Want To Earn Affiliate Income? - 3 Tips to Insure It! January 4, 2009
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , add a comment
Internet Marketing
Are you an aspiring affiliate marketer, sometimes referred to as an Internet Marketer? If so, you might consider the Three Things you need to have in place to assure success.
What are these Three Things?
The first of these ideas is to present only one offer per web page (salespage). This doesn’t mean you can’t offer bonuses on the page. Actually you should!
Focus your efforts on the product, but especially the BENEFITS of the product to your visitor. that’s really what they are considering! They are naturally concerned with what it will do for them. Make that clear.
Do you need webpage building software? FREE HERE! Folks, I was putting up pages on the first day I tried. See this post about that very day!
The second of these Three things is to get the customers name and email address. Some people say this is the single most important goal to a sales page.
The reasoning behind that is that, on average, a sale is closed on the seventh closing attempt.
That explains the miserable closing ratios in Internet marketing when you compare it to Brick and Mortar retail. In this case we expect a closing ratio of better than 1 in 10. When you compare that to the often stated average closing ratio on a sales page expressed as 1 in 100 you can easily see that you must ask them to buy MORE THAN ONCE!
And the way you do this is with name and address capture and an autoresponder!
Here’s a good tip. When you are getting the opt ins from a salespage that is promoting, for example, website software, put those opt ins on a list named “website software”
Write the autoresponder series to concentrate on the benefits of that particular web page design software and send it to that list.
The more of these “benefits of website software” messages you send, the higher your closing ratio will be.
Say you have 100 people come to your offer in one day. You could expect one sale by the 1 in 100 formula that we all hear so often. The other 99 didn’t buy but maybe 10 of them opted in to your “website software benefits ecourse”
Now you are building your list of customers interested in web page software AND by the time the 5th to 10th message reaches them you’ll have another sale or two. This is huge.
If your closing ratio is raised from 1 in 100 to 2 in 100 you have doubled your sales with the addition of an autoresponder. And you built your list!
That example is just from one day so you can see what you’d have after just one month. Cool.
Folks, I use AWeber and so does just about everybody else! It’s $20/mo. and it pays for itself in what marketing you can do with it. This baby CAN EARN you money while you sleep.
The third of these Three Things that works with the other two so well to insure success is to make certain that the traffic reaching this sales page is traffic that is interested in website software.
The two most common ways of doing this is PPC and Article Marketing.
PPC is fast and doesn’t last and Article Marketing is slower, but builds and lasts. Ideally you run both…IF you can afford the keywords. Go for two articles a week. To get that done I aim at 3 per week.
To write the right article, grab the right keywords and aim for density around 3-5%. Have your BEST keyword toward the front of the title and same for introductory paragraph.
If you apply these three things to your affiliate marketing efforts look at what you will have done.
You’ll have sales pages touting one product and it’s benefits. The traffic headed to your salespage will be sorted by your keywords to be the ones most likely to respond to the offer.
And finally, you will be building a narrow focus list and raising your closing ratio for more sales at the same time.
Do this. Get good at it. You’ll be glad you did. By the way article marketing seems hard at first but it isn’t.
By the time you can get your article on Ezinearticles and Goarticles THESE GUYS can have them up on those and several hundred other directories and ezines. It’ll cost you about $37/mo but at the end of the first month you will have VARIATIONS of your article in THOUSANDS of places.
It’s got a little learning curve at first, and I had difficulty getting into the site because of password issues that kept coming up (made me crazy!), but it’s working and I aim to make it work a lot better…by writing more narrowly focused articles on the exact keywords that lead to my offers.
Don’t try to understand it before you do it. Do it and pretty soon you’ll understand it AND you will have gotten started!
Here’s to your success,
Riley West - An Oregon Pioneer making his way in the trade.
Article Marketing For Quick Money! January 1, 2009
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , add a comment
- Article Marketing
This page will provide you a couple of nice traffic freebies and a couple of other resource links.
The object is to provide you with article marketing traffic generation to an offer sales page so that you learn the process and earn some money.
You can earn some money fast with article marketing but you have to have the set-up in place.
Here is the essence of of that deal.
You set up a sales page and autoresponder series call Free Report Jackpot.
You write a couple or three articles on the merits of free reports.
The Resource Box points to your sales page and the traffic goes there!
See how many you sell. See how many names you collect.
Now, imagine how much traffic you’d get if you let these folks submit your article to hundreds of directories and ezines AND do it eight times a month for about $37/mo. They are who I use.
Don’t jump into the auto-submission thing at first. I know it’s tempting but if you hand submit at first, until you know what it’s like, traffic will start sooner.
