Internet Marketing Blog

A recent Economist Magazine article on video surveillance struck a chord with me – face recognition is becoming mainstream and as such there are virtually no limits to the violations to privacy that will soon be possible by unscrupulous companies and criminals.

As you know, the Privacy Pirates are out there stealing your personal data, but this is one step beyond that – this is potentially LIVE and ADAPTIVE in both the physical and virtual world.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to get worried. I’m far from being paranoid, but there are tell tale signs that the abuses are increasing at an alarming rate.

Since I am NOT into propagating conspiracy theories, I have put together a report that summarises several issues that you should be aware of.

If you’d like a copy, you’ll need to contact us to get it. It’s not a free giveaway download. The 24 page report took 37 hours of research assembling 67 articles with 126 reference links for you to get quick access to what you need to protect yourself. Contact us – prevention is the only cure for this disease!

The true power of the Internet is its ability to reduce the cost of communicating with your suspects and prospects.

The video below, by the Book Box Company is the perfect explanation of what they do, how they do it and why it’s important to the final (finished) product.

There is no doubt that once you’ve seen the short video (less than 4 minutes), you know everything you need to know.

There is also no doubt that sales will increase as a result of the video – because we can appreciate the time, care, effort and thought that has gone into the process – especially all the recycling!

I am an avid dog lover which is why I get along so well with two of my clients: Bree Robbins of Paddington Pups and Cory Andrews of The Dogs Country Club Kennel and Resort in Victoria.

I’m sure they’ll refer to this blog post from their blogs since it’s one of the many Internet Marketing Strategies I covered at the recent Blogging for Business Sales Lead Generation and How To Converts Your Online Browsers To Buyers Workshops – now both available as convenient Webinars.

When Angela Muzyczka sent me this joke, I just had to share it with you, not for SEO reasons, but because it’s funny.

The Difference Between Dogs And Computers

Favorite Food
Dogs: Kibbles
Computers: Bits

Method used to end undesirable behavior
Dogs: Hit with rolled up newspaper
Computers: Hit control-alt-delete

After destruction of personal property
DOGS: Dog not found
COMPUTERS: File not found

Favorite trick
DOGS: Roll over
COMPUTERS: Play dead

Read More »»

Many small business people treat one of their most precious assets as an afterthought, rather than as one of their most precious assets. It’s not inconceivable for a website to be worth $100,000+ when there is a legitimate brick and mortar business “behind it”.

Put differently, years ago, when you bought a Yellow Pages ad, you’d SPEND thousands of dollars with NO appreciation in the capital asset value of the phone book. With the Internet, every dollar spent on your website should increase its capital value. Think about it this way – if you were assess two identical businesses, one with a website and the other without one, which one would YOU buy?  Enough said.

Most small businesses don’t proactively deal with their website and/or web online presence for a long list of reasons including:

• “I don’t get all this Interweb stuff”
• “I don’t like Facebook and don’t understand why people waste so much time ‘talking’ to complete strangers”
• “My son-in-law, nephew or neighbour seems to understand it and is not charging me much to handle my website…”
• “Technology is changing too quickly, I can’t keep up.”
• “I don’t get any web inquiries so it’s not worth worrying about.”
• “My staff’s taking care of it, in fact, we all kinda pitch in to get stuff done.”*

Whatever your excuses, as a small business person, in this day and age you simply cannot hand over your online presence to just anyone anymore than you would give them the pin code to your bank card. I am totally serious.

Read More »»

I am not a fan of Facebook. This is one of the many reasons… People manipulating their online identities to be who they’re not, to have frriends they would NEVER think of inviting to their homes… I wanted to share this with you because it was funny if it wasn’t so true.

I know too many people who post a profile picture that is 5 to 10 years old…

What do they think the impression is when someone meets them in person and they LOOK that much older?!?!?

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”

If the first impression is deceitful, how do you move on from there?!?!

I was interviewed by Ludwina Dautovic for Red Tent Radio yesterday and I have to admit it was one of the most fun interviews I’ve done in a long time. We got started and before we knew it, the 40 minutes were up! We talked about blogging for small business owners. The interview will be released as a podcast in a few weeks, but before it comes out, I thought I’d take this opportunity to remind you that we’re staging a 4-hour Masterclass called “How to convert your online browsers to buyers” in Sydney and Melbourne on April 11th and 18th respectively.

NEWS UPDATE:

CLICK THE HYPERLINK to download the Blogging For Small Business
Interview With Ludwina Dautovic on Red Tent Radio!

If you missed our exceptionally popular workshop “Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation“, you’re in luck – it’s now available as a 4-hour webinar you can stream to your computer. A webinar is great because you can stop, pause and rewind to make sure you don’t miss any important details.

