Vol. 2 - Issue 11 - DotComSecrets, Inc. - Nov. 2008 Inside This Issue: How to Quickly Dominate the Most Popular Video Sharing Sites Like YouTube, MySpace and Viddler by Scott Brunson, Video Editor Plus: Four Ways to Ethically Steal Traffic From the Top Gurus and Bloggers in Your Niche by Russell Brunson, President Now you can siphon targeted leads from the most visited websites in your niche and become a traffic parasite with just four simple tactics. Four years ago Russell Brunson set out to make some extra cash on the internet in his tiny, college apartment. He had no formal training and little money but today his company, DotCom Secrets, Inc., brings in millions each year. In 2006, the company grew from Russell and one other employee to 13 inhouse specialists. To compete in such a rapid field of business they are studying, testing and applying new ideas everyday and learning what works through trial and error. All of Brunson’s employees signed confidentiality agreements when they were hired. But now, he’s given them the okay to share the trade secrets that make DotCom Secrets, Inc. a success— but only in this journal. Why? Because he knows more than anyone that making money on the internet takes two things— dedication and knowledge. You now have monthly access to the publication with the highest concentration of information on the dot com world. Every month Russell and his team will update you on the latest tips and trends that will make your internet business stand out from the millions already out there. Everything is inside, from writing cash-sucking sales letters to generating free traffic to your website. So, if you have the drive, you now have everything else you need to make your online business a success. By applying the secrets he and his staff use, you will find that living your dream isn’t as far off as you think. Wow, it’s only been about a month since we launched our first ever $100 Million Challenge and the competition is already getting exciting! Our office has been enjoying the creative videos that contestants have been sending in - so please keep them coming! It’s been extremely rewarding to see how many people are taking action on the principles we are teaching and this is just the beginning. If you aren’t already competing, you can join in by going to: http://contest.dotcomsecrets.com Remember, there is a brand, new Corvette at stake for the winner of the competition. So put your game face on and get started right away if you haven’t already. Just a note about this month’s issue of the DotCom Secrets Journal. We’ve been focusing heavily on lead generation for the last few months, especially as we continue to increase the number of people who are signing up for the $100 Million Challenge every day. So in this month’s issue I wanted to make sure to fill you in on all of the powerful new lead generation tactics we have been using. First, you can find out how we create videos and instantly turn them into hordes of targeted traffic in Scott’s article (pg. 18). And in my article this month, I’m going to reveal little-known strategies you can use to ethically steal traffic from other gurus and bloggers in your niche. We have been shocked by the number of leads these tactics are getting us, so I urge you to try them out! Again, thank you for being a member of our DotCom Secrets Journal and DVD of the Month. My team and I really enjoy putting it together every month - and we especially enjoy seeing how the principles we teach are changing people’s lives. Your Partner for Success, Russell Brunson President of DotComSecrets.com 2 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com Contributors, legal notices and subscription information LEGAL DISCLAIMER AND TERMS OF USE You do not have resell rights or giveaway rights to any portion of this Publication. Only customers that have purchased this publication are authorized to view it. This publication contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any way without the prior written permission of the author. Violations of this copyright will be enforced to the full extent of the law. The information services and resources provided in this book are based upon the current internet marketing environment. The techniques presented have been extraordinarily lucrative and rewarding. Because the internet is constantly changing, the sites and services presented in this book may change, cease or expand with time. We hope that the skills and knowledge acquired from this course will provide you with the ability to adapt to inevitable internet evolution. However, we cannot be held responsible for changes that may affect the applicability of these techniques. Screenshots in this book are from publicly accessible field archives.All product names,logos and artwork are copyrights of their respective owners. None of the owners have sponsored or endorsed this publication. While all attempts have been made to verify information provided, the author assumes no responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretation on the subject matter herein. Any perceived slights of peoples or organizations are unintentional. The purchaser or reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. No guarantees of income are made. The author reserves the right to make changes and assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever on behalf of any purchaser or reader of these materials. DOT COM SECRETS JOURNAL Publisher: RUSSELL BRUNSON Editor: BRITTANIE BYRON Editorial Questions: editor@dotcomsecrets.com Contributors: BRENT COPPIETERS, Affiliate Manager DEREK FAYLOR, Pay Per Click Manager KEVIN HILL, Copywriter ROSS BRUNSON, President of Book Ease, Inc. SCOTT BRUNSON, Video Editor TOM RICH, Vice President of Marketing Past Issues. Missed an issue? Back issues are available for $39.97 while in stock. If you would like to purchase a past issue, please submit a ticket at www. customerhelpdesk. org with your name, email address and the issue you would like. DOTCOMSECRETS.COM 3100 S Vista Ave Ste 200, Boise, ID 83705 Support Desk: www.CustomerHelpDesk.org Tel. 208.323.9451 You can contact us at www.CustomerHelpDesk. org for changes to your mailing address or billing information. Please send comments, questions and letters to the editor to: editor@dotcomsecrets.com. This publication is another quality product from DOTCOMSECRETS.COM Copyright 2008 © DotCom Secrets, Inc. All Rights Reserved Insider Journal | 3 ©iStockphoto.com/Alexander Hafemann ©iStockphoto.com/Kativ vol. 2 issue 11 MARKETING 06 Traffic Parasite Four ways to ethically steal traffic from the top gurus and bloggers in your niche. 14 You may never know your customer’s exact thoughts as they make a purchase, but you can get pretty darn close with these five research methods that will help you get inside your their head. 24 PRODUCT CREATION What Makes People Buy? Residual Affiliate Checks Learn how you can use affiliate marketing to work once and profit over and over again. 4 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com 33 A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Own Profitable Continuity Program There’s no question that a continuity program can be vital to your business’ longterm growth - but how do you create one with limited budget and resources? Find out in this simple-to-follow guide. ©iStockphoto.com/ Nathan Gleave ©iStockphoto.com/Eric Limón LEADS AND SALES 10 How to Read Like a Copywriter Kevin Hill, copywriter for DotComSecrets. com, reveals a powerful, must-have checklist you can use to determine if the copywriter you are paying is worth their salt. 18 Harnessing the Power of Viral Video 21 How to Laser-Target Your PPC Ads FINANCES 37 The Magic of Limited Liability Discover a little-known, governmentgranted gift that can help you protect your business and personal assets. Insider Journal | 5 6 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com ©iStockphoto.com TRAFFIC PARASITE How to Ethically Steal Traffic From the Top Gurus and Bloggers in Your Niche Do you ever look at the big marketers and bloggers in your niche and wish that you could just take a percentage of their traffic and send it directly to your site? Just think what would happen if someone with a list of 100,000 people or more sent 10 percent of their list to your site once a week. And what would be even more exciting is if you had 20 or 30 people like this all sending you a percentage of their traffic every day! Well, even if this just sounds like a dream right now, I’m going to show you some simple tactics that will make this possible today. It’s a tactic I call parasite marketing, and I’m going to show you my favorite ways to snipe traffic for free from all of my competitor’s sites every day! Step 1: Understand How A Parasite Works Before you can become a parasite, you need to understand how one works. Now I know that parasites usually have a negative connotation as “blood suckers” who live off of the resources of something else – but when it comes to traffic I promise you that it’s a good thing. I was at an event this weekend where Michael Pennland talked a little about how parasites work. He said that a parasite will setup shop on an animal like a cow. Now, when this cow eats something, or gets something to drink, it feeds the cow, but it also feeds the parasite. The parasite doesn’t have to do a lot of work after it’s found its home because it can live off of the nutrients Now you can siphon targeted leads from the most visited websites in your niche and become a traffic parasite with just four simple tactics. Don’t worry, it’s 100 percent ethical. In fact, many gurus will happily send you hordes of their traffic if you just follow a few simple ground rules. By Russell Brunson, President of DotComSecrets.com Insider Journal | 7 Now, you need to realize how most good marketers run their businesses. Most of them have built up large mailing lists of subscriber. Most of them also have a blog where they communicate with their members... Now, wouldn’t it be powerful if you were the first person back to their blog, the first person to read the entry, and the first person to post a comment with their signature file...? that its host provides forever. Now, if you were a parasite, what type of animal would you want to become a parasite on? The skinny sickly cow, or the fat happy cow? Of course it’s going to be the fat, happy cow. You also want to find a cow that eats often, because the more often it eats the more often you would get fed. Now I want to switch this analogy to you. Stephen Pierce once told me that you don’t need to create traffic. There is already tons of traffic out there, all you have to do is find out where it already is, and get it to come back to your site. You can do this by using this parasite analogy. There are other marketers in your niche who are already getting tons of traffic to their websites. They already have huge mailing lists and already have followings of people. So, as a parasite marketer, I need to figure out how I can attach myself to their marketing, so I can benefit from their already existing sources of traffic. Now, before I share with you my favorite strategies, I want to give you a warning that you cannot use these strategies to go to people’s sites and spam them. If you aren’t using them ethically, then you are as bad or worse than the spammers. I promise you that these techniques work well, and are MORE effective when you use them ethically. 