Archive for General Marketing 101
14 Things Would-Be Marketers Should Know
Posted by: | CommentsThis is a long post, but I think it is important to brush up on the basics once in a while. Take 5 minutes to read this long mail and you may very well find some areas which need tweaking with your online efforts.
1. Do not invest much money in your first site. This is the great thing about the Internet! There is little downside and the rewards can be almost unlimited. If you can’t make money on a low cost start-up, you won’t make any money no matter how much you spend on the site…advertising etc. I started Cactus Canyon with a $3.95 per month hosting account and one case of product I bought for $200! There is not another business opportunity ANYWHERE with such low risk and high reward possibilities than an online business.
2. Google’s ranking criteria consists of over 200 different variables. Relevant and optimized content and the number of incoming, one-way links from relevant sites are at the top of the list.
3. If you have someone else design and build your site, your first question to them is do they have a good working knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing in general. If they don’t have a clue, find someone else. Better yet, learn to design your site yourself. In my opinion, your chances of success are slim to none if you don’t learn how to create and modify your site yourself. It is not rocket science. Take the time to learn it if you are serious about making money on the Internet.
4. The more pages of content the better. Set yourself some goals for content. Imagine if you create one new page per day. In a year the site will have 365 pages of great content! This content should attract a lot of traffic! Even if your goal was only 2 pages per week, you would still have over 100 pages in a year!
5. Write your content page AFTER you have determined the exact keyword phrase you are going to use and then optimize with it. Never write content simply for the sake of writing content. Always use keyword tools to help you write content which people are actually searching for.
6. Remember that keyword phrases 3 and 4 words long are MUCH easier to rank for. Although there are many more searches for “dogs” than “dog training tips”, it will be far easier to get traffic to the page optimized with the longer phrase. PLUS the people who search for and find your “dog training tips” page will be interested in EXACTLY what your page is about.
7. Think NICHE! The Internet is HUGE, and so is the competition! But no matter what the area is, there are enough niche areas within it to generate a LOT of traffic and profits.
8. Keep your site’s theme narrow. Google LOVES themes! In other words, for a dog site, focusing on a narrow theme will make it more attractive to Google. All things being equal, a hundred page site about dogs in general will have less respect from Google than a 100 page site about dog training. Keep your site focused!
9. NEVER pay money to a company to “Get your site submitted to hundreds of search engines”. This is a COMPLETE waste of money.
10. NEVER sign up with a company which promises 100′s of incoming links! Remember that saying “If it sounds too good to be true, it is”. AND it could get your site banned if Google thinks you are personally participating in link spamming! There are no free lunches in Internet Marketing. Before you ever pay money for any type of listing or linking service, PLEASE write to me and let us talk about it first! Don’t end up shooting yourself in the foot!
11. Be careful about spending money for even “legitimate” links. There are many great sites with high page rank which will place a one-way link to your page from theirs for twenty-five to fifty dollars. As you may know, having a link to your site from a site with a page rank of five or six and with the same theme is a VERY good deal for your site. Google will give your site bonus points for a link like that. However, Matt Cutts with Google has stated that Google minimizes the importance of the link if they detect it is paid link. And as I said earlier, the Google spiders are VERY smart.
12. After you have a dozen or so pages of original content published to the web, go ahead and start submitting to article directories. (yes, this strategy still works great!) Ask me in your strategy call with me about how I make this process much easier.
13. You can submit your site directly to Google and Yahoo if you wish, but the search engines will give your page more relevance if they find its link in some other way; like at the directories which you submitted to. I never bother submitting directly to Google or Yahoo anymore. Besides, when Google sees links to it from another site, they will give my new site more relevance.
14. Do not spend your time or money on pay-per-click advertising like Google AdWords until you have traffic and sales coming from regular, “organic” searches. The learning curve is high for pay-per-click success. Your time and money should be spent learning basic search engine marketing. Remember, search engine optimization, both on and off page SEO,will be your most effective marketing strategy.
Need help? Schedule a no-cost call with me here: http://www.talk-to-steve.com
Which Online Marketing Group Are You In?
