Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving, but it’s long time to get serious about your marketing efforts here. Just like the retailers offline figuring this is their time to make 40% of their sales, in essence the same is true for us online.

This time of year there are probably more “Giveaways” than any other time of the year. This is the time that you truly can build your list. One Giveaway I joined has 100 contributors. If they promote to each of their lists and each list only has 10 subscribers, that’s 1000 people getting notification that this is going on. Now just between you and me, we know that these people have more than 10 subscribers, so imagine how much free advertising that can be. Each giveaway usually has their own rules. Some run contests with prizes for the most referrals. Others pay cash, etc. Any way you go, it’s a worthwhile venture.

The first thing you need is a product. If you don’t have something of your own you have put together, such as an ebook, etc., there are plenty on the web. A lot of them are free. Just make sure they have Private Label Rights and or Master Resell Rights so you are free to give the item away, brand it your own, etc. You need to read the rights of each product as the licenses sometimes differ from product to product, but for the most part you’re pretty safe with Private Label Rights.

Once you have your product, the next thing you need is an autoresponder if you don’t have one already. I personally use Aweber, but there are a few good ones. Some others are Response Marketing, Constant Contact. Just google “autoresponders” and compare services and prices. Also be sure to check reliability.

You need to set up your autoresponder with a “webform” for getting people’s names and email addresses. Once you get this set up in your autoresponder, you can get the html code to put on a landing page, or sales page. People see your product, click it, go to your landing page that tells them about your product, they enter their name and email, it bounces back to your autoresponder. Your autoresponder sends out a link for them to click on in their email to verify the email address. When they do that, it should take them to a Thank you page that you have created that has a link for the free gift download they signed up for, or your autoresponder sends a link to their email where they can recover their gift.

This is the first time I have ever done this. It took me 2 full days to get it set up. I pretty much let everything else slide but I figure the time was well spent. The product I offered is valuable to all kinds of people, not just internet marketers and I’m confident my list will start growing soon. For the people who sign up for this particular product, I know what I need to send them in the future. A much more targeted market which will be a lot easier to market to.

If you want to check it out, this is the one I joined. This lady is super helpful and has a whole pdf you can download that gives all sorts of pointers, etc. along with the rules. Just click on the banner below.

If you would like to contribute, it’s not too late. Just click on the link and you’ll go to the contributer part.

http://www.myladywebsgiftgiveaway.com/go/ldbeams/jv/

I as well as the next one believe in Holiday promotion, tying into what ever’s going on to help you promote your stuff, but don’t fire off some warm and fuzzy email to me on Thanksgiving Day, telling me how much you love me and appreciate my business, and then try and sell me something. If you want to send me a “Happy Thanksgiving” and thank me for my business, that’s fine. In fact that’s good business etiquette. I know the big dept. stores are sending out their ads, etc on Thanksgiving Day, but you’re not them.

They are not wanting a “personal relationship” with me. They are not wanting me to believe that they can teach me how to make millions of dollars running another store just like them. They are not trying to convince me that the products in their stores are going to change my life because they did it. If you are just sending me another affiliate link or link to one of your products to buy on a holiday, don’t bother.

This is how your email affected me. On Thanksgiving Day, I am not interested in buying anything to do with work. On Thanksgiving Day if you have to spend your time sending emails trying to get me to buy just one more product from you instead of spending time with family and friends, you need to go find a “guru” that can help you. You obviously aren’t doing very well and if that’s the case, I probably can’t learn a whole lot from you anymore. Thus the unsubscribe button. Oh and by the way, if your unsubscribe button takes me to an error page or another sales page and I can’t opt out, I’m reporting you.

So if you are an Internet Marketing Newbie, don’t make this mistake. People will want to buy, but they don’t want to be insulted, which is what you do when you try to make it sound like you really care about them and then jam a product in their wallet.

Well, we’re on a downhill slide to Christmas from here, gang. It will be here and gone before we know it. I’ve taken the Halloween and Thanksgiving freebies down and will add all the new ones for Christmas as I get them. These are a great way to build up your library. Just don’t get too carried away. LOL.

One particular way to  build your list is to join a Give Away event. In a real sense, it’s a huge way of conducting an “ad swap”.  If you have joined any of the Give Away events I’ve listed on the “freebies” page, you might have an idea of how it works in general. If you have no idea of what a Give Away event is and how it works, let me explain.

