Ray Harries' Blog

The Next Step

Marketing your own product is a great way to generate an online income. When you combine a good overall marketing and promotion plan with a nice product, sales will inevitably follow. If you’ve created the right product in the right market space, you’ll enjoy some decent sales numbers.

However, you can’t hope to experience optimal sales numbers if you’re working alone. The highly successful marketers understand that the biggest success stories often involve a smart joint venture agreement. There’s strength in numbers.

How many more sales could you make if you had a team of big-time marketers aggressively promoting your product? How big could the numbers get if you had top marketers backing your product just as diligently as they would their own? What if you could multiply that impact by teaming up with a group of top marketers?

The World of Joint Ventures

If you have a product, you need an affiliate program. If you can get other people working to promote your product, it will multiply your sales. The standard-issue affiliate program won’t do the trick, however. You want more than a handful of marketers pitching your product as a part of their overall business plan. You want to build relationships with movers and shakers who can send your product to the top of the best-seller list.

That’s what joint ventures are all about. When you have established marketers promoting your product in a meaningful way, you can really get the most from your product. That’s why anyone who’s serious about internet marketing needs to get serious about joint ventures.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to create those JV partnerships. Unfortunately, it can be tough to reach out and build solid JV relationships. It can be hard to recruit JV partners if you and your product aren’t known commodities. Top marketers are constantly receiving requests for JVs. You need to have an interesting, attention-grabbing, smart JV offer to make something happen.

Many marketers make the mistake of approaching joint venture partners as if advertising their existing affiliate program is enough. That’s a huge mistake. You can’t hope to build quality joint ventures unless you have a smart, specific plan. You need to approach joint venture relationship building the proper way.

Making Joint Ventures Work for You

You need to know a few things in order to put together good JVs. First, you must understand the different ways to structure a JV Second, you need to know how to assemble a JV proposal that offers benefits to both parties. Third, you need to know how to get your foot in the door and to make the connections necessary to tap the power of joint ventures. Fourth, you should know the tricks of the JV trade–the various ways to transform a ho-hum offering into something thrilling. Finally, you need to master the process of organizing and implementing your plan.

If you don’t hit all five of those nails on the head, you won’t experience JV success.

Basically, you need a real education in joint ventures if you want to enjoy the strength in numbers they produce.

You could take a do-it-yourself approach to learning about JVs. If you do, prepare to experience a number of failures before you taste success. It only takes a small mistake to derail a seemingly solid joint venture plan.

That’s why those who understand strength in numbers will want to learn from someone who knows the world of joint ventures inside and out. This is one area of internet marketing that really calls for assistance and instruction. This is an area of IM that truly justifies an investment in quality training. You need to find a good source of JV information and recommendations. After you’ve learned the skills necessary to become a good joint venture broker, you’ll be able to reach your full profit potential.

Spending the Big Bucks

How much are you spending to learn the tricks of the Internet marketing trade? Are you spending money left and right in hopes of finding the perfect internet business system? Do you find yourself hitting the BUY NOW button day after day, believing that you’re about to find the missing link in your moneymaking chain?

If you’re spending a fortune on your business, you’re not the only one. Many IMers are on the buy-buy-buy-and-buy-some-more treadmill.

Those spending habits have a logical appeal. It makes perfect sense to purchase new information and products to keep your business rolling right along. Investing in new materials to stay on top of a quickly developing industry is reasonable. Spending that money when you’re struggling is a different story.

There’s a significant difference between trying to stay on the cutting edge and gambling on every possible tool in hopes of making a business work.

You want to be the smart investor. You don’t want to spend yourself into bankruptcy before you build a real business.

The Right Kind of Purchase

So, how do you avoid becoming the wrong kind of serial buyer? It starts by building a rock-solid foundation. If you ignore the bells and whistles, you’ll see the IM is really based on a few simple premises.

You need a product to sell. You must have a way to sell the product. You need to secure traffic to the website you’ll be using to generate sales.

That’s really all there is to it. All of what you do needs to relate directly to one or more of those core basics.

So, you must work to create a strong presence on all three of those fronts. When you buy something, it must directly address one of those three foundational needs.

