I was listening to some Howie Schwartz material today, and he brought up an interesting point.
He discussed how setting up a website, optimizing it, creating content, generating traffic, etc, all takes the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME, whether it is for a $20 e-book or a $1,500 product. He kind of called everyone out to think about their businesses and look for ways to offer higher ticket items.
He also brought up the point of still wanting to be diversified, and that there is a place for a full range of product offerings. But if there is a hole anywhere in your offering, you certainly don’t want to be missing out on the large sales.
In this case, it is unusual but the network marketing industry might actually be ahead of the curve compared to pure internet marketing. In the last few years, part of the network marketing arena HAS been shifting to higher ticket items, generally in the specialized information arena, including high priced conference tickets. These businesses are known as GPT (Get Paid Today), or High Ticket Direct Sales or Top Tier Business Opportunities, and I would highly recommend looking into some of these, especially if you are somewhat versed with internet marketing strategies. (For example, see some information here about a company called LifePath Unlimited.)
I believe strongly that a strong, well designed business will include plenty of affiliate products for quicker income, a back-end (high quality) network marketing business for both residual income and highly leveraged income, AND a Top Tier Business for a large payoff. Of course, monetizing through selling adspace is fine too, but that should generally be the bottom rung of the strategy for most home-based businesses.
Of course, traffic generation strategies should also be diversified, but that is for another time….
Mike
If you are using Google Adwords and have gotten your minimum bids kicked up to $5 or $10, here is what you should do. Actually, this is best practice when starting ANY campaign, so you should ALWAYS follow this advice. Don’t settle for a quality score of 7, shoot for an 8, 9, or 10. Over the long run, this will have a HUGE impact on your bottom-line. How do you do this? Easy. Keep your CTR high, and follow these rules for your landing page:
- Keep ad copy relevant to the landing page, and include the bidded keyword on the landing page itself if you can. (You can use dynamic keyword insertion to automatically make this happen, if you use a program like Affiliate Prophet.
- Try to keep your keyword density over 2% if you can. You can check that at www.keyworddensity.com.
- If you have an affiliate link on your page, you should mask it.
- Have at least 5 pages on your landing site. Adding a simple blog with a few posts is a GREAT idea. Doesn’t have to be anything special, and just having a small link to it in your footer is good enough.
- include main keywords in the domain name itself if you can.
- Use meta tags appropriately and completely, but don’t keyword stuff.
- Link out to a couple authority sites about your topic, and get a few incoming links to your page. Simple blog comments and a couple links from articles will do.
- Submit a sitemap to Google. www.xml-sitemaps.com
- Include business pages for transparency, like contact us, privacy policy, and about us.
- NEVER have a pop-up, exit pop-up, or pop-up of any kind on your landing page.
- Video, even a simple 30 second video, will boost your quality score AND conversions, so use it.
- Pictures: for any pictures that are unrelated to your topic, name them with a number. For pictures related to the topic of the landing page, and you should aim to have a couple, be descriptive with the title and include the keywords when you can.
It may seem like alot, but if you follow these rules when creating (or better yet, outsourcing) your landing pages, you will completely avoid the slap, and enjoy higher quality scores and lower costs over the long-run.
Training: There are 3 key areas you’ll want to be trained in: using pay per click, affiliate marketing, and CPA marketing.
Pay Per Click Training: Google’s Learning Center, Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords, Mindvalley’s Adwords Exposed
Affiliate Marketing Training: Chris Carpenter’s Google Cash
CPA Marketing: Gauher Chaudhry’s Free Report
News: In the News…
Discussion: www.webmasterworld.com, http://forums.digitalpoint.com, http://forums.searchenginewatch.com
Tools:
Keyword Research: Google’s Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, WordButler
Market Research: Microsoft’s Adlab, Market Samurai, Google Insights, Lycos 50, Yahoo Buzz
Tracking: Affiliate Prophet
I’m not going to list out current affiliate/ CPA news items here, but I will point you to my favorite places for keeping up with the industry. (Excluding dicussion boards which are a great place as well, I list those in the resource section.)