Ludwina and I discussed WHY small business people need to blog,
what NOT to do and HOW to get started quickly and easily

As you’d expect, I have a very different take on most marketing strategies – one of them is I am not a fan of Social Media… I don’t adhere to the common propaganda that’s proliferating “out there” that you need to be on Facebook and Twitter. If you want to hear an honest viewpoint that will benefit your bottom line and save you from wasting countless hours, make sure you keep an eye out for the interview – I will blog about it when it comes out and you’ll be able to download it for free.

But, by that time, you’ll realise you should have attended my 4-hour Masterclass called “How to convert your online browsers to buyers” in Sydney and Melbourne on April 11th and 18th respectively.

So you know what to do – take the time now to have a look at the event page and keep in mind it comes with a 100% no-questions-asked money back guarantee. If at the end of the 4 hours, you haven’t received at least 2 or 3 times the cost of admission, we’ll refund you and remove you from our mailing list. That’s how confident we are of the immense value we’ll be revealing.

Here’s one of the concepts Ludwina and I touched on during the interview – it’s called the Miser Mentality. With a Miser Mentality, the focus is on the cost of something rather than the value or potential. A prime example is someone who drives 15 to 20 minutes to save a few cents on petrol. They have no appreciation for their TIME VALUE. A Miser can only see the COST (petrol saving) – not the BENEFIT (paying a little more, but saving time).

The strategies I will reveal at the next DIY Internet Marketing Masterclass can increase your website traffic anywhere from 15% to as much as 200%, depending on what you’ve done and how well you’ve done it. But here’s the thing – anyone who has a product or service that is worth at least $300 would get a benefit of $3,000 to $5,000 from the strategies I will reveal as a MINIMUM STARTING POINT.

So if the question was:

Would you pay $300 to get $3,000 in sales
in the next 12 months?

The answer should be YES! but the problem is that with a Miser Mentality there is a filter, a bias, a distortion that comes into play – that PREVENTS the POSSIBILITY from being even considered.

It might be thought, in a fleeting moment, but not seriously assessed or considered at its full (potential) value. Therein lies one of the key differences between the abundantly wealthy people who seek and focus on potential opportunities whereas misers miss those opportunities NOT because they aren’t there, but because they can’t see them.

In the psychological literature it’s called a Scotoma. The best example is looking for the salt when the salt shaker is right there in front of you…

I will address some of these inhibitors to success at the upcoming Exponential Extravaganza in May and June, but before that event takes place, the Internet DIY 4 hour Masterclass takes place.

Can you see the dilemma EVERYONE FACES – you know you want the benefits, results and rewards… But you have to consider and BELIEVE it’s possible. Quite the tug of war isn’t it?

I know. I struggled with it more than 30 years ago. I don’t remember what the trigger or catalyst was, but at some point I decided that the Miser Mentality can’t work – so I gave Boundless Opportunity Thinking a try. Once adopted, I transformed it into my own Exponential Mindset Thinking and the rest as they say is history…

So what “history” will you create for yourself in 2012, 2013, 2014 and beyond…?

It’s hard to get an important PREVENTION message across… The anti-smoking lobby struggles with it. One of our gym owner/client finds it hard to help people prevent the onset of type II Diabetes and I want to protect small business owners from being fleeced by unscrupulous Internet Marketing spuikers, web design companies and now “Social Media Consultants”…

It’s hard to get the message across
without being heavy-handed or sensationalistic

Brendan Rigby of Inspire Fitness and Wellbeing in Melbourne tells me that someone who’s overweight, drinks too much alcohol, smokes and doesn’t exercise is a prime target for Type II Diabetes, but even if all the red flags are there, everyone but the ‘patient’ sees them.

I feel it’s the same thing with the Internet. I see or hear about small business owners  getting fleeced, taken advantage of and otherwise ‘robbed’ by Internet Marketing Spruikers who pitch miracle solutions from stage with manipulative tactics at the get-rich-quick opportunists that many would argue “get what they deserve”.

But isn’t that the same for the smokers or obese, soon-to-be diabetics?

The challenge we all have is how do we get the message across without being fear mongerers and using heavy-handed tactics like the video below?

I can remember meeting a smoker amputee who lost BOTH her legs (above the knee) due to smoking. She was still smoking with the impeding threat of double-arm amputation, which is when she claimed she would “try to quit”. I was in my early twenties at the time, she was in her 40′s. I doubt she made it to her 50th birthday. I am still shocked almost 30 years later recalling that conversation.

There are some people that can’t and don’t want to be helped or saved

But there are those who, given a fair chance,
want to be forewarned – especially if the alternative is better

Leveraging the Internet does not have to be scary, intimidating or costly. In fact, the world has changed to make technology and access ubiquitous via increasingly easier and cheaper tools.