Infrastructure First - Offers In Place - Traffic Is Next. December 27, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , add a comment
Building Bridges
Hello Aspiring Internet Marketers!
I’m addressing this message to people who are interested in building a business online that will support them year after year and grow while doing it.
Here’s what you are going to need, beyond a computer, internet service, and a place to sit.
You are going to need a blog. You will use it as a content management system/blog combo and, you don’t know it now, but it’s super helpful in managing all your website offers. I recommend Wordpress and so does just about everybody else.
I highly and proudly recommend hostgator. I use them and I think they have the best support staff in the world! I think you should get your first domain name there and your hosting, too. Here’s why.
Hostgator comes with a ton of extras but, right now, you just want Fantastico and they give it to you at no extra charge. Fantastico will slap your Free Wordpress Blog up on hostgators servers at your domain address so fast it’s fun!
Now…I’m telling you exactly what I did to build my business. I went to Yahoo for my other domain name - rwestdotcom.com/. They make it so easy but here is the main reason to have them host your html web page offers.
I love how easy it is to fix a webpage at Yahoo. This is big! You are a beginner. There’s going to be mistakes.
Listen to this…when I spot a misspelled word on one of my webpages (and I have many and growing) I can, with one click, be right in among the files, and usually I can fix it right there. That’s without having to download the file out of Yahoo to my HTML editor, fix it, and then re - upload it.
This is a killer time saver and makes you look like a pro when you can fix a web page mistake on the fly.
So that’s me now. My blog is at Hostgator and all my HTML sheets are hanging over at Yahoo.
By the way, I have dozens of webpages selling for me on ONE DOMAIN and HOSTING plan at Yahoo. They don’t seem to mind heavy loading. Think about how much that saves you!
Here’s how that works. my domain name is www.rwestdotcom.com….if you go there it is my index page but I hardly ever use it.
But, if I want a salespage for my website tutorial I just bang out the rough draft and, with one click, I upload it to a new domain name that I just make up! Make them up intelligently so you can tell what it is from it’s file name.
It’d look like this ….www.rwestdotcom.com/websitesalespage.html and THAT is right where my website sales page resides. Go take a look. It took 5 to 10 minutes from scratch so you ought to be able to put a good sales page up in an hour or so.
I have one other piece of infrastructure that, for me is indispensable and that is my $20/mo AWeber autoresponder. This single piece of equipment is what makes it possible for your website/blog combo to sell something on automatic without you having to be there! You CANNOT do without it.
I almost forgot PayPal! Just do it. It’s so easy. You can get fancy, expensive checkout systems later when you might need them. This is how you get paid! Why not keep it simple?
Now, that’s the infrastructure. Here follows a list of other things you’ll need.
1. You’ll need a website HTML tutorial and the software. I have it for you.
2. You’ll need a blog installation tutorial to get your Wordpress Blog up at Hostgator. I have that for you.
3. You’ll need an FTP program for when you want to move a LOT of files really fast.
I have located two free FTP’s and I use one. I’m on Mac. I have them both for you here FREE! Cyberduck…and…Filezilla.
4. You’ll need an article marketing tutorial so you can learn to drive traffic to your offers and blog. No traffic no sales BUT…this is cool…blog’s attract traffic because search engines love them. Still, you need articles for great targeted traffic.
By the way, the first things I sold were the very things I used to do what I did.
If you want to see what I did go to my blog and look around a bunch. Click a ton of the links. Don’t worry, these links don’t cost me anything.
So what I am telling you is that my blog/web page combo works fine and is producing sales. You can have one just like this one. Just use all the things I did and copy me.
The only thing you can’t copy is the actual “copy” or words that I use in the way that I use them. They’re copyrighted.
And, you are going to have questions. Use me for that at riley@rwestdotcom.com.
This way works. I was shown it by my mentor at the time because he knew it worked. You are welcome to it, a proven path to sales and a growing business.
Here’s to your success,
Riley West - An Oregon Pioneer making his way in the trade
You May Be Able To Make Money Online By Yourself…But… December 22, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , 1 comment so far
Removing The Barriers
Hello again!
In the last post I detailed one of the “stumbling blocks” I have encountered in some of the “Do It This Way AND You’ll Have Big Cash In Two Weeks!” type programs.
Yes, I have fallen for the siren salespage that made it all sound so easy. Hasn’t everybody?
My main point in the last post was that they always seem to leave something out. That is…that their “step by step” plan is missing a step or two!
It seemed to me that, no matter how hard I tried to follow the plan, that I would invariably get to that place where I didn’t know how to proceed!
In my case it was when I got to the step that started with “Open a Google Adwords account.”
For a lot of folks, opening an account is achievable, but actually building an ad campaign that earns money faster that it costs money is practically impossible.
