Rockstar Internet Marketing

Why Squidoo Makes Good Marketing Sense

Squidoo is a remarkable resource for Internet marketers.  It’s one of several interactive, multi-media web environments that is considered a web 2.0 site. The Squidoo interface allows users to create “lenses” which are individual pages hosted on the Squidoo.com domain that promote user expertise in a specific topical area.

You may be wondering what’s so great about Squidoo, when thousands of other sites allow you to promoter your expertise or do your own thing with a weblog or simple webpage. Make no mistake–Squidoo is unique.  Not only does Squidoo make it incredibly easy to create a web page–ripe with graphics, traffic-building content, interactive modules, and widgets–they allow, in fact the strongly encourage you, to use the page to make money (which is very different from the marketing ban that severely limits profit opportunities on sites like MySpace).

A few other web 2.0 sites allow a minimal amount of marketing to take place; HubPages is an example. But they’re far stricter about the number of outgoing links you can have, and they have other restrictive rules, which make it harder to use the site for your own personal profit potential.

Squidoo is actually far more conducive to making real money than any other site that has come into popularity in recent years.  This is the biggest reason Squidoo has risen to fame so rapidly and why so many ebooks and courses have been developed about Squidoo with an endless supply of guru marketers providing step-by-step instructions on how to market the right way on Squidoo.

Squidoo provides savvy marketers with a site that can be used for commercial purposes in addition to being a valued consumer resource and wealth of free information. Thousands of smart marketers have flooded to the site to take advantage of the free tools available to them.

Of course, honest marketing potential can never exist in a vacuum and Squidoo has seen its share of spammers who have tried to exploit the value of the platform.  This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a sharp decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google with a corresponding sharp drop in traffic. This was called Google’s Squidoo Slap.

Squidoo was quick to take action, removing some of the tools (such as iFrames) that made it easy for spammers to abuse the system.  They also banned four major spam topics from the site.  This was frustrating to a lot of honest marketers, but it made it harder for spammers to abuse the site.

They also instituted some policies to ensure the quality of lenses, requiring a more substantial amount of content to be published before the lens would show up in searches on the Squidoo site itself.  This also helped to deter spammers who would put up a lens with just a paragraph or two of keyword-rich spam text and then a bunch of outbound links in an effort to grab cheap traffic.

Squidoo can be used in many ways. You can promote services, products, or affiliate items through your lens. You can have multiple accounts and on each free account, you can have an endless supply of lenses.

You can cross-promote your lenses. You can build one master topic lens, and then branch out to build a number of more targeted lenses.  Squidoo helps anyone to be an expert on any subject, and Google love to Squidoo is once again rampant, helping lenses acquire page 1 rankings in the search engine rankings for many competitive keywords and phrases.

People who sell on eBay also love to promote their eBay stores or auctions through Squidoo, using built in eBay modules (building blocks) that Squidoo offers.  Some modules give the lensmaster a share of co-op earnings through AdSense and some module profits. You can also use text and image links to funnel traffic directly to your own domain.

Squidoo is a powerful tool that provides new marketers with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that also has enough flexibility built in to satisfy the most demanding veteran marketers. Add a few lenses to your marketing strategy. If you use Squidoo properly, you may see both an increase in your preeminence as an expert in your field as well as some nice revenue each month from ad sharing commissions based on visitors to your lens.

Look Out Aweber, Here Comes Twitter!

Ever think about using Twitter as a micro-autoresponder? It’s possible and does an outstanding job of serving as an additional way to promote your expertise!

I’m experimenting with Twitter as a micro-autoresponder as a means of publishing my internet marketing tips on a daily basis to my Twitter followers. You can see how I’m using Tweetlater to schedule these tips each day and see all of the tweets at http://feeds.tweetlater.com/17/icemanbaldy/

It’s all about being creative and putting technology to new and different uses in order to get back to the fundamental purpose of creating additional web traffic and awareness about your products and services. It’s also key to not just promote or let your scheduled business tweets be the only thing that keeps your twitter account active–spice up your account with some personal interest to let followers know that you have a life too.

