Greg Cassar.com

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This is an amazing story, the folks at Havamag (digital magazine for business owners) reached 350,000 readers in only a year or two, which is massive growth. They just published me in their latest issue on some Facebook stuff. http://havamag.biz/biz/biz-issue7/index.html

We started with the barter system, then moved onto precious metals, then coins and notes, followed closely by credit cards.  The next evolution is using your smart phone as your wallet (credit card).

Google has recently launched ‘Google Wallet’ – an app that makes your phone your wallet—with Citi, MasterCard, Sprint and First Data. With Google Wallet, you can tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC).

If you don’t have a Citi MasterCard and you want to use Google Wallet you can use the Google Prepaid Card. The Google Prepaid Card is a virtual card that you can fund with any of your existing credit cards.

The business implications of this technology are far reaching too:

Gift cards: Google Wallet can store gift cards for participating merchants. When you tap to pay at a merchant, Google Wallet transmits your gift card information to the terminal. This is very clever.

Offers & Loyalty: Google Offers are deals on products and services at local or online businesses. Whenever you buy or save a Google Offer, it automatically syncs to your Google Wallet so your offers are always with you. Google Wallet can also store loyalty cards for participating merchants.  The world of the coffee loyalty card will never be the same again.

Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple, was a unique visionary and his influence, as a technology innovator will be sorely missed.

World leaders, tech giants, and countless ordinary people have paid tribute to Steve Jobs after his death, marvelling at how the Apple visionary made modern life more user-friendly.

US President Barack Obama said Jobs, who died from cancer on the 5th of October, had “transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Founder and CEO posted on Facebook “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”

After founding Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, he was eventually ousted by the very CEO he had hired to run the company. Without him, Apple struggled and flirted with bankruptcy. With him, Apple flourished and will always be recognised as the greatest turnaround in corporate history, as Apple has become the largest company in the world by market cap.

Apple’s Mac Computer range have unparalleled industrial design while proving that computers can be irresistible as their users ultimately become raving fans.

Apple re-defined the MP3 player market with the iPod and the iTunes Music store set the standard for digital distribution of music and content.

The iPhone not only raised, but really smashed the Smartphone bar and changed the mobile device world forever with the now-ubiquitous touch screen and shot down the idea that technical specifications were all consumers cared about. Rather, ease of use and an integrated user experience trumped everything else.

The newest market that is still unfolding under Apple’s influence is the tablet market, whose standards have been set incredibly high by the iPad and now the iPad 2.

During his absence from Apple, jobs also acquired and created Pixar. Starting with the original Toy Story they redefined the standard of computer generated movies for years to come.

Jobs list of accomplishments are many and far reaching. So what business and marketing lessons can we take from them:

11 Business and Marketing Lessons from Steve Jobs

1. Design trumps function
All the devices Apple made had one crucial thing in common: people fell in love with them. They felt passionately about them, in a way the world had never seen before.

Design, as he explained in 2000, wasn’t about how it looked. It was about how it worked. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Apple products are just plain cool. They’re sleek, attractive, enticing and they work well. While other products may work just as well, people want something that looks good too. Steve Jobs was well aware of the importance of good-looking designs

2. Turn Your Customers into Raving Fans
Apple has become a popular culture icon and adored by its customers on a level that most other brands can only dream of.

They have done this with their sleek cool design and by creating insanely great brand experiences. They have turned their customers into Raving Fans.

Most people are either Windows People of Mac People. From my experience once someone has changed from the dark side over to the light side and embraced the Mac there is no going back . They even become evangelists to try and get others to try it too.

3. Be a visionary leader, not a follower of the Pack
Visionaries are always called crazy in the beginning. Be confident. You might be right, even though nobody listens to you. Jobs showed the world that thinking differently is acceptable. Do not be afraid to implement your ideas.

4. Improve on what is Currently Offered in the Market Place
Apple is known as a highly innovative company that has completely transformed the way we think about entertainment and communication.

