Effective targeting Email subscribers

Research, plan, test, tweak

As with any marketing strategy you want to make sure that your email campaigns are targeting the right people. email marketing is not a simple as getting an autoresponder, generating some leads and making sales. It takes research and effort to ensure the campaign is effective. If you go into an email campaign with a clear plan of targeting email subscribers in as narrow a niche as possible you will find that you can build a very responsive audience. To be clear it doesn’t happen overnight- you will need to plan, research, track and tweak your campaigns constantly.

The Importance of narrowly targeting email subscribers

One of the most important aspects of marketing with email is to brand yourself as an expert in a particular niche. You want to ensure that your marketing is focussed on a highly targeted audience. Make sure that your squeeze and landing pages are narrowly focussed on a particular aspect of your niche. Then focus on that area – don’t stray into unrelated topics. I’m sure you’ve experienced the frustration of subscribing to a newsletter about a specific topic (let’s use SEO as an example) and then been bombarded with emails about everything else but. Keep your focus narrow. It brands you and builds trust. If people subscribed because you offered help with Facebook give them that and nothing else. People will love you for it.

Deliver targeted well written content

Another aspect of your campaigns is your content. Emails written from the heart will give you a significant advantage over the competition. Of course the emails should be written so that they’re readable. However, your tone and your voice will give your emails that personal flavour that speaks to people. Emails brand you and your business. Make them talk for you.

Your content should be written in a manner which will appeal to the target audience. If necessary, you should conduct market research to determine demographical information for your target audience. This research may also determine preferences the target audience may have for receiving marketing information. This may include the type of language used, the format of the emails, the layout of the emails and even aesthetic appearance of the emails. Paying attention to these details can make the email marketing campaign significantly more effective.

The content you decide to include in your campaign is largely a matter of personal preference but there are some methods which have traditionally been more successful than others. Content such as articles, short useful tips, links to relevant websites, reviews for complementary products and even some subtle forms of advertising which are meant to persuade the recipients to take some form of action.

Mix Your Content

For example, sending articles give you the opportunity to include information about your products or services in the copy of the email. This in itself can be a subtle form of advertising.

Short product reviews can also be very useful because they can help attract a great deal of attention especially when the reviews focus on the products you offer and provide favorable reviews for these products. This type of information can either be subjective in nature or can remain objective by simply specifying the features of the products and offering other concrete pieces of information as opposed to opinions of the products.

Email Marketing Day 2 Targeted Email, The Best Niches,

Finding your target audience and engaging with them effectively is the essential component of email marketing. Of course some niches work best for email marketing and they are covered in the video below.

Whatever niche you are working with you re…

Email Marketing Video Pt 1

The Tools You Need

Recommended Autoresponders

The video recommends Get Response and AWeber. Both are good. I prefer Traffic Wave for a multitude of reasons. Links are provided to Traffic Wave and Get Response. I think AWeber is a third choice.

Recommended Hosting

Domain Name

GoDaddy

NameCheap

Squeeze Pages

Optimise Press

WP Lead Guerilla is currently not available

If you don’t use Wordpress you can’t go past this

Bonus Report

Why Should They Open Your Email

Structure

Advantages of Email

In this first lesson let’s talk a little about some of the advantages email marketing has over other types of marketing.

Email marketing is one of the most popular forms of online advertising. This is because it holds many distinct advantages. However, it does have some disadvantages as well. In this lesson we are going to look at those in order to gain some insight into how you can plan and execute an effective email marketing campaign.

Perhaps one of the most significant advantages to email marketing is the ability to reach a large audience with minimal effort. While it’s possible to reach an audience with other forms of advertising such as television, radio and the print media these are not nearly as effective as they once were and they can be very costly especially when compared to email.

Which leads us to the next advantage, affordability. This is significant because there are many other types of marketing, including Internet marketing that are more expensive. The costs associated with email marketing is minimal, especially if you will already have a list of email recipients who are interested in your products and services, because there are no upfront costs associated with building a list. Additionally, the cost to send out email is small and can be easily incorporated into your regular operating costs. All of these factors make email marketing extremely cost effective.

However, there is some cost involved in email marketing. Primarily this is the costs associated with writing the advertisements and creating any graphics which will accompany the email advertisements. This will require hiring a writer to write the copy for the advertisement and a designer to create and implements the graphics. The cost of these services will vary pretty widely but in general you will pay more for writers and designers with more experience. This is because these writers and designers are expected to be able to produce a higher quality of work than those with less experience could produce.

The most obvious disadvantage to email marketing is the possibility of having your email marketing viewed as spam. This is a very important problem because it could prove to be quite costly in terms of the profit margin for your business. Each day Internet users are bombarded with unsolicited emails serving as advertisements. This problem has reached epic proportions and the abundance of spam infiltrating the email boxes of innocent Internet users has to be cautious and suspicious about any email they receive which is unsolicited and appears to be promoting a particular product or service.