8 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com Step 2: Comment Sniping This is one of my favorite new ways of becoming a parasite on other people’s sites. Now you need to realize how most good marketers run their businesses. Most of them have built up large mailing lists of subscribers. Most of them also have a blog where they communicate with their members. And what often happens is that they will write a blog post, then send an email to their lists saying, “Hey, I just made a new blog post, check it out at www.myblog.com.” What then happens is that tens of thousands of people rush to their blog post within minutes and read that person’s blog post and comment on what they said. Now wouldn’t it be powerful if you were the first person back to their blog, the first person to read the entry, and the first person to post a comment with their signature file that had a link back to your site - so that when the thousands of others came to read that blog post they would read the post and then see the first comment (which is yours)! Unfortunately, we don’t always know the second someone makes a new post to their blog, but there is a solution. There’s a powerful software tool called “Comment Sniper” that you can get for free at www. CommentSniper.com. With this software, you can watch each of the most powerful blogs in your niche, and the second The First Commenter on a DotComSecrets.com Blog Post. The poster’s name is also a link to their website. anyone posts to them, comment sniper will let you know, and you can race to that person’s site and make the first comment with a link pointing back to your site! As the floods of people they send to that post have a chance to read it, they are always going to see your comments and your links! The keys are to make sure that your comment adds to what the original blogger wrote and then structure your comment so it will be a resource for other readers. For example, let’s say someone makes a blog post talking about how they use eBay to sell their products. An intelligent comment that would get you a lot of targeted traffic would be something like this: Hey (name) – thanks for that post. I’ve also used eBay to sell my products. What I’ve found is a very powerful way to use eBay is to use their classified ad program to send traffic directly to my site. That way I can bypass eBay fees, and also get them to join my list. It’s been a powerful way I’ve used to build my list up huge. Hope this helps. Russell Brunson To learn 7 other eBay tricks that I use everyday to build my list download my free report at www.mysite.com. Notice that my comment adds to the creditability of the blogger, helps give his or her readers more information and then gives them something free if they visit my site? Posts like this can get you 200 to 300 subscribers or more every time you Parasite cont. on page 36 Insider Journal | 9 READ LIKE A COPYWRITER 10 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com ©iStockphoto.com s a marketer, it is extremely important to understand the basics of copywriting. There is no question that the best marketers also know how to write good copy, and you need to at least know the basics if you want to write a winning sales letter. However, if you don’t want to write your own copy, or are too busy to write a good sales letter, you can always outsource it. The only problem is there are a lot of “copywriters” who haven’t made a sale with their copy, or they just don’t know what they’re doing. The worst part is they get away with it since the client doesn’t know what makes a good sales letter tick. The great Gary Halbert once said that if you can write a sales letter, spend money on advertising, and make a profit, then you can call yourself a copywriter. However, there are a lot of unproven rookies who call themselves “copywriters” but don’t fulfill this criteria. After reading this article, you’ll be armed with the information you need to ensure you’re getting what you paid for. Because I’m going to teach you how to think like a copywriter when you review a salesletter. This will be your “checklist” when you outsource a copywriting assignment so you can decide if the copywriter you hired needs a revision. Are you ready? Let’s get started! You don’t have to write your own sales letters, but you do need to know good copy when you see it. Kevin Hill, copywriter for DotComSecrets.com, reveals a powerful, musthave checklist you can use to determine if the copywriter you are paying is worth their salt. Written by Kevin Hill Copywriter for DotComSecrets.com Are There Enough “You’s?” One of the most common faults of sales letters is there aren’t enough “you’s.” In other words, the letter talks about the business owner or a case study rather than focusing on the customer. Therefore, there are a lot of “I’s” and “we’s” in the letter. Here’s a fact: the customer doesn’t care about you. They only care about themselves and what you’re going to do for them. If you get a salesletter that has a lot of “I’s” in it, it’s apparent you’re just talking about yourself and could care less about the customer. As a result, the prospect will tune out your letter and the chance of getting that customer will be lost forever. So you need to make sure there are a lot more “you’s” in the letter than “I’s” or “we’s.” In fact, at least two-thirds of the letter needs to be “you’s.” If it isn’t, then you need to shoot an e-mail to Insider Journal | 11 your copywriter and tell them to write a more customer oriented sales letter. Is the Copy Conversational? Another error most copywriters make is writing their letter as if they were writing an English paper. They use long sentences, too many adjectives, and don’t get to the point right away (more on that later). If you were to take their letter and read it to a friend, it would sound like a boring novel. And if your letter puts your friend to sleep, it’s guaranteed to do the same to your prospect. The first thing you need to do is read the letter out loud to yourself or a friend (the latter is preferable). Pretend your friend is your target customer and you’re talking to them one-on-one. If the letter doesn’t sound conversational, then you need to send it back to your copywriter if you want to make any sales. This includes using short paragraphs and sentences. This also includes using powerful verbs instead of adjectives that make the language sound “flowery.” This is a sure way to lose your prospect’s attention. So if you get a “fluff-piece” sent to you by your copywriter, then send it back and tell them to read it aloud to someone and fix the awkward parts that don’t sound conversational. It’s the copywriter’s responsibility to do this, not yours. Does the Copy Have a Logical Flow? Another thing you can check is if the copy has a logical flow. I’ve written about this many times before, but I’ll give you the “Cliff-Notes” version right here of how a successful salesletter is structured: 12 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com Headline: Get’s the customer’s attention. Introduction: Tells the customer what they’re going to read. Story that agitates the problem: Connects with the reader since they relate. Story that provides the solution: Paints pictures in the prospect’s mind and builds desire. Offer: What you’re going to offer them to get the above benefits. Bullets: Little “teasers” that build curiosity. Value-Builder: Where the price is introduced and reframed so it appears cheap. Bonuses: Two to three items that improve the offer. Takeaway/Scarcity: Something that encourages immediate action (like limited time offer or small supply). Guarantee: Where you give the customer a way to back out of the sale. Close: Where you ask for the sale. There can be several variations, but this is the overall structure of a salesletter. If you get a letter back from a copywriter that deviates 50 percent from the above, you need to tell them to revise the letter so you can get your money’s worth! Does the Copy Have an Arresting Introduction? When you review your sales letter, does it have a great introduction? You see, there are some copywriters who don’t know how to get to the point in a letter. For many, the actual letter doesn’t start until the second or third page because they insert a bunch of fluff and filler as if they were writing a short story. The ultimate test is this: does the intro deliver a Big Promise to the reader? For example, if you’re selling a weight-loss product, does the intro tell the reader they’re going to discover a method that’ll allow them to lose weight without changing their diet or exercise? Remember what I said earlier, the letter has to tell the customer what’s in it for them. In other words, the letter has to tune into the radio station WIIFM: What’s In It For Me. If the introduction doesn’t get to the point and speak directly to the customer, then your prospect will go back to whatever they were doing before they came across your letter. So if you get the letter back and it doesn’t give the customer a Big Promise within the first paragraph, then send it back and tell your copywriter to get to the point! talking about long calls-to-action like example; they can be embedded commands in the middle of sentences like: “Or you can take action today and start experiencing