Give Away Event Explained

Basically, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool in their individual gifts in one limited-time event. Each participating partner contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass, or a product he is already selling (if he is

kind enough to offer it into the event). The participating partner prepares a Lead Capture Page where he gives the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. In other words, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list. When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every partner will then send an announcement about the Giveaway event to their own mailing lists. The result? Lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners! With so many visitors downloading gifts from one focused event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download several free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list! Many times these gifts come with some form of resale rights that let you give it away, sell it or whatever the rights stipulate.
There Can Be Some Problems

For starters, a lot of Give Away events often require the potential Joint Venture partner to have a minimum of at least 1,000 subscribers in order to participate. Therefore, if you do not have that amount of subscribers or

more, there will be a lot of giveaway events you will be excluded from. You could set up your own Give Away event. You should probably have the idea of paying your Joint Venture (JV) Partners a decent percentage of commissions for every successful One Time Offer sale. You might also want to know which partner is doing well in referring subscribers to your event and who isn’t, so you’ll want a way to track.

Usually, the one who runs the Give Away event wins the most in terms of subscribers and One Time Offer sales, if any. However, this is where the second problem is: if you don’t have any programming skills, you can kiss this idea “goodbye”!

A third problem is that big time Give Away event runners often suffer these throughout the start, run and end of the event: sleep deprivation, stress and lots of hard work! In fact, in some ways, being a participating partner can be even more appealing to most list owners even though the reward is proportionally smaller in terms of success, new subscriber counts and sales, if any.

If you have a decent gift to give away, and you’re set up right, and the giveaway has a lot of partners mailing to their mailing lists, you have a good chance of getting a good targeted audience to your mailing list.  This is especially true if you have a specialty niche that your gift is connected to, so when people want to download your gift you know they are interested in what you have to offer.

Affiliate marketing has many descriptions, yet all have the same meaning. Affiliate marketing is a huge business on the Internet. It is a cooperative effort between merchants and an affiliate’s website. For many years now, affiliate marketing has proved to be a cost-efficient, measurable method of delivering long-tern results. It has become famous for Internet sites who are trying to make some extra or additional income for their site. Every day, people get interested in affiliate marketing and want to make money out of it. In many cases these new affiliates do not fully understand the affiliate world and make costly mistakes. In other words, affiliate marketing has often been misunderstood.

One of the common misconceptions that are being associated about affiliate marketing is “selling”. Selling is an important activity of affiliate marketing and the central function of a business operation, but it’s not the only component. Another is that affiliate marketing is commonly linked with “advertising”. While the importance of advertising in marketing a certain product is not to be underestimated, the fact of the matter is, advertising like selling, is merely a part of the many functions of marketing.

In affiliate marketing, an affiliate is compensated for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. The said compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit. The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing from the merchant’s viewpoint is that no payment is due to an affiliate until results are produced.
Affiliate marketing is typically being run by affiliate networks and these affiliate networks are composed of two functional bodies, the group affiliates and the group merchants. Each has their special function and role when it comes to affiliate marketing. The affiliate network acts as a third party between the merchant and the associated affiliates. The network provides the technology to deliver the merchant’s campaigns and offers. The affiliate network also collects commission fees from the merchant and then pays the affiliates which are part of the program.

The merchant is any web site owner that wants or desires to take advantage of performance based marketing. The benefits to the merchant are many. First, the merchant maintains and operates the affiliate program. If it would be extracted, the merchant needs to do their part by researching interested affiliate websites to ensure that they are a good fit for their particular product. Finding a fit for their merchandise would be the key to more generated income. The merchant has access to markets and customers without him spending valuable time searching out. Banner ads on affiliate sites are not distracting to the site user. It might produce interest for that product and drive the consumer to the merchants’ website. It is also the merchant who decides how much he is willing to pay for each sale that results from a visitor sent from an affiliate.

