Dot-Dash.NET

When I first started out in online marketing I was attracted to the idea of spending time and effort putting up sites that made money passively and residually. Despite what all the hypey sales pages and get rich quick people say there is nothing easy about it. The concept is simple – drive traffic to a your links, they click, they buy and you get paid. But simple and easy are not the same thing.

In practice driving enough targeted traffic to a good site that is well optimised to convert visitors to not only click through but click through and buy is by no means simple let alone easy. This is why there is a very well known saying that rings true for anyone serious about making consistent and decent money from affiliate marketing. It is also the part that bugs me about this whole business:

“The money is in the list!”

What this means is that in order to really do well at affiliate marketing you need to build a subscriber list and promote affiliate products though a newsletter. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? You put your efforts into online lead generation then sell not just one but many affiliate products over a period of time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disputing the effectiveness of this method – I know how effective it is. This is my issue with email affiliate marketing:

If you are not genuinely an authority and ‘go-to’ person with a real passion and knowledge for your “niche” then you have no business running a newsletter about it

There you go I said it and I know a lot of people will disagree with me and that’s fine. I know there are plenty of people doing very well from email marketing and they will be the ones who should be doing it. There are also a huge number of people who are really struggling to build their lists and make any money from them. Many who have fallen into the popular trap of trying to promote affiliate products to other marketers. I’ve been on these subsriber lists and seen the desperation in the messages telling me I’ve simply got to have whatever it is they’re punting at me – every single day until I’ve unsubscribed.

My Experience of List Marketing

By now you’re probably thinking that I’m some disgruntled, failed list marketer with a beef about making money online. And to a point you may be right because I spent about 2 years dabbling around in various niches, putting up sites, driving traffic, capturing leads, writing autoresponder series’ and sending out broadcast messages. I made a few sales but nothing like what I intended to. So after a while I came to the realisation that I had an internal conflict inside myself that was holding me back. I was not 150% confident and behind what I was doing. It did not feel right for me to be promising these website visitors the solution to x, y and z on my opt in pages.

There was no solid foundation to this business and that’s why it crumbled. And if you are struggling trying to make money online by marketing products in niches you know nothing about and have no genuine interest in then you’re probably in the same boat.

Becoming a ‘percieved authority’ and/or learning enough about a niche to market confidently is very very hard work. Mutiply that by all the niches/sites/lists you need to get into to make a full time income and you’ve got a real job on your hands. In order to make it with list marketing you have to provide content and value that is so good that your visitors and subscribers will open and read your messages and maybe click through and buy.

Afilliate Marketing Without a List

Having said all that I’m still in the affiliate marketing game and making money. Not as much as if I were to do it the list way but that’s not my game plan. After about 4 years of scrabling around online I’ve settled with Chris Rempel’s conduit site method. It’s good, it’s solid and it’s providing value.

In short the concept is that you put up review/info sites about specific products and companies. Your target visitors are right at the final stage of the buying cycle where they’ve decided on the product they want to buy, how much etc. They are doing their final bit of online due diligence on this  company/product before they make their purchase.

They find your conduit site which provides them with a quick lowdown on the company/product, the company contact details, the price, the return policy and some real feedback and a rating. If they decide to continue with their purchase they click through – and buy

No list, no compelling content or learning how to become an expert soap maker/scrap booker/herb gardner/fitness guru/online millionaire. No autoresponder series, no copying and pasting some guru’s suggested mailing then blasting it out to a bunch of people with your real address at the end of the email.

Just attract traffic that is about to buy something, provide them with the exact information they’re looking for to complete their purchase – they click – they buy – you get paid.

Simple – yes

Easy? – no

Worth it? – Works for me!

Click here to find out more about Chris Rempel’s “lazy affiliate” conduit site method.

Most people know this already but I’m going to write about anyway. We recently put up a new lead generation mini site which has got to the #1 spot in Google within less than a week since I clicked the ‘publish’ button.

With no link building, submitting of RSS feeds or any other kind of promotion the site has hit the top spot. You can read more about the details and see which site it is here

How did this happen?

While no one actually knows the exact criteria for ranking highly in Google, I believe that this happened because of the simple fact that the keyword is the domain name.

If you have the search term you are targeting in your domain name then you’ve already won a large part of the battle.

How can you use this?

Keyword rich domain names are big business. There is a whole industry that has built up around people using keyword research tools to find popular search phrases then buying the domain names of those search phrases with the intention of selling them for a large profit. If you find a good search term you’ll be very lucky indeed to find the domain name still available.

