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issue #8 - April 2004 - Creating Multiple Income Streams, Co-Registration and the SEO Basics
Dear Colleague,
A great number of business opportunity seekers (marketing newbies) think that in order to create multiple streams of income they have to join a bunch of biz-opps and promote them to other biz-opp seekers. When I started in my online business venture two years ago I´ve been in the same situation, just didn´t know it better. But soon I noticed that I´d completely lose my focus and also waste my money. Fortunately I´ve been strong enough to learn from my mistakes and studied the right way to do business online in the "school of hard knox" (so they call it), reading books like Ken Evoy´s "Affiliate Master Course", a couple of free ecourses, weeding through the information jungle in dozens of marketing newsletters and of course by trying out the techniques I´ve learned. Let me give you 3 concepts of creating multiple streams of income: 1) Create one website / community around a topic you love and in which you have a certain experience, providing valuable content to your visitors / readers. 2) Have a product of your own (created by yourself or a product with resell rights) and add more income streams through back-end sales. 3) Create several affiliate web sites, designed to rank well in the search engines. Today we´re going to have a closer look at choice #1, see how it works in theory and then I´ll give you a few examples. First of all, you need to do a little brainstorm and write down topics in which you have at least a little bit of experience and that you love to write / talk about and share your knowledge. Write down everything, even if you think it´s impossible to monetize on a certain topic - you´ll soon find out that you can make money from almost everything. What you want to do is to create a theme based web site to provide people with valuable information and help around that certain topic. When you provide quality content that your visitors love and once your site becomes popular, then you´ll have several options to make money from it: - selling advertising space on your web pages - displaying Google ads - looking for merchants who are selling complementary products and services through an affiliate program and link to them from your web site with your affiliate link. In addition to that you should try to build a community (newsletter / ezine) with those people interested in your topic. This way you´ll be able stay in contact with them, build a good relationship and also recommend certain products that will earn you commissions again and again. It can be just a simple email newsletter or you might also offer free access to restricted areas of your web site in exchange for their contact details. How about a forum ? Selling advertising in your newsletter is a further way to make some extra money. Now - these are only the basic theories of how it works and before you jump into something you´ll have to find out if there really is a market for what you want to share with the world. We are going to have a closer look at how you can conduct a market research in the next newsletter (in two weeks) when we´ll also be discussing choice #2 of creating multiple streams of income. Contact me if you want to share your business ideas with me and see if there is a market for them. Here are two real life examples of how this concept works: #1: TheJungleMarketer.com You are part of a community - the readership of my newsletter. I built my site around the topic web site promotion and internet marketing, targeted to online marketers, web site owners, webmasters and also business opportunity seekers. It´s a very popular topic but also very competitive. I wouldn´t recommend you start a marketing site / newsletter if you haven´t been in this business for at least one year, yet. What I´m doing is sharing all my knowledge about internet marketing and web site promotion with You. I write reviews of eBooks and software tools in order to help You make a better buying decision when you are looking for these products. Note that I´m not raving about everything just to try to make you buy. There are of course also things I don´t recommend at all (like Mr. FreeAdGuru´s book). At the end of every review there´s either a recommendation or not for the product and usually my affiliate link to the sales page. This way I´m earning commissions from several affiliate programs (multiple streams of income) without having to actively promote each product. You also notice that there are Google Ads in the right column of almost every page. So if there´s something of interest to my visitors, they click on the ads and I get a share of the click-charge. Another way for making a few bucks from a web site. Although I don´t send advertising in my newsletter, there are always recommendations for certain useful products that help me to improve and facilitate my business and could as well be useful for you. Again - when you decide to use one of those tools, I earn a commission (hope that doesn´t make you feel bad). #2: Mark Liron´s updatexp.com http://www.updatexp.com Look at this site and see how Mark found a niche and created a community of interested people around his chosen theme. On the home page alone you´ll find several recommendations for related products and if you browse through the articles you´ll find some more. That´s how it works: By sharing valuable information about your chosen topic with your subscribers you´ll build a good relationship with them and in return they trust you and buy the products / services you recommend. 2. The power of co-registration As we have discussed in the previous article, one way of building a profitable online business with multiple streams of income is to create a community like a newsletter. Obviously you must get some readers or you won´t be able to profit from your newsletter. It ain´t always easy to build a decent size of an opt-in email list, especially when you are just starting out and are on a low budget. And it can be frustrating to stick to editing and sending out the newsletter on a regular basis when you have only a few dozen of readers. Of course, the subscribers that came to your site, liked what they saw and finally signed up for your newsletter are the most responsive ones. But there are other effective ways to quickly grow your list(s) like Co-Registration: What is a Co-Registration list builder and how it works? Have you ever come across a web site that has an ad-box on it which is filled with a dozen of newsletter descriptions or was there an exit pop-up that asked you to subscribe to several newsletters ? In the ad or pop-up you see a couple of newsletter descriptions and a check-box next to each one. You can select as many as you want, enter your contact information once and you´ll be automatically subscribed to all newsletters you´ve selected. That´s co-registration. A honest co-registration service has a big network of partner sites which display the ads - including your newsletter description - and rewards the web site owners with a share of the amount you paid the co-reg service for each subscriber. While this sounds pretty good in theory, I have some concerns about Co-Registration services and I want you to be careful when you use such kind of service. 