Emails which contain subject lines or content which appear to be similar to spam may be automatically transferred to a spam email folder by the email system. Emails which are not automatically deleted may be deleted without being opened simply because the recipient does not recognize the sender of the email. Both of these problems can result in essentially wasted time for the business owner because the recipients are not even viewing the emails advertising the products and services offered by the business. Additionally, they may result in complaints being lodged against the company for being a purveyor of spam.

Now that you understand the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing, you might wonder how you can maximize the advantages to use email marketing to your advantage. The most important factor to consider is your email distribution list. This should consist of former customers who have expressed a desire to receive emails with information and advertisements as well as potential customers who have also expressed interest in more information.

The content of the emails should also be carefully considered. They should certainly highlight the products and services you offer but should do so without appearing to be a hard sales pitch. A writer with experience in writing this type of copy should be able to assist you in providing insightful and accurate copy which also entices the reader to find out more about your products and services. Finally, your emails should provide the readers with a call to action. This should be a statement urging the reader to take a specific action such as making a purchase or researching a product.

We have a lot to go over in the next few days if you want to learn effective email strategies that you can use for your business, so make sure you look for your next lesson soon. We will be talking about how to reach your target audience with email marketing.

How to send a newsletter by email.

Email is still one of the key communication tools that businesses use to reach their customers. Consistent clear informative communication via email creates trust – key component in building any business relationship. Many business owners recognise the importance of email communication. However, many have no idea on how to send a newsletter by email. Here’s a brief run down on how to create and send a newsletter by email.

Who can you send an email newsletter to?

What is A PLR Product? Discover How You Can Profit

What Is A PLR Product, How Do You Use It? & Where Can You Access PLR?
PLR (Private Label Rights)is one of the real business opportunities that on line business owners can take advantage of. Amidst all the hype, snake oil and smoke and mirrors th…

February 12, 2017

Here Is Why The Establishment Is Losing

I really Should Know Better

Here’s whey the establishment is losing the goodwill of the people.

I responded to a post from a Facebook “Friend” – Kenneth who had suggested that Brexit was “the longest train crash in history.”
I spar with Kenneth regularly. It’s fair to say that I respect his views but don’t see the world the same way as him. That’s OK – it’s great to see different perspectives and I see a lot. I want a complete picture so I tend to subscribe to and listen to a range of opinions from the far right to the far left. I don’t agree with any particular political persuasion but I like to know what people think. It helps to draw characters for my fiction work, if nothing else. Anyway back to Kenneth’s post. I though his statement was a bit of a stretch.

World War 1, World War 2, the collapse of many empires, the Holocaust, Pol Pot or many other major events in history that were a)longer and b) caused more damage could have been mentioned.

I chose to suggest another event happening right now that has potentially much greater consequences for the entire world.

A Facebook Exchange Based On Incorrect Assumptions

This map of the radiation spread from Fukushima gives you some idea of why I think this is a tad important.

Apparently my point of view was upsetting to a friend of Kenneth’s who immediately labelled me a “quitter”

I don’t know who this guy is but it’s worth noting two things. He labelled me and made an incorrect assumption and b/ He denigrated me because why? I didn’t think Brexit was the biggest train crash in history? or that I said that nearly half the people of Britain disagreed with Kenneth? I don’t know. But I responded, it has to be said quite impetuously.

I don’t actually think Brexit is hilarious but I do think the reactions of people like David and to a lesser extent, Kenneth are. I understand that they are fearful of what will happen, but I don’t think lecturing and name calling are going to solve anything – on the contrary they only serve to alienate people and polarise opinion. This strategy worked oh so well for the Clinton campaign as they first alienated Bernie supporters and then labelled Trump voters “deplorables.”

You can think you are superior. You can tell yourself that you are better, but if you don’t listen to and engage with people whose circumstances are different to yours, then you live in a bubble…..and bubbles burst.

Anyway my new acquaintance was just getting warmed up.

Getting Warmed Up

Oh dear – capital letters. Besides his obvious distress he plucks a few scorched earth numbers from the air and continues to attempt to belittle me. Red Rag to a bull I’m afraid.

That didn’t placate him and he drew on his vast reserves of sarcasm borne undoubtedly from his superior knowledge and education.

By this stage I had grown tired of the game and simply supplied him with a Wikipedia listing for Neo- Liberal. Maybe I could have said simply someone who puts profits and corporations ahead of people, but I didn’t. When you get into these debates, there’s only so many fronts you can fight on. I could have also said the opposite would be exactly the same because when you get to the extreme edges of the political spectrum the results for the ordinary person are the same.

I didn’t get into debating the Saudi thing. The point that the outrage over Brexit is misplaced compared to real human rights abuses occurring on a daily basis doesn’t need a lot of debate I would have thought.

David belittled my use of Wikipedia and again assumed I was a cretin.

I asked him what his point was and if he was incapable of reading. That’s when things got really interesting.

