Sunday, September 07, 2008

Google PR – What is it?

A google PR ranking is really important. PR meaning “page rank”. Basically, Google ranks a web pages importance based on the content, links and the traffic coming in from that content for a particular page on a site. So, basically if you have a PR6 ranking, Google is saying that your page is ranked as a 6. What Google does is they measure the importance of a page. A 6 out of 10 is a fairly good ranking. A 10 out of 10 being the best, 0 out of 10 being the worst – actually, grey bar is the worst.

The average person out there has a page rank usually of a 2 or 3. It’s very easy to get a PR of 1. Google page rank is simply showing the ranking of a web page from 0 to 10. According to Wikipedia.org, “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important". In other words, a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support.”

Just ensure that when you are building your web site or if you have an existing website that you create good content that will drive more people to your pages. Google can tell if you have a garbage page with content that isn’t meant for the human visitor. It will know if you have gobily goo pages slapped up just to place google adsense. Google actually hires “real people” to actually scan your pages – not machines interpreting the information on your pages. So as long as you make sure you provide solid, useful information that your readers will find helpful, you should be able to get a pretty good ranking... but also move your pages up the Google page rank ladder.

Cheers to that!

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

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Monday, September 01, 2008

Article Submission Software

Article submission software has gotten a bad reputation over the years because some so-called article submitters have had problems. They were little more than thinly-disguised spam machines that would eventually get banned from the best article sites. The articles would end up where they’re not wanted and so many of them wouldn’t even get a link back.

Having said all that, there is a good, legitimate piece of software that I use and recommend called Article Submitter Pro. So, rather than spending countless hours submitting my articles to the myriad of submission sites out there, I simply plug them into Article Submitter Pro and it takes care of the rest.

Article Submitter Pro is really easy to use. You first have to go to the various sites you want to submit to, apply and get your log in details. The software memorizes your usernames and passwords and logs you into each one. So, you may say, “Okay, I want to submit to these 1,000 locations.” Well, it’ll take you to the one location, it’ll pre-populate the page, and then all you have to do is hit the submit button. Then it’ll auto-fill in all the information where it needs to go. You’ll look over the auto-fill information to make sure that everything is correct and then you push submit. It’ll then take you to the next one, log you in and perform the same functions until it has completed the task. It is completely automated!

However, you should make sure you don’t go overboard and submit too many articles to too many sites in too short a time frame. You want to make it feel as natural as possible to the search engines. For example, we only submit two to three articles a day in my office. We don’t submit 500 articles, even though I have 500 articles. See, 500 articles will last me 250 days because we’re submitting two to three every single day. You want to make it a habit and be as consistent as possible when you’re submitting your articles and not send them out there all at once.

So, you take one article. You load it into the software. Let’s say you have a thousand locations. Article Submission Pro logs you into a thousand locations, pre-populates a list and you push submit. Then you go to the next one, push submit... Go to the next one, push submit. Go to the next one, populate, submit, populate, submit, populate and submit... That’s all you have to do. Just submit two to three a day. Then another option is if you want to do one a week, you would use the same process. It’s really up to you. When I first started, I was doing one a month. Then I said, “Okay, I want to do one every week.” Then I got down to one a day and then two to three a day. By doing only a few it appears as natural to the search engines. The last thing you want is to get in trouble with the search engines. If you do just a few per day, the search engines will love you and your rankings should continue to improve.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
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`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Strategies for Selling an Ebook on Amazon and Ebay

If you've written an eBook congratulations! It's no easy feat but you can rest assured that if you market your book well you can make a nice income from it. However, the first thing you need to do when launching your eBook on Amazon is securing an ISBN number. The reason you need an ISBN number is because you really can't list anything on Amazon unless you have one. Where do you get it? You can go to ISBN.org, where you buy a lot of ten. Once you have that ISBN number, you want to sign up for Amazon Connect and this will allow you to start selling your eBook specifically on Amazon.

One thing I'd strongly suggest using if you are going to go the Amazon route is to try to find every book out there that you have read inside your niche and give feedback on that book. Then you can select books that you talk about and use the book selection. When you select books, use your book and your signature. You could write something like, "This book is absolutely amazing and great. I'd highly recommend it to anybody." Then put your name and your book underneath it and put a link back to your book. This is one thing that I do and suggest to my students. Sell from the feedback on other people's books. It's amazing how viral this one strategy is.

Now with eBay, you're not going to need an ISBN number. You can simply do a listing. How do you do it? Well, first of all, you're going to log in and create an eBay account. Once you have your eBay account set up, what you will need to do is grab your sales letter and everywhere it says "Click here to buy now," say "Bid on this eBook now". Leads from eBay are going to be the best leads you're ever going to get, so we're not too concerned on what price things sell, especially with digital delivery. You want to set it up to make sure that you do have the digital delivery, because you do not want to be forwarding and sending an email to people with your product. Digital delivery allows the orders to be processed automatically.

