Product Marketing Strategy: Where do you start?

So you have decided to become an Internet Marketer  you’ve got your product marketing strategy all laid out. You’ve developed an informational product to sell. You may have spent weeks (or just a few days) writing your copy and you have some great ideas for what you want your web site to look like. So it’s time to hire that graphic artist and get your site up and running, right? Wrong.

Before you take a product to market, you need to take the step most people leave out of their product marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter how much effort you’ve put into getting that product ready, you start my getting some test subjects to look over your product before it is released to the public.

Give away a few copies, preferably to some people that have been in the business a while and know what they are doing. They need to understand what is behind the scenes of any type of product marketing strategy and understand that you need real answers, not just a few pat on the backs as they brush you off. It can be the difference between a few sales and a GREAT income, so this step is VERY important. When you have the right people, ask them a few pointed questions.

1) Rate the product between 1 and 10

2) Is there anything you could add to make the product more useful to them?

3) What did they like the best about the product?

4) What did they like the least about the product?

These and any other product specific questions you can come up with will help you tweak your product marketing strategy and make it more than just another product and can mean the difference between making some sales, and getting rich!

Keep in mind however that no one owes you a review. Their are plenty of others that are willing to help people who are putting in the effort to do their homework, but they can be just as busy as you are. So do not expect 100% participation and do not get upset with someone if they do not reply.

It is your product marketing strategy and it may take some effort to get enough people to have a good understanding of the quality of your product. Just consider those little ups and downs part of the learning process and keep moving forward till you find the success you are looking for.

Till next time…

Have a GREAT day!

Larry & Denise Freeman

Promoting on Surf Programs

I have been hearing a lot of people recently talk about not being able to get people from surf programs to join ad exchanges being advertised on the surf programs. I advertise my own ad exchange on the surf programs and gets just as good of results as anything else. How can that be if advertising them on surf programs does not work?

The problem is in the WAY they are being advertised on the surf programs. The main page of an ad exchange is designed to be basically a sales letter. When people are surfing for credits, you’ve got to QUICKLY catch their attention or they will be off to the next site before they even know what you are offering. They simply are not going to take the time to read a sales letter and lose out on all the credits they could be earning during the time it takes to read it.

Surf Programs can make your profits go up!

Splash pages are the way to go with surf programs, especially if you take the time to make sure your splash page stands out from the crowd, and that is a very key factor. Almost every ad exchange offers members at least 1 slash page to promote with which is better than not having a splash page, but think about this aspect of it. When thousands of people are using the exactly same page to advertise with, people get tired of seeing it and actually are able to block it out the second they see it. They never consciously see what you are offering giving you zero chance of a sign up. It is the same whether we are talking about ad exchanges or surf programs.

Make Your Own Splash Page

Every internet marketer needs to learn how to design splash pages and obtain the software to prepare graphics that will make their splash pages stand out from the crowd.

It is all about grabbing people’s attention. If you are showing them the same thing as 1000′s of other people, your chance of getting their attention is slim. If on the other hand you keep your splash different than what everyone else is doing and change them out every couple of months, you will get much better results than those that don’t and it works whether you use ad exchanges or surf programs.

In your quest to design something that grabs attention, just make sure you keep it family friendly. You risk having people ignore your splash page if you go over board with graphic images or foul language. Keep it clean, keep it light and keep it funny and you’ll have a splash page that will pull well in both ad exchanges and surf programs.

Have a GREAT day!

Larry & Denise

Recruiting versus Selling

I hear so many people talking these days about not being able to recruit anyone to a program whether it is MLM, paylines or even just commissioned sales for bringing in new advertisers. Yet these same people are selling products from one or more of the many sources of affiliate programs you can find on the market.

The truly savvy entrepreneur understands that recruiting and selling are actually the same thing. The steps might be a little different in each, but in both cases those that excel in what they are doing, run their business pretty much the same way. They start with building a relationship with their prospect first then they can begin to sell items as the prospect begins to feel confidence in the seller.

It is in your best interest to learn how to both recruit and sell online in order to keep your business diversified. I know first hand what happens when your entire business goes down the drain in one days time because the opportunity you have been earning from suddenly goes out of business.

