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!

Focusing for Profits

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in this business is to jump from offer to offer, looking for the perfect opportunity to promote. Most of the time they pay to get into one program, promote it for a few days, then something that sounds better comes along and off they go onto the next project.

Sadly what ends up as the result is they rarely make any money. Those who are extra lucky might make the occasional sale, but they really can not be considered successful because they do no stay focused on any one project long enough to truly build and income.

The key to survival is to build lasting incomes in multiple profit centers. All that means is to find an opportunity that has staying power, build an income in it before you move on to something else and build a second income, (then 3rd, 4th, etc., etc.). By keeping diversified this way, when one opportunity dries up, and it will happen at some point in time, you will still have income flowing from all the other profit centers you have built to keep you going while you find another opportunity and build it.

To build multiple income centers requires focusing your efforts. It does not require you to promote only 1 opportunity at a time. In fact, it is fine to choose 4 or 5 opportunities to work as a group and put most of your efforts into. But stick with that group longer enough to actually start seeing profit from them.

This is one of the reasons I always suggest to complete noobs to start with building your list. Don’t worry about finding products to promote that are not about advertising. Use the advertising opportunities to build an income, traffic and your list all at the same time. After you have some money flowing and your list has started growing, then you can worry about finding other opportunities to start additional profit centers.

Break the Cycle

Program hopping can be hard to break away from. There is always a program that looks and/or sounds better than what we are already doing. Someone claims there is more earnings potential or in many cases, all but guarantees you will make money. If you are hurting for money, it can be very hard to overlook the hype and promises because lets face the facts, the job of advertising is to get you to buy and marketers know exactly what emotional buttons to push to get you to break out that charge card.

Learning what is your personal trigger and what trips it can help you learn how to move pass the latest and greatest hype and stay focused on your main goal.

It can also help to keep a list of programs you want to investigate once you get your first group working in your favor. Instead of telling yourself, no you can not join a program that is pushing one of your triggers, you simply add it to the list so you can revisit it once your first goal has been met. This allows you to retain contact with the opportunity without giving a definitive NO and can make allow the opportunity to sit for a while an easier choice to make.

Whether you meet your first goal of developing your advertising sources as income in a week, a month or a year keeping focused on that goal before branching off into anything else can mean the difference in making small change or becoming truly successful.