But in reality, the business has built its success on improving what went before. It made the MP3 player better with the iPod. The mobile phone was improved with the iPhone.

The story goes that the iPhone came about after Apple execs complained to each other about what irritated them about their mobiles. Jobs focused on what wasn’t working in current trends and overhauled it.

5. Keep a Strict Focus
Jobs once said: “Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before… it means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

6. Demand the Best
Jobs may have a favourable image in the media, but those who have worked under him describe a hard man obsessed with perfection. As well as thinking big, Jobs liked to be across the detail too.

“My job is not to be easy on people,” he once stated. “My job is to make them better.”

7. Work Hard
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day. He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures.

8. Turn a problem into an opportunity.
Jobs got fired from the company he built, but came back to build the most valuable technology company in the world. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Do not give up when facing obstacles. It might just be another hurdle you need to clear before arriving at your destination.

9. Simplicity
One of the largest and most widespread early arguments for switching to Macs was that they’re easy to use. People raved about how simple Mac computers were and felt no sympathy for whiny PC users who couldn’t find the files they stored or the ‘print’ command in Word. Bringing things down to a consumer level can be hard to do, but Jobs made the computer accessible for everyone.

The same can be said for Apple’s other devices as we have a 3-year-old son who can work the iPhone and iPad to play Angry Birds. The same could not be said for many if any other mobile device brands.

10. Make it Easy to Buy
iTunes is the most perfect ecommerce store online. It has an incredibly smart design where they capture your credit card details once and then store it and all your details with your unique ‘Apple ID’ so that next time you are ready to buy you can buy with just one click. Having 200 to 300 million customers setup to buy with 1 click buy has no doubt largely helped the profitability of Apple in recent years.

11. Do What You Love
Steve Jobs said: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Do what you love. Seek out a business that gives you a sense of meaning, direction and satisfaction in life. Having a sense of purpose and striving towards goals gives life meaning, direction and satisfaction. It not only contributes to health and longevity, but also makes you feel better in hard times.

Lets finish with Jobs’s parting advice to the Stanford graduates of 2005 in his Commencement Speech – “Stay hungry,” he said. “Stay foolish.”

The traditional search based HTML browser session isn’t as sexy as it once was.  Now apps (applications) are taking their place as people spend more and more time consuming content and interacting on mobile devices without being tied to a web browser.  The web is now less about the searching and more about the getting.

These are the sorts of common place apps and your interaction with them that are changing the digital landscape: Email on your iPad, living on Facebook everyday, chatting on Skype,  listening to your favourite Podcast on iTunes,  the kids playing Farmville or Moshi Monstors for hours on end, reading Internet Marking Magazine from Zinio or iTunes, Google Maps App on your phone, reading books on your kindle… and the list goes on.

For all of these daily activities you don’t even need to search the web – you just go straight to the platform that delivers what you need.

It’s driven largely by the rise of the Smart Phone, and mobile computing that just fits into your life because it’s always in your pocket.

As a side note, Mobile is now making up 10%+ of all digital search traffic and is rising steadily.

If you’re not Upselling your customers, you’re missing out on an easy Internet marketing strategy that could increase your sales by 39%–or more!

Adding complementary “Upsell” offers to your thank-you pages or pages prior to checkout is by no means a new strategy, but it’s just as effective now as it was years ago.

According to Marketing Sherpa, 39% of their newsletter subscribers take advantage of one of the opt-in offers they put on their “thank you for subscribing” page.

Upselling your customers at the point of purchase is a KEY Internet marketing strategy for growing your business.

Why is Upselling so effective?

Well, by the time a customer sees your thank-you page, they’ve already made the decision to trust you enough to buy something from you… so encouraging them to make a second purchase that you have positioned as a ‘no-brainer’ offer is a relatively easy sell.

