Value Based Marketing in Action

Posted on by Donald in Internet Marketing 2 Comments

First off what is Value Based Marketing? In this example it’s giving value to the consumer first, without expecting anything in return. It’s the best way to advertise yet not a lot of people use this marketing strategy. There have been hundreds of case studies that when consumers receive value first, whether that’s entertainment, valuable information, sample products, what have you, consumers respond positively to the product or service and instinctively want to learn more from you.

In this example, a post on Reddit links to a Bruce Lee video, where Bruce Lee is demonstrating his Kung Fu abilities. A short but entertaining video!

What caught my eye was one of the comments in the Reddit posts below: 

value-based-marketing

What you see is Value Based Marketing in action and it’s Instant Results!

A person viewed this video, liked what they saw and decided to purchase the product right away. Not only did they purchase the product right away but they announced what they were doing to other viewers which was positively received. That’s awesome!

What sort of Value Based Marketing Could You Do?

Personally I like to give as much value as possible to consumers without asking for anything in return. In my case that’s useful information, case studies, quick videos and more.

What seems to work best is video based marketing, whether it’s tutorials, reviews, testimonials; something a person can absorb quickly. Of course you’ll want to point viewers to your product or service to learn more. Video based content is easy to create, valued highly and well received.

A strategy I like to use are video series. I like to create videos with follow ups, such as “Tutorial Part 1 of 7“, keeping viewers glued to their screen, subscribed and waiting for follow up videos. It’s fun to create video series, to add cliff hangers or hooks to your content.

When done correctly Value Based Marketing trumps any other sort of marketing. Now add in series of content, subscribed viewers and quickly trust is built and you’re selling more products. It’s that easy!


Facebook Ads WTH

Posted on by Donald in Internet Marketing Leave a comment

My experience with Facebook Ads has been up and down. Either I don’t fully understand them yet, or I’m just missing something. Some days I get really good traffic with FB, and other days I get nothing. I’m only running a couple campaigns right now, so it’s nothing major but I would just like something a little more consistent, like adwords.

Facebook Ads

As you can see some days I get pretty high amount of clicks and other days nothing. The only changes I made recently were to up my daily spending limit which increased clicks 100%, but then one change to a campaign brings everything back down.

Maybe I should just stick to the big three search engines instead. I find I convert more with Google then any other network anyway.


E-commerce VS Affiliate Marketing

Posted on by Donald in Internet Marketing Leave a comment

Right now I do a mix of affiliate marketing and E-commerce work. I started out with e-commerce (selling physical goods), then moved into affiliate marketing (selling someone’s products for commission). There are pros and cons to both of them. The basic idea though is that you’re selling a product one way or another, and that’s how you make money online.

With affiliate marketing you have fly by night products to promote that may or may not pay you. With e-commerce work, you have your own products and as long as the competition doesn’t kill you, you’ll do fine. I know all there is to know about both of them. It’s just deciding on what would be better to go full steam ahead with in the new year.

There are lots of pros and cons..

E-commerce Work:

  • More work (a lot more)
  • Takes more time
  • Sometimes easier to do
  • Cost more
  • Customer Service Required

Affiliate Marketing:

  • Steep learning curve
  • Requires a jack of all trade
  • NO customer service needed
  • Faster to get started
  • Set it and forget it

Both would be okay for me, but I think affiliate marketing would be the wiser decision. It’s just so nice to wake up earning good money while I slept and not having to deal with any customer issues. I mean people in the forum, and eBay Stealth, that’s no problem. What I’m talking about are live chat sessions with customers who just ordered something from you, and want it then and there. That’s something else though I won’t talk about. I think affiliate marketing is the way to go for the short run.

We’ll see how it goes. 🙂


AutoBlogBook Snippet – Market & Keyword Research

Posted on by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Making Money Leave a comment

Since I haven’t posted in awhile I decided to post a snippet of my new eBook AutoBlogBook.

