Posted by Ray White on April 23, 2010 Comments Off

The other day I was scanning my Twitter stream and saw an interesting tweet about a blog post. I clicked the url link in the tweet to go read the blog post. A new browser tab opened for the blog. I caught a glimpse of the blog post title just as everything went black. No, I didn’t pass out. The tab window darkened. Then a big white box popped up to fill the screen. It was an opt-in form to get blog updates and other information. Now I had a choice to make in order to read the blog post: enter my best email address and hit the submit button, or click the close button at the top right corner of the opt-in form.

Nifty little lead capture system, eh? Drive traffic to the blog with a titillating tweet, then show an impossible-to-miss opt-in form that must be dealt with in order to read the blog post. That’s how a squeeze page works. Grab the viewer’s attention with the page and give the viewer two options, opt-in or move on. Squeeze pages convert well in traffic exchanges. But this wasn’t a squeeze page, and I wasn’t in a traffic exchange.

I clicked a link with an expectation. I expected to get some information on a specific topic. That expectation was foiled when an opt-in form was shoved in my face before I could read anything else. Made me a little cranky.

I was given two choices to read the blog post. I decided that I didn’t really need to read that post after all. And in case you are wondering, I didn’t opt-in either.

Posted by Ray White on April 21, 2010 Comments Off

Good, quality articles about your niche product and services serve several purposes. They attract information seekers to your website. They provide customer service by answering questions that potential customers may have. They enhance your website’s reputation. They develop trust with your website visitors. Most importantly, they can get you people on your opt-in list.

Your website visitors subscribe to your newsletters and other promotional materials such as catalogs and free promotions. Opt-in marketing uses your list of subscribers to send e-mail to. It is essential that you present your promotional items in a manner that will catch the interest of your subscribers and keep them wanting more. Well written articles full of useful information will do the trick.

Articles also aid in search engine optimization. As more people are heading towards the internet for their information needs, serving the right information to them via articles in your site will increase the flow of your website traffic. With more traffic, the percentage of your sales will grow. More sales turn into more profit.

Well written articles will also boost your site’s reputation and brand you as an expert in your niche. Your articles must be well researched so that the people will trust you. When you have gained their trust, they will always come for you for their needs on that subject.

The articles need to tackle subjects that are closely connected with your type of business. If you have a site for a medicine to treat a certain disease, your articles should be about that disease. Or if you sell materials for home improvements, provide articles along those lines. Most articles searched for are tips, guidelines, methods, manuals and such. If you provide good quality articles to your customers, they will always go to your site for help and advice as well as for your products.

Don’t post all the good stuff on your site though. Save some articles for your newsletter. You want to get people to join your list for more information. When you provide good information, your emails will always be opened. Your readers will be happy to be receiving your newsletters as well as other promotional materials to keep them well informed. Others may even forward your newsletters to other people when they find a certain article interesting. Provide links in your newsletter to your site.

Make sure to keep your subscribers happy and interested in your newsletters and promotional materials. Keep on posting and writing good articles for your site and newsletter. If you are not interested in writing them yourself, or if you just don’t have the time, hire a writer to help you out. The investment will pay for itself in time.

Posted by Ray White on April 16, 2010 Comments Off

#11

At least 3 ways to win bonus credits every day … just by surfing

#10

Don’t need an eagle eye to surf this exchange: everything on the surf bar is very easy to see

#9

No empty nesters here: even free members can earn commissions

#8

Power customization: not only can you put your picture on your personalized splash referral pages, but you get to put a banner of your choosing, too

#7

Soaring4Traffic has its own fan club

#6

Just 3 words: Power Surf Central

#5

Seize control of your surfing schedule with the Surf Center Console

#4

Admin/owner lives in Texas, ’nuff said.

#3

Know exactly how much time you have left to reach your surfing goal — Server Time and Pages Surfed are displayed prominently on the surf bar

#2

Sister sites Pro Click Exchange and AdKreator

#1

Ray White, admin/owner extraordinaire, does all his own support work

Posted by Ray White on April 8, 2010 Comments Off

In a previous post about handling email, I tossed out a few ideas on how to organize your email inbox. This post will cover my take on how to handle one aspect of your incoming email: answering support issues.