www.webpronews.com
http://blog.clickz.com
www.seroundtable.com
There are many different ways to drive traffic to your website. I find it best to break these down into categories and focus on mastering just one source at a time. My favorite is pay per click search traffic because it is so fast and predictable, but there is certainly a place for other sources as well. Keep these in mind when thinking about the business that YOU want to build:
Free Advertising - Research and Locate places online to place free ads or otherwise direct free traffic. This can include: free classified ads, safelists, link exchanges, traffic exchanges and forums. This is not my favorite because it involves alot of time and manual labor. However, this type of work can definitely be outsourced. You just need to carefully analyze cost vs benefit here, but the problem is that results from this effort are difficult to track.
Pay Per Click Advertising - Definitely my favorite: extremely fast traffic source, dependable, expandable, and trackable down to the keyword. The downside of course is that there is a monetary expense here. If properly researched, managed, and analyzed that should NOT be a problem though.
Purchased Action Advertising - Purchasing traffic from another source: website, blog, e-zine, etc. After pay per click, this is the next best area because it is also somewhat dependable and definitely trackable. The downside is that it is not quite as targeted as paid search, and you are reaching a passive audience instead of an active one.
Article Submission - This technique has many advantages. It is free to do your self (but will cost precious time) but can absolutely be outsourced. You can leverage the writing here to also go in an e-mail newsletter, or refurbish and put on a blog, website, or in other article directories. People coming from here are pre-sold also. And, this can be a helpful SEO source as well.
Blogs - When you go deep in a business, you’ll want to build up a large blog. This is a great source to monetize and grow free SEO traffic (as search engines love them.) Additionally, however, it is also a great thing to add to a landing page to increase your Google Landing Page Quality Score, thus lowering your costs. In addition, many times as you build out a simple 3 post blog to start things out, you’ll notice free traffic starting to flow from Yahoo and MSN.
List Building - For a long term business, this is a key component. People many times will not buy on a first visit, but need to be warmed up and exposed to something repeatedly (some studies say as much as 9 to 11 times on average) before they will take action. Building rapport and trust through an autoresponder system that only needs to be set up once but can work for you forever, is THE tool to do this. E-mail marketing has taken a hit due to the emergence of spam, but if you break through your customers attention and build trust, your e-mails will be looked FORWARD to. Most importantly, you can create literally push button profits when you e-mail an offer that you know will honestly benefit the people on your list.
SEO - This is one of the most complicated, misunderstood, and sought after methods of marketing online. It has all the advantages of paid search (targeted, active audience) without the disadvantage of having to pay for the traffic. If you look at things on a cost basis, having a top 3 listing for a popular phrase and getting hundreds to thousands of free visitors per day is worth THOUSANDS of dollars everyday. The HUGE drawback here is that it takes time to build a presence, and results can shift dramatically and unexpectedly. (That means this method is NOT a true business, as pay per click and list building ARE.) Due to this drawback, SEO should be a SECONDARY method that comes AFTER an optimized PPC campaign. (Well, at least outsourced shortly after entering a market and learn the “money” keywords.)
Networking - Getting to know other successful business owners in your niche and partnering with them. Also known as Joint Ventures. In this way, in a sense, you have NO competition. Instead, what you thought of as competitors are now future partners!
Auctions - Don’t forget about E-bay! (Or craigslist) This is a great way to capture people’s attention and send them to your affiliate offer, blog, or website.
Social Media - Obviously Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter can be huge traffic sources. This method builds trust and credibility like NONE of the other methods can. However, in terms of business building, you need a business to be built and optimized at least from PPC before it should be exposed in this medium. This is the way of the future and will be central to all internet businesses within a few years.
Not to scare you off, but how many of these 10 strategies does a successful internet business use? Well, if it is built and optimized with PPC, why wouldn’t it use ALL of these? The fact of the matter is that in most (but not necessarily all cases) it will. The key is having a methodology and using profits to outsource the manual work. (So, don’t let the vast amount of work you see here discourage you off, other people will help you out!)
