Today I spent some hours working on my marketing and specifically on social marketing. In the past my energies have gone in the article-marketing department. I can write fairly quickly and that’s why I use the article funnel for my sites more than anything else - but I am being re educated into the Social marketing and its fascinating as well as a threatening to me at this stage but I will get there.

‘What’s important’- is the theme of this short note. This morning early I had a phone call asking me if would visit the hospital to minister to a dying friend. I am a retired minister of the Anglican church and I try to stay retired and pursue other things these days but in this case I knew I had to put my hand up and go and do the things I had been trained and worked in through Army chaplaincy, Industrial chaplaincy and parish ministry.

He spoke briefly some moments lucid other moments confused, as is the case when the end is near. His pain was high and his wife was not sure how to handle this so I sort of took over and advised the head nurse that he needed more than Panadol - she came with morphine and administered the needed quantity. He had stopped food intake and was only taking a little water at this stage - the sort of shut down stage had started a week earlier and I could see the signs that he was at best left a day or two at most. He died at 5.30. In the afternoon today.

There are more things to do and I have been asked to speak at his funeral - as I am retired I am loathe to get in the way of the current vicar. But I will do what is needed with his agreement. And so I ask the question, which I have asked all my life.” what really matters”?.

Care and friendship cannot be bought it is just given and received however I am very conscious of the material needs of people today and for some its a great struggle to survive in the current climate of the economy and so these days my hobby, business or whatever you want to call it is internet marketing. And a key reason is to make money, which I am doing however my prime purpose is to train others in how to make a dollar. I want to do this for those who cannot do anything else because of their circumstances. Their are so many who with just an extra 200 dollars a week could pay for a decent rental place or could put better food on the table or just pay the weekly fuel bill for their car. These folk are single mothers, students, aged pensioners etc.

And so what matters is sharing knowledge that will benefit others so that they can make headway in life. Being a millionaire is not so important as being able to get through week without being stressed to the point of breakdown and I do know so many in this situation

One thing I have learned the hard way is that while you may give to charity it is unwise to give to others without some response on their part.  Even for those who are struggling I do expect some return for what they receive. It may be nominal but it is part of a healthy business equation. If we do not ask others to put return energy into what they receive we will diminish them and furthermore they will not value what is given to them and added to that they will not work at what is before them.

So My blog offers free articles about what works for me and then also affiliate programs which cost money but which I have used and found successful in building a business. Eventually I will set up live classes in my community and make available my training and knowledge for those who cannot afford many hundreds of dollars that most coaches charge - but there will be a charge and that will give motivation and commitment to any training that is received.

I currently conduct life-coaching classes in my community and the model there is a fee for service. I started out not charging and discovered that the same material being presented by other coaches was costed at many hundreds of dollars and I also discovered that the classes that I conducted were taken rather lightly but once the cost factor came in there was an accompanying commitment to the training.

So what really matters? For me at this time it is to equip those who have few resources to make headway in life. It is to encourage and fan to life their motivation and see the joy in their faces when they make incomes from their efforts through the training I give.

In all this process I will make money and I like that I enjoy the current incomes I am generating and I love spending it but I never fall in love with the income it is simply a means to an end and that end is ultimately to serve others as well as myself.

To close with a well know saying “love your neighbour as yourself” and you will notice that you are to love yourself because if you don’t do this you will dry up the joy of helping others.

Regards Leonard

Social Marketing Social Marketing Social Marketing! Its like a record going around and around in the same track. It’s talked about written about thought about and some people are actually doing it.

My problem was that working from a small knowledge base in this area of marketing I found the little knowledge was a dangerous thing. I blundered around and got into some difficulties by being too much market oriented in posting to MyFace and other sites.

The worse thing though was that I was getting hardly any traffic after all my efforts and so I thought I’ll just go back to what I know works and use the traditional article publishing, solo ads, adwords etc.

Later I started again at it (social marketing) because it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I wondered inside my brain – is there any real guide out there that can take me by the hand and make it happen for me?

