I just wanted to share how I managed to increase a Facebook fan base from around 600 to 8266 in six weeks.

A friend of mine has an online beauty shop that sells cosmetics to the asian market, as such he wanted to create an extremely targetted database of clients that might be interested in the product range he offered.

We decided to run a competition to find a new girl and boy model to appear in an advert. The prize offered was a professional make over and photo shoot.

After making a request for people to come forward, a gallery was created for the entrants.
The person that received the most ‘Likes’ over a five week period would be the winner.

We invited entrants to contact their friends and family in order to get them to become a fan of Asian Face and vote. What happened exceeded all expectations as the contestants, desperate to win contacted all their friends, who contacted their friends and the whole thing went viral.

So the main lesson to take from this is that Facebook competitions are an excellent way of building your fan base, but you need to offer something that is of real interest to your clients.

If you have any tips you would like to share, please feel free to comment.

John

Anyway, I’m not going to give up and I want try adding videos to various sites to find out if having a video embedded on a different site has an effect on a primary site.

I’ve used Animoto to create this 30 second video clip for a limousine hire company.

I’ll let you know how I get on, If you have any ideas for me, please feel free to comment.

John

One way links are exactly what search engines are looking for and websites with a high number of quality, one way links are typically the sites that rank the highest. 

There is a vast number of free directories that anyone can submit their url to, but the process is very time consuming.

As a way of automating the process several websites directory submission programs have been developed. In my opinion, the best and easiest to use, is a new program created by Brad Callen, called Directory Submitter.

The software currently contains around 1700 website directories, all free.
It’s really easy to use,  all you need to do is:

1. Input your website details (i.e. title, description, URL, etc.) into the
software ..

2. Click on the directory you want to submit to and the software will automatically fill in your website details.

3. Click the submit button and your website is instantly submitted to the directory.

Then, you can move on and select the next directory.

If you were to go through the entire list, by the time you’re finished, you’ll have roughly 1500 one way links pointing to your website. In reality, you can work your way through the most appropriate directories with the highest page ranking. It’s still a time consuming process, but much quicker and easier that reentering the same data over and over.

Note; If you’re going to add multiple links quickly, it’s important to vary your website title (anchor text) every 20-30 links or so, to make things look more natural to the search engines.

You can do this really easily via Directory Submitter at the start of the process when you initially create your project.

According to their sales blurb, the software is constantly being updated and their is also a community of fellow users established (and growing), that work together to improve the software.

To check out Directory Submitter, click on the banner below:

My work as a computer programmer dried up with the recession back in October 2008, but I believed in myself and the importance of networking (both online and offline). It was during a networking meeting held by Business Link, that I got talking to a guy about Internet marketing.

We realised that whilst information products were often given away or sold for a few dollars, customers will often spend more on a physical product such as a CD or DVD. So buy replicating the same information in different formats, it is possible for any internet marketer to offer their clients a range of product choice and user an up sell or down sell to find the most suitabley priced product.

Product Creation

As many newbies do, I’d signed up for a number of courses from different people. One of my courses was “Micro Continuity” by Russel Brunson, where it was outlined how easy it can be to create a product. One suggestion was to sit down with someone who is an expert on a particular topic and interview them on video. The idea being that the video can be edited to become a DVD, you can strip the sound off and create an audio version to be sold as a CD or MP3 download and the transcript can be reproduced as a physical book or an eBook.

Kunaki.com

One of the resources that Russel Brunson gave was the name of a company that could manufacture and ship CD’s and DVD’s for $1.70 each, with no minimum order quantity. That company was Kunaki.com

Based in America, Kunaki is a machine rather than a traditional company, that specialises in the manufacture of digital products. It has been tailored to meet the requirements of independent retailers such as internet marketers of musicians wanting to create and distribute their own products.

The Problem with Kunaki ……

Whilst Kunaki is undoubtedly an fantastic service, it relies on their customers inputing the requirements of what product needs to be manufactured and where it needs to be shipped.

So the issues are;

• An internet marketer needs to check for online sales and manually submit orders to Kunaki.com. (This is both time consuming for the internet marketer and can result in a time delay for the end client who has ordered through an online shopping cart).

The Solution

I’d read that Kunaki allowed customers to submit orders using XML.
As a programmer, I saw an opportunity to create a product that would benefit so many Internet Marketers. By creating a web service, a person could simply create an account that would store their login details and match the product they were selling with a Kunaki product id that needed to be manufactured. Using the point of Payment notification as the trigger to send the customers order requirements and shipping details directly to Kunaki.com

Creating Send2Kunaki.com

Although a programmer, this project was touching on areas I had little experience in, so initially I put the project out to tender on a website called getacoder.com. It’s amazing how many people step forward and offer to work for you. But on this occasion, I met an American developer called Ian McManus at another networking event being held at the University  of Warwick by B2B.

