected with care as too many plugins can slow down the page load speed. On the other hand, you need the site to do what it needs to do!

Trade Associations

I asked my customer whether she was affiliated to any Trade Associations as adding these to her site will potentially lend more authority and credibility to her business.

There are many online trade directories – adding my customers business details will improve search engine rankings over time

Content Creation

There are a number of options for creating the site content:

I create it
my customer creates it
outsource it
a combination of the above

The ‘About’ page will be written by my customer as she wants to cover her families long history as greengrocers in the Nottingham area. This will include some vintage photographs to illustrate this history.

The ‘Delivery’ page was created by researching competitors sites – it will need refinement in the light of operational experience.

My client wants to be able to add and delete products from the online shop. To enable her to do this, I will create a video showing her how to do this so she can create most of the shop content although I will support her with graphics etc.

Blog posts – I suggest that my client creates these (another training video will be created) to cover the following:

promotions and special offers
new products and services
market news such as ‘in season’ produce and price variations
forthcoming events such as valentines day, mothers day etc that relate to seasonal product sales
winners of the customer monthly draw
the initial shop launch

Some of these articles will be created around the targeted keyword list that I have created for my customer to drive SEO traffic to the site and to notify existing customers by email to drive them back to the site with a view to purchasing more.

The point about ‘Content’ is to agree with the customer who exactly will create it and to agree deadlines for completion – for many customers, this may mean that I end up doing the majority of the work to ensure that it gets done.

Delivery Deadline

My customer is opening her shop on the 5th February, in time to sell flowers for Valentines Day.

Understanding my customers expectations for delivery of the website is important because if the time-scale is tight, it enables me to prioritise my work e.g. in this case create the Valentines products in the online shop before anything else!

Conclusion

As you can appreciate from this article, to set up a business website requires quite a bit of work if your purpose is to build on strong foundations. Unfortunately, many so-called website designers skip some of the necessary steps – particularly those that relate to invisible benefits or are deemed future ‘upsells’ to the customer.

In my opinion, 95% or more of business websites are not for for purpose, receiving little or no targeted traffic and poorly designed. Without traffic, a website is just so much digital dust and almost completely useless to the business owner – web designers know this but do not explain this to the customer. Without results, a lot of websites become stale and out-dated because the website owner has no incentive to invest further time or money.

By covering the rigorous process that I use for creating a website for a client, hopefully this has been helpful for you – this is for a small local greengrocers and florists i.e. a local business rather than an authority blog, sniper site or membership site.

New Websites For My Daughter

I have just created two new websites for my daughter who is working from home offering a number of health, weight and fitness products.

My sister has been working in the nutrition industry for a long time now and is an international speaker on all things related to nutrition and health. So when my daughter decided to work from home in order to bring up my young grandchildren (without being hammered by care costs) it was natural that she would partner with my sister in building up her business.

My daughter earns an income by earning a commission from the sale of products and also recruiting members to a network marketing opportunity.

She wanted a minimalist design for her website, so I set up http://emsparry.com for her using a spare theme available to me.

I have also set up a members area on a separate directory of the same site.

Here are some of the features of the sites:

the themes are responsive i.e. they resize for mobile devices
they automatically backup on a weekly basis to Amazon S3
they include the latest page building technology i.e. it is easy to create customised web pages with no coding skills
any font can be deployed on each site
the sites are secured against brute force attacks
the membership area will be secured when content is added in due course
the legal pages have been added using a special plugin
the blog has great SEO capability should my daughter wish to generate organic traffic.

The content on these new websites for my daughter is ‘holding’ content because she has not yet seen my designs at the time of writing this post.

If you would like to hire me to create a website for you, then please contact me with details of what you have in mind and I will give you a quote.

List Building With Optin Hurricane

I am about to start list building with Optin Hurricane.

I have been exploring if there are better and faster methods for building a list. In the past I have relied upon SEO to drive traffic to my website and then had various optin or buying options on my website.

I have also built lists by launching info products on JVZoo and Warrior Plus where traffic has largely been driven by affiliates.

However, I wanted to find a way of creating a list faster through paid traffic but realised that, if I was going to pay for traffic, I needed a number of things in place:

a good sales funnel
analytics to measure conversions and ROI
split-testing to improve conversions
the means to recover traffic ‘leaks’ using exit popups

I bought a product called ‘Optin Hurricane‘ – The Secret Files’ that sets out a basic funnel for solo-ad traffic as follows:

To facilitate the building of this funnel I am using a plugin called Optin Hurricane which I have purchased and installed on my blog.

