Alle Beiträge von Steve Blalock

Effective Niche Marketing Secrets

Niche marketing gets to the heart of your customer base. Instead of wasting time and energy marketing to the masses you are focusing on the group of people who are the most likely to buy your product. You are cutting down on the work you have to do, but getting the best results.

Niche marketing is very effective. You do need to, however, understand how to do it effectively. You have to learn how to get the most from niche marketing in order to make it effective for your business.

One of the main keys about niche marketing is being able to find your niche market. This doesn’t mean defining them, but finding them so you can advertise to them. This is very important because part of the reason for niche marketing is so you do not waste resources marketing to people who may or may not buy your product. So, you have to figure out where your niche market is so you can advertise to them.

If you know your niche market as good as you should then you should be able to figure out some places where they would likely frequent. You will want to use places where your niche market is going to be hanging out. It is here they would likely pay attention to your advertising.

Another main key to niche marketing is connecting with your niche market. As mentioned, you should know your niche market very well. You have to speak to them on their level. You have to communicate with them in a way that is natural and comfortable with them.

You want to make your advertisements something they would be interested in and something that would speak to them and their needs. You want them to pay attention and understand your advertisements. Your advertising should never speak down to your niche market, but just be on the same level as them and be something they can relate to.

The secret to niche marketing is really just knowing your customers and knowing how to sell to them. It is likely that your niche market is going to buy from you because that is why they are your niche market, but they can not buy from you if they do not know about you. You need to connect with them through your advertising and you have to make sure your advertising is effective.

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Tips on Increasing Your Landing Page Conversion Rate

There are three major ways in which you can increase your landing page conversion rate. All landing pages created by professionals usually include these three elements as well as a few others.

The first way in which you can increase your conversion rate is through personalization. This is usually done in two ways: the first way is by providing a photo of yourself. The second way is by adding your signature to the bottom of your landing page. This radically increases visitors‘ trust. Most people who resist buying products online do so because they’re weary of getting scammed by a faceless liar, who wont be around when they need help or when they need to return the product. By adding your picture and signature, you can gain visitors‘ trust.

Another way you can increase your landing page conversion rate is by using black text or a white layout. Regardless of what anyone tells you, this is one of the easiest ways in which to make your page look professional, rather than pathetic or desperate.

The third way you can gain trust is by offering something for free. This is generally what you will do if you’re using a squeeze page to generate leads: you’ll offer a free report or five-day course “ and then use that to generate leads, which you will later upsell or generate revenue from via affiliate sales. Why is this technique so effective? Quite simply because it allows them to judge your work and ideas before they actually have to pay for them. Additionally, it builds trust.

In addition to these three ways in which to increase your conversion rate, you should always guarantee a product. If you sell through Click Bank, you actually wont have a choice. But if you’re using Paypal or some other check out program, you will want to make sure you clearly state that customers can return your product for any reason within a given period of time after the purchase.

Follow all of these steps and you will significantly increase your landing page conversion rate.

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Publishing Your eZine

There are many advantages publishing your own eZine can offer to you. If these appeal to you, creating a paperless newsletter can be ideal for you.

The most obvious reason publishing an eZine can be the most ideal business to you is that it is extremely easy to start. There is no need to invest in starting a brick and mortar business or even staff and heavy machines for that matter.

In fact, you can do this from the comfort of your home as the most important thing you will need is an auto responder equipped with broadcast feature. Auto responders such as GetResponse.com and aWeber.com are highly suggested when it comes to publishing your own eZine.

In spite of the low start up cost and monthly fees, you can make money from several profit centers in your eZine issues. You can make money from selling advertising space, just to name one.

Most importantly, you get to build your own personal media and spread your marketing influence, making you more valuable to product and service owners, so do not be surprised if you receive Joint Venture proposals every so often.

Given some of the best reasons in the world of Internet Marketing, publishing your own periodical eZine can be one of the best money vehicles you will ever acquire or even build.

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PPC – It Makes Your Business Click

PPC stands for Pay Per Click – a popular advertising method on the Internet. Found on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines, PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These are usually placed close to search results, where an advertiser pays a particular amount to visitors who click on these links or banners and land on the advertiser’s web page.