Now in this post I won’t talk about creating autoblogging so much, but instead the process of researching a niche to dive into. I added this to the beginning of AutoBlogBook because without the initial research for any website, you’re going to have a hard time breaking into a niche. Now this can be helpful to anyone about to start a new online business.

Without further ado, here are a couple pages from my new eBook on Autoblogging.

Market & Keyword Research:

First off before we dive into creating your first autoblog, we need to figure out what you want your autoblogs to promote. Now I’m not going to hold your hand in searching for the perfect niche for you. For me any niche that has plenty of affiliate offers to promote, and has decent adsense earnings is good enough. Really there isn’t a niche that is too saturated if you do proper keyword research first.

Before we do keyword research I recommend you check the health of the niche you want to promote by using Google Trends. What you should do is head over to Google Trends and type in your main niche keywords to see if the search trends are going up or down. If the search trends are up or holding steady, that means we have a solid niche to promote. If the trends are going down then you might want to select another niche to focus on.

Let me add I do my research first before creating autoblogs. I find niche ideas mostly from looking at different affiliate networks for example: Clickbank, CJ, Neverblueads, Peperjam Network, AzoogleAds etc. If there is a good offer out there, I’ll do my research and if it can be easily cracked I’ll setup a dozen or so autoblogs to test the waters. Once I see that it’s profitable I’ll continue building autoblogs for different high traffic, low competition keywords.

Once you find a niche you want to focus on, you must to do the research to find high traffic, low competition keywords. And I stress you MUST do keyword research because if don’t and you start building autoblogs blind your traffic results WILL suffer.

Think of it this way, you don’t want to build your autoblogs targeting highly saturated keywords that you’ll never get traffic for when there are plenty of low competition keywords with just as much traffic, but are much easier to rank for.

Okay, enough talk.

Let’s do some keyword research.

Keyword Research:

Generally I tend to focus on keywords that have more than 1000 searches per month, and have less than 50,000 search results in Google doing an exact keyword search.

An easy way to find solid keywords for your niche is to go to Google’s Keyword Tool, and do a search for your main niche keyword.

The keyword tool will generate new keyword ideas.

Once your search is complete, you’ll see a list of related terms.

I like to add the column ‘Show Search Volume Trends’ when doing my searches.

Also make sure to switch from Broad match type to Exact Match Type.

You’ll want keywords with at least 1000 searches per month under Exact Match.

Once you select a few keywords, go to Google and do a search on the competition. What you need to do is an exact keyword search and look for total search results. An exact keyword search in Google is your keyword in quotes, for example “keyword”.

Basically you want keywords that have less then 50k search results. The fewer search results there are, the easier it will be to rank on the first page of Google for that term.

So are you getting the idea now? You want keywords with high traffic and low competition!

Now this can be a tedious task, but you know what? It’s free and works.

If you want a faster and easier way of finding high traffic, low competition keywords then I highly recommend using Micro Niche Finder. It’s the best keyword research tool I’ve used. It does exactly what we need it to do but it goes a step further in analyzing the competition to determine their keyword strength. Actually it does that and a lot more, check it out here.

It’ll save you a lot of time in your keyword research.

To learn about creating Autoblogs from A to Z be sure to check out AutoBlogBook. It was written by me about a month ago and so far I’ve had nothing but positive feedback about it.

Be sure to check out AutoBlogBook.com!

Good luck!


Content: Type of Content, Usage and Results!

Posted on by Donald in Internet Marketing, Intresting Stuff Leave a comment

This post is for the autobloggers out there…

Content: Type of Content, Usage and Results!

100% Original Content (You either write it yourself or someone else writes it for you. This content original with no duplicates found online, it’s keyword researched, ranks easily with a couple backlinks, and will bring you traffic depending on how saturated your niche is. This is the best type of content to have, but takes the most work to get.)

Hand Rewritten Content (This content is from an article you rewrite or you have someone else rewrite. It’s keyword researched, and unique to Google. This is similar to original content, but tad bits here and there maybe duplicate to Google, which is okay, nothing wrong with that. Hand rewritten content is usually just as good as original content as long as you have a few backlinks pointing to it.)