There’s too much that can go wrong, especially for beginners.
So that’s one example of a place you can get hung up and even hurt, financially, if you don’t at least have some familiarity with the “step”.
And almost all the programs that claim to be “The Way” to making money online will have these “steps,” that a lot of people won’t get past. Be it for reasons of patience or whatever people hit points they don’t want to go past. It becomes too difficult for them and they either quit or look for another way, which is going to have the same problem.
I fought that a while. When I first started looking into this it all seemed so reasonable.
You see, I’ve been in marketing a long time…say 35 years. But NOT Internet Marketing, and, naturally, it has it’s own unique methods. And tremendous growth potential.
One thing I can say for certain is that ALL the current sales techniques were being taught to me by the world’s best in the late 70’s. BEFORE we had computers we used TV, Radio, Newspaper Display ads, and most important, cheap rate snail mail. (If you’d like to read a bit about it I have a free book offer here - a book that I contributed to.) If you want just go past the sales pitch, get your free ebook which is unlike all others, and sign up to get your FREE, PUBLISHED, NO BUGS VERSION as soon as it is out.
So, I saw this problem for what it was and I decided to eliminate my ignorance of all things mechanical in Internet Marketing.
My theory is that, as long as you don’t understand the mechanics (which I often refer to as “Infrastructure”)…the specific ones you don’t understand are going to stop you.
Well, I didn’t want to be stopped.
So I joined an Online Internet Marketing School and I immediately set about learning what I didn’t know and making a list of those things I had to have down pat so that I could do what I wanted to do.
And THAT’s Direct Sales by means of the Internet. At that time I knew Direct Selling but I didn’t know Internet Marketing Infrastructure.
Prior to this I really didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Things like “Building a Web Page.” I didn’t know how to do that and was seduced by those who said, “You can make money online without a website!”
Same with blogs, only I had heard that Google loves blogs AND now, every day, I get visitors to this blog from SERP’s (search engine page results) that Google served up to their query. (the words they typed in) A blog makes Traffic!
Other things I knew very little about were simple things like Domain Names and Hosting.
I avoided FTP (file transfer protocol) for a long time because I found a harder way first that was simply loading my website files up to my Hosts servers one at a time - by hand!
I could understand that. Then I found out later that FTP is FAR easier and will do other good things for you,too. Like back up large numbers of files or just transfer them someplace. Or duplicate or delete them!
I didn’t understand the autoresponder, list building, and email marketing. (Also known as “back end sales.”
Now I was on my way but I felt I needed to understand this at a higher level and I found that higher level training in a program run by Ken McCarthy called “The System.” I go into that a bit more on my next post. It’s important.
But, before I quit today let me tell you what my goal was, besides the obvious one of understanding Internet Marketing.
I wanted an online business that made money even when I wasn’t there to watch it!
Tell me that doesn’t sound great.
Now, I know what that takes and I am doing it…if at a low level. More on that later, too.
One more thing…if I had found this PDF when I started I would be a lot further along than I am. So, go there and get that. I’ts FREE!
Once again, it’s been fun…comments welcome,
Here’s to your success,
Riley West - An Oregon pioneer making his way in the trade.
PS: More on developing skills and finding your way in the next post. - rw
What Can You Do When You Build a Site That Doesn’t work? December 12, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , 6comments
This Doesn't Work!
Hello again:
I’ve had a couple of sites that didn’t make any money. But each time I felt I got closer. I don’t know why there can’t just be a place you can go to be told why your site isn’t working.
I like the idea of Instant Site Review.com/ I don’t think that kind of thing exists.
Now it does! This unassuming little article is that place. Or one of them.
Did you ever hear that idea of doing a website about something you just really like? Well, I’m crazy about Dachshunds, so I made a big elaborate site. Took me a long time.
Turns out wiener dog words are cheap so I flooded the site with a ten dollar a day budget and a few articles.
I had a signup rate of about 15%. The list really took off!
Let me tell you that a wiener dog site is easy to do! Wonderful pictures AND I made a page where anybody could send me pictures of their dogs and themselves and I would post them up right away. That got busy!
I had CPA offers and affiliate offers and adsense and ONLY adsense paid. It paid about three bucks a day and I had $10 per day in PPC.
People liked the site, but they wouldn’t buy. I didn’t get it.
I declared the whole thing to be a great learning experience and shut it sown. Maybe, if I’d stayed with it…but I had all five of the criteria below going pretty well and it didn’t work.
Call me impatient but I bagged it.
Look at these following points of discussion about the efficacy of websites. One of these might explain why your site isn’t making any money.
Low Traffic - If no one sees your sales page you are finished right there!
