I love free (or nearly free) Internet Marketing Methods. I can’t help it. I know that I can plunk some cash into my adwords account and almost instantly stream a flood of traffic to a web site…I know it…but I still LOVE to get that traffic for free, even if it takes a long time for that traffic to come around and even if it takes a huge effort on my part to get it.

That’s probably one of the main reasons why I’ve always loved Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing methods. The idea that I can do a few things to tweak the SEO of my web site, then do a little work getting backlinks that point to my site…and then watch a floodgate of steady free targeted visitors begin to flow into my web site; is intoxicating. And I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here! (Or at least you do if you’ve been around very long in the Internet Marketing world).

And it was especially the case back in the earlier days of the Internet, say around 1996 or so. Back then you could literally load your meta tags up with hundreds of keywords and then shoot up to the top of the rankings at the “search engines” (I use quotes because they were only vaguely what we would think of as search engines today!).

Of course, that sort of thing quickly stopped working as the search engines became more sophisticated, but the idea is still the same today. Do a few things to your site in order to make it more attractive to the search engines and enjoy tons of free traffic in exchange.

But is all that traffic actually free? That question got me thinking….

Today, onpage SEO factors are only a VERY minor part of getting a web site ranked well at the search engine. Backlinks are massively more important, and backlinks take a HUGE amount of time to do it right. Sure you can spam your site onto all the social media type sites like digg and reddit and mixx and twitter etc and you will get some short term bumps, but they never lead to long term sustainable search engine rankings.

No, today you have to put a lot of time into building link bait in order to get others to link to you (and let’s not forget the fact that you have to get people to your site TO BEGIN WITH before they link to you...which takes time and money).

Other than that you can use article marketing to get back links, and I do that a lot… but it takes a lot of time and effort to pump out fifty to a hundred articles to the major article directories because I don’t spin them or duplicate them on different directory sites.

So when you think about it…all that “free” SEO traffic isn’t really all that free after all. If you value your time at more than minimum wage, free SEO can actually become prohibitively expensive!

But still…it’s still just so much fun!

Internet marketing is a great profession. There’s nothing better than building a web site, marketing it a little bit, sitting back, and watching the orders come flooding in.

And in the arsenal of Internet marketing tools, there are none so satisfying as Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing methods! Why is that? Because SEO is free, for the most part. Not only is it free, but it is continuous and targeted. By that I mean, you can put forth a finite amount of effort and continue to reap results for years to come. And of course, I mean targeted because your prospects pre-qualify themselves by going to the search engines and actively searching for whatever they are looking for.

Thus you know that if someone found your web site from the search engines, then they are actively looking for exactly what you are offering.

The problem with search engine marketing is that its unpredictable and difficult. There is no real right way to do it. Sure, there are a lot of industry best practices to follow, but these change so often that it’s often hard to keep track of them all!

So I’ve decided to cut through the muck today and explain the most important part of SEO. What is that? It’s pretty simple actually. The most important part of SEO is linking.

The major search engines have a long list of things that they use to determine how to rank a web site. But the most important thing is links, by and large. Think of links as “votes”. If another site links to you, then they are in essence “voting” for your site.

Then, the site with the most votes gets ranked the highest (usually, but not always…see, its tricky!).

So what you want to do is convince as many sites as possible to link to you. There is many ways to do this. You can offer them something…like an eBook or free video in exchange for a link. You could pay them to link to you, but the major search engines don’t like that and it can get you into trouble.

Finally, you can go out and create the links yourself, which is what you will probably end up doing. There are a number of ways to do this, like article writing. You can write articles, like this one, and post them to article directories. Most article directories allow you to post a signature file at the end with 2-3 links in it. That is where you put your links to your site.

There are many other different methods of creating links, but article marketing is one of the safest. You see, if you build links too quickly, the search engines can get angry. The best way to do it is slowly but surely, and that’s why article marketing is perfect, because you can only write so many articles at once!

People often ask me this one question, and it’s a slightly odd question but I can see why people may be interested in it so I thought I would discuss it in a little bit of detail in this article today.

What’s the question? It’s this… if you had to focus on just one thing in Internet marketing, what would it be?

It’s an academic question because you’re never really going to focus on ONLY one thing, but still it’s an interesting exercise so here’s my take on it.

First things first; we have to determine what kind of an Internet marketer you are. There are two main types of Internet marketers and each one has its own main focus. Don’t worry, I’m gonna talk about both of them today.

The first type of Internet marketer is the person that sells their own product or service. For this person I would suggest that the main thing for them to focus on is list building. Building your e-mail list is incredibly important when it comes to selling your own product or service, because if you don’t have a list of people to market to, it’s going to be very hard for you to make any kind of sustainable money.

