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How to create a special report without writing a single word

by on November 22, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building, Product Creation, Productivity Tips

Many people aspiring to become an Internet marketer are stuck at the step where they are supposed to create a special report. More often than not, it’s a confidence issue. They may say, “oh, I’m not that good a writer” or “I just don’t have the time.”  But usually it’s their fear of taking a piece of their work and putting it out there for everyone to judge, that is causing them to procrastinate.

Well, today I offer a simple solution that will allow you to have a special report out in less than 20 minutes. And the best part is, you don’t have to write a single word of it!

(Hint: You can be the aggregator / publisher of other people’s work and have your name on the cover.)

How to create a special report (video)

How Create a Special Report Without Writing a Single Word

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Should I Use ClickBank or 1ShoppingCart For My Product Launch?

by on August 11, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Product Launch, Referral Marketing

This short article is a response to a question by one of the readers, Peter Davies:

I have looked at Infusion and found it to be too expensive at this point in time. Do you think 1ShoppingCart is a decent enough product or if you are a first time launcher like me would you just use ClickBank?

Well, let’s see.

I personally don’t have a lot of experience with the vendor side of ClickBank. I am going to point out a few things that would work differently for you if you were launching your product with each solution. Also keep in mind that there are many other solutions available. However, both ClickBank and 1ShoppingCart are quite popular so it’s a good idea to compare them.

There are plenty of examples of successful launches done with either one. Either solution can work for you. It will depend on the launch model you chose and on the niche you are launching in.

1. Affiliate Management

I understand you don’t have access to the list of your affiliates from within ClickBank. You can overcome that issue by using some add-on software or by forcing your partners to register on your website first before you tell them how to set up their hop link.

1ShoppingCart has a rather elaborate affiliate management module that allows you to maintain a list of affiliates, set their commission percentages, send them emails, etc.

2. Creative / Template Management

If you use ClickBank, you need to find a way to deliver the email copy, banners, and text ads to your affiliates via your own website or email autoresponder.

1ShoppingCart Affiliate Center allows your affiliate to login and get access to all your campaign creative and template with their tracking links already built in.

3. Commission Tracking

Both ClickBank and 1ShoppingCart rely on cookies for commission tracking, which may not be the most reliable method. There are affiliate tracking solutions (e.g., Nanacast, Post Affiliate Pro, etc) that use both the cookie and the IP address to make sure your affiliates get the commissions they are entitled to.

4. Cookie Prospects For All Products (Not Just The One Being Promoted)

ClickBank will only cookie the prospect for the particular product being advertised by the affiliate. If the prospect decides to buy a different product offered by the same vendor that sale will not trigger the commission for the affiliate who referred that sale.

1ShoppingCart will cookie the prospect for all your products. I think it is only fair that affiliates get paid for all the sales they generate for you (including the products they have not directly promoted to their list).

5. 2-Tier Commissions

1ShoppingCart allows you to set up two levels of commissions. The second tier is for the commission you pay to the affiliates to refer other affiliates to you. The reason you may want this in place is because now you can bring in professional joint venture brokers (like yours truly) who will then, in a short time, connect you with the list you’d otherwise have no access to.

6. Solution Cost and ROI

1ShoppingCart would cost you at least $99/month for the package that has the shopping cart and the affiliate management module. There are no per-transaction fees other than those related to your merchant account.

ClickBank is “free” when you don’t use it but you end up paying a small fee for every transaction. Depending on the volume of sales you are about to generate, ClickBank can actually turn out to be a more expensive solution.

7. Affiliate Network

1ShoppingCart allows you to manage affiliates but doesn’t help new affiliates find you.

ClickBank is one of the oldest and largest affiliate networks around. If your product converts well, you’ll have new affiliates find you on ClickBank and start selling your products without you doing any work to recruit them.

8. Affiliate Payouts

Figuring out how much you owe each affiliate and sending them checks can be quite a hassle 1ShoppingCart and ClickBank address the issue differently. In 1ShoppingCart, you have the PayPal Mass Pay function to pay your affiliates with a click of a button. In ClickBank, you don’t even have to click the button because everything is handled by ClickBank on your behalf (and that is one of their biggest selling features).

9. Market Niche

1ShoppingCart seems to be more popular in the Personal Development / Self Help niche. ClickBank is the de facto standard in Internet marketing. To help your launch go smoothly, you want to give your affiliates a tool they are familiar with.

Hope this information will help you chose the right affiliate management software for your product launch.