You have to actually recruit visitors to the site! My favorite method is Article Marketing.
Unless you are very competent, depending on the Search Engines to bring you traffic is unlikely to ever work, and, really, you need to be proactive.
The best ways to drive traffic to your offer (site) are PPC, Article Marketing, and Web 2.0 Social Networking.
I’m still old school.
PPC bums me out, most of the time. I made $70,000 with ppc in 2007. But, it wasn’t repeatable.
Currently I have a blog. It gets traffic. More each month! I’m working on it.
I use articles to send people to my blog where I have several offers on webpages linked from the blog.
Bad Site Design - If you have traffic to your site, the next thing to look at is how visitors perceive your site.
If it looks unprofessional, if it’s tough to navigate or is a little ugly… it’s unlikely that visitors will trust you. They just won’t give you their money.
Good webpage/salespage/website design is easily and cheaply available. You can even do it yourself. Read all about it!
Bloggers can look good through nicely designed Wordpress themes and templates.
If you aren’t a blogger, consider using website template services for ideas.
But, I gotta tell you, being able to build or at least modify your own HTML websites is an absolutely invaluable skill…especially at first. Learn about it a little…it’s actually easy after you expose yourself to it for a little while.
Bad Traffic = Untargeted Traffic - This is pretty straightforward but a lot of people get it wrong. Example, if you have a wiener dog site don’t use “dogs” as a keyword, Broad, Phrase, OR Exact. You’ll pay for tons of traffic and very little of it will be interested in Dachshunds.
Watch your links! If you can send traffic somewhere (a valuable skill) DON”T make the mistake of sending them to the wrong place accidently! OMG! Yes, I did that very thing.
Short Story - A couple of years back I remodeled my main website. I also changed the URL address to a better one… I thought. I made a little typo. Check your links… then double check your links!
Because of that little typo I sent $700 worth of PPC to the 404 Forbidden Zone! You should have seen my face when I discovered that!
When selling specific items, send your traffic directly to the most relevant page on your site that gives them what they were looking for.
Copy Problems - If you send traffic to a beautiful page that promotes a specific product and it isn’t working, you may want to consider your copy!
Does the copy have spelling and grammatical errors? The kiss of death! Throw yourself down the staircase, kid…you can’t spell! How smart can you be? I should take your advice? That’s how a lot of people judge you, or the image of you…by the words you use and the way you write. This includes spelling and grammer.
Rewrite your copy to the best of your ability and then find someone to edit it. (proofread)
Good copywriting is what makes sales happen. Sell the benefits and tell your prospect how a product will improve their life.
No E Mail Follow-Up marketing? What if you did it all right? If your prospect left your site without buying…it’s OK…If you have their name and email address. And if you follow up with an autoresponder series.
Way back, when I was learning sales and marketing from the leaders at that time…they had a mantra. it went like this…
“We studied the best salespeople in America and we found that the top producers closed the sale on average on the seventh closing attempt (read… An email to the prospect)…AND…when you take into consideration that many salespeople know two closes and only USE one…then you have some idea of why there are so many peons in this business.)”
The lesson is this…If you want above average results, attempt to sell AT LEAST SEVEN times! Otherwise…accept low returns.
And, you can use your autoresponder for this!
So, EACH of the items listed above is critical to your online business success.
Here’s the nugget. Get the website, salespage, web page…whatever you want to call it… really looking good. Now, send it a lot of targeted traffic. Articles are my favorite. PPC is my next choice.
Pay attention, bank the money and then…PAY ATTENTION AGAIN! You will learn and prosper!
Oh, by the way, reconsider your offering (product)…if it’s not so hot, all the stuff above will still leave you with no sales! Don’t try to sell baldness remedies to people who are looking to lose weight. You want Targeted Traffic!
So, now you have it! Do all the above AND make sure it’s a killer converting product!
Thank you again…Go forth and prosper…and pay attention…you’ll get it.
Riley West - An Oregon pioneer making his way in the trade.
PS: Would you like a free ebook on spelling and grammer? Couldn’t hurt.
The “Basics” of Internet Marketing November 5, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , add a commentHello Again:
What are the basics of Internet Marketing? Weren’t we just talking about that?
Oh, well, the basics are always fun to review. Usually profitable, too!
I say it’s putting the right offer in front of the right people by means of the Internet.
Still, I think we can paint a little picture here that may simplify the concept of Internet Marketing for you.
Let’s say you already know how to handle getting a webpage up. Let’s put a good offer on that webpage selling something people need and want. (Two different things…need and want)
Once you have the offer up and running with an autoresponder it’s time to get down to the real business. Yes! Up until this point we were only talking infrastucture!