One of the reasons for this is because most of the money that businesses make, is made on the backend. Sure you make a little money when you sell one product, but the real money comes from selling lots of different products on and on and on- year after year to the same people who bought your first product. In fact, many marketers sell their first product at a loss (called a loss leader) simply so that they can qualify a person onto their mailing list in order to sell them more things on down the line.

It’s this sort of behavior that separates the real marketers from the wannabe marketers. It’s a stamp of professionalism to be able to discuss your backend as opposed to the front end.

The second type of Internet marketer is an affiliate marketer. These people sell other people’s products, and not their own. Building a list is important for them to, but not as important because usually speaking they don’t take advantage of the backend… the original manufacturer of the product usually gets to reap all the backend products, not the affiliate marketer.

The most important thing to focus on if you are an affiliate marketer is traffic. How you get traffic is the most important aspect of your business. In fact when you come right down to it it’s the only factor of your business. Affiliate programs come and go and on any given day you may market a dozen different products… and those products may change tomorrow making it hard to maintain a list for such a diverse potential product line.

No, the most important part is how you get traffic and how you funnel that traffic to the affiliate offer. The affiliate offer is irrelevant, it’s the traffic that is your bread and butter. So building solid traffic models is crucial if you are an affiliate marketer. You may focus on spending money on advertising in Google adwords, you may focus on buying banner ads across the Internet, you may focus on viral marketing in order to build up traffic through word-of-mouth like funny YouTube videos and things like that. However you do it, building traffic is the most important thing for you to focus on.

So there you have it! The most important thing to focus on in Internet marketing depending on your specialty!

I’ve seen it time and time again, in fact I’ve seen it so often it’s almost comical if it wasn’t so tragic. I call it the Internet marketing Internet marketing trap.

Okay what the heck am I talking about? No that wasn’t a typo but let’s go ahead and shorten it to the IMIM trap.

Just what is the IMIM trap? It’s fairly simple…

Somebody comes online, they look around, they realize that people are making money on the Internet and they decide that they want to make some money too. No problem so far! Then they start doing research and learning all about the different facets of Internet marketing.

They learn about building an e-mail list, they learn about the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), and they learn about auto responders and twitter and Facebook and all the other different social marketing plays…

And then they start to participate in some of the marketing forums and groups around the Internet. At first they are very quiet, they just read, watch, listen, and learn what other people are doing. But as time goes on, they become more confident in the information that they’ve learned.

They may not have actually put it to use yet, that is to say… they haven’t actually made any money or very little money at marketing, but they feel that they have a good understanding of Internet marketing. And they probably do from a technical standpoint, but that’s only half of the story because until you get into the trenches- roll up your sleeves- and actually start making money… you don’t know nuthin!

But you see, they start participating actively in the forums; they start answering other people’s questions and they might actually start to look like they know what they’re talking about. That’s when they fall into the trap, the IMIM trap, that is so devastating to so many people.

Instead of taking all of the marketing knowledge that they’ve learned, and sometimes its considerable, and going out and creating a product or service and marketing it and making money… they start to sell Internet marketing advice. They become a guru.

They’ve fallen into the IMIM trap!

Selling marketing advice is incredibly difficult. It’s a very competitive market to crack. If they had just taken all of that knowledge and gone out and tried to sell golf clubs, or birdfeeders, or anything else mundane online… they would probably have had fairly good success and spent much less work doing it.

But instead they sell marketing advice is if they know what they’re talking about when they don’t. They may make a few bucks here and there but eventually the industry kicks them out the back side and the person declares to themselves that this “Internet Marketing” stuff doesn’t actually work anyway and they go back to the regular job.

So don’t fall into the IMIM trap. Learn as much marketing as you can but then put it to use selling actual things, not marketing advice. You’ll probably make a whole lot more money, you’ll be much more happier, and you won’t have to compete with me ;-)

I started off by telling you that there are THREE main ways to make money online.

1. Build an email list and market your products or services to it.

2. Build an email list and market other people’s affiliate products or services.

3. Cash in on social networking like Twitter.

Today I want to talk about the first two ways to make money online.

Notice anything similar about them? Yep, they both involve building an email list.

Building an email list is incredibly important to internet marketing. Why? Because conventional marketing wisdom tells us that it takes a regular person 7 times of hearing about something before they decide to buy it.

That’s like an old school Robert Collier Letter Book type marketing axiom.

The problem with the Internet is that people will see your web site once and then move along to the next web site, often forgetting about you completely.

But if you get a hold of their email address first, you can continue to contact them over and over, building up a trusting relationship, and eventually persuading them to buy your products or services, or an affiliates products or services that you recommend (and earn a commission on).