You need to build a solid foundation that will allow you to start making money online free before you begin worrying about the details. Once you have the basics in place, you’re going to start making money. Then you can start experimenting with new ideas and products.

How to Build Your Foundation

You can start building that money making foundation without going broke in the process. This is what you need to do.

• Get a smart, big picture understanding of Internet marketing. You can get that kind of perspective from someone with successful IM experience.
• Focus on ways to boost traffic. Traffic is, as noted, one of the core elements to a successful online business. It’s also the most important one you’ll address. Without traffic, you can’t determine if your product is interesting or if you’re sales strategy is working.| Absent traffic, you can’t determine if you have the right product or a workable sales strategy. You need to put eyeballs on your pages right away.
• Secure ongoing support. A smart ebook can be worth its weight in gold. A video can be invaluable. However, there’s nothing like developing an ongoing connection with a coach or mentor who has a history of success and a willingness to show you the ropes. You can become more efficient and successful when you’re on the receiving end of expert advice.
• Manage your risk. You want to meet your objectives without risking significant losses. Look for opportunities to secure the right information at a reasonable price. Find a way to develop a valuable relationship with a personal business coach or mentor at a reasonable price.

Even if you’re new to Internet marketing, you’ve heard the same old saying a thousand times. The big money is in online list building. List building is one of the most effective ways to generate online home based business success. It’s a strategy you can’t afford to overlook.

Why it works

In most cases, people need to see a marketing message more than once before they’re persuaded to make a purchase. Repeated exposure is usually necessary to inspire action. You have the chance to share your messages repeatedly with those who are a part of your list.

People are also more likely to buy from those with whom the feel a trusting connection. You can use emails to your list to forge a personal connection. That increases your credibility, producing more sales.

How to do it

Building a list is a rock-solid way to take advantage of a good home based business opportunities online, and it beings with a single simple page – the squeeze page. A squeeze page is a landing page designed with a single purpose. It should persuade the reader to become part of your list. Anything else is completely extraneous.

The use of a free gift is an effective way to persuade visitors to join your list. This is a proven strategy that you can use to spur the success of your business.

It’s not enough to have a good freebie, though. Building a squeeze page the right way is just as important. There are proven ways to build an optimal squeeze page. You should emulate those proven techniques. That means you’ll want to follow these three guidelines.

Squeeze page basics

Initially, there should be no outgoing links on your squeeze page. You don’t want to provide your prospective customers with an “escape route” or distractions that may reduce conversions.

Second, you’ll need to write a short, powerful message. You want your squeeze page to generate those sign ups – everything else is extraneous and will decrease effectiveness. Remember, your squeeze page exists solely to generate sign ups. You should choose every word with that goal in mind.

Finally, you should handle the sign up procedure as if it’s a sale – you should work to close the transaction. That means that you will need to make a strong, persuasive call to action as part of your sign up form. Make it clear to readers that they’ll benefit from the simple, free act of filling out your subscriber form.

Summary

If you’re following those three pieces of advice and are offering a smart “bribe”, you’ll have a successful squeeze page! You’ll be able to build trust and credibility with your subscribers. You’ll also be able to put your message in front of subscribers repeatedly.

Online list building is a powerful way to improve your Internet marketing performance. It’s not a coincidence that top marketers all rely on their lists. The money really is in the list!

No one can deny that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online. And free traffic beats everything else. Where does free traffic come from? Google and other search engines.

How do we get free traffic from Google?

This is something you’ve experienced first hand countless times. You visit your favorite search engine. Enter the words you’re interested in. And then you visit one or more of the sites that show up. That website owner has just enjoyed the benefit of free traffic. What need to figure out is how to get you free traffic.

If you’re like most people you only click links on the first page or two. In fact, the first page of results receives almost all the free traffic. What’s even more amazing is the the first 3 links get more than 70% of the free traffic.

So to get any significant amount of free traffic from Google, you really need to be on the first page. To do that, you need to be “ranked” in Google’s Top 10 results. Which brings up..

What is search engine optimization?