And that’s where I came across Traffic Explosion

Here is something that is working for me and can work for you. It’s the best help I have discovered so far in training and guidance in Social Marketing. The mystery and confusion has been removed for me and I am able to sail ahead with it all now.

… With 8 comprehensive step by step videos it shows you EVERYTHING you need to know about driving lots of traffic into your website and affiliate links from the social marketing sites.

You get to see, on the screen, exactly what you need to do, which buttons to press and which hidden options you need to activate to get your profiles attracting lots of highly targeted leads that are ready to buy from you.

The videos are so easy to follow that you simply can’t go wrong with them and although they cover everything they are fast to move through. You start applying the tactics from them and seeing traffic from the social marketing sites very, very quickly.

You get shown on a guided tour on the best way to REGISTER, CUSTOMIZE YOUR PROFILE and get MASSIVE TRAFFIC from some of the biggest social marketing sites that exist out there.

And the best part?

Using these social marketing sites to get lots of highly targeted traffic is free.

Anyway, go and have a look at these excellent videos for yourself;

Regards Leonard

I have just got hold of a valuable tool for blog posting Its called Instant Blog Feed and allows you to store up articles and posts and inputs for your blog for months ahead. Just think of it instead of laboriously posting every day which you must do to make the blog work you can have a store house of material that will release by itself at a predetermined date. This is a great too and quite inexpensive in fact real cheap and thats what made me buy it. So now I can do some storage work for all my creative efforts and my machine will release them on the dates I ahve set. This of course doesnt prevent spontaneity because you can always just put up something on the moments notice but its real handy to have a robot help me out - not with material for that my part and its got to be real and original and good - but with the release of the material and thats what Instant Blog feed is all about.

Regards Leonard

I have just finished watching the two videos by John Reese on Traffic web 2.0 - heres the link if you want to see it ( its not my link and I am not an affiliate)  http://www.drivingtraffic.com/ts/

I made a rough summary of the points on the video and here they are below - they are rough but it will give you some idea of the magnitude of his approach to traffic . his concept of reverse engineering - which normally applies to web sites where you just find out the number one ranking product in any given area then you go backwards to find their keywords and links and then copy - he now applies to several other areas . So here is my rough summary made after a quick watch - best you watch the videos yourself for I think they are enormous value to any marketer . hope you find this helpful - it really is advanced marketing stuff.

Reverse engineering

1) Find the best sites by simply typing in the keywords “how to play golf” take the top site and reverse engineer it – use various software to get to their keywords and ad process

2) At Download,com go the categories that are like your product – look at the reviews and the number count of downloads to find what people are looking for in software in that product area.

3) Go to DIGG examine all the posts that are presented see which homepage has got the most votes and you will know what people are actually wanting and like.

4) Have a look at FACEBOOK check out those who have the most friends in the category that is like yours and again reverse process and work out what it is that has got them the huge “friends” opt ins .

5) Go to ADWORDS find those who are using the most expensive keywords and backtrack their site to see how they are advertising

6) EBAY is a source to see what is hot selling in your area and also gives keyword searches that are working .

7) PR WEB here track down the most successful press releases in the area that is like your product – learn from the way and style they use and copy

TECHNORATI do a basic search with technorati and you find the traffic blogs on any subject . Have a look at the most successful blogs and learn what is working for them

9) COMPETE .COM gives reports on who is getting the most traffic afnd where it comes from - again reverse engineer and find out what makes them successful

10) COMPUTER JUNCTION to find the best ads from the best products copy their style of ads for affiliate marketing

Please excuse the rough notes with a few mispells     Regards Leonard

Video  2     Is  about  CONTENT

OWINING MORE OF THE INTERNET

CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT the more pages you have , the more content you have )( and it has to be real and productive content ) through blogs articles sites etc then you will get syndicated across the web

GURU.com

Odesk .com

Affiliate Marketing Overloading is my own term. It describes my many wasted unfocused hours of struggling to understand how to break into the Affiliate Markets.

