Here’s a quick video I created for you that shows how to use Affiliate Marketing Programs to build traffic and build Opt-In Lists:

As you know, the ability to build traffic and build opt-in lists at will is the secret to successful marketing online, so don’t miss ANY opportunity that’s this powerful – be sure to get your own affiliate marketing program up and running as soon as you put your first product online. If you don’t have a professional affiliate program yet, you can get one cheap – it’s part of the package from Hosting4Marketers.com and I can highly recommend it, since I’ve been using their affiliate marketing program for years now for all of our products!

For more ideas on how to build targeted traffic and opt-in lists you can download my free report, or learn more about it in depth as part of my PowerStart Marketing Internet Marketing Coaching Program.

But no matter what methods you prefer to learn from, be sure to learn everything you can about how to build traffic and how to build opt-in lists as quickly as you can – the success of your Internet marketing, affiliate marketing or any other online work-at-home business depends on it!

Technorati Tags: build traffic, build targeted traffic, build opt-in lists, list building, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, marketing online, PowerStart Marketing, PowerStart 2010, marketing mentor Doug Champigny, coaching, mentoring

 

4-Week Ultra-High-Intensity Internet Marketing Coaching Review

Earlier this month PowerStart Marketing launched their PowerStart 2010 Internet marketing coaching program amid great fanfare to great response. Kicked off by Internet Marketing mentor Doug Champigny in his speech at the Internet Super Stars Conference in Orlando, Florida, PowerStart 2010 is an ultra-high-intensity 4-week Internet marketing coaching program that puts new and seasoned marketers alike through the necessary steps to create & promote an entirely new online business in just four weeks.

This swiftly-paced course has “trimmed the fat to the bone” according to Champigny, and “focuses the students just on those strategies and techniques that lead to immediate progress in their online work-at-home business.” Coaching students start with keyword research and then install a blog on a keyword-driven domain, write and post several articles to their blog, create a report to use as an incentive to entice optins & place it online behind a squeeze page, process a master resell rights product and put it online, convert a PLR product to their own unique offering and put it online, create articles, podcasts and videos and get them distributed through the various directories to drive traffic to their blog, products and squeeze pages and then learn the ins-and-outs of affiliate marketing in today’s economic climate.

“This course isn’t for the casual marketer – or the feint-of-heart” Champigny chuckles. “It’s for people who seriously want to be successful Internet marketers, most of whom have been trying for some time and have already spent untold thousands trying to make it on their own. PowerStart 2010 is the ultimate answer to people tired of being jerked around by those with a big image and no substance to back it up – our results will speak for themselves!”

And already positive feedback is pouring in from those enrolled in the program… Lawrence J. Parsley is one of those people who has spent a few years and tens of thousands of dollars in his quest to become a successful Internet marketer, and here’s his video review of the PowerStart 2010 coaching course so far…

 

 

For more information on the PowerStart 2010 program, see the Internet marketing coaching program site at http://www.PowerStart2010.com – new classes start the first Monday night of each month.

Technorati Tags: coaching, Internet marketing coaching, marketing coaching, marketing mentoring, PowerStart 2010, Doug Champigny, video reviews

 

Internet marketing success requires two main skills more than any other – the ability to drive targeted traffic to your sites, blogs, squeeze pages and affiliate links and the knowledge of how to build huge opt-in lists fast.

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These two skills are intertwined, because list-building requires you to drive traffic to your squeeze pages and opt-in forms, and your list, in turn, is the fastest way to direct traffic to your links. As such, it’s always best to deal with both subjects at once at you strategize your Internet marketing attack.