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3 Main Phases Of A Product Launch

by on June 24, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing

Most product launches have three main phases:

1. The Pre-Launch
2. The Launch
3. The Post-Launch

Let’s look at each phase and what it entails.

The Pre-Launch

The Pre-Launch is typically a 3-7 day period during which the prospects receive a lot of quality information and get excited about the upcoming product launch. The information  they receive during the pre-launch makes them think, “Man, if their free stuff is so good, imagine how great their PAID product must be!”

The paid product, however, is not available yet. Prospects are sent to a squeeze page that asks them to subscribe and receive a series of videos, special reports, and allows them to participate in tele-seminars and webinars.

The purpose of this phase is two-fold: Build a list for the launch and create ANTICIPATION on the part of prospects so that they are ready to pull out their credit card as soon as the product becomes available.

For this phase to have the proper effect on the prospects, you have to give away the best information, tips, tools, and advice you have. This may seem counter-intuitive, however, it’s critical that you do that.

The Launch

The day of the Launch comes and now all these thousands of people are going to rush to the website and get a copy of the product. Those who don’t buy it right away will receive an automated follow-up sequence of emails designed to persuade them to buy.

Usually, this is the phase when affiliates make all or most of their commissions. Holding contests that are based on the number of referrals or the amount of sales helps

The Post-Launch

This is a 1-4 week period after the product launch that allows the product owner to do more virtual seminars and interviews and generate more sales. Many launches skip this step and leave a lot of money on the table.

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Product Launch: Keep Your Hands Away From That Last Cookie!

by on June 23, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Product Launch

All the big product launches we get to hear about are done via a network of joint venture partners with large lists.

It is not uncommon for the same subscriber to be on several lists and hence receive emails about the same promotion from several joint venture partners or affiliates at the same time. When a sale happens, the big question becomes, which affiliate is entitled to receive the commission on it: The first one to deliver this offer to the prospect or the last one who sealed the deal and convinced the prospect to take action?

Either approach has positive and negative aspects.

The “first cookie wins” approach allows you to give your major partners an incentive to mail early and to create the momentum for your launch. However, smaller partners who find out about the launch or start promoting it late, will have little if any incentive to participate because a lot of their own subscribers would have been cookied but the larger affiliates. This also invites “black hat” tactics like “cookie stuffing” that some of the less scrupulous affiliates may turn to in order to gain advantage over other partners.

The “last cookie wins” approach seems the most fair. After all, it’s the affiliate that gets the sale who should get paid on it, right? So it is no surprise most affiliate tracking packages work according to this scenario. Obviously, it may be a little harder for you to recruit some of the big list owners as your partners as now they’d have to work harder to make their commission from your launch.

It is also possible to use a combination of the two approaches by using the “last cookie wins” for tracking but recording the affiliate ID along with the contact details for the prospect in your autoresponder. When you send out follow up emails, you can drop in the affiliate code of the original affiliate in the purchase link. In this case it’s the affiliate who generated the lead is the one that ultimately gets paid the commission.

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Internet Marketing Lesson: A Sheep, A Duck, And A Rooster

by on June 16, 2010 in A/B Split Testing, Copywriting, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing

A little story for you, which may not seem related to Internet marketing right away. I promise to bring it all home for you in the end.

If I were to say “Montgolfier”, most people would answer that that name belonged to the two brothers who flew the first ever hot air balloon…  and they would be close but not quite correct.

See, Montgolfier did invent the balloon and were the first to build one. However, they weren’t the first passengers on board their invention.

Since up to that point, human beings had never had a chance to become airborne, the effect of the air flight on a living organism was unknown. The Montgolfier were offered criminals as their guinea pigs. They declined. Instead, they picked a sheep, a duck, and a rooster.

Obviously, that story has a happy end. Nowadays, thousands of people get up in the air in airplanes, helicopters, gliders and, of course, hot air balloons. They don’t think twice about it and obviously don’t remember the three little creatures that paved the way to human flight.

What’s the moral of the story, you may ask? And what does it have to do with Internet marketing?

Well, imagine you are creating a new product. You’re excited. You’re so sure it’s going to be a smashing success. The website it up, the shopping cart is ready to take orders. You go ahead and spend a small fortune on the traffic and, to top it off, line up a bunch of JV partners.

The big day arrives. The traffic comes in fast and furious and…

… nothing! Your squeeze page didn’t squeeze and your sales copy didn’t sell. At least not to the extent that would be considered “reasonable”.

The money spent on advertising is gone forever. And so are the partners who vouch to never participate in your lame launches again.

