The Marketing BlogZine

Building Opt-In Lists – How To Become An Online Email Marketer

July 28, 2010 | In Building Lists, Doug Champigny, E-Mail Marketing | Comments(1)

Building Opt-In Lists – How To Become An Online Email Marketer

Promoting an offline business? Then you should consider becoming an online email marketer. There is no more powerful way to promote your offline business online than with email based marketing, in part because few if any of your offline competitors will know they should become an online email marketer too!

Email based marketing can be defined as building opt-in list of targeted prospects, then using email newsletter software to brand your company, your services and your products by sending your business ezine to those targeted leads. Whether your company is currently selling locally, regionally, nationally or internationally you can raise your profile in your industry and increase sales by learning the ins-and-outs of being an online email marketer.

To get started with email based marketing, it’s best to think of it as optin marketing – you need to focus first on what would get your best prospects to optin to your email marketing. Since most people come online looking for information on a particular subject, study your target market’s demographics and discern what information they’d be most likely to search for online. Then write a series of free reports that would give them the information they’re looking for, being sure to title each so that it’s obvious what information is available in that report.

Next, you’ll need a service to register your email marketing addresses as prospects opt in, and to let you send email broadcasts to those email marketing addresses. For business ezine marketing with email, best to use a professional autoresponder service to handle all of that. Once you have your account, you simply log into the site, set up a new autoresponder and put in a welcoming e-mail that includes the report as an attachment. Your account will come with an e-mail address for those subscribing and also a form generator. If you have a company website or blog, generate an optin form and put it on your site along with information about their free report.

If you don’t have a site, you can use articles, podcasts, videos, social networking and social media sites to get the word out, each time giving them the link they can use to e-mail their optin to your autoresponder and get their free report. This is true email based marketing, since it doesn’t require you to have a site or blog to get started with your email newsletter. And don’t forget to let your offline customers and visitors know that you have that free report available too – collecting their email marketing addresses can help you retain and upsell existing customers and create new customers from your offline visitors who may not have been ready to buy when they visited your company.

Becoming an email marketer through email based marketing can really help boost your company’s bottom line, and your business ezine can easily become the base for a future website or blog to help both your offline business volume and your marketing with email. And if you do well enough as an email marketer, you may just decide to branch into email affiliate marketing in your own niche or a related field – after all, everyone can use a few new income streams, and email affiliate marketing will come naturally to you once you’ve established yourself as an online email marketer!

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Marketing mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in online marketing through his Internet Marketing Coaching and his Affiliate Marketing Coaching programs. Doug created both of these programs himself through his PowerStart Marketing division, and gives his students direct access to him and his vast wealth of marketing knowledge both during their course and afterwards. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – enroll now!

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Technorati Tags: email marketer, email based marketing, email marketing addresses, email affiliate marketing, ezine, optin

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Money-Making Blog Or Corporate Web Site – Marketing Tips For Offline Businesses

June 14, 2010 | In Blogging, Doug Champigny, offline business tips | Comments(3)

Money-Making Blog Or Corporate Web Site – Marketing Tips For Offline Businesses

One of the most common critical errors small offline businesses make when approaching online marketing is wanting to have a fancy, flashy web site like the big corporate sites they’ve seen online. But what they don’t realize is that the big companies all use advertising agencies, and part of the advertising agencies marketing strategy is to use corporate sites strictly for Internet branding.

Internet branding can do wonders for a corporation’s image – a big beautiful site using the latest technologies really does impact a consumer’s view of the company. But don’t mistake these sites as sales vehicles – there’s no call to action, no sales copy in most cases – and when was the last time you saw a Fortune 400 company come up on the first page of results at Google, Yahoo or Bing?

To listen to an Audio Version of this Internet marketing article, click this arrow:

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These Internet branding sites, often costing a million dollars or more to build and operate, are just one part of advertising agencies marketing mixes – they’re not designed to drive traffic or make sales. That part is left to other areas of the mix, like TV, radio, print ads in newspapers and magazines and even adding the URL to product labels.

