Archive | March, 2018

Half of Facebook’s more than 2.2 BILLION active users are on Facebook in any 24 hour period. In addition, the average U.S. Facebook user spends nearly 6 hours a month browsing this social network.

In other words, if your business isn’t on Facebook yet, maybe it should be. And one of the first questions I invariably receive from newcomers concerning Facebook is, “What should I post to get people interested in my business?” Here are some ideas:

Showcase your customers. If you’ve got photos, videos or emails from happy customers using your products, go ahead and show them. Just remember, you’re not bragging about your product, you’re showing what your customers are doing with your product. Keep the difference in mind when choosing and framing content and you can’t go wrong.

Instead of showing a testimonial from Jimmy telling how great your product is, show Jimmy using or enjoying your product, or show the direct results Jimmy achieved with your product. For example, if you teach your customers how to restore classic cars, show Jimmy with before and after shots of his car.

Use humor. Don’t make yourself or your business overly serious on Facebook. Instead, use light-hearted humor whenever possible. This isn’t necessarily telling jokes – most times it’s simply taking a poke at yourself or your day, showing something in a humorous light, being witty or simply sharing that silly thing that happened to you a few minutes ago.

Post funny videos, especially if they’re relevant to your business. And don’t just grab videos from YouTube – make your own quick videos when you feel inspired.

Give them content. Facebook isn’t necessarily the place to offer long winded diatribes about anything. But it is a great place to share cool content – especially the “How-to” variety and the entertainment variety. And it doesn’t all need to originate with you – use curated content to round out your own and keep people engaged.

Let them inside. That is, show off your staff (if you have one) or your family or the inner workings of your business. Engage them by pulling back the curtain and showing what they normally wouldn’t get to see. For example, if you’re a one person business working out of your home, show them your office, your view, and your little dog that keeps you company. If your business has oodles of employees, post pictures of your in-office celebrations such as birthdays, as well as the antics that go on and so forth. By giving them a peak behind the curtain, your friends and fans feel very much included and part of the group. You’re no longer just a business, you’re part of their circle.

Ask questions. Nothing engages other people like asking them their opinion on something, even if it’s as silly as, “What’s better: Baseball or Football, and why?” Posts with questions get the conversation rolling, especially when it’s an easy question to answer. And be sure to respond to the answers you receive.

Use these Facebook “attention getters” to quickly begin brining more people your way.

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to make good money online is by doing webinars.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell: You choose a date and topic for your webinar, promote it, give great information on the webinar and then promote a product at the end. It’s like one big informational sales letter, in that you begin by giving away a great deal of awesome info, and you close by offering them even more information or a service or membership they can use to implement what they’ve just learned.

If you either have a skill that others want to learn, or you can interview an expert who has the skill (or information) people want to learn, then you can do a webinar.

Here are the steps to ensure your webinars generate income…

1. Make the webinar an experience. There is so much I can say about this, but it might all boil down to the following: Do NOT be boring. As you put your webinar together, think about your customers and what they want to learn and experience. Make it interesting, exciting and fun. Plan to show major enthusiasm for your topic, and to answer questions. Remember, they can leave the webinar any time they like, so make sure it’s worth staying for.

2. Provide great tools. If you’re partnering or using affiliates, provide great blog posts and emails so they can drive as much traffic as possible to your opt-in page. And provide a good variety – you don’t want every affiliate sending out the same email, since they begin to look like spam. Instead, consider helping each affiliate to write a unique email tailored exclusively for their list.

3. Spend time on your registration page. This is the page you and your partners or affiliates will be sending traffic to, and it’s do or die. Prospects decide whether or not to sign up for your webinar based upon what’s on the page, so spend a little time fine tuning it to produce the most sign-ups possible.

4. In creating the slides for your webinar, try to have a new slide every minute or two with one or more important points on it. This keeps the webinar moving and interesting.

5. You can do the webinar by yourself or with a partner. The nice thing about having a partner is you can have a give and take of information, adding in bits that the other might overlook. Of course whoever the expert is will do most of the talking, but the second person can ask questions and add a different dynamic to the call.

6. Promote the webinar. Begin promoting no more than a week in advance because frankly, people have short memories. And as the webinar gets closer, promote it more often with increased urgency.