Lets look at 7 powerful ways to drive targeted traffic and build opt-in lists…

• Article Marketing – Writing and submitting articles is one of the easiest free ways to start driving targeted prospects to your links – especially when that link leads to a squeeze page with a free PDF, audio or video with more information on the same topic. Stay within the guidelines of the article directory, provide great content and offer more information on the topic through the link in your Author’s Resource Box.
• Using Blogs – The first of the interactive web 2.0 technologies to gain wide appeal was blogging – and it remains one of the most powerful methods to drive traffic and build lists. Be sure your opt-in form appears on the blog itself, and use the articles you have at the directories as the bulk of your blog content. Be sure to use the appropriate blog plugins to maximize your SEO benefits, and to hook you up to traffic sources like Twitter, MyBlogLog and Technorati.
• Using Podcasts – A podcast is simply information presented in audio format, usually as an MP3. Since you already have those articles and your blog, now record an audio version of them and place them with the article on your blog using an audio plugin. Be sure to mention your URL in each recording, and check to see if the plugin you’re using is building a separate RSS feed for your podcasts – if it isn’t, create one manually and submit the RSS feed to iTunes, PodcastReady, Podcast Alley, etc. These directories are accessed by millions of users, and they don’t index articles or blogs, so audio is the only way to get your message to their users.
• Video Marketing – Like podcasts, videos are just one more media to present your information in. Whether you use live-action video or create screen-capture videos, you can repurpose the same info you have for your articles and podcasts by making them into videos and getting them out to YouTube, Viddler, etc. Make sure you have the link to your site within the video along with a call to action, and spell out your link in the description area that accompanies each video.
• Using Free Downloads – One of the most powerful ways to get people onto your opt-in list is through a squeeze page – a page offering an incentive to those who sign up. That incentive is usually a PDF report, an audio or a video that contain helpful information on the topic at hand – the topic targeted by your marketing efforts. And you already have the raw materials for the gift – your articles, podcasts and/or videos. Once again, compile the articles, audios or videos into a single download and build a page giving them away to those who opt to join your list. Use the social media sites like Twitter & Facebook, your blog, etc. to drive traffic to that gift and build your list.
• Using Teleseminars and Interviews – Are you an expert in your niche? If so, set up a teleseminar and spend an hour giving out valuable information to your audience. Require a signup to your list for entry to the call, and be sure to include a Q&A session at the end so people get the most from it. If you’re not an expert, arrange to interview someone who is and use that as your live call. Be sure to record the call either way, and offer the replay and/or download from a squeeze page for ongoing list-building from it. If a live teleseminar isn’t possible, do the interview by phone or Skype and record it, then offer the replay from the squeeze page. Another method is to grab an expert and ask a series of 5-10 questions, then break each question and answer down into a series of podcasts to use sequentially.
• Using Affiliate Programs – Do you have products of your own for sale online? If so, set up an affiliate program and spend some time each week recruiting new affiliates and joint venture partners to promote your products. Set up ‘affiliate funnels’ – automatic e-courses that go to the prospects your affiliates refer. The e-course should deliver strong content while pre-selling your product and be designed to lead the prospect to buy your product – and hopefully more than one. Be careful not to use affiliate links in your e-course, as you don’t want to overwrite the cookies for the referring affiliate. The better the e-course converts prospects to buyers the greater the affiliate commissions you’ll be paying out, and the harder your affiliates will be working to drive traffic to your squeeze page, thus making you more money and building your list that much faster.

These are the 7 most popular ways to drive traffic and build your lists, and you should be using and refining all seven on an ongoing basis to build your traffic, your lists and your branding all at once. The results mean more profits for you and an ever-expanding online business that can help you achieve your dream lifestyle!

About The Author…

 

Doug Champigny is a world-famous Internet marketing coach, mentor, speaker and the creator of the PowerStart Marketing 4-week Internet Marketing Crash Course. To learn more about Doug or to book him to speak at your next event, contact him through his blog at http://DougChampigny.com.

 

 

Technorati Tags: building traffic, opt-in lists, building lists, targeted traffic, increase targeted traffic, build email list, free targeted traffic

 

How To Succeed In Internet Marketing By Mastering Just Two Major Skills

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://dougchampigny.com All Rights Reserved.

How difficult is it to make money online with your own work-at-home Internet marketing or affiliate marketing business? While no one will dispute it takes time, money and laser-like focused action, the plethora of tools, strategies and advice being passed around the Internet makes that a very hard question for newer marketers to answer when they first start to research the possibilities.

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In truth, most successful online business owners can attribute the bulk of their success to two skills – building mailing lists and driving targeted traffic. Almost everything else you see is either refinements of one of these skills or tools to use to further one, or usually both, of these vital skills.

And this is true whether the person is competing directly in the Internet marketing field, the niche marketing areas or working strictly as an affiliate marketer promoting other people’s products. In fact they’re especially important in affiliate marketing, since the products, salespages and much of the promotional materials have already been provided by the merchant.

It’s important to recognize the symbiotic nature of this pair of activities too – you have to drive targeted traffic to your mailing lists’ opt-in forms, and your resultant list is often the fastest way to drive targeted traffic to your sites, blogs, salespages and affiliate links.

Set your pages with those opt-in forms, called ’squeeze pages’, up first, writing or buying a small report or video to use as an incentive to get people to join your list. Once those are in place, start driving targeted traffic to those pages via every means available – blog posts, podcasts, videos, Web 2.0 sites like WikiDot, Google knol, Squidoo and HubPages, submitting articles to the biggest directories, offering guest posts to blogs within your niche, blog commenting, social sites like Twitter and FaceBook and the whole realm of available promotional methods.

This trickle of traffic, if promoted correctly, will build to a stream, then to a torrent of signups for you, getting your list started. Once it’s around 1,000 or more subscribers, start doing some e-zine swaps (also called ad swaps) with other marketers within the niche. Put simply, you send out to your list offering them the other person’s enticement while they do the same for you.

Done right, and done consistently, this process will build both of these skills quickly, giving you control of the two biggest weapons in your Internet marketing arsenal – list-building and traffic generation. Once you have a firm handle on both, then you can consider everything else. But stay focused on just those two til you master them and you’ll be well on your way to your own successful Internet marketing business!

About The Author…

Doug Champigny is a world-famous Internet marketing coach, mentor & speaker and the creator of the PowerStart Marketing 4-week Internet Marketing Crash Course. To learn more about Doug or to book him to speak at your next event, contact him through his blog at http://DougChampigny.com.