Email marketing is a whole subset of Internet Marketing, and possibly the most important aspect of it. So I could talk about advanced email marketing strategies all day.

But it doesn’t have to be hard. In fact it’s easy to get started. All you need is two things.

1. An automated email followup system.
2. A good way to collect email addresses on your web site.

The first one is really really easy. You just need to sign up for an Aweber account.

Aweber is the leading email followup company on the Internet. EVERYONE uses them. Their system is super easy to use, and it’s really really cheap. They start at less than $20 bucks a month.

Go sign up for an Aweber Account right now…I’ll wait. If you can’t afford to drop $20 bucks, you aren’t really serious about making money online. And I’ll be straight with you….

You Can’t Make Money Online Without An Email Followup System like Aweber

It’s the foundation of everything else you’ll do online.

…Ok…did you sign up with Aweber yet? I’ll wait some more….

…..

…..

Ok, on to step two. You need a way to…

Collect Email Addresses On Your Web Site

You can do this by offering a free Newsletter, or creating and offering a free eBook, or any number of other things. For example, on this web site I offer a free copy of my Web Promotion 101 ebook. You get the picture.

Aweber has automated forms that you can post on your web site that help you collect email addresses. You can read their help sections for more information on the technical aspects of that.

Tomorrow I’ll share with you my own secret weapon that quadruples the number of site visitors that give me their email address…You’ll want to stick around for this!

Till tomorrow….

You have to convince people to buy something from you first!

How do you do that? You write a sales letter. You’ve probably seen sales letters online. If you think about it, most web sites are really just big sales letters.

How do you write a sales letter?

It’s not easy, and it’s not hard. It’s not easy because unless you know exactly how to do it, you WON’T MAKE ANY MONEY.

Let me repeat that

If you don’t know exactly how to write a sales letter, you will never make any money online. Not a penny.

Wait a second, you said it wasn’t hard? Are you messing with me?

Only a little. It’s not hard because once you learn how to do it, it’s pretty easy.

You with me so far? Good.

There’s a term for writing a sales letter….the term is “Copywriting”. Salesletter writing is called copywriting.

Learn copywriting and you can write your own ticket to easy money-ville. Yes the heavens will open up and money will fall from the sky. Why? Because copywriting is the art and science of convincing people to buy something from you.

Learn how to do that, and you never have to worry about anything else as long as you live.

Copywriting is a science, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it

And if you don’t learn the right way, you’re in trouble. Luckily for you, you don’t have to buy some expensive home study course or attend some thousand dollar seminar or take college classes. You just need a good book or two on copywriting.

There’s a secret in the world of Copywriting….

Yes it is a secret, but I’m going to tell you about it because I like your face! ;-) The secret is, most successful internet marketers learned copywriting from one book.

Yes, one book

It used to be out of print (it was written in the 1930’s if you can believe it!). Just a few years ago you could only find copies on ebay and they sold for $200 to $300 Dollars each!

I’m not kidding, old copies STILL go for that much today as collectors items (don’t worry though, I know a guy who reprinted them so you don’t have to drop $200 bucks to get a copy).

What’s the name of the book?

Its the Robert Collier Letter Book (Get it?? “Letter” as in sales letter). And you can grab a copy of it today for less than $30 bucks.

Remember when I said it was written back in the 1930’s? EVERYTHING was sold by letter back then…they didn’t have tv’s or radios. Print, newspapers, that’s how you sold stuff back then. And they really knew how to do it!

If you think about it, we’ve come full circle. The Internet is just a big newspaper really. Oh sure, we’re starting to see Internet Video become popular, but most web sites are still just text.

Writing that text the right way can mean the difference between you making a ton of cash online, and you heading back to that crappy job you hate with your tail between your legs.

So don’t be a fool, go buy a copy of that book TODAY. Read it, devour it, learn how to convince people to buy your stuff using the power of the written word.

Here’s just a short list of what you’ll learn in this amazing book:

1. What Is It That Makes Some Letters Pay?
2. How To Arouse That Acquisitive Feeling
3. Getting News Interest Into Your Letters
4. Word Pictures That Make People Want Your Product
5. Motives That Make People Buy
6. The Proof Of The Pudding
7. Supplying That Impulse
8. How To Put A Hook Into Your Letters
9. The Six Essentials
10. How It All Began
11. The First Olive
12. Selling $2,000,000 Worth Of O. Henry Stories
13. A World History That Sold
14. Books That Many People Know
15. How Wells’ “Outline” Was Sold
16. How The BookBuyers Saved A Campaign
17. A Giant Of The Mails
18. The Third Fifty Thousand
19. Will You Accept This Little Gift?
20. One Million Dollars’ Worth Of Orders In The First Six Months
21. Taking The Guess Out Of Advertising
22. We Help To Start A Store
23. How To Reach The Leaders
24. Collecting With A Smile
25. The Ideal Sales Letter
26. How To Raise Money By Mail

I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse

Go buy that book today and read it. If it doesn’t blow your socks off, if it doesn’t show you exactly how to write copy that sells, and if money doesn’t start falling from the sky after you’ve learned what the book has to teach you, come back here. Leave a comment below and I will BUY the book from you myself for what you paid for it at theLetterBook.com ($29 bucks I think).

