I’m here in Sydney with 10 of the 20 Freedom Class participants, having an extra day on advanced traffic generation techniques.
Everyone now has an MVS (My Viral Spiral) site and a Products folder for placing their product sales pages. Those two things on their own are enough for anyone to run a successful online business. All they need to do is generate their first flow of traffic.
Today’s participants are also adding a blog to the mix of their business activities. This will become an invaluable tool both for building customer relationships and for generating hordes of visitors to to their squeeze pages.
As I write this, they are writing their first post. Very soon they will be catching the eye of the search engines, and with a signup form in the sidebar of their blog, they will be filtering off a free flow of traffic to their squeeze pages and sales pages.
Here are the names of today’s participants, with links to their new blogs.
The post I made yesterday to my blog got to the front page of Google for a popular search term, WITHIN 10 HOURS!
And that’s with over 200,000 results:
“A Useful Free Internet Marketing Tool“.
In this post, I’m going to explain exactly how you can do that too.
But first of all, here’s the proof (see the bottom of this screenshot) Or, you can go to Google yourself and type in “A Useful Free Internet Marketing Tool”, yourself. Results vary, of course, so by the time you read this, it might be higher, or lower than it is displayed in the image below, and it will no longer say “10 hours ago”.
Now then, incase ‘front page of Google’ doesn’t mean anything to you, let me explain why it is so important.
About 80% of traffic on the Internet arrives at websites via the search engines. And Google has 45% or so of the search engine marketplace.
So if you can get your page ranked in the first page of Google for a common search term (or problem statement) in your niche, you’re well placed for the lion’s share of the traffic.
And this is an easy and FREE way of reaching them. It illustrates the power and speed of blogging as an Internet Marketing promotion tool.
And how can you use that traffic?
OK - here’s one way (the way I use it…)
Put a signup form on your blog, for a free ebook or something. Just make sure that on signup, your users are directed to a sales page. Either for your product, or one you’re affiliated to. That way, you’ll make money and build your list very quickly at the same time.
If you’ve got an MVS site (My Viral Spiral), then you can get the code for your signup box, to place in the side bar of your blog, straight from it. All the redirection is then looked after directly in your MVS site. Simply use the “Web Form Code” box.
You can still do this if you don’t have an MVS site yet, but are a member of someone elses. Or, if you want to join one, join mine: TimsViralSpiral.com (click register at this page)
I’ve had over 100 signups in the past 24 hours from my blog. Normally I get about 20 or so in the same time frame.
So yeah - the method I’m about to give you works!
And now I’ll explain how to do it.
1. Get A Blog
If you haven’t got a blog yet, I strongly recommend you get one. My preference is to use Wordpress on your own domain, rather than a hosted one at Blogger or whatever.
If your webhost is worth their salt, they should give you Fantastico in your Cpanel. You can install WordPress from there for free. If not, you can download it, and install it to your site from wordpress.com
If you have an MVS site, you can ask us for your CPanel details… drop us a ticket in the tech help at timshelpdesk.com with your name and domain name and ask for your Cpanel username and password. You’ll find Fantastico at the bottom right of your Cpanel.
There’s a ton of useful stuff for managing your domain in Cpanel. If you need any help with it, try Discover-Cpanel.com
2. Install The Bookmarker Plugin
Once you’ve got your blog set up, install the bookmarker plugin from SocialMarker.com. That way, every post you make will have a bookmarker button at the bottom of it, like this one does.
Your readers, and you, can then bookmark your post with as many of the social bookmarking sites as you like. This will improve your ranking in the search engines fast.
Next, decide what problem statement you’re going after. (Mine was “A Useful Free Internet Marketing Tool”), and make a post with that as your Title.
When they’re spidering blogs, Google, and the other search engines, value the title with more importance than the post contents. That’s why it always important to title your posts carefully. And using known problem statements in your niche is always a good option.
By problem statement, I mean try and match, as closely as you can, the search term your prospects are likely to use to search for your product or service.
You want to be intercepting their search.
3. Write Your Post
Then write something useful underneath, for the body of your blog post. A post need only be 500 words, or less. Many are way less, but to get credence with a search engine, its best to aim for more than 400 words.
Be sure, too, to add some tags to your post. You don’t need too many but choose them carefully and make sure they’re good keywords for your niche. In Wordpress, the ‘tags’ box appears underneath the ‘post’ box.
If you’ve got a list, direct them to it with a broadcast. You want as many people as possible clicking your bookmark button and bookmarking your post. The more who visit, the more will bookmark it. Its another percentage thing - Internet Marketing is full of them!
Oh, and don’t forget to click on your Bookmark button after you’ve published your post, and bookmark it yourself!
