The Internet Marketing Gameplan]

[The The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Gameplan

James Molfetas CompleteInternetMarketingResources.com

www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com] [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Legal Disclaimer This publication is for informational purposes only. While every attempt has been made to verify the information provided in this report, neither the author nor publisher assume any responsibility for errors or omissions. The trademarks, screenshots, website links, products and services mentioned in this publication are copyrighted by their respective owners.

It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

We do not give any kind of guarantee about the accuracy of information provided. In no event will the author and/or marketer be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential or other loss or damage arising out of the use of the information in this document by any person, regardless of whether or not informed of the possibility of damages in advance.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.

Copyright Š James Molfetas All rights reserved.

There is no resale rights issued with this.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan]

Contents INTRODUCTION: .................................................................................................................................. 9 NEWBIE ISSUES: .................................................................................................................................. 9 SO WHAT IS INTERNET MARKETING? ............................................................................................... 10 HERE ARE THE OBJECTIVES OF THIS BOOK: ...................................................................................... 11 THIS IS HOW THE COURSE IS STRUCTURED: ..................................................................................... 11 THE SIX OVERALL CONCEPTS: ........................................................................................................... 11 1. Pick a niche................................................................................................................................ 12 2. Create or source your product .................................................................................................. 12 3. Create your sales funnel ........................................................................................................... 12 4. Build your website .................................................................................................................... 12 5. Drive traffic to your website ..................................................................................................... 12 6. Seven different online monetization models............................................................................ 12 NOT A ‘GET RICH QUICK’ SCHEME: ................................................................................................... 13 MODULE 1 – PICK A NICHE: .................................................................................................................. 13 SO, WHAT EXACTLY IS A NICHE? ....................................................................................................... 14 STEP 1 - HOW TO DETERMINE YOUR NICHE: .................................................................................... 16 STEP 2 - RESEARCH: ........................................................................................................................... 16 STEP 2.1 - KEYWORD RESEARCH: ...................................................................................................... 17 STEP 3 - NOW YOU SIMPLY ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY WANT: ........................................ 17 SURVEYS: ........................................................................................................................................... 18 STEP 4 - GIVE IT TO THEM!:............................................................................................................... 18 MODULE 2 - PRODUCT CREATION ........................................................................................................ 19 INTRODUCTION: ................................................................................................................................ 19 SHOULD YOU CREATE PHYSICAL OR DIGITAL PRODUCTS? ............................................................... 19 LET US NOW LOOK AT SOME PRODUCT FORMATS .......................................................................... 20 WRITTEN WORD................................................................................................................................ 20 VIDEO OR DVD .................................................................................................................................. 20 NOW LET US TAKE A LOOK AT PRODUCING AUDIO PRODUCTS: ...................................................... 21 LET US NOW LOOK AT SOFTWARE CREATION: ................................................................................. 22 LASTLY LET’S TAKE A QUICK LOOK AT APPS: ..................................................................................... 22 CONTENT CREATION: ........................................................................................................................ 22 [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] PUBLIC LABEL RIGHTS OR PLR: .......................................................................................................... 22 PUBLIC DOMAIN INFORMATION IS FREE!: ........................................................................................ 23 OUTSOURCING: ................................................................................................................................. 23 WAYS TO POSITION YOURSELF: ........................................................................................................ 24 EXPERT: ......................................................................................................................................... 24 FACILITATOR: ................................................................................................................................ 24 CO-ORDINATOR:............................................................................................................................ 24 PRICING - ASSENTION LADDER: ........................................................................................................ 24 LET US NOW LOOK AT SOME PRODUCT EXAMPLES: ........................................................................ 25 LET US TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT MEMBERSHIP SITES (CONTINUITY INCOME) ................................ 26 AFFILIATE MARKETING ...................................................................................................................... 26 MODULE 3 - SALES FUNNEL: ................................................................................................................. 27 INTRODUCTION: ................................................................................................................................ 27 THE SQUEEZE PAGE:.......................................................................................................................... 27 AUTORESPONDER: ............................................................................................................................ 28 THE NEXT THING WE NEED IS A HIGH CONVERTING SALES PAGE: ................................................... 29 A CLOSER LOOK AT COPYWRITING: .................................................................................................. 29 GRAPHICS: ......................................................................................................................................... 30 UP-SELLS, DOWN-SELLS, CROSS SELLS AND OTO’S: .......................................................................... 30 BACKEND SALES: ............................................................................................................................... 30 PRODUCT LAUNCHES: ....................................................................................................................... 31 RECAP: ............................................................................................................................................... 31 MODULE 4 – WEBSITE CREATION: ........................................................................................................ 32 CHOOSING WHAT TYPE OF SITE TO CREATE: .................................................................................... 33 SINGLE PRODUCT SITE: ..................................................................................................................... 33 MEMBERSHIP SITE: ........................................................................................................................... 33 AFFILIATE SALE SITE: ......................................................................................................................... 33 BLOG: ................................................................................................................................................ 33 E-COMMERCE SITES: ......................................................................................................................... 34 REGISTER A DOMAIN NAME: ............................................................................................................ 34 Registering your Domain Name .................................................................................................... 34 GET HOSTING .................................................................................................................................... 34 NAME SERVERS: ................................................................................................................................ 35 A QUICK SUMMARY: ......................................................................................................................... 36 [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] DOMAIN NAME ESSENTIALS: ............................................................................................................ 36 1 - It is descriptive of my business ................................................................................................ 36 2 - The name is as short and memorable as possible ................................................................... 37 3 - It ends in “.com” ...................................................................................................................... 37 WHAT TECHNOLOGY TO USE: ........................................................................................................... 37 BLOGGING PLATFORM LIKE WORDPRESS: ........................................................................................ 37 CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS) LIKE JOOMLA: ................................................................. 38 CUSTOM BUILT WEBSITES: ............................................................................................................... 38 SO, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO YOU? : ........................................................................................... 38 STRUCTURE OF A TYPICAL WEBSITE: ................................................................................................ 39 MERCHANT ACCOUNT: ..................................................................................................................... 39 THANK YOU / DOWNLOAD PAGE:..................................................................................................... 40 OWN SITE OR AMAZON S3:............................................................................................................... 40 SUMMARY: ........................................................................................................................................ 41 MODULE 5 – DRIVE TRAFFIC PART 1 OF 3: ........................................................................................... 41 AN INTRODUCTION TO TRAFFIC: ...................................................................................................... 42 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION OR SEO: ......................................................................................... 42 ON-PAGE SEO: ................................................................................................................................... 42 OFF-PAGE SEO FACTORS: .................................................................................................................. 43 CONTENT:.......................................................................................................................................... 43 TACTICS: ............................................................................................................................................ 44 ARTICLE MARKETING: ....................................................................................................................... 44 ARTICLE SPINNERS: ........................................................................................................................... 45 BLOGGING: ........................................................................................................................................ 45 BUILD YOUR LIST: .............................................................................................................................. 45 OPT IN BOX........................................................................................................................................ 46 AUTORESPONDERS ........................................................................................................................... 46 EMAIL MARKETING: .......................................................................................................................... 46 WEB 2.0 SITES AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: ............................................................................. 46 FACEBOOK: .................................................................................................................................... 47 TWITTER: ....................................................................................................................................... 47 YOUTUBE:...................................................................................................................................... 48 GOOGLE +:..................................................................................................................................... 48 SCRIBD:.......................................................................................................................................... 49 [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] SQUIDOO:...................................................................................................................................... 49 HUBPAGES:.................................................................................................................................... 49 SUMMARY: ........................................................................................................................................ 50 MODULE 5.1 – DRIVE TRAFFIC PART 2 OF 3: ........................................................................................ 50 COMMENTING ON OTHER PEOPLE’S BLOGS: ................................................................................... 50 VIRAL TOOLS: .................................................................................................................................... 51 TELL A FRIEND SCRIPTS: .................................................................................................................... 51 VIDEO MARKETING: .......................................................................................................................... 51 PODCASTS: ........................................................................................................................................ 52 PRESS RELEASES: ............................................................................................................................... 53 FREE ONLINE CLASSIFIED ADS: .......................................................................................................... 53 PAID REVIEWS: .................................................................................................................................. 53 FORUM AND NEWSGROUP COMMENTS: ......................................................................................... 54 WEB DIRECTORY SUBMISSION: ......................................................................................................... 54 TRAFFIC EXCHANGE: ......................................................................................................................... 54 AD SWAPS: ........................................................................................................................................ 55 WEBINARS AND TELESEMINARS: ...................................................................................................... 55 PUBLISH A NEWSLETTER: .................................................................................................................. 56 SUMMARY: ........................................................................................................................................ 56 MODULE 5.2 – TRAFFIC PART 3 OF 3 – PAID TRAFFIC, JOINT VENTURES & AFFILIATES: .................. 56 PAID TRAFFIC: ................................................................................................................................... 57 PAY PER CLICK – PPC AND CPM: ....................................................................................................... 57 PPV OR PAY PER VIEW: ..................................................................................................................... 58 CPA OR COST PER ACTION: ............................................................................................................... 59 BANNER ADS: .................................................................................................................................... 59 SOLO ADS: ......................................................................................................................................... 60 JOINT VENTURE AND AFFILIATES: ..................................................................................................... 61 TRACKING AND CONVERSIONS: ........................................................................................................ 62 SUMMARY: ........................................................................................................................................ 64 MODULE 6 - MONETIZATION ................................................................................................................ 64 NICHE MARKETING / INFORMATION MARKETING: .......................................................................... 65 AFFILIATE MARKETING: ..................................................................................................................... 66 CPA .................................................................................................................................................... 67 BLOGGING: ........................................................................................................................................ 68 [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] ADSENSE: .......................................................................................................................................... 69 DOMAIN AND WEBSITE FLIPPING: .................................................................................................... 70 EBAY AND CRAIGSLIST....................................................................................................................... 71 YAHOO! STORES OR OTHER E-COMMERCE STORES: ........................................................................ 72 SUMMARY: ........................................................................................................................................ 72 MODULE 7 – PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: ............................................................................................ 73 PICK A NICHE: .................................................................................................................................... 76 Brainstorm niche ideas: ................................................................................................................ 77 Research:....................................................................................................................................... 77 Ask campaign: ............................................................................................................................... 77 PRODUCT CREATION: ........................................................................................................................ 77 Own or affiliate products?: ........................................................................................................... 77 Product formats: ........................................................................................................................... 78 Content creation: .......................................................................................................................... 78 SALES FUNNEL: .................................................................................................................................. 78 Squeeze page and autoresponder: ............................................................................................... 78 Sales letter: ................................................................................................................................... 79 Create Up-sells, Down-sells or an OTO: ........................................................................................ 79 Back end sales: .............................................................................................................................. 79 Product launch: ............................................................................................................................. 79 WEBSITE CREATION: ......................................................................................................................... 80 Set-up: ........................................................................................................................................... 80 Type of Site: .................................................................................................................................. 80 Technology: ................................................................................................................................... 80 Squeeze page, autoresponder and sales page: ............................................................................ 81 Merchant account: ........................................................................................................................ 81 Download page: ............................................................................................................................ 81 Deliver the product: ...................................................................................................................... 81 TRAFFIC: ............................................................................................................................................ 81 Tracking and conversions:............................................................................................................. 83 MONETIZATION:................................................................................................................................ 83 CONCLUSION:.................................................................................................................................... 83 The Internet Marketing Gameplan flowchart – Part 1 ..................................................................... 85 The Internet Marketing Gameplan flowchart – Part 2 ........................ Error! Bookmark not defined. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan]

IMPORTANT NOTE: Get the FREE video version of this book at www.theimgameplan.com It is broken down into 10 modules totalling just over 5-hours of no-fluff content.

[www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan]

INTRODUCTION: Hello, James Molfetas here. Thank you so much for your interest in The Internet Marketing Gameplan. I promise that you will not be disappointed. In the next few short hours, you are finally about to discover exactly how the entire internet marketing process works!

Before you commence on this exciting journey, I would like to offer you two quick words of advice that will exponentially improve your learning experience.

Firstly, print out the two page flow chart at the back of this book. Keep it in front of you at all times as you follow along in the notes because being able to see the “big picture� as you cover each small component will accelerate your learning experience and your understanding of the material.

If you are a more visual person and you have not already done so, feel free to download the FREE video version of this book at www.theimgameplan.com. It is broken down into 10 modules totalling just over 5-hours of no-fluff content. Once you have finished either reading this book or watching the videos, you will know more than 95% of all internet marketers which means that you will probably be able to crush your competition!

I created this course for internet marketing Newbies. My definition of newbie has nothing to do with the amount time that you have been trying to make money online. If you currently make less than $1,000 per month online, then this course is specifically designed to help you break the $1,000 per month barrier. The hardest thing is to make your first dollar. After that, the next milestone is to make $1,000. And if you can make $1,000 then you can make anything because the principals that you need to make $1,000 are the same as the principals to make $100,000!

So the first goal is to get you to make $1 if you have not already done so, and then to make $1,000 per month

NEWBIE ISSUES: The two most common frustrations that internet marketing Newbies (people earning less than $1,000 per month) have are: 1. Not knowing where to start building an online business and 2. Total information overload!

This leads to total overwhelm which causes many people to quit the game or they just never get started. This is what this book is about. I created it to help Newbies who just do not know who to turn to for help or how to turn their current online efforts into a profitable online business.

I spent a year studying internet marketing before I got my first site up because I did not know where to start. Once I did start, as soon as I learned about a topic, it would naturally lead me to another topic. I would then study this topic, and guess what, it would lead me to another topic. It was like trying to complete a giant 3,000 piece jigsaw puzzle but without having the box with the picture of what I was trying to build. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] This was frustrating for two reasons: Firstly, I began to think that this process of discovery would never end. I came very close to giving up. Fortunately after a year of this, I found that I had learned all of the pieces of the puzzle and more importantly because I now knew what the big picture looked like, I also knew where each piece of this internet marketing jigsaw was supposed to fit.

Secondly, I studied stuff that I did not need. At least, I did not need it at the time. I was just building little segments of the jigsaw puzzle without knowing where they fit into the big picture. Had I known this in advance by having knowledge of the overall picture (the cover on the box) then I would have known which things to study at that particular time in my journey as an internet marketer.

And this is why I developed this book /course. It was borne out of my own personal frustration and as I discovered when I did some research, this is a major stumbling block for so many Newbies. So many people are too overwhelmed by information overload and not knowing where to start, that they never start.

SO WHAT IS INTERNET MARKETING? My definition is: “it is the process of selling (marketing) products and / or services on the internet to make money.”

This whole process can be summarized in 3 steps: 1. Pick a niche whom you want to sell something to 2. Ask them what they want 3. Give it to them - sell them what they want!

So for example, I am involved in the internet marketing niche, I have determined that most marketers do not know where to start or feel overwhelmed by information overload and so I produced this course / book.

So as you can see this is a simple process, it is just not easy!

Before I give you the structure of the course, I just want to give you a bit of encouragement.

You do not need to know everything - There are so many different facets to internet marketing that you will probably never be an expert at all of them. Anyway, technology changes every day! The goal with this book is to give you a good overview of as many elements as I could think of that could potentially be involved in your internet marketing business.

You do not have to be a “techie” person – In some ways it is better not to be technically proficient!

I say this because then you will tend to spend a lot of time doing technical things, which you could easily outsource to others. This time, I believe, could be better spent in other aspects of your business. I started with zero technical skills. Today while I am not brilliant, I have come a long way and can help myself BUT I STILL OUTSOURCE ALL TECHNICAL STUFF! Nothing is complicated – in all of my research, I never came across instances where people said things were complicated. There are resources to find out how to do anything and as already mentioned, you can just outsource stuff that you feel you cannot do or you simply do not want to do. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan]

HERE ARE THE OBJECTIVES OF THIS BOOK: The ultimate aim is to build up a framework for you, to show you the big picture. I will also show you where all of the smaller components fit into the big picture.

We will do this in a logical and systematic way. We will do this in bite-size chunks to avoid overwhelming you. Each module / chapter will build on the previous one.

At the end I will then take you through the entire process and help you map out a plan that is appropriate for YOU to launch an online business. This will be based on your personality and your available resources (mainly time and money).

The value here is that you spend a little bit of good quality time upfront to determine which type of internet marketing business best suits you. You then understand which tools and technologies you need to research and then you do ONLY THAT! If you do not, you could find yourself being a student for too long and not actually making any money.

THIS IS HOW THE COURSE IS STRUCTURED: First I am going to give you a good broad overview of the fundamental concepts. This is not really rocket science; the difficulty comes when looking at the various different component parts. I have broken this down into JUST SIX concepts.

From this I will further break each overall concept into its smaller individual parts.

Then we will get to the detail of each of these groups as this is where the rubber hits the road. The devil is really in the detail. I will give you an overview of what each small component consists of.

I will show you how it fits into the big picture and then I will suggest appropriate resources should you need more information on any topic.

At the end, after we have built up a comprehensive overview of the process of making money online, I will take you through a process to help you formulate your own online business plan that suits your personality and your personal circumstances.

THE SIX OVERALL CONCEPTS: The course is broken down into these 6 areas and it is done in a specific order: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Pick a niche Create or source your product Create your sales funnel Build your website Drive traffic to your website Seven different online monetization models

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] 1. Pick a niche - A niche is just a fancy way of describing a group of people with a particular interest.

Many people have great difficulty with this when they first start. If you are a newbie and I ask you right now, what niche will you choose, can you give me an answer?

Also, many internet marketers will be active in multiple niches. You probably also have a lot more marketable skills than you realise.

2. Create or source your product - Each niche is different and so it will require different products.

These products could be physical products or virtual downloadable products. I will give you a far more detailed product creation session later but for now just know that there are MANY more possibilities than you can imagine.

3. Create your sales funnel – This may be one of the most important things you learn in this course. So many Newbies just have no inkling about this because the gurus seldom talk about it.

Basically, this is designing your entire business model before you build your website. Your success as an internet marketer depends on how you build your sales funnel.

4. Build your website – By the time you have chosen your niche and the type of product you will sell and after you have mapped out your sales funnel, you will then know which type of website to build. You will build different types of sites for different business models. Website creation will need to take the technical details of the business into account. For example, you will need to find a way to collect the money from your customers before you deliver their goods or you may need a shopping cart depending on your business model.

This section also covers the basics of how to register domains and purchase hosting.

5. Drive traffic to your website - Once you have your product set up on your website which is integrated with your merchant account, you then need to tell the world that you exist. All of your efforts will be wasted if nobody knows about or ever visits your site.

By far the vast majority internet marketing products focus on this area. This is effectively the “marketing” part of “internet marketing”. There are basically 2 ways to get people to your site. This involves spending TIME, MONEY OR BOTH. We will look at free traffic, paid traffic and how to get traffic using joint ventures and affiliates. We will also look at how best to convert this traffic into paying customers by constantly tracking our conversions and tweaking our sales funnel to maximise our conversions.

6. Seven different online monetization models - To qualify for my listing, it has to be a BUSINESS and not a job. A job is where you trade your time for money, such as writing articles for people and charging for it. A job will not get you the internet marketing lifestyle that we all desire.

You need to be able to make money when you are not there. Typically, you put in the work up front, for which you do not immediately get paid but if you do it right, you only have to do it once and get paid forever! That my friends, is the Holy Grail.