longer drives that’ll humiliate your golfing buddies!” In short, if the sales letter doesn’t ask “So if you get the letter back and it doesn’t give the customer a Big Promise within the first paragraph, then send it back and tell your copywriter to get to the point!” for the order, then send it back to your copywriter and have them correct it! Does the Copy Have a Great There are some copywriters who Headline? Does the Copy Ask for the Order? have a great headline, excellent flowing letter that speaks directly to the customer, and plenty of testimonials and proof. But the copy falls flat because it misses one important step: asking for the order! Go to the end of the copy you’ve just been sent and scroll to the bottom. Is there a call-to-action at the end? An example of a call-to-action is as follows: “So click on the link below and start losing weight while still enjoying your favorite foods!” It’s a simple sentence. Yet there are some who don’t put in a simple call to action and assume the customer will “get it” and fill in the blanks. Better yet, there should be about four to five calls-to-action at the end. Now, I’m not they are doing and read on?” If you answer, “No” then you need to get your copywriter to write another headline. Better yet, get them to write 25 headlines and have them send the top three headlines to you for testing purposes. So if the finished copy I saved this important point for last because I want you to remember it the most. I’ve said again and again that the headline is the most important part of the sales letter. Yet most copywriters will put all their effort into the body copy and slap a cheesy headline on top of the letter as an afterthought. One way to determine if the headline on your letter is important is to ask yourself the following question: “If my target audience sees this headline on their computer screen while there’s music blasting, IM windows and e-mail notifications popping up left and right, ten browser windows open, and their significant other walks in the room telling them dinner’s ready, will they stop what comes back and the headline is dead in the water, you need to get your copywriter to think of something better! In Conclusion I do realize some copywriters have different writing styles. And this isn’t meant to be the definitive checklist for great copy. However, this is a good basis for you to use if you want to determine if the copywriter you hired did a good job. A good rule of thumb is if the copy you get back into your inbox violates half of these suggestions, then a revision is needed. That said, the only suggestion that must not be violated is the last one. It is critical that the headline is impeccable. Otherwise, feel free to use these suggestions over and over again if you decide to hire out your copywriting assignments. DCS - By Kevin Hill, Copywriter Insider Journal | 13 What Makes Your CUSTOMER 14 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com ver the past several months, I have been writing about the three commandments and ten questions of successful marketers. Several of you have requested that I publish the list at the beginning of each article in this series. I think that’s a great idea because as you become more aware of these rules and can answer these questions, your probability of marketing success is increased exponentially. During the past few months, we’ve covered all three of the commandments and two of the ten questions. If you were unfortunate enough to have missed out on the in-depth review of those topics, no worries… Russell is a kind and benevolent internet marketing expert, and has provided a way for you to access this knowledge. Simply log in to the member’s website (http://members.dotcomsecrets. com) to review the article archives. For those who are new to the DotComSecrets Insider’s Journal, need a quick refresher, or cannot/ simply don’t want to visit the site, you can review a quick summary of the commandments and questions on the following page. Who Uses Your Product and Why? This month, we will be focusing on the third question, “Who uses your product, and why?” ( Just a quick ©iStockphoto.com/Michael Monu side note unless otherwise stated, for the purposes of this article, the terms “product” and “service” can, and likely will, be used interchangeably). Knowing who your customer is and how they use your product is such a critical component of marketing success it is covered by both a commandment and a question. If you ignore your customer, you do so at your own peril. Your success in a market is directly proportional to your ability to do research. It’s not a fun word. To many, the term “research” conjures up images of annoying people with clipboards wanting to ask you questions in the mall or annoying pollsters inquiring as to how you will vote. And while that is technically a form of research, the research you will need to do will likely not involve any of the “annoyance” types. Really, your research will boil down to a few key areas: What makes your customers whip out their wallets to get their hands on your product? You may never know their exact thoughts as they make the purchase, but you can get pretty darn close with these five research methods that will help you get inside your customer’s head. Written by Tom Rich, The Bitter MBA Determining market size Identifying why customers will want to buy Revealing who your past, present, and future customers are Discovering how customers use your product Establishing how you can best reach your customers Insider Journal | 15 The Ten Questions and Three Commandments of Marketing Q8: How long does a customer stay around, and how can you increase it? Ten Questions Q1: What is your product? Q2: What makes your product better than others? Q9: How much will a customer spend over their lifetime, and how can you maximize it? Q10: What do you have left over? Q3: Who uses your product and why? Q4: How can you reach out to that audience? Three Commandments Q5: What do you need to do/say to get them to act? Commandment 1: Know Your Customer Q6: How can you track advertising efficacy? Commandment 2: Measure Everything Q7: What does it cost you to reach them? Commandment 3: Test, Test, Test Determining Market Size Before you begin marketing any product or service, you need to understand the marketplace for it. At the very basic level you need to have an understanding of who would buy that type of product; how many of them are there; and how much are they willing to pay to get it. Please keep in mind that market size does not determine success or failure. That said, the price for the product should match the size of the market. For example, unless it was pretty remarkable, you couldn’t charge $654,400 for a Kleenex; however, if you happen to be marketing the fastest street-legal car in the world, and you were only going to make oh… 25 of them, you could demand that price, and then some. But not everyone can afford to drop nearly three-quarters of a million dollars on a car (after tax, title and license). So it wouldn’t make much sense to advertise in People or TV Guide. You are looking for a very small segment of the marketplace. So, before you start down the road of production and advertising, the first question you need to ask 16 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com yourself is: how big is the market for my product? The size of your market is, in large part, determined by the popularity of the need or want your product is trying to fill. Take the above examples. At one point or another almost everyone in the world will have need for a Kleenex (a very large market seeking to fill a wide variety of wants and needs). On the other end of that spectrum, a very small percentage of the market will have the want or need, or more to the point the means necessary, to attain an ultraluxury sports car. Identifying Why Customers WIll Want to Buy Many volumes have been written, theories presented, and hypotheses tested to address the question that will forever plague businesses: Why do we buy? These complex theories discuss utility derived, opportunity cost weighed, disposable income (or available credit) to be consumed. Essentially, they all boil down to one simple idea, we buy to alleviate a perceived need/want. These needs/wants may be fundamental: people need food, shelter, clothing, etc. And they buy your product to fill one of these fundamental needs. However, a $1 taco achieves the same result as a $150 steak. A $500/month apartment fills the same need as a $5,000,000 house. A pair of $15 Wal-Mart jeans addresses the same need as a pair of $10,000 Escada jeans. So what drives consumption on the one level (need) is not the same as what will drive it on another (want). Where needs are almost always based in logic, wants often defy anything resembling it. The world is full of products that successfully fill wants: 150” plasma TVs, multimillion dollar cars and homes, etc. Wants help us express who we feel we are or want to be, compensate for our shortcomings, or make us feel good about ourselves. Where needs are almost always based in logic, wants often defy anything resembling it. The world is full of products that successfully fill wants: 150” plasma TVs, multi-million dollar cars and homes, etc. Wants help us express who we feel we are or want to be, compensate for our shortcomings, or make us feel good about ourselves. Maslow pointed out that people act to fill their needs, based upon their level within the hierarchy of needs: Level One: Physiological Needs (Functional) Level Two: Safety and Security (Well-being) Level Three: Love and Belonging (Emotional) Level Four: Recognition and Accomplishment (Esteem) Level Five: Self-Actualization (Perfection) As we seek to fill higher-level needs, we tend to be willing to pay a higher price. Find which type of need your product fills, make sure you address that need/want in your advertising and promotional materials, and then start reaching out. Revealing Who Your Past, Present and Future Customers Are Based on which need they are trying to fill, how they heard about you, satisfaction levels, their purchase history, etc. your customers will fall into different categories. These categories can be based solely on purchase (as in an RFM analysis), need fulfillment (functional, well-being, emotional, esteem, or perfection), etc. Or these categories can be multidimensional. Multi-dimensional customer segmentation can be extremely expensive and time consuming, but can yield interesting results. That said, most of what most small business owners really need to know can be identified through a single factor customer analysis. Survey your customer so that you know the basic demographic and psychographics. That way you know the basic “formula” for a good Market cont. on page 28 Insider Journal | 17 Powerful traffic generation secrets that will allow you to dominate the most popular video sharing sites like YouTube, MySpace and Viddler! 