Now, what price do you sell it at? It doesn't matter, actually. I don't really care what price it sells at on eBay. You can actually get some of my stuff cheaper on eBay, however sometimes you can pay more. For example, we list all my free CDs on eBay and basically, we start off the bidding at a penny. We've got people that are paying $27, plus shipping and handling, even though you can get the same free CD elsewhere for just the cost of the shipping. So you never know what's going to happen. Let people bid on it and you'll probably sell your eBook for a whole lot more, sometimes you'll sell it for a lot less, but everything we put on eBay does sell and they are great leads to up sell everything else that we're doing.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
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Monday, August 25, 2008

How to handle membership cancellations

If you have a membership site, you know that there are some instances where you will have individuals cancel for one reason or another. Cancellations are something that we all experience from time to time, but when you are first starting out with a membership site you may not understand how to automate the process to avoid having to deal with each request over the phone.

What you might want to do, to automate the whole thing, is have them call into a voice mail service. Have that voice mail company (there’s a lot of voice mail companies out there) gather all of your customers information, maybe their first name, their last name, their address, phone number and email, so you can go and verify. That’s all you’d really need from them.

You may want to also say something like, “If you wouldn’t mind, may I ask what the reason for this cancellation is?” And then from there, see if that voice mail company will take it, transcribe it, and then email it over to you so you can get them in your email to process it. I think that would be the best way to handle this.
One thing that we have found that works well is forced continuity. This is when you force them on and then force them off as quickly as possible. Initially, I was scared to force them off, but I’ve found that people aren’t as angry and the other great thing is it hasn’t changed the cancellation rate. So that’s something else for you to think about.

Cancellations are going to happen regardless of what you do or don’t do. I mean, I think I had over 5,000 people sign up this month alone and I I think we’ve had 22 cancellations or something like that. You know, it’s the life of memberships. You can’t get hung up on cancellations and asking yourself what you did wrong. Sometimes if you have a few cancellations, it may be that whatever it is you are offering is not the right fit for that individual. But of course if you have a lot of cancellations you will definitely have to question what it is you are doing that can be changed in some way.

In my case when I have a cancellation, I’ll just go out and get more subscribers to replace those who’ve cancelled their membership. It doesn’t bother me a bit. I personally have a full-time person dedicated to managing my membership site and automate things somewhat so that it frees up my time. If you have money to invest in an assistant I would highly recommend it.

However, you can also choose a software program that automatically takes care of cancelling those subscribers for you. Aweber.com and 1shoppingcart.com are two very reputable autoresponder programs that have the ability to automate cancellations and everything else for you. It is essential to invest in a system to free up your time and make your business run smoother. Leverage your time and see the money come rolling in!

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
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are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Creating interest in an upcoming membership site

If you want to start a paid membership site, but you think it is going to take a while for you to develop content and launch the site and you want to start creating awareness in the marketplace, I have a solution.

The best thing to do is to throw up a squeeze page, drive them to that page, start announcing to them or let them know, "Hey, look, I'm starting a brand new membership site for this certain group of professionals. Go here right now to be on the pre-release list." Do you see what I said? Be on that pre-release list. Why? Because you're going to start building that rapport before it's launched to let them all know, as well as have them co-develop it for you.

Ask them what their expectations may be for such a group as well as asking them if they have any insights or ideas for particular topics or issues they would like to discuss on the site. Say something like, "I'm building this membership site right now and I'm looking for answers from you. Email me back with the things that you'd like to know, that you'd like me to develop, the content you'd like to be developed." Let them co-create it for you. That's why you have that pre-release list. You want to allow them to co-create it. And they'd be happy to do it as they'd feel they played a part in its creation.

It's a win-win when you allow your visitors to co-create it with you. They're going to be more likely to buy because they were a part of it. So, this aspect is very good. You could also send them free tips in the interim if you would like and you may want to start a blog or you could just put the free tips in the blog itself and put the information up there, maybe your updates on the upcoming site etc. This is a really good way to do establish a loyal membership.

However, there are a couple of different membership site software I would recommend. This is based upon what I know people are using. It isn't based upon things that I'm using because I don't really have a "membership software" that I'm using. The membership software that you could use is AMember, a lot of people highly recommend AMember. I've also heard pretty good things about AWeber.

A lot of my friends recommend AWeber because they use it and only have great things to say. Another option is VTribes. I've heard VTribes has a lot of capabilities. The last one is Xoops, which is totally free! I've heard a lot of people talk about how good it is. You might need to be a little more technically savvy to use it, but it's one to consider as well. I heard there are a lot of cool modules for you to use. So those are some great options for you if you're considering starting your own membership site. You really can't go wrong with any of these.


Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
..Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

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Saturday, August 09, 2008

How to reduce your keywords down to 16 to 18 cents per bid

If you’ve ever been in a niche where your Google Adwords keywords campaigns were pricey, here is a great way to reduce the amount you spend on your bids. Does 16 to 18 cents sound good to you? Well, there are multiple ways to do this. The biggest thing you need to do is testing and tweaking to get your bid down. Now, I know that’s probably not the answer you’re looking for because this can be very tedious and time consuming, but really there is no other way.

At the beginning, you’re kind of like going fishing. We’re going to throw out a big net when we go fishing. We’re going to go out and find all these different keywords. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to break those keywords down into smaller things. For example, if you do keyword research and you discover that for the term “books”, a whole list of different keyword phrases containing the term “books” pops up. Now, some of these keywords are searched for a lot more than others, so what you want to do is group the most popular keywords all together. Once you start doing this, you use the 80/20 rule; 80% aren’t going to work, 20% are.

So, from that perspective, what I do next is I take that and then I say, “Okay, here’s the 20% that are working, now let’s go break these down.” So, I will pull out, let’s say 20 words that were in books and go create another ad group and throw those 20 words that were in books into this group. Then, I keep on breaking them down.

Basically, what I’m doing is keyword structuring or what I call “marbles”. At the beginning of our Google AdWords campaign, what I do is grab the bag of marbles and pour it all over the table. Now what we want to do is break them up into little segments, creating ad groups. So, we have this one campaign which is the marbles and now we want to break them down into different colors. The reason we do this is because we don’t want one keyword affecting our whole campaign. So we break them down from there.

Then once we get even closer, even deeper inside that, the next thing is creating the correct ads. We’re testing ads with a group of words. This will help determine which words have a good click-through rate (CTR). You want to have a good click-through rate because Google’s going to reward you for having better marketing. So if you’re a better marketer than the other guy, you’re going to be making more money for Google, so they’re going to be willing to actually lower the cost per click for you.

So, essentially, it’s really about testing and tweaking, what I said at the beginning. If you’re running an A/B split test, a lot of times you’ll have two different ads with a group of keywords. What I’d highly recommend is only changing one variable. Don’t have two separate, different-looking ads because you’ll never know what is really causing you to have better click-throughs.

The goal is to get the click-through rate up. If your click-throughs are from zero to 1.5, you’re doing okay. If it’s 1.5 to 3, then you’re doing really well. If it’s above 3, you’re doing great. If you haven’t achieved this then make some modifications that you can track and keep monitoring it. Eventually, you’re going to get really good at it and may even have fun doing it.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Online and Offline Promotion

Many of my listeners have noticed the way I promote different products and events and have questioned why I choose more offline promotion for one thing and more online promotion for another. Well, the truth is, I like to incorporate traditional methods such as direct marketing via regular mail as well as the more modern methods.

Basically, what I do is I look at the numbers and compare the results of previous campaigns amongst the various types of media I’ve used. If I noticed that I had a lot of success sending out postcards for a particular event, I may choose to go this route for future campaigns as well. I mean, there really is no one best way to promote something, so all you can really do is try different things and base future decisions on the results you’ve achieved in the past.

Granted, direct mail can cost a lot more than online marketing, but if you can afford it you can reach out to other demographics of people. I call it multi-step marketing. When I say “multi-step” I’m talking about using many forms of media to get your message across. I’ve always done email and phone, but I find I’m getting more into direct mail for multiple reasons. I just think that it’s good to not only have one medium that I’m using, but using multi-mediums to make things happen. Direct mail is a lot more targeted and I figured some people’s email addresses change, some people just fall off for some reason, so I’m trying to rekindle some of that. I have noticed a lot of awareness from it.

Recently, when I promoted our Marketing Madness event I chose to do just that. We started out with a budget of 10k, but I think we ended up spending more in the neighbourhood of 17k sending out mailers to a list of 30,000 people. Now, of course you hope it pays off because as usual nothing is guaranteed, but sometimes you have to take chances.

Originally, I wanted to send out hand written postcards because I knew that they would probably pull better than typed script, but because of an assortment of problems and time restraints we ended up sending out a various array of awful neon colored postcards. I did this because I wanted them to stand out and get noticed amongst all the other mail that people receive. As of this writing, I can’t tell how well I did with this campaign, but I’m sure it will have been well worth it.

To learn more about the companies I have used and tested for my direct marketing campaigns I highly recommend you check out The Dirt at http://www.internetmarketingdirt.com .

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
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`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

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Sunday, August 03, 2008

Web-Building for Beginners

Should beginners/newbies start off with a blog, a website, or both or neither?