Obviously David seems to believe I’m an idiot who has never had a job of note, can’t string two words together and hasn’t had a positive impact upon society at all. I must be a loser.

Or maybe….just maybe people like David have a serious problem. They are so impressed with themselves and their station in life that they have lost sight of what really matters.

Mr Munroe seems to think of himself as part of the establishment solution. Maybe I’m wrong about him, but his attacks on me are par for the course with establishment progressives or conservatives(progressives not to be confused with greens, socialists or Bernie supporters all of whom can engage in intelligent debate). I’ve had far better conversations with people from the “alt right” then I have had from establishment “progressives”. We disagree but we can have a conversation.

Former Australian treasurer Wayne Swan sensed the mood of the masses some time ago and said that there has to be real change and it has to happen soon or the bonfires will be lit and the pitchforks will be brought out.

Wayne Swan saw it.

Sadly most of the establishment refuse to see it. They keep calling Trump and Brexit “aberrations.” The people’s views apparently do not matter. The establishment no longer understands. They just lecture, ridicule and label and in doing so have become the very thing they claim to despise.

They are alienating people daily.

That’s why the establishment is losing.

Now, where’s my pitchfork?

January 13, 2017

How To Professionally Create Banners On The Fly

Easy Banner Creation

This is a simple effective way to create banners that look great.
You don’t even need a website to do this, nor do you need Photoshop skills.
All you need is access to IBO Banners.
You can try this for seven days for free and the monthly fee for ongoing banner creation is about 13 cents a day.
This is well worth it. It beats what I’ve been doing for years with GIMP hands down.

The only catch I can see with this is it’s a little hard to find. If you join IBO Toolbox (free membership) and then look for the advertisement like this

IBO Toolbox is well worth joining as it has plenty of advertising and networking options that you can use to grow your business.

December 25, 2016

Effective targeting email subscribers

Research, plan, test, tweak

The Importance of narrowly targeting email subscribers

Deliver targeted well written content

Write for your audience. Put yourself in their shoes. Write to connect and you will impress. If you write to impress you’ve lost before you begin. Be natural and be warm. You may find that a particular format in your emails works well. Stick to it. And if you are unfamiliar with your niche, take the time to learn about it. Invest in market research if you think it’s necessary, but you should be able to get enough intel by investing some hours researching your topic.

What you include in your campaign is entirely up to you. It is worth bearing in mind that some methods have consistently been found to be more effective than others. A variety of content works best. Endeavour to mix up your emails with a short useful tips, links to relevant websites, reviews for complementary products and of course, recommendations for products that you endorse.

Mix Your Content

A short email containing a link to an article you’ve written or Video you’ve made,is a great way to engage the reader. This technique has two great advantages.

It avoids sending an email containing an affiliate link (often attracting a spam flag) .
It subtly invites the reader to share your content with your network (assuming you have share buttons on the article)

I also find short product reviews, usually in PDF form that work very well.

When you mix these up with some genuine tips, you are well on teh way to building a real relationship with your subscribers

December 15, 2016

Targeted Email & The Best Niches,

Whatever niche you are working with you really need to create an offer of value. Creating a high quality offer is not that difficult.

The best niches for email marketing

Creating A High Quality Offer

Reaching your Target Audience (Engaging)

In theory email marketing is not any different than other types of marketing. The basic principles of marketing apply to your email marketing as well as anywhere else. One of these most important principles is the importance of reaching your target audience.

The simplest way to reach your target market is to encourage existing and potential customers to register for a newsletter on your website. When the users register they will enter an email address for you to forward information to.

Sending email to your list of interested subscribers is much more effective than using alternate email channels. Purchasing an email list to mail or using a safelist to get your message out are the electronic equivalents of cold calling . Whereas your subscribers all have an interest in the products or services you offer. Others channels may have your target demographics but they don’t know you and may not have the slightest interest in what you have to offer. You can build rapport with a targeted subscriber list.

Research your target audience

Another tip for reaching your target audience is to understand how to communicate with your target market. Depending on your audience effective communication strategies may include-:

changing the language of your emails to suit the preferences of your target audience members.
designing the layout and colors of the email to appeal to the target audience.
including content which interests the target audience. (Sounds obvious but you would be surprised).

Taking the time to do this research can help you to effectively engage with your readers.

Keep It Simple

An important thing to remember when trying to connect with your target audience is to keep your message simple. You don’t want to write aggressive sales pitches and your readers don’t want to read them. By the same token you don’t want to write war and peace either. Keep your message clear and concise and your readers will get the message.

If you are worried that your readers are unable to understand your messages make it easy for them to leave feedback. Leave instructions for the email recipients to contact you with their questions. This approach can prove to be valuable. Through these interactions you can better understand the needs of your target audience. You can then work on tailoring your email marketing strategy to meet these needs.