18 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com HARNESSING THE POWER OF VIRAL VIDEO What is a viral video? It is a video that, like a virus, spreads itself around infecting everything with its contagious message. It can be funny, serious, happy, sad, informative, or just plain stupid. These videos usually get posted to free video services like YouTube, or MySpace and then get sent around the world through e-mail, or just plain word of mouth. In fact, chances are you have either received an email telling you to see some amazing stunt or had somebody tell you to watch a certain music video. Viral videos can spread like wildfires, but unlike real wildfires, they can be used for good too! They can be used to promote a business or product, and if your video really catches on, it could make a difference in your bank account. What Makes a Video Go Viral First you need a good idea for your video. This can be tricky and somewhat time consuming. You need to think of something that would help make your video stand out. Maybe have a celebrity in your niche record a video endorsement, or maybe record a mock news report explaining your product. Try to think of something that could add a unique element that would make people want to watch your video again, or tell a friend. Remember that it should be strong, relevant content to your niche. Don’t stray from your topic just to make it funny. You still need to provide relevant content for this to work. Also, don’t make your videos too long. People want clips that are quick, to the point and then leave them wanting more. The average length of most common viral videos is between two and four minutes ©iStockphoto.com/Erik Reis (Video Wall) and Eugene Kuklev (Trophy) Video has swept away over 50 percent of web traffic according to eMarketer and is only likely to gain popularity. How can you take advantage of this huge source of online traffic? All it takes is a few simple steps and you could have your own viral video spreading your message across the internet. Insider Journal 19 Top 20 Video Sharing Sites Traffic Geyser will submit your videos to almost 50 video sharing sites like these: Youtube.com MySpace.com Viddler.com Revver.com http://video.google.com http://video.yahoo.com UncutVideo.aol.com Blip.tv Break.com Crackle.com DailyMotion.com Graspr.com Howcast.com imeem.com MetaCafe.com Sclipo.com StupidVideos.com Veoh.com Vimeo.com 5min.com long. Another reason to keep it short is so that all the video sharing sites will accept your video. Remember, YouTube has a 10 minute limit and almost every other video site has a file size limit. If you want your video to be accepted by the most video sites possible, it is best to try to keep it under the five minute mark. Spreading Your Message Once you have your video idea decided and recorded, the next big step is to make it viral. How do you make it viral? Well, it is very unlikely that your video will do extremely well if you don’t help it out a bit. The way to do this is with the help of a few websites. First off, you need a site to store the video on. The easiest and fastest place to get started is YouTube. It is easy to set up a free account and the upload feature 20 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com has enough instructions to walk you through the process the first time. Create an account, upload your video and then tell people about it. You can embed that video in a web page or a blog or on your MySpace page. Send out emails, call people, post to other blogs or forums. Any way you can get the message out works. Then you can upload that same video to Google’s free video sharing site, and then to any more of the hundred or so other video sharing sites and repeat the process. Yes, that’s one way to do it, but what if you don’t want to work that hard? What if you don’t have that kind of time? Well, there is a solution to every problem, right? In this case, the solution is TubeMogul. TubeMogul.com offers online video distribution and analytics. This Viral cont. on page 31 How to Laser-Target Your PPC ADS Adwords costs can be steep these days, so to make the most of your advertising budget and still get the keywords you want, you may need to pull out a few tricks. Learn the little-known strategy our PPC Manager, Derek Faylor, uses to instantly laser-target prospects, grab more clickthroughs and boost sales. Imagine this: you’re the owner of a pizza place in the middle of Boise, Idaho. You’re competing directly with five other pizza places in your area, two of which are major chain stores. You’re barely breaking even as most of your customers (college students) are herding over to other pizza joints. Suddenly, you have a dream that you are able to discover a secret advertising method that allows you to annihilate your competitors by placing a single targeted ad on the internet. It will be live in less than 10 minutes and will only be shown to people within your delivery area. Well, guess what? The dream is now a reality, thanks to Google Adwords and the ability to target a specific area with pay-per-click advertising. While your competition is busy placing classified ads in the newspaper and blowing money on postcards, you’ll be able to jump over them because first, most of them don’t know what the heck Google Adwords is and second, they don’t realize you can target your ad to a specific region with just a couple clicks of a mouse. In this article, I will show you how to create region targeted ads via Google Adwords. In other words, if someone outside the area you choose types in the keyword you’re bidding on, the ad won’t show. It’s as simple as that. This strategy is perfect for people with physical stores, but I’ll show you later how you can use this strategy with an online business. All set? Let’s get started! Setting up a Campaign by Region I’m going to walk you through how to set up a basic campaign that’s targeted to a specific region. You see, Google allows you to perform region targeting based on specific areas or the diameter around a zip code. To choose the first option, you have to click on “Start with Keywords” when you start a new online campaign (Step 1). Insider Journal | 21 On the next screen (Step 2), you’ll see the “Start a New Campaign” screen. Click on “Change Targeting” so you can start targeting your customers by a specific region. You‘ll notice Google gives you four options regarding how to choose the areas you want to target. If you want to pinpoint your target area to a single city, click on the “Browse” tab. Once you do that, you’ll see a menu of all the countries you can target. When you click on the “+ signs” to maximize the menu, you’ll see the many different areas where you can pinpoint your ad placement. For the example shown in Step 3a, I decided to target the Boise, Idaho area. You can see that Google gives me the option to target smaller areas in the region by simply clicking on the area I desire. However, for this example, I’m going to include the whole Boise, Idaho region (I’m going to assume people are willing to drive a couple hours if they really want something from my make-believe store). So after I set my area, all I have to do is click “Done” at the bottom of the screen. That’s it! I didn’t have to do anything “techy” to my Adwords ads but now, they’ll only show in the region I set. All I had to do is click the mouse a few times and I’m off to launch my Adwords campaign that’ll only show in that area! Step 1: Create a New Online Campaign Screenshot of the first screen you see when you log into your Google Adwords account. Click on “New Online Campaign” and “Keyword Targeted” to start a new campaign. Step 2: Settings For Your New Campaign Click on “Change Targeting” so you can start targeting your customers by a specific region. 22 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com Step 3a: Target Your Ad Campaign by State, Metro, City or Region Step 3b: Target Your Ad Campaign by Zip Code How to Customize Your RegionTargeted Adwords Campaign Another option Google lets you do is select an address or a zip code and tell them how far a distance you want your ad to show. This is perfect if you’re running a pizza delivery service and only deliver within a certain radius. Step 3b shows the screen after I click on the “Custom” tab and insert the zip code of my location in Boise. I also told Google to show my ad within three miles of the zip code. You can also type in a physical address if you choose. What do these ads look like when someone in your area types in a keyword you’re bidding on? You can see an example on page 31. You’ll see the “Boise Landscaping” ad at the bottom is a region-targeted ad since it has “Boise, Idaho” on it. If you were searching for a lawn care service, wouldn’t you be more apt to click on the link with your own city and state on it? But What If You Don’t Have a Physical Store? If you don’t have a brick and mortar store, don’t worry. There is a strategy you can use that’ll allow you to create more region targeted ads even though you’re 2,400 miles away. You can do this by customizing your campaign and landing page so it targets a specific region. Region cont. on page 30 Insider Journal | 23 24 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com ©iStockphoto.com/Viorika Prikhodko RESIDUAL AFFILIATE CHECKS Don’t have your own membership site or continuity program but wouldn’t mind getting consistent checks in the mail every month? Then learn how you can use affiliate marketing to work once and profit over and over again. I want to start this article off by giving a “shout out” to all of our affiliates. They truly are amazing. We have some of the best affiliates on the internet. They work hard, but see the fruits of their labors in affiliate commission checks and other cool