The Keen Marketer

If you’ve got traffic coming to your site, you’re 99% there. Of course you also need to have a valuable offer for your visitors – a reason for them to transact with you. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. The important thing is getting the traffic and sustaining it.

How, then do you get traffic to your site?

Here’s a short list of great, free traffic generating methods:

• Web 2.0 Methods
• Articles Directories
• Video

And here’s how to use each method…

Web 2.0 Methods

The term “Web 2.0″ is associated with websites that facilitate interactive information sharing and collaboration in a social media setting. What this means for you is that you can join into the community and add your own content. The other interesting thing about these sites is that all the search engines (including Google) treat them as “authority sites”. The benefit of this to you is that your content is now considered as part of these sites. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong “vote” in favor of your sites – lending you credibility in the search engines. That’s the real benefit of adding content to this sites – search engine ranking means ongoing free traffic. Getting free web 2.0 traffic is a big topic that we’ll discuss more later. This is good overview of the reason to get into it, though.

Article Websites

The natural next topic is article marketing. This is because article websites are really web 2.0 site. Just like web 2.0 sites, article websites allow you to upload your own content – as articles. And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. And in addition to this, other users can take your article and place it on their own website. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you – so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. If you want to generate traffic from articles follow these steps:

• Do your keyword research
• Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
• Use anchor text links in the article and the “resource box”

Video Marketing

Our discussion would not be complete without talking about video. Just like article directories, video sharing sites also rely on user-generated content. And just as article directories give you great SEO benefits and allow others to redistribute your content on their sites. video sharing sites give you all these same benefits. And in addition to this, because Google and the others love video so much, you can get listed for highly competitive keywords much more easily.

Here’s how to get free traffic using video…

• Set up your YouTube account
• Turn off all the modules in your account profile
• Use the tags in your profile to enter the keywords you want to rank for
• Include a link to your main site in your profile
• Add 1 or more videos to your profile
• In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Summary:

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.

Let’s talk about niche selection. This is very important to ensuring the profitability of your membership website.

First – Look for Fanatics

The first step in developing a profitable membership business is to find a market with fanatics in it. Fanatic is defined as someone with an irrational enthusiasm. These are the people you’re looking for because they are so enthusiastic they’re willing to spend money on their topic of fanaticism. Here’s how to find fanatics:

• One simple idea that’s easily forgotten is to scan the magazine racks when you’re out and about. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to run a print magazine. So if you see one on the shelves you know they are making money, which means that there are enough people interested in what they’re saying to make it profitable. If they can make money in a print version, you can probably make money with a membership website.
• You’ve got lots of opportunities every day to see what people are interested in. Just pay attention to what people talk about on the radio, at social gatherings, at the store or restaurants and anywhere in public. If people are talking about something, they probably want to know more about it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
• Again, looking in the physical world for clues you can tell there are lots of people interested in something if there are clubs and organizations around the topic. By the same token, if enough people are interested to hold a convention on a certain topic, you can definitely find enough people to build a membership business around that same topic.
• And of course there are all the things you have an interest in, too! Chances are that if you like a certain topic or hobby, other people do, too. And, as an added bonus, it’s much more fun to build a business around things you’re interested in.
• Google Trends. This is a great way to figure out what people are interested in. This service shows you the current most popular search terms. The reason people are searching Google for info on these topics is because they are interested. And the fact that it’s made it into Google Trends tells you LOTS of people are interested. Building a membership business around things people are actively searching for is a great way to ensure your success.

Next – Figure out if there’s money in it

Once you found a potential niche or topic to center your membership site around, you need to figure out if you can actually make any money in it. One way to figure this out is to see if others are making money in it.

Here’s a punch list for figuring out if anyone’s making money in your niche:

• Find out if there are blogs or forums related to it. Just search Google for “YourNiche blog” & “YourNiche forum” and see what comes up. This means there is a large group of people already assembled for you to market to.
• Check Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping to find out if others are making and selling products in your niche. If other people are creating and selling products in this niche, it means there is money to be made.
• Look at Google Adwords for the same ads are running over time. If people are running the same ad over time it means they are making money in the niche. They would not continue to spend money on the ads if there were not making a return from them.