This guy could see what I wanted, but also made so many suggestions of how the web service could develop into a much larger service to help people that wanted to make information products …. hopefully it will become a portal where visitors can get help with video production, video editing or graphics for their product.

Learning to Crawl

It was really important to remain focused on the core product, so Send2Kunaki was developed, tested and is now available for use.

To build awareness of Send2Kunaki and prove the software, for a limited period of time, I am making the web service available without charge in return for testimonials or feedback which can be entered on my BuzzHerd Forum.

If anyone would like to trial the Send2Kunaki web service please register here.

…. and if anyone has any help or advise on how I could take my product to market, please enter a comment below ….. I’m also interested in Joint Venturing with people on this.

John

Last nights webinar was all about generating traffic for this new business, but like a numpty I missed most of it and have to wait for Rob to post the recordings.

In the UK British Summer time has just ended and the clocks have gone back one hour. Rob is broadcasting from Canada and I just signed in at my usual time only to catch the questions and answers session.

So let me recap on what Rob is getting us to do;-

Rob is outlining business models which he calls an ‘S’, ‘T’ and ‘M’ business.

• An ‘S’ product business is founded on providing a service …. before turning it into a product.
• An ‘S’ & ‘T’ business is one that can generate testimonials first.
  (Without testimonials it is not easy to generate income quickly).
• An ‘S’ ‘T’ & ‘M’ business is a service business that generates testimonials, but quickly generates a growing income.

So what actually is Rob getting us to do?

To prove the business model works, we are currently creating an online article writing service.

Rob set us an assignment to create an eZine style article for any clickbank product …. and he paid us and provided a testimonial.
(Later in the course, we will learn how to use the article to drive traffic to an affilliate site)

We then were asked write 3 more articles for fellow students without payment in return for a testimonial. These testimonials were then incorporated into a pre prepared Sales Page which we customized using a free online product from Trellion.com

The edited sales letter template is then uploaded to a personal url and all the steps needed to create an online service business have been achieved. I’ve called my new article writing business one-articlewriter.com

A bonus webinar was created to provide technical information on how to use the sales page editor, create Paypal buttons to receive money and how to use Filezilla to trasfer files.

At this point a few people were getting stuck and I’ve been able to help both Karen Kalata and Joann Henry with some of the technical aspects. And in doing so I’m repeating the process I’m being taught.

• Provide a service
• Get Testimonials
• Market the service to other people for financial reward
• Create a product telling people how to do the service you were providing
• Sell the product

So it’s all starting to fall into place.

I’ll report more now I’ve put my clock right.

John

The training webinars run twice a week and Rob is meeting his obligation to push all 20 students hard to create an online service business that generates money by the end of the month.

The webinars are very well presented, Rob is articulate, easy to understand and answers any questions that students have at the end of each session. Mp3 downloads along with slides and resource material are always available within 24 hours and through the use of surveys Rob has inserted bonus training to help cover areas that students wanted more help with.

Essentially, the training is devised to help you set realistic financial goals and learn repeatable processes that cover all the elements needed to set up and operate an online service business.

Online service business differ from the list building, affiliate product promoting route that other courses cover in that they can generate income quickly.

Rob asks students to put faith in his methods in a similar way that the Karate Kid had to follow the masters instructions without question.

By using this process, each student has been given;

• A formula to create and adapt their own financial goals,
• An understanding of the different online business models,
• Practical experience in creating a service product,
• The importance of Testimonials,
• Copy for an online sales page that can be used to promote an online service business.

Once students have the knowledge, the can either run with the business created during the course or transfer what they have learned into any future service based online business.

The webinar didn’t actually give away too many secrets and it tuned into a sales pitch for
‘Double Click Blue Print’, but I decided to put my faith in Rob and get out the credit card.

This is effectively an intensive training series, that aims to achieve financial results and an understanding of techniques that can be replicated once the training has ended.

Unlike Alex’s training, where the emphasis is on bulding a list and a relationship with that list, Rob recognises that list building takes time and the immedite need is to generate short term income.

So to date, we have learned about;

• ‘Financial Goal Setting’ using a formula to determine an achievable target.
• An understanding of the differences between affilliates and a service business.
• The importance of getting testimonials to promote a  start up service, as nobody wants to be the first user.

The training is being undertaken by a small group of around 20 people and Rob is using his students as clients, service providers and a micro community.

• Rob is paying his students for a piece of work in return for a testimonial.
• He’s also asking us to provide fellow students with a piece of work in return for testimonials.
• The results will be carried forward to the next training sessions where we are being taught;
  • How to market a service online
  • Strategies on how to profit from the services we create.

Whilst this all seems a little mysterious at the moment, everything should fall into place on the second half on the twice a week month long course.

My financial target is to generate $100 by 31st October. It might not sound much, but given that I’ve earned a big zero from Internet marketing to date, it will show me that I’m on the right track.

