My Favorite Web Stuff

Marlon’s new Promo Dashboard will come out really soon, and in the meantime, he has this really cool video where he gives you a nice down-to-earth rundown on how successful internet marketing works. When he puts it like this, it sounds easy — don’t know why it seemed so complicated…

And with the promo dashboard, I’m sure it will BE easy too — if it’s anything like his other dashboards, he’ll lay it out STEP by STEP and all you have to do is follow along.

About that $300? Yes, that’s right. One lucky person will win $300, and no, you don’t have to be an expert. All it takes is watch that 10 minute video, which all by itself could help increase your income if you follow some of his advice in it, and then post a comment on Marlon’s blog (there’ll be instructions at the end of the video). Marlon will pick the one he likes best, and voila! $300!

There’s a second price for someone who’ll post a video comment too! So fire up your flip video or whatever and have some fun.

Good luck with winning a prize!

Elisabeth, who’s going to compose her own reply for that promo dashboard blog.

Today, I have a guest post/article (reprinted with permission from Marlon Sanders’ blog). Marlon is probably my all-time favorite internet marketing guru. For starters, it’s mostly because of his amazing product creation dashboard (where he led me through the product creation process in baby steps and provided all the tools I needed to actually do them) that I now have an actual product and am working on more!

And guess what! I actually got to meet him and talk with him in person at UnSeminar5, where he wasn’t even scheduled to speak or anything. He just showed up to hang out! And he gave me some GREAT advice on how to fix a very frustrating problem I’ve been having.

Now I like him even more. Not only is Marlon brilliant and has fantastic products, and not only does he stand out because he’s so refreshingly unpretentious and down-to-earth in a field (internet marketing) that’s so filled with hype, but he’s also REALLY nice (and fun!).

So here’s now his article, which I think is excellent and very useful, and I’m publishing it here in hopes that you’ll find it as helpful as I did. Enjoy!

Marlon’s article:

7 Steps To Promos That Work!
How To Find Your Target Folks, Get ‘em On Your Email
List, Then Send Out Emails That Get ‘em To ACT! …

And What You Can Do Starting Today!

By Marlon Sanders

The formula for making sales online isn’t particularly complex.

1. You find out where your people hang out
2. You find ways to reach ‘em with your message
3. You offer ‘em somethin’ free to get ‘em on your list
4. Capture their name and email on your Squeeze page
5. You send emails
6. From emails you send ‘em to multiple conversion processes
7. Follow the 3 laws

Let’s break this down.

1. Find out where people hang out.

This means you find the forums they hang out in, the blogs they read, the sites they go to.

That way, you can do your surveys, run banner ads, and find the folks who have the lists.

2. Find ways to reach ‘em with your message.

a. Find out where you can buy banner ads

How about the forums? The blogs? The web sites?

b. Look for text links too

If you can’t buy banner ads, look for Google Adsense on pages.

c. Who owns lists and sell products?

You’ll know these people because in their sig line on their forum posts they’re offering something FREE. In the article directories you’ll see their articles. And at the end in the resource box, they offer somethin’ free — JUST like you wanna do.

3. Offer ‘em something free to get ‘em on your list

Give people something so enticing they HAVE to join your list. That can be a free audio, ebook, PDF, video or newsletter. Or anything else that’ll get ‘em on your list.

Run banner ads or Adwords ads offering something free. Come up with a freebie the folks with lists can send out via an affiliate link, so a cookie gets set.

Write articles with your freebie in the resource box and submit those articles to the article directories.

4. Capture their name and email on your Squeeze page

My friend Jonathan Mizel coined the term Name Squeeze page. To PROVE he invented the term, he trademarked it. In case you’ve mistakenly read someone else invented it.

Anyway, you offer a freebie on a page where folks get the freebie if they join your email list. Not so complicated here.

5. Send emails

This means firing up your autoresponder and loading up emails.

