Hugely Valuable (Yet Cheap) Copywriting Resource
If there's one skill that is vital to your success on the web - it's copywriting. Whether you're pre-selling a product, writing an attention grabbing salesletter or simply writing copy that you want your reader's eyes to be glued to, it's all possible when you know certain fundamental copywriting rules. In fact if you know how to write a truly great salesletter, then really that is your ticket to a rather large amount of money - consistently! Think about it, you can easily get someone on guru.com to knock you up a book on dog training, hell, you may be able to write it yourself, you can even grab a PLR version and rewrite parts to make it your own. But it's not the product that sells itself. Marry a decent product with an outstanding salesletter and you have an internet business setup and ready to rake in the cash. And yes, as I said earlier, there is a formula to a great sales letter. If you follow the proven steps (while injecting some of your own personality into the letter) then you have a single webpage that will go on producing income for as long as you let it. So what is the formula? Well, I could of course spell it out for you now (and my subscribers will be getting a free copywriting mini course) but... I came across this fantastic "Sales Letter Recipe" by Kevin Riley, which you simply must read. It outlines step by step exactly what you should put into your sales letter and - crucially - in what order. It gives you the formula. Now bear in mind that the top copywriting courses can cost a lot of money. I mean John Carlton's (guru he may be) costs $2000! You can get information just as valuable in this Recipe For Sales Letters for... ...wait for it... ...$7 Yes, $7 - now what are you waiting for? This is essential. Go here. Technorati tags: copywriting
Mining Gold From The Internet
OK, this post is going to be short but oh-so-sweet. There's still a lot of discussion around the marketing forums about bum marketing, article marketing and generally sending people to another vendor's site. Now, let's just stop and think about this for a while. You're going to write a bunch of articles, submit then to lord knows how many sites and then direct all the traffic you get from those articles via your author bio....to a site that you don't own!? Madness I tell ye! All joking aside, it is such a waste of manpower to throw all the readers of your articles to a site you're affiliated with. At the very least cloak your link, so it appears to be part of your site. Here's a couple of ideas as to how we can improve things and really ramp up our article marketing profits. Squeeze Page Action Set up a nice, tight squeeze page with an irresistable offer on it. This could be a free report or a set of autoresponder messages. Now set up a sequence of messages to go out after the free report, or use the sequence of messages that you're already offering and insert some affiliate links. The power of email marketing must never be underestimated! In short, use the power of your articles to start building your list, give your subscribers some valuable information for free (or for a small fee, say $7, which seems to be all the rage at the moment) and then follow up with related offers for the niche. The Review Site Model If that doesn't float your boat (and it really should) why not set up a reviews site. Choose a niche, say "acne", and use each page to review a different acne product. Be careful to give good and bad reviews to products. If you give everything a glowing review, it'll look suspicious to the visitor (remember no one likes to be obviously sold). Basically, use the author bio in your articles to contain anchor text such as "acne cream review" and send the traffic to your site whilst also improving the rankings for the key phrase "acne cream review" - a la Niche Marketing On Crack. I hope that's given you some inspiration for this weekend - remember, don't waste your articles on someone else's site ;)
Michel Fortin & The Secret
So, you've probably heard about The Secret. It's a documentary in which a bunch of people (some involved in Internet Marketing) discuss the Law of Attraction. The movie was praised to the high hills on its first release and now it's predictably facing a backlash. To be fair, I've seen a commercial where the clip they show seems to be about a woman claiming she has cured her cancer with "the secret". Now, I'm not sure how that got past the advertising stanadards authority or whatever the US equivalent may be but don't let that put you off. The information discussed in The Secret is something which I believe to be crucial, especially if you want any financial success. You can view and order The Secret over at www.thesecret.tv but what I really want you to read is this incredible post from one of my favourite blogs... http://www.michelfortin.com/we-are-what-we-think/ Enjoy!
Why Keywords Are Your Friend
Ok, in order to clarify and expand a bit on my previous post about using articles to gain traffic, I'll talk about what exactly your articles should be aiming for. The aim of writing articles is to increase the rank of particular keywords. I'm not really that bothered about people reading my article and then clicking through the author bio and visiting my site although of course that does happen and it's very nice when it does :) The real beauty of article marketing is that it forces Google to see your site via the keywords that you select. The more times it sees these keywords pointing to your site all around the net, the higher it will rank your site for those keywords (I know that sounds a little confusing!) If you have a site, you need to base it around certain keywords or phrases that you think people would type into Google in order to find your site. For example, if I have a site on gazebos, people may be searching for "gazebo designs" or "garden gazebos" or "information on how to build gazebos". Therefore, I would build a page for each of those phrases. Eventually I would like to have a site with around 500 pages of content each targeting a different keyword or phrase - but we'll get to that later! Now, if a particular keyword or phrase got a decent number of searches each day, say 50-100 and it had only a small amount of competition, say less than 10,000 competing pages (less than 1000 is a godsend but hard to find) - I would kick my article marketing into gear. Specifically I would use anchor text in my article author bio for the keyword "garden gazebos" and point it to my page about, you guessed it, garden gazebos. Incidentally, that page would on my site would have the key phrase in the page title, the header and sprinkled throughout the content 2 or 3 times. That's really article marketing and basic SEO wrapped up, it's easier than a lot of people would have you believe. You don't need expensive tools although some of these, namely SEO Elite, can make your life a lot easier. I personally use Article Marketer to distribute my articles and they do a great job. So, as I said before, get writing ;)
Why Traffic Is Crucial & How To Get It!
Over the next few posts I'm going to start laying out some of the methods and systems that I use to make an income. The one thing that you must have to make any kind of money on the net is traffic to your site. I know that is obvious, but it's no use building site after site and going after the latest hot niche if you just can't get any traffic. You can be trying different pre-sells, different ad placements, different content or products on your site but if no one's there to see it, you're wasting your time! I hope I've drilled that into you now. Traffic is CRUCIAL and ESSENTIAL! So how to go about getting some? My personal favourite method is ... articles! Whaddya mean "oh here we go again"? Liste, content is by and large the most important thing on a site. If you build your sites with quality content (which is ever-growing) and you have quality articles spread around the net, all with cunning little links back to your site, then you can't fail to succeed. It really is that simple. Just remember to make the articles of a certain quality. Make them unique and don't use the same articles on your site. This is how I do it and it's insanely successful. Get 5 major keywords/phrases, one for your index and the rest for article pages on your site. Now write (or have written) a bunch of articles and submit them around the article sites (I use article marketer). In the author bio at the bottom put something like "Matt, the author of the article has a great site devoted to "insert keyphrase", why not take a look?" Yes, it's more effective to have some sort of call to action in the author bio but we're after backlinks with that vital anchor text in them. Submit enough of these articles and assuming you've picked a decent niche (we'll go over that later), you'll soon be ranking decently for your five major keywords. There are plenty of other ways to get links to your site but article marketing is still my favourite and the mose effective - if done right. The results aren't immediate but they are long lasting. Now get writing ;)
| |