It is my intention that the front of my website will be this funnel and access to the content on my site will only be granted once someone has gone through my squeeze page.

The plugin knows when someone has already opted in or visited before and previous visitors can therefore be redirected to my blog.

There are a number of other features that make this plugin highly attractive:

Multiple Squeeze Page Styles
Multiple Backgrounds – images, videos or colours
Vertical & Horizontal Squeeze Page Formats
Built in Call To Action Buttons (but you can customise as well)
Diverse Engagement Effects – animated options
One Click Countdown Timers
Exit Pop Up Technology
Universal Auto-responder Integration
Mobile Optimized Squeeze Pages
FB Comment Functionality
Import/Export feature for pages
Add Footers, Menus & Disclaimers
GEO Targeting & Visitor Segmentation to allow only specific countries to visit pages to segment your list
Generate Free Traffic through viral features
Accurate Tracking – find out your squeeze page conversions, premium stats redirects, past visits and build multiple campaigns (- link tracking is built into the software too!)
Redirect Past Sign Ups
Redirect Past Visitors

These extensive features mean that I do not need to add other plugins and software to achieve my goals. It even has an inbuilt meta refresh page that is illustrated in the above diagram as ‘Confirm & Redirect’. This page is also integral to the conversion tracking system.

Now that I have the sales funnel plan and the software to implement the plan, product offers now need to be added, the pages created and then traffic applied to the front of the funnel to test conversions and ROI.

‘Squeeze page 1’ will have an offer that covers a basic plan for how to make money online whilst ‘Squeeze page 2’ will probably cover how to generate traffic which is a major problem to internet marketers. After that, visitors will be sent to my e-book offer wall that is already on my blog – http://mark-salmon.com/offerwall/ebooks/ .

I then need to write the email follow-up sequence which is the semi-automated part of the system.

This means that when my list building system is set-up anyone coming to my site at http://mark-salmon.com they will visit my primary squeeze page and either optin or try to leave which will trigger a second squeeze page where they will either optin or try to leave which will trigger a redirect to my ebook offer wall http://mark-salmon.com/offerwall/ebooks/ .

If anyone who has already opted in comes back to http://mark-salmon.com then they will be redirected to my blog at http://mark-salmon.com/news .

When on my blog or if someone comes into my site via a post then there is a pop-over offer to join The Sky Inside (my product) for free and there are other offers bothin the sidebar and on posts and pages throughout my website.

All this is in a effort to maximise the my traffic to my blog by ensuring that visitors have multiple opportunities to join my list which is my primary goal.

Once on my list, my prospect will be redirected to an initial paid offer and will also receive 7 days of follow-up emails with further information and offers. Thereafter, they will join my master list and will receive broadcast emails.

Purchasing Optin Hurricane will make your task of building a relatively sophisticated list building sales funnel relatively easy and I therefore recommend it.

Internet Marketing Snake Oil

Internet marketing often feels a bit like dealing in ‘snake oil’.

It’s often sold as the cure all remedy for those that want to work from home and make a lot of money at the push of a button.

Whilst you can make money by simply sending emails, getting people onto your list in the first place requires a well-executed strategy.

In an interview between my friend, Matthew Houghton, and John Cornetta, this is what John had to say:

In internet marketing, in the make money online niche, the best way to make money online is to sell training on how to make money online!

But it’s a little bit like ‘chicken & egg’ – how can you sell training on how to make money until you have made some money online?

The way around this is to leverage other people’s results by interviewing other people who have had success (-this is exactly what Matthew is doing in this video.) When you sell that product, you can then prove that you have had a positive result and you can leverage that result by showing other people how you did it and you then leverage that result and so on.

Alternatively, you can sell the internet marketing ‘tools’ – plugins and software, skills training and so on – you’ve heard the gold rush story where some people selling the spades made more money than the miners digging for gold!

Internet marketing only begins to make a lot more sense when you move the skills and strategies that you learn from the make money online niche into other niches where you are selling other products and services. Many of these niches are easy to penetrate once you have acquired the cutting edge skills that you have honed in the make money online niche.

So whilst internet marketing in the make money online niche can seem a little bit like selling snake oil, you will learn skills and strategies that can be applied to almost any business.

