complete home study course manualsecrets-of-internet-success.com/resalerights...complete home study...

Complete Home Study Course Manual 1

Complete

Home Study Course

Manual

In this manual, I reveal step by step the concepts, both

foundational and advanced, that I use to run a fulltime

internet marketing business, adding around 2000

subscribers per month to my list, and creating an average

of one new product per month.

Sean Mize

© Secrets of Internet Success and Sean Mize www.secrets-of-internet-success.com


This is a NOT a free ebook! This book does NOT come with any resell rights

whatsoever. If you received this ebook for free, from any source other than

Secrets of Internet Success, or are aware of its illegal distribution, please send an

email to: [email protected]. You may not alter this

ebook in any way, shape, or form, and it must remain in this original PDF form

with no changes to any of the links contained within.

Copyright Notice: ©2008 Sean Mize. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized use,

sharing, reproduction or distribution of these materials by any means, electronic,

mechanical, or otherwise is strictly prohibited. No portion of these materials may

be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, without the express written consent of

the publisher. Published under the Copyright Laws of the Library of Congress Of

The United States Of America, by:

Sean Mize

http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/


mailto:[email protected]?subject=Illegal%20distribution



Limit of Liability

It is a shame in my opinion that I have to include this in my book. I have taken

every effort in writing this ebook to include useful information on the topic of

creating email lists. I do not in any way shape or form guarantee or even imply

any level of earnings from anything you might apply from this ebook or anything

else you may purchase or download from me or any of my web sites. I cannot

vouch for the legality of any of the methods I describe, nor can I be held

responsible for any repercussions or reactions that may occur when you apply any

of these methods.

All of the links that I have included in this book are designed to eliminate the work

and effort involved in searching for effective resources with which to build your

business, and are included with the understanding that to the best of my

knowledge, which in some cases may be non-existent, are genuine and reputable

sources. However, whenever you make a purchase from one of the web sites,

links, or companies I recommend, suggest, or simply compile for your use, I

cannot be held responsible for their deliverability or reputation.

Now, my legal notice: This ebook is designed to provide helpful and useful advice

regarding the subject matters covered. However, it is understood that the author

and distributor does not engage in the practice of providing legal or professional

advice and that the laws and regulations governing the subjects covered in this

ebook may vary from state to state, country to country, and jurisdiction to

jurisdiction. It is also understood that the author and any distributors of this ebook



specifically disclaim any liability that is incurred from the use, application, or

recommendations of this ebook. The author and distributors of this ebook make

no representations, warranties, or claims whatsoever regarding the accuracy,

effectiveness, legality, or completeness of the information included in this ebook,

including any and all links, references, content, and recommendations therein. The

author and distributor of this ebook shall in no way be held liable for any loss or

other damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential,

accidental, or other damages. As always, legal, professional, tax, accounting, and

any other forms of advice should be sought from a professional and is in no way

implied in this ebook. Any and all links and recommendations are for instructional

and informational purposes only and are not warranted or guaranteed for accuracy,

content, reliability, or reputation, or any other expressed or implied purpose.



About the Author

Sean Mize initiated his first internet marketing venture in January of 2006, writing

his first book for internet distribution. In February of the same year, he launched

his first web site to promote that ebook, and began building his first online list at

that time. By the end of the month, he was in profit, and began to expand his

online efforts to include affiliate marketing in the internet marketing niche, and

immediately created additional revenue streams.

In August of 2006, Sean made the choice to enter the arena of internet marketing

fulltime, and began building multiple email lists of individuals interested in

internet marketing topics, including getting started online, traffic building, list

building, and web site promotion.

Starting from scratch in August of 2006, Sean had built an internet marketing

niche business with revenues of over $15,000 per month by August of 2007, one

year after starting the business, generating the bulk of his traffic through article

marketing.

To join his mailing list and receive recommendations of useful internet marketing

tools and helpful internet marketing and list building tips, visit:





Table of Contents

Limit of Liability...........................................................................................3

About the Author ..............................................................................................5 Table of Contents ..........................................................................................6

Module 1 ..............................................................................................................9 Introduction: .....................................................................................................9

Module 2: ...........................................................................................................18 Getting Started ................................................................................................18

Web Hosting and Domain Name .................................................................18 To Set Up Web Hosting and Get a Domain Name: ......................................19

Module 3: ...........................................................................................................23 Building A List ...............................................................................................23

Making Your Website Lucrative-List Building – Ready......................................23 Importance of Opt in Forms ............................................................................25

Setting Up an Account With Aweber...........................................................26 How to Route Your Autoresponder for Your Squeeze Page and an Accompanying Sales Page...........................................................................26

Introduction to Creating a Squeeze Page .............................................................34 What is a Squeeze Page? .................................................................................34 Why Do You Need a Squeeze Page? ...............................................................34 Why Is It So Important That There Are No Other Outbound Links on the Squeeze Page?.................................................................................................35 Create a Giveaway for Your Squeeze Page......................................................36 Step by Step Process to Create a Squeeze Page ...............................................40 How to Upload Your Squeeze Page to Your Web Site.....................................46 What to Offer to Get Visitors to Opt In ...........................................................49 How to Add Opt in Forms to Existing Pages ...................................................49 Why You Must Track Subscribers...................................................................51 How to Track Subscribers ...............................................................................53

What to Do With Subscribers Once They Opt In .................................................55 Setting Up Immediate Income From Subscribers – Structuring Your Thank You and Confirmation Pages so That New Subscribers Buy Immediately ...............55

Where to Place the Immediate Sales Page After Opt In................................57 How to Write an Email Campaign...................................................................58 How to Write Emails.......................................................................................62

Making Your Emails Personal .....................................................................63 How to Write Winning Subject Lines for Your Emails ................................64 My Secret Formula For Writing Winning Emails ........................................66 Why Should You Never Sell or Use Hype in Your Emails?.........................69

How to Write Compelling Emails....................................................................71



How to Format Your Emails ...........................................................................72 How to Make Your Emails Personal................................................................73 How to Get Subscribers to Click Through From Your Emails .........................75 How to Track Your Subscribers’ Behavior ......................................................76 How to Track Email Effectiv53.52 Tm(u)Tj126.13.9874 639.6 Tm(f)Tj12 0 469.54r412r

imi53.52 Tm(u)Tj126.132334 12 319.4449 6553.52 Tm(u)Tj4691.8842 667.2 Tm(0 0 12 244.5586 653.52 Tm(b)T33842 667.2 Tm(0 0 1p78-( )Tj12 0 046e)2t(i)m(26)Tj(v3eS)Tj12 0 0 12 238.6 Tm( )Tj12 0j12 0 0 12 189.Tj11938.6 Tm( )Tj128.6 Tm( )Tj128.6 Tm( )Tj2e)Tj12 0 0 12 184.5594 653.52 Tm(a)Tj12 04o9.6 Tm(f)628 639.6 Tm(2 Tm(i)Tj12 0 0 12 279.1 0 12 149.2712 325.4448 653.52 Tm(i)TjT51228.7212 653.52 Tm( S)Tj10 0 12 189.Tj1195t15.5022 667.2 Tm(5)Tj12 0 2430 12 164.1572 639.6 Tm(o)Tj36 121312 319.4449 659.Tj1195t183)Tj12 0 0 12 170.1572.21195t183


Outlining Your Ebook.......................................................................................142 Writing the Chapters and Sections.....................................................................145 Formatting Your Ebook ....................................................................................147 Formatting Text ................................................................................................147 Create Table of Contents...................................................................................147 Create Headers and Footers...............................................................................148 Inserting Hyperlinks..........................................................................................148 Create the Title Page ......................................................................................... 149 Additional Pages ...............................................................................................149 Sample Ebook...................................................................................................149 Create a PDF.....................................................................................................150

How to Use the Adobe Monthly Service....................................................150 Conclusion........................................................................................................152

Why Focus on a Big – Ticket Item?...........................................................153 Easier to hit high incomes with big – ticket items ......................................154 Examples of Big – Ticket Products............................................................154

Forced Continuity Programs..............................................................................157 Module 6: ......................................................................................................163

The Best For Last....................................................................................163 Understanding Data ..........................................................................................164 What Should You Have Conversion Rates For? ................................................166 Illustration of the Importance of Every Single Conversion Rate in Your Sales Funnel...............................................................................................................167 How One Change Can Impact Your Entire Business .........................................168 Where Do You Find The Data to Calculate Conversion Rates? .........................169 Other Conversion Rates You Can Track............................................................171 One More Reason You Have to Track and Know Why You are Selling ............172 Conclusion........................................................................................................173

Ezinearticles Tracking ...............................................................................174 Importance of Tightly-Themed Sub Niche.................................................175 How This Applies to You, in Your Niche ..................................................176 My System for Tracking Traffic and Subscribers Using Ezinearticles and Aweber .....................................................................................................179 How I Learn From This System.................................................................183 The Importance of Tracking With All Traffic Sources...............................185 What Can You Test? .................................................................................186 What Can YOU Track and Change in YOUR Campaigns?........................189 Buyer Source Tracking to Create the Highest Profits .................................190 80-20 Rule ................................................................................................190 Buyer Source Tracking Explained .............................................................191 My Personal Method of Buyer Source Tracking ........................................194 Closing Points ...........................................................................................198



Module 1

Introduction:

I have created this manual to accompany the Complete Home Study Course CDs,

to give you additional reference material, and to give you something in print that is

easy to refer to.

I have not simply repeated the ideas presented in the CDs, but instead have placed

a lot of the step by step information in this manual, and have included much of that

in the CDs – but with the CDs I tend to elaborate more on each topic, hoping to

impart not just the ‘how’ but the ‘why’.

One of the things that can be most frustrating about internet marketing (in addition

to the sheer frustration that occurs when you are trying to learn something new) is

when you create something online according to a formula – but you don’t know

why you did what you did – and then when there is a challenge, or you need to

make an adjustment, you can’t because you don’t know why you are doing

something.

So the CDs really try to give you the ‘why’ and give you a feeling for how I think

about what I do online – and hopefully give you a sense of how you need to think

to become ultra-successful online.

With this in mind, this manual does not spend much time at all on the ‘why’, but

rather focuses on the technique and the step – by – step information.



The modules are organized in the order in which you should proceed when

developing your internet business.

Of course, if you have already finished one step, you can of course skip that in

terms of action – but I would still take the time to listen the CDs that go with that

step, as you will learn things that will help you improve the way you do that one

step.

The concept behind everything that I do is what I have called my “Cash Flow

Business Model” – this is the idea that I collect subscribers in a given niche, then

build a relationship with them by offering them value, then asking them what their

primary challenges in their niche are, then creating (or finding affiliate products)

that solved their problems and challenges. This is in direct contrast to finding a

product that I like (or creating one) and then trying to get people to buy it. With

my model, you are only selling things people have already expressed that they

need – so there is no guesswork. You know the products will sell before you find

or create them.

Here is a summary of the points in my “Cash Flow Business Model”:

My Method of Developing My Profit Formula – My Cash Flow Business Model

1) Traffic

2) Squeeze page (build list)



3) Find out what list wants or needs

4) Get it for them and sell it to them

5) Repeat steps 3) and 4).

Now, the things I do to actually generate profits within the framework of my

“Cash Flow Business Model” are what I call my Profit Formula.

These are steps I take to maximize the income I can generate through my “Cash

Flow Business Model”, and operate simultaneously with the “Cash Flow Business

Model”:

My Profit Formula

1) Must Track and Test Primarily for Identifying Traffic Sources That Create

Sales for YOUR Sales Funnel – Also Track and Test each indiv point – indiv

emails, sales pages, etc. – strive for constant improvement

2) Must create a list for long term traffic leverage and communication with

prospects and subscribers

3) Must create a sales funnel – starting with free gift, then paid ebooks, then low-

priced memberships, then higher priced monthly coaching – then larger one-time

purchases



4) Must constantly be aware of funnel progression…what can you do today to

move a few more people along your sales funnel, locking them into higher and

higher monthly fees (of course, assuming high value).

I will touch on each of these briefly here; I go into a lot more detail in the CDs

themselves.

1) Must Track and Test Primarily for Identifying Traffic Sources That Create

Sales for YOUR Sales Funnel – Also Track and Test each indiv point – indiv

emails, sales pages, etc. – strive for constant improvement

One of the most important things that I do is I track where my sales come from, as

opposed to where my traffic comes from, or my subscribers come from. Now, I do

know where my traffic comes from, and my subscribers – but those are not

important metrics, except for short term evaluation of traffic or squeeze pages.

You see, if I get a million subscribers from one source online, but generate 0 sales,

then that traffic source is much less valuable to me than if I have a source that only

creates 10 subscribers – but all 10 subscribers each spend $1000’s per month with

me.

Of course, the scenario I have just mentioned is an exaggeration – but it is

designed to make a point. Traffic and subscribers do not make me money –

although they are sometimes decent indicators of future success.

But the real place I make money is with my buyers – I make money when they

make purchases.



So the most important thing for me to track and be aware of is my buyers – and

where they come from, so I can get more buyers.

You see, I don’t just want traffic – I want traffic that converts into buyers. I don’t

just want subscribers, I want subscribers that buy from me.

I have covered this concept in detail in the CD entitled “Tracking and Testing”. I

show you exactly how I do this buyer source tracking.

It is a manual process, although the services I use do most of the data collection for

me – but I still have to transfer the data to a central spreadsheet and analyze the

data.

I have mentioned some possible ways of automating the process I use, using

conversion tracking software, such as Google Analytics – but keep in mind, I have

not converted over to using software like that. The way I track does a great job of

identifying buyer sources – and I feel the information I glean from it is certainly

worth the time I spend on it, and I am not convinced that conversion tracking

information can consistently give me information as accurate as what I currently

collect.

2) Must create a list for long term traffic leverage and communication with

prospects and subscribers



This concept is of course covered in detail in module 3, both in the CDs and in this

manual.

The bottom line with this is that if you are going to find out what people really

need and want to buy, you need to develop communication with them – and

without a list, that is nearly impossible.

Of course, by having a list, you can also make your products available to the very

people who have indicated what they need.

Having a list is a core concept in my “Cash Flow Business Model”, and without a

list it will be very difficult to implement what I teach.

I also believe that as the internet matures, and more marketers are building lists

and building relationships with the people on those lists, I think that conversion

rates on ‘cold’ sales pages (sales pages that are accessed via ‘cold’ traffic (traffic

that does not have a relationship with you) will continue to fall. Of course, the

market mechanism for this could dictate that advertising prices will fall, as the

conversion rates go down, but I think advertising prices will continue to be

elevated, as many offline marketers and businesses choose to add internet

marketing to their advertising mix. Because they will not realize initially that

some advertising does not convert as well, they will initially invest in lower -

performing advertising sources, and as more offline advertisers join this

phenomenon, I believe prices will continue to stay elevated – at a level too high to

justify given falling online ‘cold’ conversion rates.



The bottom line with this is that I believe the need to use a list to generate online

income will grow over time, and will eventually become mandatory – meaning

that if you don’t have a list online, you will not earn significant income online.

3) Must create a sales funnel – starting with free gift, then paid ebooks, then low-

priced memberships, then higher priced monthly coaching – then larger one-time

purchases.

The idea of a sales funnel is that it gives potential purchasers the opportunity to

purchase smaller ticket items from you and try out your methods and your delivery

style, and as you develop loyal customers, they will continue to make purchases

from you, as you develop higher ticket products that deliver strong value.

One of the real keys with this is that you have to have higher priced products. The

reason I promote using a sales funnel is that this gives you the opportunity to start

smaller and create larger ticket items online as your experience and confidence

grows.

Although I have used a strong sales funnel (with about 20 different products) to

build my current income, and I strongly suggest you use it to get your own start, I

am continuing to experiment with the concept of basically skipping some parts of

the sales funnel, effectively presenting subscribers with higher-priced options

earlier in the relationship.

Of course, this differs radically from a sales model that basically has one product –

a high priced (generally $2000 - $5000+) product, and all sales efforts are

designed to sort and sift subscribers in such a way that the ones who cannot afford

or will not spend that kind of money online will drop out of the system, and those



that can and will spend that kind of money, will ‘rise to the top’, so to speak, and

purchase the higher priced products.

I highly suggest using the sales funnel model I present in this course as you are

building your business, and once you graduate past the $10,000 to $15,000

monthly income mark, you can begin experimenting with offering the products in

your sales funnel at differing entry points, and exposing subscribers to higher

priced products earlier in the relationship.

I only mention this, as several marketers have experienced success with this

model, and I am in the process of beginning testing with some small lists to

determine conversion rates in this model.

Once again, as I have used the sales funnel model I teach in this course to generate

income of over $15,000 per month, it is a highly effective model, and I believe that

one of the great things about the sales funnel model is that it allows you to create

smaller (and therefore easier to create) products initially, especially when you are

entering a new niche, and allows for expansion into other higher priced models

over time, as your income grows.

4) Must constantly be aware of funnel progression…what can you do today to

move a few more people along your sales funnel, locking them into higher and

higher monthly fees (of course, assuming high value).

The idea with this is that once someone has made a lower-ticket purchase, they

must be exposed to products with more value, and of course a correspondingly

higher ticket price.



If you have several inexpensive products, and subscribers are purchasing all of the

lower ticket products, but are not graduating to higher ticket – higher value

products, you must examine ‘why’.

Are you not delivering enough value in the lower ticket items that the buyers

believe your higher ticket products will have a still higher value?

Are you pricing your products at such a low price point that the buyers are being

selected in such a way that only people who are unable to afford anything more

expensive are making the purchases? It is often the case that people who will buy

$1000 products will not purchase $10 products, or even $100 products – so it is

important that you are evaluating whether or not this phenomenon is occurring.

One of the biggest mistakes internet marketers make is pricing their products too

low – which indicates to the prospective buyer that the product does not have

much content or value.

And one of the things I cover in the CDs is the idea that you need to be continually

creating additional products, as many of your buyers will purchase repeatedly from

you – even at the same price point. Again, it is important that you are monitoring

these price points, and consistently evaluating whether these price points are

effective, and whether or not they should be raised (or of course possibly lowered,

although that is rarely the case). It is much more prevalent to have prices online

that are lower than the optimal price, rather than higher than the market will bear.



Module 2:

Getting Started

In this module, I give detailed information for creating your first squeeze page

based website (like the ones I use exclusively for my income generation).

Web Hosting and Domain Name

If you already have a web host and a domain name and know how to use the web

hosting service and how to upload specifically to your web host, you are more than

welcome to use your existing web site and web hosting service for this course.

However, I can offer no support – I repeat – no support for any other web hosts

than the one I recommend here. The reason for this is that each web host has

slightly different procedures for everything they do – and unfortunately the cost of

this course does not cover my time to do technical research! I am sure you

understand.

If you already have a web host, but are not familiar with how to use it, and how to

upload pages to it, I highly recommend that for this course, you create a new

domain name and go with the web host I recommend here. This will allow you to

follow all of my web hosting and uploading directions literally step by step, and if

you have any questions, I can help you.



To Set Up Web Hosting and Get a Domain Name:

For this course I am going to use and give directions for www.hostgator.com web

hosting. I have chosen this one because it is easy to use, one of my own sites is

hosted there (that means I can help you if you run into trouble), it uses the CPanel

configuration (technical term for easy web hosting to use), and I want everyone to

be on the same system. This makes it much easier for me to give step by step

instructions.

Here are your instructions for setting up your hostgator web hosting and

purchasing a domain name:

Go to www.hostgator.com

I recommend you purchase the BABY package or bigger. If you are just getting

started, that will have plenty of storage and bandwidth for you. The BABY

package gives you the ability to host an unlimited number of domain names on an

unlimited number of subdomains (the structure it so that all of your additional

domain names will immediately forward and be hosted on a subdomain of your

main domain). If that is confusing, that is ok – it is not important to your success –

just know that your best value there is the BABY package, unless you need more

storage space or bandwidth.

Once you click on the “Order Now” button, you should get to a screen that gives

you a choice of purchasing a new domain name or importing one you already

have. For the purpose of this course, I recommend you choose a new one (this will


http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=mizesean

http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=mizesean


allow you to literally start this site from scratch, and any results or sales you make

from this site you will know is a direct result of this course).

So choose the option to register a new domain, then type in a potential domain

name into the box provided. The next screen will tell you if the domain name is

available, and if so, which suffixes are available for it. Do not get anything but a

.com name, so if there are only .net or .info names available, choose another

domain name.

Generally, I like to see something short, which is easy to spell. This will allow

you easily give out your domain name both online and offline.

Once you have chosen a domain name, select ‘continue’. On the next screen, select

the level of service you want (I recommend at least the BABY size), then hit

‘select’. On the next screen, verify that your order is correct, then select ‘calculate

totals’.

On the next page, select the option of whether you are a new customer, or if you

would like to add the order to your account. Once you have done this, select

‘continue’, then follow the directions and the menus to enter your name and billing

address. Continue to follow the menu until your order is complete.

You will receive an email from hostgator that looks like this:

(In place of my personal account information, I have replaced it with information

about what will that information actually means).



Welcome to the hostgator family!

Your Domain: secretsofim.com

Your Username: your username will be here

Your Password: your password will be here

Your sites IP address:

Your sites IP address will be here

Your name servers:

Your name server locations will be here

----------------------

Until your DNS has changed over to our nameservers, you can access

your

cPanel at:

this is where you can access the control panel to your web hosting

account for the first 48 or so.

You can view your site before the DNS has been resolved at:

this will be a link you can use to view your web page before it is

available on the web; this generally takes about 48 hours before

your web site is completely live on the web

There is a file called hostgator.html in your public_html folder.

This

page will give you basic links on getting started. Your welcome

to

delete this file or if you upload an index.html file in

public_html, then

the hostgator.html file will not come up by default.

Please read


http://secretsofim.com/


http://www.hostgator.com/gettingstarted.html for all the

information

needed to manage your account.

Sincerely,

The Hostgator Team


http://www.hostgator.com/gettingstarted.html


Module 3:

Building A List

Making Your Website Lucrative-List

Building – Ready

Now that you know what you want the demographics of your list to be, you can

focus on making your website lucrative list building - ready. This is important,

because your website is your visitors’ second impression of you (the first was your

advertising or traffic method). This impression will help determine whether you

add freebie-seeking subscribers or money-spending subscribers to your list.

Your website has to be especially tweaked so that it is conducive to pulling in the

types of people who will spend money on your products, and spend money with

you.