This type of Upsell has become more popular in the last year with 1shoppingcart and other shopping cart providers building in ‘1 click Upsell’ type functionality that remembers the credit card details and can do an Upsell without requiring the card details to be entered again – very effective.

The other main place to do an upsell is between the ‘Order’ page and the ‘Checkout’ process.  I’ve used this one very effectively in the past.

When I was in the positive cash flow property niche (my first online business) we had 1 product that out-sold everything else on the site.  We sold about $2,500 a month of this particular $97 printed manual.  Then we added an Upsell in the middle between the order and the checkout of a second complementary $97 manual for just $45 more.

Over about a year it averaged out that 33% of people took the Upsell.  This equated to an extra roughly $800 a month in additional sales just for adding in this one Upsell step. Because our cost of acquisition was still the same (our traffic costs), most of this ended up as pure profit.

Up to date knowledge of what you can Upsell is critical. Upselling the wrong or irrelevant products or services will just alienate your clients. Upselling and cross-selling the right stuff at the right time can make a massive difference on your profitability.

I find a high value low price Upsell behind an email opt-in works well. I often use this to fund my cost of traffic and break even on the front end.

Perhaps the biggest block to upselling is that most marketers don’t do it. Maybe they feel scared. Perhaps they feel cheeky. Maybe they think that they don’t have the right. Perhaps they “already know” that the client will say, “No”.

Whatever! The biggest problem with upselling is that most marketers quite simply just do not ask for the order.

Call it the McDonalds affect if you like… you have to ask! They Upsell on everything and they get a lot of “Nos” but they also get a lot of “Yeses”! You need to make just asking part of your sales process too. You could significantly increase your sales results over night.

With McDonalds they ask you ‘would you like fries with that’ or “would you like to upsize for an extra xx amount?” It’s easy because the decision to buy has already been made.

When you provide recommendations based on their needs, then you are increasing the value to the customer. It’s important to be specific, don’t ask the customer ‘is there anything else you need’ because at this point they don’t know what they need.

Make suggestions based on the most likely item that the customer will want or need and why you think they will need it. Only recommend what the customer genuinely needs, not just what you want to sell them.

So just think, is there anywhere in your business that you can add an upsell for extra profit?

We have just launched the new Internet Marketing Magazine Members area for email subscribers.

Those who are already an email member will have been emailed the link to the members area prior to this issue being released. We encourage you to join up and get access to the members area via InternetMarketingMag.net or Facebook. com/InternetMarketingMagazine.

We are trying to make the content richer with a new ‘candid don’t hold back’ interview series to get to the bottom of what really works and what doesn’t online.

The full interview mp3’s can be found in the members area and will build out issue by issue so check back there from time to time. The full Perry Marshall interview is available in there now in the ‘Audio Expert Interviews’ section. This contains heaps of great content that we were not able to include in this issue of the magazine because the size of the article would have been too long.

WordPress is the most common way that entrepreneurs and business owners build sites these days.

 
WordPress is infinitely extensible. One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.

 
Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine, in the directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ you can find, download, rate, and comment on all the best plugins.

 
While there are literally thousands of plugins that you can apply to your site, lets now look at 5 Must Have Plugins to extend your WordPress site’s functionality and reach.

 
Please note: We have not included security plugins here. We will cover WordPress security in a future edition of ‘Internet Marketing Magazine’.

No 1. All In One SEO Pack

 
This brilliant WordPress plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

 
It allows you to set your title tags and description and keywords in one easy place within the plugin for the home page. There are also approx 20 other SEO settings that make your URLs friendly to the search engines and a whole bunch of other SEO related settings.

 
Whenever you make a blog post down below the post while you are still in edit mode you will get the options to set the Title, Description for the search engines, and Keywords related to the post.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

No 2. PopUp Domination

 
This amazing list building WordPress plugin works like a PopUp but gets passed the PopUp blockers. It has a classy look and feel to it and as a result it doesn’t feel as intrusive as what you may imagine a PopUp to be.

