Ad Posting Tips and Tricks Review
October 12, 2008 by LBB Admin
Filed under Internet Marketing
After a brief hiatus, I am back to working my blogs and posting again. I took a little break to dive back into learning about the world of Craigslist (CL) posting and spent the past two weeks, many times up until 1am, learning all there is to know about changes made in posting internet marketing ads on CL successfully. CL is constantly making changes to how they filter ads so you have to stay on top of the latest and greatest techniques. All of this information is for informative purposes only and I do not advocate violating the TOS of any website or service you use.
This article is meant to inform and educate you as to what information I have learned through research and in no way is meant to be used as a guide to what to do. Do not use this to post with posting software or services.
People have used CL for years to sell personal things as well as find renters for properties and have pursued posting ads for internet marketing, primarily because they find CL to be a great source of leads (although some haven’t found a ton of categories to be that responsive for their niches and many posts to categories such as jobs automatically get flagged).
There are some CL cities where it seems flaggers live to flag internet marketing ads they deem inappropriate or out of category and some marketers will go back and flag other ads (even legitimate ones) if theirs get flagged. The reality is the best candidates for a home based business are those people who are unhappy with their current jobs and looking for something better – so sources say the best section to post about any business opportunity is the jobs section but keep in mind that this is against the TOS
There are various ways of trying to get ads to stick – tweaking the html of the ads, using the right kinds of subjects, random characters and text and many have managed to get ads to stick for a few days to a few weeks. The key is volume so if approached from that perspective, having ads up for only a day or two is fine as the ads will generate good free traffic easily.
Some cities there are so many ads posting daily it’s easy for ads to get quickly buried at the bottom of the list (many post as late in the day or evening as possible so the ad has a better chance of displaying near the top of the page longer). There is even a variety of posting software available to accomplish this easily.
Most of the posting software costs anywhere between $197 to $397 – and the free stuff is almost always loaded with malware, spyware and oftentimes viruses. Again, using posting automated posting software or agents to post is against the TOS. However, if you ‘un-automate’ the posting software, I have heard that this little change keeps you within the TOS.
You are prohibited from posting the same ad over and over and the definition of ’same’ is open for debate. Technically, changing one character or one pixel or one address or one word makes the ad no longer the same.
CL Posting Tips
For many posters, the goal with CL isn’t to avoid flagging (there’s too many people on CL just waiting to flag ads) but to get a high volume of he ads past the CL filters and posted (and thus keeping from being ghosted – this means the ad appears published but does not appear in CL listings). Having enough of a variety of the below items creates some level of randomness. Plus a high enough volume means even those over zealous flaggers only manage to catch a small percentage of ads.
Titles - a variety of titles for posts related to the opportunity/service/item. It’s perfectly acceptable to say ‘looking for sales professionals’ or ‘marketing experience’ if the goal is to attract people with experience in these areas.
Ad Type – there are two schools of thought here, each defended vigorously by those who use them: Text or image based ads. It’s up to preference and for many they prefer image ads as they are easy to create and randomize which means less coding to worry about and they get good results with image ads. Split testing is used with or without URL links embedded to gauge responses.
Ad Content – Keeping the ads simple and normal – CL bots can pick up words that would relate to MLM or home based businesses – It’s interesting to review some of the other ads and find some that are about home based or online marketing and see what works for them. Viewing the source of an ad is simple using the View Source menu of a browser. Posters like to save the html of good ads that stick to stay on top of what works best. Split testing. here is also used heavily by posters. They use these tests to fine tune and tweak their ads so they have some reliable ones to use.
Images - The primary repository for posters is Photobucket, another FREE online tool which is great for uploading the same groups of images multiple times in order to generate unique URLs (posters have found that another CL filter is repetitive URLs both in the images and in the links they use except they have not banned Photobucket since millions of CL posters use it and it would probably be bad for CL if they cracked down on photo hosting services).
For easily croping and resizing images, picnik.com is a tool used by many ad posters. The free service only allows an upload of 5 images but by deleting them after saving, 5 more images can be uploaded to resize and crop. No registration is required.
Links - domains are so cheap these days that the best practice here is to buy them as needed. But it is not necessary to buy a ton in order to generate unique links. The top ad posters use promediacode.com and while they have a free version, their is a better discount by going with the paid annual option.
This service is so simple to use – enter the ftp username and pwd (create ftp user accounts in the domain Cpanel to use if there is concern in using the main ftp account info), the domain name of the site, the path on the server (/public_html/domainname), the domain for the URLs to forward to and then use the random generator to obtain random domain folder names. By entering this text into the tool, it spits out up to 20 URLs at a time, pre-configured for forwarding, ready to use and if more are needed, just rinse and repeat. That’s it. This creates a batch of URLs to use without spending HOURS in a hosting account Cpanel creating them one by one to point to affiliate programs. It takes about 2 minutes to make 100 URLs.