One of the things you need to do is to put opt in boxes on your webpages so that

visitors can become a part of your list.

You might also choose to create a squeeze page where you specifically direct new

visitors, so that the first thing that they do when they get to your website is to opt

in to your list. That way, if they do not buy on the first visit to your website, you

can send them additional opportunities to visit your site in the future. This will

also give you the opportunity to build a stronger relationship with them over time,



stronger than the one you can build in the few minutes you have online with them

on their first visit.

You must design a campaign that makes it easy for visitors who fit the

demographics of your target customer, to opt in to your list. You must make your

website conducive to compelling these visitors to opt in to your list.



Importance of Opt in Forms

In order for your visitors to be able to opt in to your list, you must have an opt in

form on your web pages. This might seem so simple that it should not even be

included in this writing, but think about this.

If you have a web page that converts at, for example, 1%, then for every 100

visitors that comes to your website, you will get 1 of them to buy from you. Now

the other 99 visitors will probably never buy from you. They will leave, and even

if they wanted to buy something from you, would probably be unable to remember

how they got to your web site in the first place, so they could buy from you if they

wanted to.

Now imagine that instead of losing your visitors like that, you could have a

percentage of the visitors who leave yo


Setting Up an Account With Aweber

If you do not already have an account with aweber, go to: http://www.aweber.com

Across the top of the page, there is a row of links. Click the one that says “Order”.

Choose your plan and complete the application.

Once your application has been processed, you will be given immediate access to

your autoresponder account and can begin to create your first list

How to Route Your Autoresponder for Your Squeeze Page and

an Accompanying Sales Page

Note: I realize that you probably do not already have a squeeze page or sales page

yet; this is one of those ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ things.

You cannot completely create a squeeze page without an autoresponder set up; you

cannot completely create an autoresponder list without having created some of the

web pages. So if you are starting at absolute zero (which is the assumption) just

follow the alternate directions; once we have created those pages in future lessons,

I will give you instructions about going back to this and making changes.

I have written this in such a way that if you already have a few sales pages, etc.,

that you can incorporate them into my instructions; if you are starting from


http://www.aweber.com/?213728


scratch, I have specifically indicated what you can leave for later and what you can

leave out).

To route your autoresponder for your squeeze page (I am going to assume you are

going to create a new list to do this; if you are using an existing list, just skip that

step):

1) Login to your aweber account.

2) On the left of the page, it reads ‘Managing Lists’, then the name of the current

list. To the right of that is ‘add new’. Click ‘add new’

3) Under ‘Actions’ click ‘ Create List’

4) On that screen all you need to do is change to field that has the list name, and

the reply and confirm addresses at the bottom. I like to create an email address

called [email protected] to send all of my notification emails to; then I put

in a second email address for my reply address (just click ‘add’ in the section

named ‘Reply Address’) and then click the appropriate box for each address. Hit

save before you leave this page.

5) Now that you have created a list, go to “List Setting” (in the top row of links)

then go to “Verified Opt In”. It is important that you manage this page, because if

you do not, your subscribers will receive a canned email that does not get as good

a response as if you personalize it. There are some features on the confirmation

email that cannot be changed, but there are several that can.


mailto:[email protected]


6) On the “Verified Opt In” Page, you will see a box with ‘verified opt in’ turned

on. If this is a brand new account, it is probably locked in the ‘on’position. If you

have an older account, you may be able to turn it off by clicking on the ‘on button,

then hitting ‘OK’ on the next prompt. Once it is turned on, from the off position, or

if the account is used with it in the ‘off’, it can never be turned off. Basically, if it

is on, the only way the subscriber can get your emails is if their verify the

confirmation email. If it is turned off, they still get a confirmation email, but they

will still get the emails if they do not confirm in. If you leave it off, you will have

a more responsive list, as some people will not confirm in to get your free gift. If

you turn it on, you will lose some subscribers that way.

However, some people like that double opt in feature because it does create a

cleaner list. It really depends on how you are building your list. If you are getting

a lot of cheap traffic and cheap leads, then by using double opt in, you get a much

higher quality list. But if you are sending strong article traffic to your squeeze

page, and getting high quality opt ins, like I do, I do not think you really need to

use the double opt in feature. If yours is already turned on…you are stuck with it!

Even if you have it turned off, you may be sending out a confirmation email, so

scroll down and customize it. Although it is menu- driven, I will go through this

line by line:

7) For the subject line, I like to use something like this: {!firstname_fix}, Please

confirm your email for your free gift ({!firstname_fix} is the command in aweber

that inputs the subscribers’ first name, and it capitalizes it). Once you change that,

the default one from aweber will continue to show until they approve the new one.

During the week it seems to take just a couple of hours; on the weekend, it is

usually sometime Monday before your custom subject line is working.



8) For the intro, I like to use something like this:

{!firstname_fix},

Thanks for requesting my ebook, “Name of Ebook”. To make sure that I only

send it to correct email addresses, please click below to verify your email address.

Thanks!

9) The body text cannot be changed

10) For the closing, I usually just put my name – you can put your name and url,

or a salutation, and your name, etc.

11) The confirmation success page is the next thing on that page you can change.

The confirmation success page is the page that the subscriber is redirected to after

they have clicked the verification link. It is important that you utilize every

opportunity to build a relationship or make a sale, and this is one place a lot of

people skip. (If you do not already have a web site or sales page, etc, just use the

default one or leave it blank; you can add it later).

You can put a sales page here, you can put the link to your free gift, or the best of

both worlds is to create a download page that has a link to the free gift, but also

has a link to a sales page. I would use script something like this:

Thanks for requesting my ebook; here is the link to download it: (URL)



Wait! Before you leave, check out this handy tool to (whatever it does): (link to

sales page for handy tool in your niche)

12) Save everything on that page

13) Now go to the ‘web form’ page. It is one of the links across the top when you

have the ‘list settings’ tab clicked, or you can get to it from the home page. From

the homepage, go to “Getting Started – Set Up Guide” then to “Web Form

Wizard”.

14) Click on “Create Web Form”

15) There are two tabs: 1.Form Details and 2.Design Form. Start with 1.Form

Details. Give your form a meaningful name. I use this feature for my tracking –

by creating a different web form for each traffic source, I know where each of my

buyers have come f oole907.7606 6 Tm(lc co)Tj12 0 0 16 Tm(a)T Tm(o)T760( web)Tj12 0 012 0 0 16 Tm(a)6807 Tm(o)Tj112 0 0 12 496.4109 385.6807u

ve eachovoe each


Thank you for requesting my ebook. I am sending a confirmation email to your

email box; as soon as you have confirmed your email I will send the book.

In the meantime, please take a look at my brand new product:

Under that, I have my sales page.

Here is a link so you can see one of these pages:

http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/theArticleMarketingManifesto.htm

17) (If you are starting from scratch, skip this step). Now you need something for

the already subscribed page. This is useful if you happen to get someone to your

squeeze page who has already subscribed; you may want to make a different offer

to them. You can assume this person has been on your list sometime; they are

obviously still looking for information; their needs are not yet met, or they

wouldn’t have gotten to your squeeze page again. So you can either put the same

redirect as the one you use for the thank you page for new subscribers, or you

could put a second sales page their.

18) Next is your adtracking number – I use the same one as I have named the web

form, so I can stay a little organized (I have about 40 lists and as many as 20 web

forms in some of them). This works in conjunction with the web form to help you

identify where your buyers are coming from.

19) Click ‘next’ and go to ‘2.Design Form’.


http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/theArticleMarketingManifesto.htm


20) On the left, you will see a column that says ‘fields’. A field is something you

want to collect from the subscriber. It should have the field ‘name’ prepopulated.

Click on that field, and drag it to the right hand column that says ‘preview’. Once

it is in the ‘preview’ section, you can move the order around by clicking and

dragging.

If you want to create additional fields, such as telephone number or address, just

click on ‘add a new field’ and you will get an empty box. Just fill that in with the

name of the field, for example, telephone number. Click add – and it adds the new

field. Then click and drag it to the preview side.

So how many fields should you have? There is a balance you have to create here.

The more fields you have, the fewer optins you are going to get. But the more

fields you have, the more information you have about the person. So it really

depends on the purpose of your squeeze page. If you wana

l

o

n

nyn


21) If you want to create bigger fields that will accept up to 100 characters of

input, click in the top where it says ‘custom fields’, then create those fields on that

page. They should show up on your fields column in your web form. This is

useful if you want to create a survey or ask your new subscribers a question, for

example, do you have a web site, or how much money do you spend online, or

what do you want to learn about.

22) Once you have done this, click save. Now you will see the web form in a list

of web forms (or just by itself if it is the first one). One that line, you can click to

get the html code for that web form to put on your squeeze page.

Keep in mind, if you have never done any of this before, take each thing one step

at a time. You WILL learn how to do this, and over time, it will get easier, and

eventually you will not need a list of steps to do it – you will just go into your

accounts and make the changes you need, or build the autoresponders or web

hosting accounts or domains you need to.



Introduction to Creating a Squeeze Page

What is a Squeeze Page?

A squeeze page is a web page that has as its only function the opting in of

subscribers. The idea with a squeeze page is that there is only one action asked of

your visitors – that of opting in to your email list.

In a strong squeeze page, there should be no other actions asked of your visitors.

There should be no links to other pages in your web site, there should be no

advertising, and there should be no alternatives other than opting in to your list.

A squeeze page normally will offer some type of a free gift in exchange for opting

in. This free gift should have relevance to the niche in which you are attempting to

create an email list.

Why Do You Need a Squeeze Page?

The basic idea with a squeeze page is that it allows you to leverage your traffic.

Instead of getting one page view to one sales page from each new visitor to your

web site, a squeeze page allows you to gain repeated exposure to that visitor. Once

the visitor opts in to your opt in email list, they are no longer a one-time visitor,

but a subscriber. As a subscriber, if you develop a relationship with them, and

earn the right to expect them to open your emails and click through to web pages,



you will earn many more page views to your sales pages than you would have

from the one time visitor.

Why Is It So Important That There Are No Other Outbound

Links on the Squeeze Page?

The reason it is so important that there are no other outbound links or other action

options on your squeeze page is that each additional action or outbound option will

decrease significantly the opt in rate to your email list.

This is critical. For example, a good squeeze page can get between a 30% and a

60% opt in conversion rate (percentage of visitors who choose to become

subscribers), depending on the traffic source (the more targeted the traffic, the

higher the opt in rate, all other things equal). However, a squeeze page with one

other outbound link (this no longer officially qualifies as a squeeze page if it has

additional links) will immediately drop its conversion rate to about ½ of the

original – so now the opt in rate is around 15% to 30%. Add one more option, and

the opt in rate drops to 10% to 20%. This includes PPC. For each PPC link, you

lose conversion rate and opt ins drastically.



Create a Giveaway for Your Squeeze Page

This is an extremely critical part of the squeeze page. You have to have a free gift

to giveaway to the people who opt in to your list.

This giveaway product should have high perceived value and a low cost to you.

One of the lowest cost products you can create is an information product. This

information product can be an ebook (my favorite), a video, or an audio recording.

Note: at this point, unless you already have a video or audio recording that you

can upload, do not use video or audio. It is far more important that you spend the

next few days on creating this squeeze page, than to spend it creating a video or

audio. You can always change your giveaway product in the future.

If you already have an ebook that you have created, or you have an ebook of

someone else’s that you have giveaway rights to, use that first. This will allow

you to focus your energy on creating your squeeze page, rather than creating a

product. Again, you can always change your giveaway item in the future.

If you do not already have an information product you can giveaway, you can

create one easily using these easy steps:

1) Write 5 articles, or pull out all the articles you have written over the last few

weeks. Select 5 articles that are related in topic, and yet are not repetitive of each

other.

2) Take the five articles and place them in some logical order. It can be from

basic to advanced, or beginning to end, etc.



3) Compile them into one document; use copy and paste to do it.

4) Create a heading and footer for your document (like this one has)

5) Write a title for your mini-ebook, focusing on features, not benefits (explained

in the next section of this lesson)

6) Rename each of the articles so that they appear to be chapters in your mini-

ebook.

7) Create a table of contents

8) At the end of the book, place a link to your sales page (if you do not have one,

you can add it later)

9) Upload the ebook into a pdf. If you do not already have pdf software, you can

get five free pdfs made here: http://createpdf.adobe.com/ Look for the link to

creating a trial account. After the first five, you can subscribe to their service for

$10 per month, or of course buy the software for yourself.

10) How to Upload Your Giveaway PDF to Your Web Site

I am going to assume for this tutorial that you are using the hostgator web hosting

and that you are using core lite ftp to do the actual upload.

To download the core lite ftp system click here: http://www.coreftp.com/


http://createpdf.adobe.com/

http://www.coreftp.com/


Click on the ‘download’ link and then choose one of the free versions. Follow the

instructions to download (it should all be one-step-at-a-time menu driven, just take

it one step at a time, and follow the directions precisely).

Once you have downloaded the coreftp, then follow these directions to upload

your pdf:

Open core ftop (or core lite ftp).

If this is the first time you are using it, you will need to prefill some boxes in order

to ftp to your site.

The first box is your site name.

The next box is your hostname/IP/URL In this box, type in one of your hostgator

nameserver addresses which is in your welcome mail from hostgator.

The next box is for your username for your web hosting account (with hostgator)

The next box is for your web hosting password (your password with hostgator).

Once those are filled in, click ‘connect’.

You should have your web hosting account files show up in a new window, on the

right side of the screen. If they do not, generally one of the 4 boxes you just

populated is incorrect.



To correct these fields, click ‘file’ (in the upper left corner), then ‘connect’ and

you will see the screen you had earlier. Re-input the info – or make necessary

changes. Make sure you have the right name server in the hostname/IP/URL box,

as well as making sure your username and password are the ones for the correct

web hosting account.

To upload the file you have created, go into your computer files, and copy the pdf

to your web site folder, or if you do not have one yet, create a folder called the

name of your web site.

Go back to the core ftp screen. On the left side, find the folder you have created

for your web site, then find the pdf you have created.

On the right side, click on the folder ‘public_html’. In hostgator, only what is in

this folder will show live on the web.

Once you have clicked on that, go back to the left side, and click once on pdf file.

It should highlight it in blue. Then click the right-facing arrow to the top of the

box that has the files in it, and this will upload your pdf to your web site.

Now you should be able to type in:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/whatyounamedyourpdf.pdf into a web browser

and your pdf should come up.

Now you have a giveaway ebook, and if you strictly use articles you have already

written as a part of this program, the entire process should take you less than 2

hours (less than that if you have created ebooks before).


http://www.yourdomainname.com/whatyounamedyourpdf.pdf


If you have 3 or 4 articles, for example, that will fit together well, then write some

additional ‘chapters’ for your ebook.

This giveaway ebook does not need to be long; in fact, less than 10 pages is best.

The shorter it is, the more likely that someone will read it all the way through; the

more they read of it, the more likely they are to continue to buy from you.

For an example of an ebook that I created by throwing together some articles using

this process, go here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-

success.com/gifts/YourArticleWritingandPromotionGuide.pdf

By the way, if you are in the internet marketing or related niches, and do not want

to create a mini-ebook initially, I have several you can use as giveaways – just let

me know.

Step by Step Process to Create a Squeeze Page

1) Download this squeeze page maker:

http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/gifts/nichebuilder.zip

Go to the file itself (it is called nichebuilder).

Open the file. The file is zipped. If your computer does not automatically unzip it,

or you do not have software to unzip zipped files, you can get a free ‘unzipper’

here:


http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/gifts/YourArticleWritingandPromotionGuide.pdf

http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/gifts/YourArticleWritingandPromotionGuide.pdf

http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/gifts/nichebuilder.zip


Free trial (recommended):

http://www.winzip.com/index.htm

Other free unzip software (cannot recommend; have not used personally):

http://www.camunzip.com/

http://www.7-zip.org/

http://www.info-zip.org/

For all of those, simply follow the menu-driven directions to download and install

the software to use to unzip files.

Now that the nichebuilder file is open, you will see a folder called ‘ nlb-software’.

Open that folder. Then you will see the software itself, called ‘nlb’, and a pdf

called ‘UserManual’.

Double click on the software ‘nlb’.

You will get a new screen that asks if you want to extract or run the program. Try

to run the program. If the software does not open to screen that says ‘Niche List

Builder v2.0’ then, go back and extract the files, then double click on the software

‘nlb’ in the new folder it will create for you.


http://www.winzip.com/index.htm

http://www.camunzip.com/

http://www.7-zip.org/

http://www.info-zip.org/


At this point, the Niche List Builder is completely automated and menu driven. I

will go through each screen with you here.

Step 1: Enter Your Site Title. For this step, enter your site title. If you do not have

one, make one up now. For example, if your niche is gardening, your site title

could be ‘Gardening 101 – Step by Step Gardening’ Once you have entered your

site title into the box, click the button ‘Next Step’. This will take you to step 2.

Step 2: Enter your site description. This is a description of what your site will do

for the visitor. For example, ‘Learn to garden like the pros’. Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 3: Enter your site’s first keyword. If you don’t already have one, make one

up. In this case, let’s use: gardening. Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 4: Enter your site’s second keyword. If you don’t already have one, make

one up. In this case, let’s use: spring gardening. Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 5: Enter your site’s third keyword. If you don’t already have one, make one

up. In this case, let’s use: winter plants. Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 6: Enter your site’s main headline. This will be the main headline that will

appear at the top of your squeeze page. For example, in this case, the main

headline might be:

Discover How to Create a Beautiful Garden – Even if You Are NOT a Green

Thumb!

Click ‘Next Step’



Step 7: Enter your site’s sub-heading, for example in this case: Step by Step

Gardening Instructions Even a Beginner Can Follow Click ‘Next Step’

Step 8: Enter your bullet point number one here. Your bullets are generally

benefits that your new subscriber will receive by downloading your free giveaway

product. For example: Easy Gardening Techniques for Any Climate. Click

‘Next Step’.

Step 9: Enter your bullet point number two here. For example: Discover the

Secrets of All-Year Gardening. Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 10: Enter your bullet point number three here. For example: 4 Quick Tricks

to Get Your Plants to Live Twice As Long. Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 11: Enter your bullet point number four here. For example: Amazing New

Technique Makes Plants Grow Greener and Bigger. Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 12: Enter your bullet point number five here. For example: 3 Easy Methods

of Planting Year. Round Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 13: Enter your autoresponder html code in this box (you get this from

aweber’s web form ‘get html’ button).

To get the aweber code, log in to your aweber account and go to the list you have

created for this autoresponder.



Click on ‘List Setting’ then ‘Web Forms’ then ‘get html’ for the particular web

form you have created. (If you strictly followed the directions in the

autoresponder tutorial, you should only have one, unless you have added others

since). Once you have clicked on ‘get html’ you will get a new window that will

open with two different types of code, one javascript, and one html.

I prefer to use the javascript version, as it allows aweber to track my hits and

subscribes. If you use the html version, they will not be able to track for you.

The aweber javascript code looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript"

src="http://forms.aweber.com/form/08/600572708.js"></script>

If you choose to use the html version, it looks like this:

<center><form method="post"

action="http://www.aweber.com/scripts/addlead.pl">

<input type="hidden" name="meta_web_form_id" value="600572708">

<input type="hidden" name="meta_split_id" value="">

<input type="hidden" name="unit" value="articlesuccess">

<input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="http://www.secrets-of-internet-

success.com/theArticleMarketingManifesto.htm">

<input type="hidden" name="meta_redirect_onlist" value="">

<input type="hidden" name="meta_adtracking" value="articlern">

<input type="hidden" name="meta_message" value="1">

<input type="hidden" name="meta_required" value="from">

<input type="hidden" name="meta_forward_vars" value="0">



<table>

<tr><td colspan=2><center></center></td></tr>

<tr><td>Name:</td><td><input type="text" name="name" value=""

size="20"></td></tr>

<tr><td>Email:</td><td><input type="text" name="from" value=""

size="20"></td></tr>

<tr><td align="center" colspan="2"><input type="submit" name="submit"

value="Send me the free ebook!"></td></tr>

</table>

</form></center>

Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 14: Enter your Business Name here. In this case, I will use Gardening Tips

and Secrets. Click ‘Next Step’.

Step 15: Enter a link to your sitemap. I prefer to simply have this link to the same

squeeze page or another squeeze page, rather than my site map. So I will put:

http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com in this box. Click ‘Next Step’

On the last screen, you will be given several options.

You can preview your squeeze page by clicking the ‘preview’ button.

You can save the squeeze page as html by clicking the ‘save as html’ button.




You can save the squeeze page as text by clicking the ‘save as text’ button.

I recommend you save the squeeze page twice, once as text and once as html, to a

file that is easy for you to find. This way, whichever you need, you will have both

the text and the html.

How to Upload Your Squeeze Page to Your Web Site

I am going to assume for this tutorial that you are using the hostgator web hosting

and that you are using core lite ftp to do the actual upload. (note this is basically

the same process as I used for uploading the pdf)

To download the core lite ftp system click here: http://www.coreftp.com/

Click on the ‘download’ link and then choose one of the free versions. Follow the

instructions to download (it should all be one-step-at-a-time menu driven, Just

take it one step at a time, and follow the directions precisely.

Once you have downloaded the coreftp, then follow these directions to upload

your new squeeze page:

Open core ftop (or core lite ftp).

If this is the first time you are using it, you will need to prefill some boxes in order

to ftp to your site.


http://www.coreftp.com/


The first box is your site name.

The next box is your hostname/IP/URL In this box, type in one of your hostgator

nameserver addresses which is in your welcome mail from hostgator.

The next box is for your username for your web hosting account (with hostgator)

The next box is for your web hosting password (your password with hostgator).

Once those are filled in, click ‘connect’.

You should have your web hosting account files show up in a new window, on the

right side of the screen. If they do not, generally one of the 4 boxes you just

populated is incorrect.

To correct these fields, click ‘file’ (in the upper left corner), then ‘connect’ and

you will see the screen you had earlier. Reinput the info – or make necessary

changes. Make sure you have the right name server in the hostname/IP/URL box,

as well as making sure your username and password are the ones for the correct

web hosting account.

To upload the file you have created, go into your computer files, and copy the text

file you created earlier for your squeeze page. Copy it to your web site folder, or if

you do not have one yet, create a folder called the name of your web site.

Go back to the core ftp screen. On the left side, find the folder you have created

for your web site, then find the text file you have created for your squeeze page.