prizes. Currently, our Zero to $100 Million Challenge is getting bigger and bigger with more people signing up to participate every day. The reason? We have turned everyone who signs up for an account into an instant affiliate. Yes, they can participate in all the benefits like any member, but as soon as they get access they are automatically given an affiliate link to promote and easy access to their affiliate stats. Darn, Russell is so smart. Again we recognize the power of affiliate marketing, and it’s my goal through this article and all of my articles to help you realize this power too. At DotComSecrets.com we offer our own cus- tom affiliate program at www.TheSecondTier.com. We offer exclusive information and training that far exceeds our competitors in this niche. Russell has also done something that not many entrepreneurs in our industry have done; hired his own full-time affiliate manager. Most entrepreneurs handle this part of the business themselves. It can be a time demanding position that takes the entrepreneur away from creating and marketing their products. My day consists of helping organize upcoming product launches, networking with other affiliate managers and product owners, researching and recruiting affiliates and Joint Venture partners, and training our existing affiliates. I love my job. Not because of my ability to work so closely with Russell and all the other terrific individuals who work here, but my interaction with people like you. People who are working so hard to better not only their lives, but the lives of others. Insider Journal | 25 Making Residual Income as an Affiliate To illustrate the power of continuity programs, I am going to point out some options for you, and encourage you to promote continuity programs as an affiliate. As more and more companies are establishing businesses on the internet, affiliate programs have increased in popularity as a great internet marketing tool. Affiliates are rewarded with commissions for directing traffic and potential customers to the company’s website. Our affiliate program here at DotCom Secrets has been responsible for paying out thousands of dollars in commissions to our affiliates. We currently have over 30,000 affiliates who are promoting our products and services. A secret to our affiliate’s success is our continuity based products. First off, what am I talking about? Here at DotCom Secrets we have several products that our affiliates can promote, but only a couple of continuity based products. Our continuity program is one of the best in the industry. Heck, you should know as you are part of it. You have subscribed to receive our monthly DotCom Secrets Journal that is filled with great tips and suggestions that are aimed at helping you either get started or improve your online business. Affiliates are used to working once and getting paid for that work. For example: they refer a new customer to our sales page. If that customer buys our product, then we pay that affiliate a commission for referring them. Our affiliate commissions are like a “finder’s fee.” The really neat thing about continuity based products for affiliates is that you do that same work of referring a customer to our site, and if they buy a continuity product then they don’t just get paid once for the sale, but the affiliates get paid over and over again. They continue to get paid a commission as long as the customer continues to receive the product or service that they signed up for. Think about a newspaper or magazine subscription. If you referred your friend to receive the local newspaper, wouldn’t it be nice if you received a commission every month that they receive it? Or what about giving your neighbor information about a lawn maintenance program? How neat would it be to receive a monthly commission as a result of that referral? Every time the person you refer is billed, you are cut a commission check. Wouldn’t You Like to get Big, Consistent Affiliate Checks Every Month? 26 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com We have several affiliates who receive recurring checks from us every single month. For example, let’s take our top affiliate. He has promoted our monthly DotCom Secrets Journal just a couple of times and has had over $100,000 in sales. So far, he has made $50,000 plus in commissions for promoting a product just a couple of times. Again, this affiliate was going to do the work anyways, so why not promote something that will pay a commission over and over again. Our affiliates are having some great success promoting either our Free DVD or our Wealth Building Portfolio. We give our affiliates the choice to either promote the Free DVD which allows for a digital version of our Membership site, and digital access to our monthly journal, or to promote our Wealth Building Portfolio which gives access to our membership site, as well as physical and digital versions of our journal. Affiliates like having the choice of different products to promote. Some affiliates know that a free front-end offer may or may not do very well for them. They may choose the bigger Wealth Building Portfolio vs. the free DVD. Both are set up with a continuity program. Our continuity program not only makes our affiliates happy, but also makes Russell happy. He does the work once, and then makes money every month. Plus our customers are happy as they are able to receive an excellent marketing resource in their mailbox every single month. Finding the Best Continuity Programs to Promote For those of you reading this who are not currently promoting continuity programs it definitely is the way to go. A person who I consider a tremendous online marketer just e-mailed that he is getting ready to launch his own continuity program. Again, as an affiliate I would find a good program out there that can pay you good commissions, and really promote. One of the best aspects of promoting continuity products is the residual commission that you receive. Residual commission is when you receive a commission every month from one sale. So you can be on vacation in Hawaii or biking cross country and still be making money every month without doing a thing. The trick is to find continuity programs to promote that are able to retain their subscribers. If you promote the product or service once and everyone drops off after the first month, then that isn’t a good continuity program. You want to find out from the product owner what their retention numbers are. They can also let you know specifically at what point they have their greatest number of “drop for. The other day, I received an email from a successful affiliate who wanted to thank us for our continuity program. ...A successful affiliate... had received some great feedback from his own customers about the content of our newsletter. He felt like he was able to refer his customers to us, and that we would take care of them. He was also happy because he had made over $12,000 in commissions just by promoting our Wealth Building Portfolio one time! offs.” Do customers unsubscribe on the third month or the tenth? This will help you evaluate if it is worth promoting. Marketing a Continuity Program Before promoting, I would definitely sign up for the continuity program yourself. You will be able to better evaluate the program to see if it is something that your list would benefit from. It will also help you in promoting. How cool when you have a picture with you and the product, or can provide a specific testimonial about the product’s usefulness. I love it when an affiliate e-mails me and asks me to remind them what they are getting commissions He had received some great feedback from his own customers about the content of our newsletter. He felt like he was able to refer his customers to us, and that we would take care of them. He was also happy because he had made over $12,000 in commissions just by promoting our Wealth Building Portfolio one time! If you are looking for a time tested continuity program to promote, I would invite you to promote ours. Remember, you just have to do the work once, and you will get paid over and over again. You can contact me by emailing me at bcoppieters@ dotcomsecrets.com. DCS - By Brent Coppieters, Affiliate Manager Insider Journal | 27 Region cont. from page 17 customer. A quick refresher on terms: Demographics are anything that you can reasonably assume a census would report: gender, age, income, family size, rent vs. own, marital status, etc. Psychographics try to quantify the qualitative. This comes down to things that are not so easy to put in a box: Rolex vs. Cartier, BMW vs. Mercedes, Pellegrino vs. Perrier, red vs. blue, hot vs. cold, family time vs. sporting event, now vs. later, big-screen vs. kid’s college fund, monogamy vs. well, you get the point. Once you know the primary building blocks of your customers, break them into segments. The practice of segmenting your buyers will help you further refine offers and help ensure you don’t send the wrong offer to the wrong group. You should get to the point where, based on your segmentation strategy, you can answer questions such as the following: Are your customers old or young? Do you have customers from both age groups? Do they buy for different reasons? Do they buy differently (offline vs. online)? Do they pay the same amount? Which is more profitable? Which is easier to find and/or market to? Which responds best to your offers? Do they use your product differently? Which brings up a good point… Discovering How Customers Use Your Product You can’t flush toilet-paper in Asia (for those of you wondering what you do with it, like parts of Europe and South America, there is a little waste basket next to the commode for your convenience). Stranger still, if you go to almost 28 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com any truly authentic restaurant (meaning the locals will actually eat there) in Asia, the table will be prepared with many of the things you would expect: eating utensils, salt, pepper, MSG, sugar, and soy sauce. But you may encounter something you don’t: a roll of what can only be identified as toilet paper. ©iStockphoto.com/Michael Monu You see, in many of the developing nations, they have found a great variety of uses for toilet paper, many far beyond the limited scope that westerners deem as acceptable: napkins, paper towels, cleaning supplies