HERE’S A SIMPLE METHOD TO SNEAK IN ON A MARKETING FUNNEL AS AN INTERNET MARKETING BEGINNER

You’ve been studying online marketing strategies and getting into or have been doing internet marketing or online marketing to make a profit and to do this you have to market or sell something, whether it’s your own products or someone else’s products.  This is as basic as it gets.  But, I want to show you a little trick to come into the perfect position in a marketing funnel as a beginner.

Most serious online sales (and offline) follow a specific process or cycle of events.

Buyers Behavior Stage 1:

The potential buyer decides that he has a problem or need something.

Buyers Behavior Stage 2:

He begins to research the problem and sound out possible solutions. Many people find free information/solutions to their problems at this stage and drop out of the cycle.  Many times in this step friends come into play because of the trust/influence level, but they still recommend products that have helped them and then it’s on to Step 3 to do research and find reviews on these recommended products.

Buyers Behavior Stage 3:

His research and his own particular leanings make him begin to favor a particular type of solution or product. He now starts looking at review and comparison sites.

Buyers Behavior Stage 4:

Having read a few reviews he’s now favoring a particular product, and seeking reassurance, looking for the best price or the best bonus.

Although it’s only four stages, it can become complicated on how to implement this whole process into your business.  The so called gurus have figured this out to a science and can take their prospects through the whole thing until the last stage where they buy their products leaving them with a nice helping of cash in their bank account.  So I want to break this down into one small action step and give you something to take away from this that can be done right away without having to be a super ninja guru.

Check out Stage 3, reviewing the products.  This is a great place to come into this funnel as a beginner because the buyer has already concluded they have a problem, need a solution and have a handful of products to review and then make a choice on which one to buy.  Generally buyers will not drop out of the funnel at this point because they have invested valuable time getting this far.

I’m sure you have some products that you have bought along the way sitting on a shelf collecting dust at this point.  So dust ‘em off and create a blog post, Hubpage, or an Ezine article (the best would be to do all three) and put your review or recommendation about the product with your affiliate link inside the article.  Pick a couple that you gained the most knowledge about and even implemented in your business already.  Just make sure you at least have the name of the product first and then the word review in your title so you have a chance at being found in the search engines.  Be creative with your title, but make sure those two elements are in there.  You want it to stand out from the other reviews out there.

One suggestion.  Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income gets the best conversion rates of a product review by creating a video of some sort along with the review explaining to others how to use the product.  I know some other marketers that video themselves opening up the product package when it arrives, flipping through the book, opening the CD cases and then following up with a “how to” video.  You could also create an audio or pod cast outlining some of the key points of the product and how they can put it to use.  This works because of the personal interaction and not just a bunch of words.

I you want to crush it out of the park, then become an expert about the product you are reviewing, not just someone who has read the book, listened to the cd’s or downloaded the software and used it a couple of times.  Pick the ones you are passionate about and can answer questions that may come about from those who are responding to you about the product.  These will most likely be the ones you have implemented in your business up to this point.  In your review think about the objections your buyer may have and answer them up front.  This creates value and puts you in front of everybody else out there that has reviewed the same product.  Also, by creating these “how to” videos, audios or how ever you chose to present them while presenting yourself as the expert and the resource to go to, the potential buyer feels comfortable buying the product from you.

So go through your library, pick the ones you want to review and get going.  This is an action step that does require a little work on your part, but once you get started you’ll see how much fun and easy it will become.

I hope this article has helped you in some way, shape or form.  Let me know what you think in the comments below.  Also, if you have created product reviews, what has been your experience and some of your tips.

Talk soon,

P.S.  If you have an iPhone I highly recommend you download Pat’s Smart Passive Income app.  Super cool app that you can take on the go to get all of his information, including blog posts, Twitter stream and podcasts.  And best of all it’s FREE.

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DIRTY LITTLE SEO TRICKS-ARE THEY WORTH IT!

Using SEO tricks to get your website high rankings in the search engines is one of the most talked about topics circulating the internet these days.  And people are trying to beat Google for search engine traffic.  Think about this for just a second, Google is a multi-billion dollar company and has some of the best people working for them.  How do you think one person or a small team can beat out such a big company?  Answer is, you probably can’t and you will be spinning your wheels, wasting your time and money trying to figure all their rules out.

