|
Isn't it time you made the income you've
always dreamed of?
Of course it is! And here's how: Long-Time
Internet Marketing Guru Jim Daniels (the man who
helped Bogdan Fiedur, the owner of Adlandpro get
his start early in his online business and earn
nearly 3 million dollars!) has just released his
most powerful CD System yet which will give you
the ultimate edge in the world of Internet
Marketing.
As a newsletter subscriber, you can get this
incredible CD System through this special offer
for $30.00 less than everyone else would
pay.
Click Here To
Claim Your Discount! |
How To Actually "Make Money" In Internet
Marketing ©2005 by
Willie Crawford
I did a survey this week while applying to a
program sponsored
by Jay Abraham. The very detailed
survey/questionnaire got me to
thinking more about my business model. It's
changed over the
years as on-line and email marketing have
changed.
Since I test constantly, and adjust to my test
results, I
thought I'd share parts of my business model...
but not my
numbers... with you ;-) Maybe it will give you
some ideas you
can use.
Like many "Internet marketers" I believe that
the money is
in the list. The only problem is that it's
getting harder and
harder to maintain contact with that list.
Still, I publish
a number of ezines and courses as a way of
building relationships
with my lists.
When I first started publishing in 1997, it was
fairly easy
to get new subscribers just by asking them to
join your list.
There are so many lists today... many of them
nothing more
than advertising... that you have to really sell
people on
the "value" of your list. That's the biggest
change I've
noticed for people just starting to build a
list.
Over the years, I went from leading with my free
ezine, to
leading with my free Internet marketing course.
This is a
20-lesson course, offered via email from my
homepage at
http://williecrawford.com/ I lead with the
course because it
has a higher perceived value and actually sells
many people
on joining my ezine list later. They're prompted
in the
lessons to sign up for the ezine :-)
I'll let you in on a secret here. About 2 years
ago, one of
my mentors suggested that not everyone wanted to
wait 10 weeks
to get all of the lessons in my course. He
suggested also
offering the course in ebook format, and
charging a nominal
fee. I implement that... and went one better,
offering the
deluxe and super-deluxe versions of the course
(on CD and in
print format). Naturally, I piled on a few
bonuses with the
upgrades. That worked great creating a revenue
stream from
something I had previously been GIVING away.
Click Here to Start.
I still offer the free, email version of the course, but a
major percentage go for the upgrade. That has a secondary
benefit of not only providing name and email address but full
contact information on those clients since that's required
to verify the credit card purchase.
You can study how I implemented using a course as a list-building
tool, and lead generator, at
http://williecrawford.com/
If you're familiar with the funnel system of marketing, you
understand that you use lots of different tools to attract
new prospects. Then over time, you develop a relationship
with them. They gradually go from prospects, to subscribers,
to customers/clients. Then, theoretically you just offer your
clients the products and services they want and they'll buy
from you forever. It's a little more complicated than that
but not too much more.
Let me share with you several more pieces of my funnel system:
Given the challenges of getting email through, I've now gone
to offering podcasts. With podcasts, your clients subscribe
to an RSS feed, and software such as iPodder downloads your
audio message to their computer or listening device. Tools
such as iPodder check for updates at a specified interval,
download the updates, and your subscribers listen to the
recorded broadcasts at their convenience.
I started out offering "Premium Podcasts." These are podcasts
that contain such useful information that subscribers will
actually pay you to listen to them. This takes more work
that just putting out a regular podcast since you really do
have to work at providing tremendous value, or you lose
your subscribers very quickly.
I use an old marketing tool (the free sample) to get
new subscribers to my paid podcasts. They get the first
2 weeks free. In that time I need to deliver enough value
that they'll want to stay subscribed. After the two week
period, I charge only $10 per month for the subscription.
The price is low enough that I should have a very high
retention rate. I've not been doing this long enough to
know what that rate will be long-term.