 

 

Technorati Tags: list building, traffic generation, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, targeted traffic, ad swaps

 

Internet Marketing 4-Week Crash Course From PowerStart Marketing

© Doug Champigny, http://dougchampigny.com. All Rights Reserved.

Internet marketing is a great industry to be in – you have your own work-at-home business, you set your own schedule, plan your own promotions and make a really great income!

Well, that’s true if you successful at it, at least…

But most people dreaming about getting into the business don’t get to that point. For them, it’s a nasty struggle against unfamiliar terms and technology, conflicting advice from all different sources and a lack of visible results to keep them motivated. They buy resource after resource, pay for program after program, following promises that they can ‘get rich quick’ on the Internet… All of which leads them to give up on their dream of an online business, feeling used and abused and wondering if it’s all really a scam.

The truth is three-fold… One, most people aren’t geared to stay focused for long periods of time and don’t have the motivation to put in the time it takes to succeed when they’re still employed full-time outside the house. Two, most of us, myself included, need to see some sort of progress from our efforts or our motivation is on a downhill slope until eventually we abandon the current project.

Third, and possibly most important, there are a number of different paths to success in Internet marketing and listening to too many people just confuses the road ahead. Even when you weed out the copycat marketers and find those who are truly successful, you’ll find we all do things slightly differently.

The good news is that there’s a fairly simple solution for most people to start an online business – find a truly successful mentor and follow their advice exactly until you’ve reached a level of proficiency yourself. Once that lofty goal has been reached you’ll be able to chart your own path from there – you won’t get everything right, but with practice you should get more right than wrong and be on your way.

Introducing The PowerStart 2010 Internet Marketing Crash Course!

And it’s towards that end that I introduce my latest venture – PowerStart Marketing and the 4-Week Internet Marketing PowerStart course. You read that right – it’s a FOUR WEEK crash course in setting up your online business from scratch! No more wasting time, no more months of trying and failing to see any progress…

The format is an easy one – four weekly teleseminars where I’ll discuss what’s ahead for that week and field all your questions. Then I’ll give you a series of tasks to do that week – and I’ll include complete step-by-step videos to show you exactly how to do them! Yes, you’ll have to put in the time and effort to keep up, but you’ll know exactly what you need to do and how to do it.

And talk about moving forward and seeing visible results! The first week you’ll install your blog, configure it with the best plugins and hook it up to some of the Web 2.0 sites – then you’ll set up our autoresponders to handle both e-courses and an e-zine. Week Two you’ll get your first products online using MRR and PLR resources and hook them up to PayPal so you can take payments, Week three you’ll learn how to use articles, podcasts and videos to further your cause by driving in traffic, and in Week Four you’ll learn how to choose the right affiliate programs and then promote them successfully.

After the four weeks – just one short month – you can have your own online business started and running, have products online to sell, can be building your lists and starting to bring traffic to your site. Even more importantly, you’ll know how to do each part yourself, and how to repeat it whenever you like to attack a new market – or just use the skills to keep building the one operation – the choice is yours!

The first course starts Monday, Feb 1st and runs for four weeks – sign up for the PowerStart 2010 4-Week Internet Marketing Course now and have YOUR business online and on track by March 1st!

Technorati Tags: learn internet marketing, start internet marketing, starting a business online, internet marketing training, coaching, mentoring, starting an online business, work-at-home business

 

Shut Up, Buck Up, Buckle Down and Get On With It!

©2009 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

Yes, that’s my new mantra for going forward with our Internet marketing for 2010 – Shut Up, Buck Up, Buckle Down and Get On With It! Harsh maybe, but it fits the times…

I’m not any sort of licensed financial adviser, accountant or lawyer, so this isn’t a professional take on the economy. But after being in business for over 35 years, I feel I’ve learned to spot trends and many of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ plays in the economy. And it’s lead me to a nasty conclusion…

I’m starting to think that what we’re seeing at the moment ISN’T merely a recession – it’s the new reality. Think about it for a moment…

The Dow is back above 10k, the TSE is back over 11k; in many cases corporate profits are back where they were, and big financial companies now have their ownership in fewer hands – in short, the rich and the poor are back where they were, and power & money are concentrated in fewer hands now.

That leaves the middle class – leaves them in tatters. Companies have shed over 1 million jobs in North America – so their costs dropped more than their sales, leaving them in profit and a million people out of work. In January or February a Macleans Magazine poll showed 80% of Canadian respondents expected to be with the same company until retirement – don’t think this is what they meant though…

I don’t want to dwell on the negatives, though, so let’s just sum it all up – what we’ve really seen is the biggest transfer of wealth in recorded history, with over $750 BILLION in taxpayers’ money being shifted to the pockets of rich shareholders. And to my mind, that’s just too big a drain on the middle class for the economy to rebound in the near future, if at all.