So there you have it - a free way to get traffic, signups and sales using smart blogging and social bookmarking.
If you’d like the further information on how to generate hordes of free traffic with your blog, I strongly recommend you signup at unstoppableblogging.com. There are some valuable lessons and tools there which can take your blogging, and your traffic, to a new dimension.
I hope this was helpful. Please let me know with a comment to this post… Especially if you have tried it out and got good results…
Oh, and if you like it - click this bookmark button and bookmark it! :)…
So many things are taken for granted, once we get to know them.
Thats right: So many valuable tips aren’t passed on, because too many of us presume others already know about them…
Well - if you know about this, great - glad you’re enjoying it too, but if not, let me introduce you to a free tool which I use uncountable times during my working day.
Its called Sparky…
This is an attachment to my browser window. It will work with IE or Firefox, whichever is your preference.
When you go to a website, there are a number of things which might strike you about it straight away: Appealing graphics, a hard-hitting headline, good/bad copy, industry logos, testimonials etc… but none of them give you a clue about how frequently the site is visited.
And don’t you think that’s important?
Put it this way: when you’re thinking of using a service, or buying a product, it helps to know how many others have used it too. We gain assurance in our purchase by knowing this. Or we realise we’re taking a risk. Either way, its worth knowing.
This is as important online as it is off. Social proof is a great way of converting sales, and its never better than when it is provided independently.
For example… if you find a site that is offering something, and claiming thousands of people have had success with it, then you should expect it to be quite a popular site, no?
So what if you could know, straight away, whether they were telling the truth or not?
Well, one of the dangers when we start out working online, is that there are many sites like that. And the only credible way of knowing how well it is visited, is by checking its Alexa rank.
The google rank helps too. That is a measure of how many other sites link to it (and what their rank is too), but that’s for another post.
Alexa is a web information company. It continuously researches every site it comes across on the Internet and monitors how frequently it is visited. Not only that, but it also gathers information about other related sites which carry a similar topic, so you can visit them too.
The Alexa toolbar, as it was, or Sparky, as they call it now, is a very cool tool for uncovering more about the webpage you’re looking at.
With it, you can not only tell how popular the site is, but also how its traffic has grown, or declined, in previous months.
The alexa rank is just that, a rank of popularity. The most visited site on the Internet (Google) has an alexa rank of 1. As I write, Facebook has a rank of 6. This means it is the 7th most visited site on The Internet. This is how it is displayed in the task bar of my browser window.
As a rule of thumb, if you can get your blog, or a site of yours, to show an alexa rank of less than 100,000 - you’re doing well: Its a good thing to aim for.
The page you’re looking at, my blog, used to have an alexa rank of around 60,000 - when I was updating it daily. Now that I do it less frequently, the rank has dropped to 280,000 or so.
Would it help you to know how well you’re doing in the traffic rankings - at a glance?
If you think so, or even if you would like to know more about any site you visit, and what other similar sites are, I strongly recommend you get this cool free tool.
The simple fact is this: If you’re marketing online, its helpful to know how your site is ranked against your competitors’. Using this tool, you can do that easily: visit both sites, and note the alexa rank of both. The one with the lower number, is visited more frequently than the other.
You can download and install Sparky on your web-browser at this link:
Hope you found this helpful. Either way, please let me know.
Have you got other tools you find useful in your day-to-day work… let me know with a comment below -
Oh, and by the way - if you don’t want me to moderate your commment, please make sure it doesn’t contain an affiliate link.
I’ve been opting out from my work on The Freedom Class
to look at Butterfly Reports.
I don’t know about you, but once I’m focused on something,
not even wild horses can pull me away… so to begin with,
Mike Filsaime’s latest initiative was a distraction.
But now that I’ve had a good look, Butterfly Reports
intrigues me because it is following a similar principal to
My Viral Spiral - MVS. So much so, that a lot of people
have been asking me lately, how I will deal with the
competition….
Ha! - competition?…
Actually… like many things in Internet Marketing -
competition is most often collaberation in disguise. And
this is a case in point.
Let me explain… and then, please have a look at the site
and tell me what you think by leaving me a comment to
this post.
MVS, as you may know, provides a way for you to build your
own huge list by providing squeeze pages with your
rebrandable ebooks so that the people you pass them on to,
can pass them on too… That way, everyone who gets the
ebook from them, is also on your list.
Phew! - don’t think I’ve ever managed to explain it in a
single sentence before…!
The record number of signups so far is 1,200 in 5 days.
However, the one thing MVS lacks, beyond the 6 ebooks it
comes pre-loaded with, is… ebooks !