However – there’s nothing stopping you from getting a combination of the search phrase and your company name – or initials. An example is a blog I created for a social media client not so long ago. He’s a career adviser and the best keyword we could find at the time was “career advice”. As the domain name “career advice” was long gone we simply put his company initials “SMP” in front to make “smpcareeradvice.com”

So if you were thinking of registering a domain name for a new project such as a dedicated online lead generation mini site then remember to put your main search term into the domain name.

Wouldn’t it be great if people just came to your website and bought from you just like that. Unfortunately this is a general assumption most small business owners make when they put up their site. “If you build it they will come – and buy..”

In reality it’s more like “If you build it – then drive traffic to it they might come and look around for a few seconds, maybe decide to stay around or go back to the search engine results and go somewhere else”

It’s tough out there folks and it ain’t getting any easier as more businesses become savvy on how to market effectively on the web.

The Key Concept to turning Visitors into Customers

The key concept that needs to be grasped here is the difference between the online prospect and the offline prospect. To illustrate this let’s make a quick comparison between an online surfer and someone who has just walked into your shop or place of business:

Online Prospect	Offline Prospect
varying levels of commitment to even buy your product/service at all Is surfing around with an almost infinite amount of choice just a click away You have no chance to inetract with them and educate them on making the best choice for their needs.	Has committed to leave the house to go out  to buy your product (from somewhere) Has entered your premises which could be one of many but nothing compared to the choice online You can open a dialogue with them, find out their needs/goals/desires, educate them on your products/services and hopefully make a sale

Now when you think how hard it can be to make the sale in person to someone who has committed the time and effort to seek you out offline – imagine what you need to do to get the first time website visitor on board.

The End-to-End process

Looking at our first time website visitor who has just clicked through to your website – put yourself in their shoes (or slippers) for a moment and ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the ultimate goal they are trying to achieve which has brought them to your site?
• Why should they keep reading and looking around when they arrive?
• What can you do for them right now (preferably for no cost or obligation) that can help them a step further in achieveing their goal or solving their problem?
• Why should they take up your fabulous offer?

Online it’s all about relationship building and providing value up front. You do this in the form of high quality content followed by lead generation. The idea is to get them to the stage they would be at if they had just physically walked into your business premises. Call it going from wearing slippers to wearing shoes.

The steps to doing this are:

1. You research the end result your target customers are trying to achieve. You need to think in terms of benefits and not features
2. You create something of value be it a download/ebook/piece of software/telephone consultation that helps them toward achieving their goal/solving their problem.
3. This high value freebie also educates them on how your products and services can help them toward that goal.
4. You make sure that the pages they arrive at educate them on how your freebie can help them achieve their goal
5. Your site ‘sells’ the freebie which only costs them their contact details and permission for you to follow up with them.
6. You focus all your online efforts on ths one goal of lead generation, all your site content, all your off site promotions are geared to funneling people to this fabulous offer

When they have converted you now have them at the stage they’d be at as though they’d walked into your business premises.

Now you can start selling to them

To find out more about using this technique to convert cold prospect website visitors into warm leads I’ve condensed it as much as I could into a short complimentary ebook which you can find out more about here.

I hate submitting sites and blogs to directories, it’s incredibly boring, tedious and laborious. I don’t really trust submission software and services to do to properly either.

So after this morning’s round of RSS feed submissions I decided to keep a record of all the sites that did not:

• Demand a reciprocal link
• Require an account sign up and email confirmation
• Masquerade as free directories then send me to a paypal sign up after filling in my details

As of today – 02/05/2010 (English date format) this is a list I ended up with of RSS directories where you can submit your feed quickly and relatively painlessly:

http://www.feedzie.com/submit.php

http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php

http://www.xmeta.net/users/

http://www.solarwarp.net/submitrss.php

http://www.leighrss.com/rss-add.html

http://www.postami.com/rss_submit_service.php

http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html

http://en.newsxs.com/Suggest/

http://www.search4rss.com/addfeed.php

http://www.feedplex.com/add-url.php

http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp

http://www.jordomedia.com/RSS/l_op=Addrss.html

http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx

http://www.rssmicro.com/feedsubmit.web

http://www.rssmotron.com/feed_eater.php

This is by no means complete so if you can think of any more please do so in a comment.

Everyone knows that social media is great for business – as a marketing tool. But what effect does it have on your business productivity?

Lately I’ve found myself spending most of my days looking for stuff to tweet, following other people’s links and staying up to date with my Twitter feeds. How much of this can be attributed as real work is questionable and with the to-do list growing and less getting done it’s time to implement some business productivity management.