And worse yet, the public spirit has been broken by it all, as evidenced by the legislation and taxes Canada & the US have pushed through with almost nary a peep out of the public…

But I digress… Whether you believe what I do or think it’s a recession we’ll bounce magically back from through brilliant government maneuvering or corporate generosity, no one can deny that the playing field has changed – and that some changes are warranted in the way we do business online. While I don’t think we’ve yet to hit the ‘Golden Age of Internet Marketing‘, I do think work-at-home professionals need to kick it up a few notches to get back to what they were earning a year ago, and even more if they want to achieve their dream lifestyle.

And that’s what lead me to decide it was time for me to ‘Shut Up, Buck Up, Buckle Down and Get On With It!’ Does this mean more time and effort is now required to make it online? In some cases, yes – Internet marketers who have been coasting for the last few years on their achievements 5 years ago will now be left behind if they don’t take action. Those who made their name just on one or two big JV launches might actually have to work now too…

Not all will be able to adjust quickly enough – and many who already made a fortune online will decide it’s time to retire or look for profits offline instead. Witness the number of ‘Gurus’ that have recently told their lists they’re now going to be pursuing other avenues – or have suddenly just disappeared. Or those you hadn’t heard from in months who now suddenly bombard you every time there’s a new launch.

But all is not bleak – the leaderboards are populated with a lot of new names these days, alongside a few of us who have already begun changing our style. They’ve come up through the ranks quickly this year, and what separates them most from the old guard is their focus on list-building. Yes, everyone talks list-building, but most have let it slip a lot in the last few years as their increased income made it less necessary to keep hustling so crazily. Not these new leaders – these guys & gals are ad swapping and pushing giveaways like mad to build their lists.

And therein lies one of the keys to protecting our income online – all things being equal, doubling the number of targeted prospects on your opt-in lists should double your sales. You may need more than double or less to maintain and build your income from your Internet marketing business, but you won’t find out unless you start building it full-speed again, like you were when you first started online.

So that’s one way to protect your income and grow your online business without needing to put in more hours and effort – do an audit on your current time usage, and switch the time you’re already using on less profitable efforts to using it to find creative ways to get more targeted prospects onto your lists and into your profit funnel… It takes no more effort to broadcast your e-zine to 20,000 than to 10,000 – and if you’re using a service like the autoresponders at Hosting4Marketers.com it doesn’t even cost any more.

A second way to put that under-productive time to better use is to test and tweak your salespages a la Marlon Sanders – test out 2 or 3 different headlines for a bit, then stick with the one that converts best, and use it with 2 or 3 different body styles – graphics vs no graphics, paragraphs vs bullet points, video vs no video, etc. Again, stick with the winner. Upping your conversion rate from .5% to 1% or from 2% to 4% may not sound like a big deal, but it doubles your sales and profits without any additional ongoing efforts!

A third way to boost your Internet marketing profits is to use that time to get more targeted traffic to your sites, salespages, blogs and affiliate links. If you are converting 1% of 500 visitors a day, your profits double when you convert 1% of 1,000 visitors a day, right? All that changed was how many targeted prospects landed on the page you wanted them to…

Sure, everyone claims to be great at driving traffic – right up til I ask them what SEO tweaks they’ve done in the last month, when they last wrote and submitted an article, how many podcasts they have in the iTunes directory or how many video hosting sites they have videos on…

Without even giving up all of our secrets, Willie Crawford and I spent over 3 hours teaching people 15 different ways to drive more targeted traffic for free – how many of them are YOU currently using? Think you’ve covered all the bases for driving traffic? Then when was the last time you did keyword research before writing your next blog post to be sure it would pull all it could?

There are a lot more ways you can double your results, but those three are the simplest and most likely the ones you already know but have slacked off on… Me? I intend to do all 3 and a lot more – but focus on one til it’s accomplished, then the next, then the next. The multiplier effect to doing all 3 will be more than enough to make it all worthwhile and keep our online business growing… The biggest accomplishment will be in automating the tasks so they continue to pull results while I go on to the next technique.

One final tip – get all the free education you can on every aspect of the business, use free resources marketers like Jeff Dedrick, Mike Filsaime and Lee McIntyre are offering, and get to every live Internet marketing event you can, both for the content and for the networking, which is often more immediately profitable than the sessions!

And if you want more direct help from me personally, introduce yourself to Teri & me at Mark Hendricks’ Internet Super Stars Conference in Orlando, Florida in January 2010… I’m both speaking and running a hands-on workshop at that event – my topic? PowerStart 2010! Think that fits?

Even if you can’t make the event, grab a free membership at Mark’s site and listen to the recorded interviews Mark did with each of the speakers – it’s like getting a mini-version of the event for free!

And please, re-tweet this post and leave your comments below – Thanks!

Technorati Tags: online success, running a business online, making money online, surviving the recession, PowerStart 2010, speaker Doug Champigny, Mark Hendricks, Jeff Dedrick, Mike Filsaime, Lee McIntyre, Marlon Sanders, marketing mentor Doug Champigny, Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, work at home

 

Let’s face it – unless you’re lucky enough to have a huge opt-in list or deep pockets for PPC or JV bonuses, chances are your Internet marketing and affiliate marketing have taken a real hit since the ‘recession’ hit online sales the last week of April.