Yes, it does require you to create your own, or get PLR or
do whatever you have to, to populate your MVS site with
promotional ebooks so that you’ve got a consistent flow of
content to provide your signups.
Until now, you have had to use traditional methods: Either
take someone elses PDF, make it rebrandable with your MVS
site and create a squeeze page - or create your own.
And easy as it sounds, even *that* can be a lot of work…
Butterfly Reports gives us a continuous supply of
rebrandable reports and ebooks. And the wonderful thing is,
it does it for *f.r.e.e* …!
No more scouring article directories to copy and paste
articles for your scratched-together ebooks, no more head-
scratching as you stay up to the wee hours writing your own
- no more ghost-writing…
Get your ebooks from Butterfly Reports, and use them in
your MVS site… its a winning combination…!
So I strongly recommend you take a look at this site. At
least watch the video, and let it show you the potential of
what you can do with a collection of rebrandable ebooks in
your armoury.
And then, if you don’t have an MVS site of your own yet, we
are just about to release version 3.12 - an awesome
upgrade… Go ahead: have a look…
Oh, and one other thing: When you sign up to Butterfly
Reports, be sure to read everything they tell you. The site
is still in beta, and there are some important benefits to
upgrading at this time.
In most professions, there are a recognised set of skills required if you are to perform the daily tasks proficiently… Internet Marketing is no different.
Or is it?
In fact, Internet Marketing is different. Unlike most professions, Internet Marketing requires input from a complete variety of disciplines and skills, and our performance in the field will be hindered if we don’t either supply it ouselves, or outsource it.
When you try and sell something online, its actually quite similar to selling something offline. You need a shop window, a point of entry, a welcoming face, a shop interior which satisfies curiosity, and all the follow-up service which visitors expect.
This sounds straight forward. Its a process we take for granted every day of our lives when we go shopping in the high street. But to pull it off successfully on the Internet requires a careful application of knowledge and skill. Some can do it well, and get spectacular results very quickly. Others can’t and don’t.
So what is it that some have, and others don’t?
I have been researching this recently to help with my series of Freedom Classes.
In these classes I am teaching people how to market successfully online. I am offloading much of the knowledge I have gathered, about what works and what doesn’t, and - hopefully - inspiring my participants to discover for themselves what the best way is for them.
A difference about The Freedom Class is that I am conducting it by Action Learning. This means that participants not only learn directly from me, like in a classroom, but also learn from each other’s experience. It is a method of learning particularly suited to Internet Marketing because we’re all doing it all the time, and there is no right or wrong way, only ways which work and ways which don’t.
One of the characteristics of Action Learning, which is also a characteristic of successful Internet Marketing, is working in groups. It is no secret that I owe much of my own success to the Mastermind group, formed in September 2006, which brought together Bob Jenkins, Glen Hopkins, Matthew Glanfield, Dan Kelly, Scott Tousignant, Martin Salter and myself.
In the time since then, we have devoted an hour each week to a conference call, on which we can air what we are doing, express any difficulties we’re having, ask for help, and offer advice. We do this through a freely available conference line, and even though between seven of us, we are in 4 different time zones and 3 different countries, we still do it every week.
No matter how good we are at some things, we can never be good at everything. And I honestly believe that anyone seeking success with Internet Marketing who doesn’t form a mastermind group such as this, is holding themself back.
Recently I undertook an exercise to identify 5 characteristics which I believe are important to Internet Marketers. With these, I created a questionnaire for my Freedom Class attendees aimed at providing a visual display of which characteristics they possessed, and in what quantity.
The aim of the exercise is to help them find other group members for creating an effective team.
Much of the work in The Freedom Class will be conducted in groups and it is important, I believe, that each of the characteristics is represented in each group.
Here is a list of the characteristics I identified:
Writer
Artist
Co-ordinator
Marketer
Technician
My theory is that a team conducting Internet Marketing activity, in this case to provide each member with their own Internet Marketing business, should possess each of these characteristics… and - for best results - in equal measure.
We will discover if I am right from the experience of my first set of students on The Freedom Class this weekend… you can be sure I’ll keep you posted.
If you’ve received an email from me recently with mention of The Freedom Class, its because this Thursday, 31st January, I am opening registration to the first in a series of weekend learning seminars.
These are to follow the Action Learning format, a style of learning I found very helpful when studying for my MBA. It is especially applicable for Internet Marketing because it applies practical learning and not just theory. Together, over a weekend, we will build your online business.
Click here for more information on The Freedom Class, and register now for inclusion in the early launch notification.
In more ways than one, My Viral Spiral is becoming the must-have software for anyone serious about building a business on the Internet.