As a small business owner, however, you can’t compete on that scale due to budget – but you shouldn’t be trying to copy them online anyway! Think about your goals online:

* To reach a wider market
* To increase your market share in your existing market
* To sell more of your products and services
* To increase your bottom line profits

In order to accomplish those 4 goals while keeping your financial and time investments under control, take a page from the full-time professional Internet marketers. Familiar with all of the new marketing strategies online, in the majority of cases they now opt for business blog marketing over static web sites.

Free blog marketing is easy to set up, costs almost nothing to host and is designed for the best possible search engine optimization with the least fuss. A small business marketing blog can be updated in real time by anyone on your staff – or you yourself – as simply as typing a letter. No waiting for advertising agencies to make each update, and no large bills for their time and efforts, either!

Best of all, using any of the great blog tutorials on marketing using blogs, you can set up your first blog in under an hour – for an offline small business it’s easy to see that blogs and marketing should go hand in hand once you decide on your blog strategy. There really is no doubt that using blogs for marketing is the premiere choice given today’s state of the Internet.

Of all the new marketing strategies emerging from the World Wide Web, it’s easy to see that business blog marketing should be the first technique added to your small business marketing strategy development – after all, what other medium costs so little to develop and has a growing audience for your sales message every day?

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PowerStart Marketing Mentor Doug Champigny

Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970’s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program at http://www.PowerStart2010.com and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program at http://www.affiliate-marketing-powerstart.info and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well. Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!

Technorati Tags: business blog marketing, new marketing strategies, small business, blogs, marketing, Internet branding

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How To Market A Product Online – Marketing Tips For Offline Businesses

June 13, 2010 | In marketing | Comments(4)

How To Market A Product Online – Marketing Tips For Offline Businesses

One of the most common questions from the offline business community concerns how to market a product online. It’s not that they don’t know how to do marketing – it’s just that they need new marketing strategies for dealing with the online market.

The biggest difference between the online and offline worlds is the size of the market – while many manufacturers will have offices in numerous countries, the online market is truly global – especially if you have translations available for your promotional materials and customer service available in many languages.

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The second issue that must be part of your new marketing strategies is the physical size of the market – is your product easily shipped world-wide? Or is your packaging and packing going to need upgrading before shipping to another continent? And will your product still be competitively priced vis-a-vis local suppliers once the shipping charges are added on? If not, you’re better to focus your online promotions to promoting local, regional and national sales.

Depending on the value of your products, you may need to discuss payment options with your financial institution as well. While low and moderately priced items can easily be handled through credit cards or online services like PayPal, big-ticket items may require the use of wire transfers with or without escrow, so be certain to consult the necessary professionals first before developing your new marketing strategies – possible financial pitfalls like these require prudent solutions before your marketing strategy development process begins.

Assuming all is well with these and any related issues, however, a bit of time to study internet marketing practices currently in use will help a lot in learning how to market a product online. For instance, a blog is simple to set up and maintain, whereas a full-blown website will not only cost you money to develop but also may delay updates while you wait for updates to your site to be completed by your web design company. Conversely, a blog can be updated by any of your office or marketing staff almost instantly.

Since nowadays most offline businesses have a web presence you’ll be safe in assuming your competition does too, so that of and by itself won’t usually be enough to give you a competitive edge – you’ll need to use some of the new marketing strategies utilized by professional Internet marketers as well.

Business article marketing is coming into it’s own online, since most users – your customers included – go online looking for information. Instead of just posting relevant information on your blog, develop an article marketing strategy that gets the info out to the main article directories as well. If neither you nor your staff are familiar with business article marketing yet, go to a couple of the biggest article directories and read through some of the free marketing articles they publish to see how it’s done.

Web 2.0 sites can be well used by offline businesses too, especially advanced methods like incorporating your customer service into your Twitter marketing strategy. A site like Twitter lets your customers worldwide reach your customer service reps instantly to diffuse any potential issues, and giving them specials they can offer just as Twitter promotions can boost your Twitter sales rapidly while keeping your customer base that much happier.

Your offline business can benefit greatly from learning how to market a product online, but first study internet marketing trends and these marketing tips and incorporate them into your marketing strategy development. If you don’t have the time yourself, consider having one or more of your staff trained in the new marketing strategies – it could make a major difference to your bottom line!