At the end we will build your own personalised online business plan together.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] You will probably have noticed that the stuff you probably wanted first, the seven online business models, is the last thing I discuss. There is a very good reason for this and I urge you not to skip ahead. Complete the modules in the order that I have presented them to you. Once you have completed the entire book, you will realise that NO MATTER WHICH MONETIZATION MODEL YOU CHOOSE, everything that you learn in this course will be relevant to any of the models. It will all just fall into place.

NOT A ‘GET RICH QUICK’ SCHEME: I have to warn you from the outset that this is not a get rich quick scheme even though some people are lucky. I want you to understand that while the rewards are great, you will have to work for it however.

So you really need two things: 1. The willingness to put in the required work (or outsource it!) and 2. The willingness to learn the business (reading this book is your first step).

Generally as you get better at the business and it becomes more established, you can then work less and earn more but this is usually not so when you start.

I do think that having some money to start will definitely help but it is not essential. You could really start with as little as $100, or less if you really had to.

As I introduce you to the different concepts, I will recommend many tools that you will need or find useful. Some will be free and some you will have to pay for if you choose to use them. Many tools are just “nice to have” but there are a few ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL TOOLS that you will need. I will tell you which ones you REALLY NEED. I warn you now that you can spend an absolute fortune on internet marketing products. While I have no real problem with this because I have spent my fair share on them, I will try to help you spend your money wisely. I will consequently recommend many free tools that you can use, especially early on in your career. I will also provide you with many resources. As you become more experienced you will know if you need to invest in any particular area.

MODULE 1 – PICK A NICHE: We are going to get the ball rolling by learning all about how to pick your niche. This is the first of the six steps that you need to master in order to make money online.

This module has 3 components: .

1) The first thing is “How to determine a niche” This is the first step where you need to brainstorm ideas for a niche that you want to build a business around.

2) The next step is “Keyword research” [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Now you need to research the ideas that you brainstormed to determine whether there is a high probability of being able to make money out of the niche that you have chosen.

3) Lastly you conduct an “Ask Campaign” You do this in order to develop products that your market WANTS. The best thing to do is to simply ask your customers what they want and then when they tell you, you simply create the products that meet all their ‘wants”. Then sell it to them!

Now let us take a look at these factors in a lot more detail.

SO, WHAT EXACTLY IS A NICHE? If you want to make money online, you must have something to sell. It could be a product or a service. The first thing you have to do is determine which NICHE you are going to sell your products or services to. Picking a niche is the starting point of successful internet marketing.

By definition, a niche is a segment of a larger market.

More specifically, it is a FOCUSSED, TARGETABLE portion of a market. A niche is just a fancy way of describing a group of people with a particular interest. For example chess players, gardeners, rose gardeners, raw food dieters, golfers, internet marketers and the list just goes on and on.

These people are a tightly knit group of people with a specific NEED or WANT. If you know more than anyone else about your niche and you can satisfy their wants or needs, then they will be prepared to pay you for this and you have the basis for a profitable online business.

In many ways, the process of finding a niche is the most difficult part of the process of starting your online business. If you get it wrong you will spend many wasted hours pouring yourself into products that do not sell.

This is perhaps best illustrated by an example: [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Let us tie this to the idea of information products. I am currently involved in internet marketing and am quite PASSIONATE about it. I have read a lot about the topic, own many programs developed by many of the industry “gurus” and have many software tools that help me with my business. So I have a niche interest called “internet marketing” Now internet marketing is a VERY BROAD TOPIC (OR NICHE). You are consuming this material right now because perhaps you are staring out and you do not really know where to begin. You may have started off searching for the term “make money online” or “internet marketing”. You probably got millions of results.

(At the time I did it I got 161 million results for “internet marketing”). So if I were choosing such a broad niche, I would be competing in an almost impossible market because of the remote chance of someone finding my product.

So after reading a bit you probably realised that you were getting nowhere and you may have refined your search to “how to start making money online” or “internet marketing for Newbies”.

You will have noticed that you still got millions of results but FAR FEWER THAN THE BROAD SEARCH FOR “INTERNET MARKETING” (I got 3 million at the time I did the search for “internet marketing for Newbies”).

So what has happened here? I took the main niche of “internet marketing” and I decided to focus on a smaller subset of this niche being “internet marketing for Newbies”. This is probably why you found this course. I doubt that you would have found me if I was advertising the broad niche of “internet marketing” As you go through this course and your internet marketing career, you are going to find that you need to know more information about say ADVERTISING your product.

Now there are people who are going to make products that cater just for this. These people will be experts in just this topic. So now you can see that the broad niche of internet marketing has been broken down into “internet marketing for Newbies” and then into advertising for internet marketers.

When I did the search for “Internet marketing advertising” I got 1,38 million searches. Again less than the two broader niches above.

Guess what? Internet advertising can be broken down further into say banner advertising or pay per click (PPC). (We will cover all of this later in the course).

There are people who are experts at Google PPC advertising, also known as Google Adwords. My search for “advertising with PPC” yielded only 29,600 results.

Ok, I think that I have made the point.

In summary, the idea of niche marketing is to identify a group of people who have a common interest (with a NEED OR WANT) and then market a product that will be of particular interest and relevance to this group.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Often times, the smaller AND THUS MORE TARGETED the niche group you are catering for, the greater the profit potential! This is generally because the more targeted you make your niche, the more specialised the products or knowledge required in this niche. This will mean that people will be prepared to pay more for these products or information.

So for example you may broadly know what PPC is but in order for you to actually make money from it, you will have to study it quite comprehensively and there are far fewer people who are true experts on the topic. Their knowledge is thus not as freely available as other topics may be and so they can charge a lot of money for this specialised knowledge.

STEP 1 - HOW TO DETERMINE YOUR NICHE: Now that you know what a niche is and what the goal of choosing a successful niche is, you will want to look at your own personal expertise as a starting point to brainstorm different potential niches to create a business around.

Generally it is preferable to pick a niche that you are knowledgeable about at the very least. The best niche is one which you are passionate about. This will become important when you have to continually create new content. It is much easier doing something that you love.

That said, while it is preferable to love your topic and know a bit about it, it is not essential! If you read 3-5 books on a topic, you will effectively be “an expert�.

There are many checklists and ideas that you can follow to brainstorm your interests. You can use the one included in this course to help you to brainstorm niche ideas.

STEP 2 - RESEARCH: Once you have a number of potential topics, you need to narrow down your selection to find the niche that is best suited to you. This is where you need to start doing some research.

You then need to research if there really is a market for your chosen niche. This is where Google comes into play. The key is to determine how popular a topic is.

Contrary to what seems logical, often the more competitors in a niche the better! This is because it proves that there is a demand in the niche and hence money.

Your job is to establish how profitable the potential niche is by the number of people interested in it.

You will then determine how many competitors there are and what types of products they are selling and of course how much they are charging. Then you want to determine whether you can make a better product that your customers will be prepared to buy from you.

Of course on very rare occasions you may be able to find a great niche with little or no competition.

This is jackpot time baby! While this does not happen often because of the maturity of internet marketing, it does happen.

Now it is time to do keyword research.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] STEP 2.1 - KEYWORD RESEARCH: You are going to hear a lot about keyword research. It is the cornerstone of all internet marketing.

For example, let us say that you are looking for information on “low carb diets”. Most people would just go to Google and type in “low carb diets” and Google would return millions of results.

The three words that you type in (low carb diets) are what are known as keywords. Keywords can be single words or a phrase like this consisting of 3 or more words. This is what makes the whole internet world go round.

Now what if there were only a few thousand search results returned by Google for this keyword phrase? Well, it would probably mean that there is not enough demand in the market for this product.

Google has a free key word tool that you can find by just typing in “Google keyword tool” into the search engines. Or you can click here for the Free Google Keyword Tool This tool will tell you how many times a month people search for any given keyword.

It will also make suggestions to you for other keywords that are related to your search and how many times a month that key word is searched for. So “Atkins” or “Atkins diet” or “high protein diet” are related keywords that you need to look at.

Becoming good at keyword research is absolutely critical to all internet marketers. There are many specialist keyword tools on the market that perform different functions than what we have looked at here. These are normally paid tools but can often be useful. However the free Google tool is generally sufficient for most applications. The paid tools automate many manual processes that you would have to perform with the Google tool and this is often where their value lies because in most instances they use the Google search engine to get their raw keyword data.

Keywords have many uses such as giving an indication of the potential demand of the product. It also helps us to determine which keywords to target for a pay per click campaign or to help us optimise our websites so that we can be found in Google when someone types in “low carb diet”.

This is known as Search Engine Optimization of SEO for short. That is a whole topic on its own and will be covered in a later book.

STEP 3 - NOW YOU SIMPLY ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY WANT: Once you have chosen your niche, you need to determine what products your target market will actually pay for. So many people develop products that they thought were great and then nobody buys them.

Here is one of the most important things I will tell you in this course so listen carefully! PEOPLE BUY WHAT THEY WANT AND NOT NECESSARILY WHAT THEY NEED! Especially if you are developing your own information product, you do not want to waste time and money doing so if nobody is going to buy it.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] The easiest way to ensure the success of your product is to ask people what they want. You are trying to find out what their biggest frustrations, fears and problems are. If you can produce a product that solves a problem, you have a winner on your hands. What better way to create a product than by getting people to tell you what their biggest fears, frustrations and problems are.

There are many ways to do this. You can do it by researching what people are saying by reading things like blogs, newsletters and forums. This is often a very good way to find out what people are talking about even though it can be a bit time consuming.

SURVEYS: A great way to find out what people want is simply to ask them.

There are numerous online survey sites which will allow you to set up an online survey with as many questions as you like. You then just need to drive people to the survey and ask them what they want.

Normally you would do so with the promise of something free for the time they took to fill out the survey. When I launched my garage sale blueprint product, I asked people what they wanted me to cover in my course. In return I gave a free copy of the course to the people who participated in my survey once it was complete.

There are some very good paid survey options out there but there are also several free options. I did a small pay per click (PPC) campaign on Google where I paid for the traffic when I recently launched one of my products called Garage Sale Blueprint. It was however a small price to pay because it gave me a chance to assess the size of my market and what they wanted. So if my results were terrible, I would have known upfront that the product would probably not sell and thus I should forget the idea at that point before I spent any more time and money developing the product. If it got a poor response, I would have only been out of pocket by a few bucks and I may have had a dented ego for a few days!

If you have a subscriber list or a blog, you can use these resources to do your survey. It is often a good idea to survey your existing customers regularly to ensure you keep giving them world class service.

It will also give you new ideas for products that you can develop for them!

STEP 4 - GIVE IT TO THEM!: Once your research is complete and you have a high demand product, you simply create your product and cover all the items that your customers asked for when you did your survey.

A good trick is to use this survey information to write your sales letter before your create your product! You simply use all the points that your customers mentioned in your sales letter and make sure you cover all the important points, and then you build your product to agree to the sales letter.

And you are done!

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] MODULE 2 - PRODUCT CREATION Now we are going to look how to use all of this information we acquired from the first two modules to create the actual product for our customers.

There are 4 parts to this module: 1. First we will look at creating our own product.

2. There are 5 different types of information products that we can create. They are eBooks, Videos, Audios, software and apps.

3. We will then look at how to price our products 4. Then we discover how to easily create the content for your products.

We look at how to get free or cheap content that we can use as the basis of our products and we even look at outsourcing the product creation process to someone else.

Lastly we look at an alternative to creating our own products. We can actually sell products that other people have created as an affiliate.

INTRODUCTION: Creating products to sell is one of the biggest reasons that people never really get started in this business. People are intimidated by the mere thought of having to create a product because they do not know what content to create a product on or how to do it.

There are fortunately many solutions to this problem. The good news is that it is easier than you many think. In fact you do not even need to create your own product. You can sell other people’s products and earn a commission on every sale. This is called affiliate marketing.

I bet you that there are more different types of information products than you thought possible! I want to introduce you to a number of possibilities just to get your mind thinking in the right direction.

SHOULD YOU CREATE PHYSICAL OR DIGITAL PRODUCTS? For almost all of the products that I am going to talk about now, you can either deliver the product digitally or you can have a physical product made which you will need to ship to your customer.

Each of these options obviously has its advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes you could also do a combination of the two.

In most cases I think that the benefits of digital products trump physical products. Some people prefer physical products such as books because they are used to it. However with technology advancing as much as it has with things like the Apple IPod for audio products and the Kindle for books, consumers are becoming far more used to digital products.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Physical products are also far more labour intensive than digital products. They need to be manufactured, stored and physically shipped. This takes up more TIME and MONEY to deliver this to people.

The great advantage that digital products have over physical products is that you can deliver it to your customers instantly. People love this. No, people nowadays EXPECT this. If you are looking to solve a problem at 3a.m. and you find the perfect product, if you can get immediate access, you will even be happy to pay a premium. Digital products cost nothing to produce once the product is created and almost nothing to ship, just a bit of bandwidth.

Having built an overwhelming case for digital products, physical products do have their place. We will look at some examples later.

LET US NOW LOOK AT SOME PRODUCT FORMATS Essentially, there are a number of different forms that your products can take. We will first look at the formats and then we will brainstorm examples of the different formats.

WRITTEN WORD The book is the oldest information product available. Today the physical book has mostly been superseded by a digital product also known as an “eBook”.

The most common form is a PDF document which can be read by anyone with a computer. People who do not have the Microsoft Word program (or similar) on their computer may not be able to read your Microsoft® Word™ document without spending money on the software but they will be able to read the PDF for free.

After creating your masterpiece in a word processor such as Microsoft® Word™, there are many programs that are available to simply convert that document into a PDF at the click of a button.

These programs are free.

This is important because people cannot easily edit a PDF like they can a Microsoft Word document.

Most free programs will not allow adequate protection of the document, which means that people could convert the PDF to some other format and edit it that way. There are commercial programs such as Adobe® that will allow you to protect your content.

VIDEO OR DVD For many years, the written word reigned supreme. However in recent times, video products have made the greatest impact. All of today’s top marketers produce video products. This is because customers would much prefer to watch an hour long video than spend a day reading the PDF. It is also much easier to show your customers step-by-step what you are trying to teach them.

Videos also have the highest perceived value. You can often sell a video version of the PDF for 10 times more.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Again you can ship a physical product or just let customers download the video and watch it instantly. Another option is to allow customers to “stream” the video feed without them having to download the product. This will allow you to protect the video content if you feel this is necessary.

Obviously they will have to be online while they watch your video.

Producing videos is actually much easier than you may think. With the advent of high definition, relatively inexpensive video cameras can produce amazing video quality. In the world of information marketing, you do not need to create “studio perfect” videos.

People appreciate raw and real because they associate more with “real people”. Many marketers will often leave mistakes that they made in their videos just to show their customers their human fallibility.

Almost every successful internet marketer today produces screen capture videos. There is fantastic software available that allows you to record everything that you see and hear on your computer screen. The most popular form that this takes is creating a PowerPoint presentation and then recording the screen while recoding the audio and then producing a video. For internet marketing applications, one can show customers exactly how one performs certain functions. Very powerful stuff!

If you are going to create videos you really should consider investing in commercial screen capture software. Techsmith produces the premier product called Camtasia, which is available for PC and Mac. The videos that you are can download for free with this book were produced using Camtasia.

You can download the videos here: www.CompleteInternetMarketingResources.com/TIMGP Mac users often prefer a program called Screenflow because they say that it works better for the Mac than Camtasia.

If you are going to be a successful internet marketer, you WILL NEED TO PRODUCE VIDEOS. These two products are the gold standard and you really should think of them as a business expense. Buy them once and use them forever. If you use a PC, get Camtasia and if you use a Mac get Screenflow.

Note, there are certain free programs that will allow you to create basic videos such as Windows® Live Moviemaker, Cam Studio and Jing. These are ok to start with but if you are serious about internet marketing, you should invest in the commercial programs.

NOW LET US TAKE A LOOK AT PRODUCING AUDIO PRODUCTS: Audio is still a very popular choice because people can consume the product while doing other things so it does not cost them any extra time. I have listened to countless information products on my IPod while I was driving or at gym.

The mp3 player is now a household necessity. Apple has helped develop this market with their IPod but there are many other mp3 players out there.

There are many ways to record audio. You can either purchase audio software or utilise online services that will allow you to phone in to their system and record your message. They will then create the MP3s for you and then email it you. Easy as that!

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] When using Camtasia or Screenflow, you can also rip the audio from any video that you produce at the touch of a button to create instant MP3’s. This suddenly gives you two products when you make a video!

LET US NOW LOOK AT SOFTWARE CREATION: This can again take two forms. Most software is simply downloaded directly nowadays but in rare circumstances you can still get it on a disc. This is not the two forms of software product that I am referring to though.

You can either sell the software outright where the customer pays a once-off fee and then owns the software and can use it forever without having to pay again or you could get customers to pay annual license fees or better yet monthly fees.

In this case the software is often online software so the customer does not have to download it to their desktop. They can log into the software from any computer with internet access anywhere in the world.

For example, if you buy Microsoft office, you only pay once and then you can use it over and over.

You would only ever have to pay again if you decide to upgrade to a later version. If you chose not to upgrade, you would never have to pay again.

I pay an annual license fee for my accounting system. Each year they invoice me, I pay them and they send me a new license key to unlock the program for another year.

The best examples of monthly billing are for recurring services. You pay monthly web hosting fees for example. I also pay a monthly fee to Aweber for my auto responder.

LASTLY LET’S TAKE A QUICK LOOK AT APPS: Another popular product nowadays is the lowly “app”. Millions of apps get sold every month now for cell phones, IPads and other tablets. If you can dream it, someone has (or will) create an app for it! Make sure that you are the one who creates the app to fill an important need.

This is a great example of when to outsource product creation to a skilled programmer. We are going to look at outsourcing in a little while.

CONTENT CREATION: One of the biggest challenges for internet marketers is how to get their content. They are looking for ideas and for the actual content which they will package at the end of the day. Clearly if you want to succeed as a top internet marketer, you will need to have original content that is in demand.

Let us look at some useful places to get content.

PUBLIC LABEL RIGHTS OR PLR:

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] There is a very popular concept on the internet today called Private Label rights or PLR. This is a very broad term and encompasses quite a lot. In a nutshell what it means is that people produce products in a niche and then they sell those products to others with the right for those other people to do various things with that product.

Most often, people will have the right to sell that same product to others over and over because they now become the product owner. If one can just sell the product exactly as it is, this is known as the “Resale Right”. If one is allowed to also sell their customers the right to sell the product to someone else, this is known as a “Master resell right”.

The best form is a pure private label product. This will often give the buyer the right to alter the product in any way they see fit. They can rewrite it, claim authorship of it, change the sales letter and graphics etc. Many new products are spawned from using a PLR product as a base and then improving on it.

There are many PLR sites on the net that charge a monthly fee for the right to access and download as much product as one wants while one pays ones subscription fee. This product is often used as content for products, articles and websites. You can also buy individual products for a very small fee if you do not want to join a membership site.

Many Newbies often start with PLR products because for a relatively low investment, one can have a ready-made supply of products to sell.

PUBLIC DOMAIN INFORMATION IS FREE!: Another place to get content that you can rework is known as public domain content. Public domain refers to early literary works where the author’s rights have expired. You can treat this information like PLR information and put your name on the book.