So to get the right mix between getting work done and having time to engage in effective social media I’ve come up with the following system:

1. Steamline Twitter and Facebook into separate feeds so I don’t have to go through pages of Tweets on different subjects. I’m using Hootsuite for this as it puts all social networking activity in one place. There are lots of tools like this to manage your twitter feeds and other social networks but I won’t go into them in this post.

2. Get my content sources aggregated into 2 places. One is Google reader where I put RSS feeds from sites and blogs  I choose to subscribe to. The other is popurls which aggregates news from all over the place in one big searchable page.

3. Organise my time around getting things done. I won’t go into great detail here about time management but when I sit down to accomplish a certain task I like to turn off any possible distractions like email notifications (I close my email program), instant messages and that Twitter tab with (150) new tweets you just have to check every 2 minutes..

So for example let’s say I’m setting up a squeeze page and writing a blog post for a client. These are two tasks I have to accomplish today, preferably in enough time so that I can take the rest of the day off afterwards This is how the day would go:

• Beginning of the day – switch on computer.
• Check emails, look at the charts for any trades for today (if life weren’t complicated enough I trade forex and commodities as well!).
• Check Twitter/Facebook.
• Check Content feeds for interesting and relevant items to tweet and tweet if applicable.
• Close down email client and web browser tabs with Hootsuite/Google Reader/PopURLs.
• Do task #1 – set up squeeze page for client #1
• When finished check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.
• Have lunch.
• Check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.
• Close down email client and web browser tabs with Hootsuite/Google Reader/PopURLs.
• Do task #2 write blog post for client
• Check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.

For a small business using social media as a marketing tool it’s essential that you organise your SMO activities around your regular business activities. Social media doesn’t have to be a productivity killer.

“Could there BE any more keywords in that post title?”….is what I would say if I was Chandler Bing from Friends.

And I’d have a point too. Trying to rank highly for terms like “SEO” and “Website traffic” is – for me – the wrong side of the 80/20. It will take a lot more than on page factors to get ranked for such competitve phrases these days. Even with a huge budget, lots of (outsourcer) time and all the latest technical tricks it would still be a long slog and a short lived result (if any) at that.

So why not just approach your SEO and website traffic (did you see what i did there?) efforts as Google intended and just make your site worth linking too/tweeting/bookmarking/digging etc. Your time and budget can be put to so much better use creatively. You know your target market, you know what they want, you know your industry and how you can help your customers and prospects achieve their goals.

Anyway – off the soapbox and on to my SEO and website traffic (sorry I just can’t help myself, it’s like a tick!) experiment:

The SEO and Website Traffic Experiment

My trading site is in one of the most competitve fields there is – forex and commodity trading. It’s right up there with weight loss and making money online, it is rediculously oversaturated. But I don’t care because I’m writing about something I love and am gaining some excellent knowledge and experience in.

And that puts me ahead of probably 90% or so of the competition who don’t really know much about it but are “in this niche” due to it’s popularity and lucrative affiliate marketing and contextual advertising opportunities. This isn’t restricted to the investing/trading niche either. You’ll find that if your business has a lot of targeted searches and the potential to reach your market through selling information products – much of your competition will be internet marketers trying their hand at making money from your customers and website visitors.

These will be people who don’t specialise (some of them will but a lot won’t) in your field of expertise but have gone to great lengths to become ‘percieved as an authority’ (yes there are courses on how to do this), research your website visitors just to sell them someone else’s ebook/course/product/whatever. Or worse still – just click an add.

This is who you’re up against and they know all the tricks about SEO and website traffic (oops, sorry did it again!).

So How Will You Beat Them to the Top?

Your edge which you can use is to just actually be an authority, simple as that. But you need to let people know about it as well so a good social media campaign can be enough of a lift to start a viral campaign to put your site where it deserves to be.

That’s what I’m doing with my trading site. I’m not even going to bother with any link building or SEO. The experiment is simply to do the following:

• Actually be a successful trader
• Write about it
• Publicise it through social media

It’s currently in it’s infancy but growing just through the above. Yahoo site explorer shows 5 backlinks, 4 of which are image links from charts I have posted on popular trading forums and 1 other. I’ve linked to it from this site for navigation purposes as well. Other than that I have done nothing to promote this site through any directories, articles or anything else other than social media.

Let’s see how it fares against all the genuine competition and the ‘make money online’ crowd. Watch this space…

I get asked this a lot. What is the optimal frequency and how often should one blog?