Plugin Rewritten Content (Plugins or software rewrites this content, depending on the software you use, it is most likely poorly rewritten, but passes Google’s duplicate content filter.. some what… Your users won’t like the content, but if you serve them up something else, like a nice video, or targeted ads with your content they’ll be okay with it. The better your tweak your rewrite plugin the better your content will be and the more traffic you’ll receive.)

Duplicate Content Unwritten (Either feed based or PLR articles, you’ll have to compete with other websites to rank for the same content. You won’t be penalized, Google doesn’t penalize for duplicate content they’ll just force your website to compete with other websites using the same content. Whoever has the most backlinks and better SEO wins and will be displayed in Google search results, the website(s) that do not have enough SEO juice will show up in supplemental results and will not receive very much or any traffic for the related content.)

Content without proper SEO is hard to rank for regardless of the type of content it is, especially if you do not do any niche or keyword research beforehand. Duplicate content can rank well depending on how your SEO is; you will not get penalized for the most part, unless your blog is clearly a spam blog. You want to create useful autoblogs full of useful information not only for your visitors but to keep your website from being labeled as a spam blog.

Pros and Cons of duplicate Content…
Pros…

  • Google doesn’t give penalties to websites that have duplicate content; they just won’t rank the content as unique and will force the content to compete with other duplicate content for position.
  • Easy to get duplicate content…

Cons…

  • It’s harder to rank in search engines with your duplicate content without solid backlinking.
  • If your website adds no value, and is later reviewed by Google, it can be deindexed as a spam blog, but this rarely happens unless you are clearly spamming Google.

Pros and Cons of Unique Content…
Pros…

  • Google loves unique content. Depending on the content, you can rank easier for researched keywords.

Cons…

  • It takes effort or money to acquire unique content.
  • It takes more effort in building autoblogs with unique content.

Pros and Cons of Rewritten Content…
Pros…

  • Can be automated with rewrite plugins. Or you can do it yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.
  • Plugins can be tweaked for better results.
  • If rewritten properly, said content is just as good as original content.

Cons…

  • Rewrite plugins sometimes leave unreadable content, which isn’t good for visitors or your Google results.
  • If reviewed your blog could be considered a spam blog and deindexed if content is poorly rewritten.

For those interested, this is a snippet from my new autoblogging eBook I’m working on. Hopefully it should be out in a couple weeks. I’ll post more details when I can.

Cheers!


9 Tips to Writing Effective Google Adwords Ads

Posted on by Donald in Google, Internet Marketing 2 Comments

9 Tips to Writing Effective Google Adwords Ads
The better you follow these ad writing tips, the more successful your ad campaigns will be.

1. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
It’s very important for your click through rate that you include your main keywords in your headline, description text and display URL if you can. Google will highlight searched keywords in your ad, which will help draw attention to it. The more clicks you receive, the higher your click through rate and the lower your cost per click.

2. Sell the Benefits
Include one or more major benefits in your ad. For example, fast shipping, lowest price, instant delivery if you’re selling digital items, etc.

3. Include Attention Grabbing Words
Start your headline with attention grabbing words. For example, Fast:, New:, Sale:, Free:, etc. Keep within Google’s editorial guidelines.

Here is a list of power words I recommend using, Power Words List.

4. Link to Your Products Page
If an ad is for a specific product or service, create a landing page for that ad. Include relevant and useful information to convert the customer. Generally, a well designed landing page will almost always convert more visitors than if you simply sent visitors to your home page.

In other words, link directly to your products page. For our example with Green Widgets, we would link to http://www.ourwebsite.com/greenwidgets.html for maximum conversions.

5. Remove Common Words in Your Ad
Common words, such as “a, an, in, on, it, of,” etc. Remove every word that does not absolutely need to be in the ad. Make every word count.

