First of all, this is not a Fluff piece – If you decide to read on, you will get the truth (as far as I know it).

Doing the ‘hard things’ in business is what is going to keep you from falling and jumping off of a cliff – this goes for any business.  I don’t care if you are running a restaurant or a zoo.  The devil is in the details and you must master the core skills of your trade.

One the of those core skills in the online marketing world is RESEARCH.  I hear the groans now.

Do you want to know why the top online marketers are at the top?  Is it an accident?  Is it a stroke of luck or good fortune?  No, it’s because these folks have mastered their craft – they have become masters of performing proper research and making rational and right decisions on what they find.

Why is research difficult for most people?  Bluntly stated, it requires great patience and discipline.  It requires that the researcher not come to conclusions about an issue until all of the data is collected and analyzed.  These are difficult skills to learn and master.  But you must because your long-term financial success depends on it.

For an online marketer, what are some of the tools of the trade, from a research standpoint?

The top three that I use are:

Keyword Phrase Analysis
Forum posts
Competition Analysis

Keyword Phrase Analysis

This is probably the easiest of the three to perform.  I wrote a post about the mechanics  earlier – here is the link http://askstanbeck.com/archives/21.

At a high level, Keyword Analysis is a way to find out what people are searching for in the search engines – their questions, if you will.  Knowing what people are searching on helps give you insight as to what pains them – what are they trying to solve.  There are many tools out there — the key is to pick one and use it.  A good free tool that I use frequenly is GoodKeywords.

Forum Posts

This research method takes a little more work.  First you must find the gathering points for your market – the water cooler if you will.  There are thousands of forums out there – just simple search in Google for ‘TOPIC’ forum – that’s a good starting point.  Here, you must read posts and take notes.  What are people writing about?  Are people indicating that they are willing to spend money to get ‘xxxx’ benefit?

Competition Analysis

There are millions of topics of interest out there.  However, if you are running a business, you only want to involve yourself with those ventures that will eventually convert into a profit for you.  "Underwater Basket Weaving" may be a hot topic for some, but this group may not spend money on their hobby – maybe they are perpetually looking for freebies.  Some areas that people spend money on Hobbies like Fishing, Hunting, Tennis, Golf – areas where there is passion. 

How do you find out where money is being spent?  A quick and easy what is to pay attention to the advertisers.  If advertisers are repeatedly spending money on a market, there is a good chance that it is a good market to pursue.  You want to look for markets that have lots of competition – you don’t want to blaze and trails – it’s too hard to do and takes too much time and money.  From an online perspective, use a tool like GoodKeywords to look at the Overture ads.

Okay, you’ve identified your target market and that they spend money – that’s a huge step forward.

Next, we need to go back to our notes from what keywords our market is searching on in the search engines and what questions they are asking in the forums.  These are the keys to what you are going to offer your market.  They have told you what they want – so give it to them.

Spend some time on Google and figure out who are the experts in your target market – read everything you can get your ‘hands on’.  Follow their links – take copious notes.  You want to collect as much data as you can as it relates to the questions your market is asking.

Then, once you’ve compiled your information, start posting and answering posts in the forums where you market hangs out.  You need to get some experience conversing with your market and this is an excellent way to do it.  Offer free advice and invite people to ask questions of you directly.  Once they start doing that, then you’ve got something – these are the very questions that people are now asking you – questions you can answer in your new product!

Build your product around this research and you can’t go wrong – how can you, you’ve already uncovered what your market wants, and you are giving it to them.

Do the hard work of research and you’ll save yourself countless grief and money.

Not all Keywords are Equal

If you are an Adsense advertiser, you must realize that not all keywords are equal.  Advertisers, on some HOT keywords and keyword phrases have been known to pay up to $50 per click and more.

$50 and more.

Let me say it again.

$50 and more.

So what does that mean for you?

You need to build your site pages around those keywords that bring in the greatest amount of cash per click – simply stated.