The last time it happened to me, I swore I would always keep diversified and it helped me tremendously after my accident 5 years ago. I was almost killed in a car accident and spent over 2 years in bed afterwards. I lost HUGE portions of my business because I rarely knew who I was, much less how to deal with the business.

Yet because I was so well diversified, I continued to receive money from several different sources month after month during the entire almost 5 year recovery process.

Don’t let recruiting or selling keep you from using both as a tool to keep the money flowing into your life. It just might be a financial lifesaver in the event of a major illness or accident in a worse case scenario and can greatly increase your earnings while your business is running strong.

Till next time…

Have a GREAT day!

Larry & Denise

Profit Funnel: Establishing confidence

In this article we will be talking about using your profit funnel to establish a relationship with your customers/prospects. If you don’t know what a profit funnel is, I strongly suggest you do some homework before you spend a dime on anything in this business.

In it’s simplest form, a profit funnel is really nothing more than a series of steps you go through to move people from being a prospect that has never purchased anything from you, to actually making a purchase on a low cost product, to then making purchases on products with a higher profit ratio.

Your first goal with your profit funnel is to establish a relationship with your customers/prospects by building their confidence in you and what you are offering. This is where the personality of the seller tends to come through. People who are in this just to get whatever money they can get, tend to skip the step below. People who see their business and an extension of the way they live their life, can actually end up being too generous on this step. Like most things in life, you are usually better if you can find a balance between the two extremes.

Allow Your Personal Experiences to Guide You

Have you ever joined someone’s list and almost every message you receive from them is trying to get you to buy one product after another? Rarely if ever do you receive any information that can actually help you build your own business even though the offer of knowledge to help with your own business is probably what attracted you to the list in the first place. They skipped all the first steps of a profit funnel and went straight to the end of the funnel by throwing the big guns at people who have not learned to trust them.

A properly designed profit funnel drives your prospect to wanting to buy from you.

What the list owner does not realize is even though they are building a list so they can market to the list members, they are building a wall between them and their customers instead of building a relationship based on actually helping each other. The concept of a profit funnel is to give more than you get in the early stages to build a relationship where at a later date, your prospect will trust you enough to make a bigger purchase.

People building their list this way tend to stay frustrated because their list never really grows. Many may join but few stick around because they are not getting anything out of the deal. Anytime you are dealing with other people, both sides have to be getting something from the relationship or it won’t last long. If they would just turn their profit funnel around, it would change their business tremendously.

I’ve joined lists in which people send fairly regular emails with a free offer in it. A free ebook or free advertising or such and while that is much better than the lists that simply say “buy this”, it still seems like they are just there for themselves, especially if every 3rd message is sales letter for a product that is WAY out of my price range and contains nothing but the sales copy that came with the product they are selling.

They are completely skipping the part about establishing confidence with their profit funnel first. It all seems too impersonal and since I tend to see all the sales material 100 times a day, everywhere I look, I rarely see any reason to buy from them, even if I am interested in the product.

The lists that take the time to help me learn to be better at what I am doing are the ones I tend to stay with. They take the time to build a relationship with me that lets me know they are thinking about more than just how many dollars they can get out of me. This is a key point in your success. You have to make your subscribers feel like they are more than just a number to you.

Over Deliver & Keep Your Customers Coming Back for More!

The way I handle my personal lists is by making sure I OVER DELIVER on knowledge and information that actually helps my customers. Most of the time, at least 90% of what I send to my list members is something to either teach them about a subject (such as this newsletter) or a link to something they can get fr.ee of charge.

Occasionally I send information on low cost products and once in a blue moon I will send info on a brand new product that can not be bought at a discount yet. But notice the key words in that statement. I send INFO on the product. Sales letters DO NOT establish the confidence in you that will make your profit funnel successful.

I might include the sales letter for the product, but I’m also going to give you some good solid reasons about what I like about the product. Sometimes I throw in tips to help you get even better results or advice on a unique twist you can use with the information in the product. But it all starts with the fact that I do not see you as dollar sign waiting to jump into my pocket.