Now this is a great question and my personal thoughts regarding this is that newbies should work on creating a squeeze page. The biggest thing that you want to focus on, if you’re new to marketing online is to focus on building your list and building your product. This is absolutely imperative because that’s how you’re going to be making the most money simply because you can sell to these people again and again. Remember, you’ll own the list because your opt-in will allow you to capture the names and email addresses of these prospects. So, I would highly urge you to do exactly that! Focus on building your list of people that are hot and hungry for that product or service you have to offer them.

Another thing I’d highly recommend is that you start looking for joint venture partnerships. Look for people that you can market your business, products and services to and build a relationship with them. Especially if you’re a newbie, start building relationships now, because when you’re ready to launch a product, then you have those people in the bag in order to make that happen.

Do I think beginners should have a blog?

Sure, but only if they can focus all their time and energy on it and systematize it so that they are posting on a regular basis. For example, if you write articles and submit your articles to the various sites out there and then take those articles and you put them on your blog, this makes a lot of sense. Basically, if you are writing articles to submit anyways, you may as well put them up on a blog. However, if you’re considering sitting down and writing specific, special content, specific for your blog, then I wouldn’t recommend it. Why? It’s going to de-focus you at the beginning.

Should a newbie start with articles even before they have a product or a website?

Yes, absolutely. I would recommend writing your articles and using them to drive people back to your squeeze page or a page where you’re capturing people’s information. This will enable you to send them information they are interested in as well as market your product to them. Here are three things you want to focus on, your list, your high ticket product and lastly maybe your continuity, too.
Now, if you ever asked me what would be the quickest way for you to make money, I would tell you by having a high ticket product. It takes the same amount of effort as selling a lower ticket product, but you can afford to sell fewer to make the same money.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

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Saturday, August 02, 2008

Suggestions to improve attendance at your teleseminars

A high attendance at teleseminars is critical for the growth of your business. However, not all teleseminars will return high results. That was the outcome of one of my students. Actually, this student asked me: “When I email out to my list, sometimes the registrations are very low. Any suggestions?”

Well, one thing to help you to get higher registrations to your teleseminars is to first think about how many people you have on your list. Let them know how many phone lines you have available and then just basically say to them, “Hey, look, I sent out this email out a few days ago and we had such a tremendous response. So, you better hurry up and reserve your seat while you still have time.” I mean, you’ve got to use urgency and scarcity to get them to do what you want them to do. You might be having a lack of urgency and scarcity inside your emails. Doing this is really going to help you out.

You emails subject line must be strong. You could write something like “Free teleconferencing, Free training”. Make sure you use their first name to personalize the message.

Another thing you can do to help improve registrations is to take all the people that have signed up for the call as well as the one’s that haven’t and send them a reminder email 15-20 minutes before the call, say something like: “Hey, look, the seminar is tonight and you don’t want to miss it. Call this number at this time to get in on the action.”

Something else that works really well, too, is when they fill out the teleseminar form; make an area on the form where they can fill in the name, email address, and phone number. Then call them using a pre-recorded voice broadcast and say something like: “Hey, I just wanted to let you know the call starts here very soon.” That’s makes your message very personalized and leads them to trust you more. This gives you a ton more credibility which helps a lot in improving your teleseminar attendance.

If none of this is working for you, you may not have a teleseminar topic that is of much interest to the people on your list. In this case, I would ask for more feedback and gather as much information as you can on the interests of the group prior to setting up a call. That way you’ll ensure you’re meeting the needs of your audience.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
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`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

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Monday, July 28, 2008

The Quickest Way to Sell your Products Online

Now that you have launched your product and made some sales, what is the best and quickest way to get your product in front of as many eyes as possible?
Well, Clickbank is always a great way since it is the Internet's largest digital marketplace. It is also very easy to list with them and they handle everything for you, totally hands free.

You may want to also consider EBay. I’ve been selling a lot on EBay lately. EBay’s been really good for me, and you can put all your stuff on EBay. I’d highly recommend it even if you’ve only got one product now. You’ll be amazed by what happens when you make your product available for sale there. Also, if you’ve launched your product and you’ve made some sales, then the next thing you want to start doing is always be focused on building your list. I mean, that’s very, very important to always focus on expanding your list.

Another thing that’s really important is finding and establishing relationships with joint venture partners. The sooner you start this the more sales you’ll make. Basically, if you’ve already proven you’ve made money with your product and it’s not some pie in the sky thing, people will probably want to do something with you. I’d highly recommend you looking for joint ventures as the quickest and fastest way to sell more products.

Another thing you might want to try is Google AdWords campaigns. By using Adwords – you may make more profit than you’d expected. Although it can be quite costly if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you pick high demand keywords, however, if you are on a tight budget there are ways that you can limit your expenditures.
You can also consider solo advertising. Go to Ezines-R-Us. If this is the right target market for your niche, they have lists that you can pay to send out solo advertisements and solo emails to.