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Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970’s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program at http://www.PowerStart2010.com and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program at http://www.affiliate-marketing-powerstart.info and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well. Doug is a regular speaker at many of the Internet marketing and affiliate marketing conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!

Technorati Tags: new marketing strategies, how to market a product, how to do marketing, marketing strategy development, marketing tips

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Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Coaching Programs

April 30, 2010 | In Affiliate Marketing Coaching, Doug Champigny, Internet Marketing Coaching, Marketing Mentoring | Comments(4)

So far 2010 has been a big year for us, most notably for the launch of our PowerStart coaching programs. After years of providing only high-end private coaching to advanced online marketers, we decided to offer Internet marketing coaching and affiliate marketing coaching programs to new and mid-level marketers as well – programs that would be open to the public as opposed to our earlier ones.

I used my speaking gig at Mark Hendricks’ Internet Super Stars Conference to announce the programs to the marketing community and immediately filled the first session for our 4-week crash course in Internet marketing. This high-intensity hands-on course includes weekly live webinars and over 1.5 gigs of training videos created for, and available only through, the PowerStart Internet Marketing coaching program.

Since then, the course has run each month for the past 3 months with fantastic feedback from our coaching students, as you can see from the video testimonials they’ve sent us. Most didn’t believe they could accomplish so much online in just 4 weeks, but happily they’re all believers now!

Then at the start of this month (April 2010) we launched our affiliate marketing mentoring program using the same format but over 8 weeks instead of four, with live webinars every two weeks and a workbook and training videos for step-by-step guidance through the two weeks between each webinar. While we’re just reaching the mid-point of the first 8-week session, the early feedback from our Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program indicates this program will be just as well received as our Internet marketing coaching has been.

As the year rolls on we’ll be adding to the courses offered, including live coaching and/or home-study courses in search engine optimization, traffic generation strategies, opt-in list building, content creation and more, so be sure to keep your eyes open for those as they’re released! Additionally, if you’re in the Philadelphia, PA area I’ll be speaking at JVAlert in mid-May and also at the Niche Affiliate Marketing Seminar (NAMS) in Atlanta Georgia in August – please come up and introduce yourself if you’re at either event!

In the meantime I suggest you give serious consideration to enrolling in either the Internet Marketing coaching program or the Affiliate Marketing coaching program – I’d love to help you make 2010 the year you turn it all around and get on track for your own dream lifestyle!

Technorati Tags: Internet marketing coaching, affiliate marketing coaching, marketing mentor Doug Champigny, speaker Doug Champigny, marketing coach Doug Champigny

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New Must-Have Twitter Tool – First Truly Viral Traffic Tool For Twitter!

March 25, 2010 | In Advanced Twitter Marketing, Free Resources, Free Tools, Internet Marketing, Tweet Traffic Rush, Twitter, Viral Marketing, marketing on Twitter, targeted traffic | Comments(0)

As the author of Advanced Twitter Marketing (now called Advanced Marketing on Twitter for legal reasons) and owner of the Advanced Twitter Marketing blog and the Road To Twitter Success website, it’s only natural that most people bringing out a new tool for Twitter users usually contact me for my opinion of their product and to see if I’ll feature it in our e-zine or on our blog.

So it was no surprise that I was sent the info about this new Tweet Traffic Rush from my friend Raamakant S. What was surprising though is the amazing potential I personally see for this new system – both to build your Twitter Following and to build traffic to your blogs, salespages, squeeze pages and affiliate links – all on autopilot! Do 10-15 minutes work setting this up and then let your friends and followers know about it – mail it to your e-zine, blog about it, etc. Then sit back and watch it’s potential for YOU grow virally for months, maybe even years down the road, all virtually hands-free after that first 15 minutes of setup and your initial push for the system!

Here’s part of what the site has to say about it…

You might have noticed that Twitter is the biggest news on the internet now. With some hundreds of thousands of new people joining Twitter each day, it is emerging as one of the largest and fastest growing social networking sites at this time.

