Conversion Marketing

Hello everyone.

Several years ago, I traded some time and talent as a professional camera man for a Golds Gym membership that I would have had trouble affording otherwise. This particular Gold’s gym had as many CEO’s, Diva’s and paparazzi as it had real weight lifting members. It was here that I met a massive gentleman whom like myself who was working there in order to get the opportunity to be near this fabulous gym, its new equipment and the fantastic talent that was there all the time.

This rather large but quiet gentleman had the ability to move silently and quite invisibly around the gym. You never noticed him until an errant weight left to long on the floor suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Solid rumours indicated that the gentleman was highly consistent in winning regional and even national body building awards.

Weirdly enough, none of the other guys in the gym could remember this so called janitor ever having a strenuous workout. Sure, he was moving weights around the gym all the time, but all of us were doing that and wonders of wonders none of the rest of us were winning anything.

There was a buzz around the gym that he was on steroids or taking some kind of drugs and quite honestly, I have to say that it really did take me more than a few weeks to even catch him lifting weights late one night.

I was elated with what I thought was a remarkable discovery. Basically news that I could use to refute the rumors, so I asked him for his secret.

I blurted before my brain had a chance to properly catch up to my tongue, “How do you win all these contests if this is the only time I have ever seen you work out?”

I thought he was going to give me the evil eye, and for sure my heart stuttered as I imagined he was going to get seriously angry. Instead he pointed at the sweat on the seat and coolly said, “Trevor, drugs particularly steroids are for fools, don’t believe the rumors”.

This seemed like the opening I was waiting for so I watched him expectantly, thinking that he was about to let me know what was going on. In vain, apparently since he left that space with a spare weight in his hand. It was pretty well a month later before I could get his attention again on the topic.

Ahh ha, I thought as a month later I spied him in the middle of a preacher curl workout. In a rather nonchalant way, I unhurriedly, wandered over and by incredible coincidence happened to be right there in front of him as his reps were finished. To my surprise, without pausing he continued the conversation from the month before.

Seeing that he was a little more talkative than before, I again asked him what was his secret.

The story him told me then was simplicity itself. He revealed that his training was based on his resting heart rate. So while others concentrated on working different body parts on different days or alternate days that his was based on this one major difference. I stood there a little shell shocked and waited for more.

Quietly, he then revealed that the difference was in the workout interval.

He works out, monitors his heart rate and never works out again until his heart rate is back at “rest mode”. If that takes 2 days or 3 or 4 he doesn’t care. He simply waits. When his heart rate is back at “rest”, he intensely works out a different muscle set.

And this is how this quiet unassuming janitor wins regional tournament after tournament and places high on the Asian body building charts while the rest of the guys scratch their heads and wonder when or how he trains.

If you are not a body builder and haven’t left a few gallons of sweat in a local gym already this story is probably a total non-event. The “No pain no gain” mantra might have been one of those cutesy phrases that you have merely heard. The real point being made here is so many of us who exercise and have been doing it for years can get so sure that we know, we absolutely know the right way to do a particular thing. So, ohhhhhh no, we are not going to change what we are doing.

So, we have all seen the tunnel visioned friend who is working hard at doing exactly the same thing he has been doing all along and hoping, yes even praying that his future plans which contain more of the same old methodologies will finally bring him that much needed change. Oops, would that be too much to expect?

We have seen new business opportunities grow in recently-invented sectors of activity with the extension of ecommerce. So, how do people make money on the Internet? Well, it does not matter whether we are talking about businesses selling products or services, the question of whether an Internet business is working out or not is best measured by sales.

The growth of competition has forced small and large companies alike to develop all manner of strategies to become or remain visible and profitable online. However, because the ways of achieving these goals are highly complex, a new type of business has appeared: the Internet marketing business. Who are these people and how can they assist with business marketing? First of all, most people do not have any marketing knowledge and understand very little about the methods used to promote a business, create a campaign and support a product or service at the top of a search engine listing.

Internet marketing businesses are usually made up of a team of people who have had proper professional marketing education and who have made a living out of studying the principles of the Internet as a mirror of real-life market transactions. The range of services provided by such companies is extensive and comprehensive. Most of them can assist you with starting a business from scratch and building everything you require for online representation, starting with the design of the web page. What the most service companies need from an Internet marketing business is the creation of marketing campaigns and their monitoring over an extensive length of time.

The objective of such campaigns is the increase of sales and overall company profitability. However, there are different categories of services that Internet marketing businesses can implement, depending on the needs of the customer. Therefore, you can choose between search engine marketing, keyword marketing, web site marketing strategies, sales leads, sales lead management et cetera.