BEAT the Cold Winter of 2007 ARIZONA'S NEWEST WONDER
Kartchner Caverns State Park opened in 1999. This stunning limestone cave system is one of the top in the world. Visit Sunny Southwest this cold winter |
If you'd like to check out how I've
implemented my
premium podcasting model, you can check it out
at:
http://williecrawford.com/premium-podcast.html
This very
simple webpage shows you how I've set it up.
If you'd like to know more about the premium
podcasting
service I use to run the whole thing, check out:
http://williecrawford.com/profitable-podcasting.html
If you aren't listening to podcasts yet, you're
missing a
lot of good stuff. You can download tons of
recorded
broadcasts and then listen to the MP3 at your
convenience.
I mentioned iPodder earlier because it's the
free software
that I downloaded and installed on my laptop. It
works
beautifully. You can grab it at:
http://ipodder.sourceforge.net
A big part of my business model is setting up
things that
offer recurring income. That way, you do the
work once
and get paid for a long time. That's the idea
behind the
premium podcasting service... although I do have
to
continuously create new recordings. However, I
don't need
to constantly chase after new customers. The
service that
I use will actually drive customers to me. Word
of mouth
also generates a lot of new customers.
Other low-cost tools I use to build
relationships with
my customers include my discussion board, and my
blogs.
The blogs are an excellent way to get
information out without
having to contend with email. The blog posts are
syndicated
as RSS feeds. Lots of visitors have subscribed
to my RSS
feed. Just as important, lots of websites have
subscribed
to my RSS feeds and integrated my content right
into their
websites. This is a great way of getting new
customers by
having other webmasters indirectly endorse you.
If you'd like
to see how I've implemented my blogs, you can
check out the
"Internet marketing" one at
http://williecrawford.com/blog/
BEAT the Cold Winter of 2007 ARIZONA'S NEWEST WONDER
Kartchner Caverns State Park opened in 1999. This stunning limestone cave system is one of the top in the world. Visit Sunny Southwest this cold winter |
While we're on getting endorsements from
others, writing
articles and allowing them to be published on
others
websites, in their ezines, and in their ebooks
works great
at attracting customers. Getting your articles
on others
websites is also a GREAT way to get one-way
links pointing
to your website. That's why I've written over
350 articles
over the years. They can be as simple as this
one, which
will undoubtedly appear on hundreds of websites
eventually.
Back to the recurring income... another proven
part of my
model is a membership site. Membership sites can
be low
maintenance, and produce tremendous customer
loyalty. Mine is
fairly simple. It's a collection of software,
ebooks, and
MP3 recordings relevant to internet marketing.
Many of the
recordings and ebooks are one of a kind, and
that's my
edge over other membership sites. That's the
secret... the
easiest way to distinguish your membership site
is to make
it unique. The easiest way to do that is to
produce, or have
produced, your own unique content.
So there's a quick "down and dirty" on the
revenue model
that has proven to work for me. On the backend I
do upsell
from inexpensive ebooks, to course, to video
products, to
live seminars, to personal coaching and
consulting. It's
really fairly simple.
I'll end by pointing out that one success factor
most
struggling Internet marketers seem to miss is
that
exclusivity or uniqueness is often what makes an
item sell.
Even if you're marketing something sold by tens
of thousands
of others, find a way to make it unique and
you'll do well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Willie Crawford is a veteran Internet marketer
who's been
running successful online businesses since 1996. You
can learn from Willie in-person at numerous upcoming
seminars in London, New York, Miami, Denver, Orlando,
Atlanta, and Phoenix. Much of Willie's schedule is posted
at:
http://internetmarketingseminarschedule.com/
|
|
Adlandpro
Toolbar gives you instant access to your
Free Email Account, Free Website, submission to
over 8,900 sites, learning tools, free discussion
list on marketing and promotion with 26,000
subscribers, Free 5 day Website Success course by
email, plus instant search. Click
Here. |
|