Tips for Getting an Online Marketing Education - Part 1

Tips for Getting an Online Marketing Education - Part 1
By: Steve Warshaw
Senior Contributor for Top Internet Guides

When staring your home based business, getting an education in online marketing will be critical in achieving success. Unfortunately, unless you've had the luxury of working for a company who specializes in this marketing medium, you will find your educational options to be very confusing.

I decided to write this guide and F.A.Q. so that those of you who are proactive enough to have done some research before jumping in (yes, that means you, since you found this article) deserve to avoid being scammed out of your hard earned money and wasting your precious time. I've been there, and it's amazingly frustrating.

Tip #1: Don't buy the hype...

Do not believe that any sort of eBook or email course created by "Internet Gurus" such as Mike Filsame or Ewen Chia as a real online education. Internet Guru's are masters of 2 things.

1. Getting you to give them your information
2. Selling you products that never teach you a complete lesson

This is the biggest trap for a new home business owner / affiliate marketer. You will find yourself buying 100's of products over and over again, only to find that even you follow them diligently, the only person making money is the guru.

Tip #2- Stay Focused On The plan

Tip #2 relates directly to tip number 1. In order to ensure that you don't get lost, make a list of goals and action items you feel you must achieve, and then prioritize them from 1 to 10 (10 being highest). Don't look at any item below 10 until all items with a 10 priority are complete. If you don't have much experience in marketing and developing an online business, I highly recommend that you go to http://www.umgsp.com. They have a complete program on education that will help you design and execute your online marketing and business development plan

Tip #3- Set an initial monthly budget for your online business needs.

This will help you stay focused on your plan, and keep your from falling into the guru trap in tip #1. I recommend the following as a good starting point.

1. Website and email hosting - $10 / month
2. Autoresponder service - $10 to $20 / month (this is for learning about autoresponders only)
   
3. PPC Advertising - $25 / month (this is for learning about ppc only)
4. Online marketing and business development educational materials - $40 to $50 / month
5. The latest super hyped up make money program, system, or mlm scheme - $20 / month

Total - $105 - $125 / month

You might think that number 5 doesn't make much sense; and if you plan on actually getting rich from these schemes then you would be correct. However, some of these programs do have very effective marketing campaigns, and studying the marketing behind them can teach you and give you ideas for your business.

7 Tips For Choosing An Online Business Development Program

Everyone Starting In Online Marketing Needs Education...

Before I get to the 7 tips, let's examine the top 3 reasons everybody who wants to have success with home based businesses absolutely needs to go through an Online Marketing and Business Development Program.

1. The amount of misinformation and sheer number of scam artists will lead you to information overload. Eventually, without proper guidance, you will become overwhelmed, led astray, and most likely quit (over 87% of home based online businesses fail within the first month!)
2. Marketing successfully online requires a combination of several complicated software tools of which most people are unfamiliar.
3. Getting people to come to your website (generating traffic) is by far the most convoluted topic relating to the internet. You must have a comprehensive plan, and must work that plan each and every day.

Tip #1 - The Program Should Include Live Training and Support

Many of the affiliate and online marketing training programs I have researched, including The Affiliate Classroom (affiliateclassroom.com) and The WealthyAffiliate (wealthyaffiliate.com), only have online videos and articles. Unfortunately, videos and ebooks are not targeted to your business and will not answer your questions.

Tip #2 - Training on Essential Online Marketing Tools Such as Autoresponders and Lead Capture Pages.

Online marketing requires the use of several industry specific software tools. All the traffic in the world won't do you one bit of good unless you can capture the customers information and be able to follow up with them, thus turning them into a lead.

Tip #3 - The Program Should Provide Access To These Tools at a Discounted Rate

Any good University builds relationships with businesses that gives their students a professional advantage. Having negotiated discount rates for essential marketing tools, the online program will have shown that is has developed relationships with business that will benefit you. They should also have a method of assisting you in marketing products that you have created such as their own e-Store.

Tip #4 - The Development Program Should Integrate All Aspects of Marketing Online Seamlessly.

At this point, if you have spent any time and money I am certain you have figured out that the internet marketing "gurus" want to sell you products that teach you to market on the internet, and I'd be willing to bet you've even purchased a few.