 
Its primary purpose is to help you build your list faster. Why we highly recommend it is that we noticed our own list building doubled on our main sites when we implemented this plugin. Every serious marketer should test and implement PopUp Domination.

 
Popup Domination works with all major auto-responders including but not limited to aWeber, iContact, Constant Contact and Infusionsoft.

 
Price: $47
Get it at: PopupDomination.com/new/

No 3. Google XML sitemaps

 
While not particularly exciting in it’s functionality, this is one of those boring bread and butter type plugins that is essential for your site.

 
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap, which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog/site. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

 
The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

No 4. Like-Button-Plugin-For-Wordpress

 
This plugin adds a Like-Button wherever you want on your blog. The button can be placed before or after the content, as well as a sidebar-widget. And many more!

 
Having a Facebook ‘Like’ button on your content is a great way of getting free referral traffic. When a site visitor presses ‘Like’ it automatically updates their wall and status updates in Facebook to show that they liked your site/post.
Because their friends are likely to be interested in similar things when they see the update there is a good chance of them following the link back to your site.

 
We highly recommend having Facebook ‘Like’ on your site as we have noticed significant traffic improvements as a result in the many places that we have tested it.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like-button-plugin-for-wordpress/

No 5. Facebook Share (New) Button

 
This plugin adds a Share-Button, which allows site visitors to share your posts. It also shows the number of times the post or page has been shared through out the Facebook.

 
Having a Facebook ‘Share’ button on your content is a great way of getting free referral traffic. When a site visitor presses ‘Share’ it automatically updates their wall and status updates in Facebook to show that they liked your site/post. It is slightly more powerful than Facebook Like because when the site visitors ‘share’ they get the ability to add a line or two of text to endorse why they shared the content.

 
Because their friends are likely to be interested in similar things when they see the update there is a good chance of them following the link back to your site.

 
We highly recommend having Facebook ‘Share’ on your site as we have noticed significant traffic improvements as a result in the many places that we have tested it.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-share-new/

I hope that is of use to you. We have tested hundreds of plugins and these certainly are some of the best.

The undisputed king of the search engines in 2011 is Google.  If you are an online entrepreneur or even a traditional business owner you can’t afford to ignore Google and your presence on their platform. Chances are that Google Search is a major way that your potential prospects and clients either are or are not finding you.

But Google is much more than just a search engine. They are a very smart organisation that has morphed into a whole bunch of different services or utilities online. Many of these services they provide are free for you to use, while some are premium paid services.

Lets now look at some of the best services that Google provides so that we can quickly identify how you as a business owner can ‘get the most out of Google’.  The areas we will cover are as follows:

1. Google Adwords
2. Google Image Ads
3. Google Places
4. Google Apps / Gmail
5. Google Analytics
6. Google Website Optimizer

1. Google Adwords

Google Adwords Search Network ads are the paid ads that turn up on the top section and the right hand side section of the Google search screen.

This is the most pure and perfect form of advertising that exists in the history of mankind. Big call I know, but the reason why I say this is because your ads only show up if people are actively searching for the keywords that you have advised Google are related to your product / service that you are advertising.

Then the best bit is that you only pay for your advertising if a Google searcher clicks on your ads.  It can’t get any fairer than that.  If you compare this to an ad in the newspaper – I can’t see any major publications allowing you to only pay for your ad if you get some interest from it.

The Google Adwords search network system works on a Pay Per Click (PPC) model. This means that you pay a pre-determined amount (eg. $0.56 or $1.03) every time that someone clicks on your ad.

The whole thing works on relevance. If Google determines that your ad is very relevant and highly regarded by its searchers because it’s getting a good Click Through Rate (CTR) and people are staying on your site a good length of time, then they will reward you with lower advertising costs and your ads will rank higher than other advertisers who are not creating as relevant advertising.

