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Are You A Digg user?
If you are, you may want to read this post that I just read on the WebProNews site.
Apparently at least one top Digg user (dubbed “Digg Throat”) has been getting paid, and quite well I might add , to promote articles on Digg. For $700 dollars “Digg Throat” will submit your article for you and promote it. If it makes it to Diggs front page it will cost you another $500. “Digg Throat” claims that this is a relatively common practice among the Digg power user community and has no plans to stop the practice. Now this may seem like small price to pay for the amount of traffic that being on Diggs front page will bring, but it does seem to go against the whole premise of users determining the best content.
“Digg Throat” was interviewed by Khalid of the Invesp,com blog and you can read the entire interview there.
Got any thoughts on this? Leave your comments below.
Talk to you again soon.
Steve
How’s Your Article Marketing Strategy Working?
Filed Under Article Marketing, Internet Marketing, Main Content | Leave a Comment
By: Steve Casteel
Having a good article marketing strategy can really give your article marketing efforts a boost. There is little doubt that article marketing is one of the best, if not THE best way of driving free, targeted traffic to your offers, not to mention all of the SEO benefits that article marketing provides.
But what about an article marketing strategy ? Is there such a thing and will it help me?
Well, the short answer to those questions are yes, and maybe. What I am going to do in this post is layout the article marketing strategy that has worked well for me. By no means am I implying that this is the only article marketing strategy that you should use, just that this one works for me. Feel free to adapt any of these tips to whatever method you use.
Article Marketing Strategy Tip #1
Sit down and plan your article submissions at least a week in advance. This an important step and taking the time to do this right will save you a lot of time. Know what articles you are going to submit each day and to what directories you are going to submit them to, and then follow your plan!
Article Marketing Strategy Tip #2
When you are launching a new site or entering a new niche, plan on submitting at least two articles and if possible more every day for 7 to 10 days. Don’t sweat anything you may have heard about not bulk submitting articles. If you have 5 or 6 articles ready to submit go ahead and submit them. This will help you get more readers right off the bat and you will control more real estate inside that category listing.
Article Marketing Strategy Tip #3
Once you start receiving traffic and hopefully sales, submit at least one article a day for the next 4 to 6 weeks.
Make this a habit!
This will greatly increase your chances of getting a lot of article views, traffic and again, hopefully sales and will also keep the search engines returning.
Article Marketing Strategy #4
Once you have established steady traffic and sales submit 2 to 3 articles a week in this niche. Now “steady traffic and sales” is a relative measurement and depends on the particular niche. For some niches two or 3 sales a week may be great while for a smaller more obscure niche, one sale a week may be good. The important thing here is to weigh your results (sales, opt-ins, etc) with the effort to see if the niche is going to be worth your time pursuing any further.
Article Marketing Strategy #5
Always keep track of your vistors per article and keep your eye on your earnings per article. You can use your web stats to do some of this tracking but the best way to do this is to actually have a tracking system in place so you can tell exactly what your articles are doing.
This is a very important step. You should always keep track of your ROI and your earnings per article. If you are not tracking, you cannot test and if you can’t test you will never know what works best.
Well that’s it for my article marketing strategy. Give this a try or develop your own article marketing strategy and see what happens. I think that you may be pleasantly surprised.
Talk to you again soon,
Steve
PS
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Publish It On Your Own Blog
Greetings, everyone from finally sunny again Central Florida! Tropical storm Fay has finally moved on and I am starting to dry out a little bit. So, that being said I just read an interesting article from Marlon Sanders that discusses the steps you need to take in order to set up your sales machine. It contains a ton of great information about setting up your sales machines so I thought that I would pass it on. Read Marlons article below:
The 6 Parts Of A Sales Machine That Won’t Quit
By Marlon Sanders
Let’s talk about you and your sales machine.
You get people into your funnel. You send ‘em emails and sales messages. Take ‘em FROM those emails to “conversion pieces” and you sell ‘em. Or give ‘em reasons to buy now.
Whatever you wanna call it.
I’ve tried hard over the past 6 months to convince you to create your own products. Whether you have or haven’t, it’s now time you move on and learn to build your list and your sales machine. If you don’t have your own product by now, just get started using affiliate products.
