Martin Goulding – Share my Internet Marketing & Passive Income Journey

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If you hate marketing, it’s going to be very difficult to have a successful business! If you believe that marketing means talking to people you don’t know, trying to convince them that they need what you are selling… well, marketing will be quite a challenge.

So, do you give up marketing? Not if you want to have a successful business! What you need to do is to give up your old beliefs and mindset about marketing and adopt new beliefs and a new approach.

Start with redefining what marketing is. Marketing is providing information to allow others to make a decision on a product or service.

Your mindset and attitude are what are going to make your marketing efforts successful. Approach your marketing with the idea that you want to help people and provide value and solve problems. You have something to GIVE. So come from a place of giving, rather than a place of asking. Come from a place of genuine interest and caring about the people you are connecting with.

After you have established rapport with your prospects, then you might tell them about the benefits of your product or service—NOT the features, but the benefits. How will this benefit THEM? How will it solve their problem?

Your goal should be connecting with people. Successful business comes from successful relationships or connections. In order to connect successfully, you need to be genuine and real—you need to be yourself. People are automatically attracted to people who are comfortable with themselves. When you learn to come from a genuine place of wanting to help others, your marketing efforts will be successful.

So, your biggest challenge in marketing is going to be being comfortable with yourself and believing in yourself. The actual mechanical skills you need to learn in order to do the marketing is secondary. Successful marketing is not just mechanical or technical skills, it comes from your attitude and approach.

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My Top 7 Free Methods to Get Traffic to Your Site

No matter what you sell online you can be sure that you will need traffic! With the search engines changing the rules all the time and Pay Per Click being costly unless you know what you are doing people want FREE methods of getting traffic to their websites and capture pages. Here are my top 7 ways of getting some quality traffic for FREE.

 

 

 

1. Social Networks.

They are free to join and easy to find people in the niche you are promoting in, I prefer twitter for this as there are many websites to help automate the experience. There are websites for automatically following people that tweet about the keywords you would be looking for, my personal preference is TweetSpinner.com You don’t have to be sat at Twitter all day long posting out your links as there are also websites that allow you schedule tweets, spending half an hour in the morning is all it needs to set up some schedule tweets throughout the day, check out Socialoomph.com If you’re followers are targeted based on keywords then the more followers you have the more potential people will see your tweets. Just don’t spam, people want helpful information and quotes etc as well as a link to your site every now and again.

2. Forums.

Forums are a great untapped resource for traffic. Check the rules on the site prior to posting but usually you are allowed a bio box with a link or two. These get automatically placed at the bottom of each and every post you write. Don’t put your links blatantly in the posts (this is usually against the forum rules anyway and will get you kicked off the forum) Just post helpful information and respond to other peoples questions. If you help someone they are likely to check out your links and bio box. You will get the instant response from the person you helped plus remember forum content stays around for years so there is a lot of people that could see your posts. There is usually a forum in every imaginable niche so whatever you promote have a look.

3. Blogging.

Blogging is great as the search engines love blog posts so they rank highly. You may have noticed when ever you search for anything online there is usually someones blog post that appears high up in the rankings. If you use blog software such as WordPress these usually “ping” the search engines when you create a new blog post. Pinging is letting the search engines know you have updated your blog. If you don’t use WordPress or are unsure if your blog “pings” the search engines then try a website called pingomatic.com it will ping several search engines for you.

4. Video Marketing.

YouTube is very big now and many people are using this to promote their business. When you upload a video you can assign it key words, you can place these videos on your sites too. Viral is best though! How many times have you received a funny video on you tube and forwarded it on to 20 people, no doubt 20 of their friends forwarded it on to 20 of their friends too so you can see how quickly it can spread. If the video has a link to your site on it then that could create you a lot of traffic.

5. Article Marketing.

OK I admit I’m writing this article not only to help you out but also because I know if you do find it useful there is a good chance you’ll click my links and find out more FREE tips on online marketing. Again articles are liked by the search engines so write an article about what you promote and that’s another way to get traffic. Again articles are around for a long time so can be seen by many.