You can also follow my normal tweets at http://twitter.com/icemanbaldy

The Free and Easy Way to Become a Master Internet Marketer: Ice Cold Lessons

Cautiously Optimistic?

Don’t be. My 52 week course is guaranteed to spur you on to a bigger and better life of profit and productivity when it comes to managing your online enterprise.

So many people are operating Mom & Pop style internet businesses and missing out on true riches because of a lack of understanding or misuse of the tools that are the hallmark of success in internet marketing. Nothing that is being done to make hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars online is new or unique. What makes the difference is the individual’s willingness to do the work (things happen quickly but not instantaneously in the beginning), and to dedicate the time to proven principles for internet success.

My course provides the proven principles, gives you an in-depth examination of the tools, and each week you are guided with assistance in understanding the discipline required to change your life for the better in ways that you may only imagine but can certainly achieve.

Nine Gotta Gets You Gotta Get to Get Money Online

I’ve published this article on a few forums and on my weblog. Rockstar Readers will also enjoy it. –Ice

NINE GOTTA GETS YOU GOTTA GET TO GET MONEY ONLINE

There are countless internet marketers who want to prosper in their online businesses and they’re wondering what things they really need to get right to get things going and make some money online. I was one of them who stumbled through what seemed more like art than science until I began to see themes that are repeated in every phenomenal rags-to-riches online success story.

Here are my nine “Gotta Gets” if you want to cut to the chase and make your internet marketing pay serious dividends. Consider these the fundamental starting points from which you will build your online empire.

The Nine Gotta Gets are focused on three areas: Tools, Traffic, and Follow-up.

Let’s begin with Tools–Focus on the basic instruments required for maximum internet marketing: A Domain Name, An Email Address, and A Website and/or Webhost.

You Gotta Get a Domain Name.
Free sites and weblogs are nice, but they scream amateur. If you want folks to take you seriously and part with their contact information or hard earned cash, they need to know that you’re serious about your business.

A descriptive and memorable domain name is the first impression that people have about your level of professionalism. A site listed as yoursite.com leaves a much better impression than someothername.com/yoursitename or yoursitename.someothername.com.

Some free sites don’t even give you the option of including your own descriptive text in the name. Others host ads on your site that you don’t control and that may conflict with your products or services–some of these ads might even promote your competition.

Domain names are a form of marketing. If your domain name is part of a larger site name, it takes away from your marketing impact. These kinds of compound site names are also hard to remember and if the main provider goes out of business or makes a change to their portion of the domain, you lose traffic, credibility, and ultimately money.

Get your own domain name.

You Gotta Get an Email Address
In the same way that your domain name serves as a marketing focus in your business, your email address is just as important in your electronic correspondence with friends, visitors, and prospects. We all love Gmail, Hotmail, and many other free providers. I have a couple of free accounts but I don’t use any of these accounts for business correspondence–I use them to register for free stuff or to sign up for lists where I know the account will be bombarded with stuff that I may or may not read in order to keep my main accounts free of clutter.

Once you have your own domain name, the great thing is that you also get one or several email accounts along with the name that carry the same consistent branding. If your domain name is yoursitename.com then your email address can be you @ yoursitename.com or webmaster @ your sitename.com or whatever you want.

The key is that anytime you send a message from your account, people will see @yoursitename.com and this is often enough to pique their curiosity and result in a site visit. Those who have already visited your site and receive messages will get affirmation that you run a top-notch business and won’t be put off by a yoursitename @ gmail.com address. It’s not a big deal, but again, you want to appear as professional as possible. If you don’t, your competition will.

Get a marketable email address.