6. Deter Freebie Hunters
Deter freebie hunters by including the price of the product or service at the end of the ad. This will improve your overall conversion ratio and lower your average customer acquisition cost.

This may reduce your click through ratio, but that’s OK. After all, you’re not trying to target everybody, only potential customers. In most cases, freebie hunters will never become paying customers.

7. Include a Call to Action
A clear call to action is especially important if your goal is to maximize your return on investment. Offering the user some guidance on what to do once they reach your site — such as ‘Buy Flowers for Mom!’ — may improve your campaign’s performance. The call to action should reflect the action that you consider a conversion, whether it’s a sign-up, a request for more information, or an actual sale.

8. Do not Copy the Competition, Stand Out!

I hear it all the time. You decide one day that since you competition is promoting a product a certain way; they must be doing something right, let’s copy them! I think this is the wrong approach. Instead of copying your competition, you can take a few ideas from them, but trust me when I say this, it doesn’t help your click through rate having your ad look exactly like everyone else’s. Stand out and you’ll have better results.

adwords-standout-googlecheckout

9. Your Display URL is part of your Ad Copy

You can put absolutely anything in your display URL, provided that the domain matches with the domain of the destination URL. No matter what your domain name is, you can include your primary keyword with a trailing slash in your display URL to ‘assure’ the searcher that they will indeed go to the right page. For instance if a searcher is looking for a white iPhone, which ad below would be more compelling?

white-iphone-google-ad

That’s about it for creating solid Google Adword Ads. I hope this helps in your PPC ventures. If you need futhur help with PPC Advertising, SEO, Email Marketing, Direct Advertising, etc check out Webmaster Blueprint, and new eBook I wrote up on creating and marketing an online business.

Cheers!


Okay, I Can’t Hold My Excitement Any Longer!

Posted on by Donald in Adventure, Article Writing, Fun, Internet Marketing, Intresting Stuff, Life, Making Money Leave a comment

Hehe, either it’s the second shot of Monster energy in me, or I’m just excited about my next eBook I’m working on! Not only do I love doing eBooks now, even though I hate writing, but I love the fact that when writing an eBook I learn so much more about the subject it makes it all worth it.

So I just finished the first version of Webmaster Blueprint, an eBook about learning how to start on online business with your own website and how to market it.

I need to come up with a new tag line..

Webmaster Blueprint! The best damn internet marketing eBook out there, a Beginners guide to starting an online business and Marketing it for EXPLODING SALES! YEAH!!!!!! Bi*CH!!

monster_energyHaha.. Monster Energy is Awesome!

Ah, I forget what’s my new eBook about? The secret I didn’t want to talk about in one of my lastest post?

It’s for the lazy Black Hat Marketer! I find at times I’m a pretty lazy person, other times when I have monster in me I’m apparently not so lazy. Okay enough delay, my new eBook which is still in the research stage will be on Auto Blogging!

What is Auto Blogging?

It’s the process of setting up dozens, even hundreds of Blogs that run on autopilot!

If your auto blogs are setup correctly you can easily make hundreds even thousands of dollars a day with them. But it’s not an easy process! I want to stress this, it’s not all fun and games and not for a quick buck until you master auto blogs!

I’ve been auto blogging for a couple years now, and the blogs I have, some are doing very well and others are on life support with me reaching for the cord.

Auto blogging can be fun because you can watch and nurture your auto blogs into a money making machine that can drive tons of traffic to anything you want really.

If you have a business you want to promote, setup a dozen or so auto blogs and point your blogs to your business website. I used to do that when I sold virtual currencies for online games and it worked very well.

If you’re an affiliate marketer, add your affiliate offers all over your blog for sales.

Currently I like to presale a product with landing pages, also I have banners setup to promote affiliate offers and I collect emails to promote more products later on! It’s awesome and it generates me hundreds of dollars a day on autopilot.

I do a lot of things to make money online, and I found auto blogging and selling my own product seem to be the best bet for making solid long term income online.