1) responsiveness: In order to create as much subscribers as possible, some of these services use enticements like the chance for winning a new sports car or cash prices. This can dramatically lower the responsiveness of your list and finally your profits. 2) spam complaints: Everybody can just use other people´s email addresses and sign them up for the newsletters, trying to get the ezine owners into trouble. Although you have proof of subscription and are legally safe, you still can get nasty spam complaints and even get falsely accused for spamming. The only way around is to use only co-reg services that offer double opt-in subscribers. 3) unethical services: There are those services which claim to deliver high quality subscribers but then resell you old lists which they´ve got from somewhere else. Once I´ve seen someone selling biz-opp leads dirt cheap. As there were also included the mailing addresses, phone numbers and the URLs where these people gave their contact, I´ve decided to take a look at it. What I found is that many of them just exchanged their contact details for free toilet paper, free condoms, shopping coupons and free games. Biz-opp leads ? Sure, you are legally on the safe side, because those people agreed that their contact may be shared, but did they really read the fine print ? What kind of lists do well with Co-Registration ? If you have chosen a topic for your newsletter which has a broad interest like health, fitness, dieting, saving money, home business, etc... then you can do pretty well with a co-reg service. I´ve just tested a few of them for my newsletter and found that the click-through rates (CTR) are between 8-15 %. That´s industry standard and not bad for co-reg generated subscribers. What´s more important is to find out how much is a subscriber worth over a certain period of time. This depends on factors that only you control and you´ll have to simply test it. You can have 1000 subscribers for 150-200 Dollars. So if you get an average 10% CTR and send out one mailing per week, then you could get about 400 visitors to your web site or affiliate links. And if only 10 of them purchase a product or service that earns you 25$ in commissions then you´d already be in profit. But that´s really something you´ve got to test by yourself. Here are three services which are safe to use and I´ve also seen other big names and respected marketers like Terry Dean, Diane Hughes, Len Thurmond and others (oh - me too, of course) using these services. Glen Hopkins´ Listopt.com Subscribers start from 10 cents, but I would only take the double opt-in subscribers which you can get for 15 Cents each. Glen offers a free 3 day trial. You can block certain domains like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, .. but it will cost you an extra 3 cent per subscriber for every blocked domain. Marty Foley´s LeadFactory.com Maybe one of the best lead services out there, although Marty currently offers only single opt-in subscribers. But somehow he manages to keep the number of Yahoo and Hotmail addresses pretty low and the subscribers are usually more responsive than from other services. Seems he doesn´t offer any incentives / prices for subscribing, so people just opt-in when they like the newsletter description. WorldWideLists.com Another Co-Registration service which offers single, double and even triple opt-in subscribers and a wide range of additional targetting options (for Pro-users only). You should at least use double opt-in with this service. Some cautions you should take when using co-registration services. With the exception of Marty Foley´s leadfactory, I would only purchase double opt-in subscribers in order to protect yourself from fake subscriptions (Marty´s service seems to use a sophisticated system to validate all subscriptions and filter out bogus subscriptions). Send a welcome message to all new subscribers reminding them that they´ve requested a subscription for your newsletter and add all the details (name, email, IP address, subscription date) at the bottom of the mail. Stay in compliance with the laws when sending commercial emails => read more about the can spam act. 3. More ways to build your opt-in list(s) There are dozens of ways how to get people subscribe to your newsletter. As I told you already, the most responsive subscribers are usually those who visit your site, like the information presented there and decide to give you their contact information. So the task is now to get those people visiting your site, right ? You can get a couple of ideas by reading TheOptInStrategy, a free ebook that you can download from the Vault (see email for password). Other good resources for more tips are: Paul Myers´ Amazing List Machine Steven Quartermaine´s List Builder Magic Alex Sampson´s Explosive Listbuilding You should also read two of TheJungleMarketer´s past issues that will show you how to use articles to get visitors to your site and build your list. October 2003 November 2003 4. Search Engine Optimization - the Basics Ok - I must admit: I´m not an seo expert (yet). My first attempt to win the search engine positioning game started in November 2003, when I learned the process from two people, whose newsletters I highly recommend: Dr. Andrew Williams at http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com Sumantra Roy, SEO expert and president of http://www.1stsearchranking.com/newsletter.htm I´ve posted all lessons of Sumantra´s free seo e-course here, so rather than regurgitating all that information here, you should instead browse through the lessons and study the basics given there. I was pretty impressed how fast my site went to #1 for the test phrase "internet marketing ezine" (within 5 weeks). While it surely isn´t a very competitive phrase, it´s proof enough that the techniques outlined in both courses work. Currently I´m trying to climb up the ranking latter for terms like "web page promotion" and "economical search engine optimization" which are more competitive (not mainly because of the number of search results but more because I´m competing with other webmasters who know the game, too) and therefore harder to achieve a top 3 position. Study the basics now - we´re going to build on them in the coming newsletters. Remember that you can contact me at any time with your questions: simply send me an email. I´d love to hear from you. Talk to you again in two weeks. Sincerely Yours,  Guido W. Stiehle TheJungleMarketer P.S.: If you liked this newsletter, please tell your friends about it. A honest testimonial would also be very appreciated. Disclaimer I accept no responsibility whatsoever for the content, profitability or legality of any published articles or advertisements contained within articles published on my web pages. And, although all of the guest articles have been selected for
their content, the publishing of such articles on this website
does NOT constitute a recommendation of the products or services
mentioned or advertised within those articles. If you found some information to be out-of-date, please contact
me and let me know it. Sincerely Yours, |
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