Finally, it is important to solicit feedback from your target audience to ensure you are meeting their needs with your email marketing campaign. This should be done constantly, as the needs of your subscribers are certain to change over time. When you ask for feedback from your subscribers ask specific questions that will help you to better serve their needs.

December 14, 2016

Advantages of Email Marketing.

While the advantages of email marketing are many, you really need to understand how it all fits together to build your marketing campaigns successfully.

The Tools You Need

Recommended Autoresponders

The video recommends Get Response and AWeber. Both are good. I prefer Traffic Wave for a multitude of reasons. Links are provided to Traffic Wave and Get Response. I think AWeber is a third choice.

Recommended Hosting

Domain Name

To be honest I prefer

NameCheap

Squeeze Pages

Optimise Press

WP Lead Guerilla is currently not available

If you don’t use WordPress you can’t go past this

Structure

Advantages of Email

In this first lesson let’s talk a little about some of the advantages email marketing has over other types of marketing.

Email marketing is one of the most popular forms of online advertising. It has many distinct advantages over other forms of advertising. However, it does have some disadvantages as well. We’ll cover both advantages and disadvantages of email marketing in this article so that you gain an understanding of how to make it work for you.

Instant Reach

Perhaps one of the most significant advantages to email marketing is the ability to reach a large audience with minimal effort. It is possible to reach an audience with other forms of advertising such as television, radio and the print media. However, these channels no longer work as they did-especially when compared to email.

Affordability

Which leads us to the next advantage, affordability. This cannot be understated. Many other types of marketing, including Pay Per Click and other Internet Marketing channels are more expensive. The costs associated with email marketing is quite small. Especially if you already have a list of email recipients who are interested in your products and services. If you have a list there are no upfront costs associated with building a list. And if you don’t you can build a funnel (as described above) to substantially reduce the cost of building it. Additionally, the cost to send out email is small and can be easily incorporated into your regular operating costs. All of these factors make email marketing extremely cost effective.

Costs

However, there is some cost involved in email marketing. Primarily these costs are generated by writing advertisements and creating any graphics which you may need. This will require hiring a writer to write the copy for the advertisement and a designer to create and implements the graphics. The cost of these services will vary pretty widely but in general you will pay more for writers and designers with more experience. This is because these writers and designers are expected to be able to produce a higher quality of work than those with less experience could produce.

Disadvantages

The most obvious disadvantage to email marketing is the possibility of having your email marketing viewed as spam. This is a very important problem because it could prove to be quite costly in terms of the profit margin for your business. Each day Internet users are bombarded with unsolicited emails serving as advertisements. This problem has reached epic proportions. Innocent Internet users are right to be cautious and suspicious about any email they receive which appear to be unsolicited. Particularly when the email promotes a particular product or service.

The Spam Trap

Emails which contain subject lines or content which appear to be similar to spam may be automatically transferred to a spam email folder by the email system. Emails which are not automatically deleted may be deleted without being opened simply because the recipient does not recognize the sender of the email. Both of these problems can result in essentially wasted time for the business owner. The recipients are not even seeing the emails advertising the products and services offered by the business. Additionally when you become irrelevant to the email recipient you run the risk of incurring spam complaints.

Now you should have an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing. And you might wonder how you can maximize the advantages to use email marketing to your advantage. The most important factor to consider is your email distribution list. This should consist of former customers who have expressed a desire to receive emails with information and advertisements as well as potential customers who have also expressed interest in more information.

Content

Plan the content of your emails carefully. Make sure that you highlight the products and services you offer. The trick is not to make the recommendation sound like a hard sales pitch. A writer with experience in writing this type of copy should be able to assist you in getting the balance right.

Finally, your emails should provide the readers with a call to action. This should be a statement urging the reader to take a specific action such as making a purchase or researching a product.

We have a lot to go over in the next few days . if you want to learn effective email strategies that you can use for your business make sure you look for your next lesson soon. We will be talking about how to reach your target audience with email marketing.

December 7, 2016

How to send a newsletter by email.

Who can you send an email newsletter to?

Strictly speaking you are allowed to send an email newsletter to those people who agree for you to do so. Many businesses already have some sort of database where the customers have agreed to receive email updates from them. Provided you can demonstrate that they have agreed for you to send an email, you should be able to legally send them.

But there are a couple of traps.

Common Email Newsletter Traps

The first consideration is confidentiality. I am still astounded to receive emails from business people that have simply listed everybody in the address portion of their email. This allows all recipients access to email addresses and names. It shouldn’t happen. At the very least is shows lack of consideration to all recipients and brands the sender as unprofessional and uncaring. At worst the sharing of confidential details (i.e an email address) could lead to some nasty legal action.

This problem is easily overcome by using an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a piece of software that can be used to send personalised emails to multiple recipients at once. Once you have one of these you will wonder how you ran a business without one.

Of course if you use an autoresponder you have to overcome the opt-in rules that surround newsletters and this can be a little confusing if you already have a database full of emails that your clients have freely given you. The problem arises because all reputable email marketing companies insist that all your subscribers “opt in” to receive your newsletter.