It’s not really a big deal to do any of this stuff, but I would highly recommend you taking action and trying these methods out. But remember, joint ventures are going to be the quickest and fastest way for you to really get a lot of eyes focused on your product.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
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are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
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Sunday, July 27, 2008

Capturing Names for Your JV Deal

If you are partnering with someone and helping promote their products as well as yours, how do you ensure you have access to the customer list? This is a question I received recently. To make this completely clear, here was the question:

“How should I set up 1ShoppingCart to accomplish the following? I’m working independently as a promoter for a person that creates digital content for coaches. We’re doing a launch with five different products for $147. The names will be going through his shopping cart. He already has the shopping cart set up with the products and the promotion. How can I make sure that I capture the names of anybody that buys the products? I want to make sure that if they buy something in his cart, I can capture their first name and email address and they get on my list as well.”

The fastest way to do it is to talk the individual whose products you’re promoting. You could say something like: “Hey, look, if I’m going to spend the time and energy promoting your products, I would like to get the contact information of the people that I send you. Somehow you need to work out a deal where you get access to their names and email addresses as well.

Now, if you don’t want to do that, the next best thing to do is offering a bonus. For anybody who buys any of those five products, they’ll get a specific bonus. However, in order for them to get the bonus from you, you’ve got to get their name and email address. Since you don’t have the shopping cart you can do something else. How about offering your bonus on the thank-you page as well as the landing page that people land on!

If your jv partner is not too keen on just giving you every single persons contact info that buys then what you could say is, “Well, okay, no problem. Why don’t we do it this way? I’ll offer an unadvertised bonus! So, they go in, they purchase it, they go to a thank-you page, and on that thank-you page it will say: “Here’s our unadvertised bonus. Click here to get this.”

Once they click on the link, they’ll be lead to a squeeze page and then you can capture all the people that take you up on your bonus offer. So, your partner is no longer handing them to you, but what’s happening is those people are choosing to go there and give you their information and you can collect their contact information from there. That would be a great way to capture their info.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
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are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

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Sunday, July 13, 2008

Free Press Releases or paid Press Releases?

If you haven’t already read my A9 process you should probably do that before you read this article as you’ll get a better understanding of the process and how I use press releases to garner more traffic.

As you may or may not already know, I always highly recommend submitting press releases (PR) in addition to all the other steps in the A9 process, but the question is which should you use, the paid PR sites such as PRWeb.com, or a host of free PR sites? Which produces better results?

A press release can cost you a couple hundred dollars if you use the paid service. So, if you are on a limited budget I would only use them when you have something that is truly newsworthy. In this case, I think it is worth the cost because it will get passed around enough that it will hopefully bring you in a steady flow of traffic. If you have an unlimited budget, then I would highly recommend using the paid service.

Since it is our goal to drive more traffic to your site, the $200 press release from PRWeb is going to be a heck of a lot better than submitting to tons of free press release sites. You really get what you pay for. The search engines place greater emphasis on site’s like PRWeb because they know that if someone is paying to post content on a site it is probably more relevant then the content placed on the free sites.

However, for me personally, if I have an article that I turn into a press release, I’m not going to pay $200 to get that out there. I would submit them to all the free locations. Articles turned into press releases aren’t newsworthy. Just remember that.
The other thing is, paid PR sites are going to have editor reviews and all this other stuff and maybe not accept your articles anyway, so that’s the other reason why I do it that way.

I would recommend occasionally paying the $200. This is essential, but only when it’s newsworthy. The rest of the time, go to the free locations and then just submit them there.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com

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Wednesday, July 09, 2008

What are meta tags and How important are they?

First off what are meta tags? Anyone who has a site or is exploring having one has probably heard this term before. Meta tags are used in html page headers. These tags contain information about specific keywords and descriptions of a web page. The search engines rely on meta tags so that they can properly catalogue your site. This allows users who are doing a search to easily find your site based on the keywords they enter into the search engine.

So, how important are these meta tags anyways?

They’re not as important as they used to be, but they do still have some importance. From a Google perspective – Yahoo, they actually still do work on Yahoo. But I will tell you, it does work better with Yahoo. Meta tags are fairly easy to do. Just go to your website, log in, go to your editor or website editor, whatever you’re using and right-click on the page. A lot of times it’ll pop up and say, “page properties.” Just click on the page properties. You can change your meta tags there. But it’s in that area when you right-click it. Actually, when you right-click on a web page and select page properties, you will see the title tag and a keyword tag. Those are meta-tags.