You see signs of it everywhere in the biz today – Internet marketers suddenly selling everything and anything they can get their hands on for $1.98 or $2.95 (an unsustainable, knee-jerk reaction), gurus suddenly switching to bringing offline businesses online and the like…

Naturally, they couch the latter in glowing terms, but let’s be honest a minute – people who have been making millions online suddenly focusing on finding clients in the offline world to charge them $5,000 up front and maybe $500 a month to continue with the program. The ongoing SEO etc is outsourced, so they keep a portion of that, and some are touting it as the way of the future, right?

Here’s a point to ponder… How many of those offline businesses would it take to match the millions they were making? How much time would it take to find and convince enough offline businesses to use the service? Even if that were possible in this economy, once all the clients come aboard, how much time would be involved in setting up and coordinating the ongoing services? In servicing and reporting back to the clients each month?

Appears to me that like all the rest of us, they’re doing a lot more work, putting in a lot more time and making a lot less right now…

Another example that’s harder to spot until you reach a certain level is demonstrated by Jeff Dedrick’s Send Button Profits launch that’s on right now. I and many other of Jeff’s friends and JV partners starting promoting it right from the start of the pre-launch – and some of us have done very well with it, since it’s a truly great product/service/pricing combination…

When the actual launch started on Tuesday, at least 4 of the A-Level gurus sent their first promos on it to all their lists. Now understand, these are guys used to sweeping in on the launch and capturing first spot with an e-mail… Fact is, 24 hours later not one of those 4 was even in the top 20! Yet another view of the diminishing returns we’re all experiencing right now! (If you haven’t seen Send Button Profits yet, feel free to visit it through my affiliate link – as I write this I’m still Top-10 there and would really like to keep it that way. But do it for the great free & paid content, not just to help me!)

OK – so no big news there, right? Everyone’s talking about, and blaming, the recession…

But what if it’s NOT a recession, but turns out to be a CORRECTION in the economy?

After all, how many manufacturing jobs are left in North America right now? How much income have both the population and the Governments of Canada & the U.S. lost as a result? Same with the 1 million plus jobs that have disappeared since the start of the year…

And some financial types pointed out for years that the stock market had gone from about 7,000 to 11,000+ with no underlying increase in GDP – a bubble waiting to burst? And burst it did, as we all know, forcing the governments worldwide to pump billions or trillions collectively into propping up the economic cycle – funds taken from their depleted incomes and/or yet to be paid by future generations…

I’m no trained economist, not even a financial expert – but maybe, just maybe, this isn’t a recession but instead a new reality… What then?

Internet marketers and affiliates who cling to the hope of a quick return to better times will be washed out of the business, realizing too late the changes they need to make… And the effects will be most dramatic at the top levels, where big dogs have heavy overheads from technological services, staff wages, outsourcing costs, etc.

Marketers just starting out will find it harder to get a true foothold, but won’t be as negatively impacted as they have yet to get to a level where they depend on their online income to survive. Mid-level marketers will probably be divided into two groups – those who acknowledge the truth early and take steps to continue their growth, and those who don’t and slide downhill til they have to find employment offline once more.

Survival and prosperity would still be possible in the Internet marketing industry and for work-at-home affiliate marketing businesses – but it will most likely take two things, both antithetical to most marketer’s personalities:

Financial Prudence and Hard Work!

The first is proved by a simple concept – if you have less sales revenue or affiliate commission coming in, your spending has to reflect that too. Only governments can seemingly continue spending more and more while revenues drop – and even they eventually have to face the music.
Take a long hard look at your monthly commitments and keep only those that directly benefit you and your business and contribute directly to your bottom line.

Don’t slash your spending recklessly – that can kill a business just as much as overspending can. But be sure you’re not still paying for resources you don’t use anymore, or for perks that were more appropriate when times were good. This is the first global downturn the Internet marketing industry has faced, and some of what we all considered benefits that go hand-in-glove with our online businesses will need to be forsaken – and it’ll sting even more at first since we’d never envisioned giving up any part of our elevated lifestyles!

‘Work Smarter – Not Harder!’ has been a rallying cry in our industry and many others for years – but maybe now it’s time to alter that to ‘Work Smarter AND Harder!’ This is where I’ll lose some of the people reading this post – those who were attracted to the biz by nonsense like promises of a 4-hour work-week or get-rich-quick promises made by unethical promoters. (Notice I said promoters, not marketers – no professional marketer would make claims so easily disproved or so corrosive to their long-term success.)

It’s not as bad as it sounds, though – it’s a matter of keeping up to date with what’s working best RIGHT NOW, increasing your reach through building a bigger opt-in list and doing more to generate targeted traffic, only paying for ghostwriting and outsourcing when it will increase your net profits in short order, and more effort put into networking for joint ventures and a larger mastermind pool to draw inspiration and ideas from.

To use Jeff’s launch as an example once more, 3 of the Top 5 positions in the JV contest are held by TEAMS of 2 or more marketers, each of whom might have been at that level on their own before everything changed – Smart marketers who are already accepting the new reality and taking action to minimize the effects it has on their businesses!