SEO means that your website is clearly about something specific, Google knows that that is and thinks others will agree and find your site useful. It’s a complex formula that only people working for Google know exactly. However, we do know a few things that count.

Getting indexed

Before you can get ranked, Google has to first know your site exists. This is called getting “indexed.” What this means is that Google visits your site and records information about it in their database.

In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you. Getting a link from another site will accomplish this easily. Google will actually follow the links on sites it already has indexed to find new sites and index them.

Use your Twitter and Facebook updates to get quick indexed links to your site. These sites are very popular so Google indexes them multiple times a day. And follows new links it finds immediately.

Gaining ranking

After getting indexed, you need to work on your search engine ranking. Just getting indexed does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.

The 3 factors in getting ranked:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

SEO content

This is the SEO work you do on your page. And it means that the content on your page matches the keywords you’re targeting. Obviously, the article you’re reading now is about search engine optimization. Google knows that not just because the words search engine optimization show up. Another reason is because there are related words, like website traffic, too.

In addition to the content on the page, other things to keep in mind are the title tags on the page, and the domain name itself. Google uses all of this content to figure out what your site is really about.

Link juice

Next, you need to pay attention to the links to and from your site. The links coming in and the links going out are included in this. With inbound links, you want to have more coming in than going out. So the number of inbound links is important.

A very easy way to get a lot of links to your site is through article marketing. To use this technique you write articles related to the topic of your websites. You have to also write several different versions of your articles. Because you’re going to post a unique copy of it to lots of different websites. The more sites you can do this for, the more links you’ll get back.

Increasing your activity

Finally, we know that Google gives you credit for the activity on your site. You can’t just put up a page and leave it alone and expect it to rank well. So you need to update your pages often. You can do this with RSS feeds and news posts.

Another great way to keep your page content fresh is to enable comments on it and allow others to discuss your page topic. This means you need to get real live people to your site, as well. Online forums are simple source of real live visitors.

Create profiles on lots of forums about your site’s topic. Visit often and make posts. And link back to yourself in your signature file. This generates even more links back to your site. And it also gets people to your web page.

Conclusion

All of the above is important. However, writing a bunch of different articles on the same topic. And creating a bunch of forum profiles. And visiting all the sites to post up your comments and articles takes a really long time. Which means you probably won’t end up doing it.

The good news is that there are automated software programs out there that will do this for you. So my best advice is to automate as much of this as you can. This way you’ll actually do it. By taking these steps you practically ensure you’ll get free traffic from Google.

OK, forget everything you know about affiliate marketing. Everything you’ve been taught is simply out of date. If you play by the old rules, you will lose this game.

The promise

You’ve probably heard how easy it is to start an affiliate business. And it is – sort of. It is the easiest business you can possibly start. But starting your own business is really hard, so it’s all relative.

The bad news…

The worst part is that the information you’ve received is all wrong. You’ve been told to find quality products. Next to pick your keywords carefully. Then to use keyword-based advertising to send visitors to the product. And finally get a fat check for all the sales. But it doesn’t work.

Forget keywords

There was a time when this worked. But the competition has shot the price of keywords through the roof. It’s time for a paradigm shift.

A better way

There’s still hope. Follow this method and win again…

• Start using CPA marketing
• Instead of researching keywords, research demographics
• Do image ad marketing

Start using CPA marketing

CPA means Cost Per Action. It’s far superior to product promotion. Because your visitor doesn’t have to buy anything. Your commission is generated when they complete an “action”. Such as filling in a form. And getting them to do this is so much easier.

Instead of researching keywords, research demographics

Don’t waste time researching keywords (see below). So spend your time doing demographics research. First, select the CPA offer you want to promote. Then hop over to Quantcast.com. And research what kinds of people will be interested.

Use image ads

So you know what your promoting and you know who will be interested. Display networks allow you to target demographics with your ads. And use images as your ads. No keywords required. The biggest advantage is price. Image ad clicks are much cheaper.

Summing it up

This is powerful method to make money online. Because it’s free to get started in CPA. You can buy image ad clicks for a fraction of keyword ad clicks. You can use demographics to target your ideal prospect. And your commission is much easier to earn.