Many of the larger ones are reluctant to accept a list of your existing subscribers. Most of those that will consider accepting your list will make you jump through more hoops than a performing seal at sea world.

The one exception to this is Brian Rooney, the owner at Traffic Wave. A quick skype conversation and a genuine explanation of my circumstances saw Brian arrange for me to transfer my subscriber base to Traffic Wave without any fuss at all. I know he would do the same for you.

But What if you have no subscribers?

You start attracting them today. If you are a business owner you can simply ask people to subscribe to your newsletter. Or you can create a landing age and direct visitors to it and grow your subscriber base that way. The list growing exercise deserves an article of its own, but suffice to say you have to start someday and today is as good a day as any.

So once you’ve overcome these issues, you can arrange to broadcast a newsletter to your subscribers.

How to broadcast your newsletter by email.

OK so once, you’ve set your auto responder up and imported or attracted new subscribers, you’re ready to send a newsletter by email.

Autoresponders have two essential functions – the ability to send a message series at predetermined intervals and the ability to broadcast a message at a set time to your audience. To send a newsletter you will need to use the broadcast function.

It’s a pretty simple process.

Firstly draft your newsletter,|so you can simply copy and paste it into the autoresponder WYSIWYG editor.
Open up your autoresonder and go to the campaign manager
Select the autoresponder campaign you require
Choose create new letter
Choose between using a template and starting with a blank letter – I prefer blank letters – personally I find that templates bounce much more than blankly formatted letters – that’s been my experience – yet others will use templates.
You will then arrive at the letter editor and you have a range of choices here. Most Autoresponder companies now use point and click functionality that allows you to style your letter as you see fit. It may take a couple of minutes experimentation to find out how everything works But once you get it figured – simply paste your re written newsletter into the body of the email
Insert all tokens or codes that you need to personalise the message. These tokens will coincide with the information that you have captured and stored in your autoresponder database common tokens include Name, Firstname, Address, Date Subscribed (Timestamp), Company, City and Signatures.
Save your newsletter
The letter will be stored (held in your stored letters and is ready for broadcast.
To schedule your newsletter broadcast you need to go to manage subscribers
Once there you need to choose manage subscribers and then schedule broadcast

You then choose the letter you want to send out.Then you simply schedule the time you want an email sent out click done and then scheduled broadcast and you’re done

Final notes re newsletters by email

Email is sold by many marketing gurus as the magic button that guarantees online success. Email doesn’t sell anything. It is a tool to build relationships. A regular email newsletter in any niche that builds rapport, gains trust and offers value will help to build business relationships.

Email newsletters are a tool to build business relationships. Used wisely they can do just that.

November 29, 2016

Do I need a website when I have a Facebook page?

There’s a lot to be said for the power of social media. Facebook and YouTube in particular are two of the highest ranking traffic sites on the web today. A Facebook page will certainly brand your business and create interest in it, but is the traffic that you are generating quality traffic? Or to put it another way are you getting genuinely interested visitors to your business with Facebook?

While there is a case for some particular business owners to make do with not having a website, the reliance upon social media solely is fraught with danger. To discover what best works for your business, we need to look at what both channels do.

What does a Facebook page do?

Facebook is a social network. People interact with friends and associates on all manner of topics. Most of these topics are of mutual interest promoting discussion and a sense of belonging.
A Facebook page that is set up to promote your business can reach people who are already connected with your business in some way. People who like your page receive your updates and may even share your business with others. Your business visibility on Facebook is viral in nature.

A Facebook page is free and gives you potential access to a audience of millions. The truth is that the likely impact of a page on its own will be minimal. To really tap into the potential of Facebook, time and money need to be spent on effective advertising.

As with any pay per click advertising, the process is not as simple as Facebook would have you believe. In all likelihood a pay per click advertising campaign may cost several thousand dollars before bearing fruit.

The other downside with Facebook is that Facebook page’s rarely rank in organic search results with Google or other search engines. In short when people look for solutions to answers that your business could solve they will turn to a search engine. They won’t find your business if it’s only listed on Facebook.

What will a website do for your business?

Having your own website to promote your business has many benefits. The key is that you have total control of the look and feel of the site. This makes the site recognisably yours and gives you total autonomy on what goes where on your site.

Your own website will present your business in a positive professional light. A clean functioning website that informs and gives value to visitors is a great business asset. Importantly, it can and should gain traction in the search engine rankings.

I cannot overstate the importance of Search Engines. Social media is fine – but it operates on an engagement and network basis. Search engines operate on an enquiry basis. This makes the traffic much more valuable. When people use search engines they are looking for answers. When you provide quality content – your website will display in Search engine results and attract visitors looking to solve problems.

Use your website as your online business hub. This will enable you to deliver a clear consistent message and coordinate it through multiple social media channels and you will be on a winner.