Infrastructure is important because it’s the “setup” that let’s you run automatically. That’s important because you can hardly do without it. But guess what “it” can’t do without.
Traffic. Better yet Targeted Traffic. People coming to your website.
Targeted traffic is when people with bald tires are shown a new tire offer.
So how do we get targeted traffic in numbers big enough to sell something. Well, what’s that, for example?
I’ve seen it so often it must be true. Conversion rates rarely exceed 5%…more often 1-2%.
So if you want to sell 10 of these things (in your webpage offer) you must get a thousand people to come to your site AND they have to be the type of person (traffic) that wants what your offer.
So traffic…Targeted Traffic is what you need to work on. Lately I’ve been getting into that and I’m starting to make some progress.
But traffic is what you need after you have your infrastructure in place! That would put you in the market for Website Creation, Offers, Hosting and Domains, and Autoresponders!
You see… until you have the infrastructure in place you don’t need traffic. Unless you are generating traffic for someone else’s offer, which happens a lot, but I’m not going there right now.
After you have the structure in place you have to get the traffic! So you can get to that place where the simplest equation describing Internet Marketing dwells.
It’s here that the money is made… Traffic + Conversion = Sales. Think about it.
You get your offer all rigged up and ready to go. You drive Targeted Traffic to it. Some of that traffic convert into sales and you are on your way. Selling and building a list.
Don’t forget about the list. Customers that have visited your site and especially those who purchased, are likely to buy from you again. Unless you fail to treat them like you would want to be treated.
If you are in need of the skills necessary for success in IM and you’d also like to see the “big picture” I recommend the Internet Marketing Kickstart Course.
If you need website skills you should see this… WEBSITE!
If you need Hosting and Domains you should see this….HOSTING AND DOMAINS.
If you need an autoresponder you should see this….AWEBER!
If you need a List of the Basics, this is Good and This is FREE!
If you need Traffic you should consider this…ARTICLE MARKETING TUTORIAL
If you’d like a blog like this one that attracts it’s own targeted traffic then you’ll want to look at this…..WORDPRESS TUTORIAL
Well, that’s pretty straightforward…which is what you get here.
That’s it for today - Thank you - Please, leave a comment!
Riley West - An Oregon pioneer making his way in the trade.
Internet Marketing Pilots Checklist October 31, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , add a commentHello again:
One of the things I really don’t like is having to do things over because I didn’t do it correctly the first time.
But we all know that Men don’t like instructions.
Still…maybe they can live with a checklist, since many of our hero’s do.
People like Pilots, Submarine Commanders. That sort of people.
Sometimes I get my infrastructure all up, files named, links out all over, etc.
And then…something is screwed up!
Have you ever had to go all the way back redoing links? I have. Watch out! It gets ugly. But you just plow through it. Maybe after a beer or two and a nights sleep.
You see, sometimes I get ahead of myself.
It happened again today and I just have to put a stop to it. It’s maddening.
30 years ago I was a pilot. I knew how to fly those planes and I did so all over the Western United States. I was proud of my expertise and skills. And I loved doing it!
And I loved the view. And the time compression. We live in Oregon and have many friends in California and Montana. We could get to the Bay Area in 2 hours. LA …2 more. Fast. But, as usual, I digress.
Right now, today, even though I haven’t flown a plane for nearly 20 years I am certain that I could just walk out on the tarmac and take off…and come back. Alive. It would be fun. I should go do it. I still have my certificate.
I might not have any passengers, tho.
One of the secrets pilots swear by is a checklist. It’s required. A forgotten check item could kill you. I used the checklist almost everytime.
Actually I only forgot once and sure enough, I took off with my seatbelt not fastened. Worse, it was hanging outside the door about 3 feet!
I didn’t notice because I had my headphones on (they call them Clarks) and I couldn’t hear the fearsome racket that was frightening the sweat and her last two years, out of my grandmother in the rear seat!)
The belt with the big old chrome buckle on it was hanging outside my door and trailing back…banging like hell on the planes aluminum fuselage. It had prop wind and ambient wind, and it was ‘rippin” at 100 miles per hour.
Grandma hated that sound and I couldn’t hear her protesting in the back seat.
So I took off the headphones and suddenly I could hear her screaming and the ungodly loud racket of the seatbelt denting the side of my plane and wrecking the paint!
Grandma didn’t get back into the plane again, and she never asked again, and I don’t think I asked her anymore. I knew. She didn’t trust me anymore.
So, I’m going to make a Checklist for Internet Marketing Infrastructure Installation.
Because I can get really fouled up!
Think of all the things you have to do to get a sales page up and some traffic headed to it. I have actually started the traffic before I was ready…oops!
Let’s see…Gotta make the Salespage. Did that.