Email addresses/CL Accounts – Posters here differ on this too. CL accounts make it easier and faster to post ads. There are people who use CL accounts and want to post high volumes of ads, so they keep an inventory of multiple CL accounts. This of course is not condoned by CL (also against the TOS) and I am only telling you this to inform you of what’s out there. Same thing goes for email accounts. CL filters will pick up if many ads are posted using the same email account so posters randomize the email addresses used.
IP addresses – this is another tricky one but easy to manage. CL can tell when a large number of ads are being posted from the same IP address and these will get ghosted as well as IP banned meaning inability to post from that IP again. If using DSL for the connection and it’s fairly simple to power cycle the modem after posting 4-5 ads. Then obtain a new IP address and post another 4 ads, power cycle, then do it again and that’s the process.
That is it for now.
In a future post I will cover 16 awesome and FREE tools you can use to free up some time in your internet marketing efforts.
Until next time!
PS. Here is an awesome video I just had to dig up from a couple of years ago. Talk about tricks.
http://www.dailymotion.com/videoxnbymKeyword Research Primer
October 3, 2008 by LBB Admin
Filed under Internet Marketing
In my last post I mentioned keyword and traffic research as a way to test or identify how effective your subject of choice will be as it relates to your online marketing efforts and in this post I will provide a basic primer on the subject.
If you have read my previous posts, by now it is fairly obvious that I love to write. I could literally spend hours writing on subjects that interest me (and hopefully interest you as well) but truthfully, my life as a single dad with a full time, high demand job allows for little free time to focus on my marketing efforts to the level I would like – transitioning to Wordpress from a previous platform and writing new content has easily kept me up until 2 am a number of nights this week.
With all of the steps involved in writing content – research, outline, drafts, crafting copy, checking it double checking it, etc…I can easily spend an hour, in most cases more, on just one article or piece of content.
For that reason, I am always on the lookout for simple to use FREE resources and tools for online marketing – the simpler, the better. So rather than try to reinvent the wheel here and explain everything in detail, today I am going to give a basic overview of keywords and traffic research and then provide you with some amazing free resources to help you in these areas.
So let’s get started.
Keywords – when you want to find something online, you probably head over to Google or one of the other search engines. The text you enter for your search are keywords that search engines use to provide results of websites that match what you are looking for. A simple way to look at keywords is to think of them as the market you are looking for or interested in.
Keywords in the internet marketing world are like the keys to a car – they are the starting point in your journey. The car itself is like your business – the vehicle that gets you where you want to go (and hopefully you have a Ferrari vs. a Yugo for your business – but if not, there are ways to make your Yugo perform better).
As with any car, it requires gas (and in this analogy I think of ‘gas’ as the traffic to drive your businesses). And of course there are ongoing maintenance and performance enhancements for your car – content and optimization.
In my post on Internet Marketing Strategies and Ideas, I shared a process to identify your market or subjects of interest for your business and you will use those subjects as the basis to find the keywords you can use to ‘start the car’.
I am a huge fan of the 30 Day Challenge team as they provide a no-nonsense, straightforward FREE course on internet marketing and they do an awesome job of showing you how to go from A to Z in starting an online business. The 30DC team has tons of great videos on Youtube that show you exactly what to do. One I like a lot on the subject of keywords uses the FREE Google Keyword Tool to research keywords.
Watch the video on how to use the Google Keyword Tool here.
Traffic – is the gas that fuels your business and like a car, without traffic (gas) your business will go nowhere. There are basically two types of traffic – broad or targeted. Either of these can be obtained via paid or free sources.
Broad traffic is in most cases not targeted and is based on volume for its success rates. An example of broad traffic is unsolicited spam. This type of traffic is really a numbers game – massive traffic will get you conversions (sales) but the percentage of conversions depends on how effective your traffic campaigns are and it take time. I will cover in a future post some of the sources of broad traffic but here I want to focus on targeted traffic. After all, that is the purpose of researching keywords for your business and FREE or organic, natural traffic is what we are looking for.
Why? Because eye tracking studies have shown definitively that natural or organic search results are where people focus nearly all of their attention on search engine results pages. People spend a small amount of time looking at PPC or sponsored links. For more information, visit http://www.enquiroresearch.com.
Ok, well I will close this post here. Hopefully you have garnered an understanding of the basics of keyword and traffic research and can use some of this to help you in your own ventures.