You Gotta Get a Website and/or Webhost
Many internet marketers will argue that you don’t need a website to run a profitable business and I’ve also written articles to that effect. The truth of the matter is that you can run a very successful business with nothing more than an email address and great affiliate products or using any number of pre-existing sites where you share in commissions from traffic that you direct to the site.

eBay is just one example of a popular platform that some marketers are using to maintain a revenue stream by selling their own products or to sell products on behalf of others. There are other auction-style sites in addition to business opportunity MLM-style sites that provide marketers with a site and associated tools to conduct business. It’s not absolutely necessary for you to have a website of your own to make money online.

That is, not unless you want to take total control of your profit potential and make some serious money.

Maximum marketing is being in control of both your web traffic and your products. Your website serves to market you. Not having a website and just working from a list means that your relationships are one-dimensional with no real way for your customers or prospects to contact your or to relate and connect with one another outside of one-way email messages.

By using the sites provided by others as a convenience, you don’t need to worry about design or content and upkeep. The downside is that you can’t distinguish yourself from any of the other people who are also using these “conveniences.” Having your own site allows you to customize your messages, provide your audience with an interactive way of connecting with you and maybe one another, and provides business depth that conveys authority, expertise, and social proof.

Get a website and stand out from the crowd.

Traffic–Give online searchers a reason to visit your site and come back for more: Use Content, Your Own Products, and Affiliate Products.

You Gotta Get Content
Your site does nothing for you or anybody else if you don’t have stuff at your online location that gives people a compelling reason to stay and visit and then come back for more at a later time. Content is king when it comes to the viability of your website or weblog.

Your content can be informational or entertaining. It can be relevant or irrelevant. It can be stylized or very plain. It can be audio or video. Whatever it is, it needs to be something that you can commit to maintaining for an audience of people who find it interesting.

You can develop your own content, use the content of others with their permission, or you can have others develop your content for you based on their contributions to the site.

The first two options are subjects of the next two Gotta Gets.

You Gotta Get Your Own Products
This is where the real money is made when it comes to profiting online. You can build up to this point by promoting other folk’s stuff or by receiving commissions from sales that you make on behalf of others (affiliate products). But if you want to set your own price based on exclusive content that is only available from you or by providing a small group of people with individual access to your unique expertise, then you’ve gotta have your own products.

The marketing funnel is based on this very principle: First, you offer a variety of free products of your own design or that you have acquired rights to distribute to whet your prospects’ appetites.

You then offer a smaller selection of for-free products that cater to their needs once you’ve established a relationship with them and they understand that you are not out to con them out of their hard earned money.

These offers are followed by even better, more selectively focused products at an expense that justifies their increased value.

Finally, you offer exclusive, much smaller opportunities to interface directly with you through seminars or web-based technology and/or e-courses or mastermind groups at your premium rates.

The marketing funnel takes your customers through the value chain from free to higher paid products while providing you with recurring income and greater margins.

Get your own products to start building your business at the front and back ends of the marketing funnel.

You Gotta Get Affiliate Products
As important as having our own products is, you don’t need to start from that point. You can make money fast and build a following by finding good products that meet the needs of your target market letting your market know about what you’ve found.

Affiliate product producers will often provide you with everything you need including sales pages, email message content, banners, links, and graphics or anything else that will help you to sell their product. If they can help you to make money, then they benefit from your promotional efforts (through repeat sales to customers that you find for them) and they are often willing to pay you up to 75% and in some cases 100% of the sale for your work.

Clickbank is one of the leading sites for finding affiliate products or to offer your own affiliate products for sale. It’s easy and free to get started. Use affiliate products to strengthen your for-free and higher prices offerings while you build your marketing funnel. Affiliate products are also great ways to offer products that compliment your own as additional revenue streams.

Get some affiliate products and jump start your product portfolio.

Follow-up–Once you begin to grow an interested number of repeat visitors and purchasers, you need to maintain these key relationships for future growth: Use Autoresponders, Social Tools, and Virtual Assistants.