However, a word of caution, don’t fall into the temptation of sacrificing quality, relevant content for the sake of higher paying keywords – if the content is not there or somehow doesn’t fit with the site theme, people most likely will not click.  Or if they do click, they may not buy from the advertiser because they are not serious prospects.  If this happens enough, Google will start to pay you less per click.

It stands to reason that the higher paying keywords and keyword phrases are going to be very competitive.  So, if you are going to go after the bigger $ per click, you are perhaps going to have to use some guerrilla tactics to get the traffic to your page.

If you already have some traffic coming to your site, make sure you subtle advertise your ‘higher per click’ page by posting a link or something like that to draw people there.

Another tactic is to crank out a few articles, advertising your ‘higher per click’ page in your bio information.

If you have a list, then by all means, send them a note telling them about your new ‘higher per click’ page.

Another great thing to do is create an interesting 12-20 page report or so and impregnate it with links back to your ‘higher per click’ page and sell it on eBay for 99 cents, giving away master resale rights.  Make sure that the report is of substantial value or it will not appeal to the masses.  You can even offer it for free to some of the well-established eBook sellers for free so you don’t have to bother trying to market it yourself.   This is a great way to crank an enormous amount of viral traffic.

Anyway, just some ideas – I hope this helps!

The Background

The other day, I was building a website http://VoIPMadeEZ.com which sells an eBook I bought the Private Label Rights to and then modified, called "Definitive Guide to VoIP."   When I was getting ready to monetize the site, I decided that I wanted to use PayPal, since it is so easy to setup and use. 

So, in PayPal, I created a button using my own custom image – fine, easy enough. 

Then I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before… 

When I created the PayPal button as encrypted, PayPal didn’t supply the HRef hyperlink version that you use inside an email or even on a webpage.

But, when I turned off the encryption, the HRef hyperlink version appeared.  This means that if I want to use the HRef hyperlink version, I have to have all my sensitive data unencrypted — not good or wise.

So, I came up with this method of handling that situation…

The Solution

This is not a tutorial on how to use PayPal buttons – although I can write about that another time if there is interest.  However, what I’m going to show you is how to further secure your PayPal Button transactions.

If you don’t already know, you can setup PayPal buttons as Encrypted and as Non-Encrypted.  The Encrypted button is optimal because PayPal disguises all the details from the user, like price and ‘return.’   However, when you use Encrypted, you loose the ability to use some features.  One feature, in particular, is very helpful, and that is to be able to put a hyperlink in the text that say’s "Order Now".

For an example, see my site http://VoIPMadeEZ.com

Here you see that I have several "order now"-type of hyperlinks.

Here is what the unencrypted link looks like (doctored slightly for security reasons):Now, it probably looks like gibberish to you – let’s break it down, parameter by parameter (note that each parameter is separated by the ‘&’):

 

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=ps%40voipmadeez%2ecom&item_name=Definitive%20Guide%20to%20VoIP&item_number=Definitive%20Guide%20to%20VoIP&amount=9%2e77&no_shipping=1&return=http%3a%2f%2fvoipmadeez%2ecom%2fa%2db%2dc%2ehtm&no_note=1&currency_code=USD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dBuyNowBF&charset=UTF%2d8

Here are the parametes broken out, one per line.

business=ps%40voipmadeez%2ecom
item_name=Definitive%20Guide%20to%20VoIP
item_number=Definitive%20Guide%20to%20VoIP
amount=9%2e77
no_shipping=1
return=http%3a%2f%2fvoipmadeez%2ecom%2fa%2db%2dc%2ehtm
no_note=1
currency_code=USD
lc=US
bn=PP%2dBuyNowBF
charset=UTF%2d8

There are still some characters that are difficult to read – that’s because HTML  doesn’t understand spaces, hyphens, etc.  So, HTML substitutes Hexadecimal equivalents for those characters.  In every the case where you find a ‘%’ (percent sign), that means the next 2 characters are hexadecimal.  So let’s translate the above using the following:

%20 – space ‘  ‘
%2d – hyphen "-"
%2e – period ‘.’
%2f – forward slash "/"
%3a – colon ":"
%40 – at sign ‘@’

(By the way, a good site to use for hexadecimal to decimal conversions is http://asciitable.com)

Our list of parameters now looks like this:

business=ps@voipmadeez.com
item_name=Definitive Guide to VoIP
item_number=Definitive Guide to VoIP
amount=9.77
no_shipping=1
return=http://voipmadeez.com/a-b-c.htm
no_note=1
currency_code=USD
lc=US
bn=PP-BuyNowBF
charset=UTF-8

This definitely makes it easier read.

From the above list, please note the following 2 parameters:
amount=9.77
return=http://voipmadeez.com/a-b-c.htm

"amount" is the amount being charged
"return" is the page that the user is returned to after a successful transaction – this is the return page that gives my buyer the location for his product to download.

So, an unscrupulous buyer can potentially cheat you by altering either of these values and submitting the rebuilt link.  Or, he could avoid paying altogether and go to the ‘return’ link and download the product without paying at all.

One way to combat this is with a link is with a URL redirection service, like go2-url.com.  Go2url.com takes long URLs and transforms them (masks them) by a URL that disguises what’s underneath.

So, for example, this link:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=ps%40voipmadeez%2ecom&item_name=Definitive%20Guide%20to%20VoIP&item_number=Definitive%20Guide%20to%20VoIP&amount=9%2e77&no_shipping=1&return=http%3a%2f%2fvoipmadeez%2ecom%2fa%2db%2dc%2ehtm&no_note=1&currency_code=USD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dBuyNowBF&charset=UTF%2d8

can be transformed into a link that looks like this:
http://Go2-URL.com/aarnes

With Go2-URL.com, you have option of choosing a "Link Type" of "Simple Redirect" or "Hidden" – you want to choose "Hidden", otherwise, your original URL with all of that sensitive information will appear on the URL line when the link is clicked.

Then in your webpage, change your hyperlinks to http://Go2-URL.com/aarnes and they will be magically redirected the correct PayPal payment page without divulging any sensitive information.

Ah, and I forgot to mention, Go2-URL.com is free to use

I hope this is helpful.

There is nothing more than I hate than going through the chore of soliciting Link Exchanges.  Link exchanges do work, but the process is very tedious and a tad demeaning.

I supposed that soliciting link exchanges was more tolerable until I learned this next technique…

Article Writing

Articles are a fantastic way to build one-way links to your site, very quickly.  The internet is starved for information/content and when you give it what it wants, you are rewarded.  

Here are the steps:

Write an article about something related to the topic of your website you want to promote.  It doesn’t have to be a huge article, but between 500 and 750 words would be great.

Write a bio phrase that includes a link to your website you are wanting to promote. 
"For more great articles like this one, go to http://greatsite.com"

Here is a list of good, solid article sites:

• http://articlecity.com
• http://ezinearticles.com
• http://articlesfactory.com
• http://infonexus.org
• http://articlehub.com
• http://searcharticles.net

This list  is not exhaustive, but will certainly get you started.  To find other article sites, you can Google for "submit your article" or "article directory".

Submit your articles to each of these sites and make sure you put your article in the proper category.  For example, if you article is about dog grooming, then choose the Pet category.  Also, in the Bio section (each have this), insert your previously written "bio phrase" (see above).

I would try to submit 2-3 articles a week for a month or two, if you can.  Then you can back it off to 1 a week.

Once people start using your articles are their sites (a one-way link), Google will reward you with a higher Page Rank.

Another nice benefit of writing the articles is that after about 60-day of this, you will have loads of content which you can repackage into an eBook or special report, which can be sold.

One more benefit to submitting articles is that you will soon (within in 30-60) days become known as an expert in your field – this is a huge advantage for gaining credibility.

If you feel uncomfortable writing articles, you can alway have them written for you, using a service such as http://elance.com.