To Your Success!
Traffic Exchange Hell
October 3, 2008 by LBB Admin
Filed under Internet Marketing
So, you want ideas to make money in the internet marketing business?
Great! Before we get started, some housekeeping related to my Internet Marketing Wake Up Call post here, specifically about my background.
In my introductory post I told you I was new to the world of internet marketing (a little over a year) and did not know what I was doing. This is true. I plugged along trying to learn what I could about internet marketing and I ended up joining literally hundreds of forums, dozens of affiliate programs and a number of online businesses. I really did make money by accident without any real ideas to make money.
The problem for me was I was inundated with tons of things all at once – spam emails, latest tools and software, ebooks, sites, forums, memberships – and because I had just coughed up $4000 to get started (and at the time money was very tight), my focus was on trying to recoup that as fast as I could. I didn’t look as closely to the process as I should have so I made mistakes and lost money. Fortunately, I did not lose tons of $$ as a lot of others have but I think you get the point.
I have had a number of enlightening experiences and here is one I will share – keep in mind that this was just one of the many balls I tried to juggle, things I mentioned above. I spent the first 60 days of my baptism to the internet marketing world in traffic exchange hell trying to earn enough credits for clicks and banner impressions and I found that for me at least, it was a waste of my time. Hours and hours with multiple tabs and traffic exchanges trying to drive traffic (clicks) to my site.
Never mind that most everyone on these sites was there for the same reason – I mean, how many of us are REALLY going to click on other people’s pages beyond the initial click to get credit? Sure there were some neat sites and products on the traffic exchanges but nothing that I couldn’t already find via Google directly and I did not get one sale from traffic exchanges. The analogy I use is playing darts blindfolded and trying to just hit the board (forget about the bullseye).
It may work for some and I know people that have outsourced the clicking of banners overseas to countries like India where the costs are lower, but for me that was not what I was looking for.
In any event, the point here is I spent my time in the trenches learning what did not work (had I spent more time studying what did work, I would have been a lot farther along the curve early on) so you will not have to repeat my mistakes.
You see, the ’skill’ or techniques of sales have been around as long as man and they are quite simple to understand. The basic sales process no matter what you are selling or where you are selling it can best be described by the acronym AIDA.
AIDA
Attention/Awareness – attract the attention of the customer
Interest - raise their interest level
Desire - convince the customers that they want and desire what you offer
Action - lead the customers toward taking action – opting in, buying, subscribing, etc…
As I mentioned, I was new to internet marketing but I was not new to sales. For over 20+ I have been in sales – operations, marketing and management. I worked for some large Fortune 500 companies primarily in the beverage industry and later in the technology space where I learned a lot about sales contact center operations.
The principles of online and offline sales are exactly the same. The main difference is the environment and the execution.
When I sold Pepsi, my process for sales was AIDA. I had to (A)ttract the attention of both my existing customers and new prospects (I worked in the soda fountain division – bars, restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, colleges – and in the early days, customers were loyal to either Pepsi or Coke and most places did not sell both so we were always trying to steal away Coke retailers). Obviously that is not the case today but I digress.
I had to (I)nterest them in any new products or promotions we were offering.
I had to (C)onvince them that they had to have the new product or take advantage of the killer promotion.
I had to lead them to take (A)ction and buy what I was offering.
AIDA is the sales process you will be following to drive your marketing efforts with your business.
Your first thing you are going to want to do is familiarize yourself with the concept of AIDA, if only from the perspective of understanding how the sales process in general works. You do not need to become an expert in any of these areas and frankly an in depth discussion of AIDA is beyond the scope of this blog and not something you need great detail about. Just know that these 4 components are the underlying basis that drives the sales process. With Web 2.0, much of the components of AIDA are simplified and I will touch on these in future posts.
The second concept you need to understand is that traffic + conversions = sales. As basic as the formula looks, this is of extreme importance for you to comprehend. Without traffic you will not have conversions to sales with which to fill your pockets with money. This topic alone can fill hundreds of pages but the main focus here is that you need traffic, but not just any traffic – targeted or highly targeted traffic is the key.
I’m betting that you probably receive hundreds of unsolicited spam messages like I do every day (I receive upwards of 300-400, all redirected into my spam folder). Consider that there are roughly 220,000,000+ internet users in the US alone and well I think you can picture how much unsolicited spam is out there.