Paypal Buy Now Buttons
Put the right url in the return to merchant button
Test that.
Gotta make the Download Page
test all the links.
Spell check
Upload it and record the addresses
Make a webform for the autoresponder.
Check that.
Put in a couple of AR units to buy time.
You know what? This list isn’t going to do. It’s not complete enough or detailed enough to be bulletproof.
So, I am going to ask you folks to leave a comment that might go like this…Riley, here’s one…”test the whole system all the way to the download page” or “Opt in and test that!” Whatever. We have all experienced getting out of order.
We’ll get together a working Internet Marketing Pilots Checklist.
By the way, this would make a saleable product to the legions of newcomers to Internet Marketing that wash up on our shores everyday.
If you had the checklist ready to go in numbers, you’d just have to stand in the right place on the beach.
Checklist. Don’t leave home without it!
Thanks again - and please, leave comments!
Riley West - An Oregon pioneer making his way in the trade.
A Killer Resource That Doesn’t Take an Arm or a Leg! October 23, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , 2commentsHello Folks:
I have bought and paid for a LOT of how to ebooks and about half of them were OK to good and a few of them were totally excellent. The totally excellent stuff is what you’ll find in the blog.
You might want to slap me around a little for not telling you about this sooner.
You see, back in the day, when I was careening from one ebook to another I fell across one book (not an ebook) that literally changed the way I saw marketing on the net. I could see clearly now. I understood. The big picture.
The man behind this is named Ken McCarthy and you would do very well to hear him. (or read him) He’s a great writer and makes it fun! But, there’s a catch. Isn’t there always?
The catch is that a big part of his information is FREE.
As it turns out this guy is one of the pre-eminent teachers of Internet Marketing Skills in the world.
I hadn’t heard of him a couple of years ago and it wouldn’t be a surprise if you haven’t either. You may not have heard of Ken but all the big name marketers have. Many of them studied under him.
Every year he has this big gathering called the System Seminar that people from all over the world come to attend. A $2500 event. Plus travel and incidentals like food.
So it’s high end stuff but it’s presented in such a way that totally sets it apart from the other things you may have read about or attended.
But I’m getting ahead of myself! Here’s the nugget! This guy hands out free information like he has to get rid of it fast!
And this information is better, often, than anything you can buy and it’s all about how to Market on the Net.
Here’s what I did. He gives out so much info in the form of mp3’s (ipod) that I just put them on my ipod and listen to them when I’m out for a walk or driving somewhere.
Each of these tapes (not really a tape but I don’t know what to call them) is about an hour long and is an interview between Ken McCarthy and one of the people who is going to be teaching their specialty at the System coming up.
What’s really great about these interviews is that they are not a pitch-fest! They are an in depth look at a certain area of Internet Marketing skills with lots of good useable, actionable tips and skills that you can take away (FREE) and use to build your business or skills or both!
I love what this man produces! I think many of you will too. This is both bedrock action info and advanced techniques that will blow you away. Exciting stuff.
Go here and sign up for the Free Pre-System Seminar. A free information series you will not regret! This will really add to your arsenal of good usable knowledge. I did it and I won’t quit doing it! It’s Free and it’s Good!
They also sell products, too. Who wouldn’t? And this Internet Marketing information is absolutely top drawer. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Go get the Free Pre-System Seminar right now and, please, come back here and tell me what you think. I’d love to hear it. As always you can email me at riley@rwestdotcom.com/
Thank you - Please leave a Comment!
Riley West - An Oregon pioneer making his way in the trade.
PS: Next Post: Get weekly lesson sessions that will take you from no where to making money.
How to Kickstart Your Way Into Internet Marketing -1 October 22, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , 2commentsThis is the first chapter in what will be a multi-chapter detailed review of the new Weekly Lesson Plan program offered by Sara Brown and Tony Shepherd. It is called The KickStart Course.
This is a training program is produced by a couple of people I have been lucky enough to work with for quite a while now, and I still do. I consider them to be very high caliber instructors of Internet Marketing processes. So far, for me, they are the best.
Plus, they are easy to get along with, these two. They are folksy to a point and approachable. What I appreciate most about these two Brits is that they are very good at making money on the web and uniquely capable of telling you how to do it, too.
There are thousands of people out in the world of “make money online” that offer plans ranging from $47 to $2000 plus that are “Guaranteed” to teach you the ins and outs of marketing on the ‘net. In my experience there are none better than than these guys.
And, their program is just plain inexpensive. it might just be “Your Way“.
Before I really get going on this I’d like to demonstrate how a seemingly simple thing can get out of hand and cause frustrated newcomers to quit in droves.