Here are a few ideas on how to make answering support questions easier.

Make cheat sheets.

Using Notepad or your favorite text editor, write the answers to your most often asked questions and save it in a file on your computer. That way, when you get the question, all you have to do is copy and paste the correct answer. Takes all of maybe 5 seconds.

Write an autoresponder series for more involved answers.

Part of being an internet marketer is being a mentor. For more involved issues, like say, how to build a downline, or how to make the best use of traffic exchanges, it might be best to break it down into smaller pieces. You can write an autoresponder series and direct your downline to it when they ask for help.

Add an FAQ page to your web site.

Head off the incoming questions by posting the answers on your website. Write a page with the most asked questions and their answers. You can do that with very basic HTML coding knowledge. If you want something a little fancier, you can install a blog platform to your domain and make a special page on the blog. You can make individual “posts” for each question with its corresponding answer.

Install a support desk

You can find free support desk scripts to install on your web site if you want to go that route. It will keep support questions separate from your other email. You can also archive your answers for easy follow up. Plus, having a support desk makes it easier to have someone else handle your support for you. You can give your support person their own login for the support desk and let them have at it!

Posted by Ray White on April 3, 2010 Comments (1)

One of the biggest time eaters in our hectic schedules is handling email. It seems the inbox never empties. How the heck does one get through all of it? There are lots of ebooks and blog posts about how to handle email. None of them agree with each other. You have to figure out what works best into your specific situation. These are my random thoughts on how to handle email. Use what you will. Laugh at the rest.

Pick ONE time of day to hit your inbox and handle everything at once.

I know, I know. Email never stops coming in. We deal with people in time zones across the globe. But seriously, how many email messages are so urgent that they can’t wait a few hours to be read? Your partners and special customers probably have other ways to contact you in case of emergency. If you do have reason to handle emergency situations by email, then install a support desk and hire someone to help you. That way, you can take turns sleeping. You can only do what is humanly possible. If you truly don’t want any email to wait 24 hours, then hit your email twice a day, three times at the most. Don’t leave your inbox open all day long. You have to limit your time spent on email or else you will be at it all day and nothing else will ever get done.

Mail Filters are your friends.

Or maybe your email client calls them mail or message rules. Gmail lets you put “labels” on certain email messages to help you sort them. Whatever it’s called, use it to organize your incoming mail. Separate all of your incoming mail into different folders or labels to help you classify how to deal with them. You can pick specific email addresses or subject lines (or both) to determine what goes where.

Suggestions for folders or labels:

• newsletters
• TE updates
• affiliate program updates
• Google alerts
• hosting/server alerts
• validation/welcome emails
• social media alerts
• payment notifications (the real ones, not the phish messages)

Don’t be afraid of the delete button.

Decide from the subject line whether it’s worth your time to read the message. If I see the same subject line twice, I’m not wasting my time on opening both messages. If the message is a follow up for something that I already took care of, then I don’t need to deal with it. And what is up with those “urgent” email messages? Have you ever opened an email message that the subject line said was “urgent” and it really was?

Unsubscribe from lists that no longer interest you.

Lessen the load by stopping the messages at the gate. If you already got all you can from that newsletter, then unsubscribe. It’s okay. Nobody’s feelings will get hurt. It just means that you are growing and ready to learn something new. Free up your inbox space for something that you will read and learn from.

Posted by Ray White on March 28, 2010 Comments Off

Being your own boss has its perks. Your time is yours to do with what you will. No punching a time clock. No answering to any supervisor. You can come and go as you please. It’s life on Easy Street. Gotta love it.

Except when your husband asks when is dinner is going to be ready. Your wife wants to know when you are going to fix the dishwasher. Your kids or grandkids miss you at their Tae Kwon Do tournaments and piano recitals. Friends and relatives can’t get you on the phone unless they use Skype. The dog sits at your feet with his leash in his mouth. Your cat won’t leave your lap; she doesn’t have to since you never get up from the computer. On those rare occasions when you do get up (to go to the bathroom), you notice how much your back hurts, how stiff your neck is, and that your butt is numb from sitting for hours on end. Then you suddenly remember that email that you were supposed to answer and you go running back to the computer.