By design, unsolicited spam has to function the way it does (“help, I’m being electronically assaulted”) because the conversion rates are minuscule (the click through rates are so ridiculously small – you literally have better odds of successfully herding cats) that it takes a MASSIVE amount of it in order to generate revenue. My point? Traffic is essential because without it, you have no conversions BUT traffic without a targeting strategy is useless because you will not get the conversions you want and you will spend a ton of time, money and energy that would be better spent in more practical revenue generating activities (affectionately known as ‘RGA’).
NOTICE to Barbara Deville (if that is your real name), Queen of Unsolicited Spam (uniteddvds or titaniumsoloads): please get an autoresponder service and allow people to opt out. You are in violation of the CANSPAM act.
I will go into a broader discussion on traffic in the future but just know this – the components of AIDA will help guide your strategy to target traffic (read CUSTOMERS) to your business, traffic from people who want to know about you and what you offer. And these are the people you want – targeted, interested, like-minded folks hitting your sites are the most likely to purchase from you or opt in to your newsletter, take (A)ction either now or later, and guess what? They are even more likely to purchase from you a second, third or even more times, provided you gave them what they were looking for, it met their expectations and the ‘customer experience’ was a positive one.
For now, if you are not already, become familiar with the following tools:
Flock – the next generation of browsers. It puts the process of Web 2.0 social browsing on steroids and it is phenomenal. I have replaced IE and Firefox with Flock (don’t worry, it is built on the Firefox platform and works great). There are some great getting started videos on the site. Check it out.
Twitter - a great little tool, designed primarily for people to keep tabs on each other and what they are up to at the moment. While I myself am a real novice with this tool (I only recently decided to try it out but I have friends that make good money using the power of Tweets), I can see the value in using it to attract people interested in me and what I have to offer so Twitter is now part of my strategy
That’s it for now. Until next time – To Your Success!
Stopping The Insanity
October 3, 2008 by LBB Admin
Filed under Internet Marketing
Starting an online business is an exciting adventure, one filled with unique challenges and oftentimes great rewards. In this article I will discuss some common sense best practices for evaluating a potential off line business that will provide some context to help set you on the right path to starting an online business based on tangible products.
I use a well known method to determine what businesses to invest in and it is this exact process I used to find my second income stream: the two-filter test.
This second income stream is in the health and wellness field and it is progressing nicely – I am 1/20th of the way towards my income goal of $50,000 per month. from this new venture.
The questions I am asked the most are: If you have no experience with online businesses, where do you start? How exactly do you do it? What is the best strategy to navigate the thousands of choices out there?
In order to answer these questions, you should first ask yourself the following:
- What are my goals with my business?
- Am I looking to augment or replace my current income or job?
- What do I decide to market or sell? A product or a service or both?
- What resources do I need to successfully build my business?
- Is my business going to benefit everyone who is exposed to it?
TIP: With the wide selection available today and depending on your budget and available start up capital, it is important to determine if you want to invest in top tier programs such as those that pay high commissions of more than $1000 per sale or low to mid tier programs that pay considerably less. Why? Because it takes the same amount of time and effort to market either type of program but with top tier programs, you need far less highly qualified customers to earn a significant income. This tip will further define the list of available businesses out there for you to consider but remember that you cannot keep the right type of person out of the right business so keep an open mind.
To start, there are two filters and three dimensions or test areas you should use to determine what business to invest your money in. The filters are Common Sense and Proof and the test areas are Company, Product and Compensation.
If these three areas can pass the two-filter test then the odds are extremely high that you have found a business worth your effort and attention and you should seriously consider investing your money in that business.
Company
- How long has the company been in business?
- Have the owners ever been sued, been to jail or shut down?
- Can you contact the owners?
- Does the company have a headquarters?
- How many offices do they have?
- Is the company financially stable?
- What kind of support does the company provide?
It is amazing how many startups are being run out of a basement or a garage with some down line software and a white label product…ask the right questions and you will get the right answers. It is equally amazing how many company owners have records of convictions in their past.
Product
- How much competition is there?
- Is it the 25th new product of its kind this month?
- How long have they manufactured the product/provided the service?
- Do they have any proof or credentials for the product or service?
- Do they make their own product or is it made for them and hundreds of other companies like them?
- How big is the target market?
- How many people actually need or want your product?
Ask yourself why you want to start an online business in the first place? Is it for financial freedom, more time for you or your family, do you like the product, something fun you like to do? Why don’t we have all of this with most companies?
Compensation
- How long does it take to explain the compensation plan?
- Do you have to read a 30 page manual or attend a two hour comp plan training session?
- Do you need an accountant, a lawyer or an actuary to understand the business?
- Do you get knocked out of your position in the company if you don’t maintain your monthly quota?
- Do you need to understand PV, BV, CV and dozens of other cryptic acronyms?