I’ve been making money with auto blogs for literally years now… and that’s the way I like it.

I’ll keep you guys updated on the status of the Auto Blogging guide.

It shouldn’t be a long process like Webmaster Blueprint, hopefully it will be done in a month or two! Most likely two months. *crosses fingers*

My monster drink is making me crash so I must nap now.

Cheers!


The Girl Scouts Marketing Got To Me! But HoW?

Posted on by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Making Money Leave a comment

So I’m on a Low to No Carb diet for the most part and man… up until 10 minutes ago I’ve been crazy low on energy today. I woke up around 7am, did the usual updating sites, checking the forum and affiliate sales and passed out around noon until 3pm.

Luckily! My usual route of checking mail boxes, visiting some neighbors, going to the local stores I found my self being slammed by girl scouts and their cookies. Twice I encountered these little screaming girls and sad to say I gave in the second time. *half of sleeve of my thin mints is down!

I got to thinking and in my crazy mind of marketing, the first group of girl scouts I wasn’t much interested in, but they got it in my head the idea of cookies. The second group had me sold before I walked up to them. They simply let me walk by without saying anything, but on my way out, I knew they would still be there; wanting me to buy their cookies. I know about their product, I’ve had it before. I had a demand at the time, I was low on energy and needed a quick carb pick me up. And damn the second time was a charm. I bought the cookies.

girl2

Marketing…

How does this tie in with Internet marketing? I’m getting there…

Email Marketing does wonders in gaining confidence in potential customers who just aren’t ready to buy from you.

Once you have someone on your list, you can email them again and again until the confidence is built and they’re sold on you. I have auto responders on a few of my sites where when someone signs up, they’re sent an email once a week for about 5 weeks. It really should be more but I haven’t had the time to write more emails yet.

Anyway, usually seven emails sales a customer if you can gain their trust. The seventh email is the proven money maker if you do things right.

A simple 7 week course on something you’re promoting is enough to gain the customer’s confidence and for you to make that sale.

I use GetResponse, it’s cheap at $19.95 per month and is easy to setup and implement. If the Girl Scouts can do it with their sidewalk Super Sales, you can do it too but on autopilot! Try it out!


Breaking the Blog Money Making Code!

Posted on by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Intresting Stuff, Making Money Leave a comment

So you have a blog that cost you more in hosting fees then what contextual advertising can pay you. You had a dream of making money online as a blogger, you read John Chow Dot Com and you’re inspired but you can’t seem to break the money making code?

First things first… most people who are into making money online know about John Chow dot com. His blog is about making money online, and his goal is to generate as much money through his blog as possible. He has monthly income reports that tell you exactly what he does to make money online. The information he gives is priceless! Check out December’s report:

  • Private Ad Sales: $10,480.00
  • Affiliate Commissions: $5,701.48
  • ReviewMe: $5,400.00
  • Text Link Ads: $2,097.74
  • Kontera: $1,000.00
  • TTZ Media: $321.14
  • Subscription: $40.00

Grand Total: $25,040.36
Read the rest of the report here: John Chow Blog Income Report

john chowHow does John Chow make most of his money online? Through private ad sales, affiliate commissions and ReviewMe post. Everything else requires the huge amount of traffic to see at least 1/100th of the value he’s getting out of it.

Example: Kontera advertising. Those in text double links. Every time someone clicks these links, John Chow makes money. But actually John Chow negotiated a salary from Kontera. He’s making a cool $1000 a month through them for a set period of time. Though its better then adsense, you won’t make more then a couple bucks a day without serious traffic. So Kontera ads aren’t worth it.

