The REAL secret to succeeding in Internet Marketing

take_massive_actionWhether you are a wet-behind-the-ears internet marketing newbie, or you’ve been involved in the industry for some time – if you are reading this article, chances are that you are still waiting to experience the success you desire. Why is that, do you think?

From the moment you step into this ‘arena’ you are bombarded by other marketers with hyped-up products to sell. You get jostled from one ‘best-ever’ way to make money online to the next. Your head is left spinning and before you know it you are 12 months down the road with nothing but a big dent in your credit card to show for it.

The problem

Part of the problem is that there are SO many different ways to make money online, and if that’s your goal you are drawn to the promises being made by each new offer you come across. But in actuality, all you need is one way that works. Just pick one and stick to it.

You can read all the forums you like, buy as many internet marketing products as you can afford, and learn as much as you can about the business – but it still won’t make you a red cent. It takes something else to succeed in this game. Action. The missing ingredient that everyone knows about, but rarely includes.

No Magic Success Pill

There is no Magic Success Pill you can take that will change your fortunes overnight, so stop looking for one. Stop buying products on the spur of the moment. And stop fooling yourself that you are taking action, when you are not. You know, all the stuff you fill your time with that doesn’t get you anywhere. For example, swop the time you spend reading and posting to forums for something that can actually make you money.

Take massive action

Whatever you decide to take action on, be sure to take ‘massive’ action. Don’t just give it a try for a week. Don’t dip your toe in the water. That won’t give you results. Instead, give it 30 days of ‘unprecedented’ action.

What constitutes ‘massive’ or ‘unprecedented’ action’?

A consistent, continuous, impressive level of effort with accumulating results.

For example, if you decide to write 3 articles a day for 30 days you’ll have 90 or more by the end of the month. If each was just 300 words long, you would have 27,000 words written. That equates to 2 or 3 decent length ebooks if you decided to create your own product instead of writing articles.

Ramp that up to 10 articles a day and you’ll really start to see results. 300 articles by next month or 9 x 10,000 word ebooks. Do you think those articles or ebooks would be worth money? You betchya! Keep up that level of activity for a few months and your massive action will reap massive results.

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How to avoid turning your product into a Meatball Sundae

I spent most of last night watching Seth Godin videos online. The guy is a certified marketing genius, but his larger gift is that he is very entertaining to read and listen to, and illustrates his ideas in a way that is immediate, impactful and often very amusing.

This video is of a talk Seth gave at last year’s Business of Software conference. And while the talk is directed at programmer and such, there is much to be learned by anyone trying to market their own products or affiliate products online.

He discusses the importance of NOT being mediocre or average, or creating products that are designed to appeal to the masses. As he says: you make money by being uqiquitous – being everywhere, or by being bespoke – through scarcity. You don’t make money by being in the middle, being average, mediocre.

Seth illustrates vital marketing concepts with discussions of Meatball Sundaes, purple cows, sliced bread and Sneezers. This is 60 minutes of Absolutely unmissable, classic Seth.

-Mark Wilson.

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Referral-based marketing, the Seth Godin way

I can never get enough of Seth Godin. In this video he talks about referral-based marketing and about giving your best customers a megaphone to sell for you.

If you market your own products online using affiliates, giving them a a great set of affiliate tool and offers they can use to promote your product helps them spread the word about your product.

-Mark Wilson.

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Diary of a Wealthy Affiliate Member – Introduction

wealthy_affiliate1When it comes to learning to make money online with Internet Marketing, it seems like you can’t move without falling over a ‘guru‘ selling their ‘secret‘ method of making $10,000 a month ‘in your sleep‘.

If you’ve spent more than a wet weekend looking for a way to make extra cash or replace your lost income, you already know that there seem to be thousands of different methods, all claiming to be the latest, greatest money making method … as long as you ‘buy before the 300 copies are gone forever‘. It’s easy to get pulled from one thing to another, spend your precious cash on something that either doesn’t work, or simply leaves you even more confused.

Another question that comes to mind is, If it’s so easy to make money online using these methods, why do 95% of people fail to make anything at all? Is it the method they choose, or is it something else?

In an effort to strip away all of the sales hype and help you get on the right track to success I’ve decided to join, buy or implement the teachings of some of these Internet Marketing gurus and report back to you on my progress. That way you can make up your own mind about a particular program or method and decide if it’s for you.

To shorten the process I’m only going to pick programs that I’ve already heard good things about, rather than simply pick any old program at random – and I’m going to start with Wealthy Affiliate.

Wealthy Affiliate is a members-only ‘Affiliate University’ run by a couple of guys by the name of Kyle and Carson, with the intention of teaching you how to build a successful Affiliate Marketing business. The site has been online since 2005 and has thousands of current members. You don’t need any previous experience, complete beginners are catered for, and catered for very well!