In case you haven't, let me tell you that no matter how many of these packages you buy, you will never be taught from end to end all of the components necessary to succeed in online marketing. These "gurus" are very good at giving you just enough crumbs to make you buy their next "big thing." This will be an endless process for you.

Tip #5 - There Should be a Dedicated Module or Course On Writing Effective Ad Copy

Knowing when, where, and how to advertise are all great tools, but if you don't know how to get the attention of Your customer, you won't make any sales. Writing effective ad copy is not rocket science, as you see examples of it everywhere. The trick is tailoring the ad to a specific audience, and that takes education and practice.


Tip #6 - There Should Be a Dedicated Module or Course On Traffic

By far the most difficult and convoluted task you will take on as an internet marketer will be getting the right customers to actually see your web site. Contrary to logic, web site traffic is NOT a simple numbers game; just because you get more hits, doesn't mean that you will make more sales. See my article on traffic myths

Tip #7 - Compensation For Enrolling New Students

I included this as the last tip because it stands to reason that if the company follows their own development model, students should be able to take practice using their new knowledge during the development program in real time, and be compensated for their successes. This drives home the effectiveness of the development

Summary

I hope these tips
By no means is this list 100% complete, but it is a good list of features to look for while trying to determine development program to choose:

1. How To Use Lead Capture Pages
2. How To Generate Site Specific Traffic
1. Including email marketing, phone marketing, and other actual marketing tactics
3. How To Integrate Auto Responders into your capture pages
4. How To track all of your advertisements from click, to signup, to sales
5. How to write effective autoresponder messages
6. How to write ad copy, sales letters, and lead capture pages
7. A supply of effective advertising sources with ratings
8. Have a web based training archive
   
9. Live Support for the program and marketing questions
10. Detail help files
11. Integrated Payment Processing, including a store for you to place your products
12. Training on affiliate (downline) managment
13. How to up sell and cross sell
    

The Internet Marketing Guide They Don’t Want You To Read: Part 1

Part 1:

They Are Playing Mind Games With you – How To Navigate Through Scummy Waters

As you read every word of this article you will become stunned at the amount of misinformation and psychological tricks being played on you if you’re trying to start an online business. If you are new to affiliate marketing or marketing your own product online, or are struggling with an existing program, you need to be prepared for the onslaught of distractions and mental mind games that will come your way while learning how to market online. Part 1 of The Internet Marketing Guide They Don’t Want You To Read is dedicated to saving you from being ripped off or straying off course from the tasks you need to complete to market your product successfully.

Online Marketing Mind Game #1 - $x,xxx in xx days

“Make thousands of dollars in 60 days”, “our $7 products will turn your computer into an ATM machine”, and other such headlines are all categorically and completely false promises for new marketers. Let me explain to you how people are able to claim these numbers. First, they are established marketers and have a sales leads list that has thousands and thousands of people who have bought something from them before. It is statistically verifiable that once a customer makes a purchase from a company they are over 1000% more likely to do so again. As you can see they are able to market new products to thousands of customers who are ready to buy from them instantly, without ever having to prospect for new leads. Second, they have huge marketing budgets, and a staff of people helping them create web pages, sales copy, email series, marketing campaigns, doing search engine optimization, and offline recruiting. Quite simply, there is no way for you as an individual to replicate their results until you have established yourself.

Online Marketing Mind Game #2 – Guaranteed Traffic

You’re smart enough to know that getting people to view your website (traffic) is the ultimate goal of all of your online marketing efforts; it is also the most difficult to achieve. Some very shady characters have taken notice of this fact and have created “Guaranteed Traffic” programs. As a new or struggling internet marketer the prospect of having 500,000 visitors show up to your website may sound VERY appealing. It’s Not! In case you haven’t noticed, all traffic on the internet is NOT created equal.

Here’s a simple test for you to run.

1. Go to www,clickbank,com (replace the commas with periods)

2. Click on marketplace

3. Under Category, select a category of your choice

4. Under Sort By: select High Gravity

5. Click go”

   Clickbank will then return a list of results with each result looking like this:

   Ultimate Wealth Package. New Sales Page - Now Converting 1:20 - Affiliates Must See.