 

I was recently playing a popular computer game called Civilization IV and during the game I heard the following phrase:

"A man who chases two rabbits will end up with none."

I don’t recall who the author of that statement is – I’ll have to look that up…

But,

It is very, very powerful.  Really, it is a kick in the head for me.  Here is how I interpret the statement:

"If I chase too many projects simultaneously, I will end up not accomplishing anything signficant."
 
The word that seems to sum it all up is "Focus."

Decide what is important in your life and focus on that – don’t get easily side-tracked.

Perhaps "Focus" should be one of my goals for 2007.  We’ll see…

How can blogging cure your writer’s block?

Do you find that you have a real writer’s block?  Have you been trying to write a much needed special report or eBook, but just can’t seem to get organized?  Blogging may be your answer.

Many people have giant mental blocks when it comes to writing – just the thought of it makes them cringe, remembering back to having to write essays and reports for school.  It wasn’t enjoyable then and it’s certainly not going to be enjoyable now.

Some have a fear of writing a more substantial piece, such as a report or an eBook – is this you?  Take heart, blogging may be your answer.

Blogs are generally used as a place in cyberspace to write shorter themes and thoughts about a particular topic.  So let’s say you’re blog is about ‘dog training.’  You post 3 to 4 times a week, faithfully about all kinds of issues.  You start to gain an audience where they leave comments and questions to which you respond with your best answers.  So after a month or two of this, what do you have?

• You have several reports
• You have an eBook

All you need to do is go through your blog entries and pull out the little nuggets of genius that you’ve been faithfully distilling down to ‘paper’ and organize them around a particular theme.  Package it, and put out there in cyberspace, sell it on eBay, whatever.

In summary, your blog is a tremendous to tool to help you take baby-steps to producing a larger written work – blog faithfully and it will serve you well.

Email marketing can be a powerful part of your online business — if it is done correctly…

Know Your Audience?

The master ‘key’ of getting powerful response results in email marketing is knowing your audience — what they like, dislike.  The better you know them, the faster they will trust you because it will show in your writing.

These are some common ’seed’ questions to help prime the pump:

• What do ‘they’ want?
• What in life truly frustrates ‘them?’
• Is anyone else providing solutions other than what you have?
• Why should ‘they’ believe/trust you?
• Why should ‘they’ respond to your rather than to a competitor?

Without a great subject line, they may trash your email

I don’t care how great your product/service is, if your prospect deletes your email before opening it, they can’t respond to you.  Therefore, you’ve got spark that interest in the subject line.

Here are some very powerful ways to grab their attention:

List a powerful benefit – "’XYZ’ can drive truckloads of cash to your wallet"

The curiosity factory – "’XYZ’ reveals power-packed traffic generation secrets

News Declaration – "’XYZ’ launches to Invitation Only program to generate massive traffic"

Immediate Gratification – "’XYZ’ can take you from zero traffic to breaking your web server in 24 hours"

Note: It is a good idea when writing subject lines to brainstorm at least 30 before selecting one.  Once you’ve select which are the best two, test them against one another.  Don’t toss out the others because they may come in handy for other campaigns.

It’s all about them — It’s NOT about you

Do you know the difference between a benefit and a feature?

• A feature describes, in factual terms, the attributes of a product or service (LOGIC).
• A benefit shows ‘them’ how ‘their’ life will be changed/improved by your product or service (EMOTION).

Do you see the difference?  People make the decision to buy with emotion and justify it with logic.

You’ve got to get all emotional

From the previous step, we mentioned trying your darnedest to appeal to your prospects emotions.  Here is a list of powerful emotions:

• Anger
• Curiosity
• Ego
• Fear
• Greed
• Hope
• Vanity/Pride

For each emotion listed, try to list 3 to 5 items for each for your customer.  So for anger you might write:

Anger:

• "Frustrated that you can’t enough traffic to your site?"
• "Are you tired of getting beaten by your competitors when it comes to website exposure?"