By keeping your overhead as low as prudently possible while still allowing you to grow and increasing both the volume and effectiveness of your efforts, you should still be able to build a solid & sustainable Internet marketing business and do very well with it – both individually and collectively in conjunction with those you partner with.

And if the economy DOES turn around and reach those lofty levels again?

With a low overhead, growth strategies in place and your increased output and effectiveness, the potential for profits will be higher than ever before! Avoid the most common trap – don’t increase general overhead just because you can, let the same diligence govern your spending as during this time. And don’t ease up in your personal activity level or networking – during good times they represent not mere survival but the foundation of more rapid rises in status and income!

Yes, you can spend more as you make more (within reason) – just make it purchases covered by existing funds, not debt that will add to your overhead again! Couple that with avoiding all but necessary long-term contracts and you’ll keep your overhead low – protecting you better from the next hiccup in the economic cycle…

Now don’t misunderstand here – I’m no legally-licensed legal, financial or business expert and the above cannot be construed as professional advice, so please accept it as it’s meant: Observations from a friend and mentor who’s been online full-time since the 1990’s and the conclusions I’ve personally drawn from my experience and observations. And, I hope, of some help to you both in surviving the current state of the economy and WHATEVER the future holds for the industry!

To You continued and ever-increasing success,

Doug Champigny,
Internet marketer, super-affiliate, mentor & speaker.
http://DougChampigny.com

Technorati Tags: Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, work-at-home marketing, succeeding online, online success, economy, recession, economic downturn, economic rebound, business strategies

 

Position Your Internet Marketing Biz For The Economic Recovery

©2009 Doug Champigny, http://DougChampigny.com. All Rights Reserved.

Here’s some Internet marketing honesty you won’t see many places: right now online marketing sucks. Oh, it still beats pretty much every other form of work-at-home business, but the numbers are way off compared to a year ago.

If you’re an old pro at Internet marketing I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but as an industry we seem to be afraid of telling newbies that things aren’t all champagne and roses at the moment. The truth is, even with sales down so badly as a result of the recession, there are still plenty of 6, 7 and 8 figure marketers online – we’re just not making AS MUCH as we were until the recession hit.

While the worldwide scope of Internet marketing protects us from most localized downturns, a global recession HAS to impact us, and every big marketer I’ve talked to agrees sales have been off 50% or more since the last week of April, compared to earlier this year or last year. But nobody’s talking about it publicly, and it’s become the ‘elephant in the room’ that no one can ignore.

You can see evidence of it all over the online world – in fact, to a big extent it’s separated the order-takers from the marketers. The order-takers – those without a marketing background – are trying to compensate by dropping their prices to $1 and $2.95 to try and get more people to buy. This creates a negative spiral – they’re still not getting enough total income to survive, and have to be constantly rushing new products (mostly resell rights products) to the market. You see them sending out a new product every third day now…

Don’t misunderstand – these are people that were doing well before the downturn hit. It’s just that they come from all walks of life before coming online, and don’t have experience marketing through a recession. Most of this group got by entirely on resell rights and private label rights products, and don’t have their own materials to throw into the pot.

The true marketers, on the other hand, haven’t dropped prices, but instead have added value to both their sales process and their products. From releasing great training videos to offering free e-books, they’ve upped the ante and moved the ‘free line’ to pay it forward by offering helpful content BEFORE the visitor even sees a salespage. Then they’ve added more content to their product or included bonuses to beef up the value while holding the price line.

All of that hasn’t protected them from the recession, but at least it allows them to make as much as possible during this period and maintains the perceived value of their products. And it’s a lot less work than preparing a different product every 2 or 3 days…

Mind you, the smartest ones are putting in extra effort now too – looking for marketing tactics they haven’t yet incorporated into their strategies, such as podcasts, videos, press releases, etc. When Willie Crawford and I recorded the Top Traffic Tips we highlighted 15 different ways to promote your site and products, and few of us use all 15 regularly. But a little extra time now to develop additional targeted traffic streams can pay off both instantly and down the road.

So, with all of that, how can you both protect your current market share and best position yourself for the recovery?

First up, accept that you’re either going to be working smarter AND harder/longer for the next while or you’re going to see lowered profits til things turn around. Either is entirely acceptable – your financial needs and time available should be your deciding factors.

Secondly, protect your price points by adding value rather than dropping prices – you don’t want to get stuck in the ‘discounters’ league’ and have to fight your way back up from there when things turn around. Far too many people have a perceived value of your information based on what it sells for rather than it’s content, so always keep your branding and reputation in mind.

Thirdly, pay it forward. You’re not helping people by cutting your prices if it means they pay less attention to your product – instead, be sure you’re regularly giving them powerful free information they can use right away to help them in their online business. This can be in your e-zine, on your blog, in podcasts or videos, in reports and e-books, on teleseminars & webinars or any combination of methods.
While loyalty and gratitude are rare commodities online, people’s own self-interest keeps them paying attention to those who help them most.

