For all newbies to the internet marketing game the problem of information overload of 'the greatest next big thing' recommendations from 'gurus' is a real problem.
If you have not seen Scott Boulch's latest report, 'The Internet Marketing Cure', then I would recommend it for its take on the current state of this business. In it, he recommends that every time your receive a recommendation to buy some product you reply and ask for proof of the affiliates success with the product.
No reply means you unsubscribe from their list as they are not providing real value.
Rick Butts was the first to grasp the nettle and you can see the response it has generated over on his blog
You really should go and read the comments. Wow! That's how to start a conversation.
| Did you like this article? Then subscribe now to my RSS feed: |  |
There are a very few fundamentals to internet marketing and list building is one of them. Why? Because unlike the real world, your presence on the web is completely invisible to potential customers unless you go and stand in their way and make them fall over you. In internet jargon that's called 'driving traffic'.
In reality, it's more like finding a herd of stampeding cattle and making sure you go stand in front of them.
So once you've got someone's attention you sure don't want them to disappear again like someone walked into your high street store, took a look around and walked out again without buying anything. At least they walked in so there must have been something about your shop/products/staff or even the pattern on your carpet that attracted their attention. So you want to make sure that you can communicate with them again just in case you can work out what it was that they liked and offer them some more of the same – up to the point that they might buy something from you.
You can't do any of that if you do not know who they are. So your number one priority the first time they wander into your store is to get their name and email address and their permission to communicate with them again. That's called list building.
I recognised a little while ago that you can work your socks off as I have done for some time learning individual skills and applying them to various projects with varying degrees of success. But without an automated system you are working very hard for little progress. What you really need is automation which is exactly what the internet is good at. If you are into online marketing and are not using the one unique characteristic of the internet then you have to ask yourself if you are barking up the wrong tree.
That's why I shall shortly be launching my automated list builder called www.ListLegions.com that embodies all the fundamental aspects of marketing whether online or offline.
Giving value to your prospects before you ever offer them something to buy, gathering their details to add to your list, using viral marketing concepts to persuade your subscribers to pass your message on to their friends, offering all the services of your own system to them so they can benefit too and automating as much as possible of these marketing basics so that subscribers can concentrate their time on marketing and not on the mechanics.
It's an abiding principle of marketing that you have to give in order to receive – and I am planning that ListLegions.com is going to do just that by making list building as easy as possible for my subscribers.
| Did you like this article? Then subscribe now to my RSS feed: | |
You will have gathered by now I am an enthusiast for Semiologic Pro. Particularly as it's author, Denis de Bernardy, clearly knows what he is talking about not only about blog software but also about how to use it for SEO purposes.
I have criticised him in the past for not providing enough guidance to users on how to extract the maximum benefit from his technical efforts so I was interested to see that he has recently been 'giving some love' as he puts it to the help areas of his web site to advise users how to make best use of the blogging phenomenon.
You can find his thoughts on the subject at: http://www.semiologic.com/resources/blogging/ and my own thoughts on the subject on my Blogging page.
| Did you like this article? Then subscribe now to my RSS feed: | |
For those using the vanilla flavour of free Wordpress it is worth remembering that no website is ever completely safe from the unwanted attentions of those who have nothing better to do than try to screw up other people's hard work.
A colleague of mine in the Smart Marketing Coaching Club recently reported an email he received from Google telling him of problems on one of his blogs. You can read his story and about the solution on his blog here.
There is a secondary word of warning to build in to this story. His first concern when he received the email from Google was his suspicion that it was not genuine – and quite rightly too. This is very similar to those infamous phishing emails asking you to log in to your bank account or Paypal in order to verify your details. Don't do it – no reputable financial institution will ever ask you to log in by any other means than through your normal login. In this case it turned out to be legitimate but it was worth checking in any event.
So the story is to keep your Wordpress blog up to date with every update just as soon as they become available on the Wordpress site.
| Did you like this article? Then subscribe now to my RSS feed: | |