That’s one possible scenario.

Now imagine doing things a bit differently.

You create a product and put together two different versions of the same squeeze page. You set up an A/B Split test and send the traffic to these squeeze pages through a link rotator, which you then promote to a relatively small in-house list (the online equivalent of the Montgolfier’s sheep, duck, and rooster.)

You generate a bunch of clicks, just enough to tell which squeeze page works better (and if it works at all). You pick the better version (“control”) and send it out to all the lists you can get your hands on.

Your affiliate partners come in and start promoting your product too. This time, the conversions are high. Everybody is making money on the upsells and everyone’s happy.

What was the difference?

It’s easy to see: Instead of trying to predict how your squeeze page would weather out in the marketplace, you did a limited test before opening the floodgates to major traffic. A small extra step in planning and testing your campaign can mean the difference between making it and not making it in Internet marketing.

In a few days, one of my JV partners will be sending out my offer to his super-big list. So guess what I’m working on now? Exactly: I’m setting up an A/B Split test for my pages that I will promote to one of my own list. And when the big traffic hits my squeeze page, I will put my best foot forward because I will know which one is, in fact, the best.

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Driving Email Open Rates

by on June 13, 2010 in Copywriting, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

There are a number of email marketing metrics a savvy marketer can use to continuously improve the performance of his or her campaigns. I’d like to touch on the factors that impact the open rate of an email marketing campaign.

Whether your email will or will not get opened depends on the time and the day of the week when you are sending it out, how strong the relationship is with the list you have been able to build and, of course, the subject line.

Your autoresponder system should store all the emails you have ever sent out to your list along with the open rates. Note which days and times tend to be better for your list. Once you notice a pattern, start strategically targeting the times that are likely to get you the better opens.

  • The relationship with your list is something that you build over time, before you need to send out a promotional email to your list. It’s a well that you need to dig way before you’re thirsty. That being said, there are still a few things you can do even in a promo piece that will continue the process of building a relationship:
  • Make sure to use the “from” name they will recognize
  • Brand your email messages with the name of the topic you are writing about or the abbreviated name of your newsletter  (put it in the square bracket in the beginning of the subject line.)
  • Work a personal story into the copy or take a short paragraph to tell your list about what’s going on in your life right this moment. (E.g., “I’m just heading out and taking my son to the baseball game but I wanted to make sure you receive this important message”)

As they say, people do business with and refer business to those they know, like, and trust. If you want them to spend their money with you, let them know more about you, get them to like you through your stories and be consistent, and they will very soon will start trusting you.

Now, let’s talk about the subject line.

The subject line is the add for your email and hence all the copywriting principles apply here. Danny Hatch, one of the best copywriters, has identified seven “copy drivers”. They are: fear, greed, guilt, anger, exclusivity, salvation, flattery. Use these in your copy to see more action from your subscribers.

The two types of subject lines that have performed well for me are benefit-centric (“8 Free Special Reports with Resell Rights”) or curiosity-based (“Seen This?”)

You should put as much care into crafting a good subject line as you would into writing a headline for an ad. If you need inspiration to start writing, check out the 100 Greatest Headlines that Jay Abraham has put together.  Some of these could be over 100 years but they still work as well now as they did then.

Treat your Inbox as a gigantic “swipe file”. Read the emails you are getting from other marketers and see which ones you’d be interested to click on and read. Copy / paste the best headlines into a text file and store it on your computer. That will become your personal swipe file and the source of the higher email open rates.

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List Building Secrets: Top 10 Easy Ways To Build a “Seed” List – Part 2

by on June 10, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series List Building - Seed List

6. Get Paid Search Traffic (PPC, PPV, Content Network, Banners)

Buying search traffic is one of the fastest ways to get the clicks.  If you have some cash to burn, then this may be the right way to test the new market you’re about to enter.

What I like about pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-view (PPV) and other paid traffic methods, is that you can measure the effectiveness of each campaign, each keyword you’re bidding on, and every piece of online ‘real estate’ you advertise on. If you are the analytical type, this may  become your favourite traffic method.

Since you are paying for every click, you need to find a way to immediately monetize this traffic so that you could run a PPC campaign indefinitely at a profit or at least at a break even. This may require a fair bit of fine-tuning, and that’s why you need to have a cash reserve to play this game.

7. Get “Free” Search Traffic (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is a misnomer. You can’t optimize search engine. You can, however, optimize your web pages in a way that search engines will find it and start suggesting it to the people who type in certain search words or phrases in Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

SEO is something that takes time to see the results of. If this is new territory for you, then pick another — faster — method of acquiring a seed list.

