How Will You Make Your Fortune?

By Bud Wiser

I want to talk a little bit about marketing. I know this won’t be as exciting as reviewing a great new program, but needs to be discussed. I think we can all agree that there are a lot of great programs and tools on the market for marketing what ever it is you are marketing. Which brings me to my question, “How Will You Make Your Fortune?” Will it be with adsense, affiliates, or perhaps your own product or service? Will you rely on the tools and programs to do all your work? Will you bust your ass on seo and slave around a hundred hours a month for six months to a year trying to get backlinks? Will you rely entirely on search engines? And what exactly does marketing mean to you?

Marketing is the act or process of buying or selling in a market. It can be any where. We will limit our discussion to the Internet. Marketing on the Internet means different things to different people but is essentially the art of profiting through buying and selling products. The product can be any thing, including adsense. How we market is the key! For those who have any sales background they already know that marketing is everything! On the Internet I see a common error in thinking that SEO is marketing, and that SEO is the most important factor in the formula. It is not. Certainly seo has value and worth, but not nearly as much as you might think! Some of the most successful sales pages on the web don’t even rank very well, yet make serious money! So how do they do it?

They do it by marketing! Marketing in my book is networking, advertising in as many different avenues as possible, using email campaigns, adwords, and yes, seo too, and so much more. But even if you can get a lot of people to visit your page, will it sell them? Is your page Sales Optimized? Here is where some basic web design comes in to play. Nothing too fancy, but a definite plan.  You understand what search engine optimization is already, well sales optimization is optimizing for people. Here’s where sales comes in! If your selling a product your sales page needs to be direct, keep their interest, excite, produce a feeling of urgency, and most importantly you need to give them a reason to buy! It has been said most people really want to buy, but need a good enough reason to justify the purchase so they don’t feel stupid for rushing in to it. Most sales pages bend over backwards to accomplish all this!  So marketing is also the art of sales!

But what should a person sell if he doesn’t have a product or service of his own? Other people’s products and services of course! In my humble opinion, affiliates is the best way to go, far better then penny pinching with adsense!  I strongly recommend clickbank, and amazon! But don’t over look the ebay connection! There are very clever ways to incorporate ebay in your marketing! But thats a different story all together!

How do you select good products? Notice I said products, and not product? You need to get involved in as many products as you can handle! How many stores in malls only sell one product? Well I got news for you, you need to think even bigger then a store. Forget about being a store, you should want to be a mall! When you think along these lines, the question of how do you select good products becomes a little silly because almost all prodcuts are good! You just need to sell them

So once you have figured out that marketing is everything, you can finally begin to use all your cool tools to their best capabilities and finally see some thing happen because you now understand that SEO takes like 5 to10 minutes, and after that it’s all marketing! Now you can better spend your time! Sharpen your sales skills, and move on to another market.

Now the bad news, your not going to like this. The deck is stacked against you! You will loose most hands you play! In fact you could feel like a miserable failure and give up! That’s what most people do. They give up. But those who keep going, and keep building, and keep moving, those who can take a licking and keep on ticking, those are true marketers. They can NOT fail! Nothing can stop them. They refuse to accept defeat, whether it’s a bad showing in the last 20 markets they tried, or the stupid captcha filter at blogger! They know this is all one big numbers game! And it gets easier with time too!

So how do you begin? Join clickbank and amazon! Pick the most popular items to start with. You optimize your pages the same way for affiliates as you do for adsense, with keywords, the only difference is it’s for affiliates! You build, build, build!

Should you include adsense on your pages with affiliates? NO! How many sales pages have you seen with adsense ads?

Lower price items or higher price items?

I wouldn’t waste my time with lower price items, and I wouldn’t shy away from higher priced items, but don’t think you will work less for higher priced items! They are fewer and further apart. I would concentrate on midrange priced items, these sell every day! And around Christmas really push electronics, cameras, phones, and computers! Don’t over look markets you think are for the opposite sex only. Men can sell cosmetics, and woman can sell golf clubs! It doesn’t matter! A sale is a sale. Keep trying new products, and when you find one that works, milk it dry!

You need to come up with a way to create a email campaign or newsletter! Great converter! So you need to build real content information pages too! You need to use every thing! Blogger, wordpress, blog solution, bloglines, blogsome, typepad, rss feeds, build, build, build! Soon you will begin to see that as great as all these programs are, and they really do help out a lot in the automation process, but by themselves are not the main factor. In the end it will depend on YOU!

Sales is a wonderful thing! So may things happen when a sale is made! So may people benefit from a sale! Now go out and make some sales!

Posted by Administrator on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 9:53 pm.