You Gotta Get an Autoresponder
Autoresponders are email agents that you set up to work for you automatically and in the background. They are true timesavers that any internet marketer with a granule of common sense will tell you that you cannot live without.

One of your goals as an online entrepreneur is growth. You grow your business by increasing the number of prospects who become customers who then become repeat customers who then became raving fans of your business. Autoresponders allow you to put some of this growth on autopilot.

Aweber and GetResponse are two of the leading autoresponders. They are a business expense but the time that you save given the fee that you pay for these services is priceless. This is how it works:

You have a website or weblog or maybe you’re marketing someone else’s products. You find people who are interested in what you have to offer and they visit the site. Your autoresponder provides you with a form that you design and place on your site where you collect prospects’ names and email addresses in exchange for free product information or the purchase and download location to acquire a product they desire.

Once you have their name and email address and have confirmed that you have permission to send them email (the autoresponder takes care of this confirmation automatically), you can send them helpful information and recommendations for additional free or for-free products. Repeat marketing to individuals who have expressed an interest in your offerings has a much higher success rate than trying to find new customers all the time.

Once you set this up the first time, your autoresponder saves the sequence of emails so that when someone new joins your list via the online web form, they receive the very first message in the series with all the other messages scheduled to follow based on the frequency of delivery that you establish for each message. This process continues for every new subscriber to your list. You can have multiple lists for different markets and products and your lists can contain hundreds or thousands of subscribers.

You maintain contact at different levels of your email relationship with multiple customers and prospects based upon when they became subscribers. Each message can be personalized with their name and include complementary links to your other products and services in addition to solid, helpful content that will keep your subscribers hungry for more. Some may even share the emails with their friends and prompt them to join your list!

Get an autoresponder and put your email marketing on auto-pilot while you market and make money in your sleep!

You Gotta Get Social
Making money online is more than a numbers game. Volume helps but you need the right kind of volume–that is, visits from people who relate to what it is that you have to offer. Relationships are at the core of effective internet marketing where you take a targeted approach that leads to repeat business at increasing purchase levels.

How do you find the right kind of people who will become long term customers? You spend time in forums that cater to your niche and by building an internet presence where those whom you help will visit your sites to see what you’re all about and ultimately become members of your list, your community or loyal followers by whatever means they are most comfortable.

You can run a very profitable business while sitting alone in a coffee shop a few afternoons a week or from the comfort of your dining room table–and yes–some have ridiculous money while sitting on the beach, but you don’t do it alone in a vacuum. You’ve got to spend some time online connecting with people in your market.

By helping people in your niche you establish your expertise, build trust, create awareness, and in many cases, a spirit of reciprocity develops over time. Because you have been so helpful to others, it’s not unusual to make a suggestion about a product to your list of several hundred fans and supporters and accurately predict how many will take you up on the offer and magically send you money. The truth is, there is no magic about money and relationships. You will have established a bond with people who view you as an authority in your area and they will thank you for your assistance with proper compensation.

Participate in relevant forums, make contact with bloggers in your field, join social networks that make sense for your niche and be a valued contributor, use social bookmarks to point to your best content and build a strong internet presence, and microblog about your endeavors.

Relationships beget profits and profits beget more relationships. You need to beget more money.

You Gotta Get Good Help
Sure, you can do it all by yourself and make a mint but why would want to? I’m just as stubborn as the next guy or gal when it comes to not wanting to give up control of my business or foolishly believing that I can do a more than capable job on my own. After all, we’re all talented, creative, and most of us have some technical know-how. Who better to write articles for our business or to conduct the day to day affairs than we who founded or created the enterprise?

Keep thinking that way and you’ll create a job for yourself that will ultimately become no better than the work you may be performing for somebody else today. What is your time worth? What could you be doing to promote or build your business if you weren’t doing some of the more mundane stuff that can easily be contracted out to others? This is when having good help really pays off.

