You know my thoughts on making things go viral. I think going viral is fantastic but its really not up to you, it’s up to the audience to decide whether they will make it go viral. In essence the concept of viral marketing is a load of rubbish. It’s like me saying I’m in the field of surf waves creation. Doesn’t really work does it?  What I do believe in however, is the ability to facilitate the rapid spreading of great material.

I stumbled across this site a little while ago which I thought I would share with you. It’s called BubblePly.com. It’s a cool free service that allows you to put text and comments on any online video as well as an embedded link. The potential for Internet Marketers and the Video Marketing industry is huge.

So here is the scenario, you grab a video from Youtube, stick a link in it, post it on your blog and submit it to Digg, Reddit or Twitter and if people like the video then they will (hopefully) pass it on or bump it up the social network ratings order. The great thing about this is that this video could have a link to any site you wish as well as a related affiliate product.

Below is an example I just created:

The manifesto is very close to completion and is a bootstrapper’s formidable guide to online marketing and earning a living online.

I have set myself a target for Wednesday 27th May for the release of my eBook. Guess how much I’m selling it for? $297? $197? $97? 47?! $7! How about nothing. $0. I’m not charging a cent for this book at all. I believe the basic principles outlined in this book should be given away so that everyone can learn them and remove any excuse not to try.

I get extremely frustrated when great online markets with valuable information decide to run a course but then charge $497 or $297 a month. This immediately eliminates those who genuinely want to try but can’t because they simply don’t have the money to invest. It doesn’t make sense really does it? You provide a beginners course but then charge corporate rates. By no means am I knocking their product as I think many of these courses are worth many times more than what they actually charge. However it simply does not give everyone a chance to learn not only the basic principles but great marketing techniques as well.

A few things the eBook will contain:

• How to determine what product to sell
• Using your blog to full advantage
• 1 single step to increase affiliates conversions by over 200%
• Drop shipping guide
• The mega profitable eBay loophole that 99% of sellers don’t know
• Loads more.

Once again, all you need to do to get your hands on a copy when it comes out is to sign up to my mailing list. You can do this on the right hand column of this blog (and get your Free copy of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich) or using the form below. Hope your excited like I am!

Every online marketer knows that building a list is the one of the most effective ways to build a potentially profitable following. The same marketer also knows that those who have already bought from them are most likely to buy from them again. We see this all the time so would you like fries with that?

So how do you combine these two well known theories and turn them into one powerful marketing and sales technique? One and a half words – eBay.

There is a strange divide between people who swear by the monster marketplace and others who shun it like an Italian motorcar. I’m a bit of both, I love Ferrari’s but I drive an Alfa. What I’m trying to get at is that you may not be experiencing the full potential of the available resource but that doesn’t mean that it does not exist.

When I first started selling on eBay I did the normal thing. I sold something, sent out a great product, got good feedback and then moved on to the next customer. I would comfortably say that the majority of the sellers do this because that’s the way you do things right? Not quite.

Lets dissect things a little more. eBay is a massive marketplace full of millions of buyers ready and willing to buy stuff. Ready and willing to buy stuff. Those are some really powerful words right there. If you put a product up for sale on eBay you are exposing it to a market that is there not just surfing for fun, but are genuine buyers. That’s the first thing to take note of but it’s nothing that we don’t know already and many hundreds of ambitious entrepreneurs have used this fact to make thousands and thousands of sales.

Secondly when people buy a product from you on eBay you are required to communicate via email to finalize the sale. Now I’m guessing that little light bulb is flashing inside your head thinking you know where I’m heading with this. Your also thinking how could you possibly have not thought of this? Well looking at eBay’s terms and conditions there is good reason why you haven’t already thought of it or dismissed it entirely:

• Using member contact information obtained from eBay or using any eBay system to offer to sell any listed item outside of eBay
• Canceling a listing to sell to a buyer who became aware of the item through eBay.
• Ending a listing early to sell the item at a higher price to the winning bidder
• Offering to sell an item to a bidder in a Reserve Not Met listing without going through Second Chance Offer
• Offering to sell duplicate or additional merchandise to under-bidders without going through Second Chance Offer
• Sending unsolicited (without prior permission) commercial email offers to bidders for the same or similar products that they have bid on in the past

We need to read between the lines here a bit. If you run through the text in more detail you will notice that eBay makes a specific point of mentioning that sellers are not to use details obtained within eBay to sell any listed items outside of eBay.

So you can’t go and use the details you gather from eBay to sell the listed product outside of eBay but this is also the loophole: it doesnt actually say you can’t use this information to sell non-listed or alternative products outside of eBay.

As an eBay seller, once an item is sold, what you now have are the details of people who have already bought from you in a buyers environment. That’s the marketers dream right there and the potential is enormous.