On the right side, click on the folder ‘public_html’. In hostgator, only what is in

this folder will show live on the web.

Once you have clicked on that, go back to the left side, and click once on the

squeeze page text file. It should highlight it in blue. Then click the right-facing

arrow to the top of the box that has the files in it, and this will upload your squeeze

page text file to your web site.

You can also upload the html version in the same way. You can change the text

squeeze page to an html file by changing the extension from .txt to .htm

Now you should be able to type in:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/whatyounamedyoursqueezepage.htm into a web

browser and your squeeze page should come up, like this:

http://www.secretsofim.com/gardeningexamplesqueezepage.htm

Congratulations! You now have your very own squeeze page! This is one of the

biggest steps towards building a list.


http://www.yourdomainname.com/whatyounamedyoursqueezepage.htm

http://www.secretsofim.com/gardeningexamplesqueezepage.htm


What to Offer to Get Visitors to Opt In

In addition to your squeeze page script, you need to think about how you want to

incentivize your visitor to compel him to opt in to your list.

I use a number of different squeeze pages which contain a number of different

offers. Most of them use a free gift like an ebook as the incentive to opt in. I find

that my opt in rates are the highest when I use a free gift like an ebook as the

incentive.

However, I also use a free ecourse as an opt in incentive on another niched opt in

list. I find that on that list my opt in rates are much lower, but I find that my

revenue on that list is quite high. I mention this only out of fairness in mentioning

the methods I use to compel visitors to opt in, as I am considering adding a free

ebook gift to that squeeze page also.

How to Add Opt in Forms to Existing Pages

Perhaps you already have a profitable web site and you do not want to change your

index page to a squeeze page. That is fine, if you are already profitable; at this

point I would challenge you to create a separate web page that is a squeeze page

alone and begin to send traffic to that squeeze page. Track the profits from that

new squeeze page as compared to your existing index page, and in time I think you

will probably make the switch. But since you are already profitable, there is no

need to immediately disrupt that profitability.



However, if you are not already profitable, what do you have to lose? Imagine that

you end up with 10 times the revenues by switching to a squeeze page and then

building a relationship and then selling, rather than directing people to buy when

they first get to your web site. Which visitor is more likely to buy, one who has

just happened on your web site from an ad or a search engine, or one that has built

a relationship with you and now trusts you?

Regardless of that decision, it is imperative that all of your pages that are going to

be seen by visitors who are not already on your email opt in list, have an opt in box

on them somewhere. Now I qualify that somewhat because if you are sending

people to a sales page and they are already on your list, there should be no way out

of that page except to buy, much like with your squeeze page there is no way out

of that page except to subscribe.

So what you need to do to all your other pages in your web site, all your

information pages, all your content pages, all your pages but sales pages that are

visited by your subscribers (or that already have a high conversion rate), is to put

an opt in box on those pages.

You can put that opt in box just about anywhere you want, but I like to put mine

near the top of the page. You want to give your visitors the option of opting in in

the first few seconds of their visit, before they choose to leave the page.

Because I exclusively use the squeeze page method, I cannot give you guidance on

where on the web page will produce the highest conversions, because I don’t have

the data for that, like I have for much of the rest of the sales and opt in process.



Once again, you should be able to get opt in script and directions for putting it onto

your webpage, from your autoresponder company.

Why You Must Track Subscribers

One of the things that I learned early in my career online was to track my

subscribers by their propensity to buy, not by any other means.

I track my subscribers and my traffic sources exclusively by their respective ability

to convert into revenue, and at what cost.

Think about this. You might track your traffic and the traffic cost by how much it

costs to get a subscriber. And you might find that some traffic sources cost you 10

cents to get a subscriber and others cost you one dollar to get a subscriber.

So perhaps you decide that the best way to get your subscribers is via the 10 cent

method, which seems logical. But if you are not tracking your sales and their

sources, you might not discover that your 10 cent subscribers spend only an

average of 5 cents per subscriber, but your one dollar subscribers spend 10 dollars

each. Which is more effective? The cheap subscribers or the relatively more

expensive subscribers?

I solve this entire dilemma in my marketing by tracking the amount of money I

make per subscriber versus what it costs me to get that subscriber. That’s it. I do

not care how many subscribers a particular method nets me. I care only how much



money I make per subscriber. I focus just about all of my energy on my ability to

produce money from my subscribers.



How to Track Subscribers

So how do I track subscribers so that I can see what their revenue perspective is

for me?

I choose to track the source of every one of my buyers. That’s it. Now, one of the

things that happens in the process of tracking purchases is that I can see where

they are coming from, so I can see how many subscribers a particular form of

advertising nets me. But although I see that information, I place almost no value

in that, except perhaps to see if something that I have spent money or time sending

traffic to my website is actually producing subscribers or hits, which lets me know

if the company or method whereby I am advertising is actually doing anything at

all, but all of my decisions are based on the revenue, not on the number of

subscribers.

So the way that I do it, is I assign every significant source of traffic to a separate

autoresponder opt in form which my autoresponder company provides for tracking

purposes. Now an alternate method would be to use an adtracker service to do that

work for me. Now, the reason I do not use an adtracker service is because I

believe that the work that I do online should be the very simplest possible, and that

I should have the most control of the work that I do. Without going into detail

here, I believe that the method I use is much simpler and affords me more control.

But all of that to say that an adtracker can do this work for you. One word of

warning about adtracking services: if you use one and use the tracking links

extensively, if for any reason they were to go out of business, the links would no

longer work, and you wouldn’t have control over changing that – you would just

have a lot of dead links online.



Now, once I know where the subscribers are coming from, I simply track each of

the buyers of my product by linking them to their source. Once I do that, I can

identify how much revenue is produced by a given traffic source. Remember, I am

not concerned with how many subscribers I get from a source, only the amount of

revenue I receive from that source.



What to Do With Subscribers Once

They Opt In

Setting Up Immediate Income From Subscribers –

Structuring Your Thank You and Confirmation

Pages so That New Subscribers Buy Immediately

One of the most valuable things that I have done with my list and opt in procedure

has been to add an opportunity for my customers to purchase immediately after

they have opted in to my list.

You may have heard of a one time offer, which is a script that allows the customer

to purchase something at a one-time low price if they buy it right now. Special

scripting allows you to make sure that the one time offer page only shows one time

per IP address. Initially, I chose not to use the one time offer script because I

didn’t want to install script that, although it would work most of the time, could be

gotten around by subscribing from a different IP address, or by opting in to

multiple lists, which is a strategy I employ to squeeze more profits from my list.

The bottom line is, I have chosen not to use the one time offer principle, but to

take the idea and use a page that although it is not constrained to being a one time

offer, would appear to the subscriber immediately after he inputted his info in the

opt in box.



My estimated conversions on this page is about 5%, which is interesting if we

assume that my web site would convert at an industry-average of approximately

1% if presented without an opt in – only mechanism (my mandatory squeeze

page). This means that although only half of my visitors are opting in, about 2 ½

% of them are buying from me, 250% higher than I might expect if I did not use

the opt in squeeze page method of visitor capture. Just something interesting to

ponder.



Where to Place the Immediate Sales Page After Opt In

The way I structure my immediate backend sales page is on the redirect page that

my autoresponder company provides after my visitor opts in to my email list.

I include copy at the very top of the sale page that reads much like this:

Thank you for subscribing to my article marketing newsletter (or requesting the

free ebook “How to Article Market More Proficiently”, whatever the case might

be). An email is being sent to your email address to confirm that we have your

correct information, simply click on the link in the email and you will be directed

to the download page (or other situation-appropriate page).

While you are waiting, take a moment and check out this incredible new resource

that will aid you in your article-marketing efforts:

And then at that point, the sales page begins.

Now, you could also have another backend sales offer after the confirmation in the

confirmation email, and have the download link be sent to them in an email. I

choose not to do this because I am in the process of building relationship with

them, and I feel that some people might feel that I am ‘just trying to sell them

something’, which of course is true, but I might as well not be blatant about it.

The one upsell is enough for me, especially since I estimate that it converts at

about 5% ( I don’t have exact numbers on that one metric because I combine those

sales numbers with others; remember I only track the sales from particular

sources).



How to Write an Email Campaign

This is probably one of the trickiest things to do when you are getting started,

because you obviously don’t know what to say.

This is also tricky because it gets into the age-old question of how much content

versus how much sales material in the first 10 emails or so.

If I were to answer this question outside of the scope of this book and the obvious

topic of this book, maximizing your total income, and I were just focusing on

subscriber loyalty, I would give you a recipe for the content versus sales pages

concept that would look a lot like this:

Send content the first 3 emails, then send a free gift, then send 2 content emails,

then send a sales offer, then some more content, then a free gift, then a sales

letter…and so on.

I think that is a perfectly good email campaign, especially for someone who is just

getting started online and is likely to make lots of mistakes with their email copy.

(Not that experts don’t make mistakes too, just that as you gain experience, and

you test, your mistake propensity should go down).

However, through intense testing using my autoresponder service, I have

discovered that even with that formula (or at least a campaign very similar to that

in nature), email open rates and click through rates go down significantly after the

first 5 or so emails.



So the problem with that is that just when I am beginning to offer the sales

material, people are not opening as many of my emails!

Now bear with me here.

Think about another scenario. There is a concept called the ‘period of buyer

intensity’. To illustrate that principle, let us assume that your wife (or husband)

has compelled you to go to a rhythm and blues concert to which you did not want

to go. Now, after arriving at the concert, you find that you did enjoy the music, so

much so, in fact, that you decide you want to learn more about playing the guitar,

for example.

So when you get home you go online and look for information about playing the

guitar. You subscribe to my fictional newsletter, and I send you free content

information, and some free gifts (perhaps an ebook on how to learn to play the

guitar). Now, over the next week, you purchase a guitar online, several sheet

music books, several manuals on how to learn to play the guitar online. Now,

simultaneously, you are receiving my informative newsletters, and I am building a

relationship with you.

About a week or two down the line, you have tried to learn, unsuccessfully, and

are becoming frustrated with this entire process. You stop opening all of my

emails, because you simply aren’t interested anymore.

What has happened here?

You went through the period of buyer intensity while I was following the pattern I

showed you earlier about building a relationship with your buyers. While I was



creating a relationship with you, you were buying either from some one more

aggressive than me, or from a site you found while using a search engine.

Now, perhaps several more aggressive emailers pushed you to the point of opting

out of their list, but only after you purchased something they recommended.

I, on the other hand, have created a reader who does not unsubscribe from my list

– you like me, but you have bought from the other vendor, not me.

Are you seeing this idea here?

I built the relationship, the other guy made the money. I was respectful, the other

guy made the sale.

I am in this game, on the internet, to make money, not to build relationships. Now,

don’t get me wrong, I build relationships. But my purpose is not building

relationships. My purpose is making money. And I am building relationships

with the purpose to making money. But I cannot let the action of building

relationships interfere with my ability to make money.

So what have I done myself to rectify this situation, and make money and build

relationships simultaneously?

I literally do both! I send out an email campaign that builds a relationship, while

simultaneously sending out sales emails! Yes, I send my subscribers at least two

emails a day. And yes, I get a lot of unsubscribes too. But the important thing

here is that I catch people when they are in their period of buyer intensity.



I am able to capitalize on the period of buyer intensity and at the same time build a

relationship with my subscribers.

So what does that mean for you? You must remember that I am doing this at the

very beginning of my relationship with these potential buyers. This is when they

are experiencing that period of buyer intensity. If you read what I just wrote and

try to apply two emails a day to an existing list, you will probably lose most of the

list. You are stuck with your existing list. There are things you can do to

supercharge your existing list, like sending free gifts, and opening up lines of

communication. But the 2 a day method I use will probably not work on your

existing list.

So these thoughts only apply to a new list that you are building. And before you

begin to implement a strategy like this, ask yourself if you really have the time. I

work this business fulltime. I have the time to create two offers a day and still

have time left to create things like this, and write articles. If you are only working

this part time, a couple of hours a day, you probably do not have the time to

prepare a couple of offers per day.

Now, in the long run, if you prepare one offer a day for awhile, and begin loading

things into your autoresponder, you might eventually be able to add a second email

to your email campaign without stretching yourself too thin, or add it when you go

fulltime online, if you choose to do that.

Another creative way to tackle this problem, which I have not tried personally,

would be to create an email campaign with content one day and a sales letter the

next, alternating between the two. (If you do this and track your results, perhaps

against a control group of some campaign, I would love to see your results).



How to Write Emails

One of the hardest things to do when you are online and list building is writing

fresh emails every single. It is hard to keep them personal, hard to come up with

fresh, catchy titles that don’t take away the personalized feeling. It is hard to come

up with new ideas every single day. But if you are going to make a living, you

have to learn to do it. And I really mean, learn.

I doubt that very many people online were born knowing how to write emails.

There are many formulas online for how to write an email, but I believe that if you

wrote an email every day according to the very same formula, your list would soon

get bored. So I don’t believe you should write according to the same formula

everyday.

In fact, I don’t think you should write much from a formula anyhow, except one

that says to get their interest, keep their interest, and send their interest to a sales

page. And I think you should probably mix that up some too.

I am going to dare to say here that you should not use a formula, that you should

write from the cuff everyday. The reason I suggest that, is that I think these emails

should be personal in feeling (not in nature; I am not much of a fan of getting a

play-by-play of an internet marketing housewife’s day or of the vacation), and that

they should be written according to your mood that day. Sure, some won’t sell as

well, but I think that if you are sending frequent emails that your subscribers must

feel as though it is one friend to another, if you are going to get long-term response

and purchases.



How to Write Winning Subject Lines for Your Emails

I do not have much of a formula for writing subject lines, but I know that everyone

is looking for one. But in my mind when I am writing subject lines, I am simply

looking to stimulate interest. So in some way, that is my formula.

If anything at all, I have this idea that I am trying to connect with someone. So

when I write the subject line to the email, I am thinking of how can I stimulate

your mind so that you will open my email? This is very hard to quantify, to put

into words, how I think when I am thinking of subject lines. So I am going to give

you some subject line suggestions that are basically the types of subject lines I

would write. This should give you a jumping-off point, so that you can brainstorm

some of your own subject lines. And when I say brainstorm, that is really what I

mean. I do that a lot when I am writing subject lines. I write them and rewrite

them and when I send myself a test email, if I don’t get a good feeling, if I don’t

think that I would have opened that email myself, I will generally work on the

subject line some more.

So keeping in mind that my subject lines are designed to arouse interest, here are a

few:

Who else wants to build a big list?

Do You Know How to Write Articles?

Do You Know the Best Way to Create a Web Page?



How Write an Effective Ebook Effortlessly

3 Keys to Success Online

I Need Your Help…..

What Do You Think of This?

Have You Seen This?

Have You Missed This?

Did You Miss This?

Why Do You Build Your List That Way?

Do You Know What You Are Doing?

Why Do You Do It Like That?

Do You Do It Like I Do It?

How to Write an Article That Sells

How to Write Effective Emails



The idea here is that you want to create subject lines for your emails that compel

your readers to open them, that create a desire, a curiosity in your readers’ minds

and hearts that drives them to open your emails. Your title should create interest

and perhaps even stimulate an emotion or feeling, like happiness or anger or

surprise.

My Secret Formula For Writing Winning Emails

I am very much against giving you a formula for writing an email. But I fear that

if I do not, some of you will think this course is incomplete. In my own email

letter writing, I rarely use a formula, except maybe just some basic sales idea in the

back of my head, when I am writing emails.

I like to have my very first line in my email match or be the same as my subject

line. Why? I figure that the reason they opened my email was that the subject line

stimulated them, that it interested them. So if I want to create interest, why not use

the very same line that is already proven to create interest in this reader, for my

opening line? So, for example, if my subject line was: Can You Build a List Like

I Can? , then my email might open like this:

Dear {!firstname-fix},

Can you build a list like I can?

Are you getting 10 subscribers a day, or are you getting 50-100 like I am?



Next, I have to back up what I say. So my email might continue like this:

I have recently written a book that teaches you exactly what I do to get 50-100

subscribers.

I guarantee that if you read my book, I will give you 3 times your money back, if

you don’t triple the number of subscribers you get everyday.

I really believe in this technique – look, it works for me, and makes me a lot of

money.

(insert URL here)

Here’s the deal. I really believe in you. I want to see you succeed. I want you to

have the same exact techniques I had when I got started.

To download everything, go here: (insert URL here)

To your online success,

Sean Mize

I went ahead and continued with the email, so that it is not really broken up, but

now I will dissect it.

After I say something that backs up my initial subject line and leading sentence, I

use something to compel the reader to click the link.



Notice that I am not selling the book here, the sales letter does that, but that I

simply give them an incredulous reason to click the link: I guarantee that if you

read my book, I will give you 3 times your money back, if you don’t triple the

number of subscribers you get everyday.

Next, I include language that makes this really personal:

I really believe in this technique – look, it works for me, and makes me a lot of

money.

(insert URL here)

Here’s the deal. I really believe in you. I want to see you succeed. I want you to

have the same exact techniques I had when I got started.

Now you can do this lots of different ways. Without writing a whole bunch of

emails here, I will give you a mini-formula to follow:

1) Create interest

2) Give them a good reason to click

3) Be personal

That’s it! Notice there is nothing in there about selling. The sales letter does the

selling.



Why Should You Never Sell or Use Hype in Your Emails?

The key when you are writing emails is to drive people to your sales letters time

and time again. Now, you might ask, what about creating a personal relationship

with people? Well, in my mind, that goes back to driving people to my sales

letters. You see, if I create a healthy relationship with people, they will visit my

sales letters when I ask them to.

So why not sell in my emails?

Here is the deal. You might be excited about something. And you make a big deal

about it. You are all excited. You get your subscriber excited about it by writing

in exciting language. Your subscriber clicks through to the web page sales letter

and is very disappointed.

What just happened? That subscriber just lost faith in you, that’s what happened.

The next time you hype something, even something he might normally respond to,

he is going to be less likely to open it, or click through, or if he does, then he does

so with doubt.

But let’s look at another scenario.

Let’s say instead that you use language like this:

Hey, I came across something I thought you might like. No big deal. Take a look

at it. Let me know what you think.



Sean

Now, how is that different? Well, first off, his expectation is different. He is

thinking, well, I will check this out – awful nice of Sean to send this my way.

So when he gets into it, if he doesn’t like it, he thinks, well Sean meant well – and

my relationship is preserved.

And if he gets there and likes what he sees, then what does he think?

He thinks, wow!, I really appreciate Sean sending me here.

I really believe that your long term open rate and long term click through rate is a

lot higher if you do not use hype. You always want to give the reader the

opportunity to make up his own mind – you cannot do that for him.



How to Write Compelling Emails

I think that one of the most compelling things we can do in our emails is to create

long term trust. If there is long term trust, if the reader trusts you, then the very

fact that you recommended a sales page is compelling.

I think of it as the difference between going to a new car dealership to buy a new

car and some kid with slick hair is all hypey about the new car he wants you to

buy. No matter how compelling he tries to be, no matter what kind of bonus he

offers, you really don’t want to buy it from that kid.

But if your best friend worked at the dealership, and you walked in, and he poured

you a cup of coffee, and you sat outside and drank it for awhile, and finally you

asked, hey, friend, anything new come in from Detroit today? Then your friend

says, yeah, there’s one orange one here – that’s your favorite color isn’t it? – yeah,

I thought of you when it rolled off the truck, what do you think? --- What do you

think? Who makes the sale? I say the friend. And that’s the attitude you need in

your emails. They will buy from you based on your relationship, not based on

your hype and excitement.

The biggest thing you can do to compel is to always be honest, to be truthful, to

over-deliver. Then they trust you – and that is compelling.



How to Format Your Emails

Your emails need to be written so that they can be read in basically one eye

movement from left to right. Also, the emails need to be formatted so that they are

not reformatted by the email recipients’ email host.

The easiest way to keep that from happening is to format the emails so that they

are no more than 65 characters wide, including spaces. If they are wider than that,

some email programs will reformat them, and the emails end up looking real

choppy – some lines are real long, and some are real short. There are several

email editing programs out there; you can find them pretty easily using a search

engine, or you can do it by hand by counting out 65 characters and placing a ruler

across the top of the word processing document, and hitting ‘return’ at the end of

every line (basically creating a hard break after each line).

I personally think that if you give a hard return at the end of every few sentences,

that it is very readable and probably creates more clicks long run, like this:

So this is what

it might look like

if you were to hit a

hard return after

every few words.

It basically makes it

a lot easier for the

reader to just scan



down and get to your

click through if they

are in a hurry.

This also creates a

distinguishment between

your emails and many

of the others that people

receive every day.

As you are writing emails, you can play around some with how they look, and you

should come up with something that complements your personality.

How to Make Your Emails Personal

Although I have already covered this some already, I want to give you some more

mental pictures that will really help you make your emails personal. And I think

that when they are really more personal, that you get more opens and you get more

click throughs and you get more sales.

It is interesting to me, when I get the same affiliate email from several people and I

want to buy the product, I will search for the person I like the best, with whom I

have the best online relationship, clear my cookies, and buy the product from their

link. Why? Because in some way, even though I have not met them personally,

something in their letters to me has induced me to feel like I know them, like I like

them, and I want to put the commission in their pocket specifically.



The obvious thing is, you need to use the personalization technique your

autoresponder company offers, so that your headlines and subject lines read

“Firstname, ……” and your salutation in the letter reads “Dear Firstname”,.

Notice that I capitalize their first name. I really hate it when I get an email and my

first name is not capitalized. Now, the crazy thing is that when I sign up to

autoresponders, and I do it a lot so I can see what is going on out there, I usually

don’t capitalize my name because it takes extra time for me. But I still don’t like it

when my first name is not capitalized. And do not use their last name – it seems

that open rates go down when you use their last name, too.

But in addition to name personalization, write the letter to a person. Use the word

‘you’ when writing to them, not ‘ you all’ or ‘my list subscribers’. This letter

should feel very personal, and they should not be able to tell the difference

between the autoresponder email that went out to 2,000 or 10,000, and the

personal response you gave to a question they asked you.

I remember when I had been corresponding one time with a fellow list-owner and

during the correspondence I sent him an autoresponder email that had the headline

‘a free gift for you’ and there was a link to a free book. This guy wrote back and

thanked me personally – I had sent them like that before, but I think that he really

thought it was part of our personal correspondence – now that is what

personalization is all about!

