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Whether you need one or multiple merchant accounts, we can accommodate your processing needs.
Contact me for details and a quick no obligation info request. 404.592.1253 ext 10
Eddie@LoadedBeachBum.com
Sizzling Hot Graphics Explode Sales
Sizzling HOT Designs That Transform Poor-Performing Salesletters into Cash-sucking Selling Machines.
Gone are the days when copy was the sole determining factor in sealing a salesletters’ fate. Things have changed since then and marketers who preach that copy should be the only tool in your marketing arsenal are simply living in the past, oblivious to the rapidly changing landscape of direct response marketing and Web 2.0.
Let’s face it. It’s 2008, not 1998 anymore.
Graphics, layout and presentation have risen to become as equally important to a salesletter as the copy itself. If all elements are perfected, working in unison, these four key elements together can create some seriously high converting marketing pieces.
Just yesterday I happened to stumble across a brand new design studio called ‘Pulp Minisites’ that specializes in turning poor performing salesletters into cash-sucking sales machines that will explode your business with new customers.
Now the thing that makes these guys different than your everyday freelance minisite designer is the fact they’re a real design studio, they have a real team with a real office and treat their operation as a real business. In other words, they’re not your typical minisite designer working out of a basement.
It looks as though these guys have some real big plans for this niche and you only have to see their work to realize that. I’d recommend checking them out and see for yourself whether this new design studio is just ‘hot air’ or whether they’ll become a ‘household name’ in the internet marketing community.
See for yourself, click on the link below: **Apparently they are no longer around. 06/29/09
http://linktrack.info/lsxr3lu
How Secure Are You?
I am finding more and more of my newer team members in my businesses have little to no practical experience with best practices when it comes to internet security of their own computers. I decided to shoot this quick video on what I use and provide some neat cool tools you can use in your browser as well as online to research websites before you visit them.
I introduce the basics of a whois via centralops.net, my favorite online source for checking on domains, email addresses and other cool stuff you can do.
I tried to embed it but I shot it too large to display here and the resize isn’t working in the plugin with this theme so just click the link, both IE and Firefox recognize the file type and can play it in your browser.
Keyword 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!