Keep visiting the site to find out how I get on.

John

Rich showed a slide called ‘Step by Step Plan to Freedom’ in which your business was split into three sections:
-    Marketing  (Customer Attraction, Conversion and Retention)
-    Fulfilment  (Product Development, Delivery and Improvement)
-    Operations (Finance, Human Resources and Systems)

The idea being to identify the processes within the business.

Through ‘process mapping’, it should help you identify better ways of doing things in order to make best use of your time and resources.

I’ve been working to develop some software that is aimed at helping internet marketers improve areas of their fulfilment processes through automation.

To succeed in Internet marketing, we have learned that marketers benefit from having their own product.

We also know that some customers will pay a premium for the same product in a different format.

What I am developing is a web service that helps automate the manufacture and shipping of physical information products such as CD’s and DVD’s.

The idea is to allow marketers to create additional products from their existing digital products, by creating audio CD’s and DVD’s. Not only does this allow more sales revenue to be generated, but it will open up the opportunity to market your products on Amazon and eBay, (where it isn’t possible to sell digital products).

How can this work?

It is possible to use a digital manufacturing company called Kunaki that builds retail quality CD’s and DVD’s (with a bar code & wrapped in cellophane). Their
Software allows you to design and configure artwork for your case, disc, inserts, cover art and contents.

• There are No setup charges minimum orders, commitments, or contracts.

• Orders are drop-shipped to any address.

• Just-in-time production means risk-free, zero warehousing costs.

So what’s the problem?

Kunaki solves the problem of to manufacture and drop ship any orders you receive, but it relies on the seller manually submitting orders to Kunaki.

What have I developed?

I have developed a web service that associates products sold through Papal, eBay and 1ShoppingCart with the product that you have uploaded to your Kunaki account.

Using my software will automate the process of transmitting orders from your website to Kunaki who will fulfil the order for you.

At the moment I’m running some final tests and developing instructions on how to use the software.

Whilst this software will be a subscription service,
I would like to offer free access to the software in return for testimonials and feedback.

I’m going to limit this access, so if you want to create your own physical products and
have customer orders drop shipped by Kunaki, please add a comment asking for the service.

John

It isn’t really viable for newbie Internet marketers to compete for the most popular key words through pay per click campaigns due to the cost, but we can compete by being smarter in our keyword research and utilizing long tail keywords.

By long tail keywords, I mean, either phrases that people are currently searching for, or very detailed searches such as an exact product id.

I’d like to share some advice from Andrew Hansen of Firepow, on his technique for
Google keyword research.

Using Googles keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

For the type of niche you’re looking at, start off by identify the main key word
(e.g. Snoring).

The idea is to identify words and phrases that people are currently searching for, that you could use and add content to.

So look for words with 500 – 5000 hits per month.

Once the keywords list appears, double click on the column called ‘Advertiser Competition’.
This sorts the phrases into a list, with the less competitive keywords at the top.

This technique helps to spot words and phrases with relatively high actual search levels,
that aren’t currently being bought in pay per click campaigns.

If the technique above doesn’t give you enough ideas, go back to the Google search page and type in your primary niche keyword or phrase e.g. stop snoring (don’t use quotes).

Copy the first non sponsored URL

Then return to the Google Keywords Tool and select the website content radio button.

Paste the url into the webpage url box it prompts you with.

The search results that are returned will provide you with keyword ideas based on the keywords that site uses, which you know works because it is in position 1 on the first page of Google for your niche keyword.

Once you’ve researched your keywords and found long tail words that have traffic, it’s down to the graft of creating content on articles, blogs and YouTube videos ensuring those key phrases are included in titles and content.

As I’m currently creating marketing videos to promote a limousine company, I was fascinated to read a little used technique that can dramatically increase your YouTube video views.

Video Response

What is a Video Response?
As you know, YouTube allows viewers to rate and comment on the videos they have watched.
A Video response is just another method of responding to YouTube videos.

Why should I post a Video Response?

Video Response provides you with an opportunity to piggy back popular videos. (As long as it is relevant).

It is a video marketing technique to increase the number of views your video receives by association with related content that has already received a high number of views.

How to create a Video Response:

Upload a video to YouTube.

Find a related video (on YouTube), that has LOTS of views.

Post a video response.

Look underneath the video in the section called “Video Responses”.

On the right hand-side you’ll see a blue link that says “Post a Video Response”.
Click on that link and you will then be taken to a page where you can post a video response.

Click on the link in the middle that say, “Choose a Video”.
Select one of the videos you have already uploaded on YouTube and click on the button that says, “Respond with This Video”.

To read Kim Roach’s 21 traffic sources on BuzzBlogger click here.

I’ve added video responses to a couple of limousine videos that are getting lots of hits and I’ll let you know what impact it has.

Please share any success you have using this technique.