On the other hand, if you are an SEO expert and have websites that search engines send a lot of traffic to, all you need to do is offer all these people a chance to subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for a special report or other valuable gift.

8. Use Safe Lists and Viral List Builders

A safe list is a special email “club” where each member can send emails to other members. When you join a safe list, you give permission to other members to send you their ads. Don’t expect the leads that you get from a safe list to be quite as responsive as, say SEO traffic. However, you can still successfully market your squeeze page in safe lists.

Viral list builders take the idea of safe lists to the next level and compensate you with traffic credits for referring other marketers into your “downline”.

When you use either safe lists or viral list builders, remember not to sign up with your main email address. You are likely to receive a large amount of promotional emails there. So create a brand-new gmail account and use that instead.

9. Use Traffic Exchanges

A traffic exchange is a network of marketers who receive traffic credits for looking at other people’s websites. Since the users of traffic exchanges get compensated for looking at your squeeze page, your conversion is likely to be rather low. However, you will still be acquiring leads.

If you have children at home, get them to login into your traffic exchange and click on other people’s ads. That will help you build up your credits, and with more credits in your account, you will receive more traffic.

10. Buy Co-Reg Leads

Coreg (also “co-reg” and co-registration) refers to a service that allows you to place your ad on other people’s thank you pages.

The responsiveness of a co-reg list would depend on a lot of factors. Remember that these leads don’t come free. You should expect to pay anywhere from 25c – 50c per lead of good quality. And just like with any other method, run a test and see if these leads are going to respond to your offer and products.

Most of the major autoresponder providers don’t allow you to import a co-reg list anymore without your subscribers re-confirming their subscription. Give preference to those co-reg services that already come with an autoresponder.

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List Building Secrets: Top 10 Easy Ways To Build a “Seed” List – Part 1

by on June 9, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series List Building - Seed List

List building is easy… once you have a list. With a list of your own, you can grow it fast through “joint ventures” or “ad swaps”. (Which I do almost daily.)

The problem is, you need to have a list in the first place to be able to do ad swaps.

The answer to this conundrum is the “seed” list of a few hundred names. It is a starting point in list building. It is your ticket to creating real equity in your Internet Marketing business in the form of a responsive list of email subscribers.

That seed list, however small, will allow you to set up joint ventures with other list owners. You can work with lists of similar size or approach the lists that are 2-3 times bigger than yours, in which case they may send your offer to a segment of their list or ask you to mail multiple times to match the clicks.

So how do you get there if you are starting from complete, utter zero?

The following is a brief (and by no means complete) overview of the methods of building a seed list fast.

1. Get a Friend to Send Out a “Solo” Email For You

Several Internet marketers I know got their start in this profession with the help of their friend or a relative who already had a list. Hey, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being lucky or having the right connections. If this shortcut is available to you, take it.

2. Pay Someone to Send Out a “Solo” Email For You

In lieu of a friend who would send out your stuff to their list for free, you can find someone who would do it for a fee.

If you don’t have the money to pay for this, trade your time. Everything has value in this world. In exchange for having a successful list owner build your list, you could handle their customer support, write some articles for them, build web pages, sit their baby, walk their dog, cut their grass… you get the drift. Now don’t be shy. Go through your Inbox and reply to some of the emails you are getting from various list owners and ask if they could use some free help around their office (in exchange for building your list, of course). Contact those who appear to be doing everything by themselves, with no staff to help them in their daily “grunt” work.

3. Buy an Ezine Ad

This tactic is very similar to #2. Except this time we are going after lists that routinely sell advertising “space” like solo emails and banners.

A couple of places to meet ezine owners and buy email ads would be Rent-A-List and Directory Of Ezines.

4. Create a Product And Offer 100% Commission

Okay, okay, maybe this method isn’t as easy as some. However, if your talent is in creating content, it won’t take you long to put together a special report, an ebook, a set of videos or audios, or a software tool. Most people don’t have either the skill or the confidence to create their own products. Hence they are always looking for new potentially lucrative things to promote.

Now imagine how excited they are going to be when you offer them 100% of the money! They will promote your product like crazy!

On the technical side, you can collect all the money first and then pay it out to your partners. Or you can simply link the Add to Cart button on your sales page to your partner’s PayPal account(s) and have them receive it instantly. They make all the commissions, and you see your list grow rapidly.