To really win the Adwords game your ads need to be relevant to the keywords that are being searched for, and then the website landing page that the searchers end up at after clicking the ads need to be closely relevant to the keywords that were searched for as well as the keywords in the ad.

Google Adwords is something that every business owner should consider from accountants to plumbers and beyond.  The reason why is because there are already millions of people searching for solutions to their problems, so it makes sense for you to have your ads showing up on the first page of Google stating that you can provide a solution to the relevant problems.

Unfortunately Google Adwords is not as cost effective in 2011 as when I first started doing it 6 years ago.  There are more competitors now and because of supply and demand the cost per click goes up over time.  A good Google Adwords Consultant will be able to smash the competition for you and result in cheaper clicks and better rankings for your ads. This may be more cost effective for you than trying to learn to do it yourself.  My team at http://InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com can assist you if you need a hand in this area or any of the sections below.

2. Google Image Ads

Google has a 2^nd major part to its advertising, this is the display network. The Google Display Network is when your advertising shows up on relevant non Google Websites where website owners display Google ads on behalf of Google on their sites.

Display network ads come in many types, but essentially there are two main types – text ads (like Google Search) or image ads. I love Google Image ads because it works out a very cost effective traffic source for driving leads to free offers.

‘Image ads’ is just another way of saying Banner Advertising on Google’s display network.  The thing is that it is more targeted than standard banner advertising on other networks because you can determine the keywords and page content that are relevant to the websites where you want to show your ads.

Your image ads can be either standard images or they can be animated (gifs or Flash).  You should choose animated gifs as this allows your banner ads to have a cost effective way of having animated components. This means you will catch the site visitor’s eye more with movement on your ads. The other main benefit of animated gif ads is that you will be able to communicate more on the same sized banner ad because you have multiple images worth of words and images that can rotate on your ad.

Unfortunately there is a little bit of an art to really getting this form of advertising really cracking.  Give it a go yourself but if you don’t get the results you are after you should engage a professional to give you a hand.  These campaigns don’t require much maintenance so once it is live you could save money by managing it yourself.

This form of advertising is not necessarily well suited to every business.  Where it is relevant is if you have some kind of free offer that you are using for lead generation such as a free report or video in exchange for their contact details so that you can market to the leads again.

3. Google Places

‘Google Maps’ is now called ‘Google Places’ even though most people still think of it as Google Maps. Millions of people search Google Maps every day. A free listing on Google Maps makes it easy for them to find your business.

If you are a localised business then you want to make sure you are maximising your exposure in this medium as it really is an easy way to rank high for free traffic from Google.

Use Google Places to create your free listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products. It’s easy, free, and you don’t even need a website of your own, but it is better if you have one that you can link to from there.

A common thing that we find with nearly every local business that we work with is that they have a presence on the maps on Google but they have never ‘claimed their listing’ and populated the information.

While Google never really reveals their search and ranking algorithms it is clear that Google Places listings that have been ‘claimed’ and populated with full information about the business do get higher priorities in rankings than those that have not been claimed.

Google Places is particularly relevant if you have a ‘traditional business’ such as ‘Accountant in Bondi’ etc as these local searches are when the Google Places listings will show up.

If you haven’t already done so then please visit http://www.google.com/places/ to claim your business listing today.

4. Google Apps / Gmail

Google has grown into a service provider online that provides web visitors and website owners far more than just search services.  One of their biggest developments in recent years has been their Gmail email service.

In a relatively short period of time Google’s Gmail service grew in popularity because of its superior spam protection and smart web based email client. Many people use Gmail as their personal email service, but as a business owner you also have the option to use the premium corporate version of this service called Google Apps.

Google Apps has many components to it, with one of the most popular of these being the email service.  Effectively it is like is Gmail for your business, so instead of your email address being @gmail.com it is @yourdomainname.com.

