Tips, Tricks and Tales From My Internet Marketing Journey

The persuasiveness of your salescopy is the single most important factor in determining your success as an online marketer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how good the product is, if the copy sucks then so will your conversion rate.

With this in mind, I’ve compiled a list of the 7 best copywriting websites I’ve found online. They’re all free to access (although one or two require you to opt-in) and should prove invaluable in helping you write better copy for the web.

Here they are…

1. Copywriters Board - Michel Fortin’s copywriting forum. This is an excellent starting point to learn how to write great copy. If you’re feeling brave you can even get your own salesletter critiqued by experienced copywriters’s.
2. Clayton Makepeace’s Total Package - Copywriting tips and examples from a collection of top copywriters including Robert Bly and Yanik Silver, aswell as Makepeace himself.
3. The Gary Halbert Letter - A treasure trove of direct marketing gems from the late great copywriting legend. Dive in, explore and learn.
4. Copywriters Library - Another Michel Fortin site with reports, books and audio interviews with legendary direct marketing copywriters, John Carlton and Gary Halbert.
5. MichelFortin.com - I swear I’m not being paid by this guy! But this is a great blog, choc-full of useful copywriting tips and articles.
6. Bly.com - Find dozens of copywriting and direct marketing articles by one of America’s top copwriter’s, Robert W. Bly. He is also the author of a wonderful book I’m currently reading, the “The Copywriter’s Handbook“, which is an absolute gem for anyone interested in learning to write persuasive copy for the web.
7. BenSettle.com - Copyriting tips, free swipe files and expert Interviews with the likes of Ray Edwards, Doug D’Anna and Ryan Healy amongst others.

There you go. Check them out and let me know what you think by posting a comment below.

I‘ve just read on John Thornhill’s blog that eBay will be banning the direct selling of digital items such as ebooks, audio mp3’s, domain names etc from March 31st 2008.

Sadly and quite arrogantly, eBay have deemed it necessary to only give a weeks notice on a policy that will dramatically affect the businesses of hundreds of sellers.

Targeted Campaign

The justification for the digital item announcement was that many ebayers were only buying/selling digital items to pad their feedback rating. This new policy will obviously eradicate that problem. It also appears to be part of a targeted campaign by eBay against feedback abusers, coming hot on the heels of their hugely controversial announcement to stop sellers leaving feedback for buyers.

Unfortunately, the business model of many vendors is to sell low-priced ebooks to generate leads and then upsell the buyer to higher priced items.

That model no longer exists.

It will however still be possible to market digital delivery items using eBay’s Classified Ad format. It costs $10 for a 30 day listing and allows you to link back to, and process payment from, your own website rather than through eBay. As nothing is bought or sold on eBay itself, no feedback mechanism is provided.

Also the ad stays up for the full 30 days so you can generate multiple leads/sales from the one ad.

Physical Products

The other alternative is to create physical products by burning ebooks to CD and delivering them by regular mail. Although the instant gratification of receiving an ebook within minutes will be lost, this may well be the way forward for many marketers.

Still, the biggest lesson to take out of this is never to place your entire business model at the mercy of one company.

Major developments are afoot at Clickbank which will have huge implications for affiliates and merchants alike.

The first announcement, and effective immediately, is that merchants can now offer their products in the Spanish language.

The Spanish speaking market is obviously huge. The US alone is home to more than 40 million Hispanics and worldwide Spanish is the first language of over 330 million people. So this new feature should massively expand the market for existing and new Clickbank products.

More Languages To Follow

Support for other languages is already in the pipeline with French and German expected to be next.

The other important announcement is that work is underway to allow order payments in currencies other than the US dollar. No doubt, many non-US merchants will be delighted, given the greenback’s plummeting value right now.

It’s unclear yet if this feature will also enable merchants to charge in the buyers local currency, by using ip tracking to detect the purchaser’s location.

You can read more about the first phase of what Clickbank has ever-so-modestly titled Project Globalization here

The word “Free” has become so overused in webcopy now that it’s lost much of it’s ability to convert visitors to subscribers. That’s the conclusion of David D’Anna in his latest post over at Clayton Makepeace’s wonderful copywriting blog.

To a large degree I think he’s right. The mere fact that something is FREE in todays hyper-competitive online marketplace no longer counts for much. As some marketers have abused their lists with offer after offer, surfers have understandably become more choosy who they hand out their email details too.

That’s why it’s imperative to offer huge value in your opt-in offer and then deliver on what you’ve promised. The benefits and value of your offer should be so obvious and compelling, the fact it’s FREE should barely matter.

The really smart marketers out there will tell you the same.

Lee McIntyre for instance, is almost evangelical about building strong relationships with his lists and web visitors by giving away value-packed original content . And he’s proven it works with a string of successful product launches and lucrative affiliate promotions.