Lead Generation Using Warrior Special Offers

Warrior Special Offers are a great method for lead generation. You pay $20 for a WSO sales thread and you can put your special offer in front of the traffic on the Forum.

I have noticed that a number of Warriors create free WSO’s – these convert at around 50% or better. If you were then to add a low-priced upsell after the free offer, it would not take much to recoup the expense of your thread and you would have a list of prospects and buyers to market to.

The only problem with these leads is that these prospects would be comparatively low value because it is likely that they are being bombarded by offer after offer and some of them will be freebie seekers. Also, most people do not value that which they get for free so they may not even consume your product!

I was doing some research in Warrior Plus and I noticed that some marketers are using this method frequently and here are their results:

Product /	Launch Date	Sales	Visitor	Visitor	Avg.	Comm	Refund	Niche
Vendor	Launch Date	Sales	Conv.	Value	Price	Rate	Rate

	22/11/2014	250+	59%	$0.18	$0.30	0%
FREE WSO: Fiverr Informer							Fiverr
barbling

FREE WSO: The Basics of Internet Marketing	13/11/2014	100+	47%	$0.00	$0.00	0%	IM Basics
Reed Floren

	11/11/2014	100+	57%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: 9 Surefire Traffic Strategies
Reed Floren

Done for you sales and list building funnel Version II	11/11/2014	1000+	51%	$0.61	$1.19	0%
net66

FREE WSO: The 7 Internet Businesses You Can Start Today	10/11/2014	250+	56%	$0.00	$0.00	100%	0%
Reed Floren

	04/11/2014	100+	57%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: How to Make Money as an Affiliate Marketer in 48 Hours							Affiliate Marketing
Reed Floren

	31/10/2014	100+	50%	$0.00	$0.00	0%
FREE WSO: The 3 Pillars Your Internet Business Needs							IM Basics
Reed Floren

Easy Online Profits	12/10/2014	1000+	8%	$0.00	$0.05	0%
webmarke

As you can see from these stats, some of these WSO’s are getting a 1,000 plus leads.

I notice that Barb Ling tends to create products around breaking news whilst Reed Floren is attracting newbies with products that cover the basics of internet marketing. Both these experienced marketers will be montetising these leads on the back-end like crazy.

It may be worth moving the squeeze page offer on your blog onto the Warrior Forum to get the benefit of the Forum traffic – it’s just an idea!

You can keep bumping the thread as long as you keep getting some good leads and can monitor your return from the leads that you generate.

Perhaps this research will give you the motivation to use Warrior Special Offers for lead generation purposes – if so, join my list if you want to keep informed about more strategies for making money online or indeed for list building.

One Minute Squeeze Page Briefing

‘One Minute Squeeze Page Briefing’ is a short report on the process that I use to create squeeze pages that convert exceedingly well.

This is a system that was taught to me by Mike de Vincent in Squeeze Page Laboratory where he was getting 50%+ optin rates.

I’ve adapted his system slightly, which I felt was a little over-complicated in the way he taught it, and created a short report about it.

Whilst the squeeze pages that are created through this core system are somewhat ugly, they load fast and convert exceedingly well.

My report includes information on:

squeeze page components
squeeze page creation
target audience demographics
thank you pages

If you would like a free copy of my One Minute Squeeze Page Briefing (it is literally 2 pages of content including a link to a video and example squeeze pages!) – then please optin here

Marketing Scams Revealed

In this article I want to talk a little bit about marketing scams.

Having run an offline manufacturing business myself for 12 months, I know what it is like to have to find someone trustworthy to outsource marketing jobs to because there are plenty of untrustworthy agencies in the marketplace – these are the pirates of commerce! They are out to ‘steal’ your marketing budget i.e. deliver a lot less value than you could otherwise get if you had some insider knowledge.

I have recently been reminded of this fact by my son, who has started a marketing job with a company that sells higher-end accounting software. They have put out for two marketing quotes:

to restyle and vectorise their logo – they were quoted and paid £285
to create a survey of their customers – they have been quoted £6,000

These are jobs that I could gave got done for $19 within one hour for the logo restyling with unlimited revisions and in the latter case I could have either set this up for free using Google Forms or, if they wanted a more sophisticated job, for around £200 plus a couple of hours of my time bearing in mind that the survey questions will be created by my son’s firm anyway!

These are just two examples of marketing agencies leveraging the ignorance of their customer to quote outrageous fees. My son is learning fast that he needs to be very careful in shark infested waters!