6. Responses (Blog and Article)

If you read a blog post or article you like and it relates to what you market in leave a comment on it. Most blog and article responses will ask for your website. It’s just another place for your link to be seen and the more links available to be seen means more traffic.

7. Free Classifieds

Yes these do exist, funded by the paid adverts on the websites these are a great way to get targeted traffic, there are many so search in Google but my recommendation would be Phinditt.com or VivaStreet.co.uk Choose the area you wish the advert to be seen, select a category and section for your advert then come up with a great headline that will inspire people to check out your ad. I would recommend putting a picture in the advert, people are more tempted to open an advert with a picture in it.

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One of the biggest challenges in running your internet business, is actually getting your email recipients to take action and join or buy from you.

Well, it may be easy to drive traffic to your website and getting them to leave their names and emails, when you offer them a good bribe… like a special report or a training video… etc.

But, for most marketers, proceeding on to the next step – getting their email prospects to click through to their emails “to buy”, can be a major obstacle.

You see, selling online is very much similar to selling offline. The only difference, is the medium that you are using. But the same principles of effective selling, do applies…

The more reasons you give your customer as to why they should buy your product, the chances of them handing you the money is higher.

It could be the benefits that they’re getting from the product…

or

The fact, that it’s so scarce that someone might just grab the last product if they don’t take action…. etc

The same concept also applies in email, when you are sending out your emails. If you want to increase the number of click-through rates of your emails… You need to start giving your customers more reasons to click onto your link.

 

Below are 7 ways which you can triple your customers’ click through rates.

1. Include more “call-to-action” links

It’s always beneficial if you include more “call-to-action” in your emails. Normally, I’ll find a connection with certain words to the sentence. Then I’ll hyperlink “some call-to-action” words such as, “click here now”… “for more details” or “for instant access”… etc By including more links into your emails, it not only keeps your customer curious but also reminding them that they have to click on your links in order to get the full benefits.

2. Hyperlink Your Headlines

Headlines are the first thing that most people look at, when their opening up their emails. This is certainly a privilege where one can sneakily exploit. All you need to do is to highlight the whole Headline and just create a hyperlink. This is one of my favorite methods.

3. Adding Links To Your images

People are so used to clicking images and then, being directed to another place. Just add in the hyperlink of your salespage, to your email.

4. Using a Time Limit

By giving the exact time of expiry to your products, it creates the urgency in your customers that makes them go, “I better get it now, or it’s going to be too late”, kind of mentality. Then, add a hyperlink to the date where you are going to end the offer.

5. Email Tease

You can tease your customers in your email by sharing only a portion of story or even a testimonial. Just when you are about to get to the climax… Include a hyperlink that says “Click here for full scoop”… something along that lines. But, don’t forget that the story has to be related to the link that you want to send them to.

6. Giving a Special Offer

People always want the best bargains or anything that is on sale at a discounted price. You can either link this to an image or to a text. It works just as well.

7. Free Gifts

This works almost all the time. After all, who would turn down valuable information when it’s given for free. To entice them even further, do not tell them exactly what you are giving to them, unless they click through to your emails.

Go ahead and try it out in the next email you send. I can assure you that you will have a higher click through rate.

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Blogs are often said to be good for search engine optimization. The reality is, blogs are simply software tools and what you get out of them from a SEO perspective is in proportion to how well you know how to use them. Good keyword categorization and content are a start, but blogs are not much of a SEO asset unless they attract links. Without clicking on a link or finding it on a search engine, how will others find your blog? Content is King but only if you promote it.

Links from relevant, credible sources balanced with on-page keyword optimization make it easier for search engines to find, index and sort blog posts in search results. Be sure to consider some of the following link building tactics:

1. Create content worth linking to. No matter how many tactics you find here and elsewhere, there simply is no substitute for creating content that others may find useful. Take the time to look at blog posts that already rank well in search results and notice their structure, quantity of words and word placement.