This is not a free service, it costs US$50 per mail user per year but it is a very cost effective way of running an email service for your business.  Back when I had a day job one of my roles in corporate IT was as an email Network Architect for large multi nationals, so I know email very well.  For a small to medium sized business it is no longer cost effective to run Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino (Notes) if you can have an email service hosted and managed by Google for just $50 per user per year.

The other real benefit of Google Apps for your business is that it will provide you with a whole suite of other collaboration tools for your team such as Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites just to name a few.

Try Google Apps at http://google.com/a for your business today, as it really is excellent. We find we implement it in 9 out of 10 companies we work with.

5. Google Analytics

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is one of the better things I learned from one of my marketing mentors Mal Emery. The tool that I use for measuring website stats and I recommend that you use too is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service from Google. Effectively you tell Google what website that you want Google Analytics to track website visitor statistics on. Google Analytics will then supply you a piece of tracking code to put on the pages of your website.

Google Analytics will then start recording how many site visitors you get per day, how they found your website, what parts of your site that they are clicking on and much more. You can even get Google Analytics to send you automated reports on a how your website is progressing.

It’s amazing how many website owners we meet who don’t have Google Analytics setup for their sites. If you fit into this category please consider this a virtual slap on the wrist from me for being a naughty boy / girl / other and take action immediately to get it live for your site by visiting http://www.google.com/analytics/

6. Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is another free service from Google.  What it does is it gives you a way of comparing two website pages or website elements together to see which one results in the best lead or sales conversions.

Website Optimizer, Google’s free website testing and optimization tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without having to spend additional funds on traffic.

As the readership base for Internet Marketing Magazine is quite diverse from complete Internet Newbies to full-time marketing pro’s we’ll keep it simple and talk about the most the most common configuration of the Google Website Optimizer tool which is A/B split testing.

Most website owners take guesses at which components of their websites are going to result in the most leads and sales. There is no need to guess when Google Website Optimizer will tell this information to you based off real site visitors and their actions.

Say you have a page on your website and it’s primary purpose is to give away a copy of your free report in exchange for the site visitors details. Each time this happens we would consider it a ‘conversion’.

What you now need to do is take a copy of that page and create a 2^nd version of it with a new webpage name.  On that 2^nd version of the page change a design element that you think may have a positive effect on your conversions.  A great place to start is by writing a new headline.

Then within Google Website Optimizer tell it the web address of the first page and also the new page you’ve created. Also tell Google Website Optimizer the page that the web visitor will end up at following an opt-in (a conversion).  Google will now give you some tracking code to put on those pages.

Once that is done you choose for the A/B experiment to start and Google will start rotating automatically between those pages in a round robin fashion when site visitors hit the site.  Over time you will be able to see which page of the site performs better and you will be able to declare a winner.  You then take this winner and create a 2^nd version of it and repeat the process again.

Effectively what you are doing is constantly tracking and measuring and pushing the conversion rate up on your website.  You can have the same advertising cost but actually reduce your cost per lead simply by increasing your conversion rate.  If you are paying for any advertising for your site you should without a doubt be utilising Google Website Optimizer in your business.

There is much more to Google Services than we have outlined here, but this is a good summary of the fundamental services of theirs you should be implementing in your business today.

99 out of 100 entrepreneurs online are focused on ‘Selling’ as their primary objective and main focus. This is understandable as selling for profit is the reason that we do marketing online.

While this is a valid model, it’s certainly not the best model to position your business
for lasting success in 2011 and beyond. Traffic is getting more and more expensive and so the cost of acquiring a customer to make a one off sale often costs the same as or more than the profits you will make from one sale alone.

So for this reason…

Your Number One Most Important Job as an Internet Marketer is to build a list (database) of prospects and clients who that you can create a relationship with to then market other products and services strategically to them over time.

Think about it now in your own business – “If building my list is the most important task I have online, how much time, effort and resources do I put to that task each week or month?”

