I have just launched a new website that is now getting 20-40 clicks per day. Which is not bad at all for a site that has been up for just a few days. It’s been indexed by all the major search engines and has a page rank in Google.

And here’s something even better: It ranks #1 in Google for my target term!

Sounds somewhat impressive, doesn’t it? Well, if you know anything about SEO, you should ask me which term I’m ranking for. The term is, “local marketing richmond hill”. “Local marketing” is what I do, “Richmond Hill” in the name of the place I live in. There is hardly any traffic for this keyword phrase and hardly any competition. So it’s really not that big of a deal.

However, the leads still trickle in. And, more importantly, it’s not a bad way to build some credibility with prospects. Prospects want to be confident that I’m not full of it and know what I’m talking about. Besides, their own site needs to be optimized for “what-they-do city-they-are-in”, doesn’t it?

That’s where my site comes handy. It presents a great case study of how to rank high and fast for a geo-targeted local search term.

See, local businesses usually only need to rank for search terms that contain location modifiers (“chiropractor seattle” vs “chiropractor”). In many cases it’s a relatively easy thing to do. But since most business owners don’t know the first thing about SEO, you need to give them a good examples. Wouldn’t it make sense to use your own site?

For the record, I don’t mean you should snow your prospect and claim your site is getting a beejillion clicks every day. Don’t stretch the truth. Be helpful and be real. Many businesses aren’t looking for a flood of leads from their websites every day. A few leads here and there is usually all they look for.

PS: My next step is to get my sites show up on the first page for “local marketing toronto” and eventually for “local marketing”.

In Internet marketing, traffic is half of the battle (the other half is conversion). When you are able to drive traffic, many other things almost take care of themselves.

There are only 3 main ways to get the traffic to your website:

1. You can buy it (with pay-per-click, per-per-view, banners, solo ads, etc)

2. You can create it (with SEO, social media, blogging and content sharing)

3. And finally, you can borrow it (with various forms of joint ventures)

Which one is the best? Well, it depends on who you ask. Those who manage to build solid online businesses utilize all three.

If you are new to Internet marketing, don’t try to figure all of these methods at the same time. Pick one and master it. Once it’s working, automate and outsource it and add another method. Then rinse and repeat.

That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Well, let me kick one more thought in: Don’t be afraid to try a new traffic method. Set your budget, both in terms of time and money you invest, and give it your best shot. If at the end of your “budget” time you made money or broke even, tweak it until it’s consistently profitable. And when it is, just keep “miking” it.

See, you don’t have to be a super-human to build an internet marketing empire. You eat that elephant one small piece at a time.

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 Create a Special Report Without Writing a Single Word

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.

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.

Technorati Tags: product launch, pre-launch, post-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.

Technorati Tags: product launch, affiliate management, affiliate tracking, joint ventures, Internet marketing

If you plan on launching an information product — be it a course, a membership website, a coaching program, or simply a book — through a network of joint venture partners, one of the more important considerations is the software used for affiliate tracking.

Your most important task is to make sure your affiliates are paid all the commissions they are entitled to. Alas, many software packages are much less than bulletproof when it comes to commission reporting and tracking.

Some shopping carts offer built-in affiliate systems. There are also a number of stand-alone affiliate tracking solutions that are either hosted for you or that you can host yourself.

Here is the list of the most important things to consider when choosing an affiliate solution:

1. Are the referrals tracked only via cookies or are there additional level of assurance like IP tracking?

2. How much control do you have over the way cookies behave? (How soon would they expire? Is it the first cookie or the last cookie that gets the sale?)

3. How many levels of commissions can you pay? (Many launches only pay one level of commissions, however, adding an extra level will allow you to approach joint venture brokers and off-load a lot of JV partner recruiting to them. You may want to stop at two levels as anything more than that and you will be considered a multi-level company with many regulations and restrictions around what you can and cannot do.)

4. Would you be able to set commissions to a different level for individual partners? (You may want to be able to offer some of your key partners a special deal and possibly pay them a higher percentage).

5. Is the reporting function adequate? (Many affiliate programs simply don’t give you much information or the information in the report may be delayed by 24 hours, which is almost eternity in a product launch scenario.)

6. Does it offer you an easy way to host media files (email copy, banners, text links, pre-written tweets, etc) with the affiliate’s link automatically built in?

7. Will it work with your current autoresponder / email marketing system?

8. Will it scale to handle the traffic and the load on the server?

9. Will it allow you to go into the system and manually verify the commissions by matching them to the orders from a particular affiliate? (Blindly trusting the software can be disastrous. Best practices include thorough testing preceding the launch and spot check throughout. Be aware that some affiliate tracking packages will report to you the number but may not give you enough information to know how this number was arrived at, rendering any manual verification impossible.)

Technorati Tags: product launch, product launch formula, joint ventures, affiliate marketing, affiliate management, affiliate tracking, affiliate software

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.

