Free Traffic VS Paid Traffic! 1

Posted by Mariameg on September 13, 2020 in Content Marketing

Free Traffic VS Paid Traffic: You might think traffic is the hardest part, but it’s actually a lot simpler than you think to get traffic! We’re going to take a look at a few of the best strategies for getting traffic, both free and paid.

Free Traffic

As far as free traffic goes, there’s only one method that’s quick enough to generate traffic starting today, doesn’t have a hefty learning curve, and provides quality traffic that can convert: social media.

Keep in mind that certain markets are more inclined to use certain social networks than others, so it’s important to locate your market and be certain you’re focusing most of your time and energy on those locations. While you can still use other social networks, most of your effort should be focused on those sites that have a higher concentration of your target demographic.

We’re going to look at a few of the most popular social networks, and how you can locate your target demographic on each one in order to find out which one(s) you should concentrate on.

Facebook

Locating your target demographic on Facebook is relatively simple. Begin by searching for a topic related to your niche and find pages and groups that fit your niche.

For example, if you are offering a dog walking service, you’d want to search for things like groups for pet owners in your city or state. Find out how many people are in those groups, and how many groups there are. This will give you a rough idea of how many people you can reach on Facebook.

Join these groups and participate in them, making sure you follow their rules. If they don’t allow promotions, you’ll need to contact the group administrators and ask for permission to advertise your service. Otherwise, you should be able to pipe in if people happen to ask about dog walking services.

You can also start your own group, which is your best option. This will give you a source of traffic you can turn into leads anytime.

You should also start a Facebook page for your business, and you can even include a link to your squeeze page on your Facebook page.

Pinterest

Pinterest is like an online corkboard. You can have multiple “boards”, and then pin images with links, sort of like bookmarking a page.

You can find out how popular your niche is on Pinterest by performing a search, and then clicking “Boards” to find out how many people have boards related to your niche AND how many followers those boards have.

You can also search pins for the niche and see how many repins each one has. This will let you know how interested people are.

Pinterest has a huge amount of traffic, and it’s relatively easy to access just by following accounts that have some connection to your niche and pinning content related to your niche and using keywords in your board names and descriptions.

You’ll need to have some interesting content to pin, so it’s a good idea to have a blog or website that you use to post content related to your field. For example, you could have a dog care blog for your dog walking service and post useful information for pet owners.

One important thing to note is that Pinterest is heavily imaged-based, so you’ll need good images to pin that relate to your article.

For example, if you’ve posted an article called “5 Tips for Housebreaking Your Puppy”, you’d want to include a photo of a dog being trained, or something related to housebreaking a puppy, and have the title of your article on the image.

If you take a look at Pinterest, you’ll see that most images are taller than they are wide. That’s because they take up the most screen real estate since images are constrained by width, but have much more space to expand lengthwise. Thus, try to make sure your images follow the same format.

Instagram

Instagram is a great platform for visual content, and you can get a lot of traffic from it, especially if your business is related to fashion, beauty, art, lifestyle, food and cooking, crafts, or other topics that are popular.

You can get a good indication of what’s popular on Instagram by opening the app and clicking the search icon, searching for a term related to your niche, and then clicking “Tags”. This will show you how many posts are currently on the site using that phrase, as well as lots of related phrases.

For example, when I search for “dogs”, I see millions of posts with such hashtags as #dogsofinstagram, #dogs, #dogstagram, and #dogsitting.

You can also click the “People” tab and click some of the top profiles to see how many followers they have. This is another good indicator of interest in your topic.

There are three important steps to getting traffic from Instagram:

1. Fill out your profile and include a link to your website or squeeze page there. Make sure to choose an interesting photo of either yourself or something related to your niche for your profile picture. And include that link because you can’t include links in the descriptions of your individual posts! (Just tell people to check your profile for a link.)

