Learn Internet Marketing Strategies For Your Business

The other day, I shared with you my #1 affiliate marketing strategy, which is to create a product teaching other people how to use the strategy or tool I’m promoting.

Today, I’d like to share my next favorite way to generate revenue and build my business with affiliate marketing. This lesson comes from Module 3 of my SIMPLE 2 Business Acceleration Bootcamp in Baltimore September 24-26, 2010, which of course I’m encouraging you to attend.

Offer Mutually Beneficial Bonuses

I’m not talking about participating in the big bonus wars that seem to distract customers from the huge product launches. I’m really talking about thinking of a complementary bonus that does 3 things:

Read the rest of this entry »

Previous related article

A lot of people hear they can “get rich” with affiliate marketing, but too many come up way shorter than they want to.

Or, worse, they spend so much money on advertising and driving traffic that they dig a much bigger hole than the one they started in.

As I’ve developed my own business, I’ve generated quite a bit of my revenue from affiliate marketing. In fact, it typically makes up about 1/3 of my income. At times in the past, it was even more than that. But I don’t subscribe to a lot of the hypey ways to do it.

I’d like to share some of my big secrets to affiliate marketing success with you, starting today with my favorite one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Previous related article Next related article

The most popular price point for “big ticket” programs online seems to be $1997, and if you’re like me, you probably wonder if they’re really worth it, or is that just a number settled on inside the secret back room of internet marketing.

The answer is yes, no, maybe, sometimes, and “it depends.”

In reality, the answer relies much less on the product itself, but in the results you get from taking action on what you purchase.

Let’s take a couple of examples that are hot right now: Affiliate Dot Com and my own SIMPLE 2 event.

Read the rest of this entry »

In your business, are you doing what you’re great at, or what other people are telling you to do?

Last weekend, I taught at and participated in the Millionaire Coach Secrets private workshop hosted by Adam Urbanski.

At the event was one of my mastermind partners, Bobby Medina (left in the picture).

Bobby’s known as “America’s Most Wanted Trumpeter” because of his reputation as a superb bandleader at corporate parties, legends tours, high end weddings, etc. He’s toured with Ray Charles, the Four Tops, among others, and has been the bandleader for parties of celebrities like Christie Brinkley.

Anyway, I love this picture we took together as a joke because it speaks to today’s lesson.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was in Staples yesterday, and I don’t know about you, but I love walking through an office supply store during back to school time.

All the binders, the pens, gadgets, etc., charge me up.

It reminds me of how it felt when I was a kid, and the possibilities of a new year of learning were ahead. Wondering if I’d like my teachers, who I’d be friends with, if I’d get to sit next to the girl I had a crush on…

Read the rest of this entry »

Summer is almost over and the fall is about to begin. This time of year tends to be quite a rush in my business, and I imagine it’s a good time for you to get focused as well.

So this weekend, I’m recharging my batteries before the Back To School rush (planning and hosting SIMPLE 2 will dominate the next 7 weeks for me). I’m in Jekyll Island, Georgia for a few days, and thought I’d send you a quick video postcard.

Also, to help you get geared up for the 4th quarter of 2010, I’m putting something together for you on Monday.

Enjoy the video!

After the video, please share your answer to this question:

What do you want to see happen during the last quarter of 2010? What’s missing or would prevent you from doing that?

Bob Jenkins

Today, I’d like to share a very practical process you can take your business through for accelerated growth.

I call it the Connect-Create-Collaborate model, and it’s the cornerstone of my own success in business. Most people try to do these steps in the wrong order, and struggle with the frustrations of poor results.

If you have the 6 elements of a S.I.M.P.L.E. business in mind, this 3-phase path is sure to lead you to success.

Phase 1: Connect People To Solutions

Since you know your industry better than the average customer in that marketplace, you are in a great position to help people locate existing solutions to their problems. You most likely use those resources, tools, and experts yourself – or you did at one point to help you get to where you are now.

Listen to the crowds of potential customers and what they’re griping about. Help them to solve those problems by connecting them to the solutions. This could mean you share a software tool that addresses the issue, or bringing their attention to a leading expert’s training program that’s already up and running.

You can also serve as a filter by reviewing books or courses that help audiences take action and implement those solutions.