Affiliate Marketing is all about PRE-selling other people’s products or services. The big benefit of this approach is that you never have to stock product, handle transactions or provide customer service. You get paid a commission if someone ends up buying from the vendor after following one of your web-links. Also, you can get started with this business model using totally free methods and gradually switch to paid solutions once you are making money.

Wealthy Affiliate costs $29.99 a month if you pay a year’s subscription up front, or $39 if you opt to pay monthly. If you are hesitant about paying a monthly fee to learn how to build a successful online business, don’t be. The training, support, tools, community spirit, motivation and encouragement you get from being a member of a like-minded community beats the “here’s an PDF and a few videos – good luck!” approach hands down!

The fact that members are posting in the private WA forum on their first and second anniversary of becoming a Wealthy Affiliate member speaks volumes about how good it is. You don’t keep shelling out cash if you aren’t making any.

On joining you are recommended to begin the 8 Week Action Plan, a series of guided learning assignments to help kick-start your Affiliate Marketing career. In the next post in this series I will talk about my first week as a Wealthy Affiliate member.

-Mark Wilson.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Make Money Online, Private Label Rights (PLR) | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Real Traffic Tuesday #4 – Combine Twitter with Article Marketing for More Traffic

If you are trying to get more traffic to your website or blog, then it’s likely that you are using Article Marketing and probably Twitter too. Here’s a great little tip for combining both these methods for even more website traffic.

Article Marketing + Twitter = Endless Waves of Traffic – Visitors & Viewers (AM + T = ET)

Article Marketing is one of the very best ways to bring endless waves of traffic and visitors to your websites and blogs. Add Twitter to the mix and you have an extremely powerful traffic generation system for free.

I could not stop the traffic and visitors coming to my websites and blogs even if I wanted to, and I sure don’t want to.

AM + T = ET

AM + T = ET stands for Article Marketing plus Twitter equals Endless waves of Traffic and viewers. Here’s how you do it:

1. Auto-Tweet Your EzineArticles Submissions – Set up your free account to automatically send a message to Twitter each time a new article is published. Each time you have a new article published an auto-tweet will go out to your followers announcing your new article.

This is great, but don’t stop there…

2. Follow up the Auto-Tweet – As in all areas of business, your fortune and future here is in the follow up. Don’t just rely on the auto-tweet to announce your articles. Direct your followers to your articles yourself. You can say something like this – “For 3 tips on how to… check out” and then give the URL of your article.

3. Other will “Re-Tweet” Your Article – Part of being social on Twitter is “re-tweeting” (RT) messages you like and want other people to see. Many people will do this for you without being asked. How do you get other people to RT for you? Ask them, and return the favor with their tweets.

4. Direct to Opt-In Page – You can also invite your Twitter followers to go directly to the opt-in page that you normally send people to from the Resource Box in your articles. What’s that you say? You don’t send people from your Resource Box to an opt-in page? We need to talk!

Here’s how you do it – “Get free instant access to…” whatever it is you are giving them in exchange for their email address.

And when you follow these tips you will drive endless waves of traffic and visitors your way with Article Marketing and Twitter.

And to learn so much more about how to create endless waves of traffic with your Article Marketing, you can check out The Article Marketing TeleSeminar Club at http://www.AMTeleSeminarClub.com

You’ll learn all about Content Creation – Traffic Generation – List Building – Repurposed Marketing – Product Creation with Article Marketing.

From Jeff Herring – The Article Marketing Guy & the Great Article Marketing Network.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeff_Herring

Linking directly from your resource box to your opt-in page is a good trick for affiliate marketers who are using Article Marketing or Twitter as a traffic source.

-Mark Wilson.

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Namecheap Domain Name Coupon for July

This month’s Namecheap domain registration coupon code is FIREWORKS

The coupon code is valid for July 2009 and reduces the cost of registering a domain at Namecheap to $8.81

The coupon is for domain registration only, and will not work for hosting or domain name transfers.

-Mark Wilson.

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The Importance of Customer Service – Online or Offline

I know this is meant to be Traffic Tuesday, and in a way it is. Get ready for a rant!

Maybe I just attract the wrong kind of people, or maybe customer service standards – online and offline – are really as bad as I think they are. I’ve encountered 3 examples of appalling customer service in the last 2 days alone. That’s got to be some kind of record.

Surely the primary task of a salesperson is to guide you to the point of parting with your money. Seeking to help you if you need help, answering your questions about the product (or at least directing you to someone who can), and generally adding to the customer experience so that you would happily shop in the same place again. Because, as we all know, loyal, repeat customers are the goal of any successful business – unless you’re in the Adsense game of course.