Most of these books have excellent content, especially for “evergreen” topics. You may however just have to modernise the content. One example of this that most people know is the book “Think and grow rich” by Napoleon Hill. Many people have sold this book as is. Others have created entire home study courses around the material in the book.

In the US, all works created before 1923 are now in the public domain, while many other works published later will also be in the public domain.

Public domain also includes other creative works such as movies, music, books, manuals, photographs, posters, software and more

OUTSOURCING: Your internet business lends itself perfectly to the wonderful world of outsourcing. Outsourcing simply means getting other people with more skills than you in a particular area to do what you cannot do or choose not to do or where the tasks are just not economically feasible for you to do.

This is particularly useful for people who live in developed first world countries. This is because resources in those countries, such as the US, are relatively expensive. The trick is then to outsource internet related tasks (which can include product development) to people in countries where the [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] general standard of living is lower and where people are used to getting paid less. This does not mean that the quality of the work is poor; it just means that it is cheaper.

Prime countries for outsourcing include India, Pakistan and the Philippines.

There are a few well known internet sites which control this whole process so that you know that your work is guaranteed and the person doing the work knows that they will get paid so it is really very easy to outsource your requirements.

Every successful internet marketer outsources something; some even outsource their entire business.

However, outsourcing is a skill in its own right that does take some application to perfect. It is a vital skill which will be well worth the time to learn.

WAYS TO POSITION YOURSELF: There are a few ways to position yourself when creating original content.

EXPERT: You can position yourself as the expert. You use your own knowledge to create the content for your products. You are the Guru.

FACILITATOR: You can also play the role of a host interviewer. You seek out other experts in your chosen field and then you interview them and create products by pulling it all together. For example you may do a series of video or audio interviews. As you do more interviews, you become “an expert� by association because every time an expert comes up, YOUR NAME gets mentioned.

CO-ORDINATOR: You can take the facilitator role a bit further. This is where you get different experts in your niche to contribute small bits of their expertise and then you combine it all into a product. For example you could get 10 different experts in your niche to each contribute one chapter of what you publish as a 10-chapter book.

Generally everyone will feel comfortable within at least one of these categories. So there really should be no excuse for not producing good content and products. You will also generally be able to produce the types of products that you feel comfortable with. For example if you do not feel comfortable on video, you can produce audio products or get someone else to do the voiceovers for you.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] I want to discuss a concept that I got from Russell Brunson called the assention ladder.

In the world of internet marketing, the different types of products have different perceived values.

As you change the format of the product, the perceived value (and hence what you can charge) increases.

Typically the written word would have the lowest value. An eBook on a topic may sell for say $9.99.

If one then makes an audio recording of the eBook, it may now sell for say $27 to $47.

If one then creates a video (even a screen capture video we spoke of earlier), this product may now sell for say $97.

What if you were to hold a live event? Now you may be able to charge say $297 to $999 for your product.

The next step could be small mastermind groups that you train together. It is not unusual for the top marketers to charge $10k-$20k a year for this.

Next is one on one coaching.

Lastly, right at the top is where you simply do whatever the client needs for them. They do not have to learn it as you just do it.

In general, the closer one gets to the “guru”, the more one has to pay for the privilege. So while we speak of internet marketing, this does not mean that product fulfilment will only be in the form of digital or physical products. The internet will often act as the base for building your reputation. You can then cash in offline by consulting or performing “done for you” services for your client.

A great way to create products would be by starting higher up this ascension ladder that I just told you about and then working your way back down. Start with a live event. This is the only bit that you have to do. You can now outsource the rest. Get someone to video the event for you and now you have a video product. You can then rip the audio for an MP3 and then transcribe the content to create a pdf. You can then mix and match these in any way you please to create many products from just one live event!

LET US NOW LOOK AT SOME PRODUCT EXAMPLES: Here is a list of possible products that one can create: • • • • • • • • • •

Books & eBooks Newsletters Magazines Monthly DVD or CD – physical or digital Software Apple or android apps Audio products Multimedia – i.e. a combination of formats Home study kits Special reports

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] • • • • • • • • • • •

Live events Coaching Consulting Done for you services Webinars Teleseminars Mastermind groups Workshops Certifications PLR and public domain products Membership sites and continuity programs

LET US TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT MEMBERSHIP SITES (CONTINUITY INCOME) The best form of online business is when you can bill your customers month after month.

If you create a product that your customers want and you continually update it with relevant and useful content, you will have the makings of a great business.

There are many different formats and variations of memberships that one can sell. There are open ended memberships which go on until customers cancel and there are memberships with a fixed term.

This is such a broad topic and really has many facets ranging from the concept to the content to the technical side of the software required to manage everything on autopilot. However, virtually all of the successful internet marketers today have some sort of membership site or continuity program.

AFFILIATE MARKETING Affiliate marketing is a huge topic on its own but I think that it is appropriate to include it here in the product development section. We take a much more detailed look at it in the traffic and monetization videos later in the course.

Affiliates sell other peoples products for a commission. By now the lights should be going on because you can make a good living on the internet marketing other people’s products, which means that you never actually have to produce a product of your own!

You can start earning money immediately! Now I am not suggesting that you follow this route but it certainly is an option. There are some very wealthy “super affiliates” who make an excellent income. However, most successful marketers sell their own stuff. In fact they sell their own stuff and act as affiliates for others.

The only way that these huge figure profit launches that you hear of are possible is by many people selling your products. Even if you give away 50%, you will still make more money by having 3 or more affiliates selling your product than you could produce on your own.

The way it works is that you include a piece of code on your website, in your ads or emails that attract your customers. When they click on your link, they are then taken to the vendors purchase [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] page. The code is then identified as belonging to you and you get credit for the sale. The biggest online digital marketplace is called ClickBank. Go and visit www.clickbank.com to get an idea of the type of products that get sold in your industry.

MODULE 3 - SALES FUNNEL: We are now going to look at building a profitable sales funnel.

This is the third major concept that you need to know about to make money online.

Let us take a look at an overview of the whole process: 1. The first thing we do is create a squeeze page for our site to collect our visitors e-mail addresses so that we can email them content and product offerings. We will also need an autoresponder to collect and organise all of our lists.

2. We then need to write a compelling sales letter, which means we need to understand basic copywriting and graphics requirements for our site.

3. We then look at ways to make additional money off our existing customers with Upsells, downsells and cross sells as well as one-time offers.

4. We also plan our entire business upfront so that we can continue to make money from our customers in the future.

5. Lastly we look at how to launch our product to the market when it is ready.

INTRODUCTION: Understanding how the internet marketing sales funnel works is one of the most important skills you can learn. Most Newbies do not know about this because most gurus do not teach it, at least they do not teach it to Newbies.

Understanding the sales funnel is absolutely critical because it will be the basis of your entire business plan. If you do not understand or implement many of the key strategies of a successful sales funnel, you will make substantially less profit than you should.

THE SQUEEZE PAGE: All successful marketers use a “Squeeze Page”. A squeeze page is an internet marketing term used for a page that tries to “squeeze” your visitors email address out of them. A squeeze page is also known as an opt-in page or lead capture page.

As every successful internet marketer will tell you, “the money is in the list!” This is because most people do not buy anything from you the first time they come to your website. It usually takes up to 12 visits or interaction with you before they trust you enough to buy from you. So it does not help

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] to just throw up a web page and then try to sell something to your visitor the first time they arrive at your site, because statistically (normally only 1%) they are not going to buy!

This is why the most important thing you can do is GET THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS! This way you can continue to engage with them via email while you build trust and slowly encourage them to buy from you. Ideally you want this to be the first page that visitors land on when they arrive at your site Squeeze Pages are generally very short with only 4 main pieces of information on them: • • • •

Attention pulling headline Brief description and or graphic of the product A call to action and An opt-in box where your visitors can enter in their email address.

The reason there is no other information is so that visitors are not distracted in any way because you are leading them to perform you desired outcome which is to get their email address.

Now the question arises, how do we get the visitor to give us their email address?

You will generally use “an ethical bribe” to get users to give you their contact details. This means that you will offer your visitors something of value FOR FREE in exchange for their e-mail address.

You should try to give away something that relates to your business or the offer which you are about to make or something that solves a burning problem for your customers. You could give away eBooks, videos, audios, reports, software checklists…anything of VALUE!

AUTORESPONDER: When your customer’s type their email address into your opt-in box (mostly from your squeeze page) the details have to be captured somewhere so that you can store them logically and easily utilize them in future. Enter one of the best inventions of the internet marketing world, THE AUTORESPONDER! This service captures the details that your visitors type into the squeeze page, typically a first name and an email address. The auto responder service then stores these names for each different list that you create. You can then, at any time you like, send out e-mail messages to your entire list.

So typically as soon as they opt into your list by filling in their details in your squeeze page, the auto responder service will then send out a welcome or thank you message to your visitor thanking them for opting into the list and giving them a link to the free download that you promised. The beauty of an auto responder is that you can set up a series of messages once, and this same series of messages will go out to everyone who opts into your list in the same order and at the same time intervals that you choose. You do the work of setting up your series of emails only once and from then on the process is automated so you never have to worry about it again.

Autoresponders can be used to send out any number of emails at a time to your list. The email messages can be personalised for each of your clients. This increases trust and encourages return visits to your website. Each email message sent to your customers presents you with an additional opportunity to sell them something – either your own product or an affiliate product.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] THE NEXT THING WE NEED IS A HIGH CONVERTING SALES PAGE: The sales page only has one function and that is to sell your product. There are no other distractions or links on the sales page. Of course you want to have a good appealing sales page with eye catching graphics and emotive copy in order to entice your customers to buy your product.

The typical sales page follows a tried and tested formula and is made up of a number of core components. This means that if you know what they are and what order they need to appear in, 90% of your sales letter construction will already be taken care of!

Sales letters can be in a number of different formats. They could be short (2 pages or so) or long (550pages). They could also consist of only video. In fact sales videos seem to be more popular in the internet marketing niche at the moment than written sales letters.

A CLOSER LOOK AT COPYWRITING: A well-crafted sales page can sell even a poor product. I am not suggesting that you do, I am just pointing out that good copy may be one of the most important, if not THE most important skill that you can learn. Often the best written sales copy sells the most products.

You can either hire someone to write the copy for you or you can write it yourself. Outsourcing this can be very costly. If you have a fantastic product that stands to make a fortune, then by all means consider this option as long as you can afford it. Copywriting services can run anywhere from $500 to $20,000 and more per sales letter! I am sure that you can see that this is a very useful skill worth acquiring.

For the most part, good internet marketing sales letters are very formulistic. What I mean by this is that they have a number of key elements and they generally appear in the same order. ALL good sales letters have the same elements. If you just go to www.clickbank.com, which is the largest digital marketplace on the web, you can click on any ad to see a sales letter. I suggest that you study the internet marketing niche (even if this is not your niche) because they understand the process better than anyone else.

Some of the components of a successful sales page, in the order in which they generally appear, are: • • • • • • • • • •

Headline Sub-headline Introduction which usually states the problem that your product will ultimately solve Establish your credibility Proof that the product works – normally through testimonials Features and benefits of your product Build up the value of your product in the user’s mind- normally through additional bonuses of high perceived value A call to action Money back guarantee PS – usually ends the sales letter which is a final push to your customers as to why they should buy your product NOW!

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] GRAPHICS: Part of your successful sales letter and indeed any website is the graphics. Graphics can often sell the product on their own.

If you are creative then you can create your own graphics but most of us will have to outsource this.

Common graphics needs include: • • • • •

Webpage headers Footers Product images Buy buttons Banner creation

UP-SELLS, DOWN-SELLS, CROSS SELLS AND OTO’S: Getting new customers is up to 10 times more difficult than making more money out of your existing customers. A great way of making more money from your existing customers is by offering them Upsells or downsells or one time offers.

This strategy essentially offers them additional products once they have already purchased your product offering but before they finalise their transaction. The reason this works so well is because the customer is already in a peak buying state. Once you get the customer to make the decision to buy from you, they will often be happy to spend more money with you as long as you offer them good value.

McDonalds’ classic line “would you like fries with that” is the best known example of an Upsell. You have already bought the burger, they now try and sell you fries as well. Because fries COMPLIMENT your burger on many occasions you will be happy to buy the fries as well. The same principals apply to online selling.

One of the best forms of Upsells is known as an OTO or One Time Offer.

As the name suggests, you customers only see this offer once ever, and that is at the time of the original purchase. What makes this compelling is that it is usually of such a high PERCEIVED value to your customers that they can’t help themselves but buy the offer. There is also a sense of urgency built in because once they click off the page, they will never again have the offer available to them.

If they refuse your Upsell or OTO, which will often be as a result of price rather than product, you can then offer them a down sell which is a cheaper version of the Upsell or OTO. For example if you Upsell as an additional 30 videos for $97, your down sell could be 10 Videos for $47 instead.

A cross sell would follow the same pattern as Upsells and downsells, the only difference is that the product may not be directly related to the primary product but the principals are the same. For example if I am selling a product on how to do article marketing I could offer a product on how to make money on eBay as cross sell.

BACKEND SALES:

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] It is much easier to sell more to your existing customers than it is to try and find new customers. To really make a lot of money as an internet marketer, you must have a good backend sales system.

What is a backend sales system? This simply refers to the process that you follow once you have acquired a customer and made a sale to them for the first time. Once they have bought something from you and you have established a bond with them, they are very likely to buy from you again in the future. How you tap into this phenomenon is with your backend system. You need to ensure that your business plan accommodates a back end sales plan and sales funnel. I think from this you can see that it is better to be in a niche where you can sell multiple products to your customers rather than only sale.

You can sell your existing customers more of your own products or you can sell them affiliate products.

It generally costs a lot of money to acquire a new customer, especially if you use paid advertising methods to do it. If you know the lifetime value of your customer (the amount that your average customer will spend with you over their lifetime), you can actually afford to make a loss on your first sale because you know you will make it up on the back end.

This knowledge will allow you to spend more than your competitors on advertising or pay your affiliates more. This will obviously lead to more customers

PRODUCT LAUNCHES: Hundreds of products get “launched” online every day. Many of them do not make any money.

In order to make the most out of launching your product and to ensure that you continue the momentum of the product launch to build your business, you need to plan and prepare properly for you launch.

It is important to let people know when you will be launching a new product. You need to give yourself enough time and you need to give your affiliates time for a proper launch. There are a few key steps which you need to do and these all take time, but the preparation time will be worthwhile.

For a large launch you will need to enlist the help of others, especially if you do not have a list of your own. All of the huge successful product launches that you have heard about have only been possible because many people have promoted the item to their list. Joint ventures and affiliates are a vital piece of this puzzle.

You also have to test your entire sales process as you intend it to be carried out on the day. You do not want your server crashing because it is overloaded or for there to be problems with your product downloads.

RECAP: This is the end of module 4. Let’s have a quick recap of the important things we learnt today: •

Your biggest take-away from this section should be the importance of the sales funnel.

Understand that the money is in the list because you have a chance to build trust and a long

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] term relationship with your customers. This will increase their lifetime value to you because you have their permission to constantly communicate with them and offer them products that will help them.

•

In order to build a list we learned that we should create a squeeze page and use an autoresponder to automate the process rather than sending customers directly to our sales page, where statistically we have a very small chance of them buying anything from us.

•

We learned about the different elements of a sales letter which should have put your mind at ease because creating a sales letter is actually a lot easier than you may have thought at first because of its formulistic nature.

•

We then learned how to maximise our sales from our existing customers by using Upsells, downsells and OTO’s.

•

We also learned why it is important to create a long term and sustainable backend for your business and

•

Lastly we took a quick look at the importance of planning a product launch.

MODULE 4 – WEBSITE CREATION: We have already looked at how to pick a profitable niche and how to create or source profitable products that your customers will love. Now that we have determined the structure of our sales funnel, it is time to learn how to build our website.

Let us take a quick overview of what we are going to cover in this module. We will break this section down into four different parts: 1. First we are going to look at the different types of websites that you may need depending on the business model that you choose. These include single product sites, membership sites, affiliate sites, blogs and a full ecommerce site.

2. Then we are going to look at the basics of setting up your website including hosting and registering your domain. This is where I explain the whole process in easy to understand language.

3. Then we will look at the technology which is not nearly as scary as most people think. I will also show you the easiest solution that will handle 99% of your problems. We will look at blogging, content management systems and custom built solutions.

4. Lastly we will look at the components of a typical information marketing website selling a single product. This will cover all of the fundamentals that you need to know as most websites will have at least these basic components.

We have already covered squeeze pages and autoresponders in the sales funnel section. We are now going to look at how to get paid and also how to deliver the product to our customers once we have been paid.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] CHOOSING WHAT TYPE OF SITE TO CREATE: SINGLE PRODUCT SITE: A single product site is by far the simplest of all the site types, and normally contains only a few pages. We will take a detailed look at this type of site at the end of this module.

The whole sales funnel is set up to sell a single product.

MEMBERSHIP SITE: Membership Sites allow you to sell products or services in a special password protected area which is accessible only to members.

As long as the member pays their membership fee, access is granted to this special website or website area.

Different Membership Plans can also be offered to your members. These sites require sophisticated software to manage your members and the different membership levels (plans), and provide access to the right areas of your site to the right members. Software can also be set up to drip feed content to your members at the exact time that you want them to access it.

Other than the special membership software that you simply install on your site, the rest of the operations will work the same as described above.

AFFILIATE SALE SITE: An Affiliate Sales Site is a site where one markets other people’s products. You first drive traffic to your affiliate site and you “pre-sell” them on the product that you are promoting. This is so that they are already motivated to buy once they land on the vendor’s sales page. You then send people from your affiliate site to the product owner’s sales page. When your customers buy the product that you recommended to them, you earn a commission.

This can be in the form of a review sites, Comparison sites or a Recommendation Site.

This is also a very simple site and can often be just a few pages consisting of text and a few images.

As you are not actually selling your own product, only pre-selling your customer on someone else’s product, you do not have to worry about things like merchant accounts and download pages.

Wordpress is the ideal platform to use for such a site.

BLOG: A Blog (from Web Log) is an online journal with regular posts. Posts will normally be commentary, description of events, or other materials like graphics or links.

A blog is usually presented as a person’s own views and opinions and has an informal tone. Most blogs are interactive and they allow the readers to comment on the blog post.

Blogs are probably the simplest form of website to set up because of how easy it is to use them.

There are also some excellent free blogging platforms like Blogger and Wordpress. They are also very easy to install and to keep updated. We will discuss blogs in a lot more detail later in the course. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] E-COMMERCE SITES: An e-Commerce site allows for selling multiple products or services. The best know example is probably www.amazon.com These sites are technically the most challenging to set up and should probably be outsourced to trained professionals. All of the other sites discussed are simple enough for anyone to understand and set up although much of it can also be outsourced.

Dedicated software is required to manage the product, categories, discounts etc.

E-Commerce sites also require shopping carts/baskets to allow multiple products to be sold in the same transaction. Shopping cart software can either be purchased outright or rented on a monthly basis.

REGISTER A DOMAIN NAME: The first thing you need to do is register a domain name.

A Domain Name is the name of your business on the Web. A Domain Name can be any combination of Letters or numbers, and can be up to 63 characters long.

For example, one of my websites has the domain name of www.garagesaleblueprint.com. This is effectively the name of my business, just like Wal-Mart is the name of the large US retail giant. This is now my online shop front and will form the brand that I will be promoting.