The credibility factor

People won’t buy from you if they don’t trust you – period!

Trust is built slowly and ruined quickly, so you must do everything within your power to deliver on your promises — even over-deliver. 

The best way that I’ve heard this described is by a well-known internet marketer, Michael Cheney.  He describes establishing trust like stepping stones across a creek.  You want to lead your prospect one stepping stone at time — just tiny little steps.  The more expensive your product your service is, the more stones you may have to use. 

Here are some great credibility builders:

Testimonials — this shows how other people have used and like your product and service — and more importantly, how it has changed their lives.
Give something for free — this is very subtle and disarming
Make promises and over deliver — Offer them something small like a free guide to traffic building and then deliver that and another free bonus

The all-powerful guarantee

You must have a strong guarantee, especially in the online world.  You will find that the stronger your guarantee is, the stronger the response will be. 

"30-day iron clad, no questions asked, immediate refund if you are not happy in anyway"

60-day, 90-day or "LIFETIME"

Does "lifetime" scare you?  It should until you understand that most people rarely ask for refunds, even if they are marginally disappointed.

Ask for the order

You’ve got a great sales email — the customer loves it, but you didn’t ask him to take action and order.  Some experts say you’ve got to ask between 3 and 7 times.

Break up the text

Large blocks of text, long paragraphs can be a barrier to your reader.  Break up the text – some long, some short.

Use asterisks, dashes, bullet points and ellipses (…).  Variety is the key – don’t write predictably.  Write conversationally – you are not writing a paper for your high school English teacher.

Killer List Building Tactics using eBay

Today, I’m going to share with you a super profitable blueprint that allows you to sell another author’s eBook, using eBay to drive massive traffic to your webpage.

Step 1 – Find a high-quality product on Clickbank to promote

• Sign up on Clickbank for a free account.
• While at Clickbank, research information products that you are interested in promoting.
• Buy the Clickbank product using your own affiliate id (thus giving you a discount).
• If you don’t like the eBook you just purchased, ask Clickbank for a refund and go find another product.

Step 2 – Set up an account with an autoresponder service, if you don’t already have one.

I personally use GetResponse, but many top marketers also use AWeber

Step 3 – Create an excerpt report from the product

• Read carefully through the product you just purchased on Clickbank.
• Don’t plagerize, but use main points to fuel your research and create a report related to the theme of the eBook you purchased – about 10 pages in length.
• Make sure your report heavily references your squeeze page url.

 

Step 4 – Create a 5-day mini-course based on the product highlights

• Each day’s mini-course ‘lesson’ should be between 200-400 words and should only give highlight information — no real detail.  The meat will be given in the product you are going to promote.
• Each day’s material will be delivered by email in 1 day intervals by your autoresponder of choice.

Step 5 – Create a sales letter

• This is ‘part 6’ of the 5-day mini-course which recommends the Clickbank product you purchased earlier.
• Be sure to make the spirit of this ’sales letter’  a review explaining how the product has helped you and why are you are recommending it to your list.
• Also, make reference to the author’s bio and qualifications —
• When looking for selling points, look at the author’s eBook product sales page

Step 6 – Create a squeeze page that collects first name and email address, adding your visitor to your list in exchange for receiving your 5-day free mini-course

• A squeeze page is nothing more than a single page hosted on some website which gives the highlights of your 5-day mini-course and exchanges a sign up on your list for the mini-course.

Step 7 – Contact high-volume eBay eBook sellers (Power Sellers) and offer them a free copy of your report with resale rights.

• Recommend the sales price to be between $2 and $4.

 

Putting it all together

Your 10-page report, sold on eBay, is your main marketing arm.  As people buy the report from the eBook sellers, and read it, they will see your squeeze-page link in the report and naturally follow the link to your squeeze page.  Your squeeze page is marketing your 5-day mini-course in exchange for them signing up on your list.  Once signed up for the 5-day mini-course, the first edition will arrive immediately and each subsequent issue in 1 day intervals thereafter.  After the 5th lesson is delivered, a sales letter is sent which promotes the Clickbank product you are promoting.  You will make money from the affiliate commission from the sales of the Clickbank product as well as any future revenue marketing to your list.