The campaign can get even more specific too, so there can be further targeting. Thus, some companies need to convert visitors into leads, others want to improve their search engine ranking and small businesses often want local or regional promotion et cetera.

And last but not at all least, Internet marketing businesses are often a very good source of advice for the more experienced website developers, who manage the optimization of a suite of their own sites themselves, but who still need advice on ways and means, methods and promotional techniques.

A good example is the choice of the software necessary to optimize a web page and monitor it constantly, improving the activity and increasing the company’s profitability. What is the criteria for recognizing a valuable piece of software? Well, it is not easy, but excellent software is usually rather dear, but it should not be very dear. It should automate rather a lot of the processes you require and it has to produce easily-understandable reports that enable you to alter your website.

The world-famous Exhibition of the Lord of the Ring Trilogy was exhibited by Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS). Though HMNS expects that this exhibit will create a great deal of interest but it happened the other way, it didn’t have a lot of appeal to people. Every success of an exhibit lies in how well it was marketed.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science looked for someone who can help them to reach their target audience and arouse interest in the Exhibit, so they quickly called in Spur Digital. Aside from reaching out and creating awareness to their target market, they were hoping to gain fresh members and patrons to increase their future income.

Spur digital worked with HMNS to identify the target market for the campaign and developed an integrated online media plan to reach those audiences.

It featured an online competition that was promoted in targeted online media channels, which includes Web sites related in exhibit, lists of third party E-mail and Search Engines. Viral marketing played a big role for this campaign, so Spur created a strategy to persuade their customers to refer them to other people.

Spur identified the target audience as males 18 to 34 years old who were fans of action and fantasy films, frequent video game players and movie renters, tech-savvy who generally didn’t hang out at museums.

Spur decided to use search engine advertisements based on this information which conveyed certain search words, sponsored e-mail advertisement, dedicated e-mail advertisements, banner ads on web sites that concentrated toward their market and a list of e-mails for HMNS.

The result of their marketing effort was outstanding. The impact of the viral marketing effort was undoubtedly great; more than 23% of contributors are from their feature called Tell-A-Friend.

The Spur’s direct marketing efforts yielded brilliant results as well. The locally-targeted online strategy campaign in 12 weeks period resulted more than 2 million people, 40,000 unique hits, 12,000 and 6,000 invitations sent by friends at a cost per action of less than $3.00 which contributed to the attendance record of almost 100,000 in 3 month’s period.

Ebooks For Free

There is much going on with ebooks that everyone who is Internet obsessed is aware of and can get engaged in a constructive discussion. The popularity is not only because it is for free, but also because free ebooks are formed to bring the reading culture home.

In this information age, so many people are well-versed with the Internet, the biggest spot for free ebooks. Internet is bearing many advantages such as professionals can submit their electronic data to discerning readers who are willing to download them at any cost. And yes, there is compensation as well. When you read, you get knowledge which stays with you forever. With free software, putting your stuff on the sites is not an issue. There is software that reads this electronic data and packages it in HTML format that can be displayed and read.

Free ebooks, the new sensitization, has taken gained attention from the whole world. But while listening to others experiences through ebooks, do not laugh as you never know when your turn will come. These are common people or professionals who are giving out their best opinions.

You could wake up and say that ebook professionals are visionary. They think big and this is put practically into free ebooks to make it something that can be banked upon. In many ways, ebooks are at the forefront of shaping the culture of reading and writing.

Ebooks have been used to tell unsaid stories. Examples are cases where women were as naked as frogs and cases which might not have appeared in the mainstream media.

However, in todays business that is well-acquainted with latest technologies, free ebooks are an absolute boon to both professionals as well as non-professionals. There are few short comings, for instance, there probably isnt any established standard format for ebooks.

A brilliant way in which to promote your web business is through bum marketing. Doing this costs nothing and works really well. Although, there is a lot more you might do with each article you write. You might actually generate more content and use many marketing opportunities with each article you compose. Here are 3 methods you might use to improve the power of article marketing.

The first method you could use to enhance the power of article marketing is to take the article and construct a social networking website around it. There are many widely used social networking websites. You could use the article you wrote and put it into a social networking web page. Next, you could put in several more components on the page, conditional to what exactly is provided on that social networking website and you will have more content online. It shouldn’t take any longer than half an hour to accomplish.

Another excellent method you could use to better your article marketing is to make each article you come up with into a blog entry. You need to have a minimum of one blog in every niche you generate income with. You may want to have a couple blogs. However, whenever you finish an article, you will need to post it on your blog as a new blog entry. You will not need to change your article’s title. You may also wish to alter several sentences within the article’s body, although, you will only need a couple of slight modifications. In a matter of minutes, your article could become a blog entry without any trouble.