2. Post often. Instagram posts scroll by and are gone quickly if someone is following a lot of profiles, so the best way to get seen is to post as often as possible. Don’t spam! Just a few posts a day is fine, but spread them out every few hours. And don’t forget to add at least 5 relevant hashtags to every post!

3. Follow people who are related to your niche. Many will follow you back, and others will find and follow you from those people’s profiles. It’s a good idea to follow at least 20 new accounts each day, which you can find easily through the search function and referrals from other people. Stick mostly to following accounts related to your niche, because you want qualified leads, not just a high follower count!

Other Social Networks

There are other social networks that can be effective, too, depending on your market. I suggest giving each of these a try to see how they do for your particular market, but you might want to concentrate your efforts on the other sites we’ve talked about earlier in this chapter.

Paid Traffic

I don’t recommend using paid ads until you’ve thrown a good amount of free traffic at your squeeze page for a while and tested conversion rates. If you aren’t getting many leads, you may want to make some tweaks to your squeeze page and/or lead magnet to increase those conversions.

Once you’re happy with how your page is converting, you can start sending some paid traffic to it.

Let’s look at some of the most effective paid ad platforms. These are generally the most profitable, but they may not work for all niches equally, so be sure to track your conversions carefully, tweak ads as needed, and kill any ads that aren’t performing.

Facebook Ads

Facebook is generally considered one of the best advertising platforms, because ads are typically affordable and convert well. This is mainly because of how well they are able to target ads to the appropriate parties.

Remember when we talked about how important it is to get qualified leads? Facebook is brilliant for that, because they have incredibly advanced targeting options. You can target people based on age, gender, location, marital status… just about anything you can think of… PLUS, you can target by interests, shopping habits, and so much more.

Sticking with our example of using a local dog walking business, you can target people in your city, or surrounding cities, AND who are dog owners. You can seriously get THAT specific!

When you create your ad, pay attention to the type of ad you’re creating. The regular newsfeed and mobile newsfeed formats are considered the most profitable.

Keep in mind that the price you pay for your ads on Facebook is heavily based on your CTR (click-thru rate), so it’s important to design the most effective ad possible. If you notice an ad has a low CTR, pause the ad and make changes. Keep tweaking until you find the right combination to bring in qualified leads at a low cost.

Facebook has a great guide to help you get started:

>> https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide

Bing Ads

Bing’s ad platform isn’t nearly as competitive as many others, because they have much less traffic than Google, Facebook, and some other platforms. However, you can still get a lot of traffic at a very low price, because the lower competition means you can actually get more traffic than you could at the more competitive sites because in many instances you could be the only advertiser in a genre.

Bing is a PPC platform just like Google AdWords, so if you’re already familiar with AdWords, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.

Bing has a lot of training if you’re not familiar with the platform:

>> https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/training/courses

Other Ad Platforms

There are platforms you can explore as well, such as YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Google AdWords, and many others. But these can be a little trickier to master than the other three platforms we discussed, as they are either more expensive, more competitive, or harder to master.

For this reason, I suggest exploring other platforms once you’ve mastered the other three we discussed and are getting consistent results.

Quick & Easy List Monetization Strategies 2

Posted by Mariameg on September 12, 2020 in Content Marketing

Quick & Easy List Monetization Strategies

Here are a few fast and furious ways to monetize your lists.

Membership/Continuity Websites
Membership sites will never go out of fashion. People love receiving fresh content automatically every month without having to think about renewing their purchase or manually paying for access.

From a website owner’s perspective, it simply simplifies the process of keeping customers active within a funnel, while giving them the reassurance of a stable monthly income they can count on.

You can also choose to host your download pages and files on your own hosting account, or simplify the process by allowing InDigitalWorks Bitreveal to do all of that for you.

Regardless of what software or platform you use to create your membership site, you’ll want to tie it in with your existing email campaigns. For example, you could offer a subscription model that takes place entirely via email that gives your subscribers access to premium content.