Registering your Domain Name Hundreds of Registrars currently operate online today and the process is virtually painless. These registrars like www.godaddy.com will provide you with search tools to establish if the domain name is available. It will also give you some suggestions if the site is not available, and will allow you to register the domain with multiple extensions (e.g. .Com or .Net or .Info etc.)

A domain name will cost around $10 per year. You have to renew it annually. You can often pay hosting for many years in advance to ensure that you do not lose it because you forgot to renew it.

Most domain name service providers will nowadays offer you an automatic renewal option which means that on renewal date, they will simply debit your credit card and your domain will be valid for another year.

I would advise registering your domain name as soon as possible. Often it will take you a bit of time to come up with the best domain names so make sure you have time to do so. Also, the sooner you register it, the better because then no one will be able to steal it.

One of the most popular domain registration services is www.godaddy.com

GET HOSTING The next thing you need to do is to get hosting for your website.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Hosting is like your online location. In the offline example, you can put any type of business into your location such as offices, storage or even a retail store. In your online location, you can house any of the five different types of sites that we discussed at the beginning of this module such as a membership site or even a full ecommerce site.

So if you go to Wal-Mart at your local mall or strip mall, you know exactly where to find them. They are always there, every time you visit. Your virtual shop is no different. It needs a permanent location so that your visitors can easily find it again and again.

Just like Wal-Mart pays rent to their landlord, the mall owner, so you will have to pay rent to your virtual landlord also known as an Internet Service Provider or ISP. All that your shop/website is, is a number of files. It is just like any directory on your computer. The only difference is that now the whole world needs to be able to find these files which make up the pages on your website.

Your ISP makes a section of the hard drive on one of their computers, called servers, available to you to host your website – this is now your virtual store location. This is what you are paying “rent” for.

Typically you will pay a monthly fee for this ranging from $5 and upwards depending on what additional services you require from your ISP. One of the most well-known ISP’s is www.hostgator.com When you purchase hosting, your ISP will normally give you what is known as your name server information. Let us have a look at what this means.

When you purchase hosting, your ISP will normally give you 2 important pieces of information: Your Name servers and Your FTP information which is what you will need to transfer data to your host server

NAME SERVERS: When your ISP allocates the allotted space on its computer to you for your website files it assigns an IP address. This IP address is just a series of numbers. These numbers are in the established internet format and they represent WHERE on the internet your website can be found.

The internet uses what are known as name servers to assign memorable names that humans can remember to these IP addresses.

Now a typical IP address may be something like 184.172.153.90. This is not something that is going to be very memorable to your customers. Do you think it is easier to remember www.garagesaleblueprint.com or 184.172.153.9?

Just like GPS co-ordinates would indicate where the physical address of Wal-Mart is to be found, so those numbers making up your IP address are effectively the GPS co-ordinates of your virtual store.

Just like real GPS co-ordinates probably mean nothing to you, it is the same with this IP address consisting of just numbers. You just know that if you put the co-ordinates into your GPS it will magically take you to the actual physical address of the Wal-Mart store you are looking for.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] This is where the last step of identifying your website comes in. You need to associate your memorable URL to your IP on a name server.

If you purchased your domain name from a separate company to your ISP, then you will have to go back to your domain name provider account and find your domain name and then “point” this domain name to the name servers that you got from your hosting company.

This is as simple as copy and paste. You simply copy the domain server information that you received from your ISP to your domain account. That is it!

This will then enable your customers to type in your URL, which will then redirect them to the name server on your ISP’s computer (i.e. your web address).

Be patient because this process can take up to 48 hours to complete.

Nowadays many of the bigger ISP’s are also offering domain registration services. If you buy the two together, your domain names will often be automatically pointed to the name servers and you will not have to worry about this last step.

A QUICK SUMMARY: After having said all of this, there are only three simple steps to follow: Step 1 – Register your domain name. I suggest www.godaddy.com Step 2 – Set up a monthly hosting account. I recommend www.hostgator.com. I pay less than $10 per month and I can host an unlimited amount of URL’s or domain names on this one account.

Step 3 – Simply go back to you Godaddy account (domain registration) and paste in the information that you got from Hostgator (ISP) telling you what your name server information is into your account.

It really is as simple as that. Now all you need to do is to upload or create your website. We will talk more about this in a little while

DOMAIN NAME ESSENTIALS: Let us take a closer look at my domain www.GarageSaleblueprint.com This name was not chosen at random! You will note the following important things about this name: 1 - It is descriptive of my business – and more particularly of the product which I am promoting.

The name contains the keyword description “garage sale” in it.

Just to recap what we learned in module 2, a keyword is essentially a word or phrase that someone will type into the search engines when they are looking for information on a certain product. In this case someone may type in “how to make money at garage sales” or even just “garage sale”. This is why it is important to make your domain name or URL as descriptive as possible. If I had called it something unrelated like www.HowToMakeMoneyToday.com I would not really have any chance of [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] being discovered by the people that are my ideal customers i.e. people looking for garage sale information.

Domain names are quite competitive these days and so it is often difficult to find your ideal domain available. In my case all the obvious domain names were already registered by someone else so I could not get them. I had to spend some time checking for an available domain name which was descriptive of my business. I was able to add the word “blueprint” to the URL because if you follow my course I effectively give you a step by step blueprint of how to do it. It was the most descriptive name that was available that I could use.

2 - The name is as short and memorable as possible. Of the available names this was as short a name I could find that contained my main keyword (garage sale) and that people would remember because they associated it to my product. It is still quite a long domain name but it was the best I could do in this case.

3 - It ends in “.com” – (this is known as the “Top Level Domain” or TLD) Nowadays there are many possible variations of the TLD but many normal internet users are not really aware of this. The vast majority of people will tend to just type in www.searchdomain.COM as a matter of course. So if someone else had say www.garagesaleprofits.COM and I build my business with www.garagesaleprofits.NET, many of my potential customers would end up on my competitors’ site!

Make sure you get a .com TLD. You may have to add another word to the URL such as www.BESTgaragesaelprofits.com or use hyphens such as www.garage-sale-profits.com. JUST MAKE SURE YOU GET THE .COM!!!!

WHAT TECHNOLOGY TO USE: WebPages are all written in HTML or hypertext mark-up language. This is just the format that all WebPages have to have. If you look at the source code for each webpage you will see what a typical HTML page looks like. It can be quite intimidating if you do not know anything about HTML In its simplest form HTML really just instructs the web browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox) what to display, where to display it and how to format it. For example it will display a headline in red which is bold in the middle of a page.

Fortunately you do not have to know any HTML in order to create a website. There are many different options which just allow you to type up the information that you want displayed on your web page by just typing normal text just as you would if you were sending an email or typing up a Microsoft Word document for example.

You have three options for your site. Let us take a closer look at all of them.

BLOGGING PLATFORM LIKE WORDPRESS: Fundamentally WordPress is a blogging platform but has become so advanced that it can also handle most other tasks that most websites would ever require. Most internet marketers only use WordPress as it will handle most of the things that they need it to do.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] WordPress is free and it is easy to install. You can have a WordPress site up and running in 5 minutes. Literally!

It is very easy to update your WordPress site with fresh content on a daily basis. Bogs are ideal for people who want control over their website that is easy to implement.

Many plugins exist to add just about any functionality that you could require to your WordPress blog. Many of these are free but you may have to pay for some. You can also get custom plugins written for you if you cannot find what you need. You can think of a plugin as a piece of software that usually takes just one click to install to add some sort of functionality to your site. For example, you can turn a simple wordpress blog into a membership site by installing a membership plugin.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS) LIKE JOOMLA: Joomla is also very easy to install and it is also free just like WordPress.

It allows more flexibility than your traditional blogging platforms when you want to customise your site. This is something to think about if you have a complex site or if you feel that you will need to upgrade your site to something more complex in the future.

CMS systems are a bit more complex to use than blogging platforms because you will need to give the system additional instructions in order to utilize its enhanced functionality. This is why most internet marketers prefer to use the less complex WordPress platform.

These CMS systems will also have blogging platform attached to them so you can choose either a CMS or a blogging platform that will be able to handle all of your website requirements.

CUSTOM BUILT WEBSITES: Sometimes websites are not built on specific platforms.

This will often be the case for either very simple websites or very complex websites that require custom functionality.

An example of a simple website would be a sales page and a download page. You can create these two static pages very easily by using what is known as a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. You simply type your content into your WYSIWYG editor and it will automatically convert this to HTML and display your WebPages in a format that humans can view and understand.

A popular free WYSIWYG editor is Kompozer which you can download at www.kompozer.net More complex websites will generally be outsourced to skilled programmers so you do not really have to worry about learning any scripting languages (Like PHP and ASP) which are what they will use to enhance the functionality of a basic HTML page.

SO, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO YOU? : Creating websites is really a very simple process.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Any complicated (or simple) websites can easily be outsourced.

Even if you know absolutely nothing about setting up WordPress, go to a site called www.fiverr.com and there are a ton of people that will do it for you for just $5! So there is no longer any excuse for not having your website up and running!

STRUCTURE OF A TYPICAL WEBSITE: When developing your website for internet marketing, there are certain CRITICAL components that your website must have and a few others that will make your site perform better than that of your competition. Let us take a look at a typical single product website, which is very common type of site for internet marketers.

An example would be my www.garagesaleblueprint.com site which basically only has 4 pages.

Here is what we need our website to accomplish: 1. When the visitor arrives, we want their name and e-mail address 2. Then we want to send them to the sales page 3. From the sales page, they will be taken to my merchant’s page where they will pay for the product. I use clickbank.com as my merchant.

4. Once they have paid for their product, we need to send them to the page where they can download their product. This is often called a “download” or “thank you” page.

4 Pages, that is it!

At this point I am going to assume that you already have a product and that because you now understand the importance of building your list from the last module that you have a squeeze page and an autoresponder set up. You should also by now have a sales page set up.

MERCHANT ACCOUNT: Once people eventually decide to buy your product, they need to be directed to some payment gateway so that you can get paid. After you have received payment, you need to be notified that payment has been received and then the customer needs to be given access to the download page of the product that they just purchased. The good news is that this process will be automated once you set it up.

Probably the two most utilised options in this regard are PayPal and Clickbank.

PayPal is more of a stand-alone option while Clickbank includes an affiliate program which I will explain shortly.

PayPal has been around for a long time and is well known and loved by many internet shoppers who are still nervous about giving their credit card details over the internet, although this perception of risk is diminishing as more and more people become comfortable with using the internet to buy stuff. People sign up with PayPal and create a secure account. They can either preload money or just link up their credit card details to PayPal. The issue here is that PayPal is TRUSTED.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] In truth there is no difference if they were to pay you directly with a credit card or through PayPal. The PayPal service is of course very useful for you because they act as your merchant. If you did not use them, you would have to use someone else anyway, so it is a win-win for all. Another reason people like using PayPal is because PayPal pay the merchant directly, so the customer’s credit card details are never exposed to the merchant.

Clickbank is the favourite marketplace for digital products on the web. They essentially do what PayPal does with one major additional advantage. They provide a ready-made affiliate network.

Clickbank claims to have over 100,000 registered affiliates. (Affiliates are people who sell other peoples products for a commission. We will cover affiliates in a lot more detail later in the course) Once you have set up your merchant account, say with Clickbank, you need to set up a link that will take your customer from your sales page to the Clickbank site so that they can make payment. This is set up with a piece of code which Clickbank will give you that you place on your website.

THANK YOU / DOWNLOAD PAGE: Once the transaction is complete, Clickbank will automatically send people to the page on your site where they can download their product. That is why it is often called the download page.

You will often thank you customer for their patronage at this point and this is why it is also called the thank you page.

OWN SITE OR AMAZON S3: You have two options when setting up your download page. You can either store the digital product that your customers will download on your site or you can store it on someone else’s site.

If the size of your file is small, for example it is just an e-book, then storing on your own site is probably ok. However if you store large amounts of data on your site, you are likely to run into band width problems. This happens when too many people start downloading huge amounts of data from your site or they download at the same time.

The first thing is that Your ISP will force you to upgrade your package which will cost you a lot more for monthly hosting. When a lot of people download large data files at the same time, it will slow down your site which will annoy your customers. In extreme cases, your website could crash under the load.

Fortunately our friends at amazon.com, the online retail giant have a ready-made solution for us.

They make available to us internet marketers the same technology that they use for their huge online empire. It is a service called Amazon S3 which stands for Simple Storage Solution.

You transfer a copy of your files to the Amazon site. You then simply have a link pointing from your site to Amazon S3 which will take your customers there to download their product. This is currently one of the cheapest solutions for internet marketers and it is very reliable.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] This process is seamless to your visitors. When they land on your thank you / download page, they click on the link to download the product, other than seeing the link to Amazon S3 they would be none the wiser, and in any event they probably would not care.

SUMMARY: We have now come to the end of module 5. Let us do a quick recap of what we covered in this section: The first thing that we looked at was the different types of sites that a typical internet marketer would need. We looked at 5 different types of sites, namely, single product sites, membership sites, affiliate sites, blogs and full blown e-commerce sites.

We then looked at the basics with regard to setting up our site which included purchasing a domain name and hosting.

We then looked at some of the technology options that are available to us for setting up our sites.

Wordpress will suffice for the majority of your site needs and for more complex sites, I recommended that you outsource this to skilled programmers.

Lastly we looked at the structure of a typical single product website because with minor modifications, most other sites (other than a full blow e-commerce site) will contain the same components of this type of site.

MODULE 5 – DRIVE TRAFFIC PART 1 OF 3: This is the largest of the modules. In fact we have broken the traffic module down into 3 separate modules. The first two will focus on free traffic while the last one will focus on paid traffic.

We have already looked at how to pick our niche and how to create world class products. We then looked at the entire sales process of how to sell in order to make maximum profits. We then looked at how to build our website.

All of these previous modules effectively cover the first part of the process which is getting your product to the market. Now we need to start marketing our product. This is in fact where you will spend the vast majority of your time as an internet marketer.

There must be hundreds of different methods to drive traffic to your site. We are going to cover the top traffic generation methods that will give you the greatest return for your time or money that you spend.

In this module we are going to look at the following FREE traffic generation methods: • • • • •

SEO or Search Engine Optimization Article marketing Blogging List building Email marketing

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] •

Social media

AN INTRODUCTION TO TRAFFIC: Now for the business end. Now that your product is made and your slick sales letter is in place and your website is ready, you now have to do the “marketing” bit in the term internet marketing. This is a never ending process and you will continually be trying to get new people into your sales funnel.

As with all things in life, there are paid options and free options. I say free because they do not cause you to have to put your hand in your pocket to pay for them but they will cost you your time, which as you know by now is not really free. However, when starting out, free traffic is very important.

Clearly paid traffic is easy. The more money you have, the more traffic you can get. You should continue to increase your advertising spend for long as you are making more money from the products that you sell than you are spending on advertising. Paid traffic is part art and part science and is one for the number crunches.

You need to know your metrics. Metrics are your financial stats relating to your advertising campaign. This is not as horrific as it sounds. As long as you know how much it costs to get a customer and how much you make from each new customer, the rest is easy.

Then there is the so called free traffic. Essentially this boils down to search engine optimization and getting other people to send you traffic. SEO is the process of getting your site ranked higher up the page in the search engines. There are also methods of driving traffic directly to your site for example putting a video on YouTube with a link back to your site.

Let me ask you a rhetorical question. When you search for something, it can be anything, how often do you even go to the second page of the results in Google? There is you answer as to why being on the first page of Google is vital and if you can get there, you will get a ton of free traffic. The hard part is getting to the first page but once you achieve this, you really can get a lot of free traffic.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION OR SEO: SEO is quite a broad term and will probably have some overlap with other methods of getting traffic to your website. SEO is a really broad topic and it takes a lot to get to know all of the intimate details.

The basics will take you a long way though and so it is well worth while taking a bit of time to learn the basics.

Essentially, SEO can be broken down into two categories. Firstly there is what is known as “on-page” SEO and then there is “Off-page” SEO.

ON-PAGE SEO:

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] The term “on-page” essentially refers to the structure of your website. It is based on how you lay your website out. A nice way to think about it is that on-page SEO is what you do on your website, while off-page SEO is what you do on other people’s websites.

The search engines have devised complicated algorithms for how they rank web pages. Remember they do not rank web sites but instead they rank each individual page in the website. Obviously if the individual pages rank highly, the website as a whole will probably also rank highly.

Learning a bit of basic on-page SEO can take you a long way. When designing your website, make sure to include the basics, because you will usually have an advantage over competitors as most people are not aware of the important factors or they just do not do it. If you are using WordPress, there are many free Plugins that make it easy to incorporate the basics, just make sure you do it.

There are a number of simple things that can be done to improve the on-page factors. These include Things like: • • • • • • •

Keyword selection and placement on the page as well as Keyword density.

How one names a page title matters.

Headers and things like Bold, underlined or italics text matter.

Factors that can influence your ranking include whether you have a site map or not and How fast your pages load.

OFF-PAGE SEO FACTORS: As the major search engine algorithms are a state secret, we never know exactly how the top search engines like Google rank our pages.

Because wily webmaster regularly figure out some of the components and then try to “beat the system” the search engines are continually changing the system to thwart people who do not provide value.

So what one really needs to understand is what the search engines are attempting to do. They make their money from advertising and so there watchword is RELEVANCE. It is as simple as that. If you type in the word garage sale, it is no good if results come up for investment cars for example.

Google is always trying to provide its users with the most relevant content.

CONTENT: Content is king! You will hear this a lot because it is true. Google loves good original content that is updated regularly. So this is the first golden rule. Always provide good content. It is highly unlikely that any algorithm change will affect good content. You can bank on that.

The other major element is what Google refers to as AUTHORITY. If it sees your site as an authority site, then it will rank your site higher in the search engines.

The primary way that Google does this is by looking at BACKLINKS. The feeling is that if enough people have taken the trouble to link back to your site, then your site will be more likely to be an [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] authority. Now clever webmaster have also found ways to get around this simple philosophy and so NOT ALL BACKLINKS ARE EQUAL! A few backlinks from a few relevant, authority sites in your industry or on the topic of your website are worth more than hundreds if not thousands of random arbitrary links to unrelated sites.

Google gives sites a “page rank�. This is based on its perception of how highly a site is rated, i.e. what sort of authority is has. The higher the page rank, the higher the authority. So your number one goal is to get as many good backlinks from high PR sites as you can. Page rank is on a scale of 010, with zero being the lowest and 10 being the highest.

The subject of link building is a huge one in there are many resources devotes to just this topic alone because of the on-going benefit that one gets from having high search engine rankings.

TACTICS: From this point on, we are going to look at traffic tactics.

Some will be pure SEO tactics while others fall into a more general category of getting people to your site.

There are hundreds of tactics to get traffic. You cannot possibly do them all, neither will you want to. The idea is to master a particular tactic before you move on to another one. Some tactics will resonate with you better than others. Some tactics may not resonate with you at all.

Find the ones that you like and do those. Often you may only need a few tactics to achieve your goals. So now we are going to take a closer look at a number of potential tactics for you to use.

One way to expedite this traffic process is to outsource a lot of this work.

ARTICLE MARKETING: Article marketing is one of the top tactics used by internet marketers.

This is because it helps with both SEO and driving traffic directly to the site.

