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/

Your potential customers can’t hear you. With the average person exposed to anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand ads a day, you need to make sure you stand out. You can’t be vague in your messages to your customers. You must make sure you are reaching your target audience, and then make sure you are communicating the benefits of your product to them. You need to get potential customers interested enough in your message and your product to reach out to you. To visit your store or Web site. Then you can develop a relationship with the customer, which is the first step in the selling process.

How do you effectively communicate with your potential customers and make sure that you are heard, seen and read above your competitors and other advertisers? Target your market. Decide who you want to reach with your marketing efforts. Define as much about your target customer as possible. Is this person (or people) men or women? What age group do they fall into? Do you want to narrow it down further by occupation or lifestyle? What about the area they live in? If you have a clear idea of who you are trying to connect with, you’ll have a better chance of actually connecting with them while you create your marketing messages.

Market to a broad audience. Act as a specialist by targeting your market, but deliver your message broadly. If you are marketing a dermatologist’s office, yes, you want people with skin problems so you market to their general doctors, but who else could use a dermatologist’s expertise? You could use postcard marketing and mail some informational full color postcards pieces to a cancer center. With skin cancer on the rise, market to cancer centers, supermarkets that sell sunblock and you can get more generalized from there.

Speak directly to the customer. Tell your prospects their needs and wants. Tell them how you can fulfill their needs and wants, but focus on them, not you. Focus on how you can help them with a solution. Show how you’ve helped others just like them with similar problems or wants.

Talk about your benefits, not just your features. People don’t care about the newest technology. They care about how the newest technology will help them. How will it be a benefit in their lives? Meticulously define your benefits and the best way to communicate them to your customers. Will you save them money? How? Give an example of how your product or service benefitted someone else.

Complexity does not impress. Don’t convolute your message with big words, industry jargon or long sentences. People understand simple words in simple formats. Don’t try to impress by throwing in words they’ll have to look up – no one will. You could “complicate” things by mailing out full color postcards – the color is enough interest to draw the customer in. Your simple message will do the rest of the work.

Come up with a catchy slogan. A slogan is a phrase that expresses something about a benefit or feature of a product or service. Burger King for example uses “Have it your way.” This clearly states that you can have your food any way you want it. They exist to accommodate you.

Get feedback. Show your ads or copy to friends, family or co-workers before you let the world take a look at them. These people are part of your world, and could be in your target audience. Getting their opinions can make your ads so much better. If you have the resources, use a focus group of your target market and use their feedback to make changes for the better.

Provide easy-to-understand information. Use words that your target market will understand. This applies to everything from your postcard marketing campaign to your Web site. Clearly label your Web site address, your business address and phone number, and any other information the customer needs to know. Include any instructions needed, like directions to get to your store. If your store is online, sometimes people need instructions to get there also.

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.

Put that website up, and they will come… NOT! And even if they were to come looking for you, standing on the street corner, shouting your name, will you be ready to respond? If you’re starting a business on the internet, you better fall in love with Internet Marketing.

Bill Gates has been quoted in 2000 saying “There are 2 kinds of businesses going forward: Those who have an internet presence and those who are out of business.”

Let’s face it, you must become knowledgeable about the internet. There is so much to learn and it seems like you’re just getting a handle on it, when something new comes along. In fact, unless you already enjoy having marketing experts on your team, you will need to make marketing your new love.

Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing is much more. It’s who you are in the marketplace. It’s what you represent. It’s what folks think when they think of you. Marketing is the way you compete for brain space. It’s your message. Most important, marketing is your road to wealth. If you are waiting for folks to find you, you will go broke. If you get in front of the people who are looking for you, and you communicate in a way that is compelling, you win. Marketing is the art of getting in front of those people who are looking for you and communicating in the language that they want to hear.

So here is the deal: Fall in-love with marketing. Make it a game. Keep score. Develop the marketing skills that will take you where you want your business to go. I believe strongly in finding a mentor in whatever area I want to master. I find the best for my current education level and my ability to afford them and study. I do what they do. And I make a point of learning from multiple sources. If you can’t afford to study personally with a mentor, read their books, listen to their programs, get on their email list and get busy.

The great thing about internet marketing is the tons of free information and strategies available. You can begin by searching out every marketing guru out there reading the free materials they offer. By starting with the free education, you learn the vocabulary and strategies that are currently available on the internet. I don’t recommend buying anything initially. Take a look at all the offerings and work to get your head on straight about what is available vs. what you need in your business. I make a point of subscribing to a number of internet marketing newsletters. I download Podcasts, those audio shows that are free for the download. I watch videos. Don’t forget to take advantage of our “free resource” page to get you started.

While I don’t do everything that is suggested, I find that the constant exposure to new marketing ideas keeps me fresh. I understand that marketing doesn’t come naturally to me: I must learn my game. This is a free and gentle way to keep myself thinking about marketing.

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.

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

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Site optimization purposes

We all want top rankings on Google, MSN, etc. It’s pretty hard to do when you’re an internet marketing newbie. There are a lot of internet marketers that have been around for awhile that are already there. This is of major importance to breaking through. When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website. On a blog this is usually done by your recent posts or archives. A great tool for this is in Google Analytics and it’s free to use. Just sign up for a free account.