2. Conduct backlink analysis on competing web sites or blogs – find out who is linking to competitor sites that are not linking to yours. Ask sites linking to multiple competitors to link to yours as well. If another web site or blog is already linking to multiple competitors, there is a chance they’ll link to your blog as well.

3. Make useful comments on other blogs. Comments should always be useful, but if you become aware of a topically relevant blog that does not discourage search engine spiders from crawling links in comments, it’s work spending the extra time to provide helpful insights a links to resources that you’ve published on your own blog.

4. Encourage social bookmarks. Show links to those services like FACEBOOK in the blog post template code so they are visible for blog readers to use. Some social bookmarking services will make a copy of what you bookmark or a static web page of the bookmark including a do follow link back to the source (your blog).

5. Get listed on other blogger’s blogrolls. It never hurts to ask another blog that you’re active with to see if they’d consider adding your blog to their blogroll or curated lists of blogs.

6. Guest write on other blogs and include a link to your blog in the bio. In the course of getting to know blogs that already rank well on the keyword phrases you’re targeting, you may notice that they often accept guest blog posts from others. Contact the blog owner and suggest a compelling post that would be first and foremost, valuable to their readers. If it makes sense editorially to link from within the guest post to your own blog, be sure to use relevant keywords as the link text.

7. Submit to blog & RSS directories. Many directory links have no follow links or are not visited by a large volume of people, but making sure your blog and RSS feed are included in niche categories and collections of blogs can be a positive signal to search engines as well as to long tail users. Many bloggers that aggregate large lists of topically specific blogs will cultivate blog directories as a easy way to find blogs on similar topics. If your blog isn’t on the niche list in those situations, you won’t be included.

8. Submit to regular web site directories like botw.org. While there are blog specific directories (BOTW has one of those as well) many don’t discern web sites from blogs. If a quality directory has a relevant category with other reputable web sites in it, then it makes sense for your blog to be among them as a useful information source.

9. Be sure to include your blog URL in profiles and bios on social media sites. While most social media sites that allow users to add links to their profiles add no follow to the links, there are many that do not. Public profile links on LinkedIn and YouTube channels for example, are good links. Rather than focus on registering with 300+ sites using Knowem, just make sure that of the social media profiles you do set up inlcude a link back to your blog.

10. Write testimonials for services that you use. They may publish with a link back to your blog. Testimonials must be well written, genuine and specific in order to be useful for the service/product owner. Get at the essence of what’s great about the product or service and even add something unique. If you’ve written a review of the product/service on your blog, that can also get you a link from their press page.

11. Article writing (EZINE) can still result in a few good links. Include your blog URL in the article bio. Take some of your best tips oriented blog posts and re-write them for specific industry verticals or applications. Then submit them to article repositories. When others re-use those articles, the bio link back to your blog can be picked up by readers and search engines.

12. Develop social networks and share especially useful content from your blog where relevant. Be useful to others and they will useful to you by promoting your content and attracting links. Don’t be gratuitous when sharing links to your own content, but when you have something particularly special and valuable that’s highly relevant to a particular network, then by all means, share it with them. Some are bloggers as well and may link to it from their own blogs as well as pass the link along to others.

13. Hire bloggers to write content for you. They’ll often cross-post it to their own blog with a link back to yours. Of course, you should be considerate and simply mention that this is ok, don’t ask them or require them to do it.

14. Offer them FREE reports related to your niche. By offering FREE informatuion you are offering value and this will encourage your readers to recommend your blog.

15. Create or link to an exceptionally useful tool or service . Others will link to it simply because it is useful.

Bonus tip: When others link to you, THANK THEM! Building good will is one of the most underrated marketing skills online. Be genuine, thoughtful and courteous. Also be SMART and driven to get links where it makes sense.

What linking tactics for blogs have you found to be most effective? What challenges are you facing in attracting other sites to link to your blog?