Hi - I’m back again with the latest extract from my brand new product “The Proven Internet Profit System” which is due for release in the next 7 days (and if you want to be one of the first to know when it’s released - make sure that you use the sign up box on the top right hand side of the blog).

This weeks exclusive extract asks the question:

“Why bother with follow up emails at all?”

There is an oft-quoted statistic that it takes a prospect at least 7 contacts with you to become a customer.

So the bottom line is that if they only see your product and sales letter once the chances are that they won’t buy from you.

But if you can communicate on multiple occasions and keep sending them back to your website to see your sales letter then you have a much better chance of selling to them.

So how you do this is by capturing their email address and name on your website so that you have their permission (no SPAMMERS here please!) and details to keep contacting them.

Now there are various ways of doing this which I mention in more detail in Chapter 8.

But for the purposes of your understanding please go to www.ebookcashsecrets.com which is one of my affiliate sites.

There is a grey “hover-over box” on the page which asks for people’s details in exchange for a free internet marketing course.

Once they sign up … BANG they are in my auto responder and get email messages every other day from me which give them great free information and give them a link to send them back to the website.

Beyond this one product people are also now on my email list for as long as they choose to be.

So I can send them information on my new blog posts, promotional offers, I can send them surveys (so I can understand better what they are looking for), a newsletter and the list is endless.

All of these things help me build a relationship with my prospects and customers and in the long term they get lots of great free valuable information and I increase my sales considerably - a definite Win-Win situation!

But here’s the big note of caution – you need to be careful with email as if you send untargeted, poorly written or overly promotional email to your list they will soon get fed up with you and unsubscribe from your list.

That’s all for this weeks tip.

Happy marketing

John Hillage

In my new product “The Proven Internet Profit System” (due for release in the next 2 weeks) I teach all about using Google Adwords for maximum profit.

But I also reveal my five favorite other traffic methods that I will outline below:

So here’s what I use……..

1. Other pay per click programs namely Yahoo and MSN …

For Yahoo go to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/index.php?&abr=2022403519 and for MSN go to https://adcenter.microsoft.com/

They are similar to Adwords in their basic concept but the set up can take a little learning - but both have good support and tutorials for you to learn this stuff pretty easily

They don’t get anywhere near as much traffic as Google but are the “best of the rest” in my opinion.

A quick and simple way to use them is just take your top 5 keywords and throw them into Yahoo and MSN campaigns.

Don’t worry so much about your big keyword lists as the relatively low number of clicks you will get on them means that often they are likely to be more hassle to set up than they are worth with Yahoo and MSN.

Remember you are looking for the “best bang for your buck” when looking at traffic sources - not to do all 77 perfectly; there simply isn’t time in the day!

2. Articles

Articles are a great way of establishing credibility in a niche and driving traffic for no money to your site (notice I don’t say free as articles cost you time to write and post so very clearly not FREE traffic).

You should write articles about 600-800 words long with the following 3 step formula:

• Tell them what the articles about
• Give Them The Content
• Tell Them What You Just Told Them

And don’t forget to have your web address in the resource box as that’s how you get “paid” for writing the article.

You may have heard of bum marketing which is a way of a writing articles to hopefully get on to the front page of Google for your keyword or phrase and is very clever.

Go to www.BumMarketingMethod.com to get a great free course on using this.

Some of the best sites to submit articles to are:

www.GoArticles.com

www.ArticleAlley.com

www.ArticlesBase.com

www.ArticlesFactory.com

www.EzineArticles.com

www.IdeaMarketers.com

www.SearchWarp.com

www.Squidoo.com

You can do this manually OK but there is a great tool that I highly recommend called http://www.submityourarticle.com/

This will automatically post your articles to all the top directory sites on the web – it does up to 8 per month - and if you can post that many articles per month you will be doing very well.

3. Forum Marketing

This is not a million miles from article marketing but a lot quicker -

Go to popular forums in your niche and submit helpful answers and interesting questions (but don’t spam).

Make sure the sites allow you to put your web address in the signature box when you post - otherwise it’s a wasted effort.

People who like your answers may well check your site out - giving you more no cost traffic.

But be disciplined and don’t spend 3 hours reading posts and call it work!!

4. Joint Ventures

This is a great and very lucrative way of getting traffic.

Find other webmasters in your niche who have lists of subscribers and get them to promote your product as a JV partner.

Contact them by email first - explaining the great benefits of your product to their list and also the healthy commission they will make.

If they don’t reply to email get on the phone and speak to them.

My best Joint Venture took about 2 months to set up (with emails and phone calls just to get them to send 1 little email that I pre-wrote for them!)