 

Real Strategies

Last time we concluded that working ‘with’ the search engines is the smart tactic when doing anything with internet marketing – period. If you try to cheat the system, you only end up wasting a lot of time having to retool.

So what is the secret of working with the search engines? Giving them lots of unique content – period. If you resign yourself to this now, you will save yourself a world of grief and frustration later.

Let’s steer this discussion back to talking about obtaining Inbound Links.

The highest prized item on the Internet is "________ ________!"

"Unique Content"

Feeding quality, unique content to a hungry internet population segment is a sure recipe for success. And, this is what all sites want to give to their visitors – it keeps their visitors coming back for more and that eventually translates into increased revenue. 

But, quality, unique content takes some time to produce – and many site owners/managers just don’t have the time. 

This is where you have an opportunity. Give the site owner what he wants to give to his customers – access to quality, unique content.

Let me give you an example how this may play out…

Write/Email/Phone/Fax the target site owner/manager (where you want him to put an Inbound Link on his site to yours) and offer him some relevant free content for his site in exchange for an Inbound Link back to your site. You are appealing to his greatest need. Do you see how powerful this can be? You don’t have to beg, scrape or grovel – you come to the table with some power – you’ve got the content and in internet-land, content rules.

Are you getting the idea? It’s really quite simple if you think about it.

There are a couple tactical variances of this method I want to mention.

• You can also post this unique content in a relevant Usenet/Forum leaving behind a signature tag which references your website – give the readers permission to use the content as long as they link back to your site.
• You could submit your unique content in article form to article submission sites – website managers/owners routinely scour them for content for their sites. In the biographical section of the article, reference that the readers can get more great content from your site – and give the url (an Inbound Link). 

There are a couple of not-so-obvious benefits of creating and distributing content:

• It brands your site as an authoritative site in your niche. 
• Lots of original, unique content is a huge barrier to entry for other sites vying for your position in your niche – it’s a hard act to follow because it takes time to do and most people don’t want to put in the effort.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series about Inbound Linking strategies.

Today we are looking at an overview of linking strategies.  We lay down a foundation for the correct mindset of what we should do.

The Foundation

First of all, there is little else that I like least in the world of site marketing than ‘begging’ a site to link to mine. It’s demeaning, it feels like begging and I won’t do it. There are too many good ways to accomplish this.

Now again, let’s recap why we want to have links pointing to our site – the bottom line is that search engines love them. So they are necessary if we are going to garner that easy, FREE traffic from the organic search engine results.

Let’s explore why search engines like Inbound Links so much. The main reason is that it is tangible evidence that a site is popular among the internet community. In other words, if the site is popular and great, we are going to jump on the bandwagon and list it highly as well. 

There are all types of linking strategies and methods out there today. There are a myriad of link exchange services which attempt to bring like minded people together to exchange Inbound Links – and I have used a couple, with marginal results. I have found that most of the people involved in link exchanges to have sites of marginal quality and content – just my opinion. That doesn’t mean they are all marginal, but most are.

Let’s think about it for a moment. If you had a very successful, rich content site that had thousands of visitors per day, would you feel the need to join a link exchange group? No.

Also, there all sorts of other "Blackhat" schemes about spinning off dozens of mini-sites, all owned by you, having the linking back to your ‘real’ site. I have also tried these with marginal results. Some may have had some success, but in the end, the search engines adjust and you are left in the cold again.

The problem that I have with all of these methods is that they are trying to cheat the system. I’m not trying to be an officer of virtue here, but what I am saying is that the search engines are engineered to reward highly rich content sites – why spend your time doing anything other than what they want? If you just accept this premise, then you will save yourself so much time and effort.

This this foundation in mind, we are going to cover some pragmatic ways to approach your target sites for Inbound Link requests.

Till then…