Here are the 6 steps to building your sales machine.
1. Research your target market to know the blogs, forums, and web sites your target audience visits.
You want to look at the signature lines in forums to find out who is
selling what to whom.
You want to find out WHO the list owners are because they’re your
potential joint venture partners. In other words, they’re the ones
who might sell your product to their list for a commission on sales.
You want to look at the blogs and forums and find out if there are
Google Ads on the page (if so, you can buy an ad on that exact page
using Google’s site targeting and pay ONLY when someone clicks).
You want to see if you can purchase banners there and so forth. You
want to write up an in depth profile of your ideal buyer, including
their age, income, educational level and web sites they frequent.
2. Create a hot freebie that’ll compel ‘em to join your email list.
In Internet marketing the past 6 months, highly sophisticated product launches have taken over that involve videos or other things being given away in exchange for an email address.
The formula is STILL the same:
Get people on your email list and sell ‘em. Only on product launches, you do the selling part in a collapsed time frame like a day or a week buttressed by the social support of all your buddies
(or allies) emailing the same offer at the same time.
The ART of the product launch that a few people have mastered is how to get all their buddies and affiliates to email for THEM without having to do reciprocal emails for all of them.
In most target markets, you won’t have that problem. In Internet marketing it’s an issue because everyone is obviously a marketer and has their own thing to pitch.
Anyway, the point is, you wanna find something really hot that’ll make people WANT to join your email list and confirm their email.
3. A Squeeze page and email thank you/confirmation process that is a well-oiled machine.
Once people join your list, they go to a thank you page. You usually use that page to convince people to go to their email and click the confirmation link. Then after they click THAT link, you
take them to a special offer.
In modern terminology, it’s an OTO. In truth, it’s nothing different than what has been done for 1,000 years. A special offer with a time limit.
Don’t you know that 1,000 years ago the big marketing trick was to sell your camel by throwing in the mule but only if you bought that day?
One thing that HAS changed is the format of the pitch. There is some evidence things are going more to video pitches vs. text, although I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of that with my target market.
I still like sales letters as the primary tool supported by audio and video.
4. Email that gets delivered.
You need a reliable email service and a way to monitor delivery. I get stats on my email delivery. I average about 75%. But sometimes it’ll go up to 95%.
The problem with cheaper services is you probably won’t get as good of delivery as you get with more expensive services. But the service itself costs quite a bit more.
5. Regular emails to your list that pitch and give value.
You need to have a ratio between pitches and content or value if possible. I didn’t used to do this. But in today’s market, I feel it’s important, although debatable.
If you have a situation where tons of affiliates will go to bat for your product launch, your own list doesn’t matter much.
I’m doing this ezine because I feel the content helps people stay on my list and retains readership. I’m one of the ONLY (if not the only) major brand name teachers doing this.
6. Send people to your blog, mp3 audios (podcasts), videos, live video, recorded video, screen capture video and other sales tools.
If your people aren’t BUYING, employ “The Full Arsenal.” Send ‘em links to something that does a more in depth sales job than the email can like audio or video.
You do NOT HAVE to use “The Full Arsenal.” Some people don’t like audio or video. I encourage you to use it. But you can succeed without it.
Here’s a little mini checklist for implementing “The Full Arsenal.“
– How to record audio, edit it, add a nice little music track to the beginning, sweeten the sound and turn it into nice flash buttons for your web site, this is a skill worth learning.
– On video, you should know the basics of 3-point lighting. And be able to convert video to FLV. That’s a minimum skill. Yes, you can farm out some of it. But it isn’t all that complicated to learn.
– You need to know how to use Camtasia or Camstudio to record screen video and save it to a SMALL file size, so it’ll stream right on your web site.
– You need to know how to use Power Point or the Presentation software in free Open Office to create slides you record with Camtasia.
– And I think knowing how to create cool backgrounds is a plus.
– You should be able to put audio and video on your blog.
On video, the LIGHTING makes ALL the difference in the world. Knowing the basics of lighting really helps. And on screen video, having decent audio helps.
The minimum learning curve would be doing SCREEN video and audio podcasts. Those two are ESSENTIAL in this business.