Sure your website might see some traffic for a bit and them blammo, you suddenly start to see a decline.  The Google Slap as marketers call it, has beat you.  All that work for nothing, and it could actually hurt your site in the long run.  I have tried these sneaky little tricks myself on a test website to see how some of these work.  I spent a little money, but what I saw was nothing mind shattering.  And this was for a keyword with moderate competition.

Google has a set of rules they want every website to abid by and if you break that trust, they will break your website.  But you can work with these set of rules and work them to your advantage and I can prove it to you with a website that is ran by one of my good friends.

He has had this site for several years with some traffic, but not what he has seen in the past year.  Keep in mind both he and I run our websites using Quansite, which is a wordpress blog platform, but we pay a monthly fee that comes with a ton of features including built in SEO factors.  The best thing with this system is you get to focus on your content and not how to fool Google.

What he started doing is ramping up his blog post frequency along with writing good quality content about hot topics in the news.  What’s more hot right now than smart phones?  In fact he wrote a blog post about the upcoming Samsung Attain and with using NO dirty little tricks is sitting on page 1 of Google.  Just a little hint….Google loves fresh content on blogs. Here are some of his stats over the past year:

• Alexa rank from 19,000,000 to 1,273,143
• U.S. rank from 1,600,000 to 215,705
• Google page rank from 0 to 2
• Traffic from almost nothing to 700 visitors a day
• 26% of visitors are new with a returning rate of 74%

Here are some screenshots from his Google Analytics account.

That’s pretty impressive, right?  Exactly.  And no rocket science involved.  At times his website will hit 100 visitors by 10am and this number will continue to grow with no trickery and good solid content.

So this just goes to show you if you work with Google and not against them you can see very impressive results.

What are your thoughts on this hot topic?  Speak up and leave a comment on your own experiences.

Talk soon,

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If you’ve been watching the news lately you may have heard that Groupon is using a marketing technique to change the way we eat, shop and basically live our lives, so they claim.  I picked up on one social media strategy that you can use in your social media management business and start implementing right away.

Groupon Social Media Sales Strategy

This technique is rather simple.  Talk to your clients and find out which days of the week they have the least amount of business and offering deals on those certain days, driving more traffic into their store.  As a social media manager you can use this to your advantage and offer fans on your clients Facebook pages or followers on their Twitter account a discount or whatever deal you can think of on days they see the least amount of traffic.

It’s a short, sweet and too the point message, but I wanted to share it with you.  This is just one way to help your clients, so get creative with this concept.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Talk soon,

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I have found one of the best place to start outsourcing your projects for your site or blog.  Maybe you need a banner, a nice logo, a video edited or maybe you need some article marketing done.  Whatever the project is, you can probably find it here and cheap.  A little website called Fiverr offers a ton services through contracted professionals looking to help you create whatever you need.  The best part about this, other than it’s free to join, is that all projects are $5.  You may be thinking that you get what you pay for.  I agree, accept with this.  You can get some really nice projects done for the five bucks that you pay.

Every “contractor” on the site tells you what they offer and sometimes include samples for you to look at.  I think one of the best features that FIverr has included is the rating for each contractor.  You get to see how they are rated before starting any project with them.  Not only do you get to see the rating, but also the comments that buyers have made to each of their jobs.  Very nice feature.

So before you spin your wheels on those how to video’s, check out Fiverr to outsource it.  You can’t learn everything, that’s what a team is for.  You focus on the business and have an outsourcing team to do the stuff you don’t have time to learn how to do.

P.S. As I recommend Fiverr to get started with outsourcing to learn how it’s done, I highly recommend after getting your feet wet and learn how it’s done, you will need to move on to some of the bigger outsourcing companies.  Instead of just one contractor you can get several to bid on your project and have a bigger selection to chose from.  The two that almost all marketers are using these days for their bigger projects are Odesk and Freelancer.