But when it converted to literally hundreds of sales and new subscribers I was double pleased I made the effort.

And that’s another great tip - provide JV partners with pre-written emails to save them time and make them more likely to say “yes”.

Just Google on your various keywords to find the top websites then list their details off methodically and make contact - it’s that simple!

5. Blogging

Having your own blog is a great way to drive traffic and keep your prospects interested.

You can put tips, ideas, articles (that you have already written!) on there and tell people to go take a look and add their comments.

Pretty soon you can get quite a community feel going on there which ultimately means loyalty to you (and $$’s in your pocket when it comes to selling product).

There are clever but simple things you can do like blogging and pinging, “digging” and all sorts to get your blog well-linked and all over the blog.

I learnt a lot of this recently from the excellent free eBook “Become a Wordpress Guru in 24 Hours” by Tony Shepherd which you can get at:

http://www.jobhaters.com/wpg/

Happy marketing

John Hillage

Hi all and welcome to this week’s blog post.

I’m just getting ready to launch my brand new system in the very near future that will teach you every step that you need to take to run your own profitable online business from A-Z.

So over the next few weeks I will be posting just a few of the subjects that are covered in my system to give you a feel for what it is all about.

This week I will reveal the 3 ways to create an Ebook:

Option 1 Outsource

If you want someone else to write go to www.Elance.com or www.Guru.com and post for someone to write it for you.

I will add below an example of the type of post I made for a recent book that got me loads of great responses, so use this as a bench mark:

Project Description for Report related to X

Description: I need a writer to write a report for me the topic of X that consists of 20000 words (not including titles, headers or anything that is not pure content). This will involve working knowledge of X so ideally suit X, Y and Z individuals with experience in this area. Please use Private Message Board for further info.
Thanks for reading my post.

Keep it this brief and give more details on the private message board - otherwise any snooping marketer can go in and read your post and try to copy your product idea.

Now one thing you may wonder is how big should your eBook be …

Well different people will tell you all kinds of things but in non-internet marketing niches I feel that there needs to be a lot of content - to give people a sense of buying something “valuable” (which will greatly reduce any refund requests too).

I tend to think that an eBook should be a minimum of 100 pages and up to about 250 pages in a niche market.

And pages in an eBook are always double spaced - so in “real world” pages that is 50-125 pages of a Word Document.

In certain niches like internet marketing, investing etc. you can get away with a lot less.

For example some super-duper guaranteed formula to double your returns on Forex trading might only be 2 or 3 pages but sell for $197.

This is because the information can be seen as so valuable (e.g. it will make you $3000 in the first month of using it) that people are happy to pay $197 for such a tiny document.

Now who wouldn’t be prepared to pay $197 to make $3000?

But in most niche markets like model airplanes, wine collectors, yoga enthusiasts it is not so easy to quantify the information in pure finance terms; so you need much more content and perceived value.

So working on the above principles I usually look to have about 20000 words and this gives you a real good meaty eBook.

So that’s a quick blueprint of paying someone else to do it.

Option 2 Joint Venture with an expert in the field

I did this with an expert for my most successful eBook to date.

She wrote the ebook and I took care of the rest - the formatting of the book, building the website and the marketing - and we split the profits 50-50.

This is a great way to go if you are on a low budget as it costs nothing to do and splits the tasks down.

In addition you get to concentrate on honing your skills in the most profitable area which is the actual marketing of the product not the creation of the product.

That is really important learning point for you to remember - the product itself will not make you rich.

It is the skills you develop in promoting that product (through writing effective sales copy, sending emails, mastering ppc, writing great promotional articles etc.) that bring in the cash.

Option 3 Write it yourself

This is the least favoured option as it takes a long time to do.

And when you have finally completed the book you then have to start doing all the marketing too - so it can take some time to get your product out into the marketplace.

The longer it takes, the more frustrating it gets and the less likely it is that the product will ever be successfully created and marketed and make you a profit.

If you are serious about writing your own product there is one really great and low cost eBook that you should consider getting yourself that will wipe weeks or months off the time that it takes to do it:

http://www.proveninternetprofit.com/7dayebook.html

So take your pick and get your eBook created as quickly as possible, so that you can then get to the marketing of it.

Happy Marketing

John Hillage

Before I jump right into this week’s online business tip about Google I have two words for you …

GLOBAL WARMING!

Seriously what else could be responsible for the absolute freakish weather last Sunday on the South Coast of England?

Thick snow on an April morning (the like of which I have NEVER seen in 10 years of living down here) that was almost completely gone by lunch time due to the excessive sun and heat that followed!

Strange stuff indeed, but possibly not as strange as one amazing “letter to the editor” in my local paper (The Portsmouth News) about global warming.