If you visit sites like Elance or other online virtual assistant services, you’ll be amazed at the level of professional help that is available for very little money. When you are considering a research or writing project that you need to complete to add value to your business or to further promote your efforts, you would be wise to think about outsourcing this work.

By employing the services of a virtual assistant or contractor, you retain rights to the work and receive the benefit of quality workmanship that might have taken you days or weeks to complete at often unbelievable prices. Many virtual assistants work in other countries so you benefit from differences in currency while having the ability to draw from the experience and education of individuals that you could never afford otherwise.

Exercise due diligence when choosing an assistant, whether domestically or internationally. Most of the popular assistant sites rightfully recommend that you be very detailed in your project expectations and goals and that you spend time reviewing the work and reputations of prospective bidders. Don’t make a decision until you are comfortable that your bidder can perform the work to your specifications. Build checkpoints into the process to ensure that things are on track at every important step. Many bidders will sometimes offer to provide you a sample of your completed work at no charge in an effort to win your business.

If you find a few virtual assistants whose work you really like, you may find long-term virtual partners who help to free your time to enjoy life to the fullest with confidence that you are fully in control of a business that almost runs itself.

Now that you know what you Gotta Get, get going and get more money online!

Spam Free Email Marketing for Maximum Success

The best way to use e-mail to develop your online business is by creating a double opt-in list using autoresponders like Aweber or GetResponse. I use Aweber and highly recommend it. Autoresponders help you to manage your email lists and can be set up to send scheduled messages to segments of your list at whatever frequency you determine. List members receive messages according to a sequential order or you can broadcast messages to the entire list independent of timing.

This is great for long-time members of your  list who might be receiving their hundredth message about updates related to your products while someone who joins your list today receives your first welcome message for newcomers. Once you’ve written a message once and loaded it into the autoresponder, the  autoresponder takes care of maintaining contact with your subscribers sending your loaded messages automatically as often as you like while you work on other aspects of your business.

I’m using an my autoresponder to send a weekly email course on Internet Marketing to those who sign up for the course. My subscribers get a weekly tips email from me every week on whatever day they joined the list.

Double opt-in list

A double opt-in list means that a subscriber requests the mailing then receives a verification email from the mailing list telling him that he must follow certain steps to verify his intentions to subscribe. Double opt-in is literally a method of getting someone to agree twice to receive future emails from you. It eliminates the potential that someone would receive unsolicited, unwanted email (SPAM) by requiring that a subscriber give his verified consent. Double opt-in is becoming the standard process for permission-based email marketing.

Be cautious when you read about double opt-in mailing lists for ads or sale offers. There are a lot of ill-intended marketers that send out spam to millions of customers regardless of whether it’s a double opt in or not. You also want to be sure that before you subscribe to any list, use care to make certain that the list owner does not plan to sell your information to other marketers who may then use it unscrupulously or continue selling and sharing your email address with others. The whole intent of double opt-in is to prevent the receipt of email that  you don’t want.

Email advertising via Email Newsletters

In an earlier post, I discussed the use of email to market your business. Now that you understand the importance of double opt-in to eliminate SPAM, I’d like to further discuss some ways to promote your business via email. Everything that we do online should help to grow our enterprise. Most autoresponder applications allow you to feature special content in each mailing delivered to your group. You can usually use the header or footer in addition to special templates that offer other formatting options. You can also include your affiliate links in the body of the message. A weekly emailed newsletter to the subscribers on your list provides the opportunity to conduct subtle advertising campaigns in conjunction with your stellar content.

The key to any opt-in list is to provide nothing less than top notch products or recommendations. This is the only reason why most people will sign up to receive your information in the first place. You can provide valuable information through email newsletters, and by constantly providing your readers with valuable information, you can build up a relationship with people who would actually like to buy some of your products.

Email newsletters are a great way to build up your business. Encourage your subscribers to share the email message with other people and include a link to join your list in the body of the letter–you are always on the look out for new list subscribers.