I want you to imagine that you are writing to your best friend who is away on a

summer trip. Imagine that you are talking to a friend on the front porch, while

drinking iced tea, watching the sun go down. Imagine that they have asked you

about the best way to write an email, or create an ebook, or write an article. And



then write the letter as if you were sharing the directions right there with your

friend.

That is the attitude you want to have when you write your emails. Always test the

email and send it to yourself. Then actually open it and pretend that you are the

subscriber. How would that letter make you feel? Closer? Colder? Would you

click the link?

How to Get Subscribers to Click Through

From Your Emails

As you can certainly tell by reading this, I am a big believer that the long term

relationship and trust that you develop is far more important than the one-time

impact of some special language that compels people to click one time.

The bottom line is, if they trust you they will click, if they do not, they will not

click. It really is just that simple.

Now if you just must simply have some tricks, try these:

Write your email as usual, then mention: Take a look at this web site. I think you

will be surprised at what it offers.

Or this: Go ahead. Click the link. I guarantee your satisfaction 3 times over.

Or this: Check this out: (By the way, that is one of my favorites)



How to Track Your Subscribers’ Behavior

I do my tracking at the sales level. Because everyone that comes to my sales pages

generally comes from my existing list, I can do this without any adtracking

software. I simply create a different autoresponder form for each and every

source, and a keep track of which autoresponder form comes from what traffic

source.

Then I can take the individuals’ email and name from the sales information, and

track exactly where the individual has come from.

Now, many of you may think that that is quite primitive, and indeed it is.

There are several reasons I do it that way:

1) I do not like to spend any more money than I have to. I have about $60 per

month in fixed expenses, and I spend a few hundred a month on software and

information products and products to resell. To me, that is enough. I do not want

to spend another $20 per month on an adtracker, or spend the time installing my

own.

2) I try to keep everything simple, because part of my business plan is to teach

others (like you) how I do it. If I complicate things with multiple programs, it will

not be easy enough for everyone.



3) I have heard horror stories of how people have used adtrackers or 3rd party

links, and for some reason the service goes out of business and now all their links

are going nowhere.

By having all my links go somewhere on my site, at least if I move a page

accidentally, they can still get to my main page and ask me how to buy whatever it

is they want.

Another consideration here is that if I look at things from a statistical standpoint, if

I select at least 30 random sales every single month and determine where they

came from, the percentage of each source is going to be within a few percentage

points of the actual numbers. This means that I do not have to log every one of

1000 sales per month to know where they come from; all I have to do it log 30-50

sales per month, and track them, and I will have a real good idea of what is going

on. If I cannot find the source of one sale, it is no big deal – the mathematical

distribution of sources should be about the same among the sources that are

unknown as among the ones that are known, so the unknowns do not concern me.

At this point, you might be thinking that I don’t know enough about wh


How to Track Email Effectiveness

Your autoresponder service should give you the ability to track open rates and

click through rates. Along with looking at the conversion rate of each of the sales

promotions you offer, that is about all the information you need to determine your

email effectiveness.

Over time, you will notice a pattern – your list will buy certain types of products

and not others. Over time, the open rate of your list will go down. The reason for

that is that people who have been on your list longer will not open as many emails.

As your email list gets older, and the average length of time that the average

subscriber has been on your list increases, your email open rate will go down. The

same can happen with the click through rate, although I think that with the proper

communication and relationship building with your list, that your click through

rate of opened emails can stay higher (at least not dropping at the same rate as the

open rate will drop).

How to Test Subject Line Effectiveness

The key here is the open rate. Assuming that your relationship with your

subscribers is constant, and assuming that you mail at the same time of the day,

and on the same day of the week (open rates tend to fluctuate according to time

and the day of the week), then the effectiveness of your title or subject line will be

evidenced in your open rate.



How to Measure Profitability From an Email

One of the key measurements of everything you do is how much money do you

make when you send out an email? One of the easiest ways to track this is to track

how much money you make on an individual email.

What I mean is this. If I send out an email promoting a $5 product and I get 200

opens, 100 click throughs, and a 10 % conversion rate, I have sold $50 in product.

Now I can send out another email promoting a $50 product, only get 100 opens, 50

click throughs, and a 4% conversion rate, but I have sold $100 in product. Which

of the emails was most profitable?

Of course the second was more profitable, although if I had looked at the metrics

alone, it would not have appeared to be so.

Therefore, one of the things that I do is to keep track of how much money I make

per email.

Currently I have about 1700 unique subscribers and I make about $60 per email I

send out. I try to send 2 emails a day, but it is interesting: when I send out 3, I still

get the same average per email. Now, I do not send the 3rd email most days,

because I fear irritating my list. Keep in mind, some people are on several

autoresponders and then I send out 2 emails a day to everyone, so some people

might get 5 on some days anyway, so I am already pushing it. Maybe I should add

the 3rd email! Seriously, though, I think I am at my limit – in dollars per

subscriber per month, and in emails per day.



How to Create a Strong Bond With Your

Subscribers

There are a number of things that you can do to create a strong bond with your

subscribers.

I think that one of the most basic is to offer your subscribers an incredible level of

respect.

Always tell the truth to your subscribers, and always offer exceptional content. If

you do not have something worth sending, something you would be glad to

receive, just do not send out the email. Wait until you have something worthwhile.

Another thing that I think is incredibly important is creating communication with

your subscribers. One of the things that I will do is send out a letter with the

subject line, “I need your help” and in the email I ask my subscribers what it is

they want to learn about. I will tell them that I am writing a new book on a

specific topic and ask them what they would like to see in it. This creates an

incredible amount of loyalty, and I think that when the book comes out, they want

to buy it because they thought that they were in some way a part of it – and they

were!

Once I have the questions in, not only will I use them to help make my book

complete, but I will answer every question I can. If it is a narrow question, one

that would not have much appeal beyond the person that asked it, I will answer

that question personally. If the question has a broad appeal, as many of them do, I

will use a ‘mailbag’ approach.



I will send out an email with a subject line like this: “Questions from my

mailbag…” and then the email will start out something like this: “A few days ago

I asked you what you thought about (whatever) and I have been inundated with

questions. I thought that I would answer the most popular ones in one email and I

have combined some of the questions that were most similar in nature.”

Then I will list the question, and then answer it. I will usually answer at least 3 or

4 in one email.

Now, what this does is create an incredible level of family, or relationship, not just

with me, but with the other subscribers. When people see that all these people

have responded to me, they think that I have a highly responsive list. And maybe

10 out of 1700 is responsive, who knows! But when they see 10 questions, I think

they think the list is really interactive, and they feel comforted by the fact that so

many people have asked the same questions they have been thinking.

Another thing that I use to help solidify that bond with my subscribers is to offer

them free gifts. At least 3 times per week, I will generally send out an email with

a free ebook in it. Now this ebook does not have to be worth $97, but it should

offer real value to the reader.



When to Give Away Free Items

I give away a lot of free stuff, primarily ebooks, and of course, my free ecourses.

Sometimes I will give away software, although I go a little light with that, unless I

have personally used the software. You see, the books, I can scan them to make

sure that they have strong value, and of course the ones that I write have strong

value ☺, but with software, unless I upload it and use it, I have no idea if it really

works like the sales page says it does. And even though it is free, if it does not

work or I cannot help someone if they ask me for help installing some software, it

eats away at my own credibility.

I usually give away a free gift to induce someone to subscribe, and then I usually

give away a few more free gifts in the first few days that they are on my list. I

simply load them into my autoresponder and then they all get the gifts and I don’t

have to think about them, of course.

I will also give away free gifts during the week, but more often than not, I will use

them for Saturday emails. The problem with Saturday emails is that I often will

not logon on Saturday or Sunday, so if someone buys something on Saturday and

misses the button on the paypal confirmation page that tells them to go to the

download page, then they have to wait 2 days to get the link from me personally.

So I don’t do a whole lot of promotion on Saturday, but the free gifts are a good

tool to use then.



How to Make Money Giving Away Free Items

Now there are several ways to give away free items. One way that I will do it is

by simply placing the link directly in the email, so they can download it.

However, one thing that I have been experimenting with is putting a backend sales

offer in the free gift configuration.

You see, some of my highest open rates and click through rates are for the free

gifts, so I can get incredible exposure to a sales page if it is tied in with the free

gift.

I am probably running about a 2% conversion rate on the upsell from the free gift,

which, although it is lower than my other, normal, conversion rates, it can be

significant if I get a few hundred click throughs on a free product.

The way that I structure it is when they click through my link to go to the free

download page, they get a script like this at the top:

Here is the download link for (whatever the product is): (the download link). But

wait! Take a look at the offer I have put together just for you. Read this page

entirely:

Then put the sales page here.

Now you see what has happened. Nobody feels cheated, because they can

immediately download the free gift. Now, I am not sure how many are reading the



you do not have to begin building the relationship with someone when they join

your subscriber list – because the articles have already done the work of beginning

the relationship. All you have to do is continue developing the relationship.

Another factor that can impact your long-run sales with article marketing is that

the very nature of reading your articles on 3rd party sites gives the new subscriber

the feeling that you are a respected expert in your field – even if you are not. Of

course, the idea is that as you grow in your niche, you will become an expert in

your niche – the core concept with this is that people will consider you a

recognized expert before you actually achieve that. And of course this means that

when your products are released, as you grow in your niche, your subscribers will

be more likely to want to purchase them, as they may believe that you are more

skilled or knowledgeable than your competition. Again, I am not even insinuating

that you should have a less-than complete knowledge of your niche, or that you

should mislead anyone – but the idea here is that if you are published online,

people will automatically assume that you know your field.



What is article marketing?

Article marketing is the process of writing articles on topics related to your web

site niche and topic, including a call-to-action and a link to your web site within

the article, and submitting those articles to various online article directories.

The way you get publicity is three-fold:

1) The article directories publish your article, people read your article and they

click through to your web site.

2) Other webmasters see your article on the article directories and take it and put

it on their own web site – and the people who visit their web sites read your article

and click through to your web site.

3) Through the dual process of article directories and various other webmasters

putting your article and link on their web sites, you achieve higher search engine

recognition. This creates higher search engine rankings for your web site,

resulting in indirect traffic from the search engines.

In this toolbox, I am not only going to show you how to maximize the use of each

of these opportunities to gain traffic to your web site through article marketing, but

I am also going to give you the exact resources you can use to make that happen

easily.

© Secrets of Internet Success and Sean


Two Methodologies

I have developed two very specific methods of article marketing, both of which I

am going to teach you how to do.

1) Direct traffic by submitting your articles to the highest-traffic article

directories.

2) Indirect (search engine) traffic by submitting your articles to as many article

directories as possible.

Now, after reading that, you might be thinking, well, why don’t I just submit to all

the article directories and then I will have both my bases covered?

Well, actually you could – but then you would really only be working on long-

term search engine traffic (which is fine) – but you would not be getting much, if

any, short term traffic.

You see, the key is to create a healthy balance between the two.

I actually give you two different lists in the article directories section of this

toolbox.

The one I call the ‘short list’ has a few high-traffic article directories on it. The

key to utilizing this short list of article directories is by writing a large number of

articles (I personally average about 150 per month) and submitting them to the

short list.



The one I call the ‘full list’ has over 150 article directories on it. The key to

utilizing this long list of article directories is by writing a small number of articles

and submitting them to all the article directories on the list.

The optimal way to utilize both of these lists together is to submit each article you

write to all the directories on the short list, and to 5 of the article directories on the

full list.

That way, once you have written 30 articles, you will have 30 articles on each of

the directories on the short list and 1 article on each of the article directories on the

full list.

Once you have submitted one article to each of the directories on the full list, start

the process over again.

This allows you to submit articles and gain the short term benefit of submitting to

the short list by getting immediate traffic, while also building your inbound links

by submitting to the full list of article directories, which creates long-term search

engine rankings.



List of Article Directories (full list, 157)

1 http://www.searchwarp.com

2 http://www.goarticles.com/

3 http://www.ezinearticles.com/

4 http://www.articlesbase.com/

5 http://www.articlebiz.com

6 http://www.articlecity.com/

7 http://www.articledashboard.com/

8 http://www.searchguild.com/articles/

9 http://www.bharatbhasha.com/

10 http://www.blogwidow.com/

11 http://www.easyarticles.com/

12 http://www.hotlib.com/articles/

13 http://www.article-mania.com/

14 http://www.articlealley.com/

15 http://www.articlegarden.com/

16 http://www.articleson.com/

17 http://www.articlesphere.com/

18 http://www.articletrader.com/

19 http://www.awomaninbusiness.com/

20 http://www.httparticles.com

21 http://www.linksnoop.com/

22 http://www.orbitaloc.com/

23 http://www.positivearticles.com/

24 http://www.premierdirectory.org

25 http://www.searcharticles.net/

26 http://www.selfseo.com/

27 http://www.tigrafix.com/

28 http://www.webmasterslibrary.com/

29 http://www.wowarticles.com/

30 http://www.365articles.com/


http://www.goarticles.com/

http://www.ezinearticles.com/

http://www.articlesbase.com/

http://www.articlebiz.com/

http://www.articlecity.com/

http://www.articledashboard.com/

http://www.searchguild.com/articles/

http://www.bharatbhasha.com/

http://www.blogwidow.com/

http://www.easyarticles.com/

http://www.hotlib.com/articles/

http://www.article-mania.com/

http://www.articlealley.com/

http://www.articlegarden.com/

http://www.articleson.com/

http://www.articlesphere.com/

http://www.articletrader.com/

http://www.awomaninbusiness.com/

http://www.httparticles.com/

http://www.linksnoop.com/

http://www.orbitaloc.com/

http://www.positivearticles.com/

http://www.premierdirectory.org/

http://www.searcharticles.net/

http://www.selfseo.com/

http://www.tigrafix.com/

http://www.webmasterslibrary.com/

http://www.wowarticles.com/

http://www.365articles.com/


31 http://www.amazines.com/

32 http://www.archivex-ht.com/articles/

33 http://www.article-submission.us/

34 http://www.articleauthority.com/

35 http://www.articlebar.com/

36 http://www.articlevista.com

37 http://www.articleblotter.com/

38 http://www.articlecat.com/

39 http://www.articleconnection.com/

40 http://www.articlecritic.net/

41 http://www.articledash.com/

42 http://www.articledigger.com/

43 http://www.articlego.com/

44 http://www.articleinterchange.com/

45 http://www.articlemap.com/

46 http://www.articlenexus.com/

47 http://www.articlepros.com/

48 http://www.articles411.com/

49 http://www.articles4cash.com/

50 http://www.articlesafari.com/

51 http://www.articlesbeyondbetter.com/

52 http://www.articleshouse.com

53 http://www.articleshowroom.com/

54 http://www.articlesnatch.com/

55 http://www.articlesnet.co.uk/

56 http://www.articlesnetwork.com/

57 http://www.articlesonline.org/

58 http://www.articleteller.com/

59 http://www.articletogo.com/

60 http://www.articleway.com/

61 http://www.brunkco.com/

62 http://www.businesshighlight.org/

63 http://www.christiannotepad.com/


http://www.amazines.com/

http://www.archivex-ht.com/articles/

http://www.article-submission.us/

http://www.articleauthority.com/

http://www.articlebar.com/

http://www.articlevista.com/

http://www.articleblotter.com/

http://www.articlecat.com/

http://www.articleconnection.com/

http://www.articlecritic.net/

http://www.articledash.com/

http://www.articledigger.com/

http://www.articlego.com/

http://www.articleinterchange.com/

http://www.articlemap.com/

http://www.articlenexus.com/

http://www.articlepros.com/

http://www.articles411.com/

http://www.articles4cash.com/

http://www.articlesafari.com/

http://www.articlesbeyondbetter.com/

http://www.articleshouse.com/

http://www.articleshowroom.com/

http://www.articlesnatch.com/

http://www.articlesnet.co.uk/

http://www.articlesnetwork.com/

http://www.articlesonline.org/

http://www.articleteller.com/

http://www.articletogo.com/

http://www.articleway.com/

http://www.brunkco.com/

http://www.businesshighlight.org/

http://www.christiannotepad.com/


64 http://www.commonconnections.com/

65 http://www.dime-co.com/

66 http://www.e-calc.net

67 http://www.earticlesonline.com/

68 http://www.ebusiness-articles.com/

69 http://www.eclipse-articles.com/

70 http://www.freearticlesandcontent.com

71 http://www.free-articles-zone.com/

72 http://freezinesite.com/

73 http://www.ireprint.info/

74 http://www.media13.com/

75 http://www.mega-articles.com/

76 http://www.niche-content-articles.com/

77 http://www.rightbiz.com

78 http://www.savearticles.com/

79 http://www.startuparticles.com

80 http://www.submityournewarticle.com/

81 http://superpublisher.com/

82 http://www.thearticlezone.com/

83 http://www.theleadingarticles.com/

84 http://www.thenichearticles.com/

85 http://www.tips.com.my/

86 http://www.uniterra.com/

87 http://www.upublish.info/

88 http://www.uswebpros.com/

89 http://www.aardvarkarticles.net/

90 http://www.acmearticles.com/

91 http://www.afreearticle.com/

92 http://www.article-buzz.com/

93 http://www.article-database.com/

94 http://www.article-warehouse.com/

95 http://articleadvocate.com/

96 http://www.articleblender.com/


http://www.commonconnections.com/

http://www.dime-co.com/

http://www.e-calc.net/

http://www.earticlesonline.com/

http://www.ebusiness-articles.com/

http://www.eclipse-articles.com/

http://www.freearticlesandcontent.com/

http://www.free-articles-zone.com/

http://freezinesite.com/

http://www.ireprint.info/

http://www.media13.com/

http://www.mega-articles.com/

http://www.niche-content-articles.com/

http://www.rightbiz.com/

http://www.savearticles.com/

http://www.startuparticles.com/

http://www.submityournewarticle.com/

http://superpublisher.com/

http://www.thearticlezone.com/

http://www.theleadingarticles.com/

http://www.thenichearticles.com/

http://www.tips.com.my/

http://www.uniterra.com/

http://www.upublish.info/

http://www.uswebpros.com/

http://www.aardvarkarticles.net/

http://www.acmearticles.com/

http://www.afreearticle.com/

http://www.article-buzz.com/

http://www.article-database.com/

http://www.article-warehouse.com/

http://articleadvocate.com/

http://www.articleblender.com/


97 http://www.articlebliss.com/

98 http://www.articlecapital.com/

99 http://www.articleclone.com/

100 http://www.articlecounty.com/

101 http://www.articlefrenzy.com/

102 http://www.article-hangout.com/

103 http://www.articlenetworks.com/

104 http://www.articleonlinedirectory.com/

105 http://www.articlepeak.com/

106 http://www.articlepublication.com/

107 http://www.articles.co.nz/

108 http://www.articles24.com/

109 http://www.articlesandauthors.com/

110 http://www.articlesbridge.com/

111 http://www.articlesfrenzy.com/

112 http://www.article-spot.com/

113 http://www.articlesrightnow.com/

114 http://www.articletower.com/

115 http://www.articletrunk.com/

116 http://www.articlewarehouse.net/

117 http://www.articlewise.com/

118 http://www.bestarticlesabout.com/

119 http://www.bestinfobay.com/

120 http://www.blogtelecast.com/

121 http://www.bookshop411.com/

122 http://www.businessarticledepot.com/

123 http://www.content-corral.com/

124 http://www.contentfueled.com/

125 http://www.dxarticle.com/

126 http://www.factsvault.com/

127 http://www.free-article-bank.com/

128 http://www.justarticles.net/

129 http://www.leadarticles.com/


http://www.articlebliss.com/

http://www.articlecapital.com/

http://www.articleclone.com/

http://www.articlecounty.com/

http://www.articlefrenzy.com/

http://www.article-hangout.com/

http://www.articlenetworks.com/

http://www.articleonlinedirectory.com/

http://www.articlepeak.com/

http://www.articlepublication.com/

http://www.articles.co.nz/

http://www.articles24.com/

http://www.articlesandauthors.com/

http://www.articlesbridge.com/

http://www.articlesfrenzy.com/

http://www.article-spot.com/

http://www.articlesrightnow.com/

http://www.articletower.com/

http://www.articletrunk.com/

http://www.articlewarehouse.net/

http://www.articlewise.com/

http://www.bestarticlesabout.com/

http://www.bestinfobay.com/

http://www.blogtelecast.com/

http://www.bookshop411.com/

http://www.businessarticledepot.com/

http://www.content-corral.com/

http://www.contentfueled.com/

http://www.dxarticle.com/

http://www.factsvault.com/

http://www.free-article-bank.com/

http://www.justarticles.net/

http://www.leadarticles.com/


130 http://www.look-4it.com/

131 http://www.managementandbusiness.com/

132 http://www.myarticlepub.com/

133 http://www.neoarticles.com/

134 http://www.webmarketmagazine.com/

135 http://www.onestoparticles.com/

136 http://www.pro-articles.com/

137 http://www.reliablearticles.com/

138 http://www.skillz4u.com/

139 http://www.superzines.com/

140 http://www.trafficflow.ca/

141 http://www.wisearticles.com/

142 http://www.article-daily.com/

143 http://www.articlebase.info/

144 http://www.articlecontentdirectory.com/

145 http://www.articlelinksdirectory.biz/

146 http://www.articlerag.com/

147 http://www.articlesearchnet.com/

148 http://www.articlesindex.com/

149 http://www.articlesplash.com/

150 http://www.articlexplosion.com/

151 http://www.contentarticles.net/articles/

152 http://www.ezinesarticle.com/

153 http://www.findandpostarticles.com/

154 http://www.gcyarticles.com/

155 http:

http://www.look-4it.com/

http://www.managementandbusiness.com/

http://www.myarticlepub.com/

http://www.neoarticles.com/

http://www.webmarketmagazine.com/

http://www.onestoparticles.com/

http://www.pro-articles.com/

http://www.reliablearticles.com/

http://www.skillz4u.com/

http://www.superzines.com/

http://www.trafficflow.ca/

http://www.wisearticles.com/

http://www.article-daily.com/

http://www.articlebase.info/

http://www.articlecontentdirectory.com/

http://www.articlelinksdirectory.biz/

http://www.articlerag.com/

http://www.articlesearchnet.com/

http://www.articlesindex.com/

http://www.articlesplash.com/

http://www.articlexplosion.com/

http://www.contentarticles.net/articles/

http://www.ezinesarticle.com/

http://www.findandpostarticles.com/

http://www.gcyarticles.com/

http://www.publish4profit.com/

http://www.thearticlelibrary.com/

http://www.thearticleworld.com/


Prime List (11 Article Directories)

1 http://www.searchwarp.com

2 http://www.goarticles.com/

3 http://www.ezinearticles.com/

4 http://www.articlesbase.com/

5 http://www.articlebiz.com

6 http://www.articlecity.com/

7 http://www.articledashboard.com/

8 http://www.searchguild.com/articles/

9 http://www.bharatbhasha.com/

10 http://www.blogwidow.com/

11 http://www.easyarticles.com/


http://www.goarticles.com/

http://www.ezinearticles.com/

http://www.articlesbase.com/

http://www.articlebiz.com/

http://www.articlecity.com/

http://www.articledashboard.com/

http://www.searchguild.com/articles/

http://www.bharatbhasha.com/

http://www.blogwidow.com/

http://www.easyarticles.com/


Driving Traffic With Article Marketing

Why You Must Write Your Articles With Traffic Generation in

Mind

If you do not write your articles with traffic generation specifically in mind, you

will not get as many clicks to your squeeze page. You see, when you write articles

for just about any other reason, you want people to get all the information they

need in that one article.