The affiliate or the affiliate marketer also sees a lot of benefits. The affiliate is a web site owner that promotes one or more merchants and their affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing can generate a full-time income for the affiliate. But this is not an easy task to accomplish. The affiliate needs to have a good understanding with the merchant what the commission will be, expected payment method and time involved in the contract.  The affiliate has also the responsibility to stand for the merchandise their user base would be most interested in. For example, if the site has a user base of mainly stay-at-home mothers, then on-line job openings such as surveys would be a good match for them. This group would also appreciate direct links to children’s products and informational sites. Merchandisers often provide targeted, best-seller items and personal support to their affiliates. They often offer sales promotions that will benefit the merchandiser as well as the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is a great situation for both the marketer and the affiliate. If they would work together, they can be an advantage to both. Plus the fact that it seems to make sense, it is easy and inexpensive way to start, and you can be up and running within a few days. But there is one thing to consider, it is how to get traffic and make your offer different than all others.

Another component is being able to track your visitors to the merchant’s site. Unfortunately, there are some unscrupulous merchants out there, like in any business, that aren’t forthcoming with the commissions you’re owed. We’ll get into more about that later.

We all know how important traffic is to our business online. It’s like someone told me once concerning a sign out side of my brick and mortar business-

“A business with no sign is a sign of no business”

In the beginning, e-mail was the one way that viral marketing was started. Since that long ago day, viral marketing has gone from a marketing strategy to an art form and there are many ways to accomplish the objective of creating a successful viral marketing campaign.  Seven of those ways are:

1. E-mail: It was first but it is still around and still used. It is, however, getting a little harder to use as more and more government restrictions are placed on it. Still… it does work. It does help deliverability by using an autoresponder, as explained in my last post.
2. Newsletters: This is an extension of e-mail but it a very effective tool. If you include enough timely    and valuable information, a good newsletter can drive up the number of visits to your website.
3. Blogging: Providing the tools on your website to enable bloggers to interact with one another is a terrific way to get the message about your product or service out there and being talked about. Bloggers have their ears to the ground for new products and services.
4. Chat Rooms: A chat room on your website can and does encourage interaction among your customers and that can’t be a bad thing. Also, you can use the chat room to schedule special events like having an expert available to answer questions on a given day at a given time.
5. Tell-a-friend Script: If you add this with a statement saying that e-mail addresses supplied will never be shared with third parties, you can increase your potential customer list greatly.
6. Video Clips: Including cool video clips on your website will keep the interest up and increase traffic.
7. Flash Games: Although they are a little costly to start, they are an extremely effective tool to get your viral marketing campaign going. Once they are launched, they require nothing more from you. Update: There are quite a few “free games” out there. Like everything else, just google it.

Using a combination of these will keep people coming back or help keep you in constant touch with them. Just make sure when you add scripts, etc to your websites or blogs, they don’t take forever to load or all your hard work will be for nothing. Very few people have the patience to wait more than a few seconds for your page to load.

The Difference Between Autoresponder Programs and Autoresponder Services

An autoresponder of any kind is vitally important to your Internet business. If you have gathered information from the internet at all, you have undoubtedly signed up for a newsletter or something where you entered your name and email address to get something from the site. When you did that, you more than likely got an instant email message in your inbox with a link to confirm that you signed up. This is usually from an autoresponder, which just like the name implies, automatically responds to data input. Many newcomers to the Internet marketing arena are not aware that there is a vast difference between an autoresponder program and an autoresponder service. Not knowing the difference, they often purchase the wrong type of autoresponder, and find out too late that they have wasted money on a program that is useless to them.

An autoresponder program is a program that is set up on your web server. This is usually a free autoresponder that comes with your web hosting account. It usually is your site email account. With a lot of them, the most you can do is set them up to respond the first time someone submits their information, but then after that you’re on your own. Some people don’t like the autoresponder programs that come with their hosting accounts so instead, they use an autoresponder program that they have more control over. They will purchase autoresponder programs or scripts that must be installed on their web server.

Other people are quite happy with using an autoresponder service. This is a service that is usually paid for on a monthly or yearly basis. The fees are ongoing, and everything is browser based. In other words, you can set up your autoresponder messages and manage your opt-in list through your web browser – just as you can with an autoresponder program that is installed through your web hosting account. The difference is that the service runs on the autoresponder service’s web server – not yours or your web hosts.

Beginners are usually better off using an autoresponder service. These services are very easy to understand and to use, and no technical knowledge is needed to set things up. As a newcomer to the field, however, you might be concerned about the costs of an autoresponder service. If this is the case, you have the option of signing up with a free autoresponder service.