During this phase, you’ll likely be able to generate revenue as an affiliate of those products and services. And regardless of the income, by serving the marketplace, you’ll gain credibility and social capital that will prove beneficial in stages 2 and 3 of this model.

Phase 2: Create The Missing Solutions To Fill The Gaps In Your Marketplace

Whether your Phase 1 takes a few days, or a few months, you’ll come away with an added benefit: market research to discover what people are buying, and what they’re still hungry for. Once you’ve identified what’s missing, you can then create your own products and services to fill in those gaps.

The trouble most entrepreneurs run into is they try this step first. Then they struggle to stand out within a crowded marketplace.

By filling in the gaps, you can serve a niche of your field profitably. And since you already built up a relationship with your audience in Phase 1, you have an eager market that has already told you what they want!

The missing piece you create could deal more specifically to solve additional problems that go unnoticed by the others in your field. Or perhaps you deliver your services and products in ways that the others haven’t considered. For example, your audience may want more individual attention than what the “gurus” in your field are willing to offer.

During this phase, you’ll generate revenue from selling your own products and services, while continuing to earn revenue recommending the Phase 1 solutions you had already identified.

Phase 3: Collaborate With Customers And Competitors For Faster Growth

Once you have your own products and services, you gain status in your field as a solution provider. And this allows you to sit at the “big table” in your industry.

You’ll now be able to partner with others as they help you grow your business with referrals and collaborative projects.

An important step in this process is to connect your products and services to an affiliate management software. This provides an incentive to your partners to promote you with the reward of sharing in the revenue (i.e., a commission). If you don’t have such a system in place, you can always swap marketing promotions. But using an affiliate program makes the process fair.

You’ll be able to turn your customers into affiliate partners, too. As each additional customer enjoys your products and services, doorways to their circle of influence become open to you as well.

And you’ll start hearing “yes” more often to those in your field for joint projects and promotions. No longer will you be the “best kept secret” of your field, but the go-to-expert that you deserve to be.

Repeat All 3 Phases For Exponential Growth

Perhaps the best part of these 3 phases is you can repeat the process for continuous growth. In fact, I’ve used this system over a dozen times over the last few years to become the leading teacher of internet marketing strategies for do-it-yourself entrepreneurs. I know your success is inevitable if you follow this path as well.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. In doing my live 3-day SIMPLE event, each of these 3 phases gets a full day of training. There are a lot of moving pieces to get right if you’re going to truly succeed. Get to the next one if you’d like my personal help in growing your business!

Today, I’d like to pinpoint 5 internet marketing skill sets you need to master to be in control of your success within the SIMPLE framework and the Connect-Create-Collaborate model I base my business and training on.

#1: Productivity And Time Management

Some blame the economy for their poor results, but I would be that most people aren’t growing their businesses due to a lack of focus. You need to have a system in place that keeps you on track and makes the most out of your time.

Personally, I prefer to use mindmaps to help set and stay focused on specific goals within my daily, weekly, monthly, and annual time frames. Much more powerful than to-do lists, mindmaps allow you to categorize and prioritize those activities that simply must be done to move forward.

Whatever you use, if you find that you end your day feeling like you got nothing accomplished, then that system isn’t working for you. Your system should give you momentum.

#2: Relationship Marketing Through Email And Social Media

Communicating with prospects and existing customers will likely be the #1 demand on your time. And it should be because a S.I.M.P.L.E. business is based on people!

So you need to know how to manage your autoresponder system to automate the delivery of your messages. You need to know how to use sites like Twitter and Facebook to ensure your business is being represented authentically. And you should be investing some of your time reaching out to people with questions and answers in an interactive way. You can’t afford to let others determine how your brand is perceived; be in the forefront with online relationship marketing.

#3: Website Basics

You certainly don’t need to become a graphic designer or full-fledged webmaster to succeed in your business. But if you don’t know how to edit your webpages, create blog content, then you’re going to waste a lot of money!

With software tools like WordPress driving modern websites, you truly have no real excuse to ignore this skill set.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen entrepreneurs face is finding themselves locked out of their own websites, or waiting for weeks for their webmaster to “get it right” with changes you ask for. It’s crucial that you know how to register your own domains and do basic things within your hosting account. Creating blog posts, uploading PDFs and other files to your site, and even checking your traffic stats are skills you’ll always benefit from.