7. Send reminders. The day before the webinar is the time to send the first reminder, preferably in the early evening. Send the second on the morning of the webinar, and the third reminder 30 minutes before it begins. “Did you forget?” Is a great subject line for the last minute email you send out. Also remind them that there are far more people signed up than there are open webinar slots (assuming this is true, which it usually is.) Suggest they get on the webinar early to ensure they get a “seat.”

8. Start the webinar on time. Don’t wait for stragglers, you’ll just irritate those who bothered to show up on time.

9. Give some of your best stuff. Seriously, you want to majorly over deliver, because the more you give, the more your listeners will want to know. If you hold everything back then not only do you run out of things to talk about – your listeners also wonder if you know anything at all.

10. Be a tease. Seriously, while you’re delivering great content you will also be inserting teasers here and there for the pitch that comes at the end. For example, you’re telling them how to do “a, b and c,” and of course they’ll need “d, e and f” which you don’t have time to cover here but you’ll give them a chance to learn all about it at the end of the presentation. For example: Your webinar is on traffic, so you teach several basic methods on the call and allude to the many advanced techniques they can also use – when they know how.

11. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your audience. If your webinar system allows questions to be typed in (such as GoToWebinar) then the person who isn’t doing the talking can keep track of the questions and make sure they get answered. Great trick: Imagine you are a new listener hearing you for the first time. What do you want to know? What isn’t clear? What questions might you have? Always keep your listeners in mind, and even periodically check in with them to see if they’re following what you’re teaching.

12. Make your offer deliciously irresistible. The entire webinar should flow nicely into the offer you’re making, and the offer itself should be as irresistible as possible. Pile on the benefits, make it clear what this will allow them to accomplish, and back it with a super strong guarantee. Place the URL of the order page on the screen and tell them exactly what will happen when they order.

13. Give a bonus to the first “x” number who grab your offer. This is a great way to get them off the fence and moving fast. Depending on the price point and the number of listeners, limit your special bonus to the first 10 to 50 people who sign up.

14. Stay on to answer questions and give order updates. If one person has a question there’s a good chance others have the same question. Plus you can be there in case they have a problem ordering. And as the orders come in, update the listeners on how many of the bonuses are already gone. This provides proof that others are buying and they should as well. You might even close out the webinar by letting them know you’re confident the bonuses will sell out this evening.

15. Follow-up. Send an email thanking them for attending and reminding them of the URL to order if they haven’t already.

16. Post the replay online for a few days and inform all those who did not attend to listen to it before you take it down.

It’s fairly common to make several thousand dollars from one webinar, depending of course on your offer and your listeners.

What if you don’t have a product to promote? Then you’ve got a couple of options:

1. Choose an affiliate product and ask the product owner to do the webinar with you, splitting the profit between the two of you.

2. Make your product a series of teaching webinars. These are additional webinars that they pay to attend to learn the rest of what it is you’re teaching. Record them and get transcriptions, and now you’ve got a product you can sell on future webinars.

So, are webinars for you?… If so, these tips will help you get started on the right track!

I see new marketers all the time who have a goal of a $100,000 per year or even a million dollars per year. And how are they getting their traffic? They’re happily submitting articles, writing blog posts and commenting in forums and blogs.

Now, if your goal is to earn an extra $1,000-$2,000 per month, then these methods are great. But if you want to earn far more, you’ll want to change the way you get traffic.

No one that I know of is making large sums of money using only these methods. Instead, they are doing either SEO, PPC, Facebook Ads, or creating their own products and affiliate programs.

Or they have a HUGE list. But how do you get a huge, responsive list? Generally by using SEO, PPC or some kind of advertising.

So the real questions to think about when it comes to not only traffic but also any issue regarding your business is:

A) What is your goal?

B) Is what you’re doing going to get you to that goal this year?

And if it’s not – look for another method.

I will say there are of course always exceptions to the rule. If you’re really good at a particular marketing strategy like blogging, or direct sales using Facebook chats and other social networking engagements AND you sell products that can pay you high commissions, it IS possible to build a 6 or 7 figure income with free marketing.

But for the average person, paid advertising can be a faster path to the higher income tiers. Either way, choose a strategy that works within your current budget and commit to learning how to execute that strategy at the highest level possible if you are in the online marketing game to make a serious and life-changing income.