PPC advertising is also known under the following names/variations:

Pay per placement Pay per performance Pay per ranking Pay per position Cost per click (CPC)

PPC advertising is usually done with the following standard procedures:

1. Setting up an account and/or deposit funds.

2. Creating a keyword list….this is extremely important!

3. Choosing (and setting up) an account with a PPC search engine.

4. Bidding on the ad placement, including the search result words or phrases.

5. Writing out an ad copy.

6. Setting up the ‚landing pages‘ for your ads.

7. Placing the advertisement in the search engine.

There are many benefits to Pay Per Click advertising, making it an effective way of promoting a business ‚online‘. Some of them are listed below:

Get launched immediately. PPC advertisements are implemented very quickly – they can go ‚online‘ within an hour after winning the bid and paying for it.

Obtain specific, pre-qualified, and quality traffic. PPC provides you with well-targeted traffic. Visitors are narrowed down into ‚qualified‘ people who are actually looking for specific products and/or services that you offer – those who are more likely to become a ‚lead‘ (a convert) and complete a transaction (either by buying your product or subscribing to the service that you are offering.

Widen your reach. PPC advertising provides additional traffic to your site, aside from the natural or „organic“ search engines.

Track your investment. PPC advertising allows tracking that will determine exactly who comes to the website and what they do once they arrive – the length of their stay on the site and the number of pages (including the actual pages) that they view. These are valuable tools in determining statistics such as return on investment (ROI), acquisition cost-per-visitor, and conversion rates (the percentage of visitors who are converted into customers or leads).

Below are some important things to consider when planning on a pay per click campaign:

1. Know your product. Take an inventory of the product and/or services that you have to offer (before anything else).

2. Stay within the budget. Determine your monthly budget; and stay with it. This means keeping your budget in mind, avoiding bidding wars if possible.

3. Bid just right. Know how to bid – a bid that is too high can exhaust all of your money, while a bid that is too low can make you lose that spot.

4. Watch the bottom line. Measure your profit margin against your expenses. Know when to stop and terminate your PPC program – if you spend more on advertising but have little or no sales at all.

5. Find the right keywords. Decide which keyword phrases to opt and bid for. Do some keyword research, either by looking at existing search terms or with the use of online keyword suggestion tools, to know which terms are mostly used when searching for items that are related to your business. Focus on specific keywords, not on general ones.

6. Write effective ads. A good PPC ad is that which can persuade and move a searcher. There are several approaches to this:

Discount offers Testimonials Celebrity/famous endorsers Money-back guarantees Free trials or sample offers Freebies Reverse psychology Major benefits („Lose weight“) Direct instructions („Click here“)

7. Maintain a professional-looking site. Your web content should be regularly updated and checked for grammatical errors. There should be no broken links or images. The website should be simple – designed in such a way that it will be easy for visitors to navigate and load. Include contact details to create a good impression among potential customers.

Done properly, PPC advertising can be an effective marketing tool that will maximize the return on your investment.

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Publishing Your eZine “ the Cons

As with any type of businesses, publishing your own online newsletter a.k.a. eZine has its share of drawbacks, in spite of the several benefits it offer.

The purpose of this article is not to scare you away with the disadvantages of publishing your own eZine, as the benefits are much more attractive. However, I will also show you how you can easily tackle the cons.

One obvious challenge most eZine publishers face is the creation of eZine content. Creating your own content can be tiresome, especially if you are not a gifted writer. You can also run out of ideas often while your publishing schedule is threatening you.

Create your content in advance. You can compile 30 days worth of content in one day, for example. If you are not blessed with writing skills, you can broker the writing task to capable freelance writers which you can find at places such as http://www.elance.com/ or http://www.rentacoder.com/. While you need to pay for such services, you are at liberty to take the credit for written articles.

Alternatively, you can republish articles from article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/. This is a free method you can use in making content, provided you include the resource box of the original author and that the article has republishing rights stated .

In conclusion, you can easily tackle the content creation challenge using the mentioned methods that do not require writing on your part, free or paid.

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Intro to Blogging

If writing is an art, then, blogging is one way of using words to come up with an art. This is because people who are into blogging are the ones who are artistic on their own sense, carefully choosing words that best describe their feelings, sentiments, wishes, desires, and everything.

Blogs were first introduced as weblogs that refer to a servers log file. It was created when web logging hit the virtual market. Since its inception in the mid-1990s, web logging gradually saturated the virtual community making the Internet a viable source of greater information.

However, with web logging, you still need a web site and domain names, but with blogging, you do not need anything other than an account with blog providers. In most cases, these kinds of blogs are free of charge.

With the onset of blogging in the industry, personal journaling had become a common ground for people who wish to be known all over the world. However, not literally famous as this is not a case on being popular or well-known personality.

Generally, blogs are created for personal use. Like a journal, people can write their daily adventures, sentiments, and whatever ideas they want to express online.