Following a hectic schedule of conference presentations, I’ve finally had a couple of weeks now to sit down with my programmer and work through the finishing touches for version 3.0
We are heading for a launch date of December 11th and I’m really excited about all the enhancements this version will include. Online rebranding and integration with 3rd party autoresponders are among them.
For more detail, and illustration of what’s to come, keep an eye on the MVS blog. And while you’re waiting for the release of MVS 3, you can get a feel of everything this system automates with this series of videos…
Enjoy your success…!
Here are some some pics from World Internet Summit London recently. These were taken during the speakers line up at the end. The speakers, from left: Ewen Chia, Shawn Clarke, Alan Forest Smith, Tracy Rupcheck, Sean Roach, Tim Brocklehurst (speaking), Mike Stewart, Brett McFall.
I’m here in Kuala Lumpur for Malaysia’s World Internet Summit and I’ll be speaking later today about the exciting potential for Viral Spiral Marketing in this country.
I’ll be interested to learn what delegates think of their impending position in the Internet Marketing community because it seems to me that Malaysia and Singapore are sitting on the mother of all gold mines in this industry.
Today’s newspapers spoke again of the impact on the world of increasing oil prices. For the third time in a generation, we are told, we are heading towards an oil crisis with global implications as the price per barrel teases the symbolic $100 mark.
But this time it is different. This time the price increase is driven by demand. Previously it has been caused by political pressure or constricted supply either in the Middle East, or Russia.
China’s consumption of oil has trebled since 1980. The current oil price, and potential increases in the future, are in correlation with the rise of the middle class in China and India as it steadily replaces mass poverty.
Look at these charts to see how oil consumption in China compares with Europe and the Americas:
And what else, aside of oil, do middle class consumers need?
Information… The Internet.
I believe the staggering increase in oil shown in China over the past 20 years is nothing compared to the forthcoming increase in Internet use in that country.
And when it comes to Internet Marketing, who in the world is best placed to teach them?
The cultural and language differences between China and the western world make it difficult for the main-stays of Internet Marketing to have a role in China’s growth. It seems more likely that it will come from her neighbours, in particular Malaysia and Singapore.
I’ll be speaking about this later today to the delegates of World Internet Summit Malaysia, and I will be interested to gather how prepared they are for their role in China’s Internet growth.
Lets be clear about one thing. When you’re running a business on the Internet, building a list is more than just important. Your list is everything. Its what earns you your money, its what enables your business to run on autopilot, its what positions you as the authority in your niche and its what no one can ever take away from you.
Not to put too fine a point on it, if you’re working online and you’re not building a list, you might as well not be working online… !
The chart below explains why I have been invited to speak at World Internet Summit next month, just 85 weeks since starting my Internet Marketing career… It is a chart of my own list-growth in that time.
I’m not showing you this graph to boast. I’m showing it to impress upon you that it can be done, that you can build a business, and a good income on the Internet. And there have been four key factors which have assisted the growth of mine. List Growth in The Past 85 Weeks: Tim Brocklehurst
I’ll tell you what the first two of those four key factors are right now: Conferences. World Internet Summit, Wembley. June 2006 and The Internet Main Marketing Event, Baltimore. September 2006, to be precise.
Those two conferences are points 1 and 2 above. They not only gave my business an immediate boost, but they also provided the vital foundation for all the exponential growth which occurred a few weeks later.
The relationships you make at conferences, and the methods you learn for building your online empire are, literally, priceless. If I had known for certain what effect World Internet Summit was going to have on my business in June 2006, I would have paid over $20,000 for my ticket. Really, it would have been a sound investment.
So what if I told you you can join me at Earls Court in London for the 2007 World Internet Summit (I’m speaking on Thursday 15th November), for just £10… (normal price £497). Would that appeal to you?
Come along. Do. And among many other things, I will reveal to you what points 3 and 4 are on that chart above…
Really, I can not stress enough how important it is to leave your comfort zone once in a while. Just get out there and meet all the other hundreds of other people who, like you, are working hard to build their online businesses. Team up with them, make partnerships, make friends. Its fun, its inspiring, its uplifting and… its profitable.
And if you follow my advice, and make the journey, please make yourself known to me at the event. Just come up and say hello. I’ll be wearing a big badge with my name on it in case you don’t recognize me…
Also, if you’re going to be there, please drop me a comment to this post, and look out for others who have commented here when you get there. Then you’ll have an immediate conversation starter when you see their names at the show.
And remember this tip: get some business cards made, preferably with your photo on them. Get at least 100 so you can help people keep in contact with you after the event.
If you’d like to hear me interviewed by Brett McFall about what I’m speaking about at World Internet Summit, click here (opens in new window).
And Now click on the link below for my special £10 entry page to World Internet Summit…
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