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I’ve communicated with literally thousands of people in the past 5 years about building an online business. I learned that most people all fit into about 5 basic groups.
Group 1
Out of every 100 folks who try their hand at online marketing, about 30 get caught up in a scam right off; they get frustrated in a few weeks and quit the whole thing. (or they get caught up in one or two more scams before quitting)
Group 2
20 to 30 more learn just enough to be dangerous and take a giant leap in the wrong direction. They get frustrated in a few months and quit too.
Group 3
20 to 30 more understand the process pretty well, but severely underestimate just how much work it really takes; they get overwhelmed/frustrated and will quit before any success comes their way. They simply were not willing to work as hard as is required.
Group 4
10 to 15 are stubborn enough NOT to give up and they keep trying. Most of these folks know quite a lot about the process, but their focus is off by a few degrees. Some in this group are bullheaded enough to keep at it for years without much success to show for their efforts. I admire their tenacity.
Group 5
That leaves 2 or 3 people out of 100 that are making more than a few hundred dollars a month. These are literally the “upper crust” of marketers when it comes to the percentages of those making any income at all. Many of them will move from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars in a relatively short amount of time.
Which group you are in?
Once you decide, here is how I can help you:
Group 1
These folks are already gone and not reading this anyway. However, if you ARE still here, and willing to forget those “pie in the sky promises, let’s talk. But you MUST know that real Internet marketing takes a TON of work. Are you willing?
Group 2
You are in one of my favorite groups. You are willing to learn and work hard. All you need is some good direction and focus on something that can/will work. I can’t wait to talk to you!
Group 3
Sorry, I can’t help. You already decided it is too much work. Actually, at this point, you probably don’t even know the half of it…I’d stick with a regular j-o-b.
Group 4
Many of you are pretty “set in your ways” by this time. But you must take an honest look at your progress. What you are doing is not working that great. If you are willing to perhaps backup a little and maybe take a different turn here and there, I can help you.
Group 5
You guys excite me every time I talk with you! You literally have a world of opportunity right there for the taking. Let’s arrange a time to brainstorm together and move you onto that next level ASAP! Remember, if you are making just a few hundred dollars a month now, you ALREADY know how to make $1000/month…and so on!
Did you know you can schedule a one-time, no-cost strategy call with me?
Here’s how to talk one-on-one with Steve:
Go here and fill out the form and schedule the call:
It’s one-on-one…just you and me talking on the phone about your niche, strategy, and exact methods. Make a list of what you want to talk about and questions you wish to ask me. We can cover a lot of ground in 30 to 45 minutes!
Working online has been great for me and my family; I want to help you enjoy success in this business too!
I look forward to talking with you!
An Internet Marketer Contacts Me
Posted by: | CommentsI just received this email from one of my newsletter followers, Jason King. I thought many people would enjoy reading what Jason had to say about his growing IM business.
Hi Steve,
Just a quick reply to say thanks for the emails you send to your list members, me being one of them.
As you said in this email, time is limited so I have a lot of emails from other IM ‘gurus’ stacked up ready to read someday, which’ll end up being never.
I do however, find yours genuinely useful and inspiring, as you tend to understand better than most how frustrating internet marketing can be in the early days. I also love and agree with the Relentless, Focused Action thing, I even wrote a blog post on it once
I found this email about the law of attraction particularly useful as it’s highly relevant to me at the moment.
Last night, rather than fret about what’s not working and why, I decided to take the opposite approach.
I wrote down all the things in internet marketing in the last year which I’d done well at and had good results.
They included the following:
o Lots of free traffic I’d achieved to particular sites or pages with highly ranked keywords
o Some very good conversion rates for mailing list squeeze pages
o A Twitter strategy which is working well for me
o The time I made my first profitable AdWords campaign, which took years to master
o An iPhone web app I made which earned good money with little effortMaking this list of things I actually got right really made me feel a lot more positive. There were various reasons why I couldn’t build on some of these successes, Apple no longer accept web apps, AdWords rules became far too strict, etc.
