Tips, Tricks and Tales From My Internet Marketing Journey

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.

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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

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I‘ve often thought about surveying my lists for feedback and product creation ideas. But the apparent hassle of setting it all up had put me off.

That was until the other day when I came across this great little video tutorial about how you can now survey your customers using Google Docs and a Mailing List.

In a nutshell, Google Docs have added new form functionality so you can create surveys or polls in no time. Whilst it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of specialised scripts like SurveyMonkey, it’s more than adequate and a great way to quickly gather feedback.

If you want to see an example, I’ve created a quick multiple-choice questionnaire here. The whole thing probably took me no more than 30 minutes to create.

Feel free to fill it out. It should only take a couple of minutes and eveyone who does will be entered into a free prize draw to receive 1 of 5 copies of my brand new product (more details soon) when it launches in April.

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Every month I attend a meeting of the Bristol Internet Marketing Mastermind Group.

It’s a meeting of fellow marketers from the South West of England and we get together to discuss what we’re working on, form business partnerships and learn new tricks of the trade.

Anyway, we had our last meeting a few days ago, and I picked up a useful traffic generation tip which I thought I’d pass on.

Here it is…

Say you want to get traffic to your blog or static website. Not an unlikely scenario I’m sure you’ll agree! Well, a good way to do that is to make useful and interesting comments on the high traffic blogs in your niche.

Ofcourse, it stands to reason that the first comments posted are the most read as they’re directly underneath the blog post itself. The problem then is how to track all the related blogs for new posts so you can be one of the first to comment.

That’s where Comment Sniper comes in…

It’s a neat little desktop app created by organic traffic expert Duncan Carver that notifies you whenever a new post has been made on a related blog.

You simply configure it to monitor the specific blogs you’re interested in and Comment Sniper does the rest.

As soon as it spots a new post, it flashes up a little message on your desktop (or it will send you a SMS text message using Skype if you prefer), so you can rush over and be the first to comment. Keep doing that over a period of time and you’ll soon have numerous quality backlinks pointing back to your blog.

A handy feature built-in to the software is the Blog Search utility. Just enter a niche topic and it will search all the major search engines for related blogs. It even displays their Alexa and Google Page Rankings so you can assess their worth.

Comment Sniper is 100% free, although you do have to register. Give it a try and let me know what results you get by making a comment below.

I’ll be tracking my results too and post my findings in a few weeks time.

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Ok, I have another fantastic freebie for you today, a video tutorial showing how to create your own squeeze page in minutes using nothing more than your trusty old notepad text editor!

Yep…no WYSIWYG editors here!

It’s a great primer for anyone wanting to learn how to design a squeezepage quickly. It will also save you a ton of money if you currently hire web designers to create them for you.

Plus if you’re still using nested tables for your layouts (shame on you…lol!), then this video will show how incredibly easy tableless designs are to build.

The video itself is just over 30 minutes long and broken down into 8 sections.  I’ve also included a clickable index so you can easily go back to any part of the video if you need to re-watch it.

It’s completely free, though you will need to subscribe (on my squeeze page ofcourse!) to access it.

Anyway, I hope you like it. Why not let me know by posting your comments below.

Check out the Squeezepage Creation Video now.

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Something I’ve realised over the last year is that being successful online is as much to do with having the correct attitude and mindset as anything else.

Like any new venture, there’s a steep learning curve involved and it can often be a frustrating experience. Particulary as the daily bombardment of marketing messages tends to make you feel like you’re the only one left not making a buck.

So anyway, I’ve been thinking about why many marketers find it difficult to make money online. Here’s my top ten reasons…

1. Spending too much time reading, learning, buying, watching and
   not enough time DOING.
2. Not taking your marketing efforts seriously enough.
3. Not focusing your efforts on a marketing system (whether it be adwords, bum marketing, blogging or whatever) for long enough to see results. Often this is because you get distracted by the ‘next big thing’ product being promoted by all the so-called ‘guru’s’.
4. Because there are so many ways to make money online, it becomes almost impossible to know where to start. So you end up doing nothing.
5. Lack of perseverance. You start off thinking earning money online is easy (because everyone else seems to be doing it) and quickly become disillusioned and give up when it dawns upon you that it actually takes hard work and dedication.
6. Directing all your efforts into a niche that is either unprofitable, or you lack the knowledge to make profitable.
7. Not setting up your online business in the right way to be profitable from the outset.
8. Lack of a clearly laid out route to success.
9. A failure to set practical, achievable, specific goals. This ties in with number 8 somewhat.
10. Being uncomfortable asking customers for money or not charging enough to make it a worthwhile enterprise.

Perhaps some of those ring true with you? I know I’ve been guilty of most of them at one point or another.

So if you do recognize yourself in that list, atleast take heart from the fact you’re not alone. And remember, it’s never too late to change bad habits or direction if necessary.

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In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been busy beta testing a brand new software script called Quick n Easy Sales Pro .

It works around the concept of creating offers for your customers rather than standalone products and the script, which you install on your webhost, automates the entire sales process. It handles everything including the creation of your sales pages, one time offers, upsells/downsells, product delivery and affiliate payments.

The creator of Quick n Easy Sales Pro is Debbie Figg and I got the chance to learn more about the benefits of the product when I interviewed her a few weeks ago. Just click the download link below to check it out. The recording volume, particularly at Debbie’s end, is a little low, so you may need to increase it on your computer.

So far, it looks really good but I’ll post a full review soon. In the meantime, Debbie’s also put together a free report called 7 Ways To Create Great Irresistible Offers which explains more.

Download the audio here

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Last month, I attended my very first Internet Marketing Seminar, Robert Puddy’s BritPackLive event near Coventry in the UK.

I learnt about it after I met Robert in January, at one of his half-day workshops. Fortunately, he happened to be holding one in my home town of Bristol. I soon discovered why…it was Robert’s home town too!

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You may not have heard of Lee McIntyre yet but he’s undoubtedly one of the most talented internet marketers in the UK.

The 27 year-old former schoolteacher from Manchester in the North of England has had huge success in 2007 producing his own ebooks and Standing Start Profits membership site, of which I’m a member.

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