Our relationship is a 2 way street. Yes I hope you will eventually buy something from me because after all, I am in this business to make money too. But 30 years from now I want you to look back and see we’ve had a good long relationship that was mutually rewarding, not a one way street.

I started in MLM way back in 1980, long before the internet became THE WAY to market and I’ve been treating my prospects as real people the whole time. Might be why I am one of the few that can honestly say they have built $10,000 a month downlines in multiple programs.

Have a GREAT day!
Denise Freeman

P.S. We’ve still got more FREE JV Upgrades available over at the Goldmine!

There are so many different advertising programs available online these days and most all of them have their own unique set of pros and cons. As an internet marketer, you have to decide what features suit your style of marketing the best then look for programs that give you what you want while still providing enough members to make it worth your while to use that program.

When we find a program that fits us, we upgrade because the old saying, time is money is really true. We don’t have the time to click thousands upon thousands of email links each day and by upgrading we can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to click enough links to make a program worthwhile to be in.

You have to try out a program before you know if it is going to suit your particular style of marketing and that often means send more than 1 email or place more than 1 ad to test results before making a decision to actually spend money on the program.

One of the first things I look at when checking out a site for the first time is the number of clicks needed for a solo. If this number is too low, the site stays bogged down with emails and people rarely click and of them. If the number is too high, free member are not going to work the program because there are too many sites offering free ads that draw them away from a site that has to be actually worked.

If seen sites with click needed as low as 10 and I’ve seen some that expect members to click on over 1000 solos to get a single free solo. Neither of those will last long. AdzQuik has a reasonable number of clicks needed for both the free and upgraded members. This is probably one of the reasons the click rate is doing so well for this program.

They offer everyone that joins 2 free solos so you can try them out before you upgrade. I’m not sure how long it will last but they have a offer right now where you can buy a super solo, 12 solos plus a bunch of other ads for just $12. It is a really great deal considering how high the click thru rate is for this site.

If you are really serious about building your business online, you simply can not get too much traffic and you ALWAYS need to look for the highest quality traffic you can find. Ads Quik is a winner in that regard!

Running the Numbers – Email Marketing

Almost everything we do in internet marketing can be broke down in average numbers which gives us the ability to see if an offer is worth the time or money it takes to use the offer. This also helps us to determine the quality of the advertising source we are using.

In today’s technique lesson we are going to look at email marketing and how understanding the numbers can help you be successful.

First you need to understand that there are many many factors involved in any type of marketing. For instance if you are brand new to internet marketing and no one has ever heard of you, you will get a lower response rate than someone who has been around for years and is well known in the industry.

The individual program you are promoting can have a lot to do with your success. If you are marketing a program ran by someone who has been known to scam in the past, there is a good chance they will do it again and those who have been in the industry for a longer period of time will ignore your marketing efforts because of the program you are sending.

Of course the quality of your advertisement will also make a difference in the results you are getting. If you are sending prospective clients to a website that appears to have been designed by a 10 year old, you will not get as good of results as a site professionally prepared will get.

There are of course many other things that can and will affect your results, which makes it impossible to choose any one “magic number” as the goal you are reaching for. Yet there is a sort of “unwritten” average within the email marketing industry that gives you a good starting point for determining the success or lack thereof of any individual mailing.

In general for every 1000 email you have sent out to a completely cold list, (people who do not know you) you can on average expect about 30 of those 1000 people to actually open the email.

So if purchase a solo email to 5000 people and only get 10 clicks on your link, there is a good chance the site you are working with has padded their numbers in so fashion because you should expect approximately 150 clicks out of a mailing to 5000 members.

Of course the opposite is true also, if you send a solo email to 5000 and receive 500 clicks, there is a possibility it is a very good list. At the same time however, there is also a possibility the site is forging the numbers to make them look better, so do not allow this one test to be your entire reason for choosing a site, you always need to look a little deeper.

Converting to Sales/Joining

The next step to gauge is the number of actual sales you get from the advertising. Again the numbers can vary greatly depending on many different factors, but on average you can expect 1 person out of every 100 who actually look at your site to purchase something or join the program you are promoting.  When we convert those numbers out, it means that on average you can expect approximately 1 sale/signup our of every solo 3333 emails sent.