Oh Yes I knew how to build a website and I knew how to get a product but I could not keep myself on track. I would constantly open emails offering quicker, easier , less costly, more efficient program offers and then I would fall for buying some. I counted at least 6 products designed to give me better keywords better links better this and better that. Each time there was a cost and it began to mount up. It wasn’t that the products were faulty but it was like giving Shakespeare to a child in first grade - so much of it was just beyond me and Because I had spent the money I put in days and days in trying to get these products working for me.

I had committed the cardinal sin of losing focus. What does it mean to stay focused? Well for me it meant staying with a few methods of operating until I understood them and got them working. It meant being so thorough with a few things that I could easily recall how it came together and then make them work for me.

Like so many of you when I am unfocused I start surfing anything that strikes my inerest on the web and there is just so much interesting and fascinating material that can come up at the touch of the mouse. mY greatest blunder in the world of the unfocused was to take on all the new info about social marketing and this was before I could understand Aweber the most well know autoresponder. I got so far ahead of myself that my head was spinning. I could list so many products and programs that are defined as social marketing from Squidoo to Twitter and they are all good but I was like a man on a sports field trying to catch 20 balls at the one time and dropping all of them.

Eventually I wised up and began to go back to a few things that I knew could work. I knew about the funnel concept where traffic is created by all these various methods and like a funnel it channels it into your web site but I had not worked through any of them at depth. So I chose to go down one pathway. it was the pathway of Article Marketing. I began to write articles and get them published. I began to understand the power of article marketing and it wasnt long before I had traffic and good traffic coming to my website.

The process of being a good article marketer is not hard however if its a difficult area for you - that is you find it difficult to creatively write then you can employ others to do it for you through many publishing managers Elance being just one. Whatever the case if you choose to be an article creator then work at it till you understand it and can use it easily and everyday.

Once I had the article system under my belt and felt comfortable and was producative I then moved on to the PPC. Pay Per Click. I worked at this and began to underssand its power however it was highly dependant on keyword rich and also you could lose money very quickly if you are not careful. I did lose money here in the process of learning and through the pain of money loss I wised up to setting limits and doing some tracking and a few other things. The point I make here is that I had mastered the article workfield and now I was mastering the PPC field of affiliate marketing. I had kept my focus and resisted all sorts of other wonderful offers that keep coming daily.

Since those times I have mastered video, audio and use some of the social marketing sites but not all by any means. There are so many avenues today to draw traffic to your site in affiliate marketing and unless you have a team working for you I feel that its unecessary to be in everything that is offered.

So in conclusion just stick with one or at the most two marketing “funnels’ that will bring traffic. Work on them till you know them backwards and then and only then look at other avenues. The truth is that there are many people who are successful in affiliate marketing who use only two or three avenues of marketing and leave the rest. Good luck in your affiliate marketing and stay focused

Regards Leonard Greenhall

Why are articles so important to marketing? And why is it ‘how to write an article’ is seen as such a hurdle? And then the next question is “how does an article get traffic?

• I created my first website and with a bought template I added bits and pieces until I was satisfied my product was going to do well on the web but at the time I had very little knowledge of how customers would find my website. I quickly learned that as a stand alone website it was not going to make the first ten spots in google or indeed the 300th place and so I set about to find just How I could get my product to the market place.

• Then I learned about articles! Articles are the magic to getting the search engine attention and in turn attention to your website. The google machine searches for content and content which original. This however does not mean that you have to invent the wheel. There is a heap of content out there already on any subject and as you search the web, search magazines and good books and collect good content that is relevant to your subject then you become the editor and reshaper of this content.

• You are now the creator of original content because it is in your words and has been filtered through your brain. It goes without saying that you should never plagiarise - that is copy blocks of material and just insert it - If you do copy material you must give it quotation marks and refer to the original author and article from which it came as the source and then it is legitimate.