With the advent of the online businesses, blogs had gradually taken the limelight in providing businesses a chance to boost their productivity online. This is where the business blogs have taken the limelight.

Business blogs are, basically, created to advertise the services or products of a certain web site or online business in order to increase online sales.

Business blogs are also one way of promoting the company so that the other readers will know that a certain company exists online. With blogs, entrepreneurs are able to establish a name in the virtual market through articles that can be very useful in the readers life.

From there, you can make money out of blogs by simply syndicating it to your business web site. This can be done through the RSS technology.

So, if you are thinking to create a blog, whether for business or for pleasure, you need to know some tips that could help you get through and make your blog one of the interesting blogs online.

Heres how:

1. Consider your audience

Even if your blog is generally personal, still, it would be better to consider the minds of your readers. You have to think of something that would interest them.

After all, most of the reasons of people who write blogs are not at all confined to their own personal motives. Most of them would love to be heard (or read) and would love to be known, in some way or another, even for just a minute. Hence, it is very important to come with a write up that everybody can understand, not necessarily that these people can relate to it but they can understand it.

2. Pictures speaks a thousand words

To make your blogging worth the browsing effort of your readers, it would be nice if you will put some pictures in it. It does not necessarily mean you have to place a picture of yourself. Any photographs will do as long as it does not pose danger or insult to anyone who will be reading your blog.

3. Make constructive and beneficial blogs

Even if you are free to write anything you want, it would be better to create some write-ups that would be beneficial to your readers.

After all, information technology is what you have there so you better be inclined to provide information rather than sheer quirky entertainment.

4. Avoid making multifaceted and complicated blogs

In order to have an interesting blogs, try not to use some highly technical and highfalutin words. After all, it is not a science discourse or a debate that you are making, so better stick to simple facts and short blogs.

Bear in mind that most people who use the Internet usually do more scanning than scrutinizing each site word for word. Therefore, it would be better to produce blogs that will not bore your readers just because you have these lengthy articles.

5. Make it interactive

Make your blog interactive. Yu can do this by placing some video or audio clips in your blog.

You can even place an area for comments or feedback. By doing this, you can get some impressions or reactions of other people. Who knows, you might even gain some friends just by making them feel at home in your blog site.

Indeed, blogs are not created just for the mere fun of it. It also has its own purpose in the world of the Internet. Therefore, for people who wish to harness their craft, as far as writing is concerned, blogs are the best way to do it.

As they say, blogging is the contemporary term of creative and commercial writing.

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The Cons of Publishing your Ezine

As with any type of businesses, publishing your own online newsletter a.k.a. eZine has its share of drawbacks, in spite of the several benefits it offer.

The purpose of this article is not to scare you away with the disadvantages of publishing your own eZine, as the benefits are often more attractive. However, I will also show you how you can easily tackle the cons.

One obvious challenge most beginning eZine publishers face is the creation of eZine content. Creating your own content can be tiresome, especially if you are not a gifted writer. You can also run out of ideas often while your publishing schedule is threatening you.

A way of taking care of this problem is to create your content in advance. You can compile 30 days worth of content in one day, for example. If you are not blessed with writing skills, you can broker the writing task to capable freelance writers which you can find at places such as http://www.elance.com/ or http://www.rentacoder.com/. While you need to pay for such services, you are at liberty to take the credit for written articles.

Alternatively, you can republish articles from article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/. This is a free method you can use in making content, provided you include the resource box of the original author and that the article has republishing rights stated .

In conclusion, you can easily tackle the content creation challenge using the mentioned methods that do not require writing on your part, free or paid.

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Driving Traffic into Your Landing Page

Driving traffic into your landing page sounds easy, but it’s not. And no matter how great your landing page is, it wont matter if no one ever reads it. Furthermore, if everyone in the world other than your target audience reads it, it also wont matter. This is why you need to find media through which you can drive targeted visitors to your landing page.

One way to drive traffic to your landing page is through natural search engine optimization. This is the slowest process, but it is also one of the best ways to ensure a continually-increasing stream of traffic over time.

Generating natural search engine traffic generally entails getting links to your site. While reciprocal linking was once the best strategy, many experts now believe that major search engines are devaluing reciprocal links in favor of one-way links and triangular links (which search engines can’t really detect).

Another way to get natural search engine traffic is by optimization your website for certain keyphrases. You can do this by creating pages that specifically focus on one keyword on your given niche. You can then set the page extension to that keyword and optimize the content at a 1.5% density for that keyword. You will also want to use it in header and title tags.

Now, in addition building natural search engine traffic, you will want to consider using pay per click advertising. You can do this by opening an account with Google Adwords.