Were most people make a mistake in their numbers is when they mail a set number of emails and don’t immediately get the set number of sales to correspond they move on to the next site. A single mailing however, will never be a good test of the effectiveness of the site. It is entire possible to mail to 10000 members and not get a single sale, yet mail to only 1000 in the next mailing and get 5 from that single mailing. You can not average numbers over a single set of trials, it is only by repeated trials that you can determine the effectiveness of an advertising source.

Cost & Time Effectiveness

To make this section a little easy to understand I am going to use a real life program I am a member of.

ListQuik is one of the larger mailing lists and currently has about 11500 members. As a free member, you can mail to 200 members every 3 days or you can upgrade at a cost of just $8.91 a month and mail to 1000 members every 3 days. Lets use our averages shown above and apply them to these numbers and see what happens.

Mail to 200 every 3 days.

Since the average is 30 people physically looking at your site for every 1000 emails sent, if you can only mail to 200 at a time, you would have to make 5 mailings to get a full 1000 piece mailing or about 30 views.

Since it takes about 3333 emails to convert to 1 sale, you would have to mail 5 x  3.3 times or approximately 17 times to get 1 sale. You can only mail once every 3 days so to mail 17 times would take 51 days for a single sale.

To put it plainly, that just is not worth my time to make it happen. I would rather pay for a solo that wait 2 months between sales for this one site.

It all changes at the $8.97 a month level.

At that level you can mail to 1000 members every 3 days x 3.3 equals approximately 1 sale every 10 days. So over the course of a month, if you mail every 3 days like you are allowed you could expect to make approximately 3 sales during that time at a cost of only $8.97, making your cost per sale only $2.99.

That is less than the price many places charge for a single solo and well worth it in my book. List Quik at the $8.97 a month level offers a good value for your money.

Can we compare the actual costs of the two options? Of course we can. Lets assume it take approximately 10 minutes to place a single solo ad. In order to make 3 sales as a free member, you will need to place 17 x 3 = 51 ads, versus 10 ads placed as a paid member.

That means 51 x 10 = 510 / 60 = 8.5 hours of your time placing ads as a free member.

10 x 10 = 100 / 60 = 1.6 hours of your time placing ads as a paid member to get the same number of sales.

Figuring your time is worth a lousy little $10 an hour, your total cost to produce 3 sales as a free member would be $85.00 (8.5 hours x $10).

As a paid member is would cost 1.6 hours x $10 = $16.00 + $8.97 = $24.97 to produce the same 3 sales.

So not spending money could be costing you more than actually spending a few bucks. You simply have to run the numbers to find out where the true costs are at.

TE Profits – A Marketers Best Friend

If you are marketing on the internet, the one thing you absolutely must have for your business to be successful is traffic to your site(s). Without traffic, you will never make a dime in this business and the more traffic you get, the more sales you will make. Those are the plain and simple facts and are the main reasons you will always here me advise new internet marketers to start working to build their traffic first, then worry about building the huge incomes.

TE Profits provides you will a complete system to get you started earning a profit and building a huge, never ending stream of traffic to your sites. There are plenty of absolutely free videos and articles to teach you step by step what to do to build your business. Please don’t get me wrong, they are not offering you instant overnight success or a million dollars in the next 6 weeks. It is a logical and methodical system you can choose to work to ensure you long term success.

I have seen thousands upon thousands of people get into internet marketing and walk away 6 months to a year later with a bad taste in their mouths and their pockets empty because they did not take the time to learn what they were doing before they started joining programs. There truly is a right way and a wrong way to make money in this business and if you do not concentrate on building traffic first, you are going about it the wrong way.

Within TE Profits is a cash building section too, that is very affordable and can help provide you with the income you need to be able to join higher paying programs. By making a single $6.95 advertising purchase, you can make $3200 and if you choose to spend some of that money along the way, you can build a never ending stream of cash that can fund all of your internet marketing efforts.

TE Profits is literally the first step of a quickly expanding group of programs all working together building each other and feeding back and forth into each other that is creating a literally machine that helps you build the traffic you need for whatever program you are building and each the money to build it all at the same time.