As there are millions of people joining up to and logging into Twitter everyday, Twitter turns out a bigger and better opportunity to get you loads of targeted traffic to your website.

Though you can access millions of people on Twitter, you will need to work aptly in reaching out to them correctly. Here is where Tweet Traffic Rush can help you out.

Tweet Traffic Rush is the easiest, fastest and most efficient way to get a flood of laser targeted visitors to your site through Twitter and this is… Absolutely FREE!

With Tweet Traffic Rush, you will be able to use Twitter to spread your marketing messages virally and work in creating an Avalanche of FREE Targeted Traffic to Your Website in a very short time.

And how it works?

All you do is sign up for a Free account. Then you will need to add your twitter username in an appropriate category so as to get a tiny piece of widget code. And once you add this widget code to your websites, blogs or social networking sites, you’ll start getting more targeted visitors to your site.

If you are tired of and feel difficulty in spreading your marketing messages across the net, Tweet Traffic Rush can get you thousands of visitors to your site on autopilot.

Click on the Link and Create Your FREE Account NOW!

Technorati Tags: Tweet Traffic Rush, Twitter traffic rush, traffic from twitter, tweet rush

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I Was Just Checking Out Your New Internet Marketing Videos…

February 11, 2010 | In Online Video, Video Marketing | Comments(2)

I was just checking out your new Internet marketing videos, and I must say I’m impressed! Uh, hang on – let me backtrack here a bit…

Yes, the quality and styling of the Internet marketing videos and affiliate marketing videos really did impress me – as they will everyone who sees them.

But they’re not actually yours yet, truth be told…

First, you have to get on the announcement list so you know when the doors open. Next, you have to act quickly when they do, because clients will only be accepted for four days – four days next week, in fact.

Then, and only then, you’ll have to tell them each month what your new video will be about – what product, service or squeeze page it’ll be promoting. You see, these are custom made videos, one per month, for whatever YOU want a video for – they can be Internet marketing based, affiliate marketing based – even videos for promoting an offline business! It’s entirely up to you once you’re a member of iFlash Videos Monthly.

So you see, it wasn’t exactly YOUR videos I saw, it was affiliate marketing videos and Internet marketing videos that iFlash has produced for it’s current customers, mostly advertising agencies who pay a LOT more for the same video services – in fact, even if you’re a video expert, I doubt you can justify the time to do your own videos when you can get them this cheap.

But because this video creation service is being offered for so little an outlay each month, they’re only willing to accept new members for 4 days – if you’re serious about moving ahead in your online business or seriously promoting an offline business, be sure to get on the iFlash announcement list today!

Technorati Tags: videos for Internet marketing, videos for affiliate marketing, iFlash Videos Monthly

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Affiliate Marketing Advice from Frank Michaels of Secret Affiliate Income

February 5, 2010 | In Affiliate Marketing, Work-At-Home Businesses, making money online | Comments(0)

Affiliate Marketing Advice from Frank Michaels of Secret Affiliate Income

Affiliate marketing is one of the best methods to earn quick money through the internet. It is a low cost business because you do not have to fork out a large sum of capital, unlike offline business where huge capital is involved. For online business, you can begin with a simple website and work your way into a full time business.

For affiliate marketing, the first thing you need to do is to find products or services which you want sell. Your main objective would be to drive targeted traffic to your website, so that they will buy the product through your link, and you will be able to earn commissions this way.

There are many ways for you to drive traffic online, you can use pay per click method, article writing or by building a list of responsive prospects. Which ever method you use, the main thing is to drive targeted traffic to your site, you will need to be precise and provide your prospects with a solution that they are looking for exactly.

As for pay per click affiliate (PPC) marketing strategy, you will set up small ads with a link back to your site. When it comes to PPC, it is crucial that you choose those highly targeted keywords for your niche for a better conversion and in turn, much higher revenue percentage. Same goes for article marketing and list building methods.

As an affiliate marketer, your main task would be to generate targeted traffic for your merchant. You need to keep in mind that those traffic that you drive to the site will eventually turn into money for you.