• Your article needs to be to the point, interesting and swift. The article is no place for an academic treatment of the subject it is an outline and introduction for the reader who should want to go on and look for more. Bullet points can be used or numbering - anything which makes it easier to follow. The title of your article needs to be keyword oriented. For example this article is about “how to write an article”. My research showed that these words are highly used on the net for people wanting to know how to write articles and that is why you are currently reading this article. Importantly your main keywords should appear in the first paragraph as well as the heading for the google spider to give it good ranking and distribution

• Articles are like a funnel which bring prospective purchasers to your web site. Articles are around forever once published they continually bring attention to your site through its resource box. The resource box of course is the little box at the end of the article which publishers allow and there you can place a link to your website. You are not permitted to make links to your site or other affiliate programs in the course of the article and so the resource box needs to be carefully crafted to get readers to click on for more.

• In my resource boxes, most times, I offer a Free Mini Course or a Free Report which will bring the reader to a landing page and from there they can on for more from landing page such as a one time offer or a straight out product offer. More importantly once the reader opts for the free mini course or report they have given me their name and email and they are now part of my list for further contact and further offers or free info to build a relationship with the reader who opted in.

• Finally here is a list of article publishers which i recommend you to use in publishing your articles. And remember after you publish up to just six articles you are considered an expert and beginning to make a name for yourself on the web.
• EzineArticles
• GoArticles
• SearchWarp
• ArticleDashboard
• WebProNews
• ArticleBase
• Isnare
• ArticleCity
• IdeaMarketers
• Site Reference
• Article Alley
• Amazines
• Excellent Guide
• Articles Factory
• Content Desk
• Impact Articles
• AuthorConnection
• BusinessKnowHow
• The Article Word
• Easyarticles.com

Regards Leonard

It was two years ago when I made my first attempt to make money online. I had heard about the ‘easy steps’ you would take and so I began. I had no real guidance and in my usual fashion I thought if I throw enough money at this I will make it happen.

Wrong! I purchased all sorts of programs some of which had value but they were beyond my stage of understanding at that time. Some deals, which cost up to $100 would give me massive keyword lists and cross checks to other successful marketers and their details but I had no idea how to use all this. One program on which I spent $2000 was quite useless it was for the most advanced marketers.

And so instead of making money on online I was giving away money on online.

However I have one quality that has worked for me – and that is persistence. You have got to give it to me because for about two years I bought products, paid coaches and wasted money and I did eventually learn what to do but I learned the hard way. Today I have several successful web sites and I make sales.

BUT I wish I had found someone or some book that had shown me the painless way to do all this. I wish I had someone tell me simple things like, “ your domain name should be connected to your subject and be keyword rich,” because I just made up domain names that sounded nice which had no advantage in the busy world of making money through the internet.

I wish I had been guided to know how to select products on clickbank which would sell – I thought if they are on clickbank they must be ok and it took me along time to discover what all the hieroglyphics which accompanied each product in the clickbank listing really meant. For instance there was the term ‘gravity’ which I thought might be to do with the seriousness of the product but learned later it was the key phrase to knowing whether a product would really sell or if it was a dud.

I wish someone had shown me a simple way to set up a responsive email system which would send out emails to any customers I might get – I of course eventually found Aweber and there are many others who offer the same service but again I wish someone had told me that Aweber gets more emails through than any other program of the same type.

I wish someone had taken me by the hand right at the beginning and shown me the fastest and easiest way for a beginner to make money online. If you are like me when I started out to make money through the Internet then I can tell you there are easy steps and you can be led by the hand to find your way and be successful.

There are specific programs and free information, which are out there, and I can help you find them through my blog. So let me save you some pain and let me help you make money online. Cruise around this blog site and see what is on offer. Everything I placed on this blog has been carefully selected for you to make money on the internet without blowing your money. There will always be costs however it is just a question of where you spend and how wisely you do this. There will always be free information and again it depends on whether the person or advisory group has proven themselves in the business of making money online

Regards Leonard

The great salesman may be able to sell ice to Eskimos however eventually the Eskimos realise that the ice has been there all the time and is free. Affiliate marketing is not about tricking people into purchasing something that really has no value. To do this builds mistrust and certainly does not ever give you the chance to make a second approach with other products.

It is the quality of the content that makes or breaks you as a business in the market. If you provide real information that answers real questions and needs you will draw customers back more than once in fact you will build a loyalty factor, which is the essence of a good business.