First, you write an article on your topic. At the bottom of the article is what is known as a signature box. This means that when your article gets published, you can leave your contact details at the bottom. This gives you a chance to send people directly to your site who have read your articles.

Generally, you will submit the articles to a number of article directories in the hope that they will publish them. You could also submit your articles to other blogs in your niche that already have a lot of traffic.

Once they publish your article, you now have an automatic backlink from the article directory to your site (from your signature box).

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Some of the bigger more reputable article directories like Ezine.com also have a high page rank, so this is a very good link to get. You also have the possibility of people finding your article and going to your site.

Other people may also publish your article on their site. The general rule is that they are free to do so as long as they do not alter it without permission. Should they use it on their site, you now have another backlink and the possibility of those sites customers finding you.

One of the great things about article publishing is that there are many good article writers who can do this for you, so you can outsource this function for a very small capital outlay.

ARTICLE SPINNERS: One has to be aware of the “duplicate content� trap. Google is not wild about the idea of the same content being published in more than one place.

What happens is that it tries to determine the source and then penalises all the other sources, so if you publish your article in 100 directories, you will not get a backlink credit for all 100. Never publish the same content in article directories as you have on your own site!

For this reason article spinning software has been created to rewrite the articles. It changes key parts of the articles like words and phrases or it may change the order of things. This then fools the search engine spiders into believing that is it not the same content.

BLOGGING: The best way to continually give fresh new content to you customers is by writing a blog. A blog is short for Web Log and traditionally it was just for people to ramble about their personal life. Today, blogging is big business. Almost every successful business has a blog today.

One of the reasons for its popularity is due to the FREE blogging platforms that have been developed. The two most popular ones are Blogger, which is owned by Google, and WordPress.

Both are free but WordPress is now the biggest. Because of its ease of use, its popularity has soared.

Many people now have full-fledged websites, which may or may not include a blog, based on the WordPress platform. Many people have developed commercial Plug-ins, which are pieces of software that enhance the WordPress functionality. If you can dream it, WordPress can probably do it.

You can build you blog on the WordPress servers which is totally free. However you should get your own hosting account and dedicated domain if you are planning to run a business. You can literally install WordPress on your website in under 5 minutes and you are off and running.

Blogs of course give you the perfect opportunity to build your list.

BUILD YOUR LIST:

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] We have already discussed the power of the list. The bulk of your money over the years will be made from your list. You must continue to build your list so that you can continually e-mail them offers. These could be your own products or those of affiliates.

OPT IN BOX You will want to have an opt-in box on your blog to try and get your customers email addresses so that you can continue to mail them in future. This works in exactly the same way as your squeeze page discussed in the last module.

You will generally do this by producing something that your target market will probably find useful and then offer it FREE if they give you their email address. The best things are newsletters or a mini course which will give you an opportunity to email them for say 7 consecutive days with a new episode, thereby continually building your brand because they keep recognising that the e-mails are from you.

Every blog should have an opt-in list. Many of the top internet marketers will make up to one third of their home page, or any page for that matter, as an opt-in box. It is that important.

AUTORESPONDERS You need to hook up with a reliable autoresponder service. We also spoke about this before.

Companies like Aweber will allow you to create as many opt-in lists as you like. They will then collect the email addresses from the opt-in forms on your blog (or anywhere else). You can also program a sequence of follow up e-mails to your customers, which Aweber will just continue to send to your customers automatically. This is one service you MUST invest in.

EMAIL MARKETING: One of the reasons that the “money is in the list� is because it allows us to use e-mail marketing to build trust with our customers and ultimately sell more products.

Once you have a list, you need to cultivate a relationship with it. Ultimately you will want to convert this list into paying customers.

You will always be trying to create good email titles to encourage your subscribers to open the emails and then you will concentrate on boosting your click through rates.

Crafting effective emails is an art which needs to be learned and practiced. You can give away free or paid content in your emails. Most good marketers do both. Finding the right balance of free content vs. pitching your customers is important and will differ from niche to niche.

WEB 2.0 SITES AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING:

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Social media is essentially a collection of web based and mobile technologies that people use to generate and publish content. What makes it different from the rest of the web is that users form communities and are able to comment and give opinion on issues and share this information with their friends, those people that have chosen to join their community.

Just about anything can be shared online with social media at lightning speed. This includes anything from a simple comment on an issue to videos on YouTube. Social media is a great way to create a buzz, launch a product or communicate with your customers. You can also use it to spy on your competition.

While there are hundreds of social media portals on the web there are a few that warrant special attention. This “big 3” are undoubtedly: • Facebook • Twitter and • YouTube.

Some of the other notable sites include: • Squidoo lenses • HubPages • WordPress & Blogger Apart from being able to build up a fan base for your business, you can also link back from your web 2.0 sites to your blog or website which will also give you a backlink. As many of these sites are popular it will be a high PR backlink which is very valuable.

FACEBOOK: Today Facebook has more traffic than Google! Savvy business owners are using Facebook to cultivate communities and communicate with their customers in real time.

Here are some recent statistics from Facebook’s website: 1.

2.

3.

4.

We had 845 million monthly active users at the end of December 2011.

Approximately 80% of our monthly active users are outside the U.S. and Canada.

We had 483 million daily active users on average in December 2011.

We had more than 425 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011.

5. Facebook is available in more than 70 languages.

This is the power of Facebook.

There are two main marketing vehicles associated with Facebook. Business owners are creating successful fan pages which can have more than the current private page cap of 5000 friends.

Facebook marketing has also become very popular due to being able to laser target your advertising campaigns. Facebook is beginning to be able to rival Google’s successful Adwords program.

TWITTER: Twitter is a social network and micro-blogging platform that allows you to send 140-character “tweets”. With these tweets, you can let your friends know what you're up to, share links and cool resources, communicate with your customers, drive traffic to your website, and much more. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] One of the bonus features of Twitter is the ability to “Retweet”. This enables users to share things like tweets, links, and other little gems that they pick up from others who also use Twitter. And this tweet can potentially reach thousands of customers or business prospects, driving them to your website or blog, and drawing attention to your products.

One of the great advantages of Twitter is its mobility because users can access and send tweets from their mobile phones. Because tweets are so short, people are more inclined to look at them. The information can be assimilated by your clients in just a few seconds and this adds to the appeal.

In short, Twitter is an easy way to keep in contact with your customers and effectively build a “Twitter list” YOUTUBE: YouTube is the third most popular website according to Alexa.com. It has billions of video views every month and is thus an ideal way for internet marketers to get their message to as many people as possible. It is now the second largest search engine behind Google, who owns it.

Users can easily share videos with their social networks and a good video will go viral in no time at all. You can share your YouTube links to say your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

YouTube is now a fully functioning search engine so you can easily be found by including a descriptive video title and the appropriate keyword tags (keywords). At the bottom of your video you can have links back to your site. You also have an opportunity to create a user profile and a description with every video.

You can set up your own business channel in YouTube which will enable you to cultivate a rabid following. People can then subscribe to your channel and they will get updates every time you release a new video.

GOOGLE +: Google+ is a social network powered by the search engine giant Google. Many see this platform as a challenge to Facebook’s domination of the social media space. With more than 40 million users (early 2012) and a growing influence on search, Google+ has definitely emerged as a key player in the online marketing ecosystem. Every internet marketer should be looking to harness the power of Google + in the future.

Google’s equivalent to Facebook’s “Like” button, the “+1”, is about so much more than just social networking. It’s about enhancing your visibility on the biggest search engine in the world.

The business page concept will be very familiar to those who use Facebook Pages. Even the way you switch between personal and business profiles with a drop down menu is straight from Facebook.

Google+ allows businesses to create pages and develop relationships with prospects and customers on multiple levels. Individuals can add a brand to a specific Google+ Circle, share a Google+ page with their network, and interact with the content posted by that company.

For instance, users can +1 (or in other words, endorse) the updates a company publishes, leave comments, upload photos, and tag the brand in them. An interesting aspect of this platform is that its Hangouts feature enables companies to engage with fans, prospects, and customers through [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] video conference calls.

SCRIBD: Scribd (pronounced “skribd”) is a document-sharing website that allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format.

Scribd is primarily an online publishing site and library. But it also has many of the typical social networking site properties. Think of it as “YouTube for documents”.

Scribd also has an online store so you can also sell your works instead of just sharing them.

Sharing them for free generates free publicity and the all-important backlink. You can use it like an article marketing directory without having to first get your works approved. It supports many different file formats, including the obvious internet marketing friendly pdf, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

People can also log into their Scribd account through other social network platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

SQUIDOO: Squidoo is a website where individuals are able to create one-page web sites that detail a single topic. The owner calls these pages lenses and they work as a tool to allow anyone to communicate on just about any topic they would like to.

When your Squidoo lens is published, you will notice ads will show up in the final document. Those ads will earn money from various ad programs that the company uses. With Squidoo, lensmasters share in as much as 50 percent of this ad revenue.

Creating a Squidoo lens is free. Squidoo has a high page rank so you stand a good chance of getting found in the search engines. You can link back to your website and get the all important backlink.

HUBPAGES: HubPages.com is an online community filled with informative content written by different people or hubbers as they are known. It is a free hosted social network where people can speak their mind, share information, and earn money.

HubPages shares its revenues with the writers or content producers. This social network provides easy means for writers to share their expertise and monetize their pages. The HubPages can be an extra source of income through different advertisements, products, and tools that can bring in the life blood of anything on the internet, traffic.

Since it is a social network, you can also interact with the other people online. Aside from posting original content, you can comment on the other articles posted by other hubbers.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] HubPages is free to use. As they have a high page rank, they rank well in Google and you can get a backlink for your site from your HubPages.

SUMMARY: This is the end of module 6. Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned: • • •

•

We looked at the first part of free traffic sources.

We also learned about basic SEO and the differences between on-page and off-page SEO. We also got an understanding of the important elements of the search engine algorithms.

Good content and quality backlinks is the key to ranking highly in the search engine results pages.

We got introduced to some free marketing tactics including the new rage of the net, social media.

MODULE 5.1 – DRIVE TRAFFIC PART 2 OF 3: So far we have covered how to pick a niche and how to create products for our niche customers, we then designed our sales funnel and build our website. In the last module we started to look at some free traffic sources. Now we are going to learn about a whole lot of additional free traffic tactics.

The Free traffic tactics that we will discuss in this module include: • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Blog commenting Viral tools Tell-a-friend scripts Video marketing Podcasting Press releases Online classified ads Paid reviews Forum commenting Directory submissions Traffic exchanges Ad swaps Webinars & tele-seminars Newsletters

COMMENTING ON OTHER PEOPLE’S BLOGS: Commenting on other people’s blogs is a great way to get backlinks to your site.

Find other peoples blogs that are complimentary and leave comments on their blogs. Try to be constructive and take time and care in your comments.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Most blogs will be moderated so if you write something positive and constructive, you have a better chance of your comment being accepted which will hopefully include a link back to your site.

VIRAL TOOLS: Viral marketing involves getting other people to willingly spread your message for you. This is the best illustration of word of mouth advertising. People trust friends more than strangers, so if you can get people to tap into their social networks because they like you or what you have done, then your brand recognition could spread very quickly.

You viral tools need to be “viral-worthy”. You either need to give exceptional value or create some sort of “buzz”. One of the best ways to get your name out there is to create viral tools into which you place links. You then give these tools away and encourage or incentivise people to distribute your tool.

Things that work well are eBooks, reports, templates, checklists, software etc. You should try to include links to your site in the viral give away.

If you include affiliate links in the tool, then people will be happy to pass it on. The key is to give them the ability to change the affiliate links to their own. This way they have an incentive to pass it on. Your main goal is to get people to your site. If you make a few affiliate sales in the interim, so much the better.

Another good tactic is to give people master resell & give away rights to your product. This allows them to either have content for their lists or to make some money off the report.

TELL A FRIEND SCRIPTS: These are a few lines of code that you place on your blog or website which encourage others to share your site or post which allows you to take advantage of traffic that you are already receiving.

The idea is to make it as easy as possible. These scripts literally allow a one click and you are done scenario.

Often this is linked to an incentive. You offer your visitor something of value for free provided they tell their friends about your site or product. The script will allow you to specify the minimum number of friends that have to be referred before the visitor can claim their incentive. Three referrals are generally best.

These emails can also be customized using pre-written variables. With some scripts you can even offer a further bonus if their friend in turn refers others, a bit like multi-level marketing (MLM)!

The script can even pre-populate your visitors email address to make it even easier to refer their friends. The easier you make it for people, the more likely they are to help you.

VIDEO MARKETING: Video marketing is one of the best forms of viral marketing. If you can create a good interesting video, then people will be happy to share the link around. Today video is king. There are so many video sites that you can use to submit videos to. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Google often indexes videos much faster than it does any other forms of content and many videos tend to rank well in the search engines. YouTube is of course the most well know site. You can put links into your videos.

With some software you can put an opt in box into your video and you can even put affiliate links that people can click from inside the video that will take them straight to the affiliate site or your own site of course.

Video marketing is extremely powerful and you have a good chance of getting multiple links from each video submitted. Videos are also not subject to Google’s “duplicate content penalties” so you can distribute your videos to multiple sites without fear of penalty.

Furthermore, studies projected that more than half of the people who watch a good video end up sharing the clips with friends through email or social networking sites. This serves as an example of the "viral power" of video marketing, as we'll discuss later on.

Video allows you to showcase your product, service and website in a unique way. You can educate, intrigue and entertain all at the same time. This builds trusts and a loyal following. It is also easier to demonstrate complex concepts with video than with the more traditional written word where you would have to include screen prints anyway.

Videos are often easier and quicker to create than written content and can be done for free or for a very low cost, although if you are serious about using video marketing for your business, you probably should invest in a decent video camera, screen flow and or video editing software.

PODCASTS: Podcasts are another good viral tool. Audio is still a very popular choice because people can listen to the product while doing other things so it does not cost them any extra time. Podcasting is an audio file that you can listen to on your computer or on a portable device. Note that it does not have to be an iPod, but can be almost any kind of portable audio device, also referred to as an MP3 player. An MP3 player, though, is also a misnomer because these devices will often play more than just MP3 files.

I have listened to countless information products on my IPod while I was driving or at gym. The mp3 player is now a household necessity. Apple has helped develop this market with their IPod but there are many other mp3 players out there.

Essentially, podcasting allows you or your customers to select the things you'd like to listen to, subscribe to them, and have them downloaded to your computer or portable audio device, and listen to them when you want to. Once they’ve subscribed they will be automatically updated when you release new material, like a magazine you don’t think about until the subscription arrives in your mailbox every month.

There are many ways to record audio. You can either purchase audio software or utilise online services that will allow you to phone in to their system and record your message. They will then create the MP3s for you and then email it you. Easy as that.

When using Camtasia or Screenflow, you can also rip the audio from any video that you produce at the touch of a button to create instant MP3’s. This suddenly gives you two products when you make [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] a video! There are many online sites that you can submit podcasts to, not least of which is the apple I Store.

PRESS RELEASES: A press release is something newsworthy about your business that is written in a media friendly way that gets distributed to multiple media sources. Should they choose to publish your press release, you will get a backlink and usually a huge surge of traffic to your site when the press release is first published. If you have something that is newsworthy, let the world know. Remember that news sites are always looking for fresh material. This is a very good tactic to use every time you release a new product. You can also submit your press releases for free on many online sites.

While you can outsource the press release writing to PR professionals, writing a good press release is not that difficult. There are also many free channels that you can use to distribute your press release.

Generally paid services like PR Web give the best results because of their extensive network but this does cost money. If you are launching a new business or product or if you just have something newsworthy in your industry, you really should consider a press release.

Good press releases are also picked up by Google and listed in their news feed. These press releases will also give you good backlinks in addition to traffic exposure.

FREE ONLINE CLASSIFIED ADS: Placing classified ads is a free way to promote your products. Depending on your industry, this can be very profitable.

Many of these ads will even allow you to list a URL. Perhaps the best known example of free classified ad sites is Craigslist. It operates in over 50 countries and 500 cities around the world. It is in the top 50 most visited sites on the internet (49th according to Alexa.com in Feb 2012). Craigslist is so lucrative that entire books and video courses have been produced around this topic.

EBay also has a classified ad section. Although one has to pay for it, it is a relatively cheap form of advertising due to the millions of monthly views eBay gets. EBay is one of the most trafficked sites on the net today. There are millions of monthly transactions and you have an amazing opportunity to promote your products and hence your site. More marketing material has been written about eBay than many other internet marketing topics.

PAID REVIEWS: If you can get people to do free reviews of your product, so much the better. But if you cannot, you can get someone to do a paid review. Some may feel that this is unethical. The choice will be yours but just because you pay for the review does not mean it is fabricated.

You can pay for honest genuine reviews. The reason that this is important is because many people buy products based on reviews. If you get people to review your products, this will add an element

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] of social proof and it will rank your product for the keyword “your product review” on the first page of Google. If people put the reviews on their site, you will of course get an all-important backlink.

FORUM AND NEWSGROUP COMMENTS: Forum posting is a very good way to get backlinks and to build some authority. The idea is however not to spam the forums.

You should add valuable content and build rapport with others before you start promoting products.

Once the regulars see that your intentions are genuine, you will be accepted as a bone fide member of the forum and you will be able to use those relationships for mutual marketing in the future.

Of course you can have a signature box in forum posts, so while you are adding value you are also creating backlinks.

You can also start your own posts that others can reply to. This also helps with building trust and authority.

Many forums will allow you to PM or private message individual forum members. This means that your communications are not visible to anyone else. This can be a great way to build joint venture relationships.

WEB DIRECTORY SUBMISSION: You should try to get your blogs listed in as many web directories as possible. The more targeted the directory, the better.

This works in a similar way to article marketing because you will get the all important backlink and also have the opportunity of people finding your blog when searching for your industry.

Some will just accept you. The ones with the most weight and the better quality backlinks will be those that are reviewed by humans, such as Dmoz. You may thus have to wait for some considerable time to get listed in here but the value of the listing will be worth it.

Many of these submissions are free. Paid directory submissions also tend to hold a higher weighing.

The one with the most weighting is the Yahoo directory but it is expensive at $300per year. You will however receive a high Yahoo search engine ranking. Google also like this.

TRAFFIC EXCHANGE: Traffic exchanges are where a number of website owners agree to visit the sites of other members of the traffic exchange. Members then earn credit by doing this. In return, other members will then visit your site. The more credits you have, the more traffic you will receive in return.

There are often time limits ranging from 10-60 seconds which people must stay on a fellow member’s site. This means that in order to get traffic you will have to spend the time looking at other members sites.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] If you join a targeted traffic exchange where members are from similar industries, you may find members will refer traffic to you and you can build up some good relationships.

Joining most traffic exchanges is free.

AD SWAPS: A great way for two partners to get more traffic is by doing ad swaps with each other. Essentially this involves each person advertising the other person’s product, service or website in their own Ezine, email list or on their website. The other party will then reciprocate by doing the same thing.

The parties do not get any financial gain from the advertising of the other party. Each person keeps all of the income they get from the ad placed in the other persons email sequence. This is a very beneficial way for both partners to grow their subscriber lists and sell some of their products at the same time.

This is a great way to grow your subscriber list. It works best with non competing products which are still related in some way.

It is best to try to do ad swaps with partners whose lists are approximately the same size as yours but this is not essential. For example, if A had a list of 10,000 and B had a list of 5,000, then B could do 2 mailings to the 1 mailing of A or A could just mail to half of his list.