Some brief action points to consider after a sale:

1. Send your buyers a digital thank you note (as well as a physical one when you send out your product)
2. Offer them a great bonus gift if they sign-up to your mailing list for great offers.
3. Once they sign up send through the bonus
4. Over the next 7 or so days build a healthy relationship giving away excellent products and information.
5. Sell to them again.
6. Then again.

Go the normal way and you’ll come out ok. Think outside the square and do that little extra and you’ll get your Ferrari.

I am in the process of writing my first ebook. The ebook came out of my frustration with the whole Need Money To Make Money thing. It is yet to have a name so lets call it.. Book 1. How original.

As some of you may know, in one of my earlier business ventures I spent over 50k developing a product which never took off. 2 years of hard work and frustration led to nothing and I was left demoralised. However a little later I spent $45 and $70 respectively on 2 other projects which have since proved extremely profitable. So why was this?

The problem was I was basing my work on theories developed by people who wanted you to spend a whole heap of money. The theory was that you needed money to create a product in order to make you money. Society makes you believe that this is true and this is the way you have to do things.

Worst of all, individuals now use this as an excuse not to try and get out and do something on their own. Eventually it became the excuse for everyone any anyone who wasn’t where they wanted to be financially. Now this theory has become a viral institution and infected the minds of millions world wide.

Well my aim is to get the message out there and prove that this is not true. Financial freedom does not require you to invest thousands and thousands of dollars before you get going. And I will prove it to you. It does not require you to work 18 hour days for the next 20 yrs. And I will prove it to you. It does not require you to do anything unethical and I’ll prove it to you.

So this is my little super soft pre-launch. The book isn’t released but if you want to get a FREE copy of my new ebook when it is released then please put your details below and I’ll keep you updated and make sure you know about it first.

Oh an I’ll also throw in a little present when you sign-up . To find out what it is fill the form and check your email!!

Many of you may be aware I’m quite into reading other Blogs and quite often I refer to those that I read. You may also have heard me mention Yaro Starak’s blog Entrepreneurs Journey.com.

Well Yaro just released his Membership Site Masterplan and I have got my hands on it. Put simply, its fantastic. Its very thorough and tells you pretty much everything you want to know about starting a membership site. He has been there and done that, which I believe is the key to being able to provide great value, so naturally this ebook is fantastic value.

What I can’t believe is that it’s a whopping 72 pages of Membership Site gold from the brain of one of the best, yet its absolutely FREE.

Here is a link to Membership Site Mastermind.com where you can get a free copy of this masterplan. I strongly recommend you do, if not for information about starting and growing a membership site, but for understanding more about online marketing and how to use the resources around you to promote your offering.

I mentioned in my previous post how I am able to get Google Adwords traffic for 1c per person. It’s truly a bargain in that for only $10 I can get 1000 users to my site who may benefit from my services, hopefully click an advertisement or even better, purchase a product. But is it really a bargain?

First of all, there is very little chance you can make up the advertising dollars spent by the advertising revenue on your site. To effectively get good advertising revenue, either through Google Adsense, Adbright or whatever, plenty of organic traffic is the way to go. Why? Well first of all you need to think of your site as a real business. Where advertising is your revenue model, using paid Adwords traffic to drive traffic is effectively your cost of goods sold (remember accounting 101: COGS?).  It’s your main expense. With organic traffic you don’t have that expense. (I know, not too technical here).

Most importantly however, (this is the part to really think about) Adwords traffic is traffic that came from a contextual environment. A contextual environment is your ad showing up on a relevant and contextual keyword search, another site or a blog that is in a similar niche. So the amount you pay for an ad is roughly the same amount you will receive for a click on your site, as you also run contextual ads. This means that in order for you to make a profit, or even break even, almost everybody who comes to your site must click an ad. You will need a 90-100% CTR on your site which isn’t going to happen. The only way around this is to drive traffic from probable alternatives (ie get traffic to a credit card site from a job search site) but then it will be difficult to get good conversions as your not playing the percentages. Or you can run several ad campaigns from different ad networks but then again it would kinda look like this.

But what if you sell a product? I’m still not sold on this. I honestly don’t think that Google Adwords does that great of a job to drive qualified and potential customers to your online business. I may be wrong and you may have a completely different take on this so if you do, please share. Some bloggers have their own secret tips. There are too many factors you need to overcome in order to break through to the sale. These include your anonymity, trust, competition and desire from the consumer. I can’t imagine that receiving 10,000 people from Google Adwords would compare to receiving 10,000 referred and organic traffic, either by word of mouth or through recommendations.

Genuine organic traffic is traffic that is not complicated with the earlier mentioned barriers of anonymity, trust, competition and desire. I think if your interested in running a successful online business the hardest part will be developing a following and building the genuine organic traffic.  Nothing valuable comes easily overnight, it requires you to provide value, day in day out and accept the fact that the rewards are long term. Sure you can use Google Adwords and I’m sure that you will benefit from it, but the real value comes later down the track when your effort and persistence becomes worth the effort. Work hard, don’t give up and keep at it as everything else is just a fragile quick fix.