You could also set up your membership site so that whenever a subscriber joins they are given access to a private Facebook group, or can view videos that are otherwise unlisted on YouTube. There’s no shortage of ways to incorporate a paid-access model into your email marketing campaign.

Membership sites also don’t have to cost a lot of money. You could simply start out with a lower-end price point just to move subscribers into your funnel so you can begin to qualify leads and segment your lists for better engagement.

Even subscription sites that charge as little as $10 a month are great tools for weeding out tire-kickers and converting readers into buyers.

Think about how you could create a subscription website into your email campaigns and maximize your income quickly.

Tip: Offer subscribers will early-bird access at a lower rate. This is a great way to jumpstart your membership site by offering people with a heavily discounted price for the first few months, or grandfather them in by letting them continue paying a lower fee as long as they keep their account active.

Email Based Coaching

Coaching and consulting is big business and more and more email marketers are getting into the game by charging for either personal or group training.

If you have an engaged email list, you could easily maximize your income by setting up a short-term coaching program that provides in-depth training on a certain topic.

Your coaching program could be designed to be completed over Skype, through email, via a private Facebook group, or you could set up a fully loaded training program via a site like Teachable.com in order to streamline your business and grow your audience outside of your email campaigns.

Training programs are also a great way to position yourself as an authority in your market and to increase brand awareness. They also serve as great testing grounds for future product launches as you’ll gain valuable feedback from students who move through the course.

There are many different training platforms you could use, including:

Email Based Service
You could easily set up a series of paid-access emails that go out every day, or every week. Only those who pay for access will receive this content. Just make sure that you mark your campaigns as private from within your mailing list account as by default some providers will make your email broadcasts available to the public, or anyone who shares the link.

Facebook Group

We’ve talked about Facebook groups already, but it’s worth mentioning again. Facebook groups are easy to set up and manage. You can add additional administrators or moderators who can help keep on top of posts, comments and remove any spam.

However, there is a major downside to using Facebook groups – you aren’t in full control of your community. Should Facebook limit your account or put you in what’s called “Facebook jail”, you could find yourself locked out of your own group.

The best way around this is to run your coaching program from your own website, but offer access to a private Facebook group as a bonus to those who subscribe.

Webinars
Webinars are great ways of introducing your brand to new prospects. You could easily set up a series of Webinars as part of your coaching program, or run them independently if you’re looking to gain new email subscribers.

Just make sure you email the registration link to existing contacts as well as a reminder link on the day your webinar is set to take place.

Affiliate Marketing
Obviously, affiliate marketing is one of the most common methods of monetizing your email list. It’s a great replacement for those who don’t have a product of their own, but even if you do, it’s a fantastic way to maximize your income during the times where you’re working on developing new products that aren’t market ready.

Just match quality products with your audience and earn a commission!

Final Words

Turning your list into a money-making machine takes careful planning, but it’s one of the easiest ways to jumpstart your business, build a memorable brand and maximize your online income with very little start-up costs.

The key is to work towards constantly expanding your outreach, drive targeted traffic to your landing page, provide an irresistible, exclusive incentive that will convert that traffic into leads and work towards building your back-end system so that fresh content is being pumped out to your list every single week.

Then, monetize your list with affiliate-based offers as you learn more about your target market and generate valuable feedback that will help shape the outline of your own products or services.

Even if you never create a product of your own, your email lists can serve as the foundation for your entire business just by working towards creating the perfect blend of free, valuable content and promotional-based offers.

Test out different systems only after you’ve seen success with one. Broadening your outreach by dominating one email monetization strategy at a time will help you stay focused, while keeping a close pulse on what is effective and what should be abandoned.

Don’t overcomplicate the process! With a strong lead magnet like the ones available atInDigitalWorks.com, combined with a series of high-value follow up campaigns, you’ll be able to siphon cash out of every email you send!