I would say that 90% of websites created for offline businesses are marketing scams – most of them receive next to no visitors and even if they did would not convert prospects into customers and certainly they could not measure a return on investment.

This terrible scam has undermined the trust and confidence that many businesses have in online marketing which is a great pity.

I have had to bootstrap my business and, as a consequence, have uncovered many fast and cheap ways to get things done – I could make a very good business out of arbitrage i.e. being the middleman and taking a commission out of outsourcing marketing jobs but at rates that would severely undercut these agency sharks.

There is even software available that enables you to identify people seeking marketing help on Craigslist and then matching these request with gigs on Fiverr.com so that you can quote a competitive fee to the customer.

In the info-marketing world, the scammers are characterised by people using false income claims and lying or telling half-truths about how to earn an income online. There are more of these than you would suspect. In fact any small achievement or success is often blown out all proportion by the marketer in an effort to sell his/her product.

You can only implement what you are taught and then get the experience and data you get from taking action – until you have tested it for yourself you must not believe anything you are told!

However, if you have a little marketing knowledge, it can certainly be turned into a good income if you can help businesses to find cheaper and faster solutions than those being offered by outright marketing scammers who are the pirates of our trade.

In the meantime, every business needs to proceed with caution because there are plenty of marketing scams to catch out the unwary. If you are aware of any, please post it in the comments below and share it with your fellow entrepreneurs because we need to expose these marketing scams!

Tips For Optimizing Warrior Plus To Increase WSO Sales

Landing Page Templates

I have been experimenting with landing page templates to try to uncover a page design that I really like.

In reality, it’s not what I like that really matters – it’s all about how the page converts when I put traffic through it. But first you have to create a page so that’s what I have done.

There is a lot to be said for creating your lead generation page on Aweber like this – very plain and simple, blazingly fast page loading speed, no distractions and these types of pages will convert at 50% plus.

However, most would advocate more sexy designs like these:

One of the highest converting sales pages is Google Adwords sales page so I also created a kind of replica page like this. The colours really need to be a little more subtle to match those of Google but the layout is similar. Also, in the tabbed content, whilst Google Adwords have a call-to-action in each tab, theirs is more subtle. I don’t really like the confusion on this page of having two calls to action – one to the right of the main image to sign up and then the multiple calls to action in the tabs. So I would probably just go with one main call to action or a small call to action at the bottom of each tab (-as per the ‘Success Stories’ tab).

As far as possible, it’s best to keep your landing page above the fold if you can – that’s why the Google Adwords design is so clever with the tabbed content.

I create all these pages within about an hour and then saved these pages as templates so I can redeploy them with actual offers to test them.

If I’m honest, I really like the simple designs best – less is more so I really prefer the minimal designs personally.

Which one of these landing pages templates do you prefer? – let me know in the comment box below and don’t forget to optin to my list in my sidebar if you want to find out at some point in the future how these landing pages actually convert!

How To Write Powerful Email Copy

I have been learning more about how to write powerful email copy from three top products:

The Tao of Email Copywriting by Matt Furey
Kickass Copywriting Secrets by John Carlton
Autoresponder Madness by Andre Chaperon

Last night I finished going through the Matt Furey product (which retails at $197). He is reputed to be one of the best email writers on the planet.

It all started out a bit slowly, with Matt talking about how to get yourself into the correct mindset to write email copy. This consists of some deep breathing exercises designed to get you into the moment and to energise your mind – this energy to be reflected in your subsequent writing.

As I lay on my office sofa listening to Matt in CD one, when he was talking about the fact that he was a world class copywriter, I was beginning to think it was all a lot of guru bullsit. You know the sort of thing – they spend a lot of time telling you about what a wonderful person they are and all the incredible things they have done!

I don’t really like this much – it’s a technique that Brendan Burchard uses to excess in my opinion to establish his credentials – too much hot air and not enough content!

Any ways, after not really being fully engaged by CD1 I decided to put on CD2 and see if I could manage to focus on what was being said (because I found CD1 hard to digest!)

I have to say that CD2 turned out to be simply the best explanation of copywriting that I have heard in all my 13 years as a business and marketing consultant.

What really electrified my mind was that Matt simply stood up and delivered an example of an email in front of his audience – it was made up ‘off the cuff’ so to speak. He said it was important to write your copy exactly as you speak (tidied up a little of course). This makes his writing very natural and he delivers his copy based on STORIES and his own life experience.

