April 2010 - Local Marketing Solutions

Joint Ventures, Miscellaneous

Getting Sales of your New Ebook off to a Flying Start

Almost every newbie affiliate marketer dreams of one day creating their own ebook and making a killing online with it. You may not believe me, but the easiest part of the entire project is actually the creation of the ebook. Sure, you may spend months in developing it, but once you’re done the really hard part comes in.

What most beginners fail to invest time in is promoting it. Of course you may do some article marketing, social bookmarking, video marketing and so on–but that’s not the big part.

The single biggest factor in getting your ebook flying off the ‘shelves’ in the first few weeks after it is released is the product launch. The biggest sellers online depend on finding super-affiliates (the individuals in their niche with huge mailings lists) to promote their product during its launch by sending out promotional emails with affiliate links to their lists.

There are a number of ways to find these super-affiliates, and to convince them to mail for you, but your primary consideration in launching your product MUST be in finding a fair number of these gurus to promote for you.

You want to find affiliates with big lists to in your niche to promote for you during your launch. eZineArtilcle authors with many articles in your niche are good candidates. Affiliates with listings showing in Google for your main keywords are as well. AdWords advertisers for your keywords will have lists as too.

Even just of few of these big guys doing a substantial mailing can create a huge amount of traffic to your sales page. Keep that in mind and begin bringing some key players on board several month prior to your launch date.

Video Marketing

Video Marketing at YouTube

I was wondering this week how many of you are doing video marketing to promote either your own products or those as an affiliate. It can work wickedly well, but there are some things to keep in mind.

In my own case I have found that over 90% of my video traffic comes from my YouTube videos. Sure, I submit promotional videos to a number of video sites, but YouTube really is the workhorse at least in my case.

If you are submitting videos manually, you can use a free service such as TubeMogul to submit the same video to about a dozen prime directories with the push of a button. And, while I do submit to a number of directories, like I said, the vast majority of my video traffic comes from YouTube.

If you are promoting products in a number of different niches, remember, you can easily create different user accounts at YouTube using different email addresses. I have half-a-dozen accounts I use for different purposes.

Your biggest choice is where to send the traffic you get from your videos. Just as in article marketing, you need to decide whether you want to send traffic directly to a sales page, or–to a squeeze page, so you can collect names and email addresses.

This decision kind of depends on your niche. If list building is not a concern for a particular product or niche, you will probably want to send traffic directly to a sales page.

The very best place on Youtube to add a link to your website is at the very start of your description. In other words, start the description of your video with the full http:// url of the webpage you want them to visit, then add the rest of your description.

A big key is to try to get people to subscribe to your channel. Another thing is to keep fresh videos coming.

If someone subscribes to your channel and you only post a video once every six months, it is likely they won’t keep an eye out for new videos. It’s a numbers game, the more videos you post, the more traffic you generate.

Article Marketing, List Building

Article Marketing to Build Your List

I know that a lot of you are using article marketing to build your lists and to drive traffic to your sites. What I’d like to talk about today are some of the advantages of sending your article marketing traffic to a squeeze page (an opt-in) page to collect names rather than to a specific sales page.

Suppose you write a 300 or 500 word article on affiliate marketing. You have a page with a product of yours related to affiliate marketing. Your first temptation might be to put a link in your author resource box pointing to your site so you can make some sales.

One problem is that down the road you may create another, or several more products in this niche. You would then have to write another batch of articles with a different link point to your sales page for that product when you submit more articles.

What I believe is a better option is to set up a squeeze page (a page set up with your auto-responder to capture names and email addresses).

Once you get names on your list, you can market to them by email whatever product you wish. In fact, you can send them ongoing emails promoting endless products in the niche.

So my advice is sometimes to use the author resource box in your articles to point to an opt-in form to build your list. Then, use that list to market dozens of different products to your list over the course of a year.

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