This is a tactic that can rapidly grow your list. Many marketers use this tactic early on in their careers when they only have small lists. If you can find other marketers with similar size lists, you can each share your lists with one another thereby doubling your lists instantly.

WEBINARS AND TELESEMINARS: Webinars are a very good way to build your email list. A webinar is simply a web based seminar, lecture, workshop or presentation. They can be used to exchange ideas in real time and share information. Webinars also allow live interaction between the presenter and the attendees.

Video conferencing is more or less the same thing, but it allows only a small number or group of people to communicate at the same time. Webinars on the other hand, allow a larger public to communicate effectively.

These are very good ways to engage with your customers. You can either offer live events or you can offer a recorded event. Recorded events give your prospects total flexibility to watch the webinars at a time that is convenient to them.

This is also a great way to get affiliates and joint venture partners to promote for you because you do a webinar “just for their list�. Webinars allow you an opportunity to fully explain your programs and products and answer questions and objections.

The webinar signup process requires people to give their email addresses to register so even if people do not attend the webinar, you are still building your list.

There are online services like GoToWebinar that you can use to host your webinars so you do not need to purchase any additional software to do it. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan]

PUBLISH A NEWSLETTER: Publishing a newsletter is one of the best ways to build a list. Once you have built the list this is a good way to keep in contact with your list. Always give them good content and then you can use it to occasionally pitch those offers for your products or for affiliate products.

The general purpose of publishing an e-zine is to collect a list of email addresses and names of people generally interested in the product or service niche to which you market. E-zines will also help to build your credibility and give your online business valuable exposure. Ultimately it will drive more targeted traffic to your site.

You then use the e-zine as a means to pre-sell subscribers. As you send out more and more free and useful material, they will come to trust you – to believe that you really do have the ability to help them with whatever problem they are trying to solve.

With that being said, you will want to use effective methods for finding leads, getting leads to actually sign up through your opt-in list – and, finally, you will want to develop a powerful mechanism for upselling leads. If all of these parts aren't functioning properly, your e-zine will not be an effective sales mechanism.

SUMMARY: This is the end of module 7. In this module we really just covered a number of free traffic generation tactics.

Take your time to evaluate these tactics as well as the few you were introduced to in the last module. Then pick one or two that resonate with you and get good at them. As you progress you can add more and more tactics to your arsenal. You do not have to do all of these tactics, in fact you probably do not have enough time in a year to do them all, so just choose the best ones and start building your business today.

MODULE 5.2 – TRAFFIC PART 3 OF 3 – PAID TRAFFIC, JOINT VENTURES & AFFILIATES: This is the third and final traffic instalment where we are going to take a closer look at paid traffic sources.

Just a quick recap of what we have covered so far. We started off by picking our ideal niche and then we looked at the many ways to create products for our niche. We then chose our ideal sales funnel and then we learned how to build the ideal website for our business.

In the last 2 modules we have taken a look at a huge number of free traffic sources. We are now going to look at paid traffic sources as well as how to track our results and improve our conversions.

Here is an overview of what we are going to cover in this module: First we are going to look at PPC or pay per click advertising. The two most well known examples are Google Adwords and Facebook ads.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] We then look at PPV or pay per view ads. This is done through adware that people download for free with the understanding that they will be shown ads that are relevant to their searches.

CPA or cost per action is a method of only paying when you get the desired result such as someone opting into your subscriber list.

We will also look at old favourite, banner ads.

Solo ads are probably one of the best ways to advertise because you place targeted email ads in other peoples email lists or e-zines.

Then we look at perhaps the fastest way to grow your business and that is by creating joint venture and affiliate relationships where other people agree to sell your products for a commission.

Lastly we look at the all important topic of testing and tracking your marketing efforts in order to improve your conversion rates

PAID TRAFFIC: Paid traffic is very easy to get. Many people prefer this route because it saves time. This works well for marketers who have very high profit products.

Paid traffic is not for everyone. There is a lot of skill required in order to maximize results and it is often very costly. In truth, very few people make money with paid advertising, but those that crack the code, tend to do very well.

PAY PER CLICK – PPC AND CPM: Pay Per Click advertising is one of the most popular and effective methods of advertising products or services on the internet because of the targeted nature of the traffic.

Under normal circumstances, PPC involves advertising appearing on individual websites and on search engine results pages. If the ad appears when people search for something on say Google, this is referred to as the search engine results or the search network. But Google also partners with other websites through their Adsense program. These website owners allow Google to place your ads on their site. This is referred to as the content network.

Ads will generally perform better on the search networks because people are busy searching for information on a particular topic so they are primed to look at your ad. On the content network, you are generally interrupting their surfing by showing them your ad so it is much harder to get their attention.

An advertiser creates what is most commonly a three line text advert which is then displayed on websites and search pages which show targeted results to the individual searcher or site viewer.

Advertisers can also place banner ads as well as other multimedia ads such as flash animation to help attract the visitor’s attention.

When someone who is viewing the search engine results page or the website on which the advertising is featured clicks on that advert or banner, they are immediately redirected to the web page that the advertiser wants to show them. Consequently, because this click on their advert has [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] allowed the advertiser to present their sales or landing page to that visitor, they pay every time someone clicks on their advert. They only pay when someone clicks on their ad. Hence the name Pay Per Click.

The amount that the individual advertiser pays for each click depends on many factors and is in particular dependent upon how much they are willing to ‘bid’ to have their advert displayed. This is because the position on the page where an individual ad is shown is mainly decided by how much the advertiser behind it is willing to pay for that position in an auction-like bidding process.

There are however a few other factors that determine the ultimate position that the ad will appear in. The most important factor being the click through rate achieved for the ad. This means the number of people that click on the ad as a percentage of the number of times the ad is shown. For example if the ad is shown 100 times and 3 people click on it, you will have a 3% click through rate or CTR. There are many different PPC advertising companies who place adverts all over the internet, but with minor variations, most of the PPC advertising networks work in a broadly similar way.

The advertiser chooses a keyword term or phrase that best describes or refers to the product or service that they are advertising and construct their advert around this phrase. The online advertising agency through which they place their adverts then ensures that the ad that they have just created appears on websites and search results pages that best match the particular term around which the advert was created.

For example, if an advertiser is selling green frogs, then the primary keyword phrase around which they are going to build their advert is going to be something that mentions ‘green frogs’.

Consequently, the next time someone searches the internet for information about green frogs, it is this particular advert that is likely to be shown to them assuming that the advertiser has paid enough for the advert to appear on the first search results page.

The two best known examples are Google Adwords and Facebook ads but there are many other search engines where you can place PPC advertising.

The major reasons why people use PPC advertising is because of the speed in delivering results and because of the targeted nature of it. It can take a long time to get up the search engine rankings with free SEO methods but you can instantly appear on the first page in the number one position if you are prepared to pay for it.

Advertisers also have complete control over their ad campaigns. You determine the keywords, when and where you want your ads to appear and how much you are prepared to pay for them.

CPM stands for cost per 1,000 impressions. It works in the same way as described above except you pay for every time your ad shows 1,000 times. The major difference here is that you pay once your ad has been shown 1,000 times regardless of whether anyone clicks on your ads or not. You will have to test whether paying per click or per 1,000 impressions is more cost effective for you.

PPV OR PAY PER VIEW: PPV advertising stands for Pay-Per-View. When people hear that they automatically think it’s the same thing as CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impression) advertising. It’s not! Pay Per View means you pay

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] every time your landing page is viewed. Although that sounds like PPC it’s different because to view your landing page no one is clicking. Your landing page is appearing in a popup or pop under.

Users install adware which they get for free, by agreeing to receive ads from the ad network who gave them the software. This means that you can laser target the ads that get shown to your potential customers.

PPV networks use both the pay per click and pay per impression viewed models. The impressions are of your actual landing page. These are displayed in a number of ways and in a number of sizes depending on the ad network you choose.

Another cool feature is the ability to target specific URL’s. This means that you can get your ad shown when users visit your competitor’s sites! This opens up a whole new world of possibilities that are not open to the traditional PPC channels such as Google Adwords.

PPV tends to have less competition that the traditional PPC networks because some people do not understand the medium or they feel it is unethical. Also the way that the network acquires its users may not suit every niche so you will need to test whether this medium will work for your niche. You may have to test various networks to make it work for your product.

This is a good method for affiliates and CPA promotions because unlike Google Adwords, the PPV networks will allow you to link directly to affiliate offers. Their acceptance rules are far more relaxed and you do not even have to have a landing page.

CPA OR COST PER ACTION: This stands for cost per action. In this case you only pay when the required action is completed. An action can be anything from filling in an opt-in form to purchasing a product.

You will often end up paying more for this than PPC, CPM or PPV but you will be getting your desired result before you pay.

There are many CPA networks that you can sign up for to get others to promote for you. It does require an application process to the CPA networks and you will generally have to have a few thousand dollars to start to ensure you can pay affiliates for leads that they generate for you.

BANNER ADS: In the early days banner ads were very popular but they lost favour for a while because they became old hat and they lost their effect. This is known as banner blindness because people just no longer see banners on the page. Today they seem to have made a comeback because banner ads can be quite creative and can have flashing elements to attract customer’s attention.

Banner ads can be bought through ad agencies or you can go directly to the site owner and negotiate an ad. This is a very good way to target your advertising to specific websites in your niche.

You can use banner ads on the Google Adwords program in addition to, or as an alternative to the traditional text ads. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Banners can be in a number of different shapes and sizes, so there is a lot of scope in terms of graphics, colors, design etc. Banner sizes are represented in pixels which are actually the smallest unit of color used to make up images on a computer or television screen. The most popular banner size 468 x 60 Pixels but there are a number of standard sizes which most websites will accept.

It is a good idea to check with the sites you intend to advertise on whether there is any restriction on the size of the banners. Generally 50kb would be the maximum size of banner that would be accepted.

There are many varieties of banner ads available. The simplest banner ads feature only one static GIF or JPEG image which is then linked to the advertiser’s landing page.

Then there are also banners which are capable of displaying several different images simultaneously.

This can also be seen as an animation like presentation. Besides all this, there are also the rich media style banner ads. These ads make use of tools like audio, video, or Java and Shockwave programs to design and display the ad content. This allows for the ads to then become interactive beyond the initial simple link functioning.

There is also the interactive nature of the banner ads. These banners allow flash elements to interact with the viewer and engage them in the ad content and message. These are fairly popular because they tend to capture the users attention due to the movement of the banners.

SOLO ADS: Solo ads are perhaps the best way to place targeted ads. One places ads in another marketers email list or Ezine. This means that this marketer already has a relationship with his list so they will be more open to the message of your ads.

When one places a solo ad, ONLY your ad will be featured in the email so the readers will be forced to focus only on your offer because there will be no other distractions.

One normally buys solo ads based on the number clicks. This means that is like a targeted PPC campaign because you are marketing to a list of specific customers who have already willingly opted into an email list and expect to get such emails. $100 normally buys about 250 clicks. You will often get more than your purchased number of clicks.

You can also purchase a solo mailing to an entire list for a set price. This often happens when using Ezine as opposed to list owners. Obviously the amount of clicks is not guaranteed in this case.

This is a great way to build your list and if all of your elements are in place, you could build your opt in list for around $1 per opt in subscriber.

You can of course also sell products so you may even break even on the front end if you have a good offer or Upsell. You can also make substantial income on the backend. Many list owners will only place solo ads for free items. You will have to check with each advertiser what their terms and conditions are Just Google “solo ads� and you will find more than enough sources for you to spend your money.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] JOINT VENTURE AND AFFILIATES: Having an army of joint venture partners and affiliates is the fastest way to grow your online business. Getting other people with strong lists or lots of website traffic to promote your product is one of the best ways to increase your subscriber list, get traffic to your site and obviously to make sales.

An affiliate program will allow you to dramatically increase your sales by getting an unlimited number of people to sell your product. You only need to pay them after the sale has been completed!

The higher the commissions that you offer, the better the chance that people will take the time to promote your product. Affiliates will also look at the dollar amount that they will receive. Recurring commissions are also more attractive than one off commissions. How often you pay your affiliates is also important to them.

You will need software to track, monitor and report on your affiliate campaign. You can buy software or use third party online tracking software. Many shopping carts come with affiliate tracking software. There will be no upfront cost for this as it is included in the monthly fees.

Clickbank.com is used by many product owners because they handle the entire sales function, including payments and refunds. They have a built in affiliate program which handles everything for you. Many of the top marketers use this solution and it is a very easy way to start your affiliate program without incurring huge upfront costs or needing technical expertise. Clickbank also has an impeccable payment record which instils trust in your affiliates.

There are numerous different ways to recruit affiliates. Simply using Google will uncover many potential affiliates. You can also use clickbank to find other complimentary products being sold. You can then contact these product owners to see if they will partner with you. Because clickbank has its own affiliate function built in, many affiliates will find you just because you happen to be listed on clickbank.

You will need readymade marketing materials for your affiliates to use. These could include banners, headlines, sales letters, solo and classified ad wording, testimonials, samples, videos & eBooks.

Joint venture partners essentially do the same thing as affiliates but there is a major difference and that is the relationship that you build. If you cultivate good relationships, you can always get your JV partners to promote your products in the future and vice versa. Often times, you will give the JV partners a more favourable commission rate than you would to normal affiliates.

One of the best types of JV’s is an endorsed JV. This is when your JV partner sends an email to their list endorsing your product, there lists will be at their most responsive because they have already formed a bond and a trusting relationship with their lists. The JV partner makes money for sending the email to their list. You are not really paying for the fact that they sent an email, you are paying for the time it took them to build their list in the first place.

JV’s are so powerful because everybody wins. Your JV partner makes money for sending an email, you make money off his list and his list benefits by getting access to your great product. You may be the biggest winner because you have now made sales that you otherwise would never have been able to make and you have grown the size of your own list. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Some other obvious advantages of JV partners are: •

Increased credibility – you now become associated with another successful marketer

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Save money on advertising and promotion to build your list. You build your list because of someone else’s list and efforts.

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You make more money.

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You can target different markets. You can gain access to other niche markets that you would not otherwise have been able to reach.

Initiating JV relationships can be time consuming, especially if you are new in the business. The JV partner is the dominant player in this relationship and they know it. Your job is to keep them happy because they are doing you a favour by mailing their list. Some things that JV partners are looking for from you are: •

What is the benefit to their list? This is vital because they have spent a lot of time and money to build that list and to also cultivate the relationship and they will not jeopardize that relationship for a poor product.

•

Commission! Your JV partners need to be treated differently to the normal “run of the mill” affiliates. You need to give them a greater commission that you would give affiliates. 50% is the minimum and sometimes you may even consider up to 100% in order to build your list and customer base.

•

Marketing material. You need to create everything for them in order to be able to market effectively. You do not want them to have to do any unnecessary work. If they have to work too hard, they will just refuse to promote your product because they are probably busy trying to run their own business. Promotional materials include solo ads, autoresponder series and banners.

•

Give them a sample of the product. Most of them will need to check out product quality before they will promote it to their list. This also builds goodwill.

TRACKING AND CONVERSIONS: Internet marketing revolves around two simple words: Traffic and conversions!

Once you have got traffic to your site, you need to know how well it is converting because if you can double your conversion rate from say 0,5% to 1% then you will have doubled your income without any additional traffic! Conversion rates are not only limited to sales. If you wanted a visitor to opt into your newsletter list, then you will track your sign-up conversions. You need to check the conversions of any action you want them to take.

The conversion rate is the number of people that perform the action that you want them to as a percentage of the total people that you reached. So if you only get one sale from 200 visits to your site, then your conversion rate is 0,5%. Once you know this you can work on improving it to improve [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] your sales. This could mean a significant increase in your bottom line without getting any new customers.

One will never get a 100% conversion rate. Eventually you will reach a plateau but you need to keep improving until you get to this point. If you do not, you are leaving money on the table. This can make the difference between having an online hobby and a full time income. All the major gurus are obsessed with conversion rates.

Once you have your conversion rate, you will be able to calculate one of the most important metrics to an internet marketer and that is what it costs you to acquire a visitor. If you know what your cost per visitor is and how much you make from each visitor, you will know how much you can spend on acquiring the customer, be it through advertising or by paying affiliates more.

Having a high converting sales letter allows you to get more motivated affiliates and joint venture partners. Change various components, ONE AT A TIME, and keep testing until you have optimal conversions. Try to test each change using the same number of visits each time for consistency (100-500 clicks is ideal). You can look to change the following components: • • • • • • • • • • • •

Header graphics Header graphic versus no header graphic Headlines v Pre-headlines Sub-headlines Openings Testimonials Order buttons Guarantees Closings P.S.'s Call to action Feature / benefit lists

One can use software to split test different variants. This is also known as A/B testing. We only test ONE VARIANT AT A TIME. As you optimise a variant, you then start testing the next variant.

Software for these tests can be free.

You can purchase multi variant testing software. This software has a built in intelligence and once one has a large number of visits to your sales page, it will eventually show you what the optimal converting sales letter should look like. Unfortunately this is generally quite expensive software. It saves a ton of time though, because you can test absolutely all of the variables that you want to.

Most sales pages average at about 1% conversion. If you do a lot of optimization you can get conversions of 5-7%. Most affiliates and JV partners will happily promote a sales letter converting at 5%!

You can test conversions for any number of things, for example: • • • •

Adsense CPA Affiliate sales Autoresponder

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Testing and tracking is vital to improving conversions. Each time you make a change, you track the results and keep doing this until you get optimal results. You can use software or just keep track of the results with a spreadsheet. Make testing a part of your routine!

Google analytics is free and it tracks everything that happens on your website. It shows things like how many visitors there are to your site, which keywords they came from, where they go to when they leave, how long they stay on your site, where they click on your site etc. You simply install a piece of code anywhere on your site, usually somewhere in the footer code and it tracks everything for you.

By understanding how people navigate your site and especially where they exit can show you where your site has shortcomings. For example if 10 people click through to the order page but only 2 actually complete the order, you know that there is a problem with the order page.

If your webhost has C-panel, you will have access to AW Stats which is very useful. Hostgator uses Cpanel for example. For example it will tell you how many visitors you had which you can use to calculate conversions. You can also find out which countries visitors come from which could be very useful for CPA offers that may be geographic specific. When you start out, using Google analytics and AW Stats are more than enough. Most ISP’s will give you some sort of basics stats which will help you to improve conversions.

SUMMARY: We have come to the end of module 5.2, which concludes the traffic section. Let us do a quick recap of what we learned.

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We looked at various paid traffic methods including advantages of the relevant methods.

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We then took an in-depth look at how to increase your traffic by using joint ventures and affiliates to promote your products.

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Lastly we looked at the importance of tracking and testing everything that we do so that we can improve our conversions in order to make as much money as possible.

MODULE 6 - MONETIZATION Today we are going to look at the much anticipated monetization methods module.

Everything that we have looked at to this point will come together in this module because as you will discover, regardless of which monetization method you choose, you will need all of the information in the earlier modules.

We started off with learning how to pick a niche and create products that our customers would love to buy. We then understood the sales process and learned how to build a website that is appropriate for our chosen business. This completed the process of getting our product to market.

Then we looked at many free and paid ways of driving traffic to our site.

Now it is time to choose a monetization method that best suits our niche. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] There are literally hundreds of ways to make money online. But I am not going to give you a shopping list here. To qualify for my listing, it has to be a BUSINESS and not a job. A job is where you trade your time for money, such as writing articles for people and charging for it. A job will not get you the internet marketing lifestyle that we all desire.

You need to be able to make money when you are not there. Typically, you put in the work up front, for which you do not immediately get paid but if you do it right, you only have to do it once and get paid forever! That my friend’s is the Holy Grail.

This is why it is called internet marketing. The money is to be made if you are better than the next person at marketing something. Effectively this entire course is about just that. Sure you need a product and then some technical skills to create your website but after that if you are a good marketer you will make money, else you will not. That is all there is to it. We are going to look at the following monetization models: We are going to look at the following monetization models: -Why information marketing is the best way to make money online -Selling other peoples products as an affiliate -Another specialised form of affiliate sales called CPA or cost per Action -Blogging for profit -Making money with Google’s Adsense program -Making money as an eBay power seller -Selling physical products with your own ecommerce site and -Domain and website flipping.

NICHE MARKETING / INFORMATION MARKETING: Information marketing is the most common type of internet business and anyone is qualified in some way to do it. Essentially you take a topic that you know a lot about and you package that knowledge or information into a format that other people will be happy to pay for.

Advantages of selling digital information products include: 1. Copyright protection of your original works so others cannot sell your products as their own unless you have given them the right to do so.

2. Huge profit margins. There are virtually no costs associated with delivering digital information products.

3. You can work from anywhere as long as you have a computer with internet access.

4. You can automate the business to work on autopilot so you can limit your time involvement in the business.

5. You do not need any employees and all the related costs associated with this.

6. Very low start up costs. You main cost is your time and monthly hosting fees [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] 7. You work once to create a product that you can get paid for over and over.

There are so many different products that one can create with this method.

These include, eBooks, Videos, Mp3’s and software products just to name a few.

Once you have created these products, which in most cases will be digital, you then set up a website for people to access, create a payment method for them to give you the money and then you ship the product if it is a physical product or you let them instantly download it if it is a digital product.

The idea is to set up the process which is then automated. Your job then becomes to improve or update content and to find new customers.

You can sell one off products like eBooks or videos, or you could sell some type of membership. The most popular types of membership sites are those which charge a monthly membership fee. They could either go on forever as long as one keeps paying the membership fee or they could be a set series of content of say 6-months. Other popular examples of this monthly income model are payments for the use of software. For example all good internet marketers use some type of auto responder software to help them collect email addresses and send out emails to their customers.

We also pay monthly hosting fees to our ISP.

AFFILIATE MARKETING: Many new internet marketers do not have a product of their own to sell, so they start off selling other peoples products for a commission. This is known as affiliate marketing. You receive a commission for each sale that you make.

Essentially affiliate marketing is a 3-step process: 1. Sign up to someone’s affiliate program so that you have a product to sell. You can sign up at one or more affiliate networks. Affiliate networks are one of the easiest ways to find products because these networks showcase many affiliate products from different publishers.

2. Market the product or products that you have chosen to sell.

3. Make the sale in order to earn your commission.

The affiliate program will provide you with a special link called an affiliate link. This is the link that you use to market the product. This link could be on a website or even sent through email marketing. Once the customer clicks on the link, they will then be taken to the vendor’s sales page.

This special affiliate link identifies you as the source of the sale and this is how you get the credit for any purchases that the people you refer to the vendor’s site make.

It is really that simple. A lot of internet marketers make money by selling both their own products and other people’s products.

All of the shipping and fulfilment problems belong to the product owner so you just get paid a commission without any of the hassles of owning the product, such as customer support issues.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] You can promote and sell either physical or digital products. The best physical product affiliate program is www.commissionjunction.com and the best digital marketplace is www.clickbank.com Choosing the right program is critical. You will want to ensure that you get paid on time and you want to ensure that you get the highest payouts possible. There are a number of things to consider around commissions: 1. The percentage commission that you can earn. As a rule of thumb for digital products the commission will be around 50% and can even go up to 75%. In some instances it can even be as high as 100% because the product owner is more interested in the products that he can sell to the customer after they have entered his sales funnel. They are happy to pay you 100% commission because they effectively got a very valuable customer with a very high life time value to them for free.

2. The dollar value of the commission. Physical products have associated costs and therefore the commissions simply cannot be as high as 50%. However if the item is very expensive, say costing $1,000, then a 20% commission would be $200, which would be better than earning a 75% commission of a $100 product.

3. The number of tiers you can earn commission on. This works a bit like MLM or multi level marketing. In affiliate programs, 2 tiers are generally the deepest that they go. This means that you earn a commission off your customer. If your customer in turn refers another customer of their own, you will earn a further commission of this sale. You thus earn two commissions even though you only brought in one customer. Most times the second tier commission is less than the original first tier commission, but not always.

4. Recurring commissions are better than one-off sales. If you promote continuity type products that bill the customer month after month, you will earn commissions for as long as the people you referred continue to pay their monthly membership fee.

5. The quality of the products you promote is critical and so it the level of product support that the vendor provides. So is the quality and appeal of the vendor’s sales page and website.

Look for vendors who have appetising sales pages and who provide excellent sales materials for their affiliates. Good affiliate tools will include things like, keyword research, banners, articles, videos and autoresponder series.

CPA Another form of affiliate programs is called CPA or cost per action or Cost Per acquisition. In this case you do not sell a product but you get paid when you get someone to perform a particular action that the sponsor wants people to take. This general idea of this is that the advertisers pay you a commission for generating leads for them.

The type of actions you can get paid for include: • • • •

Getting people to fill in a zip code or an email address Signing up as a subscriber Accepting a free trial or sample Actually buying the sponsors product.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] The major difference between traditional affiliate marketing and CPA is that affiliate marketing is focussed on selling a product while CPA focuses on generating leads.

For CPA offers, commissions are paid once the prospect completes the action, whether they buy anything from the advertiser or not. This makes it a very easy model to generate income which is more assured than affiliate sales.

Most CPA offers are promoted through CPA networks. These networks act as the middleman between the publishers (you) and the advertisers. There is often a strict screening process. You need to be approved by these networks before you can start promoting their offers. If you join reputable networks, you will be assured of receiving your commissions.

Because of this screening process, it is a little more difficult for new marketers to get approved by CPA networks as opposed to affiliate networks. The networks are generally looking for a bit of experience, and an email list. At the very minimum you will need to have a website.

Commissions vary anywhere between $1 for a simple zip code or email capture to hundreds of dollars for an outright sale.

Some networks offer a cost per action model or a revenue sharing model. In the CPA model you get paid up front, but only once. In the revenue sharing model, you get paid an ongoing portion of the revenue that your customer generates so the long term prospects are better. However you only get paid after revenue is earned and if your customer does not spend any money, you will receive no revenue for the referral.

BLOGGING: Having a popular blog with a lot of traffic allows you to monetize it in so many different ways. To make money from the blog, you need to get a substantial amount of traffic to your site. If you provide good content, over time you can build up a very large following. Then you can effectively monetize this traffic.

Most internet marketers have a blog in order to communicate with their customers. A blog is often the point of contact with customers and a great way to increase ones customer base.

While you can earn an income directly from blogging, blogging is more of a platform to earn money than a form of making money online.

Here are some of the more popular and lucrative ways to earn money from your blog: Sell your own products – These can be physical or digital Sell Affiliate products – If you sell other people’s products you will have an unlimited choice of products to sell Sell advertising – there are many options here. Adsense is the most popular contextual advertising option but there are many other options as well. You can sell banner ads, text ads, image ads etc.

You can either work through established advertising networks who will take a commission or you can sell advertising space directly to motivated advertisers.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Promote online auctions – EBay is the best known example of this. EBay makes it easy with a plethora of simple tools. The best part: You don’t even have to create your own auctions! You can pull in auctions for items related to your topic or subject matter with RSS feeds, product feeds, or directly from auction listings.

Paid sponsorships – If writing is your true passion, you can get paid for it. You can write things like product reviews, website reviews or just blog posts about specific advertisers and their products.

You will need to disclose your paid involvement and have the highest standards of integrity.

Donations – there is nothing wrong with this as long as you provide excellent value. Simply hook up a donation button to your PayPal account. This is more effective if you are not monetizing your blog in other ways because people will understand that you rely on donations to keep giving them great content.

Coaching and other services – you can sell just about anything from your blog. You can coach people via webinars or other means on any topic. You can advertise services such as article writing, link building etc.

ADSENSE: Many people make their online income solely through Google’s contextual advertising program called Adsense. Essentially, you agree to make certain areas of your website available for advertising by installing a piece of code that Google gives you onto your website. This is the reverse side of Google’s Adwords program where advertisers pay when Google shows their ads and people click on them.

If someone clicks on the ad, then Google charges the advertiser a fee, which they then split with you.

Instead of earning revenue per click, you can also elect to earn revenue for impressions. This is usually on a CPM or cost per thousand impressions basis. This means that if the ad is shown on your website 1000 times, then you will get paid, regardless of how many times your site visitors click on the ads, even if they do not click at all.

Google places whatever advertising they deem appropriate on your site. Google’s smart advertising matching will generally result in Google placing targeted ads on your site. The ads will be targeted to the content that you display on the web page in question. This means that you do not have control over which ads Google will choose to display. Google does have a few tools for you to avoid certain ads showing on your site. For example, you could block ads from your competitors URL showing up on your site.

Google does not publish the percentage that the publishers earn of the advertising revenue, so we do not know exactly how much they pay out per click. I have seen estimates of anywhere from 40%80%. As Adsense is not the only advertising option, Google needs to ensure that they pay enough to keep your business.

The amount of revenue you earn will be based on the number of visitors to your site and the quality of your content. The more pages your site has, the more chance of earning Adsense revenue because you can place ads on every page.

There are a number of different ways to make money off the program. The two most popular are:

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Adsense for content – This is the usual system of placing ads on your site. These can be text, banner or even video ads. These ads are relevant to the content of the particular web page and hence the name.

Adsense for search – This is where you install a Google search box onto your site. This enables your visitors to search Google while still staying in context and not having to leave your site. You then have a second opportunity to earn revenue if these visitors happen to click on any of the ads that show up.

Adsense is not the only contextual advertising network you can join; it is just the best known. I suggest that you investigate other networks as they may be more pertinent to your particular website than the Adwords offer. You could also sell ads directly to other advertisers, who may also have something to sell to your niche.

DOMAIN AND WEBSITE FLIPPING: A bone fide business model is the selling of websites. Many people prefer to build up a business to a certain level and then sell it. This has created a whole industry called website flipping, which is just the geeky term for selling websites. The term flipping is a real estate term and originally meant to purchase a property and then resell it, or flip it.

Website flipping can be done this way, but the more traditional way is for someone to build a business around a site and once it is making money, they then sell it for 10-20 times its monthly profit.

Other people just build sites around a popular niche and then sell them immediately. As these sites do not have a track record, they will probably not sell for much.

The most profitable way to run this business is to find sites that are under-performing that you can buy. You then increase the traffic and the revenues and then sell them for a profit. Well monetized sites will often sell for between 8-24 times the monthly profits. For example a membership site earning $1,000 per month can sell for between $8,000 and $24,000!

There are so many way to improve an underperforming site’s monetization. Improved traffic flow is a good place to start and can be done using any of the traditional traffic methods. You can also add an advertising component to the site to immediately boost its value.

There is a well established market for the buying and selling of websites. The biggest website marketplace is www.flippa.com. There are strict rules around the listing of sites and there is good protection for both buyers and sellers to minimize the risk of fraud.

Domain names also fall into this category. Single word domain names are very rare these days, like money.com for example. People will often pay crazy money for easy to remember or descriptive domain names.

People can buy and sell domain names or register clever domains in the hope that someone will want to buy it. Some people buy old expired domain names and make money that way. If you want to see how lucrative this business can be, just go to www.sedo.com.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Aged domain names can command high prices. The older a domain, the more respect it is shown by Google. This often allows an aged domain to avoid the dreaded Google sandbox and this increases its value dramatically.

Domains with a high page rank or PR also command a premium. Domains often just do not get renewed for one reason or another and if you can purchase it just after it is “dropped” you can keep all of the associated age, PR, traffic etc attached to the domain name.

There are many domain services that will help you to find profitable domains. You can sign up for backorder services that will automatically tell you if a domain that you request ever gets dropped.

A way to monetize your domain while you are waiting to sell it is to use the services of say www.sedo.com who will “park” your domain for you. They place ads on the landing page which they create should someone type in your domain name. You then earn revenue if anyone clicks on any of the ads (just like Google Adwords). They will also place a notification on the landing page that the domain is for sale, so you could end up selling your domain name without having to market it yourself.

EBAY AND CRAIGSLIST Many people make a full-time living selling products on eBay. EBay has become such a huge market place and it has millions of visitors every month with billions of dollars in monthly sales!

You can either just buy and sell new products or you can find products in other ways, such as finding them at storage auctions or garage sales and sell them for a profit on eBay. Or find what people are looking for on eBay and then go and source the product and earn a commission.

A big part of the business is sourcing suppliers and drop shippers who will deliver your product directly to your customers once you conclude your sale on eBay. There are many ways to sell products on eBay: Auction-style is the classic eBay format, where the highest bidder wins. Auction-style listings can be set for duration of 1, 3, 5, 7 or 10 days.

Buy It Now price to your Auction-style listing. This gives a buyer the option to choose to purchase your item right away at a price you set, instead of bidding. Your Buy It Now price must be at least 10% higher than the auction start price.

Or, you could sell at a Fixed Price, as long as it’s at least $0.99. This option lets a buyer purchase your item at a Buy It Now price you set—without the option to bid.

When you set a Buy It Now price, click the Best Offer check box if you are willing to consider offers from shoppers who want to pay a little less. A little negotiation can help you get the sale.

There is no charge for this option.

EBay also has a classified ad section where you can list a limited amount of items for sale free of charge with no fees payable when you sell your products.

Fees are payable for auction style listing only if a successful sale is concluded.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] EBay also offers what is known as an eBay store. This is effectively a full e-commerce online store.

These cost more because you will incur product listing fees as well as a monthly subscription fee.

You also pay commission on completed sales. However, you will have access to millions of eBay’s monthly visitors as well as all the functionality of the eBay site. So you will be able to incorporate all of the functionality as described above. You can auction goods, sell them at a fixed price and set a reserve.

Another one of the biggest sites on the net with millions of monthly visitors is called Craigslist. This is a giant classified site which operates in over 50 countries and in all major cities around the world.

It concentrates more on your local area where eBay operates worldwide. Many people buy on Craigslist and sell on eBay.

YAHOO! STORES OR OTHER E-COMMERCE STORES: If you have physical products you can either set up your own website or use the established infrastructure of something like Yahoo! Stores. Yahoo attracts millions of customers every month and they allow you to take advantage of their shoppers by setting up your own virtual store.

You can set up your store for less than $100. You do not even have to own any inventory! Again, your job is marketing. Entice your own customers as well as Yahoo!’s to your store and you are in business.

If you want to set up an ecommerce store, this is one of the best options. The support and functionality of the stores are brilliant. You can use their templates and just click to upload all of your information. They will also help you with developers if you want to personalize your store.

They have a shopping cart for easy integration. This is all part of the low monthly fee of $39.95. You also pay a sales commission of 1,5% on every sale. It would literally cost you thousands of dollars to set up this type of infrastructure by yourself.

You can accept virtually any payment method including all major credit cards and PayPal. All the management reports and statistics you could ever want are included in your monthly subscription fee.

Their templates are set up for easy SEO to help drive traffic to your site. Hosting fees are included in your subscription and they guarantee 99.9% uptime.

Other Ecommerce providers include eBay and amazon.com.

SUMMARY: This is the end of module 9. Let us just have a quick recap.

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We looked at what makes a viable long term online business as opposed to just a J.O.B.

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We understood why information marketing is one of the most lucrative online businesses to have

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] •

We then looked at various methods of making money online.

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What I hope you take away from this lesson is that there are many different business models that you can choose. Of course you could choose multiple different models if your business allows for it. Regardless of which model you choose, I hope that you will have noticed that everything that we have done in the 8 modules before this is applicable to ANY model that you choose. Please sit and digest that fact for a minute.

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So regardless of whether you choose, blogging, or affiliate sales or your own programs via a membership site or even an ecommerce site, the process is exactly the same.

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You first choose your niche and do appropriate keyword research. You then acquire your product to sell. The product could be your own product or an affiliate product. It could be advertising via Adsense or a physical product sold on eBay or your own e-commerce site. It does not matter.

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You then build the appropriate website with the appropriate merchant account and shopping cart if applicable.

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You then drive traffic to your site and track and test your conversions to improve your marketing and you keep doing this over and over until you make the income that you are happy with.

MODULE 7 – PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: Now we are going to finally pull everything that we have learned in this course together. I am going to cover two very, very important things that should provide you with a major “aha” moment!

In this final module I will tell you about two different types of business plans that you can choose for your online business. You will choose the appropriate business plan with reference to your niche and your own personal circumstances.

I will also make sure that you understand the big picture by showing you how everything that we have covered in the course so far fits together. Until now we have looked at small individual pieces of the overall internet marketing puzzle. Now we are going to put these individual pieces together to complete the big picture.

The most exciting thing though, is how I am going to do it. I am going to do a walkthrough of the big picture by showing you a practical example of how to apply the entire process to the monetization method of building a membership site. When you are done with this module, you will easily be able to create your own business plan in just a few minutes. Ok, let’s get started.

I am about to reveal something very profound. It took me over a year to work this out and I have never seen anyone else teach this. I think that most people just do not get it. Please consider what I am about to tell you carefully and do not be fooled by its simplicity.

There are really only two different types of online business plans. Any of the monetization methods discussed in the last module can fit into the framework of one of these two types of business plans:

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] The first is what can typically be called small niche marketing and the second is building a single business around a just one niche. I will explain this in more detail in just a second. The type of business plan you choose will impact how you do EVERYTHING online!

There are many factors that will play a part in helping you choose your type of business but your access to TWO resources in particular will play the biggest part. These two resources are time and money. Of these, I think TIME is more important than money.

I think that by now after having gone through this entire course, you have probably realised that online marketing consists of a lot more than you may have been aware of before you started.

Remember that you do not have to do everything yourself but you do need to know what needs to be done and you also need to know how to outsource the things that you cannot do or simply do not have time to do. This will cost a bit of money.

The other reason that money is important is because you will continually have to invest in improving your skills and this will require a bit of money. If you do not, you will be left behind by your competitors.

Lack of time is one of the biggest complaints that people have regarding their online business. This is not really surprising because many people start an online business while still being employed on a full time basis. More successful marketers have a lack of time for a different reason. Once they progress, they need to do different and additional tasks to grow their business and this often requires more time.

With that said, let us look at our two business types again. If you have limited time, it would make more sense to choose a simple business model that does not take a lot of time to run. The most popular choice for most internet marketers in this position is affiliate marketing because you do not need to learn about product development because others have done this for them. That immediately cuts out a whole module of our course for you, a potentially huge time saving. It also cuts out large chunks of some of the other modules such as sales funnel and website development.

Your main job is to pick a niche and then find an appropriate product to promote and then PROMOTE OR MARKET it.

Now if you are marketing someone else’s product, there are really two ways to do it based on our traffic modules. You can either pay for traffic or you can create some sort of site, such as a wordpress review site / blog and then use SEO and other methods to drive traffic to your site where you then try to “pre-sell” your customers before you get them to click on your affiliate link to drive them to the product owners site where they will hopefully buy the product so that you can earn a commission.

Now many people have “perfected” their own systems for doing this, especially through small mini sites that target one particular niche or product. The real skill set is in identifying profitable niches.

Then you find a system that works for you and once you have perfected it, you simply duplicate it over and over. What this results in is a portfolio of small profitable websites that do not make a fortune individually but when you take the combined turnover of all of their micro niche sites, people can often be making upwards of $10,000 per month.

This model clearly makes sense if you have limited time. This is because once you have mastered your system it then becomes relatively easy to put up additional mini sites for a different niche or product relatively quickly. Any mistakes you make will be limited to one small area of your business.

You can create an additional site and hence an additional revenue stream as soon as you find a bit of [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] additional time on your hands. The point is that the creation of each new site takes relatively little time to create and you are able to finish a completed product so that your limited time is well spent.

People who specialise in this type of niche marketing tend to do one of two things: They either try to specialise in a particular niche or they just promote anything that is a good opportunity. Both have merit and require a different skill set. Personally, I like specialising in a particular niche because it allows you to market additional products to people on your list.

If you market knitting today, you cannot market fishing products to that list tomorrow. But if you choose say the internet marketing niche, you can market SEO products today and traffic generation and list building products tomorrow to the same list of subscribers. The model you choose does not matter as long as it works for you.

So as you can see, niche marketing allows you to perfect a relatively simple system and duplicate it based on the amount of time that you have available. You will find that many “money making systems� that get marketed on the internet revolve around teaching some sort of system that can be duplicated over and over.

The two most prolific examples of micro niche marketing are affiliate marketing or modifying and improving PLR products that you can sell and rather earn 100% of the profits. Marketing CPA offers or creating Adsense sites also fit into this micro niche business plan.

The second type of business plan is building a single business and concentrating all of your efforts on this one business. This will mean that you do not have a whole portfolio of websites but rather that you concentrate on just one authority site and one set of customers. The benefit of this is that you then get to know your market very well and you understand what makes your customers tick. This allows you to build better relationships with your customers. You will then be able to sell many products to your customers which will include your own products and also affiliate products.

Take this product that you are consuming right now.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] The Internet Marketing Gameplan (TIMGP) is in fact part of another product called CIMR or Complete Internet marketing Resources. Our entire business now revolves around CIMR. You will have noticed that TIMGP gives you the broad overview of making money online but it does not really have the time to tell you HOW to do things. Remember that our goal is to teach you the entire overview of how internet marketing works which will allow you to determine WHAT you need to know more about. That is what we will hope to achieve by the end of this module.

CIMR on the other hand will give you detailed training on ANY of the topics that we have covered in this course. This is why we included it as a bonus for those of you that purchased the video version course through Clickbank. CIMR is a membership site and it is devoted entirely to internet marketing resources. So while we will also use many of the methods taught to you in this course, they are all focussed around CIMR. TIMGP is more of a marketing tool for us to get people into our CIMR sales funnel. The point of this is that our ENTIRE business is build around one site. All of our marketing efforts revolve around just one site. We do not have a portfolio of different sites to sell different products. Any affiliate products that we may recommend, if we determine that they will be or real benefit to our members will be marketed through just one Site being CIMR or Complete Internet marketing Resources.

With these two examples, I am trying to get you to focus your mind around which of these two types of business plans you are going to build your online business around. Note that at this stage I am not even considering which monetization method you are going to choose.

Based on your available time, money, passion and drive and knowledge of your niche, does it make more sense for you to either: Build multiple micro niche sites or concentrate on a single online business?

I am now going to walk you through the entire gameplan which should serve as an excellent recap of everything that you have learned up to now. It will also bring everything together so that you can see the entire process or “big picture” all at the same time. I suggest that you print out the pdf that I have enclosed called “Big Picture” as this is what I will be using for the rest of this presentation.

At the same time, I am going to combine this with walking you through how to design your own business plan. Before you start, you should already have some idea of which monetization model or models you plan on implementing. Then for each step of the process, just determine whether it is applicable for you or not.

The reason that I just told you about TIMGP and CIMR and how the two are related (apart from hoping that you will join CIMR when you have completed TIMGP) is that I am going to take you through the process and show you how to set up a business plan assuming that you want to create a membership site by using TIMGP and CIMR to illustrate the process. In other words I am going to show you that I practice what I preach and also how I do it.

The RED text denotes how it practically applies to the example of CIMR & TIMGP

PICK A NICHE: Regardless of the monetization method that you choose, the first step is to pick a niche.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Brainstorm niche ideas: The first thing that you need to do is to brainstorm some ideas that you can research so that you can pick a niche to build your online business around. I am going to take you through our thinking when we created CIMR – www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com The niche was really easy to come up with because I had been involved for so long. It was also one of big three niches on the internet namely how to make money, lose weight and relationships.

The niche I eventually settled on was done because I solved a great problem and frustration for myself so I knew that many other people would have the same problem. I knew that information overload and the lack of a clear plan is what causes most people to fail. So I chose to give people resources to save them from the pain that I had experienced in my internet journey.

Research: Then you need to do some keyword research to determine if there is sufficient demand in your niche to give you a high PROBABILITY of success so that you do not waste your time producing products that nobody will be interested in buying.

I then did my research which involved both keyword research and other market research to determine whether there was in fact a high enough demand for my product and whether I would be able to compete successfully with the level of competition in the niche.

By looking at forums and many online survey results, I realised that there were really two types of people that would benefit from my product. Those are brand new to internet marketing and those that have been doing it for a while but have just not made any progress. In my case this equates to about 90% of the total niche! My best prospects are those that have been battling for a while because they understand the value of the solution that I am offering. The people starting out for the first time will benefit greatly from this product but they may not really appreciate it before they have truly experienced some of the difficulties for themselves. The lucky ones will just pick this up and never have to experience the frustrations that the rest of us have gone through.

Ask campaign: Once you have found a winner, ask your customers what they want so that you can build the ideal product for them. Just incorporate everything that your customers tell you through your survey into the final product.

My customers told me that information overload and the lack of a clear plan was a major stumbling block. They also told me they were tired of useless “get rich quick” schemes, the “gurus” only tell them half the story and that they lack time necessary to wade through all of the useless information out there. The Internet Marketing Gameplan, which is part if CIMR as you will see in just a little while, addresses all of these problems and frustrations.

PRODUCT CREATION: Own or affiliate products?: The first thing is to decide whether you are going to sell your own products or whether you are going to sell other people’s products as an affiliate.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] This was really a very easy choice for us because our business model is based on giving our customers comprehensive resources. There is no way I would be able to create everything that my customers would need so I would have to get a lot of my products from other people. I would thus use a combination of my own products and affiliate products.

Product formats: You decide which products formats you should concentrate on. EBooks, software, apps, audio or videos.

Again because of my business model, I need to make use of all possible formats for my products.

My customers have told me that they prefer video, so our membership training site is heavily weighted towards video training.

Content creation: You then need to decide how you are going to create the content for your products. Will it all be totally original or will you use PLR and public domain products as a base or will you simply outsource the entire product creation process?

As I was not able to create all of the necessary products, I turned to PLR products as the STARTING POINT for my products. I joined a number of PLR sites and reviewed literally thousands of products. I then picked only the best ones that are still relevant to my customers. The advantage that my members will have is that the products are neatly categorized so it is easy for them to find what they want and they know that they will get only the best products so they do not have to waste their time wading through garbage. I recommended less than 50% of the products that I reviewed for my members.

I also devised another method to keep giving members good relevant content and this was by contacting industry gurus in all of the areas that are relevant to TIMGP and then interviewing them. These gurus would then provide good content as well as some free products and a substantial discount on their paid products exclusively for my members.

We obviously also created our own original products for example TIMGP, so we will offer a combination of products we create ourselves plus PLR plus unique content from other industry experts.

SALES FUNNEL: Squeeze page and autoresponder: You know by now that because the money is in the list because 99% of the time, customers do not buy from you on their first visit to your site, so your number one goal is to get their email address so that you have additional opportunities to sell them stuff. This is why you need a squeeze page hooked up to an appropriate autoresponder.

We have established numerous sources of traffic to our site and they all have some sort of opt-in box whether it is a traditional squeeze page or just an opt in box on every page of our website.

These are all hooked up to our Aweber autoresponder. TIMGP is a very good example of this.

TIMGP is in reality just a sales tool for our main business which is CIMR, so even if you opted into a TIMGP squeeze page, you will actually end up in our CIMR sales funnel. [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Sales letter: You then need to write the copy of your sales letter and get the appropriate graphics to enhance your sales letter. You would be looking for things like headers, footers, product images, buy buttons and testimonial boxes.

For TIMGP for example, I took all of the market research that I did and used it to write the sales letter. I made sure that my sales letter and more importantly my final product, covered all of the things that my customers had asked for when we did our research and conducted our ask campaign.

We then outsourced the creation of a mini site for TIMGP which essentially had all of the graphics being consistent with the theme of the site. The site was really just a sales page and a thank you page. For my garage sale blueprint product, I still outsourced the graphics but I build the entire site myself on WordPress. I used a paid product called Optimize Press to do it.

Create Up-sells, Down-sells or an OTO: Every time someone enters your sales funnel, even if it is for a free product, you should try to make a sale to them by giving them an appropriate offer. If people have bought something from you, try to up-sell or down-sell them in order to maximise your sale value because you have already done the hard work to get the customer to buy from you. An OTO often works best and gives the most value to both you and your customer.

For TIMGP, we created an up-sell in the form of an OTO which genuinely is a one-time only offer and it offered our customers a very big discount for joining the CIMR membership. For those that chose not to take up this offer, we tried a down-sell by offering a $4.95 trial because this is the lowest amount that ClickBank, our merchant provider, would allow us to. Our goal is to expose people to our products because we know that we provide good value and we just need an opportunity to prove it to people.

Back end sales: Hopefully you chose a niche that will allow you to sell products to your customers on a regular basis.

These can be products that you develop or affiliate products. You should plan this right upfront as it will form part of your continued marketing and sales strategy going forward.

Because we have chosen a resources niche, we really do have an unlimited amount of products that we will be able to sell. In our case it will actually be hard to choose what to sell. We will sell our own products as well as those of our affiliate and joint venture partners. Remember that we said that we will be sourcing interviews from industry experts. Well, it is precisely these products that we will choose to promote over all others. Our members will have a first-hand chance to be introduced to our partners via these interviews and free products. If they like our partners and they are interested in the products that they are selling, it will be a no brainer to buy these products. Thus just by selling products of people that our members have already connected with, we will be able to make sales because of the work of other people.

Product launch: Once you are ready to launch your product you need to decide how to do it. If you do a big launch, you can find joint venture and affiliate partners using Google or some of the joint venture networks.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] You then need to ensure that you provide the right promotional materials for your partners and that you give them enough time to co-ordinate their launch plans with yours.

For CIMR we will follow the method of finding potential JV partners and then contacting them to help promote our product. We will start with the people that are already connected to our guru program because they provide us with valuable content for our members so we already have a relationship with them.

WEBSITE CREATION: Set-up: You need to arrange hosting and register your domain name and make sure that you point your domain to your ISP’s nameservers.

I already have a hosting account with Hostgator which allows me to add as many websites as I like for a monthly fee of less than $10. The reason is because I only rent a small portion of just one of their servers so they rent out the rest to other people which helps them make more profit.

After brainstorming to find an appropriate domain name we used godaddy.com to establish if our name was available.

Type of Site: By now you should know which type of site you will need for your business.

We actually needed a single product site for TIMGP and a membership site for CIMR. Technology: You then need to decide what platform you are going to build your site on, if you are going to use any platform at all.

Because the TIMGP site is a simple 2 page site, we just got the graphic designers to design the two page minisite for us which incorporated our graphics. It was a simple matter to literally type in the text of our sales letter after that.

CIMR was more complex because it needs to be a membership site. It also has to have a blog as part of the site. We simply used WordPress for this. (We could also have used Joomla but chose WordPress because it is simpler to use). We did however have to spend some money on a few things.

Firstly we used a paid plugin called DAP or Digital Access Pass to run our membership site. This cost $300 but we now have the use of it for life and we can use it on as many of our sites as we please. This is an example of what I meant in earlier modules when I said that you will have to make some investment in your business. In this case I was prepared to invest $300 to make my life easier.

Then we used a custom theme called Headway to suit our look and feel and our own specific needs. With Headway you can create any look for any page. Every page can be different, which is a big innovation over traditional wordpress themes, where each page has to look the same. This included a way for us to easily do a batch upload for our products. This only cost $50 but it is [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] something that we will use forever because we will be uploading new products for our members on a continual basis.

We could just as easily have outsourced the entire site to programmers who could have designed anything that we wanted. This was however not necessary because tried and test technology already exists in the form of WordPress and DAP. Squeeze page, autoresponder and sales page: These have already been discussed above under the sales funnel.

Merchant account: You now have to find a way to get paid. You need to sign up with some sort of merchant account who can handle this process for you.

We chose ClickBank because of their built-in affiliate program. They basically handle the entire financial function for me including sales, refunds and affiliates. We simply created a link from our sales page to the ClickBank merchant site.

Download page: This is where you create the link to the products that your customers will download. This also has to be linked to your merchant account so that people can be redirected there once they have paid.

Our ClickBank account is linked back to our download page. This technology has all been developed by ClickBank so all we have to do is tell ClickBank what the URL of the download page is. Once ClickBank has confirmed that the transaction has gone through, then and only then, will they send the customer to the download page for them to download their product.

Deliver the product: You now have to decide whether to keep the products on your own site or to host them somewhere else in order to save bandwidth.

For us it was never even a contest. It would just cost too much to host it on our own site. By using Amazon S3, it is much cheaper for us. Because of the size of our files and because a lot of our content is video, our site would probably be far too slow if we tried to host it on our own server and in heavy traffic times, there would be a very real risk that our site could crash.

TRAFFIC: You now have to decide on your marketing strategy. How do intend to get traffic to your site.

You need to decide which one of the three methods you are going to use: • • •

Free traffic Paid traffic JV’s and affiliates

You then need to pick the methods within each category that best suit you. Of course you can also use a combination of methods. Pick the marketing methods that suit you best. You only need to perfect a few of them in order to have a successful business.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Because of our business model which relies heavily on other people, especially to get established industry guru’s to provide us with content and products to promote, the very first decision that we made was to make joint ventures and affiliates a huge part of our marketing and traffic generation plan.

In order to get TIMGP into the market place, we initially decided to give it away for free. This was to build up some goodwill and credibility because we asked people to use our product and tell us what they think. This would help us to make sure that the final product is as good as it can be and even more importantly it was to get honest testimonials for our sales letter. We needed quick results for this so we decided to pay for advertising so that we could get a lot of leads in a short space of time. We decided to use solo ads because of the targeted nature of them and the relative cost effectiveness of acquiring a lead.

Our business model is to be built on a foundation of great content. We plan to regularly produce short videos that people can consume in just a few minutes a day and learn something of real value to help them grow their business. Now when I make a video, I like to first write out the script and then convert it into a PowerPoint slide presentation. I then use Camtasia to record my video. It is a simple matter then to rip the audio from the video to create an MP3. So at the end of this I will have the following: 1.

2.

3.

4.

PDF PowerPoint presentation Video MP3

So here is the plan: Post the PDF & PowerPoint presentation on as many document and tutorial sites as I can such as SCRIBD. I then submit the video to YouTube and other video sites and I submit the MP3’s to as many audio sites as I can.

I also create a blog post from this content with links to the video. I then send an email to my list every time I post something.

I will use an automated tool like Traffic Geyser to do all of the hard work for me. This will automatically blast the videos and other content to many different social bookmarking and video sites. It will also automatically send it to our Facebook and twitter accounts.

You will recall that I said use the methods that resonate best with you and suit your personality and your niche. Well this is my plan which suits my business. It will probably not suit you but you just do what does. Because my business is communicating resources, making a daily video should in reality not be too difficult. So all of the traffic methods that I have chosen are very logical for me because they simply expand on what I am doing in my business anyway. I hope you see the logic in this. I have taken one video and just hugely multiplied its effectiveness because I understand all of the possibilities available to me. I can do this because I know the big picture and now so do you.

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] Obviously we would do all the on-page SEO as a matter of course. Our off page SEO will probably be tied into the strategy above. Just think how many backlinks we will get every time we distribute hundreds of videos, audios and pdf’s onto the net. We will also try to get good quality backlinks from our joint venture partners.

We will make limited use of articles and press releases but we would probably outsource this. Our main marketing plan is producing and distributing a daily video.

Tracking and conversions: Obviously you would want to track all of your conversions for all of your advertising and marketing efforts.

We will make extensive use of Google analytics and Ad Trackz Gold to track our results. We would then make systematic changes and keep testing until we optimize our conversions. We will test the results of squeeze and sales pages. We will test the conversion rates of solo ads and the emails that we send out. In fact we will test and track anything that can be tracked.

MONETIZATION: In some ways this is a bit like putting the cart before the horse because you would actually have needed to know what monetization models to use when you were planning your sales funnel and deciding on the type of website that you would need.

If we look at our business model, we will only combine two of the monetization methods discussed in module 9. Clearly we will be selling our own products as well as affiliate products because it fits into the focus of our business.

This is because we have chosen the route of building one business as opposed to many small niche sites. This is why we would not consider CPA offers for example. While we will be blogging, it will be to communicate with our customers and to build our subscriber lists. We will not really be selling products directly off our blog. While we will probably have some banner ads on our site, they will be restricted to promoting our own products or those of our joint venture partners. This is to maintain control over the quality of the products which is in the best interests of our members and our joint venture partners. AdSense is just too unpredictable and in my opinion it tends to take away from the content of the site which is particularly important for our business model.

Similarly, eBay and ecommerce sites do not fit our profile and neither does domain or website flipping.

CONCLUSION: I know that this has been a very long course and that it has covered a ton of content. The great thing is that you can read through it again or go and watch the videos again and again until you are happy that you have everything under control. I hope that this module has pulled it all together for you and that the practical example that we ran through will help to crystallise what is important.

Your next step is to just get started. If you have a good business idea you owe it to yourself to develop it. Using this course as a template, design your business plan by identifying all of the different areas that you need to find out more about and then go and learn all that you can about [www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] them. For those of you that have access to CIMR go there right away and get started. You will find all of the detail that you require for anything discussed in this course.

Now you need to get out there and make some money! Thank you for joining me for this course and I hope that you really learned a lot. The greatest joy of this business is knowing that because of something that I did, somebody else was able to be successful too. I would really love to hear about all of your success stories. I hope that this is just the beginning of our relationship together because I will be giving all of my subscribers and members a ton of really great content aimed at helping you grow your business. I would really appreciate it if you would take the time to check us out at www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com Until we meet again, thank you and cheers for now.

James Molfetas

IMPORTANT NOTE: Get the FREE video version of this book at www.theimgameplan.com/landing-page-fsa/ It is broken down into 10 modules totalling just over 5-hours of no-fluff content.

[www.completeinternetmarketingresources.com]

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan] The Internet Marketing Gameplan flowchart

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[The Internet Marketing Gameplan]

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