About The Author:

Frank Michaels is a successful affiliate market who has earned his first pot of gold online! He has also helped hundreds of people to start their own affiliate marketing business. Cut your learning curve in half and stop wasting your time and money on the unknowns. Find out how you can start your own affiliate marketing business with his Secret Affiliate Income today!

Technorati Tags: secret affiliate income, Frank Michaels Secret Affiliate Income, secret affiliate income advice, affiliate marketing advice, affiliate marketing tips, affiliate marketing

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Internet Marketers – Have You Done All Your Backups Recently?

December 28, 2009 | In Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Work-At-Home Businesses, online marketing | Comments(7)

Internet Marketers – Have You Done All Your Backups Recently?

There’s a new decade looming, and if the past 10 years is any indication, Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, niche marketing and blogging will create new millionaires before the new decade ends… There have been so many new advances in online marketing in the last 10 years that the industry doesn’t even resemble it’s former self these days. Blogging, social bookmarking, Web 2.0 sites, the rise of Google, Bing and Yahoo! have all helped to define the current state of this business, and more people are getting into affiliate marketing and related work-at-home businesses than ever before!

Are you ready for the new decade? For all the reasons I posted on my Internet marketing blog you should be planning out the decade, not just the new year… Be sure the pursuit of your goals and your dreams is on track – you have to know where you’re headed to ever get there, right? Know the path you want to follow over the next decade, then focus on what that means for the new year.

But as marketers, most of us focus just on making sales, letting the maintenance tasks fall by the wayside – is that true for you too? If so, this is an important chance to get some of it done and protect our online business as we head into the new decade. Allot one day during the holidays to this vastly important task…

Protect Your Online Business – Back Everything Up Now!

There are so many ways that a ‘data failure’ can cause a catastrophe in your Internet marketing or affiliate marketing business – failing to have backup copies of ALL data crucial to our online business can at least set you WAY back, if not knock you right out of the game… Don’t think you need to back up your hard drive? Ever had (or even heard of) a hard drive crash? What if you woke up tomorrow and couldn’t access ANY of the programs, products or information currently residing only on your computer? Would that affect your bottom line in 2010?

What if you went to log into your autoresponder tomorrow to send out your e-zine, only to find the company whose services you use had gone belly-up? Could you survive financially while you started building your mailing list from the bottom up once again? The financial crash in the US in 2008-2009 and the DotCom bubble burst early in the last decade both demonstrate that even huge companies with millions in funding can disappear overnight – so how secure is your list if your autoresponder company has the only copy?

Is your blog one of your main sources of traffic generation to our Internet marketing, niche marketing and affiliate marketing opportunities? How long would it take you to get it back up and running if some shmuck attacked it tomorrow and messed it all up for you – or worse yet hijacked it and pointed it toward banned materials? Really want to lose the benefits you have built up from all those links, all those pages indexed in the search engines?

Each of those is a scary scenario, isn’t it? It’s easy to forget our entire livelihood as Internet marketers is based on electrons that can be wiped out in seconds… But we don’t need to be defenseless – we can go a long way towards protecting our online businesses with very little time and money invested in it. Here’s a few suggestions…

Backing Up Hard Drives

Schedule a day THIS WEEK to do your backups. Start by getting an external drive, 1 TB or larger, and hooking it up to your computers and/or laptops via USB. Use the included software or a program like GoodSync to copy all your files from each of your machines onto the backup drive, creating one folder for each machine so you don’t overwrite any important info that’s on each machine. Once they’re all backed up, disconnect the drive and turn it off – don’t leave it connected where a virus or hacker might access it!

Backing Up Mailing Lists

Most reputable autoresponder services have an ‘Export’ function, though you may have to hunt a bit for it. Before using it though, read the docs or contact their customer service to be sure it merely gives you a backup copy as opposed to also removing them from your list there. While you should be fine, some of the early companies had it set to use the link as a ‘remove to a file’ function – I don’t think any of today’s autoresponder services are set up that way, but better safe than sorry, right? Again, once you have the backup list of subscribers, turn on your external drive and ad a copy there, remembering to turn it off and disconnect it immediately afterward.