Fourth, strategize your long-term goals. Once you’ve defined what you want your long-term future to be online, map out your path from here to there and work at positioning yourself as best you can to be on track when things pick up again.

We’ve all had the conversation about what we’d do if we won the lottery – about how we’d use the money. Yet most entrepreneurs, online or offline, have put less thought into where they want to go with their business. Granted, often it’s because they’re too busy just trying to make ends meet to devote much time to long-term planning. But there’s no reason those same efforts can’t be moving you in the right direction!

Fifth (and I can’t stress this enough!) Keep building your opt-in lists full time! Whether times are good or bad, the number of targeted, interested people you can reach at the push of a button will be a major factor in determining your success online. Tie some of that free content we discussed in the third point into your list-building strategies, use some of your reports with squeeze pages for ad swaps, etc.

Sixth, use all the free resources currently available to learn everything you can about all aspects of the biz, but don’t be afraid to spend money getting the services and information you need. Just watch out for old, outdated info, because too much of it is being rehashed and recirculated right now as people scramble to find anything they can to throw online.

To sum it all up, you’re not alone – we’re all feeling the pain of the current economic conditions. But it will turn around, and all indicators are that that will happen in the near future. Rather than be a victim of it, hold on though it and position yourself for the best path after times improve. Like all tests the universe throws at us, perseverance and planning will lead to a better position once the test is over & we’ve passed again…

The golden age of Internet Marketing hasn’t even begun yet – there are more people still to come online than there are people already using the Web. Keep plugging away, monitor your efforts and results to be sure you’re on the right path for YOU, and keep your eyes on the better times ahead for Internet marketing – see you at the top!

To Your Work-At-Home Success In Internet Marketing…

Doug Champigny.

PS – If you’re also doing affiliate marketing online, be sure to follow the ‘POWER OF FREE’ series I’ve begun on my Captain Affiliate Affiliate Marketing Training blog.

[tags]Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, online marketing, work-at-home, work-at-home success, business strategies, online business strategies, home business advice, recession, economy[tags]

 

Affiliate Jump CPA Network Has Launched

©2009 Doug Champigny, All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Mike Filsaime’s Affiliate Jump CPA Network has launched with hundreds of new members joing Affiliate Jump the first day – and probably thousands more to come over this first week of it’s operation. CPA, also known as cost-per-action or cost-per-cost-per-aquisition, is taking on a new meaning for affiliate marketing – commissions per action.

There’s not a lot of buzz around the affiliate marketing community to date regarding CPA networks – except at the highest levels. Unlike many affiliate programs that let a user sign up and start promoting immediately, these networks must pre-approve you and your site before admitting you to their program, and it’s been suggested that as many as 90% of all applicants are turned down routinely.

The reason for this is that CPA is used mainly by large national or international corporate advertisers, the kind of advertiseers who often place more emphasis on branding and image than they do on measurable results. As such, the networks have to be very picky about the type of site the ads will be run on – and most affiliate’s sites don’t come anywhere near the grade in terms of high-end corporate design.

I’m not knocking affiliate sites here – in fact, for true marketing purposes, affiliate and direct-marketing websites outperform corporate 10-1 every day of the week in terms of bottom-line results. If you know our background, you know Teri & I migrated our offline advetising agency online in 1996-97, and won numerous design awards for the corporate websites we built for our clients over the next 5 years, so I know whereof I speak when discussing the variances betwen the two.

Until now, only the very top super-affiliates could afford to outsource design that qualified for most CPA programs. So what’s changed to make this a potentially lucrative field for affiliate marketers? The launch of Mike Filsaime’s Affiliate Jump service!

Video: What is Affiliate Jump?

Mike Filsaime’s Affiliate Jump is a CPA network to help those in affiliate marketing boost their onlie income – big time! Add Cost Per Action to your affiliate marketing revenue streams today with Affiliate Jump!

So just how does the new resource open the doors to regular affiliates? First, members of Affiliate Jump are pre-approved automatically, so no more waiting and waiting just to be rejected. Secondly, it takes about 15 seconds to create a webpage with 1, 2 or 3 CPA offers on it using the apps built into the members area. And since the ads are pre-approved, members are ready to go just minutes after signing up.

This isn’t some get rich quick scheme though… Yes, your offers are displayed on your own custom page almost instantly – but just like any other website, it’s still up to the affiliate to send targeted traffic to it. And while every page you create there has an opt-in form, the only e-mails the prospect receives is a follow-up series for the products in the system – you have no access to the list to send other offers. This is probably a good thing in this case, since it stops anyone from using the system for spamming – which might get the whole system banned from many CPA offers.

But because of those limitations, there are 2 other resources you might want to use with the Affiliate Jump website. The first is to download, read & listen along with Top Traffic Tips, the 3+ hour trainging seminar I ran with Willie Crawford and me teaching 15 different ways to drive traffic to all your sites, not just your Affiliate Jump CPA pages. Simply put, you will not be successful online unless you know how to drive targeted traffic at will.