Other Thoughts

Email marketing can be used to improve customer relations with your clients, to increase your responsiveness with prospects, and to promote your business to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Give some thought to using email marketing to develop new methods of communicating your value whether by newsletter, email courses, free articles and resources, tips lists or other methods where a message from you is regarded as an highly-regarded, electronic treat. Never, ever send broadcasted or individual email messages to people with whom you have no relation or logical connection. SPAM will not only irritate the recipient and if complaints are made to your internet service provider (ISP) or webhost, you can find yourself quickly on the losing end of terminated service with little recourse but to start over…completely. There is one cardinal rule in internet marketing: Do not spam. Ever.

Crank Up Your Internet Marketing with These Great Tools

While establishing a business, the first thing you need to consider upon is the quality of the tools you are using. There are a number of free tools out there available online and they can be excellent ways to enhance your online business.

Some of these tools are: -

1) Alexa toolbar: It’s a free link provider evaluation tool. For business purposes, its one of the most useful tools available on the Internet. Alexa is a toolbar that opens up on any web page whenever you go online. The most useful feature of this tool is the ‘site info’ option. When you click on this button, you will be able to see all the details of the website you are on, like the traffic ranking of that site, the contact information of the owner of that site, and other websites linked to that site.

If you are looking for link partnerships or joint ventures, this information provides you with high traffic websites in your industry. You click on a button on the toolbar for viewing the other popular or similar websites that might be good linking partners for your business.

This toolbar also contains a Google search option, which can help you to directly jump into the search engine.  The toolbar can be downloaded from alexa.com.

2) Google toolbar: One of the very important things you need to consider upon while building a successful business is to research your competitors and your target market. This process can be supported by the Google toolbar.

• Google Search: Search for your keywords within billions of web pages.
• Search news: Find news and stories relevant to your website, like ezines, blogs, etc. Keep up with latest developments in your market.
• Web Directory search: Search through Google’s directory for sites
• that match your search terms. Find out how many potential competitors you have in the market.
• Search Froogle: It’s a special search engine for online shoppers. All the new products launched, their prices, the services attached to them, everything can be seen in Froogle search.

3) Netmechanic: Net Mechanic is a tool kit resource that offers a number of free trials that are great for locating potential problems with your website fixes them immediately. It can repair any sort of problem – HTML code errors, browser display problems, broken links, etc.

4) Nvu: This is a free downloadable WYSIWUG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor, which is similar to front page. WYSIWUG means that you can see what your web page will look like as you are creating it. With the help of this software, you don’t need to spend money on HTML editors or web designing software to create your own website. You can create a very professional website without any knowledge of HTML and even if you are interested to create your website on your own, Nvu provides you with excellent HTML tutorials. I often use Nvu to customize squeeze pages that I purchase with private label rights from other internet marketers.

5) Word tracker: This software helps you to easily track those keywords that are being used most in the search engines. You can also find what your competitors are up to!

6) AnyBrowser: AnyBrowser offers you every tool that you will require for your website to be viewable in any web browser. For example, Site Viewer allows you see your web pages as surfers view them on multiple browsers. AnyBrowser will provide you with all the requirements of any web browser to make sure your website looks its best no matter what browser your visitors are using.

Give at least three of these tools a trial run and determine whether or not they provide value for you as you manage and promote your website and/or weblog.

Four Keys to Effective Email Marketing

One of the most important tools that you can use in your Internet marketing is electronic mail, better known as e-mail. It helps you to communicate with your visitors or customers easily, is extremely cost effective, and it is much more responsive than snail mail.

You have a wide variety of email programs to choose from online. Most programs work with a variety of internet service providers (ISPs). Free programs like G-mail offer a host of extra features that will save time and help you to easily organize your e-mail by filtering your messages into specific mailboxes. Some programs also allow you to use your own domain for your e-mail address to make  your business look even more professional.

Writing e-mail messages sounds pretty simple, but there are important aspects that need to be managed carefully.

