New internet marketing Q&A series

Writing a blog about internet marketing is a little difficult because the audience is full of people with varying goals and abilities.

I know I have readers who have more knowledge than I do, and others are probably just starting out trying to get their first venture off the ground and they only want basic tips. If I specifically catered to any one demographic, then the rest might become bored and stop reading. I know that when I started blogging, I wrote from the beginners perspective, because that was the level of entry that I was qualified to speak to… however, as my knowledge of the industry has increased, I’ve written about more sophisticated concepts and techniques.

Starting next week, I’ll be writing a Q&A series devoted to answering questions from my readers about internet marketing. I don’t presume to know everything on the subject… however, I do have a good amount of experience to draw on, and I’ve also made some friends in the industry who may be able to help out on difficult questions that I’m not able to answer out of experience.

Now’s your chance to get answers to your most important internet marketing questions!

If you’d like to participate, just contact me using my contact form. If you have any details that you want to remain private, please don’t include them in your question.

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Squeeze page basics

In my studies on internet businesses, I’ve found that the most successful ones have built a very solid and distinct system for filling the sales funnel.

Amateur marketers will sometimes fall into the trap of driving traffic directly to their sales page, and then be excited when their carefully crafted pitch converts two or three buyers out of every hundred. The problem with this mentality is that the sales page is failing to capture contact information for over 95% of the page visitors… and the marketer loses an opportunity to ever build a relationship with that person. This type of short term thinking will doom internet business owners who don’t understand the importance of building and filling the sales funnel.

Master marketers know that you can’t focus on the first sale. To build a successful sales funnel, you’ve got to understand one of the most basic principles in marketing, period… your customer may need to be exposed to your marketing message seven times before they’ll be willing to take action.

With that thought in mind, a good marketer would be kicking himself for focusing on landing the first sale at the expense of an opportunity to contact the reader multiple times… and possibly with multiple different offers!

What’s a squeeze page, and why do I want one?

A squeeze page is a page where you will drive your visitors so that you can capture their name, email address, and other pertinent information to your marketing campaign. After you’ve gathered that info, you can start to build a relationship with the visitor by following up with them with an autoresponder sequence that introduces and explains your marketing message. This is the time where you will present the sales page and give your visitor an opportunity to buy… they may or may not do so at the time, but you can always present your offer again later after you’ve spent more time building the relationship.

What are the main ingredients of a squeeze page?

A carefully crafted squeeze page will contain these critical elements:

• An attention grabbing headline - Something that captures your reader and compels them to look down the page.
• 4-6 teaser bullets - Build the suspense here without giving away any secrets… make your prospect want to opt-in after reading your teasers.
• The call to action - What do you want your prospect to do? Click for more info? Subscribe to a newsletter? Sign up for a teleconference?
• An opt-in form - This is where you’ll capture the contact information from your reader and get them into your sales funnel.
• An ethical bribe - Honestly, people have gotten tired of giving up their email addresses to marketers… it’s pretty much mandatory to give something away in exchange for contact info these days. Develop a product of your own, or offer something else which you have the right to give away as a trade. Popular things to offer are ebooks, videos, downloadable audios, or mini-courses.

Stay tuned for Squeeze Page Secrets!

Very soon, I’m going to offer a small package to my opt-in list subscribers called Squeeze Page Secrets… the package will include two sample squeeze page templates that you can use to create your own pages, and a 10 page report, appropriately titled, “Squeeze Page Secrets”. If you want to be notified immediately when the Squeeze Page Secrets package is ready, fill out this brief form and I’ll send you a free copy of Squeeze Page Secrets the minute it’s available!

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Beef up your Feed with the Feed Footer Plugin

One of my favorite Wordpress plugins lately has been the Feed Footer plugin, from Blog Clout. I subscribe to about a zillion feeds, and I’m surprised that I don’t see it used on other blogs more often. Feed Footer allows Wordpress bloggers to add special notices and other items to the tail end of their posts that are only viewable by RSS subscribers. Here are a couple of ideas on how you can make your feed pop using Feed Footer.

Thank your subscribers

This might sound like a no-brainer, but for some reason I rarely see bloggers tip a hat to their RSS subscribers. After you’ve convinced someone to subscribe to your feed, thanking them for subscribing is a great way to complete the connection you’ve just made… after all, if you had the opportunity to meet your readers face to face, you’d want to thank them personally for reading, wouldn’t you? The fact that feed subscribers can be anonymous online doesn’t have to deprive you of the opportunity to be courteous.

Here’s a graphic image that I use in my feed footer… it’s actually the same image that I applied to Trevor Fitzgerald’s “Subscribe Remind” plugin back in January. I felt that using a graphic would create a stronger impact than simply using text, and I also like the continuity of using the same image both on my blog (to encourage subscriptions) and in the feed (to show appreciation to my RSS readers). If you’d like to see this graphic in action, go ahead and subscribe to my feed and check it out.