How was your answer?  Chances are, not good, but that’s OK provided you learn from that and move on. If you were able to answer honestly to yourself that you are devoting massive time and resources to building your list and your relationship with them then congratulations as you are well and truly on your way to building a good long term strategic internet business.

Most new Internet Marketers I meet are in the ‘Opportunity Seeking’ business, meaning that they are chasing one online opportunity to make some cash after another.  I know this for a fact well as I did it for several years myself. You know what, this is fine initially when you first start marketing online because you really need to get some experience with driving some traffic and making offers and trying out different niches until you find the area that you are going to specialize in.

All the consulting clients that we work with at InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com that are doing big numbers online have changed from being opportunity seekers to strategic marketers at some point in their development. They now make money out of building a big list and creating relationship with them and making offers over time. There is no exception to this.

Think about it, how often does Amazon email you?  And they started off as just an online bookstore making one-off book sales and evolved and morphed over time into one of the best marketing machines on the planet. The great thing about their business is that they are emailing a list of ‘clients’ rather than ‘prospects’, which is a very powerful position to be in as they know their list already are buyers.

So how do you build your list?

The answer is to build a  website  (or  a  squeeze  page  section  of  your  website  where  you  drive  traffic)  where  its  primary  focus  is  to  provide  something  of  value for free in exchange for your new prospects’ contact details.  You then follow up with them again in an automated way with the use of autoresponder software.

Your free offer is about quality… not quantity.  What you offer is only limited by your imagination, but good examples  of  what  you  could  use  include  free  reports, videos, audios and newsletters  etc.

To create a good free offer you really need to get into the mind of your prospect and ask yourself “What is it that they really want?” and give them that, as that will significantly increase your chance of getting a great conversion rate on your landing page.

An important point with your opt‐in offer is to also communicate you are going to follow up with them again, otherwise what people see and hear in their mind is that “I’m just going to get this free product or service the one time”.  You want to set up the right relationship from day one so that they look forward to future communication from you.

You can achieve this by having an eCourse component to your offer or advising them that they will also receive your newsletter or follow up training components on an ongoing basis.

Once you have your free offer in place you need to drive targeted traffic to it over time to capture your leads and deliver your free offer to them.

A recent study by our friend and colleague Armand Morin showed up something so powerful you can’t ignore it.  His research showed that of the top

100 websites on the Internet 89 of them use the new ‘free’ model.

What we’re referring to is, if you look at the major online companies today, like  Google, My Space, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of them utilise the 100%  FREE model… it costs you nothing to use!   Then they make money out of you over time with enhanced services, or they make money out of advertisers because they have they have the target market on their list.

The way we look at it is that we can debate this all day long but the facts are facts. The free model is here and it’s here to stay.  It’s a great model and it is obviously the right model because the marketplace as a general rule doesn’t want to be ‘sold to’ and this is more the case now more than ever before.

What do you do now that you have them on your list?

You need to follow up with them in an automated system called a ‘marketing funnel’ that provides both value as well as offers over time. (I’ll cover detailed ‘marketing funnel design’ for you in a future edition of the magazine).

By opting-in the prospect has put their hand up to say that they are interested in your area of expertise, your training, your products and/or services.

You get the opportunity to nurture and educate them and build trust so that when you do make offers there is a high probability of their success because you are not marketing to strangers – they feel like they already ‘know you’. This way you become a welcome guest rather than an unwanted pest.

Having a large list with which you have a good relationship enables you to make good value offers and generate income on a predictable basis. Marketing to your existing leads and clients is always more cost effective than the costly process of continually trying to get new clients.

All successful Internet Marketers (without exception) know that the money is in the lifetime value of the client, not in one‐off sales. If you are not following up with your prospects and clients you are potentially leaving a huge amount of money on the table.

Ask yourself now “how many automated follow up emails do I have in my marketing funnel sequence that create value and relationship as well as offers over time?”

If you answer was ‘not many’ then this is a great place to start on your action list of what you need to do next to become a more successful marketer in your niche.