How then do we find the questions that are being asked that will prompt us to find the solutions that people seek? We can go to places like Clickbank and search the Market area where an enormous amount of information products are available.

Once in clickbank market area then check the ‘gravity’ of the product and this will tell immediately if it is an area where affiliates are making sales to a hungry market. The higher the gravity the more the item is being sold. There are other places such as Ebay and Communications Junction (where the EPC is like the gravity measurement of clickbank).

So once you know there is a demand in the area and the area is ‘monetised’, which means people are purchasing the product ,you now go to research. In research you are looking for good information and teaching which answers the questions being asked – and this becomes the ‘good content’. Which will make your product and articles and website successful.

How to research? Where do we go for information? The answer is simple. Firstly you do not have to draw the knowledge from your own head unless you are already an expert in the area. You go to those who are successful in the area already. To websites and articles that are out there in the thousands on the web.

For instance if I want to find good content for an article on dog food I would simply type in the google search ‘articles on dog food’. You will find so much material this way by using the already established in the field experts. Then you must carefully read and learn and reshape what you find to make your own article

It is important not plagiarise- that is to copy great slabs of material from others- For that is illegal and a very bad habit to develop. What is required is that you learn and absorb the material you gather. You should cross match and see similarities in at least 10 other articles from different authors and then create your own version of the subject. Of course you can purchase the products of others on the subject and add to your knowledge and working base in this way as well.

If all this seems too much then you can pay others to produce articles with good content for you by going to Elance and other similar article providers. However even here you should provide the basic material for the article writer to create the item.

If you have the patience and research to develop your own product it is the superior way to being an affiliate market business. Why do I say this ? Simply because you will have no competition - the product is yours and yours alone.

I first developed my own product in the area of feng shui it was a laborious task and it is a rough model compared to what I now do but it immediately paid. I used the services of a chinese born Australian to develop the material and then launched the product mainly through writing articles.

The response was immediate and many took the free mini-course by joining my list -my list grew day by day giving me an ongoing connection to go back and present other similar products in the Feng Shui knowledge area.

However while the response was immediate and I got sales it had taken me almost three months to get things together . From the mini course to the landing page to the sales page which I presented as one time offer it took time and effort and money.

Now lets compare how things are for the affiliate marketing person.

1. Firstly you don’t have to spend any time developing a sales page which is difficult and requires expertise.
2. Secondly , and most importantly, you don’t have to create a product.
3. Thirdly you don’t have struggle to find a hot product or niche for that can be revealed by a gravity search ( see my blog on “The Best Affiliate Tip to Find a Hot Product”).

So time and effort and money are cut to minimums and in the affiliate market world you can begin today and be in business tomorrow. There are many more points to differences but in a nutshell these are the three main differences and these differences sweep away the grind and costs of creating your own product.

There is a midway position however between these two approaches to marketing. You can work on the affiliate market with a particular product or line of products and as your confidence and understanding of the product promotion grows by observing the sales approaches of the experts you can begin to develop your own product in that area while at the same time working the affiliate markets.

Regards Leonard

If you dont already know about affiliate marketing through clickbank then go there have a look and tour around its dashboard. Its perhaps the best and easiest source to find products for your business. The clickbank market section provides literally thousands of ready made products for affiliate marketing  on all sorts of subjects and they come with a ready made sales page and help to set up your marketing campaign.

There are many things to learn about clickbank however there is one simple test you can employ to tell if you have chosen a hot product that will sell . It is called “gravity”. After each product description you will see a figure called gravity. Simply put when this figure is high- say 70 or above then you have a good product. Why? simply because this figure refers to the number of other affiliates who have chosen this product and they have chosen because they are able to sell it .

So go to Clickbank , click on Market at the top of the page and then type in the box provided a general product area, eg - dog food or gardening . A list of products under that title will appear and you can check the gravity and choose a hot product that is selling

Clickbank costs nothing to join and is widely used by affiliate marketers. It deal soley with digital products which simply means “information products” so there is no shipping or mailing side to it - it simply a download when a sale is made.

Good luck and good management in your Affilate journey Leonard

www.profitsgoldmine.com