This obviously well-read respondent wrote in to say that he didn’t recycle as he felt that global warming was pretty much made up and asked the editor the following highly sophisticated question:

“how can me sorting my old tins and newspapers out possibly stop a polar bear from drowning?”

Well with people like that on the earth … quite frankly I’m scared!

Anyway global politics over … on to Google.

As you may well be aware Google has just begun to enforce its latest changes to Adwords Policy namely that:

“Display URLs for new ads will be required to match their Destination/landing page URLs, without exception.”

If this may affect you I would check out the full details at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=91451&hl=en_GB

and if not then I wouldn’t worry about it!

But my point is not this individual issue but the tendency that Google has to be always updating its rules and the impact that this can have on your business.

Now at the start of April I am about 95% sure that some of my competitors in a particular niche that I work in were breaking these rules; as the number of competing ads in my niche almost halved on Google over night.

This meant some great returns for me in the short term but now these ads are coming back so it’s more like business as usual.

But Google can do this and disable your business for a few days or maybe for good if it brings in new changes that your site does not comply with.

And the tough thing is Google always make it so darned hard to ever know what it wants anyway!

So if all your eggs are in the Google Adwords basket you could be in trouble.

To ensure that Google doesn’t come along and wipe all your income in the flick of a keyboard you need to diversify and not be reliant on just 1 traffic stream.

Since suffering the first “Google Slap” one of my main goals has to been to widen my traffic sources much more and I am doing this every week.

I have used other ppc search engines (Yahoo and MSN), blogging and articles in the main.

And I am now experimenting more with social networking sites and forum marketing.

Because the more different streams of traffic you have the safer you are, and the more profitable you’ll be.

I recently invested in a great e-book entitled Free Traffic Voodoo by one of my favourite “underground marketers” from Greece called George Katsoudas.

George teaches you how to get loads of free traffic with some very crafty techniques.

I’ve written a brief review of this e-book which you can read at http://johnhillage.com/product-reviews/free-traffic-voodoo-by-george-katsoudas/

Check out if you’re interested and remember that whatever you do; it’s essential for you to start working on new traffic sources today.

Happy Marketing …

John Hillage

I went swimming this Monday as I am desperately trying to win a bet with my wife.

We are both trying to lose 14 lbs in a month and the winner gets … well I’m not sure really maybe bragging rights or a years supply of cakes or something?!

Maybe we should discuss this a bit more!

Anyway as I was walking to the pool I was suddenly engrossed in thinking “what the heck should I write about in this week’s blog post”.

I was getting quite into my thoughts and trying to wrack my brains.

Then it literally him me in the face …

The pavement that is!

I got myself so engrossed in my thoughts that I tied my bike up to a lamp post, walked about a yard forwards and fell flat on my face over a metal knee high boundary fence … crrrrunch!

What an absolute donkey I felt … and to make matters worse 2 other people witnessed the whole scene!

Oddly though they neither laughed or came to my aid, but just carried on walking.

I guess us British folk just don’t like any fuss and to be honest I was bloody glad too!

Anyway I took my crimson face into the pool and then whilst doing a few lengths I got to thinking of a dream I had the previous night …

This involved me teaching my old MLM mentor and lots of other mad MLM junkies how to market using email.

Now I did a catalogue MLM scheme called Kleeneze that was a ton of hard work and made me virtually nothing in 12 months!

It was the biggest “Rah-Rah” hyped-up nonsense you have seen where 95% of the people seemed to make nothing and grafted like hell!

What a waste of time and energy!

But I do have to say I’ve never been slimmer than that time - running around with catalogues and delivering household essentials like washing up brushes and tea towels with “funny” slogans on!

But the dream made a really good point … that there are probably tons of local businesses that could hugely benefit from learning the basics of email marketing, blogging, online surveys etc.

And I am sure that some of them would pay handsomely for the privilege.

So I plan to put up a site some time in the near future targeted at local businesses in my area and run some traffic there via some local newspaper ads.

I’ll probably give away a free report “20 ways to use the internet to boost your business” or something of that nature in exchange for their contact details.

And I will have my contact details in the report to encourage them to get in touch for a free consultation.

I really think this could do well and am sure that if you’ve been around the basics of online marketing for more than 10 minutes you’ll know about 99.9% more than most local businesses about marketing on the web.

Could you set yourself up as a local expert and sell your expertise in blogging, email marketing, pay per click traffic and the like?

I bet you could if you gave it a go.

Think about it …

This could be a great little stream of business to go alongside your other online ventures.

It’s always good to have a few streams of income … just in case one dries up for a while.

Food for thought I hope …. Until next time …

Happy Marketing …

John Hillage