He starts his stories based on TIME & PLACE e.g. ‘when I was 5 years old growing up in XYZ this happened to me’ and eventually he transitions his story into his promotion. He said that this was a technique that Ronald Reagan used very effectively.

As soon as you begin your story with time and place you draw your audience into what happened at that time and place. Sometimes stories weave in and out of each other.

This is a very powerful technique and I believe that Andre Chaperon’s technique is similar – he basically creates a ‘Soap Opera’ in his emails that draws you into the story.

Matt talked about the fact that there are at least two stories in every email – what you want your reader to understand and your product or service promotion and how it relates to your positioning storyline.

The power of this story technique is further emphasised later in CD 2 and CD3 when Matt gets his audience to write emails based on this technique and then picks on members of the audience at random to read out their emails. Through the use of powerful personal stories I have to say that in every case these examples are quite riveting.

I think that if you can tell a story based on your own personal experience it seems more authentic and real – particularly if you can outline your failure and personal problems.

I have to say from a personal perspective, my own email copywriting should be a great deal more powerful as a result of listening to ‘The Tao of Email Copywriting’ because the lesson of writing from your own personal experiences has really hit home hard this time.

When I was at school I excelled in English Literature and English Language but through many years of business report writing and business writing, I lost touch with the creative muse that really enables me to write powerfully and authentically.

Just as I have recently rediscovered a love of creating art from photographs, I think I will now have a great deal of enjoyment writing powerful and creative email story-lines.

(I live in Shakespeare’s home town, so I really ought to take a leaf out of his book and dig deeper into my creativity. How did a home boy from Stratford-upon-Avon begin to write that stuff – it still baffles scholars today?)

Matt made the point that you do need to be FEARLESS in your writing – this will offend some people but this is also good because it means that you are having some impact on other people in a sea of grey and mediocre rubbish. It also means that you need to reveal your frailties as well as your strengths.

Whilst Matt isn’t the greatest speaker, it was really when he started to give examples of his work that the ‘penny dropped’.

It is also very evident that he is not afraid to SELL his products and services hard – he says that it is important to send emails daily and even twice or three times daily. He always makes more money if he does this and he makes millions from his email marketing.

You can read examples of Matts emails here.

And this leads me onto the purpose of this article. At some time in the near future I am creating my own email marketing product entitled – ‘Email-ATM’ – which will be based on my own experiences and what I learn from these top copywriting products – each of the products listed above costs quite a bit of money if you were to buy them yourself.

Copywriting is one of the most prized and also lucrative skills that you can possess in online marketing. I have paid a heavy price my not outsourcing my own sales letters to professional copywriters. I write all my own copy because this is a skill that I really want to master and Matt’s ‘The Tao of Email Copywriting’ has moved me a big step closer to that goal.

So why not join my list at the top of the sidebar and I will inform you when I launch my email copywriting product based on the distilled wisdom of these gurus, and others that I have studied, like Gary Halbert and Gary Bencivenga.

If you get Email ATM you will definitely learn a lot more about how to write powerful email copy – so make sure you join my list now to get what will be an awesome product.

Sales Funnel Training

We are shortly going to launch a sales funnel training product because the importance of having a sales funnel in your business cannot be under-estimated.

If you do not have a well-designed sales funnel in your business then you will be leaving a lot of money on the table.

However, it is one thing to know this in theory but, in practice, creating a sales funnel can seem technically difficult to put together. The purpose of our new product, which is called Honey Trap Funnels, is to demystify the whole process of how to build a high-converting sales funnel.

Generally, the longer your sales funnel, the more money you will make.

Also, you may need to redefine the meaning of ‘sales funnel’ to extend to all your marketing after the initial sales have taken place i.e. to include your back-end marketing. A sales funnel like this requires careful planning and execution.

Creating the web pages for a well-executed sales funnel can also be a barrier but with sales funnel template software like Optimize Press and WP Profit Builder (which I reviewed recently) building these pages quickly has become a lot easier with their fully-featured templates.

I also notice that the Thrive Content Builder is moving in this direction too as they have started creating Landing Page Templates with a view to creating many more page templates in future.

In Honey Trap Funnels we will cover:

how to select products and services for the funnel
how to plan your sales funnel
how to create your sales funnel
how to move traffic through your funnel and how to recover traffic at the drop-off points
how to test and monitor your sales funnel for higher conversions
some examples of simple funnels
and much more

There will also be an upsell where we cover all of this in more detail including examples of some actual funnels that you could build for yourself.