Another example is Text Link ads. Though John Chow makes some serious cash through Text Link Ads, mostly through their affiliate program, it’s too risky to sell Text Link Ads if you depend on Google’s organic traffic. Google has been lower the quality scores of known text link sellers as a punishment to selling text link ads. Simple look up ‘John Chow‘ in Google, you won’t find JohnChow.com until the 4th or 5th page. Google has slapped his site, as well as tons of other sites that sell TLA. If you have a website that depends on Google traffic, I wouldn’t recommend Text Link Ads no matter what.

shoemoneyGoogle Adsense is all but dead. Since introducing separate content bids, advertisers have the ability to lower what they pay website publishers and man or man you’ll be lucky if you get 5 cents per click these days. As an advertiser my self, I set my keywords to around 10 cents for content networks or I shut content ads off all together. It’s simple not the targeted traffic I want or need. I’m surprised Google Adsense is still alive and kicking. The way it’s going, it’s not profitable for anyone anymore. What should be done is have site targeted advertising take over adsense. That way the advertisers have more control and publishers make more money. Either way adsense as it is just about worthless to promote.

So John Chow makes the big bucks from Private Ad Sales and Affiliate Commissions. That’s huge!

Google ReferralsWould you rather make $1-$2 a day with Kontera or Adsense advertising? Or would you rather make $20-$100 a day with affiliate sales and even more with private ad sales? Replace you adsense with affiliate programs and you might be surprised! You could also try Google referrals, which is basically Google’s answer to affiliate sales.

Private ad sales – I’ve yet to do this, but I found a very nice piece of software that can help you with your ad sales. I plan to buy it when I get the chance and try it out on a couple sites. It looks like its very easy to use and something that’ll make you big sales for years to come. You can download a copy here: OIOpublisher

So that’s it! Contextual advertising isn’t the way to go. It’s all about Private ad sales and affiliate commissions. Be sure to check out OIOpublisher to get started with your private ad sales, and start looking up some affiliate sites like CJ, NeverblueAds and Clickbank. I’m doing pretty well with Clickbank, and working my way into other affiliate networks. If you’re new to affiliate marketing or just making money online in general, one resource that has helped me a lot are the Digital Point Forums. They’re basically a huge internet marketing forum which talks about Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Design & Development, and Products & Tools. If you’re serious about making any money online, this is one resource you won’t want to pass up.

Hope this helps with your money making adventures!

Have a great day!


Making the Perfect Landing Page

Posted on by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Making Money 1 Comment

Your landing page is anything that you send targeted traffic to in hopes to convert visitors into sales. The more professional your landing page looks and the more doubts it squashes. The better chance you’ll have at converting targeted traffic into sales. And with all the competition in popular niches, you’ll want to have the best converting landing page to stay ahead of the game.

I have about 20 landing pages right now. It’s taken tons of time to optimize them but they’re all starting to pay off now. I almost doubled my sales overnight with simple changes like:

  1. Using Verdana font size 11 pixel
  2. Getting rid of content that wasn’t positive.
  3. Adding content that shows more benifits
  4. Adding trusting elements to the page.
  5. Limiting options in the page, to focuse on call to action
  6. Using black text with H1 headings.
  7. Using bold text to strengthen the eye path.
  8. Using selective images to draw attention to the call to action
  9. Having a strong header message that lets visitors know they’re on the right site, and urging them to continue with your message

Just a few changes and I doubled my sales for one of my sites, and I’m already increasing sales with another. A landing page that looks professional is key. Using blogs as landing pages works, but not if you’re on a wordpress or Blogspot free hosting. There are trust issues using free hosting sites. It’s all about trust. When someone trusts you, they’ll listen to anything you have to say. Also the more professional your message is, the easier it will be to convert visitors into sales. Sounds easy enough right? If it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.

Marketing ExperimentsDon’t worry though; I came across an awesome website today. It’s a type of landing page research website. They do test on what works and what doesn’t work with landing pages and report their findings. I found it a great read. MarketingExperiments is an online laboratory with a simple (but not easy) five-word mission statement: To discover what really works. I highly recommend going through some of their articles to work on your landing pages.

Also just to let you know I’m still learning all about prefecting my own landing pages, I’m not an affiliate marketing guru yet! I’m learning just like you are. But I hope this helps.

Have a good day,