Using Google Adwords is a fantastic way to drive traffic through effective contextual ads. Unfortunately for many industries it has become extremely expensive. We all dread that pink pastel colored warning box at the top of the screen and that classic “Bid is below first page bid estimate of A$15.65″. Who is crazy enough to pay $15.65 to get on the front page? You must have either been selling something that has a crazy conversion rate or was lulled into using Google Optimization strategies to be paying $15  a click!

(Quickly just on that, what Google’s Adwords optimizations strategy actually does is take all your money quickly and gets you 10-12 visitors for your $50bucks worth. Don’t bother with it.)

Now before I go on any further, I’m assuming you know a little bit about Google Adwords, not a lot just the basics. If you don’t there is so much info out there on it you’ll figure it out within 3 minutes. Don’t buy anything, all the info you need is free so don’t get sucked in. The best resource would be Google’s own info regarding Adwords or simply just try it yourself and dive in.
So if your in an extremely competitive market what can you do? You don’t want to be paying $10 a click do you? But you don’t want to be on the second to last page either. I personally had this problem with a games business I run. When I tried to promote free games on Google Adsense i’d have to pay at least $1.50 to be on the front page. Now don’t think that means you’ll be in a good position on the front page, we are talking $1.50 to be on the bottom of the ladder of the front page. To be at the top your probably looking at double that, probably more.

Then I discovered a way to manipulate my listing so I could get traffic for much less than that. I went down to 20c a click then to 10c. Then down to 5c. Then ultimately down to 1c! I was getting targeted traffic to my site for 1c per click! How did I do this? I skipped the search side of Adwords and focused on the content network side.

You only ever hear of 2 things when it comes to Google advertising, Adsense and Adwords. Many people fail to understand that they actually go hand in hand. Too many online marketers separate the two and use Adwords in their search marketing and put Adsense on their site to generate revenue. Adsense is nothing more than other people’s Adwords campaigns that have come up in the content network. Let’s take the facts. Adsense revenues on average are steadily declining. 4 – 5 yrs ago Adsense clicks were much more valuable and it was not uncommon to see sites getting 30+ dollars eCPM (effective cost per thousand – ie how much money you’ll probably make per thousand impressions). Today, with the exception of some competitive niches, such a figure is unheard of. What does this mean? It means the costs to get in other people’s Adsense ads, ie the content network, is now much cheaper. People are making less money through Adsense which boils down to the ads on their content pages costing less. This is in comparison with search engine marketing which is now more expensive for good keywords.

Still a bit sceptical? Well I have taken a snapshot of my Adwords account for an online gaming site I was promoting. Check it out:

Adwords Snapshot

The first white row from the top shows stats from the search network. The column under show the stats from the content network placements. The difference is extraordinary. Click through rates arn’t good either way but that’s not the point, with the amount of inventory you can receive using the content network, you’ll get the traffic. Looking at the stats again, I paid on average 28c per click on the search network and 1c per click on the content network. I got over 24,500 people for $278 using the content network. To get this from the search network I calculated that I would need to pay almost $7000!! I don’t know about you but that’s a serious bargain!

How do I get on the content network? Easy. All you need to do go to “Edit Campaign Settings” in your campaign summary page and make sure that the content network is clicked in the Networks and biddings section. Here you can also choose to disable search marketing which will make Google focus on delivering your ads in the content network. Now you should be placed in the content network.

Even better, there are not even more advanced options where you can tell Google what sites you want to be displayed on. This is excellent as you can simply find the site’s that your target market most likely visits and ask for your ads to be shown on them. This is great for slightly off-topic ads such running a promotion for an online business opportunity and putting it on job search site. This is really easy to do as well (as with most things with Google!). Click on the campaign summary and then click on the ‘ad-group’ you have created. You will see four tabs on the right hand side of the screen. These say Summary, Keywords, Placements and Ad Variations. Now click on the ‘Placements’ tab and there should be a button that says “Find and Add Placements”. Click this then I would recommend you choose the “Describe Topics” tool and do a search for your desired target topic. Then select the sites you want to have in advertise in! You will need to go back and edit your campaign settings (previous paragraph) so you can change the content network targeting to “Relevant pages only on the placements I target”. And that’s it.

Sounds a little long winded when you write out the steps, but it’s dead easy. Hopefully now you will be able to work your way around those expensive keywords and yet still place your ads in a contextual environment. The key is to test it out. Don’t go straight down to 1c. Try 20c, then 10c and so on until you reach a point where you are paying the least you can before your traffic starts dropping off. I was lucky to go down to 1c but your niche may be different. Of course by using the content network you may not have the direct targeting of certain keywords but then again, who has that budget?