I’ll add that I teach everything above in the New Promo Dashboard, although the part on lighting isn’t complete. I refer you to a $30 DVD you really need to buy to learn to do lighting right, although there are some decent tutorials for it on Youtube.
But this isn’t a pitch. These are the things you need to know and do. They aren’t sexy but they ARE the guts of the business.
In 30 minutes to 2 hours a day, you can make a real dent in learning these skills.
But the most crucial ones are everything down to row 6 “The Full Arsenal.” You can add those skills as you go along.
But you gotta know where and how to REACH your target audience, how to put together a freebie that attracts ‘em, how to put up the Squeeze page and how to send out emails that get ‘em to buy!
This is ALL the “gurus” do. Except they get all their friends to promote on the same day or week. But the process is exactly the same.
So let me ask you a question: WHERE are you on these 6 steps?
Where are you STUCK at?
What will it take for you to get to the NEXT step? To get unstuck?
Post that to my blog if you want a response from me.
Best wishes,
Marlon Sanders
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Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Info Product Dashboard.”
If you want to create your own info products, Click Here
———————————————————–
I hope you enjoyed Marlons article. He always has an interesting way of making his point. Be sure and leave your comments about Marlons Sales Machine article.
I’ll talk to you again soon,
Steve
By: Steve Casteel
Having a squeeze page, or as it is also known, a landing page is an essential part of your sales funnel. Without one you can’t build your list, can’t follow up with prospects or get a second chance at making the sale. Not only is a squeeze page an absolute must, having a squeeze page that converts well is even more important.
So how do you increase the conversion rate of your squeeze pages?
Here are three squeeze page conversion secrets used by all the big dog marketers.
- Squeeze Page Secret #1
Use Personalization.
There are two easy methods to personalize your squeeze page and I recommend using them both.
Make sure that you include a picture of yourself at the top of all of your squeeze pages.The second way to add personalization is to add your signature at the bottom of your squeeze page.
An easy way to make a signature is to use a script font in your word processing program, write your name and then save it as a graphic file.Adding your picture and signature to your squeeze pages will radically increase your visitors trust factor. Most people who are hesitant to purchase online because they are worried about being scammed by some nameless, faceless stranger who will not be around when they need support or want to return a product. - Squeeze Page Secret #2
Use Black Text On A White Background.
No matter what anyone tells you, a simple, clean and professional looking squeeze page will always covert better than one that uses loads of crazy looking off beat fonts and wild colors. It’s ok to use some color to emphasize your headline and sub-headlines (red works well for this), but don’t go crazy and distract your visitor.Remember, your squeeze page only has one purpose: Opt-in or leave. Any other choices like adsense ads or other links will only lower your conversion rates. - Offer Valuable FREE Content.
I know this is sort of a no-brainer, but these days the FREE bar has been raised considerably! You are not going to get anyone to join your list by offering some crappy report that doesn’t provide really good information. Reports, e-books, videos and e-courses still work well as long as they offer high quality information.Offering free, quality information is still effective for two reasons.
One, it allows your visitor to evaluate you and your products without having to spend any money, and secondly it reinforces the all important trust factor.
Follow these three steps and you will significantly increase your squeeze page conversion rates.
Talk to you again soon,
Steve
How do I create killer squeeze pages, with multiple
choices of free gifts to add to my squeeze page?
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New Article Directory Looks Like A Big Winner!
Filed Under Article Marketing, Main Content | Leave a Comment
If you do any sort of article marketing or BUM marketing you might be very interested in this new article directory that I just found out about. It’s called AffSphere and it’s just out of beta testing.
I just spent some time checking out the site and some of the available videos and this looks like it has a lot of potential to be a high quality article directory. Besides the obvious benefits of having another directory to submit your articles to, AffSphere is going to allow you to place your adsense code and banner ads on your article pages. This could result in some decent income as well as traffic and backlinks to your sites.
And it’s 100% free to sign up!
Pretty Cool!
You can check it out for yourself here:
Click Here To Check Out AffSphere
Talk To You Soon,
Steve
affsphere, article marketing, article marketing directory, make money writing articles