The other resource is a nifty little software program that lets you put YOUR signup box on top of every site you send affiliate traffic to. You use the custom coding the product gives you and it draws in the page you want to send them to, but lightboxes your opt-in form on top of it. People either subscribe or they don’t – but either way when they close your form they see the target page you sent them to appear. Power List Pro is a powerful affiliate tool, and like most of those we sell we use it regularly ourselves – I suggest you check out the page to see what all it can do.

But most importantly, check out the Affiliate Jump CPA Network today – if you know how to drive traffic and are willing to put in the effort, this could be a very lucrative new resource to add to your affiliate marketing arsenal. After all, we can all use another few profit streams, right?

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Jump, Affiliate Jump videos, Affiliate Jump CPA Network, affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing resources, affiliate marketing training videos, affiliate marketing tools, Mike Filsaime, Mike Filsaime launches, new launches

 

The 6-Step Advanced Info Product Creation Formula

©2009 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

For Internet marketing and some affiliate marketing purposes alike, creating your own info products is a must. Internet marketers need their own products to brand themselves and aid their climb to expert status, affiliate marketers need products to use as ‘ethical bribes’ to get people to join their opt-in lists – and by using their own info products they get the added benefit of being able to distribute their affiliate links to more people through the content of the products they create.

This post will deal with the formula for those already adept at creating info products; for those just getting into the area I suggest you start with converting existing PLR products like those found at PLR Spectacular, Resell Rights Fortunes or Joel Osborne’s new PLR release Create Your Own Info Product if any copies are still available. With PLR products your research is already done, and the information is already organized into a viable flow – you just need to customize it from there. One of our signature products, The PLR Tutorial Videos teaches how to customize PLR e-books if you’re not sure of the best way to use them.

My Advanced Info Product Creation Formula

In one of my mentoring sessions this week, up-and-coming rising Internet marketing star Andre Arnett asked what my formula was for turning out e-products as quickly and often as I do. While I seldom publicly share information from my private mentoring, this is information that can benefit any mid-level to advanced online marketer, so I’ll make the exception…

1) Start with a niche or area of Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, etc, that already has a demonstrated popularity and demand for information. While finding untapped niches can be very lucrative, for fast production of info products stick to areas with a demonstrated market already in place – there’s a lot more readily available information to use in your research.

2) Do your keyword research, finding out what relevant keywords are being searched for and which of those terms are getting the highest bids at AdWords. While you would never put AdSense links on your salespage, keywords with lots of AdWords buyers, especially high-cost bids, are already making people money and getting them traffic – thus demonstrating the greatest interest.

3) Create your salespage for the as-yet-to-be-created info product, be it an e-book, videos, audios, etc. Focus your copy around what relief, i.e. solutions your product gives to the problems your prospects are facing. Stress the benefits, not the features of the product, and work your main keywords in liberally. Just be sure your main focus is on a smooth flow from start to order button, not on getting the very best SEO benefits from the page – always write for humans, not machines. Focusing on the SEO content will break the psychology of the sell – not something you want to do, even though you see that all the time online.

4) Review your salespage. Ask yourself if it describes a product you yourself would be panting to buy if it were priced at $97 or more. If not, add what you feel is missing to take it to that level and sell the ’sizzle’ even more. Is there ANYTHING you feel could be added to the product to make it even more of a no-brainer? Add it to your salespage then!

5) When you have a salespage that has you salivating to buy the product for $97 or $197, price it at $47 and put the salespage aside.

6) Now you have an outline for creating your new info product – it has to live up to every promise you’ve made on the salespage! Create the product and as you go, make note of any further information that comes to mind during the creation process. Once your product fulfills every single angle discussed on the salespage, use those new notes to add even more to it. Try to find at least 4 or 5 more important points, areas to cover and/or questions to answer and add them to your product.

Always keep in mind that the easiest way to create a strong market for
your next product is to really over-deliver on your current one!

Following those 6 steps fully will create a dynamite new product that really over-delivers – and as long as your actual knowledge of the subject is up to the task, you’ve created a masterpiece info product that can really help the people in your chosen target niche – one you’re proud to put your name on.

Does that mean you’ve just written a best-selling product that will propel you to the upper echelons and take you closer to your dream lifestyle? Unfortunately, no. Success of any given product online has less to do with the value of the content than with the sales funnel, affiliates, joint venture partners, release timing, bonuses, your opt-in list size and any myriad of other factors – factors way too numerous to cover in this post. Suffice it to say that a lot of garbage has sold well online and continues to sell today thanks to those factors while some really helpful gems twist on the vine, never really seeing the light of day.

What this product WILL do for you is show your expertise to those who DO read it, watch it or listen to it, and turn many of those into fans of your products, anxiously awaiting your next release. Once you have a product you feel is excellent, then focus on all those factors that make it sell better, from blogging, tweeting, article marketing and video submissions to firing up your affiliates and finding new JV partners willing to announce it to their own lists.

And while all that is in motion, start the 6-Step Advanced Info Product Creation process anew, getting your followup product ready to release as soon as sales plateau for your original release!

Technorati Tags: creating info products, creating new products, advanced product creation formula, Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, Internet marketers, affiliate marketers, advanced marketing tutorials