Ash Summerville – Internet Marketing

Building Successful Businesses Online

Archive for October, 2009

Article Writing Secrets & Strategies

October 7th, 2009

Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet of paper when you’re supposed to be writing articles for your blog, for your ezine or newsletter and for article submission so you can promote your books, products or services?

How would you like to find ways to tap into a limitless supply of article ideas?

Yes, our imaginations run thin every now and then, and no, it isn’t easy to come up with article ideas sometimes. But, I promise you that there are ways to tap into a limitless supply of article ideas. No matter what your expertise lies in, you can always generate new and interesting ideas for articles IF you follow these guidelines…

5 Ways to Never Run Out of Article Ideas

1) Get inspiration from magazines covers.

Find a magazine that is as close as you can get to your niche and look at the titles on the magazine cover. Look at the titles that jump out at you and make you say, “That looks like it would be a good articleâI want to read that!”

Many times you can bounce an article off of a title you see on a magazine cover. Can you convert that title to apply to something in your specific niche?

Now, notice I’m saying, “find a magazine that is somewhat in your niche.” Many of us have websites that are in niches that do not have their own magazines. For example, there is no magazine that I know of about Article Marketing.

But I stay a short distance from my specific niche and look in related niches, such as Writing, Creativity, Productivity, and possibly even SEO. These are all issues that lie at the heart of article marketing, so they work as inspiration launching pads.

2) Don’t forget about the newbies.

When we’re writing on our area of expertise, sometimes we can overlook the obvious. We want to write helpful, educational articles, and our minds quite often go to topics that are more advanced.

Have you ever considered that someone reading your article might not even understand the basics of what you’re talking about?

I have to remind myself of this all the timeânot everyone knows what article marketing is, and not everyone even knows the reasons why it’s a popular online marketing tool.

Could the same thing be true in your niche?

Think about itâalthough our articles are not sales oriented or promotional in any way, when we educate our readers on some aspect of our niche, we are increasing the likelihood that they will one day be our customers.

So, don’t forget about the newbies who are in your target market but aren’t knowledgeable about what you do. Try to think back to questions you had when you were first starting out. Think about what confused you. Think about the very basic things that you wish someone had explained to you before you became the expert.

3) Think about: “What are the 10 questions that my customers (or potential customers) most frequently ask me?”

Write those questions down and address each one of them in a separate article.

By completing this writing exercise, you’re letting your target market tell you what to write about. This makes perfect sense since you’re trying to appeal to them anyway.

4) Use template titles and fill in the blanks.

Here are some of mine:

- 10 Great Reasons Why ____

- How To ____ in 7 Easy Steps

- 3 Secret Tricks For _____

- How To Conquer ______

- The Top 10 Mistakes People Make When ____

- Reader Question: “[insert question here]”

You may notice that these titles are all List articles (any article that has a 1,2,3 etc list in it), How-To articles, and Question articles (articles that answer a question that is stated in the title).

These are my go-to article topic stimulators. Just seeing the format for the title gets the wheels of my brain moving (which helps creativity!)

Try filling in the blanks for the template titles listed above, and I bet you can come up with a compelling title to base a new article on.

5) Use Article Writing Templates

Here are some of the article-writing templates that will help you…

- Myth Buster

- Top 10…

- How-To…

- Quiz

- Failure to Success

- Timeline

- 7 Things You Need

- What’s Hot, What’s Not

- 3 Stages

- Problem/Solution

- Plus many, many more

By following the five strategies above, you will:

- Gain the confidence to write articles whenever you want

- Banish writer’s block forever

- Remove all the frustration out of writing articles

- Develop ALL THE CONTENT you will ever need for your website, for your blog, for your newsletter and for article submission

Share and Enjoy:

No comments »

Posted in Business

Tags: Articles Beginners Blogging

Niche Marketing Tips: The Magic of Internet Niche Marketing

October 3rd, 2009

There is no doubt that the idea of niche marketing has been gaining popularity over the last few of years. Niche marketing is finding and promoting a product or service in a specific area of high demand. It focuses to attract potential clients with problem solving approach. There are many software packages available to assist you determine the viability of this new found niche.

Marketing your product or services to interested prospects rather than to the whole world makes the real difference. Internet niche marketing is the best method to market online business. If done correctly, it’s so easy that even a newbie with proper understanding of the market could make huge profits.

You need to understand that the key element is the proper planning, so your product or service could fulfill the requirements of the targeted audience. It’s like understanding your market well and develops a plan of action accordingly. Right from the headline, the reader must get a feel of interest. Your copy or sales letter should be highly attention grabbing and engaging.

The more you enjoy your niche, the more you focus to a particular group of prospects. There is a niche market for every topic you can imagine, the only thing is you have to do the research and take appropriate action.

Strong market research will identify your potential clients, your competition, markets inclination for your product or services, and your chances to get success. Let’s take a quick look on how to do the niche research:

Start your research with general topic and narrow down until you get to a point where there is lot of demand and very less competition. This gives you a working area with no major competition. It offers an opportunity to be the leading personality and to dominate your niche.

Now when you have discovered your niche, the next step is to approach your prospects with vital product or services. To do that, you could create an info-product like an e-book, a short report, a video tutorial, etc. Remember to include the uniqueness desired by your potential clients. Your product or service must address at least one of the problems of your niche and offers solution in a very easy to understand way.