Always be on the lookout for other ways you can monetize your email campaigns, such as by selling ad space in your newsletters to others in your niche market. This is a great way to introduce quality products to your audience while making money doing it. GetResponse has a great article that shows you how to do this easily. You’ll find that here: https://blog.getresponse.com/can-sell-ads-email-newsletters

The bottom line is making money via your email list is not hard. Build an email list, nurture a relationship with your leads by offering free valuable content, and plug in any of the monetization methods we’ve discussed in this special report and you’ll be able to make money easily.

Cross-Selling for Maximum Profits 1

Posted by Mariameg on September 12, 2020 in Content Marketing

Cross-Selling for Maximum Profits:

Cross Selling for Maximum Profits

Have you ever heard of cross-selling? It’s when you direct a buyer to additional relevant products that you feel they may be interested in.

Amazon has cross-selling down to an art form. Whenever you purchase a book from them, you’ll be immediately introduced to other books in that genre or category.

Just the same, if you browse an author’s website on Amazon you’ll see “Buyers of this Book have also purchased” (known in the publishing industry as “also-bought’s”), and they’re a powerful way to keep someone active within the sales funnel.

In fact, when it comes to self-published authors, many of them have seen an immediate increase of sales whenever they’ve appeared in another author’s also-bought’s just because they’re able to siphon traffic and connect with a competitor’s readers base just by being featured as a similar author.

When it comes to squeezing every dime out of your email marketing campaigns, directing people to other relevant offers is a great way to extend the sales funnel without having to have other products or services of your own.

So for example, if you are offering access to a training program that teaches people how to self-publish on Amazon, chances are you can’t cover every aspect of self-publishing.

After all, there’s: marketing, editing, proofreading, learning how to increase writing speed, productivity and focus, and the list goes on.

In other words, there are dozens of other tasks relating to self-publishing that new authors would likely want to learn more about. Rather than continuously adding new modules and training guides to your program, you could cross-promote guides and books featured on Amazon and make money from every sale you make.

Cross-promoting via email campaigns is no different from traditional email marketing. You’re promoting products that are in the same niche as your own yet they cover new ground.

Think about the different areas you haven’t covered in your own products or courses. What other avenues of training would your customers likely be interested in? What subject matter have you overlooked, or you couldn’t cover in one product or training program?

Those products make fantastic cross-promotional items that you can introduce your subscribers to throughout your email campaigns.

What is The Power of Upsells & Downsells? 1

Posted by Mariameg on September 12, 2020 in Content Marketing

The Power of Upsells:

You’ve worked hard to build a list. You’ve spent time (and possibly money) generating leads and cultivating relationships with your subscriber base.

So, you should want your efforts to count, right?

One easy way to maximize your email marketing income is to seize the power of a great upsell.

“Do you want to upsize your drink and fries?”

McDonald’s certainly understands the profit potential of an upsell, and so should you.

Offering subscribers that purchase from you the opportunity to upgrade or enhance their order by adding additional tools and resources is an easy way to skyrocket your income.

The key to an upsell is that it’s priced higher than the initial offer and offers clear value.

Your buyers need to understand how they benefit from spending that extra money to upgrade their initial purchase. This means that your upsell needs to double the value of the original product.

For example, if your customer purchased a 10-pack of social media graphics, you could offer them the chance to double their inventory by upgrading to a 20-pack of graphics.

The key is to keep your upsell tightly connected to the main product. You don’t want to stray too far from your original offer so that you’re able to paint a clear picture of how the upsell improves, extends or enhances the product they already have.

Consider what kinds of products you could create as upsells that align with your existing product line.

And believe me, there’s always room for an upsell. Even if you think your high-quality course offers everything a person could possibly ask for, chances are you’ve overlooked an area that you could fulfill with an upgrade offer.

In fact, some developers leave a segment out of their main products or training programs intentionally because they know it would serve as a killer upgrade.

Now, you don’t want your upgrade to be forced onto buyers, nor do you want it to cover a key area or step needed to accomplish their goal.