But the bottom line is – there is no point in discussing any of them – UNLESS YOU’RE OPEN to the possibilities.

If you are open to consider alternatives to expensive web designers and social media consultants, we’re staging an eye-opening workshop in Sydney and Melbourne in April.

It comes with a 100% Money-Back Guarantee that simply states that if after the 4-hour DIY Masterclass you didn’t get enough ideas, tips and tools to make or save you at least a multiple of the workshop fee, we’ll refund you the full registration fee – NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

Why? Because we don’t offer Internet web design and Social Media Consulting services – we and our clients don’t like them any more than you do.

AND BELIEVE IT OR NOT, you can grow your business leveraging the Internet doing it yourself AT A FRACTION OF THE COST OF THE SO-CALLED EXPERTS… AND GET BETTER RESULTS !!!

Come find out how at our next workshop called “How To Convert Online Browsers Into Buyers“.

We’re staging an ENCORE presentation of our very popular Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation Workshop in Sydney next week Wednesday 27 March 2012 and in April we’re following that up with a 4 hour DIY Internet Masterclass called How To Convert Your Online Browsers To Buyers in both Sydney and Melbourne.

Simply put, if you want to get more clients walking in your door or visitors to buy from your website, you have to do things differently.

The short YouTube video below captures one of the key concepts that prevents many businesses from selling more online (and of course offline).

Can you afford NOT to learn this stuff?

If you think you’re an Internetaholic, addicted to Social Media, Tweeting and Facebooking your every move – Have a look at this video I am sure you’ll tweet and forward it on!

ClickBank, the #1 Information Product Marketplace on the Internet published their vendor promotional guidelines. They are so good that I thought you should have a look at them. If you follow these guidelines, it’s inevitable that your online sales will increase. The #1 obstacle you need to overcome online is TRUST.

This blog is all about giving you the tools you need to be effective in your online lead generation strategies and web marketing.

Make sure you bookmark this page or even better – subscribe to the blog so you don’t miss out on any important information, tips or tools!

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“Thinking that you can only get paid while working is like thinking

you can only listen to music while someone is playing an instrument.”

_________________________________

This is the fundamental principle of Exponential Internet Marketing that we teach our clients in our Online Lead Generation Programs.

Our Internet strategies are legitimate, proven systems avoiding trying to ‘cheat the system’ with ‘black hat strategies’. They work in all industries for companies of all shapes and sizes that have real products and services to offer.

The best part of the strategies is that they can be setup with a passive income aspect so that traffic is generated ‘automatically’ and systematically to feed the sales funnel. Most of the strategies and tools we use are FREE and require no internal IT resources.

If you’re interested in making money 24/7/365, contact us for a quick chat and we’ll explain how we’ve helped hundreds of small business owners become market dominant leaders within their market niches within 12 to 24 months.

The next time your wifi signal drops out or your ADSL line goes dead, here are a few suggestions of what you could do.

Have you ever wondered why old farm tractors have super big rear wheels and tiny little ones at the front?

The same can be said about “what’s the point of having a business blog?”

You might not be a farmer and might not care why the rear wheels of an old tractor need to be that big, but in business, you can’t afford not to know why blogging has become so important for lead generation.

That’s why we’re staging a 1/day workshop called Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation on the Gold Coast, Sydney and Melbourne.

But then again you could go back to the paddock and give plowing a go…

The video below deals with the inevitable electronic archive that survives us… This is an interesting perspective that makes you think beyond the here and now without being morbid.

One of the ways I gauge entrepreneurs or business executives’ effectiveness and efficiency is how they respond to their emails. Without requiring ‘instant responses’, within one week of correspondence I can identify the ‘top 10%’ from the bottom ‘90%’.

This is 2012. We are in the 21^st century with email at the nucleus of our communication paradigm. Business people who struggle with technology and especially emails are ‘dinosaurs’.

Now that’s a bold statement to make, but it really is THAT important.

Allow me to contrast the top 10% versus the bottom 90%.

The top 10% respond within a reasonable time frame. It can be within the hour, the day, but rarely ever more than 48 hours (unless they are on leave or otherwise occupied with a project/event). One thing is for sure – you’re never wondering if they got or lost the email.