As mentioned earlier, successful Google Adwords campaigns do two things: they group keywords into multiple, small, related groups “ and they send leads to multiple, tweaked landing pages.

This means you will have to start with some careful keyword research; and you will then have to alter your landing pages to match that research.

These are some of the most commonly used tools for driving traffic to a landing page; however, they are not always the most effective.

Earlier in this article, we discussed driving traffic into your landing page using pay per click advertisement and natural search engine optimization. Now, both of those methods can be effective, but they both usually have rather high barriers to entry and require a lot of work.

Luckily, you do have another option: human connections. And this is where most Internet marketers fail. They don’t realize the power of human connections because they are so caught up in the idea of making transactions and collecting massive checks without having to deal with customers and clients.

One quick way to get traffic through human connections is a joint venture. You can enter into a joint venture by compiling a list of possible partners — or people who might be able to assist you in some mutually-beneficial way. This list might include other list owners in your niche, site owners in your niche, and experts.

There’s only one important thing you should keep in mind when contacting joint venture partners “ and that is to make it as quick, easy, and beneficial for them as possible. If there is no incentive for doing it, they probably wont even reply to you. And if it isn’t easy, they’ll accept other joint venture offers over yours.

Another way in which you can drive traffic to your landing page is through blog and forum posting; however, it is important that you do not spam, as many businesses do. Instead, actually participate on the forum, provide people with something of value; and, after a while, post your product in your signature “ and try to network with people on the forum who work in similar fields.

Your approach to blog posting should be similar. Include a signature file that links back to your landing page, but don’t spam. Instead, always post useful comments. This is not only more ethical, but it is plainly more effective. Spam gets deleted. Good comments get praised, inducing people to follow your link and check out your products.

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Starting Your Landing Page

Before you get started building your landing page, you will need a number of things to a) make your offer actually have a point; and b) facilitate the creation of your landing page.

One thing you absolutely must have before you get started is an autoresponder. Without an autoresponder, you are wasting money. Rather than creating a relationship with customers and potential customers “ and giving yourself the opportunity to attempt future upsales — you’re allowing them to leave and never return.

In addition to an autoresponder, you must have an actual offer that people want to buy. You may want to develop a product, such as an ebook or a piece of software. If you don’t have the skills to do either, you can always hire a professional to do it for you through elance.com or guru.com. You will then either want to sell this product and attempt to get subscribers from your thank you page “ or you will want to get subscribers by offering the product for free (which is what many Internet marketers now do).

Another thing you absolutely must have before you get started is a check out service. You may want to consider Google Check Out, Paypal, a Shopping Cart Service, Click Bank, Sale Flurry, or 2 Check Out. All of these services will allow you to make transactions quickly.

You also need a set of graphics, which usually includes a graphic header, a check out button, background wallpaper, and a half-decent picture of yourself. You can probably provide the picture of yourself, but you might want to hire a professional to do the rest.

The last thing you will need before you can get started on your landing page is some way in which to create a realistic signature. Http://www.vletter.com is probably your best bet; but, if you’re on a budget, you may want to opt for simply using a wordprocessing program.

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Increasing Your Landing Page Conversion Rate

There are three major ways in which you can increase your landing page conversion rate. All landing pages created by professionals usually include these three elements and a few others.

The first way in which you can increase your conversion rate is through personalization. This is usually done in two ways: the first way is by providing a photo of yourself. The second way is by adding your signature to the bottom of your landing page. This radically increases visitors‘ trust. Most people who resist buying products online do so because they’re weary of getting scammed by a faceless liar, who wont be around when they need help or when they need to return the product. By adding your picture and signature, you can gain visitors‘ trust.

Another way in which you can increase your landing page conversion rate is by using black text or a white layout. Regardless of what anyone tells you, this is one of the easiest ways in which to make your page look professional, rather than pathetic or desperate.

The third way you can gain trust is by offering something for free. This is generally what you will do if you’re using a squeeze page to generate leads: you’ll offer a free report or five-day course “ and then use that to generate leads, which you will later upsell or generate revenue from via affiliate sales. Why is this technique so effective? Quite simply because it allows them to judge your work and ideas before they actually have to pay for them. Additionally, it builds trust.

In addition to these ways in which to increase your conversion rate, you should always guarantee a product. If you sell through Click Bank, you actually wont have a choice. But if you’re using Paypal or some other check out program, you will want to make sure you clearly state that customers can return your product for any reason within a given period of time after the purchase.

Follow all of these steps and you will significantly increase your landing page conversion rate.

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