It wasn’t too long ago that very few industries and businesses had to actually listen to what their consumers had to say about their needs and desires. In more prosperous times it simply wasn’t necessary for retailers to play counselor or coach. But now, while consumers all over the world struggle with a worldwide recession they are becoming more and more frugal with their hard earned cash. In this kind of environment, the only way to fashion your marketing strategies is to listen carefully to the needs of your customers and attempt to fulfill them as best as possible.
Issues that consumers are facing in these days of recession are mainly reduced income, increased expenses and solutions that don’t meet their needs. Consumer demand generally consists of 3 components. Income level, personal preference and product price. Businesses cannot do much about the consumers falling income level, to some extent they can do something about the price but this obviously affects the business profitability, so surely the best way to influence the consumer demand is by addressing their personal preferences?
This is where online business can have an edge over traditional business. For example, it makes sense that a high street retailer that must carry an inventory would cut it’s product range in order to reduce stock held and cater to mass preferences. Online businesses tend to have very little in the way of inventory so by listening to their consumers they can offer solutions that can only be found online and raise the demand for their services.
Also, just because consumers have less to spend doesn’t necessarily mean that they will always take the cheapest option. Over an extended recession value will become a much more important criteria than price. Consumers are becoming more and more adept and choosing products that not only meet their personal preferences but that also stand the test of time. That’s what they want. We should listen to them.
Filed under Internet Marketing 
Performing search engine optimisation to rank your website in the search engines on certain keywords is a long and often expensive task. This is why it’s imperative that when you are finally ranked on the first page of google that those keywords are bringing in revenue for you, otherwise you have wasted a lot of time and effort for very little monetary return.
So how do you know which keywords are better to rank on than others? Or, more specifically, which keywords are going to have more commercial value to you if you rank well on them? Well, I recently purchased an SEO and keyword research tool called Market Samurai that has loads of really cool features that most of the other tools out there don’t have. Take a look at the video below where it is explained how you can compare similar keywords to find which one has the most commercial value. Using this you can concentrate your efforts on ranking for keywords that will bring in more revenue to your website.
Filed under Keyword Research
Using JV giveaways to build your list has been going on in internet marketing for the last couple of years, but with the introduction of affordable giveaway scripts, there are a lot more giveaways to join as a contributor and hence a lot more opportunities to build your list.
The benefits of being a contributor are plain to see. You can join as a contributor for free and potentially add hundreds and even thousands of subscribers to your list in a short amount of time.
All you need to join as a contributor is your own gift to give away, an autoresponder, and some web hosting. Most of the time gifts will be one of the following:
~ Ebook
~ Report
~ Access to a membership site
~ Video training/course
~ Audio training/course
~ Software and scripts
You will also have to set up your squeeze page with your autoresponders opt-in form. When you submit your gift to the giveaway, it will be displayed in a members area along with a short description, if a member chooses to download your gift they are taken away from the site to your squeeze page where they opt-in to your list.
So how does the giveaway get all this traffic in such a short time? Well, the contributors are expected to help promote the giveaway. If they don’t promote, then their gift is removed. This is fine if you have a decent sized list already, unfortunately many of you probably won’t have but don’t worry there are still a couple of options.
1) You can upgrade your contributor account to a paid account. Now I would strongly recommend doing this if you have a small list or no list at all. You usually get a few other bonuses as well, like being able to add more gifts, being able to add offers and being able to directly download the other contributor gifts without handing over your email address. If you want to build your list quickly, this is by far the best option.
2) You can use a pay per click campaign to help promote the event. As most giveaways will tend to rank your gift depending on how much you promote the event, this can be a good way to bump your gift higher in the rankings to get more exposure. After I had got a few hundred people on my list to promote events to, I used this method if my promotion needed ‘topping up’.
If you have your own gift or product already, then you probably have a squeeze page in place and I dont want to go in to great detail here on how to set up squeeze pages and autoresponders.
If you do not have a gift to give away then for a few dollars you can buy a PLR product that you can call your own and use as a gift. I’ll give you details of where you can find these below. The good thing about these is that you are usually provided with a squeeze page too, so as long as you know how to edit a few html pages and ftp to your web space, you can’t go wrong.
So, here are the steps you need to take to start building your list fast:
1) You may want to buy a separate domain for your gift squeeze page, or use an existing one.
2) Get yourself some Web Hosting
3) Sign up for an Autoresponder Account
4) Find a PLR Product to use as your gift. (Remember to check the license to make sure you can give it away).
5) Add your autoresponder webform code to your squeeze page.
6) Upload your squeeze page to your web space.
7) Use this comprehensive list of JV giveaways and sign up as a contributor to as many as you can.
Add your gift or gifts.
9) Promote the event.
I also recommend getting a copy of Jason James Giveaway Riches which includes some invaluable information on how to get the most out of giveaways and how you can easily run your own giveaway to generate thousands or even tens of thousands of leads for your list!
If you’d like any further help on this subject either leave a comment or contact me from this page.
Filed under List Building
Well, I feel a little sheepish that I haven’t joined a JV giveaway as a contributor up until this week. For the last 2 months I’ve been concentrating on generating traffic for my blog with link building strategies and other search engine optimisation techniques and hadn’t really paid much attention to the JV giveaways. I figured there wasn’t much point in joining them without my own ebook to give away.
I really wish I had started contributing to these JV giveaways during those 2 months. It was easy enough to find some decent quality products with PLR rights to give away, so you don’t even really need a product that you’ve created yourself. Although you will build your list much quicker with your own product. I joined 3 giveaways in the last 3 days and have already got an extra 100+ people on my list!
If you want to read a little more about JV giveaways and how they work then click here. There is also a list of giveaways you can join yourself. The reason I was prompted in to joining giveaways this week is due to a project that I’m working on with 3 other Alex Jeffreys students, but more about that in a future post.
Filed under List Building
I’ve had good results from using forum signatures to drive traffic to both my blog and squeeze page so I thought I’d share how I set up my campaign.
1. Try to make your signature links arouse curiosity. Simply stating ‘Click here to read my blog’ won’t get you many clicks. Rather hint at what they may find if they click the link.
2. Avoid pimping yourself in your posts. Add value to the forum first and try to make friends and build relationships with other members. Once people are listening to what you are saying, you won’t have to promote your links, people will want to find out more about you anyway.
3. If you start a new thread, try to make the title unique and stand out. Again, try to arouse curiosity. If your title is similar to many others then people are unlikelyy to even look at it.
4. The content of your thread should make the readers think. Try to write to provoke other members to react to your points, debate them even. The more thought provoking a thread, the more replies you will get.
5. When your thread gets a reply, answer that person in the thread to keep the thread alive and growing. And to maximise the exposure of your signature. But make sure you are posting content, just posting ‘thanks for your reply’ or ‘thats a good point’ is no good to anyone and people will stop following your thread.
6. Do the same as above on threads by other people that you have subscribed to.
7. Subscribe to all the threads that you create and post in, so that you can maintain the flow of conversation and keep the thread going.
8. Do not sign up multiple accounts and attempt to have a conversatin with yourself to promote your sites.
They’re all pretty obvious when you think about them, but I hope you found these tips on my signature campaign useful.
Filed under Traffic Generation