Here are some ideas for you to make the most out of this tactic:

a) Run all the leads through a squeeze page. After all, you want to build a list, right?

b) Upsell the leads with a front-end offer as soon as they opt-in (that’s the one that you are paying 100% of commissions on). This offer should be almost irresistible and a high-converting one to make it worth your partners’ time.

c) Come up with a second and bigger upsell or a continuity program that will put money in your bank account. Now you are growing your list and making cash at the same time. You may decide to offer affiliate commissions on your second upsell to make your deal even more appealing to your partners.

5. Enter a JV Giveaway As a Contributor

A JV Giveaway is an online event that allows you to submit a “gift” and receive leads that are interested in downloading your items. You are usually required to promote a JV Giveaway event. You could promote the event to your list if you had one. Otherwise, you ask a few of your friends to join. They’ll thank you for giving them access to dozens and possibly hundreds of great freebies from all the contributors. You can also promote it through Twitter and Facebook (and it doesn’t take much time make some friends there).

Click here for the list of the upcoming JV Giveaway events.

Tomorrow will we review five more ways to create a “seed” list.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-30

by on May 30, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing

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Review Of Email Marketing Solutions

by on August 31, 2009 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

Came across a question posted on LinkedIn about email marketing.

Omar is asking:

I see opt-in email landing pages everywhere and opt-in email boxes on blogs…I would like to put together an opt in landing page and add a opt-in email box to my word press blog, can anyone recommend a turnkey solution?

Here are some packages I use or have used for myself or my clients and comments re pros and cons:

http://www.infusionsoft.com – The have come down in price somewhat but it’s still the most expensive package on this list. And so it should be. It goes far beyond just giving you and opt-in box. It manages your entire business: contacts, sequential campaigns, direct mail, etc. I’m not using it but some of my clients do. And some who don’t wish they started using it earlier because switching is always a pain. If your business can afford to foot that bill, go with this solution.

http://invite.aweber.com – This one is the “gold standard” of deliverability (is that a word?). Arguably the best autoresponder package on the market as long as you only do online marketing and generate all your contacts via an opt-in. If you need to import a list from another system or need to punch in a bunch of business cards that you’ve collected at a trade show, each contact will receive an email from Aweber saying, “Hey, so-and-so is trying to add you to the list, please confirm you want to be on it!” Obviously, this is not very good for a “normal” brick & mortar business.

http://www.icontactsoft.com – good delivery, broadcasts, surveys, list segmentation, and very user-friendly. One huge advantage over Aweber: They actually allow you to punch in / import contacts. The company has just made the Inc 500 list so they must know what they are doing. I have switched most of my websites to iContact.

http://www.contactcontact.com – popular with many folks mostly due to great branding. A solid newsletter distribution service. Several months ago they (finally!) added autoreponders (otherwise I would not have recommended them at all) and revamped their pricing to bring it inline with Aweber and iContact.

http://www.1shoppingcart.com – an all-in-one autoresponder, shopping cart, affiliate manager and ad tracker. I heard from a number of people 1SC delivery is not as good as some others. Well, dunno. Maybe they have had issues in the past. They seem to be pretty good now. The major benefit is that you get an integrated solution capable of running your entire online business. There are some major online empires running entirely on 1SC so you can’t really go wrong there.

http://www.quickpaypro.com – similar to 1SC but offers a few extra features. Integrates well with WishListMember, a membership site plugin for WordPress. Offers one-click upsell, which 1SC doesn’t, at least not yet. QPP is being re-branded into or merged with Cydec and looks like there is still some dust in the air. I used their 30 day trial and decided to pull out and wait a while. The software looks a bit “undercooked”.  Nothing major, just a few small yet annoying issues here and there. Unless 1SC come out with one-click upsell soon, I’ll be looking at QPP again.

http://www.getreponse.com – A solid autoresponder product, worth consideration. They have improved a lot recently, both in terms of their user interface and deliverability.

http://www.responsemagic.com – This one gives you the ability to create “replicated” autoresponder accounts. That makes it a favorite among the business opportunity folks who need have their salespeople / team / downline send out newsletters and autoresponder sequences to their leads that were pre-written and then automatically personalized and transferred into their accounts. I don’t think that’s your situation but I thought I’d throw this one in because this is a pretty unique solution.

There is also always an option to host the script on your own server (which some people do and which I tried for one site and eventually had to do away with because if was beginning to turn into a full-time job). I don’t recommend this. However, if that’s the route you decide to take, start your research here:
http://www.arpros.com
http://www.sellwide.com
http://www.phplist.com (this one is actually free but no autoresponders)

Hope this helps.

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