Meta tags were great back in the day because they helped search engines determine how to rank a certain site. When the engines' databases were small, this meta tag was a quick, easy way to help decide which keywords might be important on a site. However, certain people and especially spammers began to abuse meta tags by putting keywords into their tags that had nothing to do with a site’s content. You may have noticed this in the past when you inadvertently clicked on a link and were redirected to an unrelated site. This is commonly used by porn sites. You have no idea you’re entering one because there were unrelated keywords placed in there that leads to these types of sites. While manipulating the meta tags brought these sites more traffic, it also caused outrage among internet users.

So, in time meta tags lost their popularity and more of the search engines focus was placed on the actual content of a site. Meta tags are still used to index pages today, but more as a supplement to the copy on a page.

However, although they play a very minor role and many people don’t use them at all, it is not going to hurt you to use them on your own site if you so choose.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com

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Sunday, July 06, 2008

Forced Continuity

For those of you that haven't heard of the term "forced continuity" before, you may have already had some experiences with this. Forced continuity is when someone offers a free trial of something and then after the trial period is over, they automatically proceed to bill you. ....

A lot of companies do this and it really is a good strategy to drum up more business. However, depending on how the offer is written, it can sometimes be very deceptive and unethical. This is why we are always advised to read the fine print and only give your billing information to a trusted source.....

While I personally have used this method before, I do highly recommend that you keep everything transparent. That is, if you attempt to create a similar offer for your list, make sure that they can clearly see that if they don't opt-out they will be billed. Always, remind them that it is a free trial.....

In the interest of transparency, another really good way to do this is to not take any billing information upfront and then after the trial period is over, try to get them to become paying customers. This is called "optional continuity". By doing it this way, you may actually get more people to take the trial offer, but the downside is it may be tougher to close them.....

Remember, when you are making an offer to someone it is usually to enhance their lives, so in effect you are doing them a service because it will ultimately help them. However, selling something to someone without their knowledge will only leave you with bitter customers. You will do them a further disservice by not being able to offer them good products in the future because they will no longer trust you.
So, forced continuity can be a very good thing if done properly. Just think about and be careful how you word things. You want to gain the trust of your potential customers and customers as well as maintain your reputation.

.. Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
..Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com
..

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Thursday, July 03, 2008

Dominating a Niche for a Product That’s Not Yours

If you have found a product that you know has poor marketing there is a lot you can do to make some good money. I actually was asked a question by someone who told me that they knew of a sports company with an awesome info product with a manual and videos. The best part of it all was that it was related to a niche of theirs. This person also knew that the product sold very, very well in its home country of Australia. But although this product had a web presence the marketing for it was extremely poor. So, this fellow did a little research and said that when he looked them up on Google under the name of the product the product was easy to find. However, if you enter other types of good, relevant keywords in their niche they weren’t even in the top 100 of Google, not in organic results or on the AdWords side. And this guy who’s researching this company is an SEO expert! So, he definitely has the upper hand here.

Basically, the idea he had was that he suggested he would act as a JV broker by hooking this company up with a well-established and respected SEO and lead generation company that he knew of. The SEO/lead generation company would boost the sport company’s web presence and drive leads, resulting in a high increase in sales. The JV broker (that being him), would get a cut of the profits that the company wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and the SEO company or rather the lead generation company, and sports company would split the profits at whatever percentages they agreed upon.

My advice?... Although this is a good idea, because you would have to do very little work – you’d only have to connect the two parties. However, I would suggest you become an affiliate and do the marketing for this product yourself. Especially since you say you are a SEO expert. You can make a ton more money working as an affiliate.

You know that you can make this company a lot of money. You can make so much more, plus the relationship with them is going to be so much greater because you’re going to be the one that actually is marketing their product and making huge sales. Now, whatever you do, don’t tell them your secret weapon. If they ask you what you’re doing, just say you have a secret weapon. You might not tell them about the SEO/lead generation company unless you absolutely have to. But use it to your advantage. You may just get a huge life-changing business proposal this way.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com

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Sunday, June 29, 2008

How to measure if your emails are getting through to your list.

If you are sending emails out to your list you know how important it is that they receive what it is you're sending them. After all, your business is at stake and this communication with your list is crucial to your business. Now, obviously if someone buys something, you know they got your email. However, for those who haven't purchased, how do you even know if your email was received?
One way to know is to use seed lists. What I do is I'll set up different accounts in different places and just make sure that the emails are getting delivered. If you are using a monitored service like FatJack, you can actually ask them for your send score.

Outside of the send score, there's a couple of other things you want to track it. If you're using a service like Autoresponse Plus, you may want to use the link tracking option provided. If you do not know how to do link tracking, you can go to PowerfulPromoter.com/howtos or go to PromotingTips.com/private.htm and in there you will find something related to link tracking. When you use link tracking, that's going to give you your clicks. So, if you send out an email, you can look at your clicks which should also give you a good idea if people are even going to your page.