So by all means, give stuff away free. Just don’t expect it to be enough by itself. Your offer has to be top-notch too.

Well after procrastinating for far too long, I’ve finally published the very first edition of my monthly online marketing newsletter. I hope it’s worth the wait…I’ll let you be the judge!

In it I reveal a viral marketing strategy I’ve been using with some success for a few months now to generate ongoing traffic, build niche lists and create passive backend income. I’ve layed out the whole step-by-step process (which is very easy!) and it really does work.

The best part is that you just do the work once, but the traffic, leads and income lasts indefinitely.

As it’s the very first edition, I’ve decided to make it available without requiring you to opt-in so the entire newsletter is viewable from the home page. You can read it here.

And I’d love to receive your feedback afterwards so please feel free to post a comment below.

Jack Humphrey has just released his 2008 version of the Authority Black Book, the Social Marketing Resource Guide.

Last year’s edition was downloaded over 40,000 times and provided some of the best hands-on advice for generating massive traffic to your blog or website using the power of social marketing.

It’s 67 pages of actionable content and resources and well worth checking out. You can download it free from here.

I‘ve just installed a very handy Wordpress plugin called Comment Luv after reading about it over at the Friday Traffic Report.

It encourages your blog visitors to post high quality comments by automatically putting a link back to the visitors last blog post.

Ofcourse, you’ll need to monitor the quality of comments closely to ensure they genuinely contribute to the conversation and aren’t just lame attempts to get a backlink.

However by default CommentLuv sets all the links to nofollow which should help keep the spammers at bay.

There seems to be a lot of positive feedback about this plugin and hopefully it will encourage more visitors to post comments and give this site more of a community feel.

Btw, if you don’t already have a Wordpress blog, plugins like this are just another reason why you should start one as soon as you can.

Anyway, check out Comment Luv below by adding your comment to this post.

In January 2007 I attended one of Robert Puddy’s half-day UK workshops here in my hometown of Bristol. It was a good decision because without a doubt, I learnt more about online marketing in those 4 hours than I did in the whole of the previous year.

The biggest lesson I learnt was that making money online is as much about building business relationships as anything else. In particular, Robert stressed that you shouldn’t just see other marketers as competition but as potential JV or even long term business partners.

And in fact if you check out Robert’s latest blog post Snowing In Indiana, wish I wasn’t here you’ll see a great example of this in action.

You’ll see that Robert and his business partner Pat Lovell are merging AdsenseRealEstate with Sean Roach’s Rip2It to create a brand new service.

How did this business partnership come about?

Answer…after Robert invited Sean to speak at his BritpackUK Seminar in Coventry in September 2007.

Building A Bigger Business

The three of them got talking over a few beers, realised their services could complement one another and decided to team up.

Now they’re building an even bigger business together than they ever could have created by themselves.

A true win-win situation.

However, that opportunity would probably never have come about if they hadn’t met face to face.

People don’t do business with anonymous names hiding behind computer screens, but marketers they know, like and trust.

Work Together

That’s why it’s so important to start meeting other marketers and build relationships by attending seminars or local Internet Marketing workshops.

Introduce yourself to people and find out how you can work together.

It might be you can help each other through integration marketing (for example, promoting to each other’s lists), or if you both have different skillsets. For example, if one of you has html or php coding skills and the other is great at creating graphics, you can exchange services.

Who knows, you may even find your next JV or business partner.

The point is, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can do it all from behind your PC.

Internet Marketing is still a people business.

I‘ve just read a fascinating post by UK Internet Marketer Frank Haywood about the SEO strategies he’s used to climb the Google Search Results for an extremely competitive search term.

For anyone using Wordpress in particular, his post contains tons of valuable advice regarding which plugins to use and how to fully optimise your blog.

But what I found particularly noteworthy was how Frank used the post as a list building strategy.

Here’s how he did it…

1. A few days ago, he made a regular post revealing that he’d managed to climb from page 30 of Google to page 19 for the keyphrase “Internet Business” in just 2 months. Now that may not seem like any great shakes until you consider that search term is highly competitive with over 19,400,000 competing webpages on Google.
2. In the same post he promised to reveal the exact SEO tips he used to improve his ranking in a future password-protected post (made today) but only for anyone signing up to his blog notification list.
3. He then password protected the new strategy-revealing post (using the Post Password functionality in Wordpress’ Write Post admin area on his blog). The post title however is still viewable to anyone arriving at his blog.
4. After posting, he sent a broadcast message out to everyone on his list to let them know the password.
5. Frank then offered to provide the password for $10 (which is money well spent in my opinion) to anyone not already on his list.

It’s certainly a novel approach for a blog. I havn’t seen it anywhere else which is surprising given how easy it is to password-protect posts in Wordpress.

I wonder if we might see a trend towards this type of subscriber-only or pay-per-view posting in the future?

What do you think? Post a comment below and let me know