Present advertising

There are different schools of thought on monetizing your RSS feed, but if you choose to go that route, Feed Footer allows you to present ads at the bottom of your feed. If your subscriber count is high, you could consider selling ad space in your feed footer… John Chow sells text ads in his feed footer for $200 a month! Of course, you may not have 20,000 RSS readers like John does… if your subscriber count is low, you might have a hard time attracting paying sponsors. In this case, you could still monetize your feed by presenting targeted affiliate offers in your feed footer.

Offer bonus content

Special content that isn’t available to regular readers of your site might be a good way to encourage new readers to subscribe to your feed. You might think about putting a download link in your feed footer for an ebook (yours, or someone else’s that you have the right to promote). I’ve tossed around the idea of running a blog contest where the contest details are only available in the feed footer… people interested in the prize would have to subscribe to my feed to figure out how to win it!

What can you think of?

These are just three ways that you can use the Feed Footer plugin for Wordpress to juice up your feed. Have you got a neat idea or trick to share? Feel free to leave it in the comments!

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Memorable Moments at Affiliate Summit

When I made a decision to engage this industry more aggressively, all sorts of things really started to happen. To this point, Affiliate Summit was really a pinnacle for my blogging business… I learned a whole lot from the courses that were provided, but I’m much more excited about the networking opportunities that were available during the event.

One thing that stuck with me the most was how many people knew who I was. I really wrestled with whether or not I should use my name as the domain for this blog, but because I have such a unique last name, it was easy for people to remember the time they had been over to read my blog!

Here are a couple of moments that I’ll always remember about Affiliate Summit West 2008.

Snapshot with John Chow at the Share-a-Sale party.

John’s reaction to seeing me at the invite-only event? “What, do they just let anybody in this thing?” Yeah, they sure do, John… read my blog and find out why!

Zac Johnson wasn’t so surprised to see me at the Share-a-Sale party.

I emailed him a week prior and told him I planned to kick the door down and crash the party to get a chance to meet him. Luckily for everyone, it didn’t come down to that… I scored my invitation about a half an hour before the party started.

I meet my favorite guest author, Michelle Gartner!

You can’t miss Michelle’s weekly Thursday articles on marketing. It was awesome to finally meet you, Michelle!

I make friends with Joel Comm!

Of course, this photo was taken before I won $50 in cash from a contest that promoted Joel’s Text Cast Live service. Looking forward to getting to know you better, Joel… I added your link to my blogroll.

Blue Man Group performance at Affiliate Bash!

The new BMG affiliate program launch was celebrated at Affiliate Bash in Tao nightclub at the Venetian Hotel. I recorded a minute or so of the performance from my digital camera.

I received over half a dozen job offers to work as a writer while I was at Affiliate Summit. I’m also following up on two different consulting jobs I was offered to assist with blog development and traffic building… it’s exciting to think that I might be considered for consulting work based on the credibility and strength of my own blog. If either of these jobs happen to pan out, I’ll be happy to share more about them.

Now? Sites set on Affiliate Summit East in Boston. ASE08 will happen in August, for those of you who might be interested in attending… this gives you tons of time to save your chips for a ticket, or you might consider going the press route. I’ll look forward to seeing you guys there!

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Jason Calacanis Bashes Affiliates During ASW Keynote

At the heart of what might have been an interesting and engaging keynote speech about curation of the internet and creating more value for internet users on February 25th, Jason Calacanis unabashedly called affiliate marketers in the room spammers who were spoiling the internet, while at the same time acting as if he wasn’t really referring to those marketers who were in attendance.

Jason’s speech showed promise as he talked about how early internet communities, such as Usenet, were ruined by over-aggressive marketers who introduced the very first affiliate spam… websites and links that were designed to make the affiliate money and provide very little value to the user. This type of marketing quickly alienated Usenet visitors, and the once vibrant community disappeared overnight. Jason went on to provide other examples of how people are gaming popular communities such as MySpace and Wikipedia with spam, because these communities allow anonymity and are therefore easier for spammers to infiltrate.

At this point, however, Jason turned his attention towards popular blogger/affiliates who publicly report their income, specifically displaying photographs of two affiliate marketers holding up six figure paychecks of affiliate income. Jason had this to say about these two marketers:

“You guys think small. Holding up a six figure check is just pathetic… is that your industry’s biggest success?”

Jason went on to say that he personally thinks that those same people who game search engines and social networks are among the smartest and most resourceful people he had ever met, advising them to “give up your life of crime and holding $100,000 checks… realize that you’re smarter than half the folks working at large internet companies and get to work creating the next Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Google, or Paypal.”

Calacanis further said that affiliate marketers who pursue low effort/high reward models of making money on the internet were poisoning the web with affiliate spam. Of course, everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion… but Jason’s semi-elitist view was insulting to a number of Affiliate Summit attendees that I spoke after the keynote. I also didn’t feel like Jason’s sour view of the affiliate marketing industry allowed much room for people’s own dreams or desires… I’m sure that many marketers would be thrilled to pull down six figures a year working from home!

All in all, this years keynote speech appeared to be the most memorable and controversial keynote in the history of the Affiliate Summit… it was definitely the talk of every table I sat at throughout the course of the event. While it certainly inspired a strong reaction from attendees, I personally didn’t find much of what Jason said from the stage to be very constructive. But hey… that’s only my opinion.

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