The bottom 90%…

• Claim to ‘lose’ or not receive emails
• Ask for emails to be re-sent because they accidentally deleted them
• Actually do have problems receiving emails because of their spam folder settings that are too strict
• Are challenged with their spam and junk mail folders – reviewing them only ‘every once in a while’ even though many important emails end up there
• Have hundreds or thousands of emails in their inbox
• Respond to emails erratically sometimes immediately and then are ‘offline’ for days with no communication
• Don’t use meaningful subject lines
• Don’t maintain message threads that are important – creating new emails with each new response
• Use TXT acronyms trying to be “hip or groovy” instead of clear in their explanations – creating the need for additional threads to find out what they meant to say
• Subscribe to every free email list available fearful that they will miss something.
• Don’t read their emails – instead skimming and overlooking the most important and time sensitive information
• Have multiple emails that they don’t monitor appropriately
• Share emails with others so everyone gets the email and multiple people responding with conflicting suggestions
• Don’t have folders for their emails – so can’t quickly locate what they need when they need it. Even though emails are now indexed, not having folders is like not having a filing cabinet for your physical documents.

Poor email management is one of my strongest pet peeves, but the reason I mention it here is because it’s also symptomatic of poor business management.

Without needing to become a Productivity Powerhouse – lack of effective email management skills (and tools) can be an important obstacle to your overall business success.

Anecdotally, over the past 10 to 15 years, I have noticed that the top business people don’t just manage their emails – the MASTER and CONTROL them with an adeptness that is remarkable.

If you’re struggling to grow your business – just look at your inbox and the list above. It’s a quick and easy problem to solve.

If it isn’t – you now have the SOURCE of the real problem!

I recently published this 2-minute link optimisation tip to avoid a common mistake a lot of people make.

If you are ‘new’ to the Internet, have no fear, you’re not the only one…

I’ve blogged about long tail niche marketing before with a YouTube video that has become a classic amongst the exponential marketing community. Just click on the hyperlink to view it.

Even though as a small business, Internet advertising is not something you’re probably engaged in, a recent report by CONTEXTWEB reveals something that I have known all along, albeit anecdotally -

Average click-through rates (CTRs) for ads placed
on long-tail websites are 24% higher than
those placed on short-tail sites.

Long tail versus short tail marketing refers to specialised niches versus broad mass markets respectively. What’s of particular interest is that the MORE specialised and targeted you are with your web strategies, the greater the returns you’ll produce.

Our clients have known this for years – often out-performing their much larger, national competitors with very deep pockets.

Long tail websites—the millions of smaller websites with niche audiences—offer significant ad performance advantages across a wide number of verticals.

Among all 20 categories studied, long tail ads registered increased CTRs over short-tail ads, led by alcohol beverages (50%), B2B (48%) and charities (48%). The lowest long-tail lift observed was for auto advertisers, but still had (12%) better CTRs.

The trade off remains between quantity and quality of the communication. This is something we cover in depth in our Killer Kopywriting Konversations™ workshops as we help our clients design Killer Kampaigns That Konvert Klients™.

As shown below, among 21 publisher categories, 16 categories registered increased CTRs on long tail sites whereas in five content categories, ads on short tail sites underperformed long tail ads.

Data Source: CONTEXTWEB‘s Intelligence Report: Using Long Tail Sites to Optimize Media Spend was published in March 2011. It analysed digital media performance from roughly 18,000 publisher sites across 1,000 campaigns in the second half of 2010.

This is 2011. Forget the Information Age, we’re in the Information Overload Age. I see it every day. People just can’t keep up with it all (even though many waste more than an hour a day on Facebook, but that’s a rant for another day).

As a business person, you need you to read the emails that are important – you are losing a lot more than you know by not reading them.

The problem or challenge is that you have too much junk or spam in your inbox. This is 2011 – DEAL WITH IT.

But let’s face it, it’s not really spam is it?

You’re on everyone’s opt-in list and you don’t want to miss anything that’s FREE…

Well guess what?

It’s not FREE – it’s costing you, dearly.

Each time you or someone who needs to reach you has to re-send an email, it DOUBLES the communication effort. It’s not trivial – with many people sending/receiving more than 100 emails/day, that’s a lot of wasted time and effort ON BOTH SIDES.

In some cases, I stopped dealing with people who can’t respond fast enough. In one supplier’s case it was worth more than $1,000. Gone. Not to mention additional on-going sales or referrals…

You need to find the SOURCE of the problem and get rid of it (excess emails).

For the emails you do need to receive -

Are you skimming them?

Are you distracted when you read them?

In this day and age, I can tell you (anecdotally) that I can gauge someone’s success (or lack thereof) by the efficiency of their email communication.

Simple as that – I know what a ‘reasonable amount of time is to respond’ and when that extends beyond the ‘acceptable’ I know it’s symptomatic.

Symptomatic of a lack of discipline.

A lack of organisation.

A lack of responsiveness.

Lack, lack, lack.

As a business coach, mentor and Exponential Growth Strategist, I figure if you can’t deal with emails you’re not anywhere close to being ready to grow your business.