Why would I do that?

I buy a bunch of those books every year to give out as x-mas presents to my best customers and clients. If you don’t love the book, I’ll buy it and give it to someone who isn’t an idiot ;-)

What are you waiting for? What’s $30 bucks versus a life of financial independence? Go now.

Questions, comment below….

]]> http://www.market-tek.com/how-to-convince-people-to-buy-your-stuff.html/feed 0 http://www.market-tek.com/webpromotion101.html http://www.market-tek.com/webpromotion101.html#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:43:24 +0000 admin http://www.market-tek.com/?p=6 Learn the tips tricks and basic strategies to drive massive traffic to your web site. Free today.

You’ve invested a lot of money and hard work into building the perfect web site. Now that it’s finished you may be wondering why no one is visiting it!

How Do You Get People To Come To Your Site? You need to learn how to successfully promote your web site online in order to drive people to your site.

Luckily, I’ve been successfully promoting web sites online for over 10 years (that’s like 50 online years!) and I’ve written a book that will teach you everything you need to know to drive thousands and thousands of people to your web site.

And I’ll give you a copy of that book today for free

But who am I to give advice about web promotion? Let me quickly introduce myself…

My name is John Alexander and I’m the CEO of
Market-Tek Enterprises, Inc. When I was 19 years old I quit college and formed one of the first Banner Advertising Exchange Web Sites on the Internet.

Less than three months later, on a budget of $0, we had facilitated over one million banner views across our network (that means our banners were seen over a million times across the Internet), and it only got better from there.

I sold the Banner Exchange Network Web Site about a year later, at the age of 20 to a public corporation

I earned enough money and stock from the sale to retire at the age of 20, but instead I took the money and formed Market-Tek Enterprises, Inc. and have been making a great living online ever since promoting web sites and selling marketing software that my new company developed.

I’ve driven millions of people to my web sites over the years.

Frankly, I know what works and what doesn’t work online. Promoting a web site is pretty easy if you just know a few simple basics. I’m going to teach you those basics today.

…and I’m going to teach you for free.

You may be asking yourself..why would I give away this book for free?

Well, for two reasons. The first, is that I’ve published the book in eBook format, so you can download it right away and read it (or print it out) straight from your computer.

Since it’s in eBook form, it doesn’t cost me anything to give it away.

The second reason is that in order to get the book, I’m going to ask that you subscribe to my weekly Web Promotion and Internet Marketing eZine. (for free)

It’s called “WebPromotion-Weekly” and it’s packed each week with great articles about promoting your web site. I share all the methods that are currently working for me, and discuss methods that don’t work at all.

Every time I learn a new way to drive traffic to my web sites, after I’ve tested it out to make sure it works, I share it with my readers.

“WebPromotion-Weekly” is regularly priced at $32.00 But I’ll even waive that fee if you sign up right now.

Just enter your first name and email address below and you will automatically be subscribed to “WebPromotion-Weekly” which comes every Monday morning to your email address.

Once you subscribe, you will automatically be redirected to your free copy of my new book “Web Promotion 101″.

You can unsubscibe at anytime.

Enjoy the free book and subscription with my compliments.

Best Wishes,

John Alexander, CEO
Market-Tek Enterprises, Inc.

TESTIMONIALS

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OK, I’m impressed. I’m not used to anyone on the net actually being helpful. Thank you for helping.
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http://www.earnmoneyonthenet.com

John,
This is the kind of help I need, tailored to my needs. I thank you a whole bunch for your words of wisdom. Thanks again:-)
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http://www.theNeedForInformation.com

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http://www.ToolmecIndustries.com

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I am very impressed with this. It’s so rare for people to follow-up or care if you’re happy with their program. Thanks!
Regards,
-Jody
http://www.precisionwest.com

It’s a fantastic program..
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http://www.silverbucklepublishing.com

Hi John,
Thanks for personally e-mailing me. I’ve been looking for a program like that for ever now. I’ll give you five stars or two thumbs up for the program! Very Cool!
-Derek Roth
http://probe74.tripod.com

Thanks a lot! That is service!!
-Ann Mulhern
Mulhern & Company Advertising Inc.
http://www.mulhernadvertising.com