However, I can repeat all of these successes and I’m currently analysing them to work out how I can link them into one idea or system. For example, I never linked the high traffic pages to my high
converting squeeze page, so I didn’t capitalise on either. That’s one of the first things I’ll be doing right away.Anyway, I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘thinking positive’ thing, I prefer something more tangible like taking action and creating things. But, there does seem to be something in it as I found last night when I stopped dwelling on failures and made a list of my successes.
Thanks again for the emails… remember, for every positive email like this you receive there’s hundreds of people who are equally thankful, even if they don’t tell you directly.
Best regards,
Jason King
Where’s My Traffic?
Posted by: | CommentsHere’s a typical letter I get from beginning marketers.
Dear Steve,
I’ve had my website up now for about 5 months and it still get’s almost no traffic. I see it in Google for a few searches, but it’s never higher than page 4 or 5 in the rankings. I keep adding content, pictures, and videos to it….but I still can’t get it any traffic to it.
Can you take a look at the site and see what might be wrong?
Thanks…..
Nine times out of ten, when I look at the site, it is fine. It looks OK, the content is original (I check it in CopyScape), and the on page SEO is OK. It seems too that they have given thought to keywords, etc.
So what is wrong? Why does their “OK cool” site not get any traffic?
When I get a letter like this and see that their site is so-so-OK at least, I am always willing to bet that they have done no (or very little) off page SEO. In other words, they are not working at getting backlinks to their site.
Google puts a LOT of emphasis on backlinks. They have for a while and it’s never been truer. You can rank any page for anything if you do enough backlinking correctly. In the past year I have had amazing results with backlinking strategies which ANYONE can do.
Yes. YOU can rank any page for ANYTHING if simply do backlinking correctly and to the degree required for the competition in the niche.
There are no tricks or secrets that only a few successful people know about. (Don’t fall for scam offers that promise such.) Backlinking IS one of those step by step, methodical and highly affective strategies that beginners like to know about.
So why don’t all beginners have massive success with their sites if backlinking is so affective and IS a simple step by step process?
The reason is laziness….pure and simple.
Backlinking takes a lot of work. It is NOT fun and it surely is not glamorous work. It’s just one of those dirty jobs that must be done.
If you have a site which gets little or no traffic, are you backlinking as you should?
I offer a Free Strategy Call with me for beginners. If you have questions about this or any other topic…or just need to brainstorm with me, register for your free call with me.
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Design Your Online Success
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Your success on the Internet, or with any other goal, is determined by a series of steps. There is a great book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill that is perfect for developing an action plan for any goal. I highly recommend it… you won’t be disappointed!
I am asking a few questions here to help you drill down to your specific plan. Please put thoughtful consideration into each answer.
OBJECTIVES/CHALLENGES
1. If I had more free time, I would…
2. What is my burning desire? What are my goals? What do I want in life and why am I doing this?
3. What are the greatest obstacles to attaining my goals?
4. How much time am I willing to dedicate each week to accomplish these goals?
5. Will I continue with my occupation after this is completed?
6. Name two things that I am willing to give up or sacrifice on your way:
Those questions are designed to see how serious you are about achieving success. Now for the steps:
The 6 Steps
1: Fix your mind on the exact goal you desire. Be definite … Be specific!
2: Determine what value you intend to give in return.
3: Establish a definite date when you intend to complete the goal.
4: Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin immediately! Whether you are ready or not… start today. Put that plan into ACTION! The specific details will work out later. Just get started!
5: Now write a clear, concise statement of your goal, the timeframe, what value you plan to give, and then describe how you intend to accomplish it.
6: Twice daily read your statement aloud – morning and night! Read with conviction – see it and believe you’ve already accomplished your goal.
Your ability to define specifically what you want to accomplish, putting an action plan in place, and then acting is of vital importance when building an online business. But the key is to convince yourself – with feeling, emotion, and “a burning desire” that you will be successful. That desire, kept strong in your mind, will help ensure that you are acting to accomplish your goals and therefore will lead to your success.