Many companies make the compensation plans difficult to understand because if you actually knew how little you made, you would never join in the first place.
Hopefully you have found the criteria I use to be useful and helpful in stopping the insanity in your search to find the right business for you.
Best of luck in your search!
Internet Marketing Ideas and Strategies
October 3, 2008 by LBB Admin
Filed under Internet Marketing
In my first post, I covered a basic introduction to AIDA, the structure and process that guides the sales cycle. I also recommended that you install Flock and join Twitter, two free and powerful Web 2.0 tools. Hopefully you familiarized yourself with them and had some fun.
Today I want to talk briefly about internet marketing strategy & ideas to make money as well as provide you some free resources to help develop these areas. How do you find ideas to make money and develop strategies to get your internet marketing business off the ground? While for some it may seem difficult to get your thoughts down and define a strategy, the good news is the process is easy to learn and implement.
I like to start with simple brainstorming and idea generation around things that I already like. I enjoy travel all over the world, health and wellness and of course making money. For me, these three ‘topics’ provide the basis of ideas on businesses I want to start and build.
Think about the things you enjoy, what hobbies you like, interests you want to pursue or maybe you have expertise on a specific subject. All of these are fertile ground for brainstorm and getting creative plus when they are subjects that you find interesting, the odds are your passion about them will show in all aspects of your business.
There are a variety of techniques that you can use to help get your ideas narrowed down but my favorite is mind mapping. If you do not know what it is I recommend you click here for a definition – there are some great diagrams on what a mind map looks like.
Basically it is a process of diagramming ideas, words, concepts, tasks and images around a central key idea. Mind mapping is great for generating and visualizing ideas and strategy – ‘roadmap’ – for your internet marketing business (and I will provide you a FREE tool you can use for mind mapping and developing ideas and your strategy at the end of this post).
So, go ahead and get out your paper and pen, then I want you to visit Amazon.com. I know, you are probably scratching your head but trust me on this. Like everything else on the web, Amazon is a great source of what is hot and interesting now, of what people are buying (and ultimately generating sales for companies) – and it turns out it’s a fantastic way to get ideas for a business.
Thanks to Ed Dale and the 30DC team, I learned this neat trick for picking up quick ideas for starting a business and I will summarize his process for you.
Go to the Books and Magazine Subscriptions. You will notice a good variety of categories and within each of these, depending on the popularity of the subject, there are dozens or even hundreds of magazine subscriptions about that subject. Go ahead and select Hobbies.
Now, you should see on the left a LONG list of hobbies listed. The goal here is to simply see what is popular, what is generating interest because the number of magazine subscriptions Amazon.com sells on a subject is a good barometer of strength of the market.
I have a friend that is really into knitting so I clicked on Needlecrafts just to see what is available – go ahead and click Needlecrafts. Notice the number of pages of magazine subscriptions – 3 pages totaling 84 different magazine subscriptions on nothing but Needlecrafts!
That tells me a couple of things. Since magazines have to support their publications through advertisements, there must be a significant number of subscribers generating massive advertising revenue for the publishers. So, this tells me it is probably a strong and healthy market.
The second thing it tells me is it may also be a heavily saturated market with little room and in my next post I will show you how to test keywords and web traffic in order to gauge the playing field but a good first pass test is to Google the site and see how many pages come up in the results.
I’ll also cover a neat FREE Google tool that helps you stay on top of your chosen subject but for now, just have fun getting ideas and be sure to write them down.
For this exercise, the goal is to simply look for ideas and think outside the box. Play with Amazon.com or some other sites like Yahoo or Google – check out different topics and categories. This is just freeform, so do not worry about structure or punctuation or neatness. Grab ideas, ideas, ideas and write, write, write.
Now, for the mind mapping tool. The Wiki article should have given you a general idea of what mind mapping is and now you have some ideas in writing but just in case, here is a great article from Mindtools.com on mind mapping for reference.
So, with your ideas in hand and an understanding of mind mapping, it is time for that FREE software. Visit Freemind and download the Free Mind application. It is a small file and a quick install – run the setup and have fun with it.
Don’t worry about getting it right as there is no right or wrong here. Use it to map out your ideas and jot down as much as you can – you can customize the colors of the nodes and tag them with different icons to show importance or sequence of steps – keep it simple for now.
Once it is down in a diagram, you should be able to see some strategic areas where you can focus on to help start and build your business, a basic roadmap of what paths you should take, what areas to focus your resources and time.
I will have a short, basic video tutorial coming in the future on this and many more great, FREE tools.
Until next time. To Your Success!!
LoadedBeachBum