Oh the joys of self employment!

We all want to do whatever we want whenever we want. What we forget as entrepreneurs is that we get to define what “whenever” is. And we have to define “whenever” clearly so that our lives don’t become chaos.

When you work outside the home, you know you have to get certain things done before quitting time. When it’s time to go home, you go. It’s easy to leave the job at work. When you work from home, you lose the physical barrier between work life and personal life. And for some strange reason, work life swallows personal life.

Maybe it’s because we are the breadwinner of the household and need to pay the bills. Maybe it’s our competitive nature. Maybe it’s just the geek in us that keeps drawing us back to the computer. Whatever the reason, our personal life goes to hell in a handbasket, yet we told ourselves that we wanted to work at home in order to have a better personal life. Crazy, huh?

Here are a few suggestions for putting some order to the chaos.

Decide when your business hours are, then let everyone know

You said you wanted to work your own hours, so define them. Make a business hours sign and put it up on your white board. Post them on your website. Let your family and friends know when you are “on the job.” Just because you are at home does not mean that you are available all day to shoot the crap and run errands. They are more likely to believe you when you say “later” if they know you have a designated quitting time. By the way, you can have a day or two off for good behavior as well.

Schedule breaks during business hours

Remember back in high school when you had 10 minutes between classes? There was a reason for that. Well, back then it was for the teachers’ sanity, but now it can be for your own. Seriously, you should at least look up from the computer every so often for your eye health, so why not make it once an hour? Get a kitchen timer and set it for 50 minutes. When it goes off, it’s time to step away from the computer for 10 minutes. Get up and stretch, get a drink, go to the bathroom, check the snail mailbox, call your mom, feed the pets.

Put personal time in your schedule

Quit “penciling in” the fun stuff, or the necessary stuff. Personal time should include family time, “date night”, meal times (the J.O.B. did give you a lunch break, remember?). If you shuttle the kids to school and soccer practice, put that in your schedule, too. And the grocery shopping. Don’t forget time to exercise. Or your favorite soap opera. Does your significant other like to talk when they get home? Make your life easier and block out a half hour for that, too.

Define your home office space

It will help you compartmentalize between work time and personal time. Designate the space around your computer as “work space.” If you are lucky enough to have a spare room to devote to office space, keep the door closed. Not just when you are in there, when you aren’t there as well. Keep a barrier between work and home. If you have just the corner of a room, make sure to keep only business related stuff there.

Work is important, but don’t let it take over your entire life. Don’t wait for someday. Enjoy the finer things in life now.

Posted by Ray White on March 22, 2010 Comments Off

I got a private message the other day telling me about a new income opportunity. I was assured that none of my team members had yet been contacted about it, so if I acted right away, I could be the one to present it to them. The message began, “I don’t mean to spam you, but … ”

But my a … you just did! I don’t know who you are. I’ve never heard from you before. Your membership profile tells me nothing about you. You are not on my list of approved contacts. Yet you feel compelled to send me a sales pitch complete with your affiliate link.

Social media has made networking so much easier. Lots of programs nowadays allow members to contact each other directly through private messaging in hopes of bringing a social media feel to the membership. It is a great networking tool when used correctly.

That’s the whole point. Private messaging is a networking tool, not a marketing tool. You can pretend that you are doing me a favor by telling me, before you tell my team, about some new income stream, but if I don’t know you from Adam, you have done yourself a real disservice. Before I received your message, I didn’t know who you were. Now, I think that you are someone to avoid.

Don’t get me wrong. I want to meet new people. That is why I allow messages from people not on my contacts list. Yes, that leaves me open to spam messages, but that comes with the territory. I don’t grow, and neither does my business, unless I take such risks.

If you were meeting someone for the first time at a social  event, the first thing out of your mouth would not be, “Buy this!” You would say hello, ask a few questions, get to know them, build a rapport, then maybe hand them your business card before leaving. That is networking.

Networking is about building relationships. Networking online takes a little more effort because the connection that you can make in person is not there. It will take a little more time, so be patient. The effort will pay off. Don’t skip dinner and aim straight for dessert. It scares people off.