When you follow these steps, you WILL have success!
“Teaching” Without a Teacher
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Over the years my wife has purchased her fair share of stuff I’ve had to assemble. You name it…everything from lawn furniture to exercise equipment. Like most men, I HATE having to follow those gosh darn “instructions” for putting together all the pieces.
What does this have to do with Internet Marketing? ….just hang with me here a minute.
She buys something and brings it home. I open the box and dump all the stuff onto the floor. I then open the instructions to step #1 and begin.
I’m sure someone tried their best to write the instructions, but they frustrate the heck out of me! They never seem quite clear enough on EXACTLY how things are supposed to fit together.
It occurred to me how that frustration is so very similar to the frustration most beginning Internet marketers experience…myself included back in the day.
Say you buy one of those “Here’s how to do it – you’ll make a lot of money” Internet marketing packages. Let’s assume you buy it from a legit guru who knows what he is talking about. Ok, you HAVE the “instructions”. He also tells you about the other “tools” you will need: hosting, a domain, WordPress, keyword tools, article submitting software, Web 2.0, social media….and the list goes on.
You have ALL the pieces you need. You have access to all the required tools. You even have INSTRUCTIONS! Cool beans you are in business!
I used to aggressively market and sell my own “packages” After all, that’s what successful Internet marketers do…right?
But that’s no longer a big part of my business model now.
I am a former teacher. Can you imagine if I had simply walked into my classroom, handed out books and “instructions” to my chemistry students and left without any actual TEACHING?
If I could create a checklist for you to follow that would always lead to great online success, I’d be a very wealthy genius.
Sure, many gurus out there have gotten rich selling folks “checklists and instructions”. They are wealth marketers. But what about their “students” who lacked a teacher? The success rate is VERY low for their buyers and they know it. I’m not knockin’ them…I’m just saying how it is.
OK, look. You can read my posts and watch all my videos; that can build a great foundation of basic knowledge. But the problem is when you begin putting all the pieces together. Not one step is “cut and dried”. You will ALWAYS have questions during the entire process. Who will you ask? Who will you trust?
Those who have followed me over the years and had the greatest success have been involved with me in a mentoring relationship.Nothing beats having the package of instructions AND a coach’s help.
No matter how well I, or any of the gurus out there, write the instructions, you will still have countless questions every step of the way. You can either give it your best guess (sort of like playing darts in the dark) and hope for the best, or make sure you have some help in the beginning.
What you need most is not a “package full of promises”. You need basic instructions backed up with a live mentor who can answer your questions when you get stuck and also to bounce your ideas off of. There are a thousand little miss-steps and dead-ends in this business; a mentor can guide you clear of those time wasters.
Try My Coaching With a FREE Strategy Session
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Click Here to Schedule Your Free Call With Me
Schedule a one-on-one complimentary strategy session with me. Ask me your questions and/or just brainstorm some ideas with me. There is no cost or any other obligation whatsoever. After the strategy session, most people agree they learned more in the free call with me than with any “package” they had purchased in the past. Schedule your call right now. I look forward to helping you!
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Coaching With Steve
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First of all, if you are a total beginner, stop reading this post right now and begin studying the rest of my site’s tutorials and videos.
Pure beginners are wasting their money when they purchase packages or coaching in the very beginning. The “basics” required to build an initial foundation can ALL be learned on my site (and other similar sites) without paying a dime.
If you are brand new to this, study and build a few basic skills and then come back and talk to me about coaching.
If you have already paid a few dues and know your way around Internet marketing a bit, my personal coaching can refine and target your skills and methods to maximize your results.
I only coach a few students at any one time. Most students find that 2 to 3 months of coaching with me gets them on track and laser focused.
To begin the process, potential students sign up for a free strategy call. During the call I learn as much as possible about you, your interests, and your current skills. We’ll brainstorm how to assemble those pieces into actions that result in achieving your goals.