Technorati Tags: kaizen, a/b split testing, starting online business, product creation, internet marketing

This short article may read like a math lesson. However, its purpose is to simply show you the revenue mechanics of your Internet marketing business and help you get that “pay raise” you’ve been working so hard on for so long.

Every successful Internet marketing business has a way of collecting people’s contact details and adding them to a database. That is usually accomplished with a squeeze page.

I think it is safe to say that having a good squeeze page is critical to “making it” in Internet marketing.

Yet a lot of people don’t test their squeeze pages. They don’t tweak them to squeeze more juice out of the traffic they are getting. They don’t look at their conversion rates.

If you happen to be in that number, I hope to give you enough evidence to make testing your squeeze page a priority.

So let’s begin.

Let’s imagine that your squeeze page is converting at a very respectable 35%. You decide to conduct an experiment and test several headlines. After a series of A/B Split tests you end up with a headline that improves the conversion rate for your squeeze page by 2%.

Next, you change the graphics and the location of your opt in box that results in another improvement of 5%.

You don’t stop there and continue testing. Adding the privacy statement results in another 3% bump.

Excited, you add a testimonial. The one from a male client doesn’t seem to help that much. However, the female version results in another 3% improvement.

These numbers may seem small and insignificant. But let’s add them up.

2% + 5% + 3% + 3% = 13%

(Actually, adding the percentages here is not mathematically correct. I will spare you the calculations but if you were to do the math right you’d end up with 13.62% improvement. Think “compound interest”.)

A 13% improvement may not seem like much. However, let’s look at what’s going on. You page is now converting at (35% + 13%) = 48%. So basically if in the past your squeeze was  converting approximately one out of three clicks into a subscriber, now it converts one out of two.

This additional 13% is in reality a (13 / 35) = 37.14% improvement to your conversions.

Let’s see how this improvement may help your bank account.

With the new squeeze page, every dollar you invest in the advertising of your business goes a whole 37 cents further. You also get 37% more leads from every joint venture. Now the campaigns that were dogs are starting to make you money, while the rest have gone from mildly profitable to wildly lucrative.

Bear with me for a little bit. We are not quite done yet.

Every business operates at a certain profit margin. Traditional “brick-and-mortar” companies may have a profit margin of 3-15%. An Internet business can, in fact, enjoy a much higher one.

Let’s say your profit margin was at 30% before all the testing and the tweaking you’ve done. Now you have just expanded the number of leads, and hence the amount of sales, by 37%.

And the best part, it didn’t cost you anything at all, other that some time, to do that! It is all pure profit.

There is a moral to this story. Here it is:

Every time you don’t find the time to properly test your squeeze page, remember that by taking the shortcut you are accepting a cut in your pay check. And while there is always something to pin your lackluster sales to — bad economy, changing search engine algorithms, too many product launches going on at the same time, or your customers “not spending” — deep down inside, you know that it only takes a quick glance in the mirror to know the real reason.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, internet marketing business, make money online, a/b split testing, taguchi, kaizen, squeeze page, profit margin

Even though Internet marketing has only been around for a very short time (at least on the historical scale), the principles that online money-making is based on have been formulated, tested, and perfected over 100 years ago by the direct response marketing industry.

One of the simplest, most powerful, and yet probably one of the most overlooked “tricks” that comes from that time is A/B Split testing. (And it is overlooked, of course, mainly by the rookies. Every successful Internet marketer I know uses it with an almost religious rigor.)

Let’s take a look at what A/B Split testing is all about.

Back in the day, an advertiser would run the same ad in two cities at the same time. The ad in New York would use Headline A and the ad in Boston would use Headline B. The sales numbers would come in and the results would be tracked.

A week later, they would run the same ad again. However this time, the headlines would be reversed: Headline A for Boston and Headline B for New York.

When this experiment is over, the advertiser would know with scientific precision, whiccdh headline generated higher sales numbers. The winning ad would be declared a “control” and  would be subsequently used to attack the national market and build another business empire.

As Internet marketers, we are blessed to have a great variety of tools available to us to help us measure pretty much anything and everything our heart desires. Computers make it easy and inexpensive to do.

Yet so many online business owners still neglect to test much of anything, either due to ignorance, arrogance, or just the lack of proper time management.

Let’s see what can — and should –  be tested in your online business.

First is your “ad”, something that gets you a click. That can be a PPC ad, a banner, or the email copy that your JV partners use to send you referrals.

The next thing would usually be your squeeze page. (Shame on you if you don’t have one.) Just a few tweaks here and there can significantly improve your conversions and result in an almost instant pay raise for you.

As we continue, we need to test the sales page, the offer, all the upsells, and downsells, and, of course, the email follow up sequence.

Here are some of the less obvious ideas to test: How about adding a physical product option (CDs, DVDs, product binders shipped to your customer’s door) and adding direct mail (postcard, greeting cards, and “3d” mail items that grab attention) to your follow up? Many online marketers never think about moving their business partially into the offline, so if you manage to create a campaign that works, you have a potential of create an enormous competitive advantage.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, marketing metrics, a/b split testing, copywriting, direct response