The answer depends on who you’re blogging for and why. If it’s for the search engines then probably about once a a day.

If it’s for your target market, prospects and customers it should be when you’ve got something to say.

Too many people feel that they should be blogging for the sake of blogging and end up diluting their sites with second hand not very good content that doesn’t ultimately do their business any favours. I’m a  firm believer in quality over quantity and I think the search engines are now as well.

A few years ago producing ‘fresh unique content’ on a very regular basis (at least once a day) was a great way to get your site spidered and indexed with the help of an RSS feed. Unfortunately like all other SEO ‘tricks’ this got abused and isn’t as effective anymore.

Which I think is a good thing – because there’s too much spammy rubbish out there put out by people desperately trying to drive traffic to ‘nothing’ blogs full of ads and affiliate links. This is good for the genuine business owner with a real passion and knowledge for their subject.

Stand out from the rest and make it a point to only post quality unique content – and only blog when you have something to say.

Happy New Year!

Let’s just hope that 2010 is better than 2009… which shouldn’t be too hard.

This is the time of year when people reflect on what they’ve achieved over the last year, what they want to achieve in the long run and what they need to do this year to make it happen.

For me I do that all year round so today is just another day when I’m working while most of the rest of the world is still asleep and/or nursing a hangover. That in itself brings me up to my one and only resolution for 2010:

To work less, earn more and get more done (and make more money) through passive and automated channels. So to start with let’s see how many projects and businesses I have on the go, which ones are currently yielding better results, which ones have (currently functional and potential) automation – then start looking through the 80/20 glasses. If you don’t know what the 80/20 principle is then I’ll put a link to a detailed explanation at the end of this post.

Current live projects:

Visiboost – Internet marketing services for small and growing businesses.

This is my main project and looking to explode in 2010.  So far I have automated huge amounts of the information gathering and compiling and have yet to automate a lot more and streamline current scripts and processes.  – Priority and yield – very high

Social Media Optimisation and Training.

Creating social media platforms (custom blogs and accounts with industry specific networks) and training businesses on how to leverage these for growth. No current automation in place but there is plenty of potential to automate the preparation and information gathering process. The training is done in-person and cannot be automated. Potential to also explode in 2010 and is currently yielding high results – Priority and yields – very high.

Foreign Exchange (FOREX) Currency Trading

Highly speculative and high risk currency trading that when done sensibly using correct money management and leveraging can yield consistently high returns. I won’t go into detail about actual systems but the overall strategy is to trade a system that is consistently profitable and execute a large number of small trades that risk no more that 3% of the account balance.

This can be automated using special programming languages that trade 24 hours. The goal is to develop a trading system that is no less than 70% successful and automate it so that each trade only risks 3% of the account and no more than 3 trades are open at any time.   Priority and yields – very high.

That’s probably enough to keep going until this time next year, however there’s more. These are probably just as important as the above priorities:

Play my guitar every day - even if it’s just for 5 minutes. maybe develop a learning plan/schedule and get some jazz/Latin lessons to structure learning and practice.

Maintain a steady exercise pattern – currently I do a 10k run every week, don’t let this slide for any reason. A nice ‘carry on’ resolution there. Exercise is a way of life not a resolution.

Produce an album of my own music – this is something I’ve started on and left under a (virtual) pile of papers. I’ve recorded tons of snippets of ideas, time to weave them together – collaborate with someone else if necessary

See more live music – Try and see some live music at least once every month.

New Years Resolution – Keep Going, Focus and Streamline

So that’s 2010 all planned out for Dot-Dash Innovations Ltd. Nothing new – just keep going, focus more on what’s working and ditch what isn’t.

I love the 80/20 principle – and so should you

Happy New Year!

My girlfriend tells me that like most men I’m not very good at multitasking. This isn’t good because running the business (working on as well as in it), catching good forex trades, responding to emails, chasing up outsourcers and still finding the time to do what I want to do (the reason we go into business in the first place) all require multitasking.

So what’s a budding entrepreneur to do when it’s not viable to employ full time staff yet but getting all this done requires a 28 hour working day?

Automation!

Automation is transforming the way a lot of organisations do business these days – mine included. Any repetitive computer based task never needs to be performed more than once manually. I just document the steps taken, refine the process and record it into an automated computer script that I can then run whenever I need – or schedule to run without me having to even click a start button.