Also, if you're doing HTML, I know you can track your impressions also known as open rates, clicks, and your sales. Now, when you're doing that, if the impressions are low or your open rate is low, what this means is that you failed to deliver what it is your visitor what looking for. Basically, you failed to meet their needs in the delivery of your communication with them. If your clicks are low, that means your email wasn't very good. You need to improve your copy. If your sales are low and if you had a lot of clicks and no sales and your sales are low, that means your sales letter wasn't very good.

But don't be discouraged. There are a couple of things you can do to fix the problem. One this is you can change your subject line to build in some curiosity. Secondly, you can format your emails correctly so that they convert better. Make sure that your email is no more than 50 characters wide. Make them short and sweet and gets straight to the point.

You also want to make sure that what your email is speaking as a friend to your reader. Let them feel like you understand them and that you've been in their shoes and can help them. Let them know that you'll try to do whatever it takes to meet their needs. Remember, you want to gain their trust as this is essential to making huge sales.

Also take a look at your sales letter. If you suspect it's a little weak, try to improve it. You want to model other good sales letters and get more testimonials. Testimonials are essential to any and all sales pages. Another thing that's really important is to create a good close. Use scarcity and urgency, limited availability, limited time, reduced price to the first X amount of people.

Use these tips to help you gain a better response and open rate from your visitors. Doing this will have you build a stronger list and a stronger business.
Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
..Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com

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Friday, June 27, 2008

What is Squidoo and how can you benefit from it?

Squidoo is basically where you can go and build a site quickly. You can recommend information, you can recommend ideas and you can spread your ideas and make them available for the public to see. It can make you look like an expert really quickly.
What it allows you to do is easily build a one-page website, pretty much on your own and they call it a lens. What you do with this lens is share your insights on a topic that interests you and that you really care about so that you can build credibility online.

You can also use it to send traffic to your sites or toyour blog. The other cool thing about it is after you’ve gone through and set up your site, you can even earn some extra cash.

My daughter is has recently set up a few lenses. I told her that before she did her homework every night that I wanted her to go and set up a new Squidoo lens. I got her to set up one yesterday and she set up another one tonight. She should probably have been in bed, but I wanted her to create new pages as often as she could. The reason why I wanted her to do this stuff is because she wanted to make money. I said, “Well, one of the quickest ways for anyone to make money online right now is to set up a Squidoo lens.”

My daughter also wanted to give money to charity, so I said, “The cool thing about it is that you can choose how much money you want to give to charity.” We actually got her a dog from the Humane Society. And because she loves dogs and wanted to give some money to their organization, she decided to give 20% of all the money she earned off that to the Humane Society and she kept the other 80% for herself. She can go back and change the amounts later if she wants. But I wanted her to just start seeing some money come in first.

Now, after you’ve gone through the process of setting up your lens you become what’s called a lens master. To start building you own site, just go to www.Squidoo.com/lensmaster/ and you can use me “Matt Bacak” as a referral.
At Squidoo, there are thousands of people creating these websites right now and a lot of it is really good information.

Other things you can do with your Squidoo website is sell things from Amazon to affiliate products as well as insert your own YouTube videos. That’s what we’re doing with Traffic Magicians. We not only do that, but we also put links back to my page. So, set yours up today or get Traffic Magicians to do it with the whole A9 process.

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com

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Monday, June 23, 2008

Local Search

If you're looking from an SEO perspective for local search, it's pretty easy. Just find names of counties and things like that and put them in your keywords. Think about what people are searching for. You can take Atlanta for example; I used to dominate "Atlanta internet marketing tips." Why? Well, because there were a lot of people actually searching for "Atlanta internet marketing tips." They don't just want to find internet marketing tips all over the world; they want to find internet marketing tips in Atlanta or internet marketing strategies, people that do internet marketing strategies in Atlanta. So I really dominated that in the beginning and I've got a big list of people in the Atlanta market.

So, utilize the names of areas, the names of counties, the names of cities around you, to do the local search. It works really well to put the name in your title tag. So instead of it being "internet marketing tips" or "real estate strategies" or "real estate foreclosures," do "Atlanta foreclosures," "Grant County foreclosures." You know, use those as your keywords or your keyword phrases.

In local search, there's actually two different things you can do - and both can be done with free traffic and paid traffic.

With the free traffic, you want to go after business owners. For instance, we've worked with carpet stores, we've worked with plumbers and we've worked with exterminators. All people are trying to do is find, for instance, an exterminator in Atlanta or for whatever city they're in. With local search, there are people searching on those search terms, so you can definitely target those terms and literally dominate them very quickly using free traffic strategies such as the ones used by Traffic Magicians. As I mentioned before, you can find them at TrafficMagicians.com.