The first incident resulted in a lost sale for the store involved. I knew basically what I wanted to buy. The value of the purchase was about $60, so not insubstantial. All I wanted to know was if it was OK to get a better look at the product before I bought it. Sounds simple. right?

Well, there were 3 sales assistants close by – this was not a large store but part of a large chain of stores, nor was it very busy – one of them was busy making plans for the evening on her phone, and the other 2 were so engrossed … in a game of Tag … that they didn’t hear my “excuse me”.

In the end I took the product out of its package and assembled it to decide if it was what I wanted. Nobody bothered me or asked to “assist” while I did this. I can’t be sure they even noticed. When I was done I re-packaged it and looked up to see that, in order to purchase the product I would have to spoil the fun the salespeople seemed to be having. I didn’t want to do that, so in the end I just walked out.

The second incident occurred in another big name chain store. I was shopping for something different this time. The item was reduced by $100 so I was keen to buy it in this store. However the salesperson couldn’t find the keys belonging to the product. Well, I was getting $100 off and this was the last item that they had in stock, so I was prepared to wait a while.

It took him 45 minutes to find the keys! During which time I was bombarded with customer-winning gems like “Why didn’t you buy it yesterday? I had the keys yesterday!”, and “Can you come back at the weekend? We’ll have more in stock then, but they will be at the full price”. I really should have given up sooner, but the attraction of a bargain can’t be underestimated!

I even suggested that he give me the display model instead, because I could see keys taped to the inside of it. But that only served to generate the bewildering response, “If I sell you the display model, I’ll have to sell someone else the one without keys”. I give up. Or at least, I was about to, when the keys eventually turned up. Thank God for that!

I’m strongly considering writing a course called “Basic logic for sales assistants” after that one.

Finally, I spent a fair amount of time trawling through the Knowledgebase of a product website trying to find if a particular product I wanted to buy was capable of being used in a specific way. I couldn’t find the answer so I emailed Customer Service and explained my question and that the Knowledgebase didn’t contain the answer.

You probably know what I received back. Yup. An email from Customer Service saying how important my question was to them and how happy they were to be able to help. An email into which they Cut-and-Pasted a section of their Knowledgebase which completely failed to answer my question.

The reason I place such an importance on Customer Service pre-purchase, is that if you have a problem after you’ve bought something, you’re going to encounter exactly the same ignorance and stupidity when you try to resolve it – only by then you’ll have parted with your cash!

Excellent customer service is such a core part of customer acquisition and customer retention, you should be watching and learning from it wherever you encounter it – online or offline. And over time, if you can’t provide top-notch Customer Service, all the Website Traffic in the world isn’t going to help you.

-Mark Wilson.

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Real Traffic Tuesday #3 – Free Traffic From Videos

Videos are a great way to generate  traffic and interest in your website, and you don’t have to be George Lucas to make one either. There are a number of great free online tools you can use to create videos for your site and for generating backlinks. Best of all, you don’t even need a camcorder, and you don’t have to see your ugly mug on screen either. Thank goodness for that ;)

Animoto.com gives you basic tools to create a short (30 second) video from images you upload, or transfer from, say, your Flickr account. You just drag them around to create the running order, select music from the fairly substantial list of tracks offered, and they put the whole lot together – with pretty cool transitions – in just a few minutes.

You can upgrade for $30 to make full-length videos or purchase credits at $3 a pop. Personally, I would like to see more control over timing, length and content before I would upgrade. But for quick and good looking 30 second video messages it’s pretty cool.

For getting your videos out there and onto some of the best video sharing sites around tubemogul.com is great and saves you the time of uploading to each site individually. It also allows you to track where your visitors are coming from which is vital.

-Mark Wilson.

Posted in Squidoo, Website Traffic | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Friday Freebie #2 – Where to find killer PLR products

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It’s no secret that you can make a ton on money online using Private Label Rights (PLR) products. But if you’ve ever bought any PLR yourself you’ll know how difficult it is to find really high quality products that everybody and their grandmother doesn’t already own.

That’s where today’s Friday Freebie comes to the rescue. It’s a free report that will teach you exactly what to look for when selecting PLR for maximum profit and minimum hassle. And it shows you the very best places on the internet to go to get reliable, high quality, low volume PLR products that you can turn around and make quick sales from.

Best of all, the report is written by the Queen of PLR, Liz Tomey – so you you’d better pay attention, ‘cos you know it’s gonna be good stuff.

Click to get your FREE killer report on where to find the best PLR products

Enjoy!

Mark Wilson


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Namecheap Domain Name Coupon for June

This month’s Namecheap domain registration coupon code is nomoreschool

The coupon code is valid for June 2009 and reduces the cost of registering a domain at Namecheap to $8.81

The coupon is for domain registration only, and will not work for hosting or domain name transfers.

-Mark Wilson.

Posted in Domain Names | Tagged | Leave a comment