Posted by Ray White on March 19, 2010 Comments Off

Back in the day, before I knew anything about creating my own splash pages, I joined an affiliate program that had several splash pages to choose from for promotion. It was a very nice selection. Different styles, different colors, and each page had a different message on it. And you could personalize the page with your picture. I remember being in awe of one specific page. It said something about earning a 5-figure income with the program. It made me really excited about being a member of the program. Someday I was going to make that kind of money online. And I knew I had access to just the page to make that announcement to the world when it happened.

A few months later, as I was surfing my favorite traffic exchanges, I saw that 5-figure income page with my sponsor’s picture on it. Thing is, I knew he wasn’t making 5-figures from the program. I had gotten to know my sponsor fairly well. He was a great mentor to me. We got along great. I could ask him about anything. So I asked him what was up with using that particular page? He told me that he had heard that it was one of the higher converting pages, so he was using it. The name of the game is getting new members in your downline, right?

Well, I didn’t agree, but I couldn’t argue either. You want to use a page that converts into new signups. That makes perfect business sense. I had a problem, though, with using a page that didn’t truthfully describe my experience. Maybe that is being too picky. I mean, every program claims to be successful from day one, and you have to start somewhere. A splash page saying, “I just joined this program and I hope it works. Join me!!” probably isn’t going to convert well.

What do you think? Do you have to agree with everything in the ad copy on referral pages provided by the affiliate program in order to use them? Or should you (GASP) make your own pages and write your own copy?

Posted by Ray White on March 14, 2010 Comments Off

The other day I read a forum post by a fellow traffic exchange owner. A url was not accepted for rotation. The member who submitted the url told the exchange owner that every other exchange accepts the url and if that owner refused to do the same, then he would delete his account and tell all his associates to do the same. The forum post was asking for the opinions of others about the url.

What is this? Grade school?

Somebody got mad and decided to take his ball and go home. Fine. If every other exchange is accepting the url, then stick with those exchanges and go about your business. No need to strong arm another exchange into accepting it. But this blog post is not about the behavior of the traffic exchange member.

What is with asking other people to comment on your business practices?

The question in the forum post was would you accept this url, why or why not, so I guess it was a fact-finding mission.  But usually when people ask a question like that, all they want is support for their opinion. Was it going to change his mind if others didn’t agree with him? I doubt it. But that’s not the point I want to make either.

It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. It doesn’t matter what everybody else is doing. Decide what you will and will not do, make sure it’s all legal, and post it on your website in your terms of service. Then stick to your guns. Somebody doesn’t like your rules, they can go elsewhere. This is business, not a popularity contest.

Posted by Ray White on March 8, 2010 Comments (4)

Early in my marketing career, I looked for the cold hard facts of sales. I wanted numbers. I wanted statistics. I wanted tried and true, TESTED methods of promotion. I wasn’t going to waste my time on crap. Every time I heard someone say something like, “Using quotation marks on headlines improves conversion rates,” I would jump right in and ask “Really? Says who? By how much? Tell me, tell me, tell me!” I would never get an answer. It was very frustrating.

Years of experience has taught me that no one can give you industry-wide statistics. There are no hard, fast numbers. Any information that is available is anecdotal. How did I come to that conclusion? Elementary, my dear reader. There are too many variables involved.

• your ad copy
• your audience (how well targeted it is)
• your price point
• your promotion effort
• your venue (traffic exchange, safelist, personal list, etc)
• your product or service (how good is it? what need does it fill?)

So what is an internet marketer to do? TEST!

Throw all of your traffic exchange credits at one splash page for a week and see how many sales or signups you get. Track your signups from specific exchanges to see which ones work best for you. Blitz your safelists with one promotional email, sending out as often as your membership level allows, and see what happens. If it turns out to be a dud, try a different email. Test different subject lines to see if they make a difference in the open rates of your emails to your list. Don’t stop testing until you are satisfied with your results.

Yes, it will take time to test things one at a time, but in the long run, you figure out where to advertise to get the most bang for your buck. You’ll also figure out if you like writing emails or making splash pages. You’ll find what fits your personality, what works into your schedule, what you do best. It is worth the time and effort to figure that stuff out so that your promotions will become the streamlined, well-oiled machine that we all strive to make our business.