#4: Creating And Selling Information Products

A crucial part of the S.I.M.P.L.E./Connect-Create-Collaborate model of business is creating and selling information products. This is how you can take advantage of this golden age of information that we live in.

Creating free reports, hosting teleseminars, publishing ebooks: these are easier than ever before to do yourself. And the speed of selling and delivering these types of products will make your customers raving fans.

Best of all, when you know how to create digital information products with low-cost tools and resources, you can realize high margins of profitability that your offline business friends will drool over!

#5: Affiliate Management

If you want to enjoy the accelerated growth that comes from the promotional efforts of your customers and your joint venture partners, then setting up and running an affiliate program is essential.

The software systems that are used to track the sales and traffic being sent by your partners continues to improve in both features and in simplicity. Without these systems, you’ll be relying solely on your own efforts. I imagine if this is where you are now, you feel like a hamster in its wheel, exhausting itself with every revolution!

When you get a handle on your affiliate system, you’ll have an automated sales team doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Outsource These Skills At Your Peril

Although you can hire people to do these skills for you, ultimately you’ll see better results if you have mastered them yourself. This way, you’ll never be held hostage by a webmaster, employee, or virtual assistant who comes up short. You’ll also avoid being taken advantage of by high-priced service providers who rely on your ignorance for their exhorbitant fees.

More importantly, I hope you take action on what you learn from me and other internet marketing teachers. And if you’d like to quickly learn how to implement these strategies and master these skills, do join the others at the IM Success Library and at the upcoming SIMPLE 2 Internet Marketing Conference in Baltimore this September so I can help you personally.

And be sure to share your comments below about your strengths and weaknesses in these 5 areas.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. These 5 are not the only skills to master, but if you are missing these in particular, you’re going to have a very difficult time achieving the level of success you’re aiming for.

Next related article

Being a former high school teacher, I’m a big fan of acronyms. So when I created my flagship training program, I decided to call it SIMPLE – School for Information Marketing Profits – Live Event.

However, SIMPLE stands for a lot more than just an event. In fact, it’s a set of elements that guide how a business can be run.

If you believe like I do in helping people profitably, and you want to succeed based on your brainpower instead of gimmicks or fads, you should consider a SIMPLE business.

You’ll know you’re following this model if your business is based on these 6 elements:

• Specialization
• Intelligence
• Monetization
• Portability
• Leverage
• Experiences

Let me explain a bit more about each one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Previous related article Next related article

Which of these 3 things is most important to you right now?

1. Getting a bigger list of subscribers
2. Generating More revenue for your business
3. Obtaining better visibility for yourself as an expert in your niche?

If you want all 3, you’re going to be very happy you found this blog post today!

I’ve got a great recommendation for you that will achieve all 3 goals above by automating the distribution of free reports.

In fact, I’ve already been using this system and it’s getting my report passed around faster than juicy gossip in a middle school lunch room!

It’s called Viral PDF Generator.

Let me tell you more about Viral PDF Generator

One of the VIP guests coming to SIMPLE 2 in September is a good friend of mine, James Grandstaff.

In case you don’t know him yet, he’s the creator of the Downline Secrets software which gave direct sales and home business team builders an incredible advantage in duplication and recruitment.

Today, he’s launching a viral ebook generator tool that I’m absolutely salivating over.

Since James is coming to SIMPLE 2 in Baltimore, and we’ve known each other since March 2006, I was able to get a sneak peek at how this software works.

Basically, you upload a report you’ve created (or a PLR report you’ve done some very minor edits to), fill out a quick form, and push a big yellow button, and voila!

… You’ve got yourself a viral marketing machine that turns any report of yours into a 24/7 virtual sales team.

Rebrand your ebooks

This would work for you if you:

• Are following my SIMPLE 3-phase formula and want to become the go-to-expert in your niche
• Have a product or service for sale that needs a lot more traffic
• Want to piggy back on the success of an affiliate product
• Build a network marketing team that wants an easy to use, duplication system without spending any money

Here’s an example of what you could do with Viral PDF Generator

Imagine you are trying to get known as an expert following my Connect, Create, Collaborate model (the foundation for SIMPLE).