First I should admit that I have bought over $5000 worth of ebooks and instructionals and, while I learned a lot in all that study, I still had to figure out dozens of little details myself.
And some of those little details can be a deal breaker.
That’s not a bad thing. it’s just the way it is.
Case in point…one day (I might have a bad nights sleep the night before) I got into a big clustercrunch about the paypal buy now buttons.
Really! I was setting up another salespage and when I got to that part of building the page that required me to go into paypal for code, I hit a brick wall.
Now, mind you, I made paypal buy now buttons before, and successfully. It would have been funny if I wasn’t in some sort of self imposed rush. I’m self employed! I don’t have to rush very often
Anyway, I got into paypal and had trouble with the code. That drug out for a while and frustrated me a little but then…then I really hit trouble.
See, after you buy something on paypal they end you up on a return to merchant page. There is a button there that says “return to merchant” on it.
Well, it would just take you back to your sales page if you let it and I knew darn well that I wanted my customer to go to the download page when he/she punched the button.
I couldn’t figure out how to do it! I couldn’t find the place in paypals extensive site that allows you to assign the “return to merchant” button a url that has your download page on it.
Simple if you can find it…impossible if you can’t.
No problem…I called paypal help! By the way that is a feat unto itself. They make finding the phone number damn near impossible and when you do find it and call you are looking at a pretty good wait!
I can practically recite their “Your phone call is important to us..blah,blah…” spiel.
Finally I got a gal who was hard to understand. Her English was a heck of a lot better than my second language is but I still had to have her repeat herself over and over.
As I tried to explain to her what I was hung up on she had to keep putting me on hold while she ran and asked someone who might know. What a horrible job. I felt sorry for her and kinda mad at the same time!
After a LOT of that, the gal came back online with an answer I knew she was reading. The essence of the answer was that there was “No way to achieve changing the url on the return to merchant page unless you resort to a custom software developer!”
I sort of raised my voice a little and said “There sure as hell is a way! It’s done all the time and even I have done it before but I guess I forgot which trapdoor to fall into.” She just read me the same answer over again..like I didn’t get it.
I said again “There is a way and it’s simple and I just can’t find it! The fact that it’s easy and you can’t even help me with it is mind bending! Can’t Paypal do better than that?
She read me the answer again! I hung up before I said something untoward.
I gave up. I had a snack. Drank a beer or two. Watched a movie. Went to bed.
I got up in the morning and said something like this to myself “I’m getting past this stupid button thing! I’ve got things to do!
So I called them again. I got a gal who was little easier to understand. Things were looking better.
I told her I couldn’t find the place to change the url in the return to merchant button.
Without hesitation she said “That’s under the profile dropdown.” There will be three columns of preferences and that feature is in the third column. It’s down toward the bottom and it’s called “website payment preferences”
I haven’t had a problem since. But that was a toughie and it shouldn’t have been.
I would bet , like a lot of other little details, that some fledgling marketers would throw up their hands and walk out mad determined to stick with their job.
Internet Marketing has lots of little details like that. I know for a fact that stops a lot of folks from getting anywhere. They just give up.
Don’t let that be you. You can learn any of the mechanical stuff like building webpages and uploading files and setting up autoresponders. You may have trouble with copy writing…some do. But you can find a workaround for copy writing.
But I think what kills off so many prospective Internet Marketers is that they just couldn’t get to that point where they could see it all, how it works, and put it together.
And that’s what I want to talk about over the next few posts because something has occurred that can change the rocky process of learning to a more calculated and smoother progression of improvement.
This is a training program that was produced by a couple of people I have been lucky enough to work with, and still do, that I consider very high caliber instructors of Internet Marketing processes. So far, for me, they are the best.
Their style of instruction works for me better than anything else I’ve done and I’ve done a LOT!
I could go on and on about how much I like the info products I have purchased from these folks, Sara and Tony in Great Britain. And I will! But not here now. This post is getting too long.
I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll pick up where we left off with a detailed review of their new product! It could be just the thing for you. If you’d like to visit the site and familiarize yourself with what I consider to be a groundbreaking new development please do so.
Thanks again - Please leave a comment!
Riley West - An Oregon pioneer making his way in the trade
The 10 Basic Things You Need for Successful Internet Marketing. October 20, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , 3commentsHello Folks:
Before we get into the meat of this days discussion I’m going to give you a link to free PDF called “Ten Basic Things You Need for Successful Internet Marketing.
Look at it when you get a chance. If you are looking to get into Internet Marketing you need to know what these “ten basics” are! Plus, if you purchase the PLR rights, you can put your own affiliate links into the document, Pass them around FREE and you’ll get some link pops from the people you give this to and who in turn, check out one of your links and ends up buying. This is a money-maker.