   $/sale: $25.48 | Future $: - | Total $/sale: $25.48 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 91.0% | grav: 647.96

   Next to grav: you see where it says 647.96? Clickbank created this score to show you which programs are the most successful. Anything over 100 is good, so for the rest of this example I will be using the Ultimate Wealth Package

   
   

6. If you don’t have a clickbank account, sign up for one and make note of your clickbank ID

7. Sign up to become an UWP affiliate: www,ultimatewealthpackage,com/affiliates.html (replace the commas)

8. Looking at that web page, you can see the program is converting (making sales) to 1 out of every 20 visitors to the website.

9. Your UWP affiliate ID will look like this:

   Your Affiliate Link: xxxxxx.imarichkid.hop.clickbank.net

   (Replace xxxxxx with your clickbank nickname)

   
   

10. Now, go to http://www,i-web-marketing,com/ (replace the commas)

11. You will see that 30,000 guaranteed visitors costs $89. According to UWP, “for every 100 visitors you send to Ultimate Wealth Package you should make approximately $223.42”

    This seems like a no brainer right? If you make $223 for everyone 100 visitors, if you buy 30,000 visitors you should make $66,900

12. Sign up for one of the traffic programs and use your affiliate link for the UWP as the website you wish to promote

13. Watch the money come rolling in? Right? WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Remember, not all web traffic is high quality. To prove it, here’s what I did.

1. I created a squeeze page for the UWP. In case you don’t know what a squeeze page is, it is a page where you promote a product, but you also attempt to have the customer fill out a form giving you their name and email address. This is how you build sales leads. There will be more on this later.

2. I added a program to this page called a hit counter that tracks all kinds of information about who visits your website, including where they are located, what pages on your website they viewed, and most importantly for this study How Long they were visiting your website.

3. I went to another guaranteed traffic program (i’ll leave the name anonymous so I don’t get sued for defamation) and used the squeeze page I created with the hit counter to receive the guaranteed traffic. I paid for 10,000 guaranteed hits targeted to the category “Home Based Business.”

4. Over the next two weeks I watched my hit counter go from 0 to 7367, and I did no other promotion for the page other than the guaranteed traffic program.

5. Guess how many sales I made??? 0

How could this be? Remember, the UWP program converts at 1:20. Even If I were to convert 1:2500 I should have made 2 to 3 sales. Taking a look at my hit counter revealed some Extremely Powerful information.

Using the hit counter software, I opened up a report on Visitor Length. This measures how long people were staying on my web page actually reading the content. A Whopping 98% stayed on the site for 0-3 seconds. Even the fastest readers on earth would need longer than that to read the content on my website.

The take away from this little test is once again that not all traffic is created equal. Most of these guaranteed programs deliver hits through the use of pop-ups, pop-unders, and some of them even use a software program to surf your website.

The bottom line, you must create a targeted marketing program that delivers real people who are looking for your product in order to achieve sales. Don’t be fooled or tempted by any type of automatic program for building traffic; they just don’t work!

In the next article I will Cover :

Online Marketing Mind Game #3: Guaranteed Sign-ups

Online Marketing Mind Game #4: e-Books and Rebranding

The Real Purpose of Traffic Exchanges

The Search For Traffic

Everyone who has ever wanted to start an online business has figured out that getting customers to their website is the most difficult task they must achieve. The irony is that getting website traffic is also the most widely published topic in the field of internet marketing

Inevitably, users will stumble upon traffic exchanges; which, when used correctly, can be a very effective aspect of an well designed marketing campaign. Unfortunately, most people don't understand how to best utilize traffic exchanges.

Some Myths About Traffic Exchanges

#1 - You can get a steady flow of sign-ups to your affiliate program, or paying customers buying your product.

While it is indeed possible and common to attract SOME payng customers, traffic exchanges are very inefficient at doing so. The good news is that when you understand the purpose of traffic exchanges you will know that this is not their primary purpose or value

#2 - Banner and Text Ads are antiquated marketing methods

This is just plain not true. It is possible to get 3% click through rates using both banner ads and text ads. Once again, the good news is that using banner ads serves another purpose entirely.

#3 - Those who surf traffic exchanges are just other affiliate marketers who don't even look at the pages.