Talk soon,

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Sure, everybody would like to make money on the internet once they know how great of a lifestyle it can produce.  I mean who wouldn’t?  Make enough residual income from the internet that you can tell your boss to shove it.  It’s the American dream.  No more boss, debt, better living, bigger house, nicer car, whatever your flavor might be.  But I’m here to tell you a little somethin’.

I’ve been online for about two years now and yes I’ve made some money, so yes it’s possible.  You see all the gurus telling you how easy it can be.  Just buy this, do this and your bank account will grow.  But I’m here to tell you right here that is ain’t that easy.  You have to look at this as a business and not a get rich scheme or overnight success, although it has happened.  It’s going to take work, many of hours of taking action and quite a bit of time to make it happen.

You can’t just buy a product, put it into action real quick and blamo, money, money, money.  There is a ton of shit you are going to have to learn.  How do I know, cause I’ve done it and am still doing it.  I currently have two sites and one of them is a site I created as a case study.  I bought an affiliate product for my case study that gave me “canned” blogs from hidden niches that make money, but not a ton of competition.  I picked one from the list I knew I bit about.  I bought the domain, got some hosting through Host Gator and uploaded the files.  I had an idea, from experience, what I was doing so it took about 30 minutes to set up from start to finish.  So in less than an hour I had a complete blog with all the goodies.  Here’s where it gets interesting.

I then started my research on how to attract the some REAL traffic to the site.  And let’s just get this out of the way.  Yes you can use the free stuff like social media and forum commenting to get traffic, it’s free and fun and I do recommend this being a part of your marketing, but not your only funnel.  I have found in this new age of new media marketing, that getting into the top page of a search engine like Google for the keywords people are searching for in you niche is where it all happens.  And if you don’t have a nice stash of cash to throw at PPC like all the gurus do, your only option is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.  And this ain’t easy either.  To rank in the top page, it’s going to take a lot of research and work to get there.  I’m not talking just a few hours, but sometimes weeks to figure it all out.  Just sayin.  So back on topic.

I used Market Samurai to help me with most of my SEO research for this niche case study blog.  And what I found was it was going to take some effort to get traffic, but it’s possible.  I’m still in the early stages with this so I will keep you in the loop on my findings.  The cool thing about this case study is that I’m outsourcing all of it, even blog posts.  I’ve hooked up with a site called Fiverr.  It’s free to join, but the super cool thing is that everything is $5.  Yes only five bucks and you can get some quality outsourcing by doing a little digging.

Now onto the products the gurus are selling you and what you need to be aware of.  First there is quite a bit of trash out there, but there are some real winners too.  Your going to have to turn on your bullshitometer to siphon through this.  I will tell you this, don’t buy a bunch of products that sound like the next big thing and never implement the strategies they give you.  Pick one and stick to it.  If you keep buying and not taking action, your business will never take lift off.  You’ll start getting frustrated trying to learn everything under the sun right away and quit, never a good idea.  I’ve seen my share of products out there, but here’s one thing to keep in mind.  Sure they are selling you an incredible product that if implemented right could give you great results.  But guess which part is hardly ever included…….HOW TO GET TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE, TARGETED TRAFFIC!  I’ve just seen one that has great potential.  It was an all in one blog stop shop by a very well know internet marketer and his price was good.  It was a point a click system and very easy to get your site up, running and easy to work with, but if you can’t get the traffic to your site, it’s just a pretty site sitting out in cyberspace and nobody knows it’s there.

So what I’m telling you is that you need to be able to get a buttload of high quality targeted traffic to your site to make internet marketing work.  People out there searching for answers that you have.  Solutions to their problems.  That’s all an internet marketer is, you provide a solution to their problem.

I’ll leave you with that for right now.  And you may be telling yourself, do I have what it takes to really make money on the internet.  Well, you can do this if your willing to put in the TIME.

UPDATE:  I talked above about getting ranked high in the search engines.  Well, Google’s new algorithm change has been announced and has been nicknamed “farmer”, which could dramatically effect your SEO efforts.

Talk soon,

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I purchased the new software program Auto Traffic Hijack and have been using it for about a couple days.  I wanted to give you the low down on what the hype is all about and if it’s for real.  You probably, like me and thousands of others, received an email promoting this thing.  I had been on the lookout for an automated program like this so I popped on the price tag.  Another big marketer just released a similar product that he was using himself and decided to release it, but the price tag on it was…………..you guessed it, $1,997.00.  And it seemed to be using similar tactics.