But not so, if you are using the articles to drive traffic. You want people to feel

two things when they finish reading your article: 1) That you delivered really

good, helpful information, and 2) That they want to read more.

So you have to have a balance of really good information that answers their

question, yet leaves them hanging, so they feel like there is more information

needed.

If you do not effectively do this, you will have people read your article, appreciate

the information, and yet not visit your web site. But at the same time, if you do

not give them good, solid information, they will not feel you have enough

information on the topic to warrant them joining your list.

As you write articles and work specifically towards making this balance happen,

you will be able to do this more effectively.



How to Decide What to Write About

I am assuming at this point that you know what your niche or topic is and that this

section is designed to help you decide what you should write in regards to your

niche or web site topic.

Start with your niche or topic, for example, gardening.

Then make a list of things that people might want to know about gardening.

For example:

How do you garden?

What climates are good for gardening?

Do you garden differently in different climates?

What types of things can you grow in the cold climates?

What types of things can you grow in the hot climates?

Notice at this point how I am building a number of questions around one subtopic

of gardening: the climate. You can probably think of 20 or 30 more questions

related to just the climate.

Now for a change of subtopic, for example: tools for gardening



What types of tools do I need for gardening?

What are the easiest tools for gardening?

Are there different tools for different plants?

Where do I buy quality tools for my gardening?

What are the top three tools for gardening?

And again, you can add many more tool questions, especially if you are in the

gardening niche and understand gardening (I am not, and don’t).

Now you should be able to easily think up 20 subtopics for your niche, similar to

the two I suggest here for gardening. For example, in the gardening niche:

Temperature

Color

Brand

Soil

Weather

Time of year

Part of the world

Seeds

Plants

Vegetables

Fruits



Obviously this is a partial list of all the subtopics for the gardening niche. Come

up with at least 20 for your niche, then write at least 10 questions to answer for

each subtopic.

Next, write an article about each question…just given this scenario, you will have

200 article subjects ready to write!

How to Structure Your Articles so That People Will Click Into

Your Web Site After Reading the Article

As I have mentioned already, one of the big keys when you are writing articles and

you want people to click through to your website, you have to both answer the

question they are asking, and give them enough information to see that you know

what you are talking about, and that they like your style, and yet you have to leave

them hanging at the end.

Now, one of the things I find that really leaves people hanging is simply the

exclusion of a concluding paragraph.

Most people are accustomed to reading an introductory paragraph, then some

substance, then a concluding paragraph. But when I write articles, instead of

getting a concluding paragraph they get, instead, my bio that starts off with

something like:

To read more on this topic, click here:



So they are left hanging, and then I give them a way out: they can click through to

get more information.

How to Write a Title for Your Article

Your title is extremely important, and must be compelling. It must drive the surfer

online to click into the article to read it. It must therefore be specific about what it

is going to address, because the surfer is looking for specific information.

Keep in mind, if they do not open your article, they will not read it, and if they do

not read it, they will not click through to your web page. So the title is critically

important. Now, not only should the title give specific information about what the

article will cover, it also needs to have very specific, keyword-oriented language

so that if someone is searching the internet or an article directory for specific

information, they will be able to find your article.

I like to begin my title with the keyword that someone might use to find my article,

if they are interested in the article topic.

For example, if I am writing an article about deep sea fishing, my article title

might read like this:

Deep Sea Fishing – Fishing Equipment Hazards and Warnings

Now that is a very highly targeted keyword rich article title.



If someone types in something like deep sea fishing hazards or deep sea equipment

warnings, I might get a click into my article. These are very targeted readers, as

should be most of your article readers. You see, the more highly targeted is a

reader, the more likely they are to be in the buying stages, and not just surfing

aimlessly.

Now after the keyword beginning, I am very specific about what the article is

going to cover.

Now, one thing that is very important here is that your article actually answers or

addresses the question or specific topic in the title. That is a credibility issue. If

the reader does not think you have been honest in your title about the article, they

will doubt your credibility when it is time to subscribe or buy.

How to Write the First Paragraph of Your Article

Although I have included this first, because it occurs next in the article, if you are

just getting started, it might be easier to write the body of your article first, and

then write the first paragraph afterwards. This allows you to ‘cheat’ by alluding to

the points in the body of your article. Then you can add an introductory sentence,

create a transition line into the main points, and you are done.

But if you write it first, you can write it like this:

Write 1-3 sentences introducing your idea.



For example, in keeping with the deep sea fishing equipment topic, my

introduction sentences might look like this:

Deep sea fishing, although lots of fun, and generally safe when done correctly, can

be fraught with danger when the equipment used is not correctly inspected. It is

important to have your deep sea fishing equipment inspected regularly.

Next, I might list the things that the equipment needs to be checked for. After that,

I will include something like this:

Here are the steps you need to take to make sure that your deep sea fishing

equipment is in safe condition before you leave the dock:

How to Write the Body of the Article

In the body of my article, I am going to address each of the main points that I

alluded to in the introduction. If you are writing the body first, pick 3-4 main

ideas that the reader can benefit from knowing, that are directly related to your

chosen article title or topic.

You can either write a paragraph for each one, or list each idea in a bulleted or

1,2,3 fashion.

One note on making your article keyword rich: Although I am not a big proponent

of spending a lot of time keyword optimizing articles, one thing that is easy and

helps with keyword density without making the article stiff is to begin each point

with the keyword or keyword phrase.



For example,

1) To keep deep sea fishing equipment safe....

2) To inspect deep sea fishing equipment….

3) To maintain deep sea fishing equipment….

In this way you are using the keyword phrase without making the article unwieldy

or unnatural.

How to Write the Conclusion to the Article

Now, if you have been reading all of this book, and not jumping around you know

by now that I do not generally use a conclusion to my article.

But if you feel the need to…

Here is how to do it.

Start with a sentence that summarizes your main idea, then follow with summaries

of each of your main points, then add one more sentence that finishes things up…

In all reality, though, if you are writing articles for list building, leave the

conclusion off and go directly to the compelling bio.



How to Write a Compelling Bio to Generate Clicks to Your Web

Site

One of the most important things in writing a compelling bio is to immediately,

while the reader is fresh from reading your article, give them a really good reason

to go to your squeeze page.

Here are some ideas of how I do it:

To download my new free ebook on deep sea fishing equipment, click here:

To take a look at more articles just like this one, click here:

To read my free report, ‘Taking Care of Deep Sea Fishing Equipment’, click here:

To subscribe to my free course ‘Deep Sea Fishing Tricks and Techniques’, click

here:

Notice that I do not begin with: Sean Mize is an accomplished deep sea fisherman

and has won numerous awards for his huge and unbelievable catches.

They already know that I know what I am talking about after reading my article. If

I don’t know what I am talking about, no amount of self-acclamation is going to

change that, and if they already know from the quality of my writing…what do I

gain?



The key here is, I want them to immediately go to my squeeze page while they are

hot, while they are really interested in my topic, not after they get bored by my

self-praise.

At the end, I might put something like this:

Sean Mize is an accomplished deep sea fisherman who has been teaching fishing

for 10 years.

Notice that this line about myself is much more modest than the earlier example,

and gives the reader a reason why I might be able to help them…not that I have

received awards, but rather that I have been teaching for some time.

Obviously, you have to adapt it to meet your needs, and it is often helpful to write

out many potential bios, and then start eliminating those that don’t feel good.

Remember, the process of article writing and traffic building is as much an art and

works on the feelings people get when they read your articles, as it is a science that

appeals to people’s needs. If it doesn’t feel good when you write it or read it to

yourself, it might not to anyone else, either. On the flip side, do not let that hold

you back, especially if you are overly critical of yourself – just write something,

follow the patterns in this book, and you will get better with time.



Formatting Your Articles For Maximum Readability

If you are using the techniques described in the previous sections, you will already

have a pretty readable article.

To make your article even more readable, add breaks after every few lines.

So for example, if your introductory paragraph has 5 sentences, but each sentence

is 3 or 4 lines long, break that into 5 paragraphs. Do not worry that it is not

technically correct…it is far more important online that it is easily readable.

If your paragraph has 8 lines, perhaps split it in two – find a natural breaking point,

even if the subject will still be the same, and add a line between the sentences.

This will keep the article easy to read – remember some people will not read the

entire article; they will just skim the first few words of each paragraph, so you

want it to be easy for those people to get a feeling for what you are writing about.



Article Rewriting Tips

Although I personally wrote my first 1600 + articles, I often get questions from my

customers asking me about article rewriting. I personally don’t do much of it, as I

prefer to just write original content, and feel that writing original content is a better

long term strategy, because when you rewrite articles you run the risk of your

articles getting caught in a duplicate content filter.

For this reason, I recommend that you only submit rewritten articles to the article

directories – do not put the articles on your own site. And be aware that some

article directories may not accept rewritten articles.

However, I realize that some of you may not want to personally write 10+ articles

per day. So in that case, one way to crank out the articles is to learn the art of

article rewriting.

This gives you the ability to purchase prewritten private label rights (plr) articles

or ghostwritten articles and rewrite them multiple times to create multiple articles

in a shorter period of time.

Here is how to rewrite articles:

1) Take your core article, for example a plr article or a ghostwritten article (or

even one of your own originally written articles that you want to rewrite) and

identify five key words in the article.



For example, using the article I wrote for the example above, I will select five key

words in the article that I can replace with synonymous words and italicize them

for emphasis:

One of my favorite ways to drive traffic to my web site is through

article marketing. What is article marketing? Article marketing is

the process of writing articles about topics related to your web site

niche ideas, adding links to your web site within the articles, and

submitting them to the various online article directories for

distribution online. One of the really nice things about article

marketing traffic is that the leads generated are usually very high

quality; another nice thing about article marketing is that there is

generally no cost to submitting the articles to the article directories,

so for all practical purposes, except for your time, article marketing

is free to use to generate traffic.

So how do you do article marketing? Here is a step by step guide to

article marketing:

1) Determine what types of ideas and topics are good for your web

site? An easy way to do this is to write a list of ten things that

people visiting your web site might be interested in. Once you have

this list, write down 10 questions someone might have in reference

to each of the first 10 things someone might be interested in. This

will give you a total of 100 questions or ideas about which you can

write.



2) Write 250-350 word articles about each of your ideas,

questions, or topics, using the formula I am teaching in this article.

3) At the end of the article, you must have a call to action. Most

article directories will call this your resource box, or your bio. I

call it a call to action, because it must be more than a bio and a link.

It must be a very specific directive that entices people to click the

link and get to your web site. If they do not click the link in the

article, your article has been basically unsuccessful, so you must

learn to write a call to action.

The easiest way to write a call to action is to first create a free item

or product that you can giveaway on your web site. Then tell the

reader to ‘click here’ to collect their giveaway. This will create just

about the highest percentage of readers clicking through to your

web site from your article – and of course that is your primary goal

when you are article marketing.

These are the words I have chosen and italicized:

Article marketing

Traffic

Click

Call to action

Web site

I have specifically chosen them because they will be easy to replace with other

synonymous words.



Next, I will use the find and replace tool in Microsoft Word to find each of those

words and replace them with synonymous words.

For example:

Article marketing – replace with - Article writing

Traffic – replace with – visitors

Click – replace with – click through

Call to action – call to visit web site

Web site - replace with – website

Here is the initial rewrite of the article:

One of my favorite ways to drive visitors to my website is through

article writing. What is article writing? Article writing is the

process of writing articles about topics related to your website niche

ideas, adding links to your website within the articles, and



writing visitors is that the leads generated are usually very high

quality; another nice thing about article writing is that there is


so for all practical purposes, except for your time, article writing is

free to use to generate visitors.

So how do you do article writing? Here is a step by step guide to

article writing:



1) Determine what types of ideas and topics are good for your

website? An easy way to do this is to write a list of ten things that

people visiting your website might be interested in. Once you have




write.

2) Write 250-350 word articles about each of your ideas,

questions, or topics, using the formula I am teaching in this article.

3) At the end of the article, you must have a call to action. Most

article directories will call this your resource box, or your bio. I

call it a call to action, because it must be more than a bio and a link.

It must be a very specific directive that entices people to

clickthrough the link and get to your website. If they do not

clickthrough the link in the article, your article has been basically

unsuccessful, so you must learn to write a call to action.

The easiest way to write a call to action is to first create a free item

or product that you can giveaway on your website. Then tell the

reader to ‘clickthrough here’ to collect their giveaway. This will

create just about the highest percentage of readers clickthroughing

through to your website from your article – and of course that is

your primary goal when you are article writing.



Now, the first thing you will notice is that some of the new language does not

make sense, so you need to go through and adjust some of the language so that it

all makes sense.

Next, break up the article into different paragraphs, perhaps renumber some things,

and create new subheadings.

This is what the final article will look like:

How to Drive Visitors to Your Web Site Using Article Writing and

Submission

Introduction to Article Writing and Submission:

One of my favorite ways to drive visitors to my website is through

article writing. What is article writing? Article writing is the

process of writing articles about topics related to your website niche

ideas, adding links to your website within the articles, and



writing visitors is that the leads generated are usually very high

quality; another nice thing about article writing is that there is


so for all practical purposes, except for your time, article writing is

free to use to generate visitors.

How to Use Article Writing to Generate Traffic:



So how do you do article writing? Here is a step by step guide to

article writing:

1) Web Site Niche Identification and Article Topics:

Determine what types of ideas and topics are good for your

website? An easy way to do this is to write a list of ten things that

people visiting your website might be interested in. Once you have




write.

2) Write Compelling Article:

Write 250-350 word articles about each of your ideas, questions, or

topics, using the formula I am teaching in this article.

3) Write a Call to Visit Web Site:

At the end of the article, you must have a call to visit web site.

Most article directories will call this your resource box, or your bio.

I call it a call to visit web site, because it must be more than a bio

and a link. It must be a very specific directive that entices people to

clickthrough the link and get to your website. If they do not

clickthrough the link in the article, your article has been basically

unsuccessful, so you must learn to write a call to visit web site.



The easiest way to write a call to visit web site is to first create a

free item or product that you can giveaway on your website. Then

tell the reader to ‘clickthrough here’ to collect their giveaway. This

will create just about the highest percentage of readers clicking

through to your website from your article – and of course that is

your primary goal when you are article writing. (439 words)

Notice this article is about 10% longer than the original article, contains about a

30% difference in words. An additional way to vary the article is to write a new

introductory paragraph, and add a closing paragraph.

Article Rewriting Software

Another way to rewrite articles is to use article rewriting software. These allow

you to either input an article, and use the software to help you rewrite the article,

or create an article template that will spin off 10 or more article versions, based on

one original model.

Here is a list of a few article rewriting software products:

Jet Spinner

Website Content Wizard

Unique Article Submission

Article Pro Software


http://www.jetspinner.com/?thankyou-page=115

http://www.websitecontentwizard.com/

http://supersmile.artemispro.hop.clickbank.net/

http://www.articleprosoftware.com/?hop=supersmile


How to Find PLR Articles

As I mentioned in the prior section, you can rewrite private label rights (plr)

articles.

Plr articles are basically articles that are written for the purpose of selling to people

like yourself, for the express purpose of rewriting and submitting to the article

directories.

They are generally keyword-rich, and therefore are actually easier to rewrite than

the article I created as an example.

To find plr articles in your niche, type in ‘your niche’ + ‘plr articles’ into a google

search box. For most popular niches, you should quickly find a list of articles to

purchase. If you are not in a popular niche, you may have to dig a little deeper,

searching ‘your niche’ + articles, etc. You may also be constrained to writing

some of your own base articles or hiring ghostwriters to create some base articles.

Once you have some base articles, you can rewrite your own or your ghostwritten

articles ad infinitum.



Warning About Article Rewriting

If you have been reading my other ebooks on article writing or article marketing,

or even if you have been reading my articles on article writing or article marketing,

you know that I am basically not in strong favor of rewriting articles.

I have included it in this toolbox because I want you to have access to the widest

range of article writing options.

However, there is one danger associated with article rewriting: the duplicate

content filters at the search engines.

For some background on duplicate content, let’s go straight to the search engine’s

perspective. For example, if you were to write a fresh article on ‘pet training’, for

example, and you were to submit it to ten different article directories. Now,

assume the article is well – optimized, and the article is well-written, and each of

the article directories have the ability to get your article into the top ten search

results in google, for example. Let’s even go so far as to assume that actually

happens – that your article gets into the top ten search results in each of the ten

article directories.

This would mean, of course, that your article would occupy each of the top ten

spots in the search engine results for the keyword ‘pet training’. (By the way, I

have seen instances where my own articles have occupied 3-5 of the top ten spots

in google search results, at one time. Quite a rush, I must say.)



Is that in the best interest of the search engine user (surfer or information

searcher)? Or is that in the best interest of the search engine itself? Of course not.

You might like the idea that your article is in the top ten results in google for your

keyword – four times over – but the web searcher and the search engine doesn’t

want to see the same result twice – they want to give the searcher diversity, so they

can get as much different information as possible.

So to counter that, the search engines have developed duplicate content filters that

attempt to prevent the same content from showing in the search results for a given

keyword.

This means that even as you are submitting the same article to multiple directories,

or even rewriting the articles so that they are slightly different – the search engines

are actively filtering out your articles so that they will not show.

There are several things on your side with this:

My personal experience has been that I can get multiple identical copies of my

articles into the top ten search results of google. This indicates to me that either:

a) the article directories are employing techniques to purposefully alter the content

on their article pages so that your articles will not get filtered for duplicate content

or;

b) the duplicate content filters are not extremely effective.

However, the fact still remains that the search engines are actively attempting to

filter duplicate content. It is not clear exactly what percentage of the article must



be altered or rewritten in order to escape detection by the search engine duplicate

content software. Therefore, it is impossible to indicate to what degree an article

must be rewritten to escape the duplicate content filter.

However, given my own personal experience with my own articles, submitted

without any changes between them whatsoever, that have shown up

simultaneously in google search results, that number may be quite low.

My advice to you: rewrite the articles as much as is reasonable without taking up

a lot of extra time, submit the articles, and keep an eye on search engine results

and rankings, to determine that the rewritten articles are making it past the

duplicate content filters.

How to Outsource Article Writing

This is another area of article marketing that I have purposely not revealed until

this time. The primary reason for that is that in my own tests of ghostwritten

articles, as many as 75% of all the ghostwriters I have hired, I have subsequently

fired for not writing original content. That is, they swipe other content off the web

and rewrite it for me.

Look, I know that makes it easier for them – but in my mind, the entire purpose of

buying ghostwritten articles is so that I can have original content in less time – I

can rewrite my own articles, if I really want rewritten articles, I don’t have to

swipe them from anyone else.



list of keywords, and send them out, rather than having to pause the project I am

working on to create a list of keywords.

To create a list of keywords, I recommend using the following keyword tools:

Here is a list of free keyword tools:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

This one requires a download, and uses a database:

http://www.goodkeywords.com/

This requires sign up and is a free trial:

Wordtracker

Here is a typical ad that I will place to find ghostwriters:

Need 50 275 word article marketing articles. Must be 100% original articles, and

not copied from anywhere, online or off. Will not pay for any plagiarized articles.

Note how important it is to me that the article writers know right up front that I

will not tolerate plagiarism or copying from the web.


http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/


You might think that this will limit the number of ghostwriters that might be

interested in writing for me, and that is correct: the ghostwriters who use spurious

means to write articles will not apply to write my articles. Only qualified article

writers will apply for the contract.

It is also important to understand how ghostwriters typically write articles, so you

can spot plagiarized articles quickly.

There are a number of different methods, and certainly combinations of these, that

occur with ghostwriters. I am going to list these in order from the methods having

the least integrity to the methods that are the best and have the most integrity:

1) Ghostwriters steal articles from the web on similar topics as yours, change a

few words, and sell them to you as original (yes, I have had it happen to me, I have

lost hundreds of dollars on these articles I cannot use).

2) Ghostwriters take articles from the web, and rewrite them according to the

method I gave you early in this toolbox. (This is also plagiarism, and you do not

want to buy articles from article writers that use this process).

3) Ghostwriters take articles from the web, read them, study them (they call this

research) and then write fresh articles without copying any of the language of the

original article. (this method or the next are the only two methods I permit my

ghostwriters to use).

4) Ghostwriters write articles on topics about which they are personally familiar,

and produce 100% original articles. This of course is my preferred method of



purchasing articles, although I will accept articles written according to method 3,

as long as they are written 100% in their own words.

