Learn Internet Marketing Strategies For Your Business

As you think of how you’ll manage your time and resources for the next year, use this list of the top 5 profit activities to guide you.

1. Build a List

First and foremost you need to be building a list.  You need to be building a list.   Now this doesn’t just mean building a list of contacts.  It doesn’t just mean building an e-mail list in an auto responder.   It means you’re building up a group of people who know who you are, who anticipate hearing from you and are willing and able to follow what you’re doing and take action on what you’re offering.

So it comes in the form of an e-mail list like a service like Aweber.  It also comes in the format of your social networks like Facebook friends or fans or Twitter followers in other resources.  You’ve got to be the person that people want to connect to.  If you’re promoting something anonymously there’s no real way for you to build a list very effectively.  People want to connect with a human being.  They want to get to know you.  They want to get to know your business, your personal life a little bit.  They just want to get to know you so they know they can trust you.

So you’ve got to be focused on building up your list.

2. Create Free Content

You’ve got to be creating content that teaches people stuff about what you know how to do.  And you need to offer that for free.  You’re also going to create paid content.  That’s number three but let me speak to the free content first.

This takes many shapes and you don’t need to do all of them but you need to be creating and releasing and distributing content that shares with people solutions or helps them make sense of something you can help with and it proves your abilities to do things better than other people.

You don’t necessarily have to be the best but you need to be the best that that person knows about.  So you might write a couple articles every week.  You might make a video or two every week.  You might set up a couple blog posts.  You might do a free teleseminar like I’m doing with you right now.  The point is you’ve got to engage with your audience and give them stuff.

I don’t care if you have two people to talk to or two thousand people or two million people.  You still need to give them good stuff for them to learn from.  And treat each of your audience members as an individual that you’re helping.

3. Create Paid Information Products

Paid information products; what I mean by that is maybe you make an eBook or a teleseminar series or maybe instead of an info product that’s downloadable you create an information product experience like the workshop I’m holding at the end of February or a virtual event that you can put on over the phone.  Or, you create a couple of online videos that people would pay for like I created at Discover cPanel.

You’ve got to create something that people will buy because if you don’t they’re not going to generate revenue for you for long.  You can create good content that you can promote for affiliate programs but ultimately you need to create paid information products because that’s the only way that you’re going to have other people promote you as an affiliate.  We’ll get into the SIMPLE system in just a second to be more specific with that but you’ve got to create some paid information products.

Ultimately people will not take as much action with what you give them for free as much as what you charge them for.  Whether you charge them $20 or $20,000 you’ve got to get your audience members invested with you so that you can help them more.  Although your heart may be in the right place to give everything away for free what you’re going to find is people don’t take action on the free stuff nearly as much as the people who pay for stuff.

4. Support Your Existing Customers

The fourth thing is you’ve got to support your existing customers.  You’ve got to spend a little bit of time or have some assistance where you hire a support person or you have some kind of an e-mail system in place where you can support your existing customers.  The reason this is so important, I alluded to it earlier, is because your existing customers are going to be your best source for revenue.

Now this is not to say you’re taking advantage of them by any stretch.  What you’re doing is you’re making sure they consume the product they purchase.  You’re making sure that if they have other issues that you can deal with that you don’t know about initially that you connect with them.  You communicate with them and then you follow-up by creating that additional service or that additional product.

And you do that because they’ll buy from you again but also because they’ll be your biggest fan.  They’ll be your biggest supporters and they will spread the word about you.  So they’ll actually be great ambassadors for you as well.  That can be a very profitable enterprise for you to conduct yourself.

5. Connect With Partners

The fifth activity I think is essential for your success in 2010 is you’ve got to connect with partners.  I mentioned earlier one of the biggest mistakes people make is they see their completion as their enemy.  Well, if you can partner up with someone who has a compatible product line, compatible types of services and you can work together to create a new product or you can refer business to one another you’re going to grow much, much faster.

When I attended my first live event back in 2006 in Baltimore I met up with a whole lot of people but specifically I connected with six other guys and we formed a mastermind team even though we were all teaching people how to promote their business online or some aspect of that.  We saw each other as compatible people.  We saw what we were doing as all part of the same kind of mission if you will.

We promoted each other.  We did teleseminars together.  We blogged with each other.  We commented on each other’s posts.  Some of us continue to this day to meet.  I met my accountability partner through that process of meeting at a live event and then connecting through a mastermind and then continuing to work together.

You’ve got to spend some time and energy this year connecting with partners.  The best way to connect with partners is to attend a live event.  But you can also work through Facebook or through Twitter and through even the e-mail lists that you’re already subscribed to and see who can you be part of.  Or in the membership forums that you’re a part of, okay?

But you cannot do this alone.  You cannot succeed in business these days working by yourself in isolation.  You’ve got to get out.  You’ve got to meet some people and you’ve got to think, “How can I present a win-win situation to other people and become part of a project that other people are instrumental in?”

Put ALL 5 Into Action In 2010 For Best Results

So those are the five business activities that I really think you should be focused on:

1. List Building
2. Creating Free Content
3. Creating Paid Information Products
4. Supporting Your Existing Customers
5. Connecting With Partners Where You Can Grow Together and Magnify Each Other’s Success

Which of these 5 areas is a strength of yours? Which do you need the most help with? Share with a comment below.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. If you are not 100% confident in your ability to carry out all 5 these profitable activities, then I encourage you to get expert help quickly. I’ll be including all 5 areas throughout the SIMPLE training event – more details are available at the event page.