1) Subject line: Grabbing your reader’s attention is a very important factor. Just because the visitor is your customer or a buyer doesn’t mean that he/she will open your message. They should be intrigued to open up your mail. You must be able to steal their attention. To steal attention, the subject of your e-mail, which is the most important part of your message, should be short, to the point, and should provide a summary or a preview as to what your message is all about.

2) Format your message: You’ll need to decide which format you would like to follow for emails. Your two main choices are between HTML or plain text formatting. Although there has been a lot of controversy on this, a text message is the better option. The reason for this is that not all your readers will be capable of viewing your e-mail messages in HTML format. But even then, if you want to go for HTML messages, the best way to accommodate all your readers is to create two versions and allow them to make the choice themselves. HTML is becoming more popular and offers a richer graphics experience for your readers.

3) Line length: Some e-mail programs do not have the feature of automatic text wrap. So, even if your message looks pretty good to you, it is very possible that your e-mail recipient may receive your message as one long sentence, which looks unpleasant. So, as you start writing your e-mail message, you should keep this in mind that your line length should be limited to under 65 characters per line.

4) Linking: When you place a web address in your messages, some e-mail programs automatically create live links with web addresses starting with ‘www.’. However, some e-mail programs are able to create live links only when the web address begins with ‘http://’. Therefore, you should always include the full URL beginning with http://.  When you are including an e-mail address within your e-mail message, you should always include ‘mailto:’ directly in front the e-mail addresses. This will enable most e-mail programs to create a live e-mail link.

Try to keep your web addresses short, so that the URL doesn’t get divided into two different lines, which may cause only a part of the web address to become a live link. Your goal is to make your links easily clickable so that your messages are an interactive experience that deliver results for you and your products.

As you become increasingly comfortable with email marketing, you may want to use an autoresponder to automate your email campaigns. Autoresponders allow you to build a list of email subscribers who receive your messages based on a schedule that you design. Once your schedule is set, your autoresponder stays in touch with your subscribers 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no further  action required from you unless you choose to send special messages from time to time. My personal favorite is Aweber. It’s what I use for my free and paid email courses and all my targeted customer lists. You can try it risk-free for 30 days. You’ll find it’s the autoresponder of choice for most serious internet marketers.

Iceman Baldy is Giving Away Internet Marketing Lessons!

For a limited time, Iceman Baldy (that’s me) is allowing anyone to sign up for his Ice Cold Lessons in Internet Marketing series at no cost–that’s $47 of a 52-part email course for FREE. Jump on it now while you can, because it’s a test I’m doing related to list building and I don’t intend to lose money on this deal for long. This course is a good money maker as a complete package, so those who stay for the entire series will have a nice reference package to read and revisit over and over to get the full benefit. True to my methods, you can be certain that the course will include other goodies from time to time just thrown in for good measure. Act fast before I wake up and wonder what I was thinking.

Three Ways to Increase Your Site’s “Promotability”

Knowledge as to which sites you visit (and why) can help to a large extent to make your site worth accessing by people, your friends and colleagues. The site preferably should be as promotable as possible. The factor of promotability is far more superior and stands of greater priority than promotion. It can be implemented by the addition of extra site elements that practically cost nothing but provide you with greater dimensions of promotion. Standing out alone or as the first to offer a certain drawing card, makes you lay down the track for serious traffic.

Promotability Begins with Valuable Content
Your focus should center on the interests and requirements of your targeted visitors, for example:

• Articles, book excerpts, tips, FAQs (frequently asked questions).
• Reference information and resources (online and offline).
• Checklists for the actions your customers take in relation to your
• Products and services.
• Educational information with applicable case studies.
• Ratings, recommendations, and reviews.
• Statistics, topical humor, inspirational quotes.
• Sales and special deals on your products and services.

A greater number of changes, frequently altered features and a larger number of eye catching segments lead to persuasive trafficking as more and more people make return visits and bookmark your site. If your business is sensitive to alterations in seasons, it is advisable to monitor your content changes in relation to the existing time of the year.