have all been replaced by the otherwise ignoble roll of toilet paper. However, a simple touch and you can tell it is definitely not the same. Paper manufacturers in Asia discovered the toilet paper of the western world was too flimsy to properly perform all the duties it was called upon to perform on a daily basis throughout Asia. As a result, they decided to dramatically reinforce it with glue to support and stand up to the needs of these less than genteel purposes. The obvious downside to this “steel-belting” the toilet paper receives is that it prevents the normal breakdown the otherwise watersoluble pulp-based composition would normally go through, and will, upon flushing, get stuck and clog pipes. The above example, while perhaps slightly crass, is used to make a point: find out how people are using your product, or more to the point, how they are trying to use your product, and make sure it can stand up to these alternative uses. Now, this is also an area many miss out on opportunity, the want/ need consumers are seeking to fulfill may not be the one you expected or designed the product to fulfill. In other words, your consumers are using your product to serve a need/ want other than the one you expected them to. For example: toothpaste can clean silver, A-1 can clean brass, beer makes a great hair conditioner… if you’re interested, thousands more of these unique uses can be found in a remarkable little book: Uncommon Uses for Common Household Products. As mentioned in a previous article, the grandfather of multiple uses is WD-40. WD-40 published a list of over 2,000 uses check it out if you get bored: http://www.wd40.com/files/ pdf/wd-40_2042538679.pdf ). Essentially, the greater number of potential uses, the greater your opportunities to sell, but that’s not all… the more usage opportunities you present, the more usage occurs. That little scenario can exponentially increase re-purchase rates, which, in case you were wondering, is good. Establishing How You Can Best Reach Your Customers This is something we will leave for next time. Be sure to read next month’s article on how you can reach out to your target audience. If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you. I will probably answer most the questions I receive through articles… so if I don’t answer yours right away… keep reading, it will likely be in a future issue. Please feel free to send me an email at: marketing@ dotcomsecrets.com. DCS - By Tom Rich, VP of Marketing Insider Journal | 29 Region cont. from page 23 Region Targeted Ad for “Lawn Care” For example, let’s say you want to sell an internet marketing course. Google Adwords costs are pretty steep these days for all the “make money online” keywords, so you need to pull a few tricks to get more clickthroughs and sales without blowing your budget. So you decide to target the Los Angeles area. It has a huge population and it would be a piece of cake to target the entire area so your ad will show only there. So, in order to make your relevancy score high, you decide to make sure your landing page talks about Los Angeles so it connects to readers. For example, you can say something like, “Teaching The Citizens Of Los Angeles How To Quit Their Jobs” in your headline. You can get creative but don’t hint you’re not even in the city. It is also a good idea to have “Los Angeles” in your ad text as well. The more relevancy to your audience (and your landing page), the higher the clicks you’ll get. You then activate the campaign so your ad will show. Chances are, since your competitors are too busy posting the usual, “I’m going to make you rich” Adwords ads, yours will stand out because it’s targeting the prospect’s specific locality. From then on, you just have to rinse and repeat in different major cities. I will say this: it isn’t easy since you have to create a different landing page. However, that’s only changing a couple words: from “New York” to “New Orleans” for example. And you have to create a lot of these campaigns if you want to get decent traffic. But your clickthroughs will probably be higher, which means you’ll get cheaper click costs and a higher ad position. It’s similar to posting to ads in Craigslist. These days, Craigslist will allow you to post to three major cities every 24 hours. There are tons of people advertising “make money online” opportunities from New Hampshire to California who have never seen the state. And people outside their regions will never see their ads. However, with Google Adwords, your ad won’t be pushed down to the second page like Craigslist. It will be in front of the eyeballs of your target audience in the area you choose 24-7, until you take it down. 30 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com To conclude this article, it is evident that Google Adwords has come out with a great innovation allowing anyone to serve targeted ads to the area they choose. The ability to do this wasn’t available more than a decade ago, and most local businesses were relegated to putting classified ads in newspapers and placing billboards on city streets. The best part is you don’t even have to have a physical store to benefit. You can create region-targeted Adwords campaigns in any location you choose in the world - even if you have a website and are miles away. Believe me,most of your competitors are clueless about site-targeting. I’ve even seen ads targeted for Canada when they don’t ship outside their country! It isn’t hard to beat out most of your competition, assuming you have good ad copy in your Adwords ads and your site is relevant to the keyword you’re bidding on. So if you have an existing website, go and create an Adwords campaign targeting a major metropolitan area using the recommendations above. I recommend New York or Los Angeles due to the population density. If you make a profit over your general targeted campaign, then select another region, rinse and repeat. So what are you waiting for? Take action today! DCS - By Derek Faylor, PPC Manager Viral cont. from page 20 means that instead of uploading your video to numerous sites individually, you can upload it once to TubeMogul and they will send it out to other sites for you! Right now, tubemogul has the ability to upload to about 20 video sharing sites.This means that with one upload, your video will automatically show up on 20 different sites. Your video has a much greater chance of becoming viral once it is in front of 20 times the number of viewers. TubeMogul has different levels of service that offer additional options. The basic account is free and allows you to upload 150 videos a month. This level also gives you the ability to track some information about your videos for a short period of time. You can see which sites are giving your video the most views and which ones are not doing so well. The higher levels are not free, but they offer additional features like live training, file storage, and priority customer service. Just starting with a free account will help you get acquainted with the process. If you are more interested in results and you are willing to spend some money (after all, you have to spend money to make money, right?) then you might want to consider another video distribution site called TrafficGeyser.com. Traffic Geyser is similar to TubeMogul in the fact that it takes your one video and distributes it to multiple video sharing sites. But Traffic Geyser offers many more tools to help get your video spreading through the internet like the virus you want it to be. First, Traffic Geyser can upload to almost 50 video sharing sites, so that helps to expand your reach with just one shot. But, it doesn’t stop there. It then takes your video and submits it to multiple social bookmarking sites. Then it is off to multiple social network sites; it creates blogs and blog posts with your video; and finally it turns your video into a podcast and submits it to multiple podcast sites. This has the potential to get your video ranked very high in the search engines within minutes! Now, that would be amazing even if Traffic Geyser stopped there, but they don’t. They then take your video and convert it to a different format and send it out again! Then they will do it a third time, and then even a fourth time. This may seem redundant,but what it does is give you the ability to target each video with a different keyword. You can set this re-distribution on a time delay basis, meaning you can have the second video sent out in a day or week or month. This way you have the potential to keep your video at the top of the search engines without doing a thing. Your video may show up in the top search result in Google for four different keywords! Now we are getting somewhere. Your video could now be seen by thousands of people within a short time of you uploading. This video is starting to look pretty viral and it didn’t take much time at all. Traffic Geyser is a monthly membership site that runs about $97 dollars a month. This is a reasonable price to pay if you are really going to take advantage of what the site has to offer. You can take this service and use it to drive huge amounts of traffic and build a large list of customers. You are probably already spending that much a month on other, less productive forms of paid traffic generation. So whether you are a small business just trying to get started using video to drive traffic or you are a large company trying to further increase your client base; you can definitely benefit from a video distribution site. Use a free TubeMogul account to see what it can do for your business and then move to a service like Traffic Geyser when you are ready to take over the internet and dominate your niche. After all, 52 percent of all web traffic is video. So it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and use your own video to drive some traffic and build leads. DCS - By Scott Brunson, Video Editor Insider Journal | 31 A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Own There’s no question that a continuity program can be vital to your business’ long-term growth - but how do you create one with all limited budget and resources? Find out in this simple-to-follow guide on creating physical and digital newsletters. Are you ready to become a publisher? I bet you are, even if you didn’t realize it yet. Creating your own monthly publication – either digital