You write a short report answering the biggest questions that people have about your specialty. In the report, you make a recommendation for an affiliate product.

The traditional method of getting eyeballs to read this report would involve you working really hard at driving traffic to a website. You might spend money on Adwords, Facebook ads, or banners. Or you could spend hours clicking around traffic exchanges. Maybe you comment on 100 blogs and forums to get links back to your site.

The primary method of this marketing: your own efforts.

With the viral marketing method, you create a useful report and empower your readers to pass it around. Even better, you give them an incentive for doing so.

Viral PDF Generator makes this really easy because your reports are delivered, rebranded, and hosted on the VPG system. Plus, James has included social sharing tools on the download page for even faster distribution.

Go get Viral PDF Generator

Viral PDF Generator Is Better Than Existing Tools

In the past, I was using ViralPDF to create rebrandable reports. And although that is a pretty good tool, it has one major downside: it requires too many steps for readers to rebrand the report.

With Viral PDF the reader usually has to:

1. Download a .zip file
2. Unzip the .zip file
3. Find and Double-click the .exe file
4. Enter the tags for rebranding
5. Create the rebranded report
6. Upload the rebranded report to their own server
7. Give out a link to the report

Viral PDF Generator goes the extra mile by skipping the complicated steps.

With Viral PDF Generator, the reader only has to:

1. Fill out a short form with affiliate ID tags or links
2. Press a big yellow button
3. Give out the automatically generated link

It really is that easy!

Here’s an example of the simple form a reader would fill out to rebrand one of my reports:

Test Out Viral PDF Generator

James Makes It Simple For You To Use His System

I mentioned above how many steps it takes for the readers to rebrand your reports using the best alternative software. But it gets even more complicated for you to create the rebrandable report in the first place.

James makes it really easy with Viral PDF Generator.

All you have to do is create a report using Microsoft Word or Open Office (James event gives you a fantastic template to work with for free), make sure you include a placeholder tag in the links, and upload it into his system.

You’ll fill out a quick form with default values for the rebrandable links, and set up the link to your affiliate program.

The system gives you a link to share to a rebranding page the system hosts for you (or you can embed an iframe on your own site like I’m doing for my report).

Everything is then hosted on the system – no download/unzip/upload nonsense required!

Phenomenal Tool For Product Owners To Give To Affiliates

In the above example, I actually sell rebranding rights for all 4 links for added revenue. But you can also simply give away rebranding rights for your affiliates if you are selling your own product.

Notice in the form above the “No ID? Click Here” area. Those are linked to the affiliate sign up pages to make it easy for people to get their links.

Your affiliate partners will love having a high-converting sales tool to earn commissions.

This Is A Refer 2 And It’s Free System

Another thing I love about Viral PDF Generator is the fact that James will likely pay you more to use his system than you’ll pay him.

Not only will you be generating more revenue from the content inside your report, James will share 50% of the revenue of any referrals you recommend this same system to. And with 4 different membership levels, you could actually have your own membership paid for with just 1 referring member.

VPG Gets My Highest Recommendation

The bottom line is Viral PDF Generator is an essential tool that you’ll love using for your business. I’m using it (and paying for the Gold level for now), and I know you’ll love it too!

Check out this video from James to learn all about Viral PDF Generator

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Set up your reports on Viral PDF and watch how quickly your list grows, your revenue jumps, and more people are impacted by what you do. Try Viral PDF Generator yourself!

p.p.s. Don’t forget – you can meet James Grandstaff in person at SIMPLE 2 in Baltimore!

While I’m away at my “Hotseat Holiday” this week with my Fast Track Masterclass students, one of the FTMC members shares some of her marketing strategies. Here’s the third and final guest post by D’vorah Lansky…

As one of Bob’s Fast Track Masterclass Clients, I am thrilled to share the following with you. As a result of my work with Bob, I was able to achieve one of my lifelong goals of publishing my first full-length book. I am thrilled to share that my first book will be available on Amazon and at bookstores near you very soon. And I’m honored that Bob has written the foreword to my book! Plus, thanks to Bob’s SIMPLE seminar in February, I connected with Kristen Eckstein of UltimateBookCoach.com to help with the cover and interior design for the book.

Read the rest of this entry »

Previous related article