Free services make their money by placing advertisements in each autoresponder message that you send out. Sometimes these ads appear at the top of your messages, and sometimes they appear at the bottom. Some of the free services are simply an enticement to purchase the professional version, and have many of the more advanced features, such as tracking, disabled.

One autresponder that a good percentage of the “gurus” in internet marketing use is Aweber . When you visit their home page you can get the info on pricing, etc. Their pricing is based on how many subscribers you have per month and goes up as you build your list. They just added a bunch of email analytic tools to the service and will even let you take it for a test drive first.

Another very popular autoresponder service is GetResponse. They are a little cheaper per month and claim to have more tools than the other autoresponders, but since Aweber added so many new analytics, I’m not so sure.

The thing about using autoresponders that make it worth the money you spend on them is your emails are more apt to get to your customers instead of to their spam folder. Another great thing about them is you can do a “broadcast” where you write one message and send it to your whole list all at the same time. This is very much a time saver as you don’t have to load up everyone’s email addresses one at a time. Whichever program you choose, if you don’t have some way of capturing names and email addresses, your leaving possible customers on the table for someone else.

I wanted to write a little something about one of my pet peeves when it comes to internet marketing.

As you can see from my “about me” page, I admit I am a relative “Newbie” when it comes to internet marketing. I try to drink in all that I can in advice, services, etc., but one of my pet peeves is when a “Guru” sends me

1. an email where their links don’t work properly or it’s the wrong page
2. or they send me to their site and it doesn’t work properly.

I don’t buy too much stuff anymore because I have gone almost completely broke and I have a ton of stuff sitting on my harddrive I haven’t even used yet. Yesterday I went to a site where the offer was just to cheap and to good to pass up, so I punched the order button. Nothing happened and after 3 tries I went away. They lost the sale.

One of the first questions that comes to my mind when I get an email or go to a site where the links don’t work is “how are they going to teach me when they can’t even get their own stuff working right?” I think that’s a valid question, especially if they’re trying to get my money.

Whether you are building a website, blog, “one time offer” page, when you’re done, go to the site as a visitor would and check your links to verify they are doing what you want them to. To me this is one of those “kindergarten” rules of Internet Marketing.

I personally usually email the person and let them know what’s not working right, but a lot of them have email addresses that go to a “noreply” autoresponder so they will never get the message. If you’re trying to earn money from your site, there will be a lot of people that don’t bother to tell you and you end up wondering why you’re not making any sales. I have a ton of email to check and by the time I notify someone their links don’t work right, I’ve already moved on to something else. Many times I don’t bother going back and that person has lost me

1. from their list
2. left my money in my pocket instead of theirs

Whether it’s a "free report", software, or an article, almost everything has a license attached. You will see PLR, MRR, Creative Commons, etc. It’s good to know about each of these so you don’t get yourself in some kind of trouble.

1) Creative Commons License

If you see that something is covered by a Creative Commons License it usually means that while it’s useable by the public, the author of the works, be it writing or images, etc. has a list of what you are or are not allowed to do with the stuff they’ve created. To quote Wikipedia,

The Creative Commons licenses enable copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

2) PLR- Private Label Rights

Private Label License tells you specifically what you can or cannot do with a product, article, etc. Some let you republish with your name on it as if you are the creator. Some let you republish but only if you leave everything in tact as you received it. You need to go through the list to verify how whatever you have may be used.

3) Master Resell Rights

Master Resell Rights are pretty much just like it sounds. They are usually more expensive and while there is still a list of dos and don’ts, the product is pretty much yours to do with what you want. In most cases you can rebrand it as your own, you can sell it and keep 100% of the money, etc. A lot of times there are restrictions on how you give it away, as the author doesn’t want the value of the product to disapate.

4) Public Domain

Many times it’s hard to tell what is Public Domain and what is not. You need to do your research here. A standard rule is that anything written prior to 1923 is public. Also, usually on the bottom of an article etc. it will tell you about any copywrites.

One thing you don’t want to do whether you’re just getting started or been online for awhile, is wind up in court over stealing material. Also if you write something or put something really good together, you may want to copywrite your own stuff to determine how people are allowed to use it.

Remember, Save your work often! One of the reasons this blog has been neglected for a few days is I didn’t follow my own advice. I lost an almost completely written post with links, etc.

They used to say in sales "you need a gimick". In Internet Marketing, you need a "niche". A niche is something you specialize in, something like your own little corner of the world.