Finally – Figure out your barrier to entry

OK, so you found a hot topic and you know other people are making money on it. Will you be able to get involved and do the same? Here’s how to make this determination:

• Look at the product types in this niche. You want to find a niche where information products are being sold as the norm. The easiest membership website to create and maintain are information membership sites.
• The next thing to look at is the competition. You don’t want to try to break into a saturated marketing, so figure out how many people are already selling in this niche.
• Unless the market is just so big that it doesn’t matter how many competitors there are, you want to limit the competition. So evaluate the size vs. the competition.
• Market readiness. Are people ready to buy? Are the receptive to marketing messages? Every market is different. Sometimes people are looking for information and are ready to pay for it right now. And sometimes it takes weeks, months or even years for them to make the decision to purchase.

In Summary

So far, we’ve talked about exactly what it takes to pick a great niche: One with a hungry crowd of fanatics, who are ready to spend money on information about their topic. And you’ve determined your barrier to entry is small enough to give it a go. If you’ve done your homework, your business will be a success because you already know your market is a profitable one with room for you. Learning how to run a membership website is a topic for another article…

Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

Traffic is useless . . . unless…

Before you begin trying to get traffic to your site, you need to do your keyword research first. Why? Because you have to target these keywords if you are to have any hope of actually generating traffic for them. Which means you need to put some thought into the keywords you’re targeting.

While doing your keyword research, keep the following in mind:

• Are the keywords you’re interested in attainable? This involves doing some competitive analysis to determine the ease of entry for each keyword
• What kinds of visitors do these keywords bring? Certain keywords are good for generating a lot of visitors who don’t buy anything. What you want is buyers!
• Will these keywords bring affiliates? If you want to build a huge business, you’re going to need affiliates to help you. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

Although this is an essential step, doing it all by hand can take a very long time. And hiring an expert is very expensive. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. The smartest marketers use training from people they trust to learn how to do SEO it right the first time around. Using a tool like this speeds up the process and improve your results, too!

Only then can you start getting traffic

Now that you’ve completed your keyword research, you can begin using these keywords to get traffic to your website.

Here are a couple of clever ways to do this…

• Something you may not have ever considered is Surveys
• “Traffic Traps”
• Video Sharing Sites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. And if you make it interesting, other people will post your survey on their website. They benefit by getting free content for their site and you get a link to your site under the survey. This allows you to get free website traffic from other people’s sites! Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. So, get creative and make up a survey that’s wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.

“Traffic Traps”

These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. Once again, the main reason for this site is not the reason you’re interested. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. One thing you can do is to visit sites like Craigslist and Yahoo! Answers and manually extract contact info to contact other users. The good news is that it’s easy to find website traffic software that can do this automatically. This allows you to do the things in your business that can’t be automated and let the software just give you the leads.

Video Sharing Sites

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! So don’t miss out of this incredible source of free website traffic.

And don’t worry if you don’t have any idea of how to make a video. You can even take a webpage or article that you’ve written. Then just do a screen capture of yourself going through it. I’ve even seen software that will automatically convert an article to a video!

In Closing

Figuring out how to get some visitors to your site is not hard at all. Just be a creative and think outside the box a bit. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you and a lot of great free training.

So, start right now and:

• Keyword research first is key
• Set up some viral surveys
• Make sure to use the “answer” sites
• And definitely include video sharing sites

Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies

If you want to get started quickly and easily in internet marketing, then affiliate marketing is for you. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just refer visitors to someone else’s website, they do all the hard work of making the sale and supporting the customer, and you keep 50% or more of the sales

These are some of the benefits

1. You can get started really quickly because you don’t have to make a product, set up a website and sales page, design the website, create marketing materials, or get a merchant account and CRM.
2. It’s completely hands-free for you because the product owner does all the hard work of support, maintenance and billing.
3. There’s no risk for you, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

Obviously affiliate marketing makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!