So here’s the skinny.  The system allows you to answer questions in batches from Yahoo Answers, which is a huge free traffic source.  It works for any niche that people are asking questions about and the best part is that it doesn’t even have to be in your niche.  Just search Yahoo Answers for a question in a particular niche and find an affiliate product with good gravity through clickbank that would solve their problem.  You can answer as many questions as you want and the system takes over and posts your answers with your affiliate link.  Your answer will be generic in nature unless you know something about it of course.  One of the cool features of Yahoo Answers is that each time a question is answered the person who asked the question gets an email each time they receive an answer to their question.  So if you were to answer twenty questions, you just sent out twenty emails with your affiliate link to a highly targeted lead.

I wish I had more to report at this time, but that’s all there is too it actually.  Pretty simple and straight forward.  It doesn’t take a lot of time to learn, set up and run.  And so far the conversions for click through seem pretty good.

Talk soon,

P.S. Auto Traffic Hijack seems like a very easy to use tool to get up and running and a simple way to make money online as an affiliate marketer.

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After being in the business for over 10 years, one thing still gets my goose is that people are still coming into this industry being sold on the fact that they are buying into this “business in a box” theory.  And even folks that have been in this business for many years are still trying to find that golden ticket in their box.  Here’s a clue………it ain’t there.

Sure, you get a box delivered to your door with all the goodies to get you started, so they say and I agree to some extent that this box does contain a few pieces of helpful information, but nothing that’s going to get you out of debt or live that life you dream of.  They just don’t put that six figure stuff inside there.  So what are you to do?  Well, the one thing, and the most important thing, that they, including your upline, forgot to tell you is that you are in a network marketing business, not a network business.  Yes, you have to network with people to get your business get off the ground, but you also have to learn how to market to them, meaning your prospects.  Which means that you need to learn marketing skills.  The kind of marketing skills that will draw your prospects to you and understand what they need so you can provide the solution that they are after.

So here’s what I got for you.  Remember when in the movie Back to the Future Marty keeps telling the ole’ Doc, “That’s heavy”?  Well, I will be teaching my subscribers in my tribe a jam packed e-course that goes through this “heavy” psychological marketing strategy that will blow your mind.  This is something I’ve never unleashed or taught before.  And it has not been taught this way to the network marketing industry.  First a little disclaimer that I’m not a psychologist or do I have a degree in psychology.  I didn’t just come up with this stuff myself either, I have taken this type of marketing strategy that I have learned and now will show you how to apply it to your network marketing business.

I want to give you the chance to come join us in this mind blowing marketing stuff before I start the course, Effortless Influence, next week starting on Monday, October 18.  I know this may sound kind of hyped up, and I hate hype as much as you do, but hype usually comes with a price tag.  And I don’t have one on this stuff I’m teaching you.  The reason for not posting this on my blog is because it’s rather lengthy and I don’t like make my posts on my blog very long, for a reason.  Also, I want to be connected to you through email if you have any questions.

So what you want to do next is sign up above and you will be automatically entered into the course, plus you get some other free goodies.

We shall talk soon,

P.S.  Here’s a little hint on what the first subject will be.  People buy with emotion, not logic.  So I will show you how to use these emotions to connect with your prospects.

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Many network marketers think there is some sort of magic trick on how to stuff your inbox full of qualified prospects, when in reality it’s a very simple.  Matter of fact it’s all around you and you may not even know it.  The next time you land on a website, you should see this little gem right in front of you.  I want you to understand how incredibly simple this is, so I’m going to get straight to how to stuff you inbox full of all the qualified prospects you need, so you don’t have to go buggin’ your friends, family and wasting money on those bottom of the barrel leads, as I like to say.  You need two things:

1.  An Autoresponder (I like to use Aweber)

2.  An Upfront Product to Give Away

That’s it.  That’s all you need to get the ball rolling.  With the autoresponder you set up an opt-in box on your site or blog where you will give away your upfront product in exchange for your prospects name and email address.  Once they opt-in, you have now created a lead that has came to you which changes the whole game in this industry.  Your prospect has found you and not you chasing them down.  HUGE gamer changer!