2) Navigation purposes

You need it to be easy for your visitors to get where they want to be, or they’ll leave. A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browse your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

3) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors time.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

Getting Started

The first place to start like anything you do is with a plan. No matter what you’re planning on doing or selling on the internet, just like in brick and mortar life, you need a plan. This place looks really cool and appears to have everything you need for free. Startup Business School I myself have not used this site, but plan on going back and checking it out in more depth after I get done here. A great blog about planning and strategies is here written by the guy that started Palo Alto Software. Just be careful where you get your information. One site I went to offered free business plan templates, but you had to go thru all this sales BS, apply for 3 offers, etc. etc. You don’t want to go there. Another thing to expect is what ever you do online, any time you take an offer, you will have to supply your email address so they can add you to their "list". It doesn’t take much before your email is overflowing with "special offers". Most the time you can unsubscribe pretty easily.

You also need to think about what your goals are as you are writing your plan. You know the old saying "if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?"

Website, Blog or Neither?

You’ll probably see a lot of headlines about how you can make tons of money on the internet "an you don’t even need a website". Pretty basically it’s true that you don’t have to have a website. What you can do is "partner" with people, selling their stuff and using their webpages. These people are called "affiliates". They pay you a commission for selling their stuff. You need to

1. Keep track of what they owe you
2. You still need a way to capture everyone’s name and email address to build your own "list".
3. The tools for selling their stuff is usually the same thing a million other people are using to do the same thing.

The bottom line is you still really need to have a "home". So after the planning comes how you are going to take your place on the internet.

The Website

I had products that I sold offline that I wanted to move online, so I started with a website. (You can see it at Beamish’s Brass Tacks ). The thing about a website is it’s more work to update for fresh content, but it does give you a pretty permanent web presence. It’s also yours so no one can tell you what to put on it or how to run it.

The greatest place I’ve found for learning HTML code is The Hidden Vault. It’s very basic but has both video and writing and provides a great way to see exactly how code works. Every time you make a change you can see it. It’s really terrific for the most basic beginning.

After you get used to playing with that, then you can go on to more in-depth tutoring. One place to go is Build Website 4 You and another terrific site for learning to build your own website is the Website Wizard. His first step is to buy your domain name, etc. which I don’t agree with, but it is a pretty comprehensive step-by-step. I like to have a plan, the website ready to go so all I have to do is load it on whatever server I choose, and then get my webhost and domain name.

The Blog

The fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get up and running is by using a "blog" for your website. The platforms are free and you can change content every day if you wish. The one thing about a blog is that you do need to add fresh content often, so pick something you know a lot about, feel passionate about, and feel like you could write about forever. Just in case you are really a newbie, a blog is a web journal. It’s like a journal you would write in often, only online for the world to see.

The two most popular platforms are Blogger and Wordpress. I personally have never understood it, but for some reason Google likes Wordpress when it comes to rankings, even tho Blogger is a Google product. One thing I should warn you about Blogger, especially if you’re planning on selling anything is they do have a tendancy evidently to lock up your blog. I just read 2 bloggers yesterday that moved their blogs to Wordpress because Blogger had arbitrarily done that to them. You have to fight to get it back up, proving you followed their Terms Of Service, and it’s a big hassle. Eventually what you want to do is have your blog on your own domain. This too is easier to accomplish with Wordpress.org. To get started for free and fast tho, just go to whatever platform you choose and sign up. It’s that easy. Another up and coming platform is Live Journal.

The best resources I could recommend is a free report Easy Blogging. You can download it and have for referring back to at anytime. The best website to learn everything step by step in my opinion, is Problogger. He has a 31 day lesson plan for building your blog.

The Beginning Stages

As with anything new, the beginning stages are the hardest and take the longest on the learning curve. As you get going the things you do will take less time and my posts will get shorter. LOL. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them. Also if you find any resources you like, please feel free to share those also. I still have a lot to learn myself!

Since you can read all "about me" on that page, I’m not going to waste time introducing myself here. Suffice it to say over the past year and a half I have learned quite a bit about Online Marketing. I’ve made my mistakes and had my successes, and I’m sharing it with you here to help you avoid the mistakes I’ve made, so let’s dive right in.

Everything you read from now on on this blog is strictly my opinion. As you become more familiar with Internet Marketing you will see everyone’s got one. Many will conflict with mine based on their own agendas.

The first thing I want you to know is that just about anything you need when it comes to your new Internet Marketing business, you can get online for free. That’s right. If you google "website templates" you will find a bunch of sites that offer free ones. If you google "free advertising" you will find sites where you can advertise without spending a fortune. Of course, like anything else, some will be better than others, and as you get more experienced you will be able to tell the difference.

This site will be a combination of products, services and resources that I will be sharing for free because I obtained them that way and thought they were useful, ones you pay for that I know are good, and a lot of free resources where you can find the answers to the questions you may have.