Do yourself a favor and join TE Profits in my group. Once you join, be sure to join our Goldmine Ad Exchange. Send us a message via the support system inside Goldmine giving us your username at TE Profits and we will give you a NICE big advertising package to help you promote your business with. This package will be added manually once we verify you are in our downline in TE Profits, so please allow up to 48 hours for the package to be posted to your Goldmine account.

Of course, if you have any questions you can always send us a support ticket from inside Goldmine. We answer all tickets as quickly as possible.

Use Positive Thinking to

Increase Your Income

When we talk casually with friends and family, we want them to be proud of us, to think only good things about us and to hold us in high regard. So when things are not working the way we would prefer them to, whether it is dealing with a regular 9 to 5 job or our work from home opportunities, we tend to look for circumstances we can blame our lack of success on.

For instance, how often have you been speaking with someone and said something along the lines of: “I had such great hopes for xyz program, BUT it turned out to be a con”. “I have everything set to start the money flowing BUT the program folded on me”.

There are many different ways you can say it and there are many different excuses you can use as to why things did not go the way you were expecting them to, yet in almost every case you can think of, there is one word you will see pop up over and over again, BUT.

The word BUT is a highly negative word and we use it to attempt to put blame for a specific set of circumstances off onto someone or something beyond our control. In reality however, we are 100% in control of our lives, yet there are times when we overlook things that allow things to go differently than what we expected.

To overcome this, we need to take responsibility for our actions by simply accepting the fact that we do make mistakes and we can overlook things that allow things to happen to us. For instance, in another article on this site I talk about List Joe being on my Do Not Join list. I take full responsibility for what happened because I did not take the time to research them, to ask others what their experience was like. The main reason I did not bother was because I saw the program as nothing more than an advertising source, not as a program for me to build a downline in.

Had I done my homework, I probably would not have bothered to purchase the credits from them, but I personally made the decision to spend the small amount of money rather than taking the time to do proper research and the result was, I got ripped off.

So rather than playing the pass the blame game, it is in your best interest to either choose to not speak of an incident, or to turn the situation into something you can learn from. A chance to grow not just your business but also your knowledge in your business.

You might say something like: “I am not making as much money as I thought I would, because I still have a lot to learn, and I am working hard to learn as much as I can right now.”

Don’t beat yourself up over your mistakes, learn from them. Seek out things you could have done to prevent it from happening and you will end up a stronger and smarter marketer because of it.

List Joe – Do Not Join

Rarely will I issue a do not join advisory. Most programs whether they be for advertising or income opportunities can help you earn money if you understand the program and how to make it work for you. Occasionally however, I have an experience that leaves me with no choice but to advise others to stay away from the program and sadly List Joe is one of them.

I joined List Joe near the first of December. I did not want to build yet another downline and was only looking for a place I could purchase advertising, not work a program. I purchased 30,000 credits and almost immediately did a 10,000 credit mailing which should have gone out to 10,000 people.

As usual, I had my tracking codes on it and awoke the next morning to find there were ZERO clicks to my link. Not a single person out of 10,000, which is obviously not worth bothering with. However since I still had 20,000 credits left over, I decided to wait till Saturday and do another mailing and see how well it did.

To my surprise when I tried to mail again on Saturday, I was told I did not qualify to mail again and would have to either pay for some token that would allow me to mail, or purchase even more credits.

My problem with all of this is:

1. No one should ever ask a paying customer to pay even more simply to use what they have already paid for.
2. No one should ever ask a paying customer to purchase even more credits so that they will qualify to use the credits they already have.

Had that been the only problem, I probably would not have bothered to write this  denouncement of them. They hit their 3rd strike however when they decided to simply ignore my request for an explanation as to why they expected me to pay even more to be able to use the credits I had already purchased, especially after I did not receive a single click out of a 10,000 piece mailing.

It has been 5 days since I submitted a request to their so called customer service and no one has bothered to reply. When I add everything together, it totals up to what I can only assume is designed to rip people off and I therefore have to advise my readers to keep away, for fear they too will be ripped off.