It means learning to write subject lines, format your emails and write bullet points that arouse curiousity and get people to click.
You gotta become a master bullet-point writer.

It also helps if you can spin a good story, just like you do with your friends over the phone or at the coffee shop.

You mix in value with or between your pitches so your open rate remains high. A lot of people make the mistake of watching their unsubscribes alone.

You gotta monitor your OPEN rate. That is crucial. It tells you if you’re getting or losing attention. This is an attention economy.

6. From emails, send ‘em to multiple conversion processes.

In other words, you send an email offering a free video. The free video gives a pitch for something.

Or you send ‘em to a podcast.

Or you send ‘em to a free report or a sales letter.

Or you send ‘em to live streaming video.

Now, WHAT do you sell?

Initially, sell affiliate products. Make Camtasia or CamStudio videos that do your pitches.

Or write pre-sell pages that give a little pitch before you send people to an affiliate link. You know, warm ‘em up first!

WHICH part of this process is the HARDEST for you? Which part do you need the most help with?

Hit me back on my blog by clicking the COMMENTS at the end of this article.

Do you buy into this process? Or are you following some other system? If so, what?

Is this so “old hat” you don’t wanna hear about it anymore?

Or are you STUCK somewhere?

7. Make an irresistible offer.

So now the person has gone to your audio, video, blog, or sales letter.

Now you gotta sell ‘em something.

With first time prospects, give ‘em your best offer.
Probably something cheap or free. Although it depends on your market.

One of my friends offers a free book then sells a $4,000 software package. When 3% of the people buy it from the book, the numbers add up.

Others offer a $1 membership offer that goes into recurring billing after 14 days. That is, after 14 days they’re charged for the membership site unless they cancel.

And they get charged every month. When you have 2900 people getting charged $37 a month, it adds up.

7. Follow the 3 cardinal laws

a. Protect your business number one

Follow the law. Pay your taxes.

b. Maintain the goodwill of your list

Don’t milk your cow so much he/she dries up. Offer value to your list. Keep that relationship up.

c. Make sales

What you can do TODAY: You start with step one. Go find out where you target market hangs out at. What blogs do they read? What ezines do they subscribe to? What web sites do they go to? What forums do they frequent?

Then, when you find that out, look for banner ads you can buy, blogs you can run ads on, text links you can buy, pages with Google ads on ‘em.

And start looking for the folks who have the lists.

Marlon Sanders

P.S. Here’s what I want you to do: Go to my blog and tell me if there’s a step here that hangs you up or you have problems with. Be as specific as possible:

Just hit COMMENTS below this post.

Is this all old hat to you? Too common sense? Do you want something newer or sexier? Or what’s STOPPING you from following this formula today?

Here’s the thing: My new Promo Dashboard will walk you through most of these steps and much more.

But I NEED to hear from YOU because I need to know WHAT to put in it to help YOU the most. I need to hear your feedback on my blog.

———————————————————–
Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Info Product Dashboard.”
If you want to create your own info products, go to:
http://www.productdashboard.com

Note by me: Do check out his Info Dashboard. The motivational video alone is worth clicking on that link — it changed my life!

The second day of Pat O’Bryan’s UnSeminar5 is almost over, but not just yet. At the moment, there’s the blues show featuring Pat O’Bryan and Joe Vitale and others. They rock, and I’ll be back there in just a minute.

But I just wanted to tell you about a little embarrassing snafu. Turns out, some of the opt-in forms here seemed to miss the “submit” button, and I hadn’t noticed (just wondered why so few people signed up!).

I fixed it now, though, and unless this blog messes with my forms, it’ll stay fixed too!

So if you want to get on my Internet Marketing Step-By-Step Newsletter, here’s where you can sign up:

And yes, I will respect your privacy completely. Your name and email address will be neither sold nor otherwise shared. And of course, you can unsubscribe at any time with the handy-dandy unsubscribe button at the bottom of every single email.

Now back to the show!