or physical – is a powerful way to create residual income in your business or to entice visitors to sign up for your list. At one point, a continuity program may become the most important part of your business. It can give you peace of mind knowing that X amount of dollars will come in each month and provide tremendous value to your customers who are constantly looking for more information on the topics that interest them most. There are many ways you can create continuity programs in your business, but today I want to focus on newsletters and magazines. They are simple to create, require little to no overhead costs and can 32 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com provide great value to your customers. The DotCom Secrets Journal and DVD of the Month is just one example of how powerful this type of continuity program can be in your business. Let me share just a few of the benefits DotCom Secrets has enjoyed since we started publishing it: It creates reliable, monthly income that covers the costs of running DotCom Secrets for the month, with a little extra profit to work from. It reinforces the strategies that are working at DotCom Secrets when each employee writes their article. We are able to advertise the best deals to our most ©iStockphoto.com/David Marchal Insider Journal | 33 loyal customers on a monthly basis. It makes it easier to move customers through our product funnel. And here are a few benefits customers like you get from our continuity program: The latest marketing strategies that are working at DotCom Secrets right now are delivered to your door each month. By emailing me at editor@ dotcomsecrets.com, you have the opportunity to ask our team any question you have about making your online business successful. Access to our entire article archive, dvds and more training at http:// members.dotcomsecrets.com. I hope that this helps you see the power in building a solid continuity program in your business. For now, I want to start by giving you a few guidelines on what kind of content your publication should include and a few ideas on how you can get that content created. What Kind of Content Should You Cover? There is no secret formula for how many pages a newsletter should be or what topics should be covered. But, there are two rules you can safely follow for almost any publication. The first rule is that a newsletter should only be as long as you have unique, quality content to fill it with. Don’t pad your pages with useless information just to fill space because in your reader’s mind, they are paying for the whole newsletter – even the parts they don’t read. If you publish a 100 page digital newsletter every month, but only 10 pages have worthwhile content, what your subscriber sees is that they wasted money on 90 percent of the product. You would be much better off if you put your time into getting 30 pages of quality content instead of 90 pages of useless filler. The second rule is contingent on the first. Do not take this rule to mean that you should throw a bunch of fluff into your newsletter just to hit more topics. That said, the second rule is, the more unique (and relevant) topics you cover, the more likely you are to hit those that floor your readers and get them to sign all their friends up for gift subscriptions. For example, some of our readers subscribe just for the traffic generation tips. Some just want to hear what Russell has to say and some read the whole journal from cover to cover. All of them are getting the information they want out of the DotCom Secrets Journal, but if we took out traffic generation, for instance, we’d lose an 34 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com entire group of subscribers. Now, you have to balance this between what you can reasonably provide and how many of your subscribers are interested in a topic. But the basic point is to publish quality content, and as much of it as you can. If it’s not relevant to your readers, throw it out. Filling Your Newsletter With Quality Content Where do you get all this fresh, quality content every month for a newsletter or magazine? The first thought most people have (and I think what turns them away from ever starting their own newsletter) is that they have to write all the content themselves. But you don’t have to look far to find great content that will compel your subscribers to keep reading month after month. For example, every month we fill the DotCom Secrets Journal with articles written by experts on vital internet marketing topics like traffic generation, programming, product creation and, of course, marketing. What makes our Journal unique is that each of these experts work at DotCom Secrets every day and see what is working and what is not. We don’t recommend that you try a new SEO tactic or create a certain type of product unless it is working in our business. But this scenario might not be realistic for you, so here are a few other ideas on how you can get your hands on unique content for a monthly newsletter without writing it all yourself: Idea 1: Feature an Expert Call up an industry expert, tell them what publication you are with and ask if they will sit down for an hour long interview.Take careful notes and be sure to record the interview. Then write an article that retells their story and include quotes from the interview. Plus, since you’re recording the interview anyway, you can sell the audio as a separate product! Idea 2: Tell a Story I recently came across a popular wedding blog filled with product reviews and wedding ideas. Most of the posts the author made received a few comments here and there but the posts that really got the most attention were those that featured real brides. All she did was post a few pictures of the couple’s wedding day and then she’d get the bride to write a couple short paragraphs about what made the day memorable. The moral of this story is that you don’t have to try to contact industry experts and hope they can fit you in their schedules – you can contact friends, relatives or even look on websites like MySpace and FaceBook for people who are passionate about the niche you’re marketing. These people don’t make the news every day, but you can bet that if they have a hobby or They will likely be writing for other publications as well, but if you’re willing to share your writer, you’ll save a lot of money over Don’t pad your pages with useless information just to fill space because in your reader’s mind, they are paying for the whole newsletter – even the parts they don’t read. talent they love to do, they’ll have a compelling story to tell. When you ask for articles or interviews from people who aren’t ever recognized in the media, you’ll find that most of them are happy to help and won’t ask for anything in return. We are planning on including a similar idea in our DotCom Secrets Journal in the upcoming months. We’re working on a new section where we’ll give our students the opportunity to share their successes and failures so you, the reader, can see how the strategies we teach here apply to businesses outside of DotCom Secrets. Idea 3: Hire a Freelancer or Two There are writers all over the place who are dying to get their articles published. In fact, many freelance journalists will write an article before anyone has ever agreed to publish it, hoping to find a buyer. A great way to get consistent content is to hire a freelancer to contribute an article to your publication each month. hiring a full or part-time employee. If you’re on an even tighter budget, you can contact a print journalism professor at a local university and ask if they have any students who would be interested in writing a monthly article. Many students will jump at the chance to build up their portfolio before they graduate. Once you’ve found a few talented, reliable freelancers, you can relax a little knowing that you have fresh content coming every month. And as your readers get hooked on a specific writer’s articles, they will stay subscribed to your newsletter longer. Putting Your Newsletter Together Next time, I will move on to the next step of creating your own profitable newsletters and magazines - putting it all together. For now, create an outline for the first few months of your publication and start getting a few articles written or outsourced. DCS - By Brittanie Byron, Editor Insider Journal | 35 Parasite cont. from page 9 post them! Just be sure to use software like comment sniper so you can be there first, and be helpful so the blogger won’t mind leaving your post where it is. Step 3: Live TV Shows We have been doing a lot of live TV shows lately at DotComSecrets. tv. There are services out there like Ustream.tv and Justin.tv that will allow you to broadcast your own television show 24 hours a day! We have had up to 800 people on our live shows before and there are literally hundreds of other marketers in every niche with their own live TV shows. What’s cool about these services is they allow the viewers to interact with each other during the shows. Now, I first noticed this on my shows when I had people coming on just to spam their links out to my audience. We quickly deleted these members and banned them from coming back, but there is a way to steal people’s visitors ethically. All you need to do is make sure the username you pick while you are watching the show is your URL. The biggest problem that the spammers have is they drop their links into the conversation and we immediately ban them. BUT – if their username is their website URL, and they post intelligent comments that add to the content of our show, then we let them post as often as they want! So, every minute you could comment on the show, let people see that you know what you are talking about and that you’re an authority on the subject, and they are going to see your domain name over and over again. I know one guy who sold seven tickets to his seminar at over $1,000 each and added a few hundred people to his list during one person’s show using this exact same tactic! Step 4: Testimonials and Case Studies The last method is to figure out a way that you can either become a case study or a testimonial for someone’s product and they will send targeted traffic to you all day long. Here are a few examples: Testimonials: I have a few friends who give testimonials for almost every product they can because they know