You're going to dominate your local search areas because they're what's considered long tail keywords, which makes them areas that other web site owners aren't trying to go after. For example, let's take "internet marketing." This is a highly, highly searched term. However, "Internet marketing in Atlanta" is not always that highly searched. However, there is still traffic for this term. Now, if you can dominate that term, plus LA, plus New York, plus wherever location, you'll obviously be able to get a lot of people. You can also find all the different search terms. Just add the city name to it.

Another cool thing is that if you're doing your Google AdWords campaign, it will actually give you the option of advertising within say a 50-mile radius of your business. This can work wonders if you're selling a service or even if you're selling houses.

For example, let's say you help save people from foreclosure and you want to target a specific foreclosure market. You would target your cities or maybe your sub-cities and everywhere else within a set radius in Google AdWords. So, instead of picking the United States, you could just pick the state of Georgia. You could pick the entire state of Georgia and only sanction that one. So, if you wanted to buy property all over your state or if you only wanted to buy property in a 50-mile radius around your house, you could do so. You can literally dominate your first three or four positions in Google AdWords by creating different campaigns because you're going to show up for those local people. You know, someone in Poughkeepsie, New York is not going to see my Atlanta ad. So, that's kind of the benefit of using this method.

Basically, if you're not using local search you're missing out on a ton of traffic.

It can literally change your business.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
..Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

The A9 Process of bringing more traffic to your website – Step 9

We’ve finally reached the last step of our A9 Process. I hope you’ve gone over all the previous steps. If not do that now before you read this last step so you have a clear understanding of the process.

For Step #9 we’re going to take all of this content again and post links back to it -to different social networking and social bookmarking websites.

There are tons and tons of social networking and social bookmarking websites out there and these are all considered authority sites, just like Squidoo.

What this does is it gets a massive amount of great backlinks to your website that the search engines are going to see and spider. This raises the value of the search term for your website, no matter where that site is in its rankings. So, we put these links back to your website, we put content in there like your article and stuff like that and then it actually pushes your website higher in the search engines.

These authority sites are saying your site is about “this”, which is based on your keyword. One of my keywords is “internet marketing tips”, so the search engines will rank me higher for that particular term.

So, that is it. The A9 process is finally complete!

It’s pretty easy to set all this stuff up. It’s just like creating blog posts on most of these sites. You can literally just go in, copy and paste stuff in, hit go, and it creates everything for you. You don’t have to sit there and work all this HTML magic. It’s a fairly simple process but it just takes a little time.

To give you an overview of how long this process could take you depends on whether you outsource it or do-it-yourself. When you outsource it, you have to micromanage people because if you’re going to have several different outsourcers you need to make sure that they’re all accountable for doing your stuff. If you’re doing them yourself, the process could go a little smoother, but it’s still going to take time just to stumble and bumble through all this stuff until you become better at it.

It takes about 28 hours per submission to submit this stuff. Outsourcing could take three and a half hours per submission. Obviously, these times can drop, but the point is, how much is your time worth?

Now, what if I told you that a company called Traffic Magicians would only take you one hour a month to get everything done no matter how many submissions you did? Sound like something you would be interested in? If so, go to TrafficMagicians.com to learn more.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com

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Sunday, June 08, 2008

The A9 Process of bringing more traffic to your website – Step 6

Let’s review what we have done so far. We first started off writing good quality 350-500 word articles. We then submitted these articles to the various submission sites. Next, we repurposed and modified the same content into press releases and submitted those. After that, we took the same content and made it into professional videos. We submitted those.

Now, we’re going to take the audio that was in your video, which your professional voiceover person did, as well as your call to action, and podcast it for you.
The cool benefit for podcasting is that there are literally over 200 million Apple iTunes users searching on iTunes every single day. Now, although Apple iTunes likes video, it is really an audio search engine, just like YouTube is really a video search engine. So, if you don’t think 200 million is a lot of people think of adding yourself to other different audio search engines. That’s all you’re doing here is you’re just placing the media that these search engines like.

So what we do is, we actually take that audio and we create you a podcast channel and then get you on iTunes. What that’s going to do is it’s going to put you into another search engine that’s going to get you even more traffic. Plus you can get back links from that because it’s an RSS feed - meaning that it’s constantly updating. It’s like a blog. You’re going to constantly see this updating in Google or in all of the other regular search engines simply because it’s like new content coming in.

Pretty amazing stuff when you think about all the techniques we use to generate a huge amount of traffic. The best part of the A9 process is it’s not a bunch of smoke and mirrors that will get you banned and the effects of using these techniques will last indefinitely because the media we are using has been around forever and is not some passing fad.

If you haven’t done so already, make sure you go over to DirectTrafficGeyser.com and check out what we have to offer. We have done our best to help you in this whole process and we have arranged special pricing on all this stuff, in case you don’t have the time to do any of this yourself. It will be one of the best investments you ever make in your business.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven't signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I'm doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt'. It's now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com

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