Sign Up For Your Free Strategy Call Here
(but only IF you are ready to TAKE ACTION and move your business to the next level right now)
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The Benefits of Private Coaching
1. Is your niche idea workable? Are there flaws in your plan? What’s the best way to proceed for maximum results as quickly as possible? Private coaching can answer these questions and give you a clear path to success.
2. You don’t have to reinvent every wheel that comes along. Coaching greatly reduces the frustration of using trial and error to find what works. Coaching maximizes your investment of time and effort.
3. Coaching offers an accountability factor. With each coaching call, you can expect I’ll be asking about the tasks and to-do lists we previously talked about.
4. You will discover tools and tricks you didn’t know existed which make every online marketing task easier and more productive.
The Value of Coaching
Simply put, the value of coaching can be answered with this question: What is the cost for NOT achieving your income and lifestyle goals in the coming year?
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How Private Coaching Works
• First, we make sure you plan is workable. Are you likely to have success with it? Will it produce enough income? We will address those questions and more about your specific area and path. (If you don’t have a good plan yet, we’ll brainstorm and design one!)
• We explore the various methods for which the niche can be monetized (including list building).
• Next we do the keyword and sub-niche research together. (Coaching is not about simply helping with one project. It’s about teaching the required skills for moving you forward successfully in the future of your business.)
• We then take that research and begin building a site (or optimizing an existing site) using SEO techniques along with the researched keywords.
• Then begins the all-important steps of off-page SEO. Most of the failures online have to do with dropping the ball at this step. This is, by far, the weakest link in most people’s efforts. This step, when done correctly, is what separates the winners and losers in this business.
• We talk on the phone once or twice a week as needed. It’s best to keep a running list of questions on your end so we can maximize out time on the phone together.
• You have unlimited support with me via a private blog page for questions which need addressed between the calls.
I am extremely invested in your success. I want your success as much as you do and will hold nothing back in helping you. Obviously, the more my students achieve, the more students there are seeking my services – it’s a win-win situation.
Click Here For Your Free Strategy Call
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The Strategy Call IS NOT a sales pitch! My goal for the call is to provide you with tips and strategies you can begin implementing right away in your business and answer some of your most pressing questions…whether you become a coaching student or not.
Private and Group Mentoring Packages Available in
Affordable Price Ranges
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The Reason I Love Internet Marketing
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the coolest things about Internet marketing is that you no longer have to “trade hours for dollars” (ummm…you know, like a j-o-b).
With online marketing, the few hours of work you do today can easily translate into many hundreds and even thousands of dollars down the line.
I’ll give you one example from my own business:
I hired a low cost writer (fairly low quality too) to write about 10 pages of content for a niche site I created about 2 years ago. All in all, it cost me about $30 to make the site. (hosting is basically free since I just use an add-on domain to my main hosting and the domain is just $8 a year with my GoDaddy discount).
Ok, so it cost me $30 to make it (I could have written the content and it would have cost me nothing) and then just $8 a year. I probably spent 2 or 3 hours buying the domain, ordering the articles, and slapping it all together.
I didn’t do much marketing to it at all. It was only making a few dollars a month. (of course those few dollars a month had already paid back my investment)
But finally, on some whim of Yahoo/Bing, they all of a sudden began ranking it pretty good. It made about $30 last month…just wait until I get it into Google!
But let’s see. $30 a month is $360 a year. And most generally, with many of my other tiny niche sites, that income won’t be for just one year; it’s year after year.
Remember, this site takes NO work each month. So there are no ongoing tasks, tweaking, or maintenance required.
Since it’s in a very tiny niche, regular SEO tweaking is not required to maintain rankings.
The ongoing income from the tiny site is basically “Free” money. (or as close as you can get to that)
So for the $8 yearly domain cost, I’m making $360. That’s about a 4500% ROI EACH year if my math is right.
Hehe…not bad huh?
See what I mean about not having to trade hours for dollars? How much do you think, over time, those few hours I invested in the site, will be worth to me?
This is what I love about online marketing.