that their name, picture and website URL will show up on the sales page for that person’s product and when they drive traffic to the site, a percentage of the people will always check out the people with testimonials and come back to their sites. Case Studies: I found out that Mike Chen was launching his 36 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com new software called “Make Your Own Software.” A week before it launched I called him and got a free copy of the product. I then created a software product with it, launched it and sold $11,000 worth of it during the next 48 hours! I then sent this case study back to Mike and he dedicated over a page on his sales letter telling my story, he had all of his affiliates telling the story about “Russell Brunson” and I added thousands of people to my lists and sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of my own product during this promotion! Become a resource to people who buy someone else’s product: A good example of this is Anik Singal, who made video tutorials teaching people how to use Traffic Equalizer a few years back when that software was popular. The product owner then recommended these tutorials to all of his customers and Anik made tens of thousands of dollars selling these tutorials and additional coaching services! The key to this whole article is that you can find out where traffic already is, and figure out ways to become a parasite and get those people coming back to your site instead! It’s very easy when you follow a few of the suggestions listed above. DCS - By Russell Brunson, President ©iStockphoto.com/Nathan Gleave ACCOUNTANT’S CORNER Discover a little-known, government granted gift that can help you protect your business and personal assets. Accountant’s Corner is dedicated to articles addressing business structuring, accounting, tax savings and estate preservation techniques. The information contained in this article is based off current United States law. M any thousands of years ago in the dawn of civilization, mankind lived under the natural law of survival of the fittest. At that time, if you were attacked or if your property was threatened, your one recourse was to fight to protect yourself and your property. If you felt you wanted your neighbor’s property and if you were bigger than he was, you would simply take it. If you were big and strong enough you could survive under your own actions. If you happened to be smaller and weaker, your survival was not certain. As you can imagine, having your survival dependant on the size of club you were able to wield or how ferocious a fighter you were, made for a very difficult and short life. The young and the old were especially vulnerable and ©iStockphoto.com/Onur Dongel Insider Journal | 37 left with little or no protection. As mankind progressed we realized that there was safety in numbers. So to insure our survival along with the aged and weak among us, we began to band together in families and then tribal groups of extended families. As certain tribal groups became larger and more powerful, the natural law of survival of the fittest was still prevalent as they continued to attack the smaller groups to get gain. The realization finally came that the only way that the natural law of survival of the fittest could be overcome was by the banding together of the majority of these family tribal groups into a community. Through the strength of the large and extended group, survival of the fittest could finally be put to an end. Rules could be put in place to protect life and property rights of all members of the group. The young, weak and the old could be protected from those who would hurt or take advantage of them. If a member of the group should to be attacked or their property taken, no longer would that person be expected to pick up a club, sword or gun to protect their life or property. Instead authorized members of the group would enforce the rules and ensure the protection of the victim’s life and property. Finally the natural law of survival of the fittest was defeated. In its place was a group of rules everyone was expected to obey. These rules became agency and court system to obtain a remedy for their loss. As laws were created, the law makers felt that each individual As laws were created, the law makers felt that each individual had a “duty” to live his life in such a way so as to not injure or destroy the property of any other person. If a person violated that “duty” imposed by general law, resulting in injury or property damage, that person could be found responsible or “liable” for those injuries or property damage. If a person is injured or suffers property damage at the hand of another, the current law requires the person responsible or liable for the damages to make the injured party whole again. known as laws. As a result, this system became known as the “rule of law.” Governments were created specifically to enforce these laws, and protect the life and property of the members of the group. Today, multiple communities have banded together into nations and governments are a recognized part of our lives. Today, if someone is injured or if their property is taken, no longer can they pick up a gun and go out looking for justice. Instead they must work through a law enforcement 38 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com had a “duty” to live his life in such a way so as to not injure or destroy the property of any other person. If a person violated that “duty” imposed by general law, resulting in injury or property damage, that person could be found responsible or “liable” for those injuries or property damage. If a person is injured or suffers property damage at the hand of another, the current law requires the person responsible or liable for the damages to make the injured party whole again. In other words, the responsible party is “personally liable” for the damages he created. When a person is “personally liable” all their personal assets can be used to compensate the injured party. If the responsible party refuses to compensate the injured party, then the injured party can take the matter to court and sue for the damages. The court will hear the dispute and will make a ruling. If the court feels that a person was in fact responsible or personally liable for another person’s loss they will provide a “remedy” or an arrangement by which the injured person will be made whole. That remedy will usually consist of taking money from the responsible party and giving it to the injured party. If the responsible party does not have enough money to cover the amount of damage he has caused, the courts may take his personal possessions and sell them and give the proceeds to the injured party. The fact that our society has given the right for all citizens suffering a loss to seek redress in a competent court of law has removed the need to seek for justice at the point of a gun. It has guaranteed to all men the right to life, liberty and property regardless of your age, strength or size. The rule of law replacing the existence of the natural law of the survival of the fittest has moved civilization a giant step forward into an age of equal rights and equal protection under the law. The rule of law has been extremely beneficial to the progress of civilization and to the individual citizens of those societies practicing it. However, the concept of “unlimited liability” and the legal duty one person owes to another, that the rule of law is based upon, originally had the tendency to stifle business creation, growth and overall commerce. This is easy to understand if we take a look at a simple example. Picture a young entrepreneur who manufactured popular small colorful toys for children. Parents in great numbers are purchasing the toys for their children. Then suddenly children begin to get sick and one even dies. The sickness and death are linked to the lead in the paint used to color the popular toys. Suddenly the young capitalist discovers that a class action lawsuit has been filed against him. Not only are the lawyers after his business assets but they also want his personal assets as well. To make matters even worse, the cost just to mount a defense for the charges will probably cost more than the young entrepreneur has been able to save. Without some sort of protection why would anyone want to take the chance that something similar could happen to them? Under these conditions, no one would ever release a new product into the market place. The chance to lose virtually everything they owned would dissuade even the most serious of entrepreneurs. Fortunately for the individual and for the businessman, government has determined that unlimited liability is not productive in every instance and left unchecked will hinder the enhancement to the citizen’s quality of life. For this reason, the government, strictly out of the goodness of its heart, has granted under specific circumstances a very special gift to business interests within its jurisdiction. This gift cannot be obtained in any other way except by the good graces of government. This gift is known as “Limited Liability.” Next time in part two of “Liability – And the Magic of Limited Liability” we will scrutinize the circumstances required by government before it will authorize the gift of Limited Liability to be granted to a business. Also coming up, we will examine all the characteristics of Limited Liability which have allowed modern business to flourish and still allow justice on a personal basis to be served. DCS - By Ross Brunson, Pres. of Book Ease, Inc Insider Journal | 39 Getting Started: Applying What You’ve Read This Issue he first step to making money online is taking action. Now that you’ve read through this issue, write down some ideas you can apply to your business and set deadlines for when you want them to be done. Make notes on which projects you can outsource and prioritize by what will make you the most money first: Marketing Ideas: Product Creation Ideas: 40 | November 2008 www.DotComSecrets.com Due Date: Due Date: Lead Generation Ideas: Due Date: Ideas to Boost Conversion Rates: Due Date: Insider Journal 41 Cover Photo © iStockphoto.com/Amanda Rohde First Place for the $100 Million Challenge is Still Up for Grabs. What Are You Doing To Get Yourself There?
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