If you own a bricks and mortar business, or provide a valuable online service like writing, Photoshopping, social media management or any other freelance activity you need a website. there is no doubt about it. That only leaves one question….

Do you need a website as an affiliate marketer or will a Facebook page be enough?

This is one area where there is really no right answer. As all affiliate models are slightly different. If you are operating as an affiliate in the Make Money On Line niche, it may well be that you could initially not have a website and still succeed .

However, if you are promoting products outside that niche and attempting to sell them through Clickbank, or another affiliate network, you will find that a website is an important element in your online marketing arsenal.

The Final Word

A website gives greater flexibility, more exposure and assists in positive branding, so you can build your online presence.

November 24, 2016

What is A PLR Product? Discover How You Can Profit

What Is A PLR Product, How Do You Use It? & Where Can You Access PLR?

PLR (Private Label Rights)is one of the real business opportunities that on line business owners can take advantage of. Amidst all the hype, snake oil and smoke and mirrors that masquerade as business opportunity, PLR sticks out like a sore thumb. It is something rock solid that you can turn into regular income. Regrettably, most people looking to make money online are never told about it. Those who ask “what is a PLR product?” are often misled about the benefits. That is a great pity.

So- what is a PLR product really?

PLR products are products that have been licensed for you to use as your own. The products could be website templates, graphics, software, articles, reports, videos or in any other digital product format. Not only can you present the product as your own, you can edit the product as you like. Importantly, with PLR you are given the source code in editable form to the document, allowing you to change how the product reads or is presented.

PLR is similar but not the same as Resale Rights and Master Resale Rights. Both of these types of rights may be included with the PLR product that you buy. Consequently it is important to understand exactly what you are buying.

Resale rights entitle you to re-sell the product after purchase. Unless otherwise stated (PLR) you cannot alter the product in anyway or offer resale rights to others. Usually products that come with resale rights come with a mini site template for you to sell the product with.

Master resale rights give you the right to not only sell the product but to offer resale rights with it. Many marketers in the online marketing industry love Master Resale Rights products as it gives them an instant product that has an up-sell built in (the resale rights) This is great in the make money on line niche, but loses impact once you get out of it into other areas.

How do you Profit from PLR?

OK – here’s where it gets interesting. There are many online marketers who recommend PLR as an easy product creating medium. In fact I’ve bought products promising PLR secrets that just recommended buying PLR products and listing them on JV Zoo or Clickbank . I should have saved my money. Quite frankly that strategy is lazy,unoriginal and noncompetitive. So don’t do it.

What you can do is take the PLR and “retool” it to make it unique. Here are a couple of ideas.

Combine several products into a package and price it accordingly.
Take the best elements of two products and combine them into a completely new product.
Take the content of a written product and create an audio or video product- reading the content and recording them. Screencast-O-Matic is an excellent tool to use in this regard.
Rewrite the content using your own voice.

When you do this you should invest a little money in branding your product as your own. Header graphics and eBook covers can be put together for very little cost using sites like Fiverr or more upmarket services like Udemy. There really us no excuse not to go the extra mile and brand your PLR content as something unique.

Where Can You Access PLR?

There are a number of sites that offer PLR across the Internet. From time to time you can pick up some excellent material from the Warrior Forum or JV Zoo. But to get consistent quality content across a variety of niches, I can think of no better site than Resell Rights Weekly.

You can view what is on offer by watching this video

Resale Rights Weekly has now become a massive library of PLR, Resale rights and Master resale rights products. It also offers plenty of practical instruction on how to build, place and sell products.

If you really want to understand what is a PLR product and how to profit from it Resell Rights weekly is the place to go.

Join today.

November 19, 2016

How to find a good niche market

How my online niche market found me.

Behind the smoke and mirrors that most Internet marketing “gurus” like to hide behind are a few essential grains of truth. The essential grain of truth that stands above all others is simply to match your passion to a niche. Then work it for all its worth. If you are asking how to find a good niche market, the answer lies within you and what your passion is.

The best way to demonstrate what I mean is to recount my own experiences with online niche marketing and how my passion allowed my niche market to find me.

Internet Marketing Snakes & Ladders

I started to believe I could make money online many years ago. This was after a long writing hiatus when I started to write articles and short stories. This led me to the small press network and inevitably online to places like Ralans. I got some stories published and won an award for best SF story at Tom Howard’s short story contest and was doing OK thanks.

But the thought of making real money on line was a constant lure.

I read everything I could get my hands on about pay per click. Affiliate marketing, email marketing and websites. My head was full of so much conflicting information, I didn’t know where to look, who to believe or what to do, but man it was exciting…..but terribly unproductive.

I went down some terrible byways and lost sight of what I was there in the first place for.

But one consistent piece of the puzzle stuck with me – targeted niche marketing could be very lucrative. Back in those days the emphasis was on Google Adsense and possibly some affiliate products. Programs like MPAM and Site Build It encouraged the monetisation of sites based upon good keyword research.