How to Find Ghostwriters

Here is a list of web sites that can provide ghostwriting for you:

http://www.guru.com

http://www.hireaghostwriter.com

http://www.ideamarketers.com/ghostwriters.cfm

http://www.articlesbase.com/article-writing-service.php

http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/ghost-writing/purchase.html

http://www.rentacoder.com

http://www.ifreelance.com

http://www.getafreelancer.com

http://www.articlesandbeyond.com

http://www.directfreelance.com

http://www.nodoubtmarketing.com

http://www.elance.com

http://www.a1-optimization.com/article-writing-service.htm

http://www.publicityadvisor.com/articlefaqs.html

Also, if you google any of the following terms, you can often find individuals who

write articles. I did not include all of them here, as if everyone who bought this

tried to buy from each of them, they would be booked for 6 months in advance. So

just google these words to find other article writers:


http://www.guru.com/

http://www.hireaghostwriter.com/

http://www.ideamarketers.com/ghostwriters.cfm

http://www.articlesbase.com/article-writing-service.php

http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/ghost-writing/purchase.html

http://www.rentacoder.com/

http://www.ifreelance.com/

http://www.getafreelancer.com/

http://www.articlesandbeyond.com/

http://www.directfreelance.com/

http://www.nodoubtmarketing.com/

http://www.elance.com/

http://www.a1-optimization.com/article-writing-service.htm

http://www.publicityadvisor.com/articlefaqs.html


‘ghostwriting’

‘article writing’

‘article ghostwriting’

‘article writing service’

‘ghostwriting service’

This will give you a lot of contacts. There are far more article writers out there

than there are people that need articles written – but sometimes it takes a little due

diligence to find them.



Article Writers Agreement

I require all my ghostwriters to sign the following agreement with me:

I understand that all the articles I write for Sean Mize are ghostwritten and must

be original content, and cannot contain any plagiarized or copied content from

any source, online or offline, and that I assign Sean Mize any and all rights

regarding the articles written, and that he can use them in any medium, both

offline or online, using his name as author, or any other name as author, and that

once I have been paid for the articles no additional compensation is required,

regardless of any future use of the articles.

I wrote it personally, and certainly it is not a professional legal document, but I

feel that it meets my needs.

If it meets your needs, please feel free to copy it, improve it, or use it as it is.

Basically what I do is send that agreement to them in the form of a text file, and

ask that each of the ghostwriters copies it and pastes it into an original email, then

signs the email, and sends it to me. Then I put each of those emails in a special

folder so if I ever need them, they are easy to find.



How to Maintain Control Over Quality of Articles

Although I generally purchase 50-100 articles at a time from each ghostwriter,

when I first start purchasing articles from a new ghostwriter, I require that they

write me a test set of 10 articles. I do pay them for these articles, unless I find that

they are plagiarized, then I send them back and refuse to pay.

Also, I have a one-strike and you are out policy. It is very important to me that all

of my articles are originally written. Therefore it is critical to me that I take all

precautions against plagiarism and any copying from the web or any other content.

If I ever catch an article writer breaking my rules and writing an article by lifting

even a phrase or one sentence from another article, I will not give them another

chance.

The way I feel about it is that if that is how they like to write articles, if I tell them

I have caught them and that they should stop writing articles that way – they will

only do a better job of rewriting, they will not start writing original articles. If

they were willing to write original articles, they would have done it from the

beginning.

There are plenty of ghostwriters online, there is no good reason keep a ghostwriter

once they have broken your rules – besides, it is not worth the risk of having

plagiarized content on your web site or on any article directory with your name on

it.

So how do I check the articles for plagiarism?



There are several things you can do.

1) You can buy plagiarism software and run the articles through the software.

This will catch some, but not all, of the plagiarized content.

2) You can do some stealthy phrase checking yourself. This will be more time

consuming, but it is well worth it to catch a bad author. I have had several authors

who I have caught plagiarizing, write me and practically beg me to tell them how I

found out – what software I was using. They claimed to have used some of the

software out there and the articles did not come up. I obviously refused – let them

sweat it out.

Basically, if you take several phrases from each article, put quotes around them,

and then look them up in google – if they are copying, you can usually find it. I

will generally take about 3-5 phrases from each article. That gives you 30-50

phrases in the first set of 10 articles – and that is generally enough to catch the

plagiarism if it is occurring.

If they pass that stage, the next thing I do is submit the 10 articles to

ezinearticles.com. If the articles also pass their software, I make the assumption I

am working with an honest ghostwriter, and I give them a set of 25 articles to write

next.

Out of the next set of 25 articles, I will generally check about one phrase per

article. If they pass this set, and the subsequent submission to ezinearticles.com, I

will step them up to 50 articles, and then only spot check the articles.



With that many articles, also, you can read through them, and you can usually tell

if the language changes – which is a dead giveaway that they have been

plagiarized. Each author will have their own unique style, and if you are alert, you

will catch the style, and you will be able to tell if they deviate from it.

With some ghostwriters, especially the ones who are willing to do 50-100 per

week, they are actually purchasing articles from other writers (basically re-

contracting some of the project) so it important that all the articles from the

various writers meets your standard.

You can often tell, just by scanning or reading the articles, which were written by

your ghostwriter and which by another writer.

Of course, all of this takes some time to get experienced at, and if you have

already written a number of articles yourself before you begin to outsource your

article writing, you will find that screening the ghostwritten articles is much easier

than if you start out by using ghostwriters.

How to Track and Test Articles

This particular area of article marketing has probably had more to do with my

success in article marketing than anything else that I have done.

I am a particular avid tester, and by testing I was actually able to create the two

article marketing methodologies I mentioned earlier in this toolbox.



I created different tracking pages for different sets of article directories, and ranked

each of these sets of article directories according to the amount of traffic they

brought me. Using the process of elimination, I was able to quite quickly

determine which web sites were good for generating direct traffic from my articles,

and which web sites were best for creating long term inbound links.

I have also used my tracking techniques to determine which article marketing

submission and distribution services were most effective. This actually spurred

me to drop some of the article submission and distribution services I was using at

one time, in favor of doing more of the work myself, and outsourcing to an

individual rather than a firm, the submission of my articles.

There are two primary tracking methods I employ, and I will attempt to go through

these in as detailed a fashion as possible, as I personally believe this is one of the

most important aspects of your web business.

You see, in most of the web marke4675 363.6007 Tm713 429.8406 Tm(v50 023m(e4675 363.6096)Tj12 0 0 12 21)Tj12 0 0 12 371 429.8406 Tm29.854 408.582 407.7606 T7406 Tm(s)Tj12 094.1102 429.84063.685223 409.8406 Tm(i)Tj3 3249 40 0 12 260.0029 /


Of course, in terms of the actual article directories, I have given you two lists in

the article directories section of this toolbox – one is a short list with the most

productive directories for immediate traffic – and the other is a longer list which is

only good for generating inbound links.

One of the tracking methods I use is that of tracking the articles by their titles.

The way I do it is I create original titles for my articles, using the google search

tool. I put in my suggested article title, in quotes, into the google search tool, and

if it comes back with ‘no results’ then I can be reasonably sure no one has written

an article (or anything, for that matter) by the same name as I am planning to use.

If the search results come back with results, then I will alter the proposed title until

the results come back with ‘no results’.

Then I write and submit my article, using this unique title. Within just a few days

after submission, I can put that title again in quotes into the google search engine,

and very quickly I can see how many articles I have in circulation with that title.

This allows me to individually test different article directories, different article

submission services, or different article distribution services.

If I submit one article personally to 25 article directories, and in two weeks find I

have 1000 copies of my article online, but I pay a submission company to submit a

different article for me to the same list of 25 article directories, and after two

weeks there are only 100 copies of my article online – I can be reasonably sure

that article submission company has not done all the work they have billed me for.



The same method can be used to test different article directories, groups of

directories, or different article distribution services.

Another method I use for testing my article traffic is by using a combination of

multiple landing pages and my autoresponder service.

This is a little more intricate, and takes a little more time to set up, but it gives me

very accurate statistics for exactly where my traffic comes from, and I can target it

to the exact article or article directory, if I so choose.

Sometimes I am asked why I don’t just use a tracking service to track my traffic,

and that is a fair question, and I will answer it before I explain how I do my own

testing.

There are two primary ways to track incoming traffic effectively: by creating

tracking links which are assigned to specific traffic sources, or by using cookies

that track each visitor to a page.

The drawback to using tracking links is that if you write and submit hundreds of

articles and they are picked up by perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands of

web sites, and they all contain your tracking links, then you are pretty much unable

to ever leave that tracking service without leaving your links behind. I am simply

not willing to give a tracking company that much control over my traffic.

The primary drawback to using cookies is that they do tend to expire or be deleted.

This is generally not a problem for the type of testing of article traffic that I am

discussing here, but since I also use my system to track sales funnel origination for



my sales, I want to be able to track those sales for a longer period of time than is

reasonable with a cookie system.

So, how do I track the bulk of my important traffic? I say important because since

this method is time consuming to set up, I do not use it for all sources of traffic,

but rather for all sources which I believe offer opportunities to significantly

improve ROI by tracking carefully.

Basically what I do is I set up individual ad tracking web form code using my

autoresponder service (I use aweber, which makes it very easy to do, and I

recommend aweber if you choose to implement this method of testing), and create

a different tracking form for each individual tracking source. You can do this as

broad as having a different tracking code for each general traffic source, or you

can take it quite deep: I have one set of 39 different tracking code forms to track

the 39 different article categories to which I submit articles. This allows me to

determine my traffic per article category, for the purpose of dropping categories in

the future which are underperforming, and beef up article writing in categories that

are performing well.

Once I have created the tracking forms, I will create an individual landing page for

each one of the traffic sources. In my case, each landing page is a squeeze page,

as I operate my web business using the list building web business model, which,

the way I run it, requires all visitors to my web site to become subscribers of one

of my lists before they are exposed to one of my sales letters or products for

purchase.

(A landing page is the first page that a visitor will come to when they get to your

web site).



This process is actually much easier than it sounds. Once I have created the first

landing page, I simply rename and save each additional version, adding in the new

tracking web form from aweber before I save each new version. It took me less

than one hour to create all 39 versions of the squeeze page I am using for article

category tracking.

My aweber autoresponder stats allow me to see exactly how many visitors I get

from each source, and they also calculate for me how many of those visitors

become subscribers, and they calculate a conversion rate for me.

The second advantage to using this method is that when someone makes a

purchase with me, I can look up that individual in aweber to determine which

initial landing page they came into my system on. This allows me to evaluate each

traffic source, not just by traffic, or by subscribers, but by how much money the

average person spends depending on the traffic source. This of course allows me

to increase the traffic from sources that are profitable, and identify losing traffic

sources, so that I can eliminate them.



Using Speech Recognition Software to Write Articles

Another method of article writing that I have experimented with is that of using

speech recognition software.

I purchased the dragon naturally speaking software, and found that between

speaking the article and going in and editing it, I could also average about 10

articles per hour.

Because I found the editing to be quite boring, and my net number of articles per

hour was not improved by using it, I no longer use the software to dictate my

articles. However, I have probably created around 200 articles using that

technique, and it was a nice break from typing.

Especially if you are a relatively slow typist, and if you have enough knowledge

about your web site topic, you may want to experiment with using speech

recognition software.



Using audio recordings to write articles (transcription)

I also use audio recordings to create my articles, and then have the audios

transcribed.

I have only created a few articles using this method, by specifically dictating them

and having them transcribed. But generally when I do teleseminars for my list

members, I will have to calls recorded and transcribed, then I will go into the

transcription and extract content to be used for articles.

I usually have to clean up the grammar a little, and sometimes the spelling, but for

each hour of telecall transcription, I can usually extract out about 10 articles – and

it only takes me about half an hour to do the actual transcription, so it is time-

effective, compared to writing new articles.

To do this, you can either purchase recording equipment for your computer, and

dictate into an mp3, or you can subscribe to an online conferencing service, and

simply call and record your articles into an mp3.

Then, send the mp3 to a transcriptionist and have it transcribed.

Here is a list of companies that perform transcriptionism (is that a word?):

http://www.escriptionist.com/

http://www.ubiqus.com/

http://www.productiontranscripts.com/

http://www.e24tech.com/


http://www.escriptionist.com/

http://www.ubiqus.com/

http://www.productiontranscripts.com/

http://www.e24tech.com/


http://www.alsintl.com/

Or you can get bids for transcription at these freelance sites:

http://www.guru.com

http://www.rentacoder.com

http://www.ifreelance.com

http://www.getafreelancer.com

http://www.elance.com


http://www.alsintl.com/

http://www.guru.com/

http://www.rentacoder.com/

http://www.ifreelance.com/

http://www.getafreelancer.com/

http://www.elance.com/


Module 5:

Product Creation

How to Guarantee Your Subscribers Will Buy Your New Product

This is a critical component of my “Cash Flow Business Model” and without the

core concept, my model begins to breakdown. In fact, without this step, it simply

degrades into a simple list building sales model, where you build a list, then pitch

to it various niche-related products.

This concept is central to the idea that you can create products that are guaranteed

to sell to your list – because your list is telling you exactly what they want to

purchase from you.

This one step can increase conversion rates by 200%, 300%, even 500% - just

because it tells you exactly what your subscribers want to purchase from you.

The idea with this is that people generally buy for one primary reason – because

the item they are buying is going to alleviate pain or challenges in their life or

experience.

The easiest way to make a sale online is to meet someone’s most challenging need,

and create a solution to that problem.



If your product does not solve their problems for them, they will likely not

purchase from you.

If, on the other hand, your product solves their precise problem, they will be

compelled to purchase from you.

The key idea here is that if you ask people what their challenges and problems are,

and then you create or find a product that meets that need or challenge – they will

buy from you.

One of the mistakes I think many people make with this is that they ask their

subscribers what they would like to buy. This simply doesn’t work. No one wants

to buy something. They want to meet their needs. But they don’t equate the two.

So they tell you what they think would be ‘cool’ if you had. What they think they

might ‘like’ to buy. But the problem for you is that people do not buy what they

‘like’ – they buy what they need.

So unless you are discovering what people need – and what people need are things

that will solve their problems and challenges for them – then you are not getting

useful information in querying your subscribers.

And when you create the sales page for your new product – the one created to

meet the needs and solve the problems of your subscribers – you can use the

solutions as the selling points. You can literally create the product by solving each

of the challenges your subscribers indicate to you, then you can create the sales

page by literally listing each of the problems and the fact that you solve that

problem in the product.



This makes the product practically irresistible to the people who told you what

their problems were – you are talking to them in their own words – and of course a

person’s own words are the most powerful words to them.

How to Find Out What YOUR Subscribers Want to Buy

This is an amazingly simple step, and yet so many people online skip this step and

try to create products they think their subscribers would like – and so often they

are wrong.

This is all I do:

I send out an email to my list, asking for help designing my next product. I ask

them what they are most wanting to learn in their field.

Once they reply to me, I create a product that specifically answers their questions –

just like I did this product.

I attempt to answer each person’s concern or question in the book or product I

create. And then I can use each person’s question as a bullet point in the sales

letter.

When someone sees the exact need the mentioned, in the bullets in your sales

letter, do you think they will buy? Of course they will, because you are answering

the one question they need the answer to.



Here is a sample email to send out:

Subject Line: I need your help designing my next product

Email:

Dear (subscriber),

I need your help designing my next product.

You see, I want to create the perfect product for you…one that will meet each of

your needs personally.

So to help me design my next product, please just hit ‘reply’ to this email and

answer the following few questions:

1) What is the one thing you really want to know about (your niche)?

2) What is your biggest stumbling block with (your niche)?

Thanks for your time today…I really appreciate this.

(your name).

That’s it.

It’s simple.



It’s effective.

You may have noticed that I just have them email me back with the answers. I

prefer to do it that way for two reasons: I hate setting up additional software (in

this case, survey software) just for one purpose that can be accomplished via email

easily, and I think that it adds a personal touch when they respond to me – they

don’t feel like I am hiding behind my autoresponder.

If you do not want to use email for the replies, you can purchase survey software

or create a blog to do it. But frankly, I think having them reply to your email is the

best way.

Today I will begin going through the steps necessary to write your own ebook for

sale. This will be a full-size ebook that you can put at the beginning of your sales

funnel and sell for between $10 and $47 (although for your first one, I recommend

$10 – this allows your customers to get to know you via a low-priced product; then

increase the price on your second product).

The first ebook you write will be the hardest one to write. It will take longer to

think of topics for your chapters, it will take you longer to write each section and

chapter, and it will take longer to edit and proofread. You will have more

difficulty getting each section to ‘line up’ and flow together with each other. Take

my word for this, the second one will be exponentially easier than the first one;

that is another great reason to write something short, perhaps 40-60 pages, and

offer it at a low price point. You will have your first one out of the way! Then

you can start on something bigger and it will feel a whole lot easier!



Understanding the Ebook Market

It is important to understand how different the ebook market is from the offline,

printed version market. People who buy ebooks online are looking for information

alone. Now, someone offline may be looking for information too, but they are also

looking for something that looks pretty, that they can put it on their shelf; they are

also the touch-and-feel types – they have to be able to see it before they buy it.

Remember the first time you downloaded your first ebook? You probably weren’t

sure what you were going to get – now you are much more comfortable, you know

you are buying information, and frankly, you probably don’t care what it looks

like, you just want it to give you information that works.

Now, reading an ebook is different than reading an offline book. The reason for

this is that if you read your pdfs online, as I do, rather than printing them out, it is

not as easy to flip from page to page, or highlight, or underline important things

like you can a physical book. Therefore, it is important that you write the ebook in

small, well-named sections. Each time you change a topic, a new section needs to

be created, and it needs to show up in the table of contents in the beginning of the

ebook, so people can easily go to the section they want.



Formatting Your Ebook

Assuming that yo


Outlining Your Ebook

I am going to assume that you are going to create a 10 chapter ebook. Now, if you

are choosing to write something short (as I recommend you do, something in the

neighborhood of 40-60 pages), then you will put about 5-6 sections in each

chapter. If your book is longer, you could add a few chapters or you can go to

about 10 sections or more per chapter (that will get clearer in a few moments).

Obviously the first step is deciding what you are going to write about. Remember,

when you are writing online, the most important thing is that you are writing to

give information. People online want to learn how to do something, how to make

something better, how to solve a problem. So think of a problem in your niche

which you can solve.

For the purpose of this lesson, I am going to create a sample niche – painting your

house.

So, if my niche is painting your house, what are some ideas for problems I can

solve?

How about these:

How to paint your house

How to paint the outside of your house

Easy way to paint your house



Now, if this is the problem I am going to solve, then every chapter, every section

in this ebook should support that problem and the solving of it. If anything I write

about, for example, painting furniture, does not support my primary topic, it

should be left out of my ebook.

The next step is to come up with 10 supporting ideas or steps to solving the

problem you have chosen.

Here is a sample set of chapters in a painting your house manual:

Step one: Fundamentals of painting your house

Step two: Choosing the right paint for your house

Step three: Choosing the right paint brushes and other tools for each section of

your house

Step 4: Preparing your house for painting (moving furniture, removing old paint,

etc.)

Step 5: How to paint the large areas

Step 6: How to paint trim, etc.

Step 7: How to fix mistakes (overlapped paint colors, paint on windows, etc.)



Step 8) How to make your painting job last longer

Step 9) Other tips and techniques for painting your house

Since I am not a painter, I must have missed something – there are only 9 steps in

this hypothetical house painting book.

Now, assuming I am going to write a short book (40-60 pages), I can target 5

pages per step and I will have about 45 pages. Some chapters will be a little

longer, so that will probably put me at about 55 pages, and once I add the title,

etc., I will be easily at 60 pages, which is a bargain at $10 – a good deal at $47

online, especially since when I write this I am going to focus only on the

information needed to learn this subject – I do not believe in adding filler to your

ebooks just to make them longer.

The next step, of course, is to write the section topics. To do this, take each one of

your chapter topics and come up with at least 5 steps that will make that topic clear

to your reader.

As an example, I will create the section topics for Step 4: Preparing your house for

painting:

1) Moving furniture

2) Preparing the ground

3) Preparing the surfaces to paint



4) Taping off windows, etc.

5) Getting organized

Go through this process with each of the 10 chapter topics you have.

Notice that I have not mentioned beginning to write any of the sections or chapters

yet – and this is because you do not want to start doing this until you have every

topic about which you will write, chosen and in a list, just like the ones I have

created here.

Writing the Chapters and Sections

At this point, you may have noticed that in this particular example, if you have 10

chapters and 5 sections each, you will have a total of 50 sections all together. You

may have also noticed that if you write each of these sections, you will have

completed each of the chapters when you have done so.

Now, each section is going to be about one page long – maybe shorter, maybe

longer, depending on the depth of the topic. That is about the length of an article.

So you can almost think of this ebook writing project as a set of 50 articles.

Perhaps since beginning this coaching program, you have written 50 articles, and

now you know how easy that can be. Perhaps you have only written 20 – but at

least you can gauge how long it might take you to write the equivalent of 50

articles. Incidentally, I recommend that you take about every fifth article you



write, and submit it as an article to the article directories. In your bio, you can

include something like this: This has been an excerpt from my upcoming book

“How to Paint Your House”. To receive notification and a discount coupon when

I release it next month, click here:”

Do not try to write all the articles (sections) in one sitting. You do not even need

to write them in the order you have put them in for your ebook. Just write the ones

that are easiest for you first, the ones that require the least amount of research,

first. Then when things get tough and you have to do some of the more difficult

topics, you will already have the ebook half done, or more, and you will be less

tempted to quit on yourself. By the way, this is the exact process I have used to

write over 6 complete ebooks in the last 7 months. I have simply written them one

section at a time, and have just about always written from an outline, just like the

one I show you how to create here.



Formatting Your Ebook

Formatting Text

If you have not done it already, put all of your chapter headings in to a heading

style. If you are using Microsoft Word, you should have a pulldown menu in your

toolbar that gives you formatting choices.

You can use ‘heading 1’ for chapter titles, ‘heading 2’ for section titles, and

‘heading 3’ for sub-section titles.

The reason you are going to format your headings this way is so that your table of

contents can be made automatically by Word.

Create Table of Contents

To do this in Microsoft Word, click into your text where you want you table of

contents to appear, click on ‘insert’, then ‘reference’, then ‘indexes and tables’,

then on ‘table of contents’. Once you get in there, you should be able to click

‘okay’ and you will have a table of contents. As you make changes to your text,

you will want to update your table of contents. To do this, right click on the area

that is created as your table of contents, and you will be given some choices of

how to refresh that area…generally I choose the one that allows me to refresh the

entire table of contents, that way I make sure I include any new headings I might

have added since I last updated the table of contents.



Create Headers and Footers

To create headers and footers, click ‘view’ then ‘header and footer’ and you will

get a box near the top of your page. I like to type the name of my book on the left,

and then the page number on the right. To put the page number in, the box that

comes up when you are in ‘header and footer’ will give you an option to put in a

page number (it is the button that has the # sign on it). Once I have typed in what I

want in that box, I underline it – so that it looks more professional.