The final of 3 strategies for enhancing your article promotion is to turn an article into a video. This is a lot faster than you can believe it to be. You can use free software to make your video or employ a web cam to record the video directly to YouTube. Your video might be as simple as you reading out the article purposely and obviously. Something so simple as a video like this may bring in visitors and help improve your traffic.

Now you know the 3 techniques for reinforcing the power of article marketing. You don’t need to just write an article, post it up online and just forget about it after. Rather, you want to employ your article to build up a social networking internet site, make a blog entry and produce a video. Taking all 3 of these steps will not take much time to do, and the result will be a large amount of fantastic content online for you and the business you run.

Let me tell you a short story…

When I was in progress in affiliate marketing approximately 8 years ago, I didn’t realize anyone in my circle of friends who was already doing it. I was the earliest.

I’m a pretty smart chap so I did eventually figure things out, but my development really began to occur when I taught close friends of mine things I had knowledge of. One colleague specifically worked on to develop into a chief affiliate advertising partner of mine and jointly we’ve achieved a lot more than I could have done if I had kept doing it by myself.

The same can be said of associate training systems. If you don’t recognize anyone individually online, registering for a learning system, which normally has confidential debates full of self-starter marketers is a great way to create relationships with people who will applaud on your achievement and turn out to be your virtual affiliate marketing partner or associates.

Paid vs Free

There are free debates, too, but then the problem with those is that they are regularly populated by a great numerous individuals who are not serious. Once people pay for something, even a modest payment, you pick out a lot of people who aren’t serious.

Look, the truth of the matter is if you’re a sensible person you can locate and read a number of open resources and attempt to decide it all out on your own. You might even in due course make a lot of money, but at what cost?

There is a great opportunity cost to be paid by making things more difficult for yourself.

However, some people get addicted to purchasing new educating stuff, courses, and inundating themselves with too much data. These people usually become too strewn to make any genuine bucks or suffer from analysis paralysis as they try to figure out the finest means to start from the 50 techniques they studied apparently.

Don’t fall for this trap!

Focus on one technique and only one till you master it. And doing it with an affiliate advertising colleague, whether it’s someone you individually identify, or get to understand online through a training membership site, can assist you achieve your aims much quicker.

Web 2.0 real estate marketing is one of the newer forms of Internet advertising for real estate. However, it is surprising that many real estate agencies and companies still tend to use the more archaic methods of advertising which are not nearly as effective.

Traditionally, advertising has always been one of the most expensive overheads of any company but with the advent of the Internet, you can even get plenty of free advertising which is still very effective. Web 2.0 real estate marketing relies on the social media on the Internet for advertising and for the most part, it is completely free to use.

Web 2.0 real estate marketing is all about social networking on the Internet. If you are familiar with social networking already, then you know that this means advertising with sites such as FaceBook, YouTube and Digg and much more. Social networking in itself is a major business on the Internet and a lot of people make a great deal of money out of it by advertising and selling advertisements.

It basically relies on the social networking websites which have boomed in recent years to become by far the most popular reasons why people use the Internet. Perhaps second only to e-mail itself, social networking is the reason why tens of millions of people around the world log on to the Internet on a regular basis.

To get yourself started in Internet advertising, it is a good idea to have a blog or some kind of website which is regularly updated. Blogging has the huge advantage of being extremely easy, at least relative to starting any other kind of websites. It does not have a particularly steep learning curve and anyone can do this without having to spend huge amounts of money to hire a professional web designer.

Once you start a blog, the articles that you post on it can have buttons affixed to them. These buttons and will allow the viewers of your articles to share articles that they enjoy a with their friends by posting them on to the social networking sites. It is very simple and all they have to do is click the button if they like the article so if you have quite a lot of visitors then you will get a lot of advertising this way, bringing more back links to your website and causing a traffic to increase exponentially.

You don’t have to spend any money to get started other than the registration of your domain names and the hosting. The costs of this are negligible and a typical website with its own domain name is unlikely to cost more than about $10.00 per month.

As a full time superior affiliate for over 7 years, I can tell you undeniably that if you wish to fasten your results you must discover yourself an affiliate marketing link who you can work with as fast as possible. Such an associate can take several number of types. It can be a single associate or friend that you decide to understand affiliate advertising with and hold each other accountable.

I comprise one myself and we have done great things jointly over the years that we would have in no way attained individually. A link can also be found at personal learning membership sites. Many of the students will be extremely success-oriented and spur you on to take action. It’s like a stimulated networking and mastermind.