If someone purchases a product from you, it should do its job at fulfilling all promises made on the sales page, and should also serve as a stand-alone product. The upsell only works to expand someone’s knowledge, provide someone with alternative methods, steps, or extends the training they are interested in.

Thinking back to McDonald’s and how they’ve integrated upsells into their sales process, without upgrading the fries or drinks to a larger size, the meal you ordered is fulfilling and complete. Upgrading only gives you more of the same thing, right?

That’s the key to a killer upsell that’ll convert.

Now let’s look at the opposite approach: a downsell.

A downsell attracts a customer who is attempting to back out of making a purchase. They’re obviously interested in your product or service, but perhaps it’s too expensive for them at this time.

That’s when a downsell should kick in and do its job at saving the sale and moving the prospect further into your funnel, even if they’re not paying full price for your offer.

Your downsell should typically shrink the size of the original offer. For example, if you were selling 10 social media graphics, your downsell might offer only 5 graphics at a fraction of the price.

Or, if you’re in the business of selling software, your downsell might provide them with a limited license that removes some of the power packed into the full-price option.

Make sense?

Both upsells and downsells will help you to maximize your email marketing income. By directing people to one main offer but giving them multiple options depending on their actions throughout your funnel, you’ll be able to close more sales and make more money.

Transforming a Simple Page Into A Cash Funnel 0

Posted by Mariameg on September 11, 2020 in Content Marketing

Transforming a Simple Page Into A Cash Funnel: While there are many different ways to monetize your email list, one of the most overlooked areas yet one of the most visited is thank you page of your opt-in form.

When people opt in for your offer, they’re interested in your brand and your products, right? So, turn these interested subscribers into customers right away by including an offer on the thank you page after they’ve already subscribed!

To increase conversion rates, make sure you are using a responsive theme.

You should also add snippets of feedback from past customers, if you have it available. Including reviews from satisfied buyers will immediately increase conversion rates as it provides social proof and helps to reassure potential customers who are just learning about your brand for the first time.

Your thank you page is the very first thing your new subscribers see after joining your email list. This is their initial greeting and so it’s likely they’ve never even read an email from you yet!

That makes it a prime opportunity to introduce those leads to your products or services, or at the very least move them deeper into your marketing funnel.

I know this goes against the grain of what some other email marketers teach. You know, those guys who tell you to spend months cultivating a relationship with your subscribers and building trust, loyalty, and all that jazz.

But the truth is, while you won’t convince every subscriber to purchase from you right away, what do you have to lose?

I’d rather strike while the iron’s hot than simply direct them into my mailing list while waiting weeks to even give them the opportunity to purchase a product that will help them.

It’s been said that at no other time will your subscribers be more engaged than they are immediately after subscribing to your newsletter.

After all, you’ve done your job at persuading them to give you their name and email address. They’ve let you into their life, they’ve given up valuable real estate in their inbox so that they can hear more from you.

So, give it a shot. Set up a simple thank you page that gives them the opportunity to purchase your best-selling products. Or, if you have yet to create a product of your own, introduce them to an offer you are signed up to promote.

If you’re nervous about promoting or selling so soon after they’ve signed up to your list, consider creating a trip wire offer.

A trip wire offer is typically a lower-priced offer (somewhere between $5-25) that is designed to move someone deeper into a sales funnel without requiring a huge commitment from them. Trip wire offers are a great way to speed up the subscriber-to-buyer transition.

And if you want to skyrocket conversion rates, consider creating a bonus product that extends the value of the products you’re promoting. Give your leads more bang for their buck and you’ll build a loyal following in no time.

Important Reminder:
I’ve mentioned earlier that successful email marketing is all about the relationships you build with your subscribers.

Your subscribers need to trust you and the offers you promote. They need to know they can rely on you as a quality and responsible source of information and recommendations.

This means you need to be extremely careful with the products and services you promote throughout your email campaigns.