On the bottom of the page, you will see the footer. For this I like to put the

copyright symbol. To get to that, go to ‘insert’ then ‘symbol’, then click on the ©,

then click ‘insert’ then click ‘close’. I like to put both my company name and my

name next to the © symbol. To the far right, I put the url to my web site.

Inserting Hyperlinks

To insert live links to other web pages, click on the ‘insert hyperlink’ icon in your

Word toolbar. There will be two boxes – one for the web address – be sure and

use the entire url, including the http:// - and one for the text of the hyper link.

To make the link open in a new window when someone clicks on it (so that the

ebook remains open) click on ‘target window’, then click on the pulldown menu,

then click on ‘new window’. Beneath the pulldown box, there is a box to check to

‘make this the default for all hyperlinks’ – check that, and all your hyperlinks will

open in a new window. I like to do this so that if someone clicks on one of my

links, the pdf stays open.



Create the Title Page

On this page, I simply put the title to my ebook, my subtitle to my ebook, and my

name. Remember, my copyright information is already in the footer, as is my

company name.

Additional Pages

I like to include a limit of liability in my ebooks. If you are in a health-related

niche, then a limit of liability is also a must-have.

I also have an ‘about the author’ page, and I usually end the ebook with a personal

note from me.

Sample Ebook

Here is a link to one of my ebooks so that you can see exactly what I put on each

page.

http://www.secrets-of-internet-

success.com/Purchased/HowToUseArticleMarketingtoListBuild9n3l.pdf


http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/Purchased/HowToUseArticleMarketingtoListBuild9n3l.pdf

http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/Purchased/HowToUseArticleMarketingtoListBuild9n3l.pdf


Create a PDF

I like to convert my book into a pdf, so that I can put security features on it so that

it cannot be copied from. The adobe software can run you several hundred dollars,

and there are a number of copy cat pdf makers out there that run anywhere from

free to several hundred dollars. When I first got started online, I looked at about

10 free pdf makers, and each one had drawbacks. For example, they wouldn’t

make your links live, or they would put advertising on your pages. What I do now

is subscribe to Adobe’s monthly service…it is $10 per month and gives me

unlimited pdf conversions. They will give you a free trial of 5 conversions, but I

have heard recently that it will no longer allow you to have live links or create

headers with the trial version. I simply think that your best choices are to either

buy the software or use the $10 service from adobe. Here is the link to the

monthly service from adobe: http://createpdf.adobe.com/

How to Use the Adobe Monthly Service

I am going to give you step by step instructions for creating a pdf using adobe’s

monthly service. To do that, I am literally going to convert a document, and give

you each step I use.

Obviously, you will have to set up the account – if I remember correctly, it was

easy to do and menu driven.

Here is how to convert a document:




1) Login to http://createpdf.adobe.com/

2) Click on ‘convert a file’ – that will open a new window.

3) Click on ‘browse’ – this will show the files on your computer. Find the Word

file of your ebook and double click on it – then it will appear in the box next to the

‘browse’ button.

4) Click ‘continue’ – this will open you another new window.

5) In this window, there are a number of different options for the settings of your

pdf. Once you set these, they will stay the same for all your pdfs, unless you go in

and change the settings.

For ‘optimization settings’ I have mine set on ‘ebook’.

For ‘PDF compatibility’ I have mine set on Acrobat 4.0 – there is a 5.0 available, I

imagine that the reason I am not using that setting is because it was not available

when I set up the service, and I do not usually change things that are working for

me.

Check the box for ‘enable tagged pdf generation’. If I remember correctly, the

hyperlinks will not work without that checked.

Under ‘password security options’ I have the 40 bit security enabled. I am not

going to give you step by step on setting this up, as I believe it is menu – driven

and self-explanatory. You can set the security settings to permit or not permit

printing, to permit or not permit copying, and you can also add a security code to




the ebook so that no one can open it without a certain password. I recommend

permitting printing but not copying, and no security code to open the ebook.

You can choose a delivery method – I prefer to have mine emailed to me. Keep in

mind once they convert it, they only keep it in their servers for 3 days – so be sure

and download it right away.

Next, click ‘create pdf’ and within a few minutes, normally, you have the email in

your inbox and you can download the pdf. Save it to your computer.

Conclusion

If you have never created an ebook before, the processes I have laid out here may

take you 5 or 10 hours to do the first time. However, the second time you do them,

they should all take no more than an hour. One thing I do is when I am starting a

new ebook or even a lesson like this, I start with the last one I have written, and go

in and change the title, and critical information, but by using a former edition of

something I have already done, I do not have to reformat the headings, or the

header and footer, etc. – and certainly all of this takes time.

Feel free to send me a copy of your ebook when it is completed – even if it is not

perfect yet – and I can give you some good constructive feedback on what to

change to make it look better, or more functional. Sometimes a simple change or

two can make a big difference.



Why Focus on a Big – Ticket Item?

Now that you have the beginning stages of your sales funnel created and you are

actively building and monetizing your list, you need to begin to think about what

your final product will look like, the needs it will serve, and the price at which the

market will optimize your profits.

Once you have your final product, your big-ticket product, conceptualized, you

can change the way you approach creating your smaller products.

Instead of creating products with your current list members in mind, you can

create products that will attract to you the types of people who will eventually

purchase your big ticket item.

For example, if you are in the arena of psychology, and you determine that your

big – ticket item is a 3 day training course to teach psychologists to maximize their

income potential by changing the way they market their services, you can now

begin to make changes to your sales funnel so that instead of just selling to

‘whoever will buy’ you begin selling to people who specifically have a need for

your big – ticket product. The smaller purchases will serve as qualifying

purchases for the big – ticket promotion. As they purchase specific products that

are designed with your end-of-the-sales-funnel big- ticket product, you know they

are self-qualifying themselves to eventually purchase your big – ticket product.



Easier to hit high incomes with big – ticket items

Another reason to create a high-ticket item is that it is easier to create large

incomes using high-ticket items than using lower ticket items.

Think about this: how many units of a $5000 item do you need to sell to gross

$100,000? How many units do you need to sell at $50 to gross $100,000?

It only requires selling 20 units at $5000 to gross $100,000, but 2000 units at $50.

Are the customers similar? Yes, they are very similar. Obviously, some people

who spend $50 do not have the financial wherewithal to spend $5000, but out of

the ones that do, if you position the product correctly, they may be as willing to

spend $5000 with you as they are willing to spend $50. When you do sell $50

products, they will no longer be end-products, they will be qualifying products for

your autoresponder to begin to promote the big – ticket product.

Examples of Big – Ticket Products

So what are some examples of big – ticket items?

A complete training course to teach people in your niche how to build an entire,

full time business, in that niche

A complete training course to teach people how to set up their own consulting

practice in their niche



A complete training program that will teach people in your niche how to become

the very best in the niche online

A 3 – day hands on workshop to teach people how to ‘do’ your niche

A 3- day hands on workshop teaching people how to monetize their niche

An online coaching course that gives


There is a $200,000 difference in the net income of dentists who have ‘figured out’

a million dollar business and those who have not.

If you have the ability to teach dentists how to go from a less – than 1 million

dollar business to a more - than 1 million dollar business, what is that worth to

them?

$5000 would be a painless drop in the bucket to the dentist who can logically see

that his income could increase by $200,000 after taking your training.

Of course, your niche is probably not dentistry. So let’s start at your niche. What

is your niche? What is the highest level of training someone in your niche might

be interested in? How much would they be willing to pay?

Create an example like the one I have just given you with the dentists. You may

be thinking, no one will pay money to learn how to create a weight loss business

like mine. Or at least not $5000.

But maybe you are wrong. How much can someone make in the weight loss

business if they do everything right? $100,000 per year? $200,000 per year?

$400,000 per year?

If either of those numbers is correct, how much would someone be willing to pay

to learn? Especially if you could show them how much their income could

increase if take your training.



Drop me an email and I will help you brainstorm a big – ticket product for your

specific niche.

Once you have determined what that big – ticket item will be, you can begin to

design both it and the rest of your sales funnel in such a way that it leads people to

your big – ticket item.

Forced Continuity Programs

Another item to add to your sales funnel is a forced continuity program.

First of all, what is a forced continuity program? A forced continuity program is a

program that requires that the purchaser continue to pay for the program to

continue to receive the benefit.

A forced continuity program can take several forms. One is that of a membership,

where certain products or services are available to the customer as long as they are

a member. Another is that of a monthly service that has monthly billing. Still

another is that of a coaching program.

What are the advantages to forced continuity programs?

One of the biggest keys to forced continuity programs is that you only have to

make the sale once, and as long as you continue to provide the service promised,

you will be able to continue to bill the customer on a monthly (or quarterly or

yearly) basis.



I have even seen evidence that the conversion rates on products with monthly

billing are higher than one-time purchases, even when the monthly price is equal

to the one-time price.

Individuals like to be a part of something that continues to offer value, rather than

purchasing something that does not, or does not appear to, come with support.

This creates a long-term income stream, versus the income that is created from a

one-time sale.

Why is this such an important part of your sales funnel?

The forced continuity program provides guaranteed income to you, in just the

same way as an autoresponder continues to add subscribers, even when you are not

working. This means that once you have created the membership or coaching

program, you will continue to get paid month after month – even in months when

you choose not to promote the program.

The forced continuity program can be so powerful, and be such an important part

of your sales funnel that the revenues from it can equal or exceed your normal

sales efforts.

What does this mean? If you are averaging $1 per subscriber on your opt in email

list, this mean


This means that if you are averaging $5000 per month without a forced continuity

program, a well-orchestrated forced continuity program can possibly get you to

$10,000 per month.

Will this happen overnight? Of course not. But a forced continuity program is

almost sure to increase your sales levels, if it is run right and has an adequate sales

page, and is presented to current subscribers and customers.

So what are some ideas for forced continuity?

Two of the most popular forced continuity programs are memberships and

coaching programs.

Memberships are web sites that continually add new information, services, or

products and charge a continuing fee. The most popular form is that of a monthly

membership.

If you provide products or you sell any type of a consumable or information

product, a membership can be a good fit.

The key here is that you have to have the ability to continue to add content or

products on a monthly basis, in order for the membership to be effective.

Coaching programs are just that – you offer monthly coaching to your subscribers

and customers, and charge a monthly fee. This assumes that you have a level of

expertise in your industry or niche that would warrant teaching others to do things

the way you have done them, or perhaps is amenable to critiques or teaching



sessions. Any of these options can be integrated into a coaching style program,

and can be set up with monthly payments.

So how do you set up a membership program?

A membership program, unlike a coaching program, should be set up on a

password – protected web site so that only members can access the site.

There are a number of membership software packages out there; to find a number

of them, just google ‘membership site software’. However, there is one system I

have set up in the past. My understanding is that it is one of the easiest to use (I

have tried a few others and could not get past the technical requirements myself)

but one of the key advantages is the videos that are in the package.

Here is a link to the videos and the full instructions; there is another link in the

package to the free membership software. There is also a paid version, but you

can upgrade from the free one once you get too big for the free version.

Here is the link:

Membership Video and Program

That package includes full video instructions for setting up your own membership

site.

Of course you will still have to come up with the initial content and the monthly

content. Send me an email, and I will help you brainstorm a membership site in

your niche, and give you directions on how to structure it.


http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/coachingprogram/MembershipSite_MarketingKit.zip


Coaching Program

The idea with a coaching program is that you offer monthly coaching and in return

receive a monthly payment, much like this program.

I find that the easiest way to automate my coaching program is to create a series of

lessons (like these) that are designed to offer value to everyone in the program, and

additionally offer unlimited email support.

I prefer to use the paypal subscription feature to accept the monthly payments. It

is easy to set up – just go into your account with paypal, go to the merchant

services section, then scroll down to subscription buttons.

You will find when you set up a coaching program that the bulk of your energy

and effort is expended near the beginning of the program, when your new

coaching clients are just learning to do things the way you do them, or they are just

getting started with whatever you are coaching.

Once you write the lessons, you will find that many of your clients will ask the

same questions. This generally indicates that you have not been clear on some

instruction, or you have not answered all the questions that need to be answered.

So once you have created the initial set of lessons, go back into them as your

clients ask questions, and answer the questions they ask.

I find that as time goes on, I get fewer and fewer questions – and the questions

become much more targeted, as well.

So how to deliver the lessons?



Assuming they are an information product, and can be delivered digitally, I prefer

to use adobe to convert my lessons into pdfs, and then I use my aweber

autoresponder to deliver the lessons.

This allows me to completely automate the delivery of my coaching program, and

as long as I check my email frequently (as I do anyhow), I can offer an incredible

coaching program with minimal time requirements from me.

So how many lessons do you need to start your coaching program with?

I started mine with one – the first one. Then about once per week I write a new

one. This allows you to keep up with the needs of the first class of coaching

clients, and adapt the lessons if necessary. Once you have created the series of

lessons, you can always go back in and adjust the content if necessary. And as

long as you continue to write an additional lesson each week, you can extend the

length of the program.

Once again, if you need help coming up with a coaching program topic and

format, let me know, and I can easily help you come up with one that will work

well.

Do not allow your lack of experience or even a small list deter you from creating a

coaching program.



Module 6:

The Best For Last

To this point in this manual and course, we have focused on some very specific

things that are foundational to your web business.

I have shown you the importance of keyword research, the role article writing

plays in generating a long-term web presence, I have shown you how to structure

your web site for maximum profits, including creating a squeeze page, creating an

email campaign, and creating your own giveaway and paid ebooks.

But no matter how well you do each of those steps, if those steps don’t flow

together nicely, if you don’t know how to go into your entire sales process and

identify what is working, what is not working, and analyze and brainstorm exactly

what you need to do to improve your system, then all you have is a system. But it

is like a car without fuel – if you have a $50,000 car but the gas line does not

connect where it should, or the brakes have a leak – your car isn’t going to get you

where it should.

It may be a nice car, it looks real pretty when you wash it, and it might still smell

new – but if just one connection is missing, the entire car is grounded.

And your internet business is a lot like that.

In this lesson, I am going to help you ‘troubleshoot’ your web business, go to the

very insides of your business, and ‘diagnose’ things that aren’t fitting like they



should. Sometimes making just one change can triple, or unleash, your web

business. Sometimes if you identify 3 weak points, and each one triples your

business when fixed – you go from where you are at to 3 times that – and then 9

times that – and then 27 times that – just by making simple adjustments.

Understanding Data

One of the things that is absolutely critical to studying your web business and

identifying weak points, and tweaking those points, is you have to be able to look

at some basic data and create conversion rates.

First of all, what is a conversion rate?

A conversion rate is the percentage of a given amount of traffic that performs a

designated action. The reason we call it a conversion rate is because it is an

indicator of what percentage of your traffic ‘converts’ into a designated action.

Now, you can have a squeeze page conversion rate, a sales page conversion rate,

an email conversion rate (we call that the ‘clickthrough rate’, but it is the same

thing, even an email subject line conversion rate (we call that the ‘open rate’)).

And you can break each of those conversion rates into subcategories. For

example, you can have a conversion rate on a sales page when web traffic visits

that page, and you can have a different conversion rate when your own customers

visit that page. And there is a crucial difference between those two conversion

rates. For example, imagine that your conversion rate of cold visitors (web traffic)

is 1% and your conversion rate for your own customers is 10%. Now, imagine

that the traffic source is split 50/50 between cold traffic and your own customers –



you would show a 5% conversion rate. But is that accurate? Of course not. That

5% conversion rate really doesn’t tell you anything.

Now, here is how to calculate a conversion rate.

First of all, I realize that some of you are statistical whizzes and some of you are

clueless – and that is OK. But since this is a core lesson, I am going to write to the

lowest common denominator – the person who is at square zero – so if you are on

either end of the spectrum, please do not be offended or insulted!

To do this, you need a basic calculator.

Start with a traffic number. For this example, I am going to assume that we are

looking for a squeeze page conversion rate. So the first number that we need is the

total amount of traffic that has gone to that squeeze page. For this example, let us

assume that it is 100 visitors over a specified period of time. Now we also need

the number of conversions (or opt ins) for that specific squeeze page. Let us

assume that it is 30 conversions. Divide 30 by 100 and hit the percentage (%) key.

You shoul

Yo)m

m

siYoats2 v998 d5208 d 483. 5 3193 0 059/78 341.5208 Te6j1265 341.5208 Tm.4408 Tm(i)Tj12 0 2 0 0 12 304.841 319(e page.)Tj12 439.4482 319.4808 7006,2 455497 341.500 12 459.4308 3e8m8021247473038 Tm(Yo)T72 455497 341.5012w12 3 0 0 12 08 Tm(m)Tj12 0 0 .2908 297.360894(hYo)Tj12 0834408 Tm(at)3944612 0 0 12 384.8707>3 312 0m(at)3944612 0 .4408 Tm( Di)Tje704.1 3Tms8 122.4 3153e8 Tm( Di)Tjeit6id2.1 0 per

6id2.182 0 0 1 0 12 37 3.44430.0323 341.520 Dii 30 coe page.e page.37.2133 384.5564 341.5208s8 122.4 3153e8 Tj1230 cos63 319.4408 Tm(u)Tj12 09 344.4517 341.111230 coe page.


Illustration of the Importance of Every Single

Conversion Rate in Your Sales Funnel

To illustrate this, I am going to use an excel spreadsheet to create a simple sales

funnel and allow it to give me various sales revenue levels based on changes in the

conversion rates of different parts of my sales funnel.

For this example, I will assume that we have 1000 visitors. Now these 1000

visitors can occur on the same day or over the course of the month, but the results

will remain the same, except that the results will occur over the same time period,

either a month or a day, etc.

Traffic

Conversion

Rate to

Subscribers

Total

Subscribers

Conversion

Rate of

Subscribers

to Initial

Sale

Initial

Sale

Conversion

Rate of

Initial

Buyers to

Premium

Buyers

Total

Premium

Buyers

Total

Revenue

1000 0.1 100 0.1 10 0.3 3 $400.00

1000 0.5 500 0.1 50 0.3 15 $2,000.00

1000 0.5 500 0.3 150 0.3 45 $6,000.00

1000 0.5 500 0.3 150 0.5 75 $9,000.00

10000 0.5 5000 0.3 1500 0.5 750 $90,000.00

100000 0.5 50000 0.3 15000 0.5 7500 $900,000.00

In this example, on the first line we see that we have 1000 visitors (traffic) and the

conversion rate on our squeeze page is 10% (.1). That nets us 100 subscribers.



Now, over time, we develop a conversion rate of subscribers to an initial sale,

perhaps a $10 product. This nets us 10 sales. Now, once they have made the

initial purchase, they are buyers and are moved to our buyers list. At this point, we

have a conversion rate of 30% of initial buyers to premium buyers (a $97 product,

for example).

For the revenue line, for easy numbers, I have used $10 for the initial product and

$100 for the premium product.

Go to the next line, where we change the conversion rate to subscribers to 50 %

and we leave everything else alone, our imaginary income here rises to $2000.

Next, we tweak our conversion rate of subscribers to the initial sale, and our

revenue rises to $6000. In the next line, I have increased the conversion rate of

initial buyers to premiei

n


conversion rate has gone up of down. Y


1) For tracking opt in form conversions, I use the tracking feature in aweber’s

autoresponders. For every squeeze page I create, I create a different web form in

aweber. Some of my autoresponders in aweber (I have about 25) have as many as

15-20 different web forms. To look at your aweber conversion rate stats, go to

‘getting started-setup guide’ on the home page, then go to ‘web form wizard’.

This is where you can create additional web forms for each additional squeeze

page. This is also where the stats will show up. It will show you how many

visitors you have, how many unique visitors you have, and a conversion rate for

each.

2) For tracking my sales page conversions, I also use aweber. In my case, I do not

send anyone to my sales pages e

33 0 0 12 401.7743


Other Conversion Rates You Can Track

In addition to squeeze page and sales page conversion rates, you can also track and

improve email open rates and email clickthrough rates. Email open rates and

email clickthrough rates are important. Imagine you are sending out 1000 emails

and getting a 15% open rate. If via testing you can increase that to 30%, you

double the number of people who read your email. If you also double the number

of clickthroughs that occur, you have increased your total sales by 4 times, without

making any adjustments to the sales page. And if you can increase the sales page

conversion rate by double, now you have increased your total sales by 8 times.

And if you increase the total number of subscribers by double, then you have

increased your total sales by 16 times.



One More Reason You Have to Track and Know Why

You are Selling

As long as you are tracking and testing each individual element of all of your

campaigns, then with just little bit of traffic and a few sales or subscribers per

month, you now have the power to make as much money as you want online.

Imagine that all you have is 10 visitors per day and you get one subscriber per day.

What does that mean? It means that if you go to 100 visitors per day by

multiplying by 10 times whatever it is you are doing to get 10 visitors, you will get

10 subscribers per day. By tweaking your squeeze page so that it convert 5

visitors into subscribers instead of 1, then you immediately jump to 50 subscribers

per day.

In this example, you have gone from 1 to 50 subscribers per day in an easier

fashion than getting the first subscriber. You see, to get the first subscriber, you

have to build a web site, build a squeeze page, write content, write a free giveaway

ebook, find some traffic, etc. But to go from 1 to 50 all you have to do is tweak

and multiply things you are already doing.

Same thing with the sales funnel. Imagine that you are starting with 1 sale per

day, or even 1 sale per month. Increase the traffic by 10 times, and now you have

10 sales per day or per month. Increase your conversion rate by 5 times, and now

you have 50 sales per day or per month. Once again, it is easier to go from 1 sale

to 50 than it was to go from 0 sales to the first one.



Conclusion

At this point, you are probably either thinking, wow!, I think I can do this. I am

getting so many subscribers per day and my results are this or that…and now I am

going to make that grow.

Or you may be thinking, Sean is crazy – it cannot be easier to go from 1 sale to 50

sales than it was to get the first one. I am going to reiterate that – it is far easier to

go from 1 to 50 than it was to get the first one – but you have to do it right.

So what is your next step? Calculate conversion rates for everything in your sales

funnel. Know what they are. Plug them into an excel spreadsheet and calculate

what a few changes could mean to your bottom line. And start focusing on areas

that need improvement.

The way I see it, numbers can tell you the whole story. You can think you have a

lousy squeeze page or a good one by the way it looks – but to me, the question

always is, what can I do to take one element to the next level? How can I tweak

one conversion rate and impact my entire sales funnel?