Promotability is Enhanced by Interactive Features
Puzzles, riddles, quizzes, and contests are all excellent options for allowing your site give an extremely good feeling about your company to your visitors and encourage them to stick around longer and potentially convert into buyers. If fun does not relate well with your image, use of more appropriate widgets is advisable. A more dignified business does well with interactive features like surveys where you ask people to register their point of view on a topic of importance or concern and subsequently provide them with voting trends of other people, either instantly or after a certain date

You can exchange messages with others on a message board or forum. This might involve people describing problems and asking for solutions, people offering suggestions, recommendations and more.
Interactions and feedbacks are efficient modalities for you to boost up your return traffic.

You can offer a signup to receive e-mail announcements of additions to your site - new articles, new specials, contest results, further installments of your case studies, and so on.

Promotability is Ensured by the Latest News and Information
Syndicators can provide licensed, up-to-the-minute information in the form of localized weather reports, stock prices, currency exchange rates, sports scores or lowest airfare that get installed at your site. RSS feeds provide alternative sources of information where visitors can use your site as a single source portal that links them to a variety of helpful content. Make sure that the content suits your topic and that you have the permission of the author to publish the content.

The creation of an attractive and exciting site leads to higher number of visits. Once this is accomplished, you are ready to cultivate traffic by linking your site to others in a way that invites additional visitors.

Rockstar Internet Marketers Know that It’s Not Enough to Have a Website

Unfortunately, having a great website does not guarantee that people will visit it. It needs to be promoted and to be able to do that, you must be aware of effective promotional strategies that actually work! The Internet isn’t just a medium to communicate with people known to you. It’s a great platform to reach out to the whole world. If you have a great website and you’re wondering why there are no visitors, its time for you take it upon yourself to make sure that it reaches out to all who matter.

Spreading the word around

A promotional activity should not be thought of as a decidedly expensive activity. All you need to do is to use creativity and thought more than dollars! Expenses can be controlled and you don’t need to have a fortune to get started. To start marketing online you don’t have to have a website. A simple looking email holds tremendous power if used judiciously. It is instant, extremely economical and very, very reliable. Then, once you have spread the word around about your product, you can graduate to actually having a website. Your mastery of using email coupled with a good website can surely make a double impact! You can then focus on improving backend operations and fulfilling what your website has been promising.

Get the ball rolling

The will and strategy to succeed is more important than the means you choose and use in terms of equipment. You can join some of the hundreds of groups and forums on the net (like the Black Internet Marketing Forum at http://www.BlackInternetMarketingForum.com), float some information and set grounds for brainstorming. You will gain attention and you will get feedback from other forum users as well. Aside from the joy your receive from socializing, sometimes you can build great credibility, visibility, and traffic just by answering patiently and accurately to questions asked by other forum members. The usefulness of your information will ensure that you are remembered and your effectiveness grows by word of mouth.

The more you are visible, the more people will remember you. This will gradually ensure that people start looking out for you to have a solution to their problems. Eventually, you will become a valued contributor and you will be well on your way to becoming very established online.

Understand the character of Internet marketing

The Internet is like a small village community where people know each other by their names. It’s much more comfortable and effective talking one to one rather than making a corporate entry. Netizens are more influenced by your personality and character and your ability to deliver. Your personal expertise holds more value as compared to the brand of your company.

Having a personal tone while communicating over the Internet helps to release its full potential. It’s better to directly communicate with your name or alias rather than the name of a company. Always remember that its YOU who is out to make a relation, and people will be impressed by your personality. They will want to pick up the conversation some other time with YOU and not your company. This personal approach helps cut costs as well. One to one conversing is often much more effective, has a higher impact, and costs less as well!

Welcome the the Fraternity of Internet Marketers–Best Wishes to you as you optimize your time and maximize your profits.