This is important if you can’t locate somebody openly in your life since, let’s face it, the truth is, is that oftentimes it’s the people closest to us who suspect our dreams the most. Their intentions|purpose| may be good, but if you wish to win, you’re going to to get good at not allowing others to wash out your own aims and inner voice.

And like minded affiliate marketing link can assit you remain on track and achieve those determined aims. You can also find a partner online at free online advertising forums. However, I do not generally suggest this.

Why not? Since they’re complimentary, they’re frequently populated by “tire-kickers” and people who are not actually serious about success. Paid training membership sites, by their very nature that somebody is paying a fee to be incorporated, is skewed more heavily toward learners of affiliate marketing who are honest about getting down to work and creating an earning.

My final piece of advice is merely this: affiliate marketing is one of those rare businesses that allows us to work in solitude. This is a good and a bad thing. It means you can simply try to perform it alone. And it’s not impossible to become extremely successful with little to no communication with others, but why do that when you can turn out to be successful much faster and have more excitement by connecting with concurring people?

Although internet marketing claims to be one of the easiest businesses to start it can be one of the hardest if you are not too careful. I do not know one marketer who, at the beginning, was not totally blown away by all the information and products available.

What most people who are new to this business do not realize is they do not need all the information that is given to them, or that they find. You must develop a plan from the outset and stick to it. If you don’t I can assure you that you will end up doing what I did and that’s reading emails and forums. I’d get to the end of the day and wasn’t really too sure what I had done…

Ok it would be nice to sit all day reading nice emails and browsing one forum after another but that is sure to have your business doomed. Devise a plan and stick to it. It is wise only to set a certain amount of time a day to browse forums and read emails. Trust me they are extremely addictive and you will get to the end of the day and you have done nothing. Keep your research focused to the particular step of your plan your working on. Do not go off in different directions as this will lead to total frustration in the end. I know I did it!!

You could always try my way of beating research addiction. Develop systems and make sure these include step by step check sheets of what you need to do to reach your goal. You will find if these are written out ( I started off with a simple word document) you will not be so easily led astray by various forums just waiting to snare you in!! You will also get a real sense of satisfaction at the end of the day because you can see exactly what you have achieved.

Remember too much research could be your downfall. Before you know it you have become a research junkie and you feel you have done a days work when lets be honest you haven’t really done anything. People who work within internet marketing or selling online are particularly prone to this problem as there is just so much information out there. You must start your business today and do not be afraid of failure. We have all been there but you will learn from all the mistakes made on the way. Yep take the plunge and see what all the fuss is about…..

You have perhaps been told that getting links from other sites related to your own website genre is generally a good idea. Perhaps you have even gotten quite a few email requests to this effect.

Many of us search engine optimization followers will know what this term means, but for the less geeky it simply means getting others to link to your site from their own.

Traditionally, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and initially whole communities even encouraged this but Yahoo Google and MSN soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because Tom would call Harry, Bella, Davis and Susan to ask them to link to his site and Google particularly thought that this activity was simply contrived and not natural.

The word “Spam” is known by some as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates,lol, sorry couldn’t help myself, but in internet lingo it is also known as the process whereby a few tech savvy individuals attempt to gain unfair advantage by flooding areas of the internet with their own commercial resource.

Examples of this, some marketers send out unsolicited comments using software robot programs - to create thousands of backlinks automatically in forums, blogs and other places. Some made hundreds of real but content-less webpages/sites with links back to their own - not the phrase “their own” - commercial products - hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. At that time, the search engines were not looking at some of these things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same organization or which 20 reciprocal links were with the same ISP. In order to thwart spammers, this information is deemed to be rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.

It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses - traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have hit the wall.

Why? We can’t specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us.

Secondly, since as a casual reader, one is not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, you are going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. One could however be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A very new online venture, even after being indexed by Yahoo or most search engines, doesn’t stand a prayer for getting traffic based on the most highly trafficked keywords - sorry but this wait for traffic could extend to many months or even years.

So, possibly a waste of time, right?

But there is yet one more major issue. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where Zero is not good and 10 is the best. Although some may argue this while a new page with N/A or O as its rank will have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in many search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will assuredly work against it.

Exceptions abound however and if the newly created page is sitting on a highly popular Web 2 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.

We suspect these exceptions work because, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageRank of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they are actually hosted on.

All sounds rather complicated huh? What can a novice do ?

Many seo experts might say, go back to fundamentals, content and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that we even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.And that’s inherently a great idea if you can get this very weighty idea to lift off the ground any at all. Its never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however I urge you to examine the issue more deeply. Calculate whether you really have the 6-18 months that it takes to consistently create new articles almost daily, and to publish a huge amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own - If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.

There has to be ways around this. What should one do?