So here it is…“The Ten Basics…..”
And now todays post…
Did you ever go fishing without the bait? Did you ever try without hooks? Or a line?
You can’t fasten down your handlebars without a bolt. Or a wrench of some sort.
It’s hard to do anything without the right tools!
I could go on. I just want you to understand that there are some basic ingredients to Internet Marketing that you really can’t do without.
OK. Enough! You want to know what the ten basic things are that you need to know to be able to successfully market via the internet.
In order to have an article here that doesn’t get way too long I am going to put links into the list for additional information and resources.
With no further ado…here we go…
1. You must understand what IM is, it’s various forms, it’s jargon, and have a little grasp of the lay of the land. It’s made up in part with Affiliate Sales, Selling your own product, E mail marketing, and sales of physical products to name the most well known.
2. One really must be able to make up a simple website for themselves.
3. A beginning marketer should know what a domain name is, and how to get one. The same goes for hosting. That’s the outfit that will put your webpage up on the web with your domain name as it’s address. In this catagory you must know how to upload the files you need to make that website appear on their servers. That would be FTP software. You need to learn about that. I recommend hostgator. It’s the one I use and it has great support!
4. A student of Internet Marketing (IM) has to know about automatic email followup sales campaigns. I use Aweber. It’s the best. Almost everyone uses it. Great tutorials! Only $19.95/mo. Worth three times that.
5. You need to understand what keywords are and how to work a simple keyword tool so that Google (or someone else) can show you the keywords. Other terms for keywords are “keyword phrase”, ” long tail keywords”, or even “search query”. Additionally, you should open a Google account. It’s free and has so much cool stuff that it is a killer resource.
6. You need to know how to drive traffic to your website. You can learn all about that here. Otherwise it will just sit there, unvisited. There are various methods. One of the most popular is writing articles. When I first heard of this I was intimidated. After I had learned how to write and submit articles it was easy and it caused traffic to come to my salespages.
7. You certainly would want to know how to let people pay you for what you offer and how to collect it. (It’s automatic) Start with Paypal.
8. One should get a blog started. They are easy to do and sometimes they can substitute for a website and/or drive traffic to a website. I recommend Wordpress hosted on your account. It’s FREE!
How I did it: I signed up for Domain and Hosting at Hostgator. They are great to deal with and have the very best customer support I have encountered. That alone is BIG!
They also include a free program called Fantastico. It will install your wordpress blog effortlessly. When you get that done email me at riley@rwestdotcom.com and I will email you an ebook For FREE that tells you how to set up your blog for maximum traffic. Works for me at 24 Hour Wordpress Guru.
Tip: Don’t fall for the free hosting Wordpress offers (Or Blogger) When you have your own name and hosting you are in control. Wordpress hosting does not allow sales pages and affiliate links.
I tried it once (because it was free) and they caught me right away and sent me packing!
9. FTP! File Transfer Protocol. What a name! Someone is just trying to sound geeky. Don’t worry about it. It’s totally easy. Way easier than doing it by hand! (Yours truly tried to hang on to the old ways but finally got dragged into the 21st Century)
Use it to upload files to your hosting servers so your webpages can be on the net. There’s lots of them for sale. I use a free one! Cyberduck. Yes Cyberduck…odd name… FREE! Works Great!
For the PC/Windows crowd there is FileZilla! It’s FREE too! I’m not sure why but EVERYBODY freaks at the idea of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) At First. I guess it sounds hairy…but it’s NOT!
FTP Makes the whole process of uploading and downloading files darn near effortless! Now, I LIKE that!
10. Maybe you are one of those folks who want to be taken by the hand and carefully led down the path to Internet Marketing Success.
I don’t blame you! If this had been available when I started (and I knew about it) I would have gone this route for sure!
It’s the Internet Marketing KickStart Course! I recommend it highly.
If I had this list and the information and resource links within I would have gotten off to a lot better start.
Thank You,
Riley West - An Oregon pioneer making his way in the trade.
PS: This Report/List will stay about the same but the links to further information and resources will grow. Check back now and then.
You can download this list in the ever Popular PDF form and give it away or use as a bonus!!
It is for your personal use only. You are authorized to give it away or use as a bonus. You can not alter it in any way. You must preserve the links within.
If you would like Master Resale Rights to this list so you can sell it, give it away, put your links in it and modify it in any way you want just hit the paypal button and cruise through to the download page. It is only $7 and it comes with HTML, Source doc, license, and rights list. It’s a no brainer. You won’t get rich but you sure as heck won’t go broke, either. My recommendation…use it to get paid to compile a list! ie They Opt-in for the Free Report and now they have your links and you have their name and you KNOW what they are interested in, don’t you?
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