The percentage of users surfing traffic exchanges who are affiliate marketers is just under 67%

The Real Value of Traffic Exchanges

Once you understand this one fact about traffic exchanges, you will be able to integrate them into a more efficient marketing strategy. The primary purpose of using traffic exchanges, including banner and text ads, is creating brand awareness! Here's an example:

A savvy internet marketer joins 20 traffic exchanges. They design a simple, fast loading, 1/2 page advertisement that uses primarily graphics and no more than 2 sentences worth of text, and 4-6 bullet points of benefits. They place this splash page on each of the 20 traffic exchanges and get some credits either by surfing or by purchasing the credits. They then get 5 of their friends to place the exact same ad on the exact same traffic exchange. They also place various banners that contain the company logo on each of the exchanges.

Now, here you are, surfing your traffic exchanges. You begin surfing on the first exchange, and you see the same advertisement over and over again. You then go to another traffic exchange, and you see the same advertisement again!

Do you see the power here? If after surfing 4 or 5 different exchanges people continue to see advertisements for the same company or program, it drastically increases their curiosity. Now at this point some people will actually click on the ad right from the traffic exchange, and that's great, but here's where having an integrated marketing strategy comes into play...

Imagine after seeing this advertisement over and over again on the traffic exchanges, that you see an email in your inbox with information about the same program? At this point, curiosity is usually overwhelming.

The Traffic Assault Team at U-M-G

The scenario I just described is just a tiny portion of one of the strategies we teach and implement in our Online Marketing and Business Development Program. We have entire teams of people dedicated to generating buzz for Your Product in the traffic exchanges, and how to transfer the buzz from the exchanges into building your email list.

For more information Go to my website (http://www.ugmsp.com) and fill out the form. You will receive more information about the U-M-G curriculum, and about how to have an entire team dedicated to building your online business.

Summary

The proper use of traffic exchanges will generate buzz about any product, just as long as the splash page always contains the company name, logo, and tag line. Combined with other viral marketing techniques, and a good sign up form / autoresponder series it is possible to drive real paying customers to your program or to buy your product.

Reuse And Copyright

I grant permission for every reader to reproduce on your website the article you are now reading -- "The Real Purpose if Traffic Exchanges. But copy this article ONLY, without any alteration whatsoever. Include the copyright statement, too, please. If you have a marketing or small business website, it'll provide great content and help your visitors learn important strategies. (NOTE: I am giving permission to host on your website this article AND NO OTHERS. Reprinting or hosting my articles without express written permission is illegal, immoral, and a violation of my copyright.)

Thank You,
Steve Warshaw

email: steve@umgsp.com
Web: http://www.umgsp.com
Skype: Stevewar 1
Blog: u-m-g.blogspot.com

The Ultimate Marketers Guide Has Lunched!

This is the official announcement that The Ultimate Marketers Guide - The worlds first and only On-Line Business Training and Development certification program - has launched. Go to http://www.umgsp.com for more more information about this highly anticipated education program for online marketers. UMG was created for the internet marketer, you, to be able to learn how to successfully market an run any business online.

What makes U-M-G different?
UMG is the worlds first *pending* Accredited On-Line Business Training and Development Certification Program.

What does this mean for you? It means that by enrolling in the class you will receive the education, training, and tools necessary to run any online business. While following the program you will also begin to build a continually growing income, as well as offset the costs of the necessary online marketing software tools (called components).

The Team Build Unleashed
The Team Build Forumla™ was developed by company founders Christopher Dyke and Nicholas Mcintosh in order to overcome the primary barriers to online business success:
- Lack of Education
- Cost of the necessary tools
- Lack of success (making money!)

If you would like to learn more about how the Team Build works, please view our flash presentation here: The Team Build Unleashed

24 Hour Live Support
UMG has available to you at no cost an entire team of Support Professionals who are able to answer any questions you have about the education program, Team Build, or online business development questions. This is not a support ticket system, and in fact does not use email of any kind. You simply download the support room software (it's small and downloads quickly), and login. This software is guaranteed to be free of viruses, spware, and you will not receive any email as the result of installing it.

Download The Webcast Software

If you would like more information about the On-Line Business Training and Development program please go to http://www.umgsp.com, fill out the form, and we will send you more information.

-Steve Warshaw