Thursday, November 29, 2007

Is Your Money Faucet Leaking?

 

A lot of people who are into information and product marketing online have a problem. They are losing money without realizing it, and the problem lies in the fact that they are not interested in investigating the mechanics the way internet marketing experts do. To be fair, I'm not expecting anyone to be an internet marketing expert. I'm simply suggesting that in order to build the right kind of process and structure within your marketing efforts to double or triple your income effectively.

I'll list down three points of weakness, and hopefully it will get you to think about how to implement your marketing program in a way that could multiply your residual income several times over.

Point of Weakness #1 - You do not have different points of entry.

I've found that when you have multiple points of entry into a product promotion, it becomes more diverse, more robust and definitely more exciting. Send people not just to a landing page. Send them to a shy-yes page or a namesqueeze page. Send them to a product review page. Send them to a blog post. Or even, to an article directory (didn't think of that one did you). Each of these pages should contain your affiliate link. More importantly, the tools should be used effectively to reduce the buyer defense mechanism. After all, when someone sees flashy sales copy, they are going to have their BS detector on overdrive mode. If you send them to places that they are more likely to feel safe and secure, that will be a great entry point to send them to a link you are referring, whether an affiliate recommendation or product link.

Point of Weakness #2 - You do not have a multiplier system.

If you get someone to read one article, one sales copy or one blog post, that's great. People are reading. But, isn't it more brilliant to have people read more than one EACH TIME? See, when people are exposed more times to your promotion campaigns, there is always going to be a time of the day when people are going to just simply stop paying attention. However, where there is great content, there is not going to be much problem. People will learn about it, and they will tell their friends.

Yet we know that sometimes, in order to persuade someone to do that extra step of clicking and sending a link to a friend, it takes a high level of trust and possibility 'ethical bribery'. You incentivize them to do the marketing for you. That's partly viral marketing in action. However, it is true that there are products out there in the market that will never be promoted as virally as the information in that same market. If you just push product, you won't get much unless people can consume it and then use that to tell other people about it. Even for you reading this right now, you would probably feel like you want to tell your friends about it. All you need to do, really, is to drop them an email, but things could be made so much easier if you could do it automatically, right?

See, multiplier systems don't just work with products, or affiliates. Multiplier systems work with credibility and referring links. This is of utmost importance for SEO based marketing, as well as for those who are new who do not have that credibility yet. After all, why not just give away your best content and innovate new content and ideas? How about getting people to give away your best content free to boost your credibility?

Point of Weakness #3 - You do not have leverage.

To understand leverage, think of the analogy of working out. You want to work out, but you don't want to have to find one place to use weights, another place to use a treadmill and another place to use a bench press. You would probably like to have an "all-in-one" gym because that helps you to create far more economy of time for you, right?

Well, think of it this way .On your website, there are many things that they can't see like in a gym. If they read one post on your blog, they may not have realized it's a massive thread on your forum. You may even have a product around this blog post that is stuck somewhere "down there". It's like a gym member only seeing one room and not realizing there are other amazing features there. If you don't have the capability to cross refer automatically, you will still die from exhaustion. There is just too much information out there, if you don't find a way to automatically link things together, it will be a serious problem for you in the future.

Conclusion

All that said, how do you actually leverage? Well, ask yourself if the things you are doing could be automated. Think of innovations to help you to cut short the learning curve and to reduce the number of steps in a process. If you can reduce those steps, it becomes more efficient almost immediately. I encourage people who are involved in setting up their products to look at the way in which they are setting up their products. Could they be more efficient? Or are they clumsy with the process? Are they able to see how the effort for doing certain things could be reduced simply through a new process innovation? While this takes a little experience, I would say that by developing a high level of insight into your own business will open up a plethora of possibilities for you, because your expertise and experience will grow with time.

Stuart Tan is Asia's leading internet marketing expert in business systems and productivity. His approach to leverage has been widely acclaimed in his national bestselling book, "Secrets of Internet Millionaires". He can be found at http://www.InternetMarketingSingapore.com/blog/

Labels: , , , , ,