The key to this whole process is your product.  You have to entice your prospect with something cool to give them.  This product has to have some value to it though.  It can’t be something lame.  For instance, I see many people giving away the e-book Think and Grow Rich as their product. ( That’s what I started out with)  It’s in the public domain and can be given away.  I actually purchased this book at Barnes and Noble many years ago and could have got it for free.  So this has some value to it and your prospects can gain a lot of knowledge by reading it, not lame.

So what do you do if you don’t have a product to give away.  Well first, be creative here.  There are many ways to have an upfront product of high perceived value.  You could go to the public domain and grab something there or use a Private Label Rights product you have purchased.  These are great, but I always go towards products that you create because you have more to gain with them.  So, you could create a short 10-15 page report on something you have learned and can teach others to do.  Other things you could do are: make an e-course that educates others that can be distributed every day through your autoresponder; create a short five day video course; find an expert and interview them for an hour.  I like the last one because you become like an instant Oprah, so to speak.  You are the voice of your prospects and asking questions that they would like to know the answers too.

So, put on your thinking cap and turn on your creative mind.  There are several ways you can get an upfront product to give away to your prospects.

Talk soon,

P.S.  I chose to go the interview an expert route.  I came up with six questions that frustrated prospects want to know the answers to and asked an expert in the industry if I could interview him to get his tips, tricks and secrets.  You can check out his answers by signing up at my blog.

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I wanted to share with you a little secret ninja trick that you can implement right away in your online business.  Have you ever thought about how YOU can get one of the guru’s in the industry to leave a comment on YOUR blog post?  It can take as little as 5 minutes to implement.  No joke.  I have broken it down into 5 simple steps for you.

1.  Find some interesting content created by a guru in the industry.  This can be an article, video or even one their blog posts you found of value and want to share it.  You could search for Hubpages, Squidoo pages, YouTube and Facebook, to name a few.  Another great resource to finding great material being posted by the leading experts is MLMURLS.

2. Create your blog post, but change the heading to something different.  Not so different it loses the effect.   You could use their wording, but change it up a bit so it’s not exactly the same. (you don’t want to blatantly steal their headline)

3.  Your first paragraph outlines what you liked about the content.  And in that paragraph you want to link back to their URL where you found the information.

4.  Your second paragraph you want to share what you like about the author of the content your sharing.

5.  VERY IMPORTANT STEP: Go back to your blog post as you were a new visitor to your site and click the link that you set up in your first paragraph.

That’s it. You may be wondering why step 5 is so important and what clicking the link does?  Once you click the link, sometimes it will alert the author that you shared their content and they will come to your blog to see what you wrote.  Or they check their traffic stats to see where their visitors are coming from and your information will be there sparking their attention.  Since you are essentially sending them free traffic and you have wrote a nice piece about them, they may be inclined to leave you a comment thanking you for sharing their information.

I have to give props to my man Ty Tribble for this little “crazy” ninja trick, as he calls it.  This is just one of many so called “tricks” you can find in his new MLM Blog Secrets.

Talk soon,

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What is this ONE key element many people miss when writing a blog post?  It may seem like a simple idea, but it is essential when putting your posts together and that is, talk to your reader as you would like a face to face conversation.  Network marketing is about relationships and you can’t develop a true one by talking to them as just a number out there.  In any business if your treated like just another number to them and not a valued customer, you look elsewhere for service.  This same concept applies in network marketing.  So when you write, use words like “you”, “your” and so on.  Don’t use words like “we”.  Also, if you come off to salesy or pitchy, you are going to loose your readers and visitors to your site.

One of the things that helps me when putting together a post, is to visualize your reader as they were right there in front of you having a day to day conversation.  Just write like you would talk.

So think about this the next time your in front of your computer getting ready to post some great content.  If you continue to write as if your reader is just another number to you, you are going to miss the boat.

P.S. If you want some more great tips and tricks to using blogging in your network marketing business, I would highly recommend getting these free videos from the #1 blogger in our industry, Ty Tribble.

Talk soon,

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