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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Life in the information age presents an excellent opportunity for people servicing clients with their brains.

Got knowledge? Experience? Shortcuts?

Share your brain and find your business growing faster than ever.

People want concise answers to the challenges they are facing. And I bet you are in a position to provide those answers.

In fact you probably are already doing this.

How many times do you answer people’s questions at parties, family gatherings, random phone calls and emails? The questions seem simple enough. And you “thinking nothing of it” when you provide your knowledge without compensation.

After all, this is easy-breezy for you. The answers simply rattle off your tongue.

Well, my friend, that’s a good sign that you are losing an opportunity to “help people profitably”.

And one of the tactical ways you can turn what you know into an income stream is by creating a free report.

You’re already giving away this information – why not consolidate some of it into a short 6-10 page PDF that people can download?

I can hear you now – “But if I give it away, how will it be profitable? How will it make me money?”

3 Ways Free Reports Can Make You Money

The answer to that question is in what you include in your report. Here are 3 things to make sure you include:

1) A call to action throughout the report for people to hire you for the services you can uniquely provide; or for a product you have already created.

2) Recommendations of a resource that you use as part of the challenge the report addresses. With the right affiliate connection, you can generate a nice income from these recommendations without any additional work

3) Provide an opportunity for others to buy rights to the report so they can use it for their business. This could be reprint rights, resale rights, private label rights, or a hidden gem: rebranding rights.

Rebranding rights allow your readers to insert their links to your product or affiliate offers. See a case study video from my friend James Grandstaff on viral report rebranding profits.

Once your report is created, you can use it to generate leads and clients through a list building campaign. Since the report is more substantial than a blog post or an article, your status as an expert elevates.

The best part about a report you give away is it works for you 24/7. Regardless of what you are actually doing, people down the street, within 50 miles and even around the world can be downloading your report from the web.

Create a free report and you have a heavy-hitter on your automated sales team. And for solo-entrepreneurs, that’s not only a money-maker, it’s also a big time saver!

And here’s even better news…

Through the rest of this month, you can learn exactly how to put one of these free reports together. That’s because I’m giving away my Discover Product Creation: Free Reports course to all members of the IM Success Library, including the Silver (Free) members.

In this training, I’ll teach you

• How to create the content for your report even if you failed English class
• How to format your report to look professional
• How to publish your report for the web
• How to create a free report delivery system online (i.e., a mini-site)

This month, you won’t pay a dime for this training, even though it’s usually something I charge for. So if you’re reading this after August 1, 2010, you missed out on the free training, but you can still get other lessons when you join the IM Success Library.

Enjoy the training, and comment below on what your goals are with your report!

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Why am I giving this away for free this month? Four reasons really…

• I truly believe the strategic and technical skills I teach in this course will help you grow your business faster. As a teacher, I love living vicariously through the success of my students!
• You may not realize just how much you can learn from me inside the IM Success Library. By showcasing one of my courses, I hope you to prove how valuable the Gold and Platinum membership really is.
• I’m embarking on an evil plot to get you to attend my next live event.
• There’s an awesome viral report marketing system coming out soon that will be useless to you unless you can create the reports.

This training is sponsored in part by Viral PDF Generator

Imagine this scenario:

A business owner (let’s call her Nicole) decides she needs to get an office. She doesn’t want to buy space (for budget reasons or whatever) so she decides to rent.

One of her employees, let’s call him Tom, happens to dabble in commercial real estate and has space to let. The office seems to fit all the criteria Nicole wants in an office: great location, affordable, good layout, already wired and ready to go. She signs the lease for 2 years to get a great rate on the monthly rent.

They make some changes to the office, make it look even better by bringing in a feng shui expert and work flow designer. They get new carpeting, install better lighting, and go to town on the signage for the lobby and outside the building.

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I’m leaving Southern California to head back east after a full 4 days at Adam Urbanski’s Info Profits Success Bootcamp.

Not only was I speaking & teaching at the event, I was also attending to learn and get reminded of actions I should be taking on a regular basis (and some I need to get rid of) to improve my business.

So I shot a quick video to share some of what I got out of the event. Watch and comment below.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Want to connect at a live event? Check out my internet marketing events page for where I’m going to be.

For the last few months, I’ve been working with Digital Access Pass as a membership site management system with WordPress.

Time for another update! It’s a bit lengthy, but there’s a lot to be excited about.

(If you want to read the journey so far, check the links at the bottom of this post)

Bad News Is Good News?

First, some bad news about Digital Access Pass. If you didn’t get yours yet, the free trial of DAP is no longer available; and the price has gone up for the single site license.

However this is really good news in disguise.

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