Use The Best Spinner To Create Bios Easily
Posted by: | CommentsThe Best Spinner is one of my favorite tools. Sure, any spinner can be abused, but if you use the correctly and for the right reasons, they save a HUGE amount of time.
The Best Spinner can be used to create multiple versions of any text. Again, you can’t abuse this feature or you will end up shooting yourself in the foot.
Use it wisely and it will be one of your favorite and most useful marketing tools.
Below is a video showing just one of the ways I use it. It’s very easy to create multiple versions of high quality bio’s for your articles submissions. These multiple bio versions, with multiple anchor texts and URL’s make your article submission work more effective.
It can be used to easily spin the whole article as well. But I won’t get into that here. I will say that when those spins are used correctly and in the right places, they too are highly effective.
Click Here To Use It For A Week For Just $7
(be sure to watch the video on this page too)
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Will You Be In The Same Spot This Time Next Year?
Posted by: | CommentsI will be upfront and tell you that this post is not describing any great marketing revelations or IM tips.
HOWEVER….
If you have online goals you seriously want to achieve, this is an extremely important post for you!
Back in 2006, after having great success with my retail site (selling dog related products) I launched my first “Internet marketing” related product. It was a 100 page PDF file called “The Secrets To My Internet Success”.
I didn’t have much success selling just the PDF file. But when I expanded the product into a video series delivered via CD’s, things really began taking off.
Those early packages were filled with the very basic info for building sites (back then with Dreamweaver….uggg!), finding niches and keywords, choosing products to sell, basic SEO, etc.
Now days I don’t sell that sort of very basic info; I give it all away for free now.
This site is filled with huge amounts of free information, tutorials, and videos. Virtually ANYONE who is serious about building an Internet income or adding income via the web to their existing business can begin that process with the free help my site offers.
Why do I now give it all away for free?
There are 2 reasons:
First, as I began personal coaching several years ago I discovered that I enjoyed the coaching process MUCH more if my students already had a basic grasp of how the parts all worked and fit together. The students who already have those basic skills benefit much more with my coaching; we can get right down to the actions and strategies of building traffic/making money.
Secondly, and for full disclosure of course, in a way I do get paid for providing all the basic info for free. I offer affiliate links to all the tools I use in my own business.
Once someone spends the time to go through and study just my “12 Steps” and has learned the basics for building a simple WordPress site, I’m then ready to take them to the next level.
I actually prefer students I’m coaching to start fresh with a new site, but it can work just as well if they have an existing site that is getting little traffic and/or making little money.
Another common question when folks consider coaching with me is “how long will success take”. I have an entire post on that topic, but the answer is highly variable. It depends on how big the niche is (how much competition), how much time they can devote to the project, etc. It could take a few months or it could take a quite a bit longer. But no matter what, the important thing for them is to understand how the process works and that they have the patience to remain focused.
Patience is a huge problem for those who don’t have the support and help provided by a mentor/coach who can see and articulate the “big picture”. It is very easy to get off-track and go chasing the next shiny object, and the next, and the next…
Most wannabe’s don’t have the relentless focus required for success. In fact, it is a good sign that YOU are still here reading this long post.
Maybe you have what is required to “take it to the next level”?
For people like you, I offer free, one-hour strategy calls via an application process( to weed out the “tire kickers”) .
If you are accepted for a training call with me, I’ll get to know you on the call and what your ultimate goals are. We’ll discuss a strategy for taking you from where you are now to where you want to be in the future…and what’s required to make that happen.
You’ll learn a massive amount about leveraging the Internet to obtain your goals in this one hour call.
And don’t worry, there’s no sales pitch at all. …yeah, I’m serious about that.
We talk about you, your goals, how to get you from here to there. That’s it.
If you choose to hear about my personal coaching and whether or not it could be a good fit for you, you can ask me about it.
But again, the call is NOT about selling you something; it’s only about helping you get on the right path as soon as possible.
I want to help you move forward in your business and be enjoying great success by this time next year!
I look forward to possibly talking with you!
Here’s the form for requesting a strategy call with me:
Apply For a Free Strategy Call With Steve
CLICK HERE
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