There were (and still are) heaps of info products that will teach you how to find a good niche market. While most of them have some good advice, very few of them offer a gilt edged way to follow through.

I know because I tried heaps of them. Several years ago I stopped trying and decided to be myself.

The amazing thing about the Internet

Is that it is so bloody big. There are communities and forums dedicated to every conceivable human pursuit- from scuba diving to chess, to conservation to exploration. And yet online marketers seem to focus on the same old same old “money niches.” You know the ones I mean. Make Money Online, Weight loss, Dating, Fitness, Health…the usual highly competitive done to death niches . I guarantee that your chances of succeeding in those areas are next to zero.
There is two reasons for this. As I said these niches are highly competitive and have been attacked from every angle, making it very hard to get any traction. More importantly because these niches are highly lucrative they attract professional marketers. People who love marketing. Do you love marketing? DO you know it inside out and back to front? Are you prepared to invest thousands of hours learning and perfecting your craft just so you can get a shot at competing?

If you answered yes to all of those questions, by all means go right ahead and chase those affiliate dollars. On the other hand…most of us don’t actually like marketing. Sure we can throw up a few ads and write a few articles, maybe even do a video or two. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty, we really can;t be bothered with all that testing, tracking, tweaking and analysis that marketing actually demands.

There’s no shame in that. None at all. In fact, I wish I’d spent my time not learning that stuff and concentrating on what I actually loved doing. It took me the best part of ten years to figure that out, but I go there in the end.

There’s no secret on how to find a good niche market

The answer is really simple. Instead of wasting months or even years learning how to target a niche, start the other way around. Discover what you’re really passionate about and then work out a way to monetize it.

When I was literally at my wits end, I threw caution to the wind and decided that my only way out was to enjoy myself. The results have been phenomenal. Most of my work now comes through from referrals. I aren’t advertising, I do very little SEO work on my own site.

I just work at what I love doing – which is writing.

Of course I had to build my profile, which I did via some freelance sites like Udemy and Airtasker, but once my profile was built the work just keeps rolling in. It isn’t all that sexy, I can’t show you some fancy screen shots and I certainly won;t be buying a Ferrari any time soon, but I am working full time from home.

The great irony about this is that I didn’t really know how to find a good niche market until it found me.

Here’s what I did

Found my passion and decided that I would live or die by my results in that area.
Worked out the best way to monetize the activity
Built my profile at several freelance sites (your passion may not allow freelancing but there are plenty of forums were you can build a profile.)
Priced initially to sell.
Delivered on time every time
Asked for referrals
Increased prices as demand increased.

Obviously, you can’t follow my exact path, but the principle of finding what you like doing and then monetising it is absolutely crucial.

You can work out what you need as you go. Hosting, email marketing, social media platforms and the like can all be used in line with your core business idea.

The whole point of working online is to attain a level of freedom that working for a boss doesn’t allow. Getting stuck working tedious tasks is not what freedom looks like. Find what you want to do and go for it. There’s a market for it. Whatever it is.

November 15, 2016

Paypal, Traffic Exchanges, List Mailers & Change

Paypal cuts the cord

Paypal has turned a huge chunk of the online advertising industry on its head. It has arbitrarily determining that many reputable business owners with sound business practices and business models no longer meet their somewhat confusing terms and conditions.

To be perfectly honest I’m not that surprised, nor am I particularly concerned, but I suspect that I’m one of the few people who are familiar with these advertising channels who feels this way.

When I first got into online marketing I began to use both Traffic Exchanges and Safelists as they were called back then and I found them to be very effective.

So much so that I was making regular $30 – $40 sales commissions advertising quality digital products across a range of Traffic Exchanges (Thank you Graham Hamer). I wasn’t building a list. Nor was I creating my own splash pages. I was just advertising the affiliate product in the advertising space.

It was very easy money. I’d buy a bit of traffic, earn a bit of traffic and make a tidy profit. Every week.

Things were much different back then.

The products I was selling were top notch.

The exchanges seemed more active AND most importantly, the viewing time was out at around thirty seconds for many sites.

Traffic Exchanges worked and I was a strong advocate for them.

I tweaked my advertising campaigns, grew a subscriber list and started to make very good money. As an aside I was also earning nice pocket change with commissions on sales of upgrades and traffic through these sites.

The decline of Traffic Exchanges

Around 2010 I started to notice a drop off. The market changed. A lot of “penny clickers” entered the market place and subscriber rates and sales slowed. I didn’t like the change and to be perfectly honest, I never have really adapted to it.

It became harder to run profitable advertising campaigns, unless you adapted and really went hard at selling other advertising programs to new visitors. TE Profits was the leader here and was a great program, but it quickly spawned a series of competitors all working on a variation of the same theme.