Here are some examples of what is automated in my business at the moment:

Example #1 New customer creation:

Manual actions – fill in form with customer details (name, contact details, industry, website details) – 2-3 minutes

Automated actions:

1. Search customer database for customer numbers and create a new customer number
2. Enter customer details into the database
3. Create database tables for customer
4. Create customer folders on the server hard drive in the customer area correctly named with customer name/number

Time taken – less than 1 second

Total time taken – 2-3 minutes + 1 second. Manually this would take about 15 minutes.

Example #2 – Updating the records of customer backlinks (websites that link to our customer websites)

Manual actions – none, it’s scheduled to run once a week at midnight every Sunday

Automated actions:

1. Retrieve a list of all active customers in the database
2. For each customer found perform the following actions:

• Take the customer’s web address and search Yahoo Site Explorer for sites that link to it
• Compare the results to sites already in the database for this customer (imagine doing this manually.. for all your customers!)
• Enter only newly found sites into the database with a date and time (for comparisons and reports over time)
• Create a log file and put it into the customer’s corresponding folder

To do this manually for one customer could take up to 1 hour depending on how many new sites need to be filtered out of the results so as not to create any duplicate records. The whole process takes Visiboost 0 minutes and 0 seconds thanks to automation.

Example #3 – Automated Forex trading

As part of my business growth and stability plan I like reinvest some of the profits into the financial markets, currency markets in particular. My charts tell me that I miss a lot of good trades overnight and when I’m otherwise engaged. Also I don’t want to spend all my time glued to the computer waiting for trading signals. So what’s the answer?

Automated trading!

My charting software comes with its own programming language that will trade my system when the right combination of signals are all in place.

Is it flawless? No

But no trading system is – in fact software is probably better at trading than I am because it will follow the system to the letter without letting emotions get in the way. Anyway the ins and outs and merits of an automated system that trades the markets for you as you would (should if you stick to your system like a robot like the software does) is a topic for a different post.

The end result is another automated system that works away in the background while I’m working on something else.

Who’s good at multitasking now?!

So I just unfriended someone on my personal facebook account. I use the word ‘friend’ loosely because I didn’t know this person – it was one of those random friend requests who I tend to just accept if they have similar interests to mine (in this case salsa dancing).

Since adding them a few days ago I’ve had 2 messages in my inbox which have both been marketing messages – goodbye!

- Accepting your friend request does not equal ‘opting-in’ to your ‘list’ –

This is something a lot of marketers need to get into their heads when using social media to build their business. It is very easy to reach a lot of people through these networks and that can be good and bad, depending on how you do it. Let’s have a look at both approaches and the effects they both have:

The bad way - You join all these networks, go through searching and adding as many people as you can then start marketing directly to them.

Results:

• You annoy a lot of people who will ‘unfriend’ you
• Probably get your business labelled as spammy.
• Yes you might make a few sales but at what longer term cost?

The good way – You join these networks, go through searching and adding as many people as you can then start sharing content with them. This can be content on your business website or blog that adds value to these visitors and also pre-sells on you and your business.

Results – If they like what they’ve seen so far they are a lot more likely to:

• Take you up on your offer.
• If not they might refer someone else (that’s leverage!)
• link to you from their website or blog (free traffic and search engine improvements)
• share your free and high quality content with their groups of friends (that’s leverage!)
• Sign up for your newsletter (that’s opting-in to recieve marketing messages).
• There’s also a high chance that the next time you share some good free content with your social network they’ll check it out.

Effective Social Media Marketing in 5 Easy Steps

For some people creating relevant, useful and compelling content to share is a breeze. For others it’s a bit daunting. If you fall into the latter catagory then here are some steps you can take to quickly research and create something worth sharing:

1. Do some keyword research – Use something like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find some phrases that have large search volumes

2. Do some Q&A research – Go to places like Yahoo Answers and plug in your high search volume phrases (from step 1) and see what comes out. Look for recurring topics, questions, answers and find a popular one.

3. Find a way that your product/service/offer helps solve the problem, answer the question and generally help your target customer achieve the end result that’s the goal of whatever the question is related to.

4. Create a quick ‘how-to’ guide on how to achieve the end result the question is related to in X amount of steps.

5. Put this guide onto your website or blog with a call to action at the end to see how your product/service/offer can help them achieve this goal that much more quickly/effectively/guaranteed.

6. Summarise this guide into a bitesize chunk and share that with your social networks. A title or short description and a link to the full article on your site.

In Summary

Using this method you’re using social media the way it is intended to be used – and growing your business in the process. This intermediary step of creating and sharing content is vital, and as you’ve just seen.. it shouldn’t be that hard at all.

If you’re interested in learning more about implementing effective social media and other internet marketing strategies for your business please get in touch here