Backing Up Blogs

I know there are WordPress plugins for this now, but I can’t comment on how well they work or even which ones work best as I’ve never used them – anything this important I prefer to do manually to make sure everything’s right. I start by making a new folder for the backup and using FTP software to download the entire blog folder or site. This ensures I have a clean copy of all the WordPress files including any customizations I’ve done to the theme, and any graphics, videos, etc. that I’ve uploaded to the site over time.

Understand, though, that unlike backing up a web site, merely FTPing down the files on your site ISN’T a complete backup – your posts aren’t included in those files! To get those, in your WordPress Dashboard, choose Tools from the left column, then click the ‘Export’ link and follow along. For ultimate safety, next go to your site’s Control Panel and do a backup on your blog’s database as well. Once again, be sure to back these all up to your external USB drive.

Backing Up E-Mails, Contacts, Etc.

Depending on what technologies you use that are crucial to your day-to-day operations, there are still a few more backups to do before you’re done. Go into whichever e-mail program you use and back up both your contacts and your e-mail folders. Each does this in a different process, so use the Help menu if you’re not familiar with the process. Next, backup your contacts in Skype, Yahoo & MSN messengers if you use them – again, use the help feature if you don’t know the process.

Backing Up Passwords, Logins, ID’s

Every day you visit certain sites you’re connected with or services you’re using – this is especially true in affiliate marketing, but also in Internet marketing, niche marketing and blogging. And a great many of those require special login URLs, user or affiliate ID’s, passwords, etc. For these I recommend a totally different type of backup – a hard copy!

I will not now, nor never have advocated people storing their passwords, especially a list of ID’s and passwords, on their computer. To me, it’s just too insecure and nothing more than bait to unsavory types. Pick up a hardcover book of blank lined pages at the dollar store and record them in that. JUST BE SURE to store the book in the safest location you can, to prevent anyone grabbing it, copying it, or spilling anything on it!

There are further steps you can take, like storing the backup drive and password book in a fireproof safe, keeping copies of both at an offsite location – even renting a safety deposit box to keep them in. Only YOU can decide what lengths you want (a can afford) to go to to protect your information and your business…

As to ongoing protection for your data, be sure to use a reputable virus scanner/protection program, a spyware blocker like SpyBot & TeaTimer, and check your blogs regularly with a plugin like exploit-scanner. The small time and financial investment in a full-protection system is far less than what it could cost you to recover your Internet marketing, niche marketing or affiliate marketing business after an attack on your unprotected data and programs!

Secure your work-at-home business now following the steps above, and sail into the new decade ready to skyrocket your lifestyle knowing you’ve done what you can to protect your online income!

About The Author…

Internet Marketing Mentor & Speaker Doug Champigny

Doug Champigny is a world-famous Internet Marketing mentor & speaker and a recognized super-affiliate who has been online full-time since 1996. Be sure to visit his DougChampigny.com Internet Marketing Blog, his Captain-Affiliate.com Affiliate Training Blog and to follow Doug on Twitter!

Technorati Tags: backing up data, backing up blogs, backing up contacts, Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, niche marketing, work-at-home businesses

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Using video for additional traffic

December 18, 2009 | In marketing | Comments(4)

Mike Paetzold back for the final day of my stop here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. Wow, seems like I just got here and it is ending already. Where did the time go?

Well let’s get started. Today the topic will be using videos for traffic. If you are looking for more ways to get traffic I strongly recommend Doug’s Top Traffic Tips.

Video is a format that has really come of age online. Now video has become much more popular primarily because of high speed connections. Before DSL and cable became common in households it was impossible to use video. Most people would not be able to download it and get it to stream when high speed was a 56k modem

Now with the exception of some remote areas the majority of people have access to some type of high speed internet connection. This has led to the popularity of video sharing sites like You Tube.

For some video has become their preferred way to get information. The odds are that even if you are reading this here that you get the bulk of your news from television already. You only need to look at the problems of the newspapers to make a profit to see that.

Which brings us to two questions. How do we take advantage of it? How hard is it to do?

Let’s answer the second question first only because I like to shake things up. The answer is…

it depends.

Now before you get all mad at me and I know that last answer got you a bit miffed it definitely is true.

It can be easy to do screen capture