Pretty soon the TE and Safelist market was awash with people either clicking for pennies or selling a TE marketing plan. As a result the industry became more insular and attracted fewer new faces. Viewed from the outside the TE/List Mailer/Safelist market started to resemble a cross between a massive pyramid scheme and a paid to click ponzi scheme. It had in many ways lost its innocent premise of cheap advertising.

This slow slide into the dangerous waters of irrelevance was not premeditated and may well have been market driven as incentive based advertisers fought against the encroachment of social media channels that made advertising easier and more targeted.

But the effect was the same.

The Industry Was Stale

Traffic Exchanges and List Mailers became largely irrelevant unless you were already in the industry. Anyone who had any profile at all seemed to think the best way to make money in the niche was to buy and run their own traffic exchange or list mailer.

Most were ill equipped to do so and the market became flooded with third rate exchanges. The industry had started to cannabilise itself.

By 2012 I was pretty much over the industry, but I kept my hand in due to the friendships and connections I’d made with some great people. People like Scot Douglas, Carl Bailey, Paul Kinder and Jon Olson had taught me massive amounts about marketing and selling and I would forever be in their debt but ….the market wasn’t doing it for me anymore.

It was staler than month old bread.

I moved on and did other things. I’m glad I did…but the ties remain.

What has happened in recent days was inevitable.

It is the end result of the madness that allowed sites like Traffic Monsoon (among others) to be advertised. The concept of traffic monsoon was not new, it was simply a variation of the ponzi schemes like 12 Daily pro that were popular about 10 years ago. When 12DP got out of hand the Traffic Exchange Industry was quick to act and block sites like it and other “High Yield Investment Programs.” The danger was averted. This time nobody moved. They allowed the program to obtain a level of legitimacy that it didn’t deserve. When the house of cards came crashing down, there was always going to be fallout.

Paypal have acted unilaterally and decisively to protect their interests. The Traffic Exchange Industry is reeling. It isn’t pretty but it was inevitable.

Paypal has given Traffic Exchanges A Chance to Reform

Industry leader, Jon Olson has faced up to the Paypal issues in the same forthright manner that he always has. In many ways, Jon is the face of the industry and his passion mixed with creative intelligence makes him a formidable force. He has acknowledged that Traffic Exchanges need to die in their current format at least. Jon recognises the opportunity and the challenge. I salute him for that and respectfully make the following suggestions to him and other industry leaders.

Suggested Improvements

Broaden your horizons. The Make Money On Line niche is full of crap, snake oil salesman and useless schemes. Encourage other niches to advertise. Allow participants to select the niches that they want to view. Personally, I could spend all day browsing sites that were guitar related and I would be engaged in viewing them. Seeing the same junk mindless splash and squeeze pages is about as enjoyable as root canal surgery. Some exchanges (Traffic G?) already have this option but I doubt if they’ve ever really marketed it effectively outside the industry.
Reward the quality of view rather than the quantity. Right now the industry is locked in a death spiral of rapid viewing of low information pages. Currently there is little value to the viewer and bloody little to the advertiser. It should be possible to reward viewers for the length of time they view rather than the number of pages they view. Anti cheat mechanisms could be set to display at set intervals when a page is viewed for a certain length time i.e 30 seconds. The Traffic Exchange would then reward the quality of content and encourage diversity within the industry.
Make yourself relevant to SEO. I know you’re black listed at Google. Re invent yourselves, make yourself relevant. Rewarding quality of page views would be a good start. Google penalize bounce rates. Make bounce rates a thing of the past. Give your advertisers meaningful data about their page views. Hell -even work at teaching them how to use and understand Google Analytics. Encourage quality reciprocal linking without incentivizing it. Educate your advertisers about SEO and the importance of Social Media…which brings me to my next point.
Get smart about Social Media. I will never tweet some of the inanities that you people want me to tweet about your sites. Sorry. I’m not a parrot. Social Media is great when used properly , tweeting I found the yellow sub at XYZ TE does nothing for me outside the echo chamber that TES are …and very little in it. Encourage quality engagement, don’t be lazy about it and don’t insult me by asking me to tweet an advertisement for you.
Become central advertising hubs. You used to be. Then you gave up. Do you remember when you used to have article directories and forums. You’ve either abolished them entirely like Tim Tech did at ThumbVu or down play their significance. I know you have the programmers to build social walls like Facebook with a bit of thought. Make it happen.
Be bold – advertise yours services to the wider public. Grow yourselves organically. Use Stumbleupon as your guide.
Classify your traffic and price it accordingly. In the Solo Advertising industry Tier 1 traffic is regarded as US, British, Australia, Canadian and New Zealand traffic. Tier 2 Western Europe Tier 3 developing nations. I want Tier 1 traffic and I’ll pay for it. I’m sure there are many like me.
Get rid of surfing for cash in any form . It’s like a red rag to a bull to me as an advertiser as well as Paypal.

Conclusion

I’m sure the TE industry will evolve. It has to. I hope that I’m still using your services for years to come with or without Paypal.