While you may be interested in "dogs" for example, that term is much to big, so you would want to narrow it down a little. Maybe you are interested in selling "dog collars" or "dog training". You need to do a little research to find an area where people are searching, but there isn’t a whole lot of information to serve those people. One of the places to do this is google’s own "keywood tool". It is a free tool that you really need to get familiar with anyhow, for when you put "keywords" into your website so people can find you. For now we are going to use it to research our "niche".

If you go to Google’s Keyword Tool, you put in the term for what you are planning on specializing in. Google will return a bunch of terms and a small graph for each one showing how full that particular niche is. It also gives you the number of searches for the last couple of months. Ideally what you are looking for is a bar graph that is about half full with a lot of people searching the term. An example may be the term for "dogs" is full, but the term "rhinestone dog collars" has a lot of searches, but the bar graph shows very little competition. So you may want to dedicate a site completely to "rhinestone dog collars from around the world" something like that. You need to narrow down your area of expertise when deciding what product to bring to market.

Other places to check out when wanting to see what people are searching for is Alexa.com, which will give you the top 100 searches and your own search engine. They all have a catagory for checking out what the top searches are from the people that use that particular search engine. I will let you know right up front that after the usuals, YouTube etc., a good portion of searches are either about celebrities or porn. You just need to wade through it.

Once you’ve found your "niche" and are deciding on what to name your website or blog, you may want to take the following into consideration.

Update: Read the post after this about finding your "niche" before reading this post. Sorry, kind of took them out of order. 

Once you’ve got a plan and decided whether to build a website or a blog, you will need a domain name and webhost so people can find you. Many webhosts include the domain name for free with their hosting packages. I myself use Omnis.com because when I first started building websites, that is what the instructor used and recommended. Their webhosting is pretty cheap ($5.95) and they offer a free domain name. The things I like about Omnis are:

1. It’s extremely reliable. They are up they say 99.9% of the time. In all of the time I have used them, they have never been down that I know of. That is very important.
2. They give you Unlimited Storage
3. Unlimited data transfer, etc.
4. They offer the first 30 days free to try it out.
   

The things I don’t like about Omnis are

1. It uses a File Manager to manage the "behind the scenes" stuff. Most tutorials and programs that you will come across are set up to use a "C-Panel". For me, being a non-techy this has made some things harder than neccessary.
   
2. It has "site builder" as it’s website builder if you don’t want to build from scratch. It’s a really great and easy tool, but they only let you build 3 pages for free. You have to pay extra for more pages.
3. I don’t like their help program. It’s like an "open source" from around the web vs. being specific help program for Omnis.
4. They’re customer service isn’t very helpful and seem rather condescending if you don’t know what they know as far as how things work.

The original webhost that I was with when I took over my first website was Lunarpages. I was so inexperienced that I didn’t understand how to use a lot of the great stuff there and thought the C-Panel was very scary. I probably should have spent more time learning my way around. The thing I don’t like about Lunarpages is:

1. It sets limits on storage, etc. It’s quite a bit and they say you’ll never use it all, but I don’t like the idea if something goes extremely right and I get a ton of traffic, my site could quit or break down. I know the average website uses very little bandwidth etc.
2. They offer a 30 day moneyback guarantee vs. just letting you try it free for 30 days.

The things I like about Lunarpages are:

1. It has so very many useful and easy features.
2. It’s cheap, especially right now because they have a special going.
3. You also get a free domain name
4. It has the regular C-Panel vs. File manager which is usually easier to use with a lot of software programs and tutorials

Another Webhost that is making big onto the scene is Go Daddy. If you watch Nascar at all you’ve probably seen a lot of their ads as they sponsor a car. I really don’t know much about this service as I have never used it. I know their prices have gone up a bit since they’ve grown so much. Just be sure and compare services side by side to see what you’re getting for your money.

If you google "webhosting" or "domain names" I’m sure you will find a ton more. One tip I read recently is to not get your domain name and your webhost in the same place. I don’t know why this is, as I have never had a problem and you can move your domain to another webhost at any time you wish. (Verify that with whatever service you use).

Also, when choosing a domain name, stick with the .com. Most people are used to using it and it will keep your visitors from landing at another site by mistake.

Once you have your domain name and webhost, you are ready to upload your website files to your server and go live!