OK, but it’s not all rosy…

You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner’s website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

It’s simple: You must get your visitors’ email addresses before you send them to the product owner’s website. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a content mini-site in between.

Here are the benefits of doing affiliate marketing like this:

1. By building your own list, you’re creating a renewable resource that you can tap again and again for instant profits.
2. You’ll be warming them up by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

1. A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
2. One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
3. A multi-part email series with at least 5 emails in it

You’ll use the squeeze page as the place to send your visitors instead of using the product website. This page is where you collect your visitors’ contact info and add them to your autoresponder, which in turn starts sending them the multi-part email series. Once your visitors have been subscribed to your email series, they are sent to your content pages.

The content pages provide valuable information for your visitors and make them more receptive to the sales message that you’ll link to from inside the content. And even if they don’t buy on the first visit, your email series sends them back to the product sales page again and again to increase your sales.

There’s no doubt that it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more. And after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page.

Someone new to affiliate marketing might want to create his/her own website that is simple but is created right the very first time around. For that to happen, the foundation has to be laid properly and it’s not just a create and post affair. There are specific steps that have to be taken for your site to be found.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. These kinds of services will build the whole system for you and then just give you a video squeeze page (with video), pre-written emails, content pages, etc. The major benefit of using a service like this is that you can get started right away, and for a whole lot less than it would cost to do it all yourself. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to “outsource” each of these compnents. Whichever way you decided to go, it’s critical to get the right website creation training in place, if you’re at all serious about your business.

Niche marketing does require a good amount of research in order to locate markets that have both demand and profit potential.

Admin: no doubt niche marketing is where it’s at otherwise one gets lost in the crowd. However a great portion of niche marketing is branding yourself so you can stand out from your competitors in that niche. This takes insider knowledge but does not have to be costly or hard to do with the right information.

On the other hand when you do find the niche that contains these ‘essentials’ the research time and effort usually prove to be a worthy investment! Working within these normally tiny niches is often considered the best online marketing strategy due to the lack of competition. These tiny, remote and sometimes hard to find internet business opportunities however offer a few other benefits that can significantly contribute to your success as well!

Here are 3 advantages you will enjoy due to a lack of competition when you find and work within any of these ‘remote’ internet business opportunities commonly called niches.

Build Relationships Faster

In much smaller markets it is a lot easier to be heard over the ‘noise’ of the crowd which therefore allows you easier access and more of it with others in the niche. This results in you being able to build relationships with people much more quickly which is a very valuable intangible that helps to increase your marketing effectiveness.

Bigger Profit Margins

By virtue of facing less competition in any market it is much easier to enjoy larger profit margins. If you have something to offer that is not all that common, which is generally the case when working small markets, you can command a higher price. This is the most common motivation for anybody to do the necessary research required to uncover these small internet business opportunities.

Establish Credibility Faster

Establishing credibility online takes time and can be hard to do but when you are able to successfully do this it is like money in the bank. Establishing this type of credibility is easier to accomplish in niches since you have greater access to people and presumably are supplying them with helpful information. As they come to view you more as an authority figure your influence will grow making all your marketing efforts easier and much more effective!

Niche marketing is considered possibly the best online marketing strategy to employ due to the lack of competition normally found in niches. Having to not expend as much of a promotional effort as you would in the much larger markets is always a ‘crowd pleasing’ attraction.

Other benefits you can also expect to experience when the niche you are working offers little competition are also significant in nature as reviewed above! These advantages contribute directly to not only your income but also to valuable intangibles such as credibility and customer relationships which are hard to develop online. In fact such intangibles will continue to follow you throughout your internet journeys remaining a factor in your future successes as well!

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About the Author:
TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina. To learn more about the many advantages of niche marketing and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques for your online marketing needs simply visit:http://blogbrawn.com/
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