In the meantime, whenever you buy a product, it is worth watching how the vendor has constructed their sales funnel.

Alternatively, simply look at product vendor JV pages to see what they are doing. However, don’t forget that after their initial product sale, they will be taking their customers through their back-end marketing system which is an extension of the front-end sales funnel so you may not get the full picture.

If you are a customer, however, you will be exposed to their full sales funnel and this is instructional.

To execute sales funnels effectively requires that your business is well-planned and organised about how it executes the process of putting a sales funnel in place.

We think that this sales funnel training will therefore be very instructive to many online business owners who may fail to understand how important sales funnels are in making money.

Creating A Logo Reveal With Adobe After Effects

I have created a logo reveal with Adobe After Effects. You can see the results of my first project below.

I have never used Adobe After Effects prior to creating this logo reveal so I am pretty pleased with the results (particularly because the training video was created by someone with a foreign accent who spoke quietly!)

I don’t think this is an area of expertise I really want to develop because it is cheap and easy to outsource this kind of stuff by buying a template from say Videohive and then getting someone on Fiverr.com to do the editing on Adobe After Effects for you.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that I should not be spending too much time learning these skills for myself but outsourcing the work to experts while I concentrate on product creation and marketing.

However, to know that I can do this for myself, if I need to, is useful and opens up more opportunities for creating stunning video products.

I recently bought a bundle of products off Envato that included this logo reveal template and I decided to give this a go. It is more complicated than I anticipated – the software takes a little getting used to but, like anything else, if you give enough time and effort to it should be easy to learn – particularly if you start with editable templates like me!

Tell me what you think of my first logo reveal using Adobe After Effects – I am sure this is basic stuff for some people but for non-technical bods like me, this is as ‘state of the art’ as it gets!

Life’s Big Question – How Can I Make More Money?

I came across the image below in Carl Picot’s Copywriting Forum with the headline – Life’s Big Question – How Can I Make More Money?

I thought that this was a terrific headline that made me stop and ponder a second…

Because this IS an important ‘life question’ that we all ask ourselves from time to time – particularly at times when money is in short supply!

The article goes on to promote a university education.

But without wishing to denigrate a university education, there are plenty of university students who leave university with a pile of debt and can’t get a well-paid job. 50% of young people in Spain are without a job and the proportion in Greece is higher still.

In fact, in my son’s business and marketing class at Nottingham Trent university, he was the only one who managed to get a job before leaving university and no one in his girlfriends class on property had a job at leaving time.

Ironically, both my son and his girlfriend are currently on a 2 month sabbatical tour of the USA and my son messaged me yesterday to say that he has a business idea he wants to pursue. Also, he told me that there are plenty of jobs for graduates in Grand Cayman.

In other words, for those that are motivated, the opportunities are abundant.

You just need to be prepared to take a more global approach to finding them because we are now competing in an international marketplace rather than a local or even national marketplace.

This, in a nutshell, is why I chose to strategically pursue internet marketing as a skill – I wanted to be able to transcend the vicissitudes of local markets so that if the UK was in depression, I could find a marketplace that was in a growth phase.

It’s also worth mentioning that in most countries who don’t have English as their first language, English is the second language. That means that English speakers have more access to market-places than any other language. That’s a competitive advantage right there.

That’s why our latest product about Google Hangouts is so critically important – it’s the ability to transcend local and national boundaries that makes it an excellent tool for selling goods and services and for forming relationships.

So if choosing internet marketing was a strategic decision in the first place, choosing Google Hangouts as a communications and promotions tool is another strategic decision too.

The more I think about the power of Hangouts for building relationships, the more excited I get.

I predict that promotions via Hangouts, rather than through Email marketing (or perhaps complementary to), is the way forwards simply because they will convert so much better.

Now you can look the marketer in the eye and ask yourself if you would trust this person – they are no longer hidden behind a veil of secrecy. They can demonstrate and show you how their product or service works and you can ask questions before buying.

So in answer to life’s big question – How Can I Make More Money? – I recommend that you purchase The Hangout Cash Code because I predict that it will become strategically important within your business to acquire these skills and we show you many methods for monetising Hangouts. (Every business, whether offline or online, needs this tool.)

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-10748" src="http://mark-salmon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/what-is-list-spark.jpg" alt="what is list spark" width="272" height="190" />What is List Spark?