Niche marketing, if done correctly can bring effective results.

So, there you have it, who knows you could grab some remarkable possibilities and opportunities. Spread your marketing messages and notice the immediate sales and profits.

Share and Enjoy:

No comments »

Posted in Business

Tags: Niche Niche Market Niche Marketing

CPA Marketing – Just What Is It?

October 2nd, 2009

CPA marketing simply means cost per action marketing.

This is one of the best businesses on the internet that most people are still not exploiting. It has up until now been the playing field of the big gun internet marketers. In fact it is a gold mine that most people are not aware of, or are unable to go into because of the requirements. This is so because some of the networks will require to call you before approving your account, also they may also require you to own a website and sometimes require only US citizens.

But the good news is that there is a solution, why not pay some one to build a website for you, also pay to drive visitors to the website, you may think that this is difficult, you can try some freelance site and place a job offer to a web designer, after that you can use Google Adwords of some site that will require you to pay some money so that they can drive visitors for you, but the best which I love so much is writing articles and submitting them on article directories, you can get those directories by searching your niche/ directory on Google.

You can also post articles on forums. So you see about $200 or less will be enough for all this, you can even decide not to spend a dime if you know how to design a website. If you are able to do all this the next step is to sign up with as many CPA networks as possible, when they approve your account, then log in and promote as many offers as possible. You can promote pay per sale, pay per lead and others. After getting customers for some products you promoted go to Quantcast and search on other offers that you former customers will be interested in, that is if you have an email list.

This is one of the best business on the internet today, one of my mentors made $20,000 in a day from it by just investing $2,000 on Google AdWords. If you are able to follow the above steps carefully, I don’t see any reason why you should not make at least $500 daily with two hours work.

Share and Enjoy:

No comments »

Posted in Business

Tags: Affiliate Networks CPA Marketing

How to Use Two Tier Affiliate Programs to Your Advantage

October 1st, 2009

To those who are not familiar with affiliate marketing, two-tier could be a new term to you but to those who are involved in this kind of money-making experience; it could mean a stream of income. Two-tier is an enticing feature of a particular affiliate program wherein, affiliates are allowed to sign-up additional affiliates below them. So that when the sub-affiliates otherwise known as second tier affiliates, earns a commission, the affiliate above receives a commission too.

In two-tier system, the first tier of commission is just like in the usual affiliate program. The sole difference is that it has an additional tier/s or sub-affiliates, whereby marketers also gain a commission once the people that the additional tiers referred to the program generate sales. Theoretically, affiliate programs can have multi-tier program with infinite number of tiers, however, there are practical limitations. As tiers increase, the affiliate program draws more webmasters who are mostly interested in gaining profit from other’s work and effort.

Two-Tier affiliate program is also recognized as Multi-Level Marketing. When you sign-up for an affiliate program, you are identified as the first tier and the person that you have recruited or encouraged to sign up is the second tier. If there are additional tiers, then the system can now be regarded as multi-level marketing (MLM). But today, MLM isn’t as effective and successful as it was several years ago. It is because at present, affiliates can freely select from thousands of affiliate programs and they can quickly switch from one program to another.

You could probably go wrong if you’re thinking that you can depend on your second tier to do the job for you. So if you want to use two-tier affiliate program to your advantage and generate more income by encouraging sub-affiliates to sign-up below you, make sure that you carefully choose your affiliate merchant. Pick those merchants who generate stable stream of high quality products, give high or just commissions, offers real time tracking, furnishes you with a proven and tested advertising arsenal and treat their affiliates very well. You can also sign-up for the merchant who gives high visitors-to-sales conversion rate.

It is also advisable if you engage yourself with a web merchant that has a user-friendly website which you can access anytime so that you can monitor your statistics including visits and sales. And if possible, choose the one with powerful marketing tools which you can use in promoting their products.

You’re just wasting much of your time and effort and worse, damaging your integrity once you promote poor affiliate program because your visitor will surely presume that the product or service you are reselling must be dreadful too. That’s the reason why it is important to pick first-rate affiliate programs. Through these, you can not only build up a good relationship with your visitor, but also, you can easily get more tiers to sign-up under you. You should also be cautious of some affiliate programs that give more importance on the profits to be earned in taking on other affiliates than on the income from sales, because you’ll just eventually find out that someone has already close those sales without informing you. Usually, this kind of affiliate program offers a very low first-tier payment but a sky-scraping second-tier commission.

If you want to start an affiliate program of your own, you surely have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier affiliate program. Who am I to say which of these two programs are better? But let me tell you the benefits you could get out of two-tier affiliate program.

First, your profit will increase due to increased sales from the customers that your second tier has referred. Second, you have a much broader customer base to which you can sell your products and services. Then, you gain more and stable income because the customers referred by your affiliate and sub-affiliates could probably develop a lifetime loyalty on your site and your products. Plus, you have an army of sub-affiliates who will promote and resell your products and services to their visitors and subscribers.

Two-tier program has been a proven winner and should be the number one choice for the budding affiliates as well as for the affiliate program managers. When you start gaining profits from your site as well as your tiers, this is now the right time to say that you have used two-tier affiliate program to your advantage.

Your Name
Your Email