And think about growth. Maybe all your conversion rates are decent. But maybe

you just need more traffic. Maybe you have found that for every article you write

you get a certain amount of traffic, and following the reasoning in this lesson, a

certain amount of traffic yields a certain number of subscribers or sales.

Once you have linked the amount of traffic you get to the number of articles you

write, perhaps you can see that if you wrote twice as many articles, you would



have twice the results. Perhaps you are writing 1 article a day – what would

happen to your sales funnel if you doubled that to 2 articles, or quadrupled it to 4

articles per day?

Look for individual areas of improvement in your sales funnel, and improve each

one, one by one.

Ezinearticles Tracking

One of my most valuable tools online has been ezinearticles. Not just because

they send me hundreds of visitors each day.

That is just one aspect of my relationship with ezinearticles.

What helps me almost as much as the traffic is the system of tracking they have.

When I combine that with my aweber tracking, and combine the stats into one

spreadsheet, I get a phenomenal amount of information.

I can see which categories of articles perform better than others. I can see which

categories of articles perform lousily.

I can see which titles outperform others.

I can see which bios outperform others.



I can see which categories outsell others, when the person actually purchases (for

this info, I need one more level of tracking: paypal).

I am able to make decisions about all my other advertising, by using a very

specific combination of tracking procedures, utilizing both ezinearticles and

aweber.

Why am I able to make decisions about my other advertising?

Although ezinearticles tracking tells me nothing about the absolute levels of traffic

I might receive from another source, or another article directory, it gives me

accurate information about the relative levels of traffic between categories.

For example, I am able to see that an article I write about article writing produces

2 times as many leads as an article I wrote about article marketing, and 10 times as

many leads as an article about ecommerce.

That tells me the relative level of interest between each category.

Importance of Tightly-Themed Sub Niche

Keep in mind, I use only one main topic for my entire funnel: article marketing.

That is a very niched topic.

Sure, it is in the internet marketing niches.



But it is a specialized sub-niche.

Why don’t I target general internet marketing leads?

Because I want people who are already involved in internet marketing.

Now what do I know about people who are interested in writing articles, especially

writing articles for traffic?

They are generally:

a) already in internet marketi


Are you trying to meet all the general needs of your niche, or do your specialize in

some sub-niche? Many times you can make a lot more money in a tight sub-niche

where there is less competition, than you can in a big niche where there is a lot of

competition. Also, in the sub-niches people tend to be more dedicated.

For example, imagine your niche is toy boats. Let’s say these are build-it-yourself

boats.

If I were to market build-it-yourself boats, I would find a special kind of boat and

market it to educated buyers (by educated, I don’t mean degree, I mean, in build-it-

yourself boats).

I would not go after the entire market – I would leave that to my competition!

You see, if you market to the entire market, you have to sell people on getting

involved, you have to sell starter kits, you have to answer basic questions – and the

pay is very low, because people don’t want to pay a lot to learn basics.

But if I sold special boats, rare wood boats that are exact replicas of ships from a

certain era, I could charge high prices for the boats, for the materials, for the

specialized knowledge.

Now I would be able to make money in the build-it-yourself boat niche.

So how does that relate to article marketing and ezinearticles tracking?

If I were to write articles about hobby boat building and I were to track whether

the article was about toy boats, wood boats, expensive boats, beginner boats, etc., I



would be able to track which topics created the highest number of opt ins, the

highest number or dollar value of sales, and so on.

And long run, I would write more articles on the topics that made me more money.

In the example I am going to show you, I am simply tracking categories – which is

easy to do in ezinearticles for the im niches because there are about 50 categories.

But I imagine there is only one category for hobby boats. So I would have to

come up with a slightly different system.



My System for Tracking Traffic and Subscribers Using

Ezinearticles and Aweber

This is what I would do:

Create my own categories, and start the title of each article with my category.

Then when I sort the articles by title, it will have the same effect as the one you are

going to see here with each category.

Real life example:

Open up this excel spreadsheet:

http://www.secrets-of-internet-

success.com/coachingprogram/ezinearticlestracking.xls

Open the tab named Articles Master

This is an actual download of my spreadsheet from ezinearticles. (To get yours, go

into your account, click on your pageview count in your articles home section of

your account, that will lead you either a list with your pen names if you have

multiple pen names, or just a list of your articles. If it is the list of pen names,

choose one to start with [you will have to do this by pen name, you can combine

them into one spreadsheet]; if it is not, I think it goes straight to the stats. Then

click on ‘download csv’. You can either save the csv file as an excel spreadsheet.)


http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/coachingprogram/ezinearticlestracking.xls

http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/coachingprogram/ezinearticlestracking.xls

Complete Home Study Course Manual


I use the web form function under list settings in aweber to create a different web

form for each category in ezinearticles.

Then I create a different mirror squeeze page for each category in ezinearticles (all

of them are the same, currently promoting an article writing download.

This allows aweber to give me stats on clicks and opt ins, by category (since the

web forms are by category).

Now go to aweber master to see a copy and pasted version of my web form stats

for the list I use for ezinearticles.

This is not as pretty as it was when I first copied it; you have to copy it from the

live screen, so the formatting is not clean – just follow my example.

So columns A through G are straight from aweber (with a little cleaning up). I

added the rest of the columns, as follows:

H is the number of articles from each category in ezinearticles. I use the same

subtotals function as I used to get click averages. This has to be hand copied over

to the aweber spreadsheet, unless your excel categories are in exactly the same

order as your aweber ones (and mine were not).

For column I, I use the formula in excel: =D2/H2 this will give you the ratio of

D over H, which is subscribers over articles.



For column J, I use the formula in excel: =C2/H2 this will give you the ratio of C

over H which is views over articles (views on this sheet is the equivalent of clicks

in ezinearticles [a click in ezinearticles becomes a view to my site]).

The column that is most important to me is column I, which is my number of

subscribers per article.

You will notice that that number is quite low, remember this is about a 45 day

period of time.

The important thing here is the relative subscribers per article between categories.

Next, I sort the results on this aweber page by column I, and in this case, they are

ranked in ascending order, so as you go down the page, the subscribers per article

goes up.

As can be expected, the highest one is the article writing category, since my

squeeze page is about article writing.

As you go back up the list (down in reference to the number of subscribers per

article) there is not much rhyme or reason to it.

I would have expected article marketing to be second, but it is about 7 or 8 away

from #1. Ebooks is second – which wouldn’t make sense to me except now that I



Con: I would have to write 36 different giveaway ebooks (just hard work, a no

brainer though)

Con: the demographics of the subscribers would change, so their buying habits

would be different. They might not purchase the products I have already created,

since I have created my current line of products primarily to meet the needs of my

current subscribers.

This is my biggest concern with changing the squeeze pages – and as long as I can

continue to grow the business by using the article writing squeeze page, which

serves as a sort of filtering device for the quality of my subscribers – I may not

make any changes along this line.

Once again – the biggest use you can get out of this is to pull your own stats off of

ezinearticles.

If you are serious enough about article writing, duplicate the exercise I have done

with aweber.

It may be worth it to have 100 or more articles written over a few categories, just

so you can test the difference in subscribers by category (and with just a few

articles, you won’t get statistically significant results).



The Importance of Tracking With All Traffic Sources

My tracking with ezinearticles is one of the foundational steps that have taken me

from $125 in August of 2006 to over $11,000 monthly now.

It may seem complicated, it may seem like it is a lot of work. It may seem as

though you would be better off just writing more articles, or tweaking your

Adwords ads, or posting in forums to attract affiliate partners. But the testing is

where you actually determine what works. Not just with articles. But in

everything you do online.

I read once where Perry Marshall (Adwords guru) received over 50% of his sales

from just one keyword in his Adwords campaign. That keyword probably only

accounted for 5% or less of his total volume of traffic, but was responsible for over

50% of his sales. And a few other keywords were probably responsible for

another 30-40% of his total sales.

The difference between knowing the small aspect of your business that is making

you money, and not knowing it – is the difference between the person who spends

$20,000 per month and takes in $20,000 per month and the person who spends

$4000 and takes in $20,000 per month.

The only way to find out the profitable keywords, the profitable traffic, the

profitable traffic sources, is to test.

And testing is not glamorous.



What Can You Test?

You can test, in fact, you NEED to test, anything that might impact your long term

sales.

Buying patterns can be drastically different from two different very similar traffic

sources.

For example, buying patterns can be drastically different for affiliate traffic

depending on who the affiliate is.

Buying patterns can be drastically different for similar keywords. For example,

the buying patterns of the following two keywords could be drastically different:

‘dog training’ and ‘puppy training’. The demographics of the two sets of

searchers could be different. Traffic coming from Google versus from Yahoo

could be different. The only way to know how it impacts your bottom line is by

testing.

Suppose you have two squeeze pages.

Suppose they both convert at the same rate into subscribers.

What does that tell you?

Nothing – except that they both convert at the same rate into subscribers.

But the subscribers of one squeeze page might be 10 times more likely to purchase

your $100 product than the subscribers of another squeeze page.



Why? Sometimes you will never know. But when you track everything that you

do, then you find out that it happens, and you can adjust for it.

But let us just assume that you are selling gardening information.

You have two squeeze pages, one targets gardeners in the north, one targets

gardeners in the south. You ship nationally, and your info products are

downloadable, so it makes no difference to you.

You tweak both squeeze pages until they are both converting at 40%, a respectable

conversion rate.

You sell an average of $10 in information products to each person who subscribes

to your list, from either squeeze page.

Because your average subscriber acquisition cost is only $1, you are making

1000% profit, so you are not concerned.

But what if you knew that 90% of all your sales were coming from the squeeze

page targeted towards gardeners in the north?

Now, your subscriber on the ‘south’ list is worth $1 (and he costs you $1 to

acquire) and your subscriber on the ‘north’ list is worth $19. How does this

information change the way you do your marketing?



What if the subscriber on your ‘south’ list is only worth 50 cents, meaning you are

losing money? You wouldn’t know it, if you weren’t tracking, because overall

you are making money.

The same thing can be true if your front end lead in is a product rather than a

squeeze page (I am actually experimenting with this now).

So you have, for example, a $37 product. You break even on this product, across

the board, because your average cost to generate the sale is $37. But you average

$500 per sale, on the backend – so you are in profit, and consider the entry level

product a loss leader – and you are only breaking even, not losing on it.

But what if you have two products, and on average the long term backend is $500

per sale. Great, so far. But imagine a similar scenario to the one above. Let’s say

that one product creates a buyer who spends $2000 over his lifetime, rather than

$500 – and the other product creates a buyer who spends maybe $50 over his

lifetime. How would that change the way you do business?



What Can YOU Track and Change in YOUR Campaigns?

What are you keeping track of in your campaigns?

Do you know who your buyers are?

Do you know where they are coming from?

Do you know what squeeze page they came in from?

Do you know the average value of your subscribers?

Do you know the average lifetime value of a buyer of your entry level product?

If you do not know the answers to these questions, you are not optimizing the

quantity of income you could be generating in your campaigns.

With proper tracking, you might be able to double, triple, or even quadruple your

bottom line online.

That means that if you are doing $1000 online, and you are not tracking, you could

be doing $3000, $4000.

If you are doing $10,000 online, you could probably be doing $30,000 or more,

just by tracking every aspect of your campaign.



Buyer Source Tracking to Create the Highest Profits

80-20 Rule

Buyer Source Tracking of course is a foundational concept in making profits

online.

One of the theories to which I subscribe is the 80-20 rule. The 80-20 rule states

that 80% of a given subject results come from 20% of the effort applied to the

subject.

This can be applied to just about anything in online business.

For example, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your products.

80% of your traffic comes from 20% of your traffic sources.

80% of your article marketing traffic comes from 20% of the keyword categories

you use.

80% of your sales come from 20% of your subscribers.

80% of your subscribers come from 20% of your traffic.

The big question about each of these statements is this: do you know which 20%

is accounting for 80% of your volume?



If you do not know, you must find out.

Imagine you determine which 20% of your traffic is accounting for 80% of your

subscribers. Almost overnight you could quadruple your daily additional

subscriber count.

How? Drop the 80% of your traffic of your traffic that is accounting for 20% of

your subscribers, and multiply the 20% of your traffic that is responsible for 80%

of your subscribers. This will multiply your 80% by 5 times, equaling 400%

(which is a quadrupling).

What about your keywords? If 20% of your keywords are accounting for 80% of

your traffic and resultant sales, what would happen if you dropped the 80% that

are only accounting for 20% of your sales and traffic, and then multiplied the

effort you put into the keywords that are left (the 20% that are generating 80% of

your traffic and sales)? Your sales should quadruple – nearly overnight.

So how do you determine which portion of your business is accounting for 80% of

your sales, using 20% of your resources?

Buyer Source Tracking Explained

You must track your buyer sources. You must compile tracking data, and then

analyze that tracking data until you have teased out the 20% that is most profitable

for you.



There are a number of ways that you can do this. You can use tracking software

on your web site that tracks the origination of your traffic (using ip addresses,

cookies, or some other similar technology). This is the most popular method – and

it is the easiest to use and to set up.

However, I use a different method, one that is considerably harder to set up, and

does require a few minutes of my time each month the compile the data. However,

I believe that I get better long-term results by using my method. Keep in mind,

however, I only track about 60 or 70 different incoming traffic sources, as I do not

generally use PPC or other keyword advertising. If I did, and I had perhaps 100’s

or even 1000’s of incoming traffic sources (treat each keyword and keyword

origination point as a source), then I would be forced to incorporate tracking

software, however I believe I would use it in conjunction with my current method.

Before I describe in detail my method, let me explain the methodology behind it.

First, what is more important? Knowing where our traffic comes from, our

subscribers come from, or our buyers come from?

Since our buyers are the ones who pay our monthly bills and our vacations, I

consider knowing where my buyers are coming from as premium information.

Tracking traffic and subscribers is only useful for short term evaluation and helps

us make short term traffic decisions. Buying decisions by subscribers may take

months, so if we relied on buying data alone to decide on our traffic sources, we



would have to wait a longer period of time before receiving preliminary

information. And I do consider traffic and subscribers as preliminary information.

Once I have buying data on my traffic and subscriber sources, I can then make

decisions about the actual value of my various traffic and subscriber sources.

However, there are ways in which we can speed up our buying data, although it

will not be complete, nor perfect, and it will bias our long term results. However,

it can be useful in short term evaluations of traffic sources. The easiest way to do

this is to create a low-priced offer and present it to the traffic sources we wish to

test (or the subscribers collected from each respective traffic source) and present it

additionally to a control traffic source, one we know to be responsive to our

premium offer, and compare the results. Again, this method is not perfect, and

will potentially bias our buyers against purchasing larger tickets items in the

future, as a low price can devalue your perceptive value in the eyes of your

subscribers.

Back to this idea that our buyer data is the most important data we can receive.

It is most important that we know what traffic sources our buyers come from, even

if they have entered our sales funnel one, two, or even three years in the past.

Most tracking software cannot effectively track for that type of time frame.

Cookies expire, anti-cookie software deletes them, ip addresses change, etc., and

these are the primary methods tracking software use to track your visitors’ buying

paths.



I prefer to track the individual itself using a two fold system: 1) my

autoresponder account, which tracks where they come into my list, and 2) my

payment processor, which tracks when they make a purchase.

By setting up a system whereby my autoresponder tracks what the traffic source of

my subscriber is (and I’ll explain that in a moment) and taking my payment

processors’ data on my buyer, and linking the buyer to the point of entry into my

autoresponder, I can easily determine which traffic sources are profitable over time

– and I can track this information over years rather than just months.

The one drawback is that it is time – intensive to set up, and requires periodic work

to match the data from my payment processor to my autoresponder records.

My Personal Method of Buyer Source Tracking

This is how I do it:

First, I set up my autoresponder (I use aweber) with separate tracking codes for

each web form that I create, and I create a different web form for each traffic

source.

Then, I create individual squeeze pages, one for each traffic source, and put the

corresponding web form for that traffic source on the squeeze page. This is

relatively easy to do, as I create one master page, then simply copy and paste in the

successive web form codes, and use the save as feature in my html editor (I use

frontpage).



I also set up aweber so that it tracks the traffic to each squeeze page, the number of

subscribers from each squeeze page, and calculates a conversion rates for each

squeeze page. Because each squeeze page is tied to a specific traffic source,

aweber is effectively tracking each traffic sources’ traffic level, subscriber level,

and conversion rate. Aweber also, of course, saves the subscribers’ email address.

Once this is set up, my tracking is in place.

The buying data comes from my payment processor. I currently use paypal, as it

has proved very simple to use, and requires very little intervention from me.

When each buyer completes a purchase, they use an email address and their name

to make the purchase.

On a periodic basis, I download by buyer files from paypal and convert them into

an excel file (they are csv files, and can easily be saved as excel files).

Then I use the aweber database to assign an entry point for each one of the sales,

using either the email address or the name of the individual. Some of the

purchasers will use a name and email address that is different than the name and

email address they used to subscribe in aweber, and these can simply be left out of

the sample (although the sales will be accounted for; I will explain how to do this

momentarily). As long as you have a large enough sample of buyers (as low as

30-50 if you only have one product, and about 20-30 more for each additional

product you have), the distribution of sales will be about the same in the omitted

entries as they are in the sample of buyers for which you do have entry point data,

so the omitted buyers are not extremely important. Theoretically the distribution



of buyers will be slightly different in the omitted set, as the demographics of that

group may be slightly different, but there should be no more of a bias than the one

incurred when someone is being tracked using ip addresses or cookies, and they

enter your system at one computer and make a purchase at another – those

individuals would not be accounted for with traditional tracking software.

Once I have compiled this data, I observe the percentage of sales which come from

each of the various traffic sources.

To keep this extremely simply, I will create an example using 3 traffic sources.

If I find in my spreadsheet that the percentage of buyers that come from traffic

source a is 10%, traffic source b is 30% and traffic source c is 60% (for a total of

100%), then I compare this with my actual distribution of traffic. If all my traffic

sources created the same number of buyers over time, you would expect that 10%

of my traffic comes from traffic source a, 30% comes from traffic source b, and

60% of my traffic comes from traffic source c.

However, that is rarely the case.

As an example, let us assume that each of our traffic sources accounts for 1/3, or

33% of our total traffic.

What would this tell us about each of our traffic sources?

Using our buyer data, this would show that traffic source a generates

approximately 1/3 of the buyers per visitor, as does traffic source b, and traffic



source b generates approximately ½ of the buyers per visitor, as does traffic source

c.

This indicates that buyer source a spends 3 times less than would be expected

based on the average of all our buyer sources, buyer source b is about average, and

buyer source c spends 2 times the average of all our buyer sources.

What is our next step?

I would drop all advertising to buyer sources a and b, and triple the expenditure on

buyer source c. Assuming the cost of traffic in each of these buyer sources was

identical, my expenditures will stay the same, while my total revenue will increase

by 80% (if my total revenue was 100% before and buyer source c accounted for

60% of that, then if I triple the results from buyer source c, the total revenue will

surge to 180% of the original revenue level).

Of course, we can analyze the data from several angles. We can use subscribers

rather than traffic source as our measurement tool. We can assign a value per

subscriber from each different traffic source, and compare that to our cost per

subscriber from each traffic source.

The most powerful aspect of this method is that it directly allows us to use buying

data as our goal and allows us to track individual visitors for a longer period of

time than either ip addresses or cookies will allow.



Closing Points

As I bring this Complete Home Study Course manual to an end, I want to

comment again on the idea that the steps I include in this program are designed to

work together. Obviously, if you already have a profitable system in place, you

can choose specific sections of this program to add value to our own system.

But if you are starting from scratch, or you are operating with an unprofitable

system, you should take all of the concepts I have taught in this program, and use

them all.

Each of the concepts I use works together synergistically to produce a highly

effective and efficient sales machine.

I consistently bring in article marketing – source visitors, consistently convert

them to subscribers at highly-optimized squeeze pages, then send those subscribers

emails that are designed either to elicit sales responses, or aid me in the creation of

further products that will meet their needs – ultimately generating more sales.

I use the methods I describe in this manual and the accompanying CDs to create

valuable products that teach my methods, much as you can do in just about every

niche on the internet.

If you are struggling to come up with ideas for products that will work well in your

niche, drop me an email, and I can help you outline a sales funnel.

If you have never created a product before, I challenge you to ‘just do it’. Do not

hold off any longer. The first one you create will be the most awkward one. You



won’t know what’s coming next, you won’t know what mistakes you might make,

and because of this it may take you longer, or it may be more frustrating to create,

than subsequent products you create.

And of course one of the most important things you can do, once you have your

traffic, your list, and your products (and even in the process of forming each of

these elements of your business), you must track everything so that you can easily

identify what works and what doesn’t, and make the changes necessary to generate

profits.

As you know, I am a strong believer in the 80-20 rule. The 80-20 rule basically

indicates that, in general, about 80% of results are achieved through 20% of the

efforts. I have found that this rule applies to online business.

This means that, for me (and probably for you) about 80% of my profits tend to

come from 20% of the effort that I put into something.

The value in deciphering which 20% is producing the results is that by increasing

the efforts that produce results, and decreasing the results that do not produce

results, you can become more effective in your marketing, and hence more

profitable.

Another basic concept is that of never giving up. Once you have determined that

you are going to try something, that you are going to make an effort at a fresh area

of monetization – follow through, unless your precise testing shows that this

particular area is not going to pay off over time. You see, many things online can

only generate results when you have sufficiently learned the mechanics of that one

area to a greater degree than the average person operating in that area.




Many times I have seen people who try something new, and when they do not

experience results in as short a period of time as one month, they abandon that

project and begin another. Of course, the new project also does not show

favorable results within 30 days, and again the individual is jumping to something

else.

With that said, do your research – find out what is working for others – then

commit whatever it takes to make it profitable for you. Once you begin

something, commit to following it through to profitability.

Of course, this does not mean stubbornly refusing to move on when it is obvious

there is no profit possible - which is, of course, the opposite extreme of giving up

too early. However, I rarely see people who hang on to something too long, but I

often see people who are jumping for one model or idea to another so quickly they

never give themselves time to become efficient and likewise profitable.

My final words to you are:

If you want success online, commit to following things through to completion.

Follow the steps I have given you in this home study course, and commit yourself

to creating a profitable sales funnel using the techniques taught in this course.

Sean Mize

complete home study course manualsecrets-of-internet-success.com/resalerights...complete home study...

Documents