Elisabeth

I’m here at UnSeminar5 where I learn to build and expand my portable empire

You know about Pat O’Bryan’s “Portable Empire,” don’t you? One of my favorite books (sitting right next to Tim Ferriss’ “4-Hour Work Week” and, like that book, inspired me to take my economic fortune into my own hands.

Arrived late last night (lots of delays due to assorted “weather” across the country). In fact, I almost didn’t come because I was so worried about the hurricane (I’m a chicken!), but there wasn’t any hurricane there when I got here!

Just had breakfast in the very nice Drury Hotel in San Antonio and getting ready for the first session. Can hardly wait for it to start. Will report back!

P.S.: Why the long delay between the last post and this one? Relapse of the flu! Details on my self-help blog.

What happens if an English professor discovers internet marketing? Or at least THIS English professor, technically a linguistics professor teaching in an English department at the time?

Well… I was fascinated! For two reasons:

First, I’ve been studying persuasion and how people get other people to do things with words (or at least try to), and so when I found myself reading marketing emails and salesletters and couldn’t get my credit card out of my wallet fast enough, I started wondering….

How in the world do they do that? I have great respect for masters of persuasive writing, and so I started studying the techniques they used to make me feel like I simply HAD to have whatever they were offering, and have it NOW. And not only that. Many of the dozens of people who fill my inbox on a daily basis are starting to feel like they’re my friends. This is copywriting artistry!

After a while, my scholarly interest turned quite practical. Hey, I wanna do that too! And once I started earning my first affiliate commissions, I was hooked.

And as I started learning about internet marketing and saw what worked, cleaned up my mistakes, and gleefully put up blogs and websites (this from someone who used to hate computers not so long ago), I had yet another idea…

See, I spent years teaching grammar, and had made it my mission to explain it in a way that makes sense. I liked to empower people to discover how grammar works from the inside out. So what does that have to do with the internet?

Plenty! Learning about the internet can be daunting, and it involves quite a bit of complicated technical stuff. Like grammar And I’m good taking complex technical information and breaking it down into small, digestible parts. Sooooooo…

Why not teach what I’ve learned (and keep learning)? And thus was born my new email course on internet marketing step-by-step. At the moment, it’s in its beta version and you can actually get in for FREE. Eventually, I’ll turn it into a paid fixed term membership, where people will have to pay to get their once or twice weekly lessons.

So this is what’s in it for you: If want to make money online and you’re new to internet marketing, or if you’ve tried your hand at it for a while but haven’t gotten results, or you’re just really confused and/or frustrated, this is your chance to learn for FREE from someone who has plenty of experience explaining complicated stuff in a nice and friendly step-by-step format.

How can you get in on this? Simple! Just fill in your first name and email address in the box below and make sure you look in your inbox for the confirmation email. Open that and click on the confirmation link. And that’s it!

And of course, your email address will NEVER be traded, sold, or otherwise given away. I hate spam as much as you do, and I’ll safeguard your privacy. And if you ever want to unsubscribe… every single email will come with a handy-dandy unsubscribe button. Naturally, I hope you’ll never want to use it

There’s even a free ebook for you once you’ve confirmed your subscription.

See you on the other side…

Elisabeth

Yup. That “secret” technique is not something you hear a lot about in all those “how to build a list” books and workshops. Why? Maybe they want to keep it all to themselves?

When I first found out about it, I was a bit concerned. Was this legit? Would it work? It sounded almost too good to be true. I mean, the last thing you want is a spam complaint, so it’s generally a good idea to be very careful about services that promise tons of subscribers overnight, especially if those subscribers come in the millions for just a few bucks. That’s a spam disaster waiting to happen.

But in this particular case, the answer to both of the above questions turned out to be a resounding YES! It is possible to accelerate your list building process and there are legitimate ways to do so. And yes, those legitimate ways are considerably more expensive, but, well, you won’t have to worry. And I found a service that meets both criteria and works really well.

I tried it, and now I’m a convert and my lists (note the plural!) are growing at the sort of brisk clip I had been hoping for all along.

Is it free? No. Is it expensive? Not very, especially not when you think of building your list as an investment and consider what it will help you earn over time…

Okay what the heck am I talking about? I’m talking about an organization, owned and run by a major authority in list building, where you can advertise your newsletter and people will sign up for it. Yes, really. They will. It’s a process called co-registration. And it’s totally legit.

Every day you’ve had sign-ups, they’ll send you a file with your new subscribers and you then add them to your autoresponder service.

And there’s the rub… Aweber, the most-used autoresponder service won’t allow what they call “purchased leads.” Technically, these leads are indeed purchased insofar as that you pay for them, but what you really purchase is the advertising and the logistic arrangement of having them gather up the leads, making them confirm their subscription and then passing them on to you. That’s very different from those other offers floating about on the internet (you know, the millions of email addresses for ten bucks kinds of offers).

So where CAN you import those links? Fortunately, my favorite shoppingcart system does allow you to import them. And yes, they’ll make them confirm AGAIN and only about a third or so of them will do so, so you’ll lose a few.

But hey, those people probably would have unsubscribed sooner or later anyway and probably wouldn’t have ever bought anything. So it’s not THAT big a loss. And on the bright side, that extra layer of protection will protect YOU — from spam complaints — so I’m not complaining.

How much does this cost then? Thirty-seven cents a lead, counting those they send you by email. Eventually, every lead I’m getting out of that co-registration system (i.e., every lead that actually confirms again and makes it onto my personal list) costs me about a dollar, maybe a little more.

And with expert opinion being that every subscriber on your list eventually averages you a buck a month in income (and potentially considerably more if you treat your subscribers well, which includes providing them with quality information and building a relationship with them), investing in leads through a co-reg service is such a no-brainer I can’t believe it took me so long to finally figure this out.

So that’s the secret. Obviously, I’m using the other list-building strategies too — I publish articles, and post on forums, and yes, I’m getting subscribers that way too, but co-reg just works like a charm and so much more quickly.

And that is important because I’m going to start launching my first teleseminar very soon (stay tuned), and I do want some people to show up!

So if you too want to turbo-charge your list, check out http://www.turbo-list.com, and if you need a shoppingcart system to go with it, get a FREE 1-month trial at the best integrated shoppingcart system around, which also happens to be the one that allows you to import your shiny new subscribers.

Happy list building!

I’m really excited! I have just started a NEW newsletter, which is really an extended e-course. And it’s FREE! For now anyway

Clarification: If you sign up now, it will be free for you as long as you stay subscribed! But eventually, I may start charging it by making it into a paid e-course. But as I said, if you get in before I made that change, you’ll get all the info for free.

Why? Oh, out of the goodness of my heart of course. Seriously, I love teaching stuff I’m excited about, and so if you enjoy it and find it useful, that’ll be my reward.

It’s also new, so any feedback you might have will be helpful to me and I’ll incorporate your suggestions into future issues and into the future paid version. In fact, occasionally, I’ll send you a quick survey (just a question or two) and that’ll help me to make it relevant to you.

What is it? It’s a course where I will walk you step by step through the process of how to build your own online business and make money on the internet. For real! No tricks!

Another clarification: This is for you if you’re NEW to the internet. It’s easy, friendly, and technical stuff explained nicely and clearly and in terms as untechnical as I can possibly make them.

You’ll even get a FREE ebook if you sign up:

Rob Toth’s “Dear Employee: Your Job Sucks!”

I love that book! It’s VERY inspiring!

So where can you sign up for THIS particular list:

For now, right here:

And just in case you wondered: I will not share your name and email address with ANYONE. I hate spam as much as you do. All you’ll get from me is my lessons and occasional news and recommendations, and they’ll appear about twice a week.

Many of them come with a little action step. And there will be the occasional freebie too!

If you decide you don’t like it, you can easily unsubscribe. Just click on the handy unsubscribe link that each and every newsletter comes with.

But of course I hope you will absolutely LOVE my newsletter/ecourse and will send all your friends!

So please check it out.

Thanks a bunch, and have a GREAT day!

Can you really make money online easily and effectively?

If you’re like me, the gurus have buried you under serious information overload. You can’t see the forest for the trees. And every week, there’s another expensive next big thing that you absolutely MUST have to avoid impending obliteration in the wonderful world of internet marketing.

Well, I found something VERY different: The Rhodes Brothers and their Simple Cash Blog.

At first, I was afraid I’d be taken for yet another ride. But no….

The brothers, Matt and John, are no-nonsense, and CLEAR! And their site presents us with step-by-step walk-throughs. Plus examples freebies, and how-tos, etc.

What exactly?  Several step-by-step paths to a working, money-generating online business.  Ways to bring in traffic that doesn’t require big up-front investments.  Ways to set up websites that work without the services of a fancy web designer. Ways to set up membership programs without fancy programming.

It’s the antithesis of the kinds of programs being plugged in the million dollar launches that have been clogging up my inbox.  My only regret:  I wish I had found the Simple Cash Blog a whole lot sooner.

Want to know more?  Want in on it?  You can find it here:

My Favorite Cash-Generating Blog

If you too are tired of all the gimmicks, you owe it to yourself to at least take a look at John and Matt’s Simple Cash Blog:

My Favorite Cash-Generating Blog

I bet you’ll like it as much as I do

Elisabeth

Yes! Marlon’s Info Product Dashboard is still the best! And if you’ve held off on getting yours so far, NOW is the time to go for it.

What’s to lose? It’s a steal, especially considering all the great stuff that comes with it. PLUS, right now, there’s a REALLY special offer!  Read on to discover how YOU can get a FREE copy of my shiny new barely off the presses ebook on how to make yourself feel better fast!

You know, in order to create great products, you have to be in good emotional shape. By now you know that like draws like, so you’ll want your spirits be sky-high — so your new info products will find many buyers.

And my new book will help you with it. Why buy it when you can get it for free just by buying Marlon’s Info Product Dashboard and sending me the receipt?

Act now before I change my mind

Oh, and once you’ve bought Marlon’s Info Product Dashboard, just send me the receipt at “support AT myfavoritewebstuff.com” and within just a few days, you’ll have my ebook in addition to Marlon’s fabulous dashboard.

“This product is going to REVOLUTIONIZE the Internet!!!”

… Aren’t you sick of claims like that?

Lately we’ve been getting bombarded with products that are
being trumpeted as the ONE thing absolutely EVERY online
business owner MUST have if they want to make money on the
Internet.

I’m sorry, but I find these outrageous claims hard to swallow.

Especially when many of these products will ONLY work for
you if your business is ALREADY making money!

If you’re just starting out… or if your site isn’t getting
any visitors or sales… then BEWARE! Most of these products
won’t give you the answers you’re looking for.

(Plus, they’ll drain your bank account of $1000s!)

That’s why I was so excited to come across Derek Gehl’s free
instructional video, “Reality 101.”

You can check it out here:

Click here for access to the money-saving video!

In this 30-minute video, Derek explodes a lot of popular
marketing myths and tells you exactly what you REALLY need
to do to make great money online.

(Hint: It’s all about the “bare bones” fundamentals… Not
“flash-in-the-pan” trends that are here today, gone tomorrow!)

If you’re eager to throw back the curtain and discover the REAL
truth about what you need to do to ensure the success of your
online business, then I suggest you watch this video now:

Click here for access to the money-saving video!

Have a fabulous & prosperous day!

Elisabeth

P.S. If you’ve been searching for a “magic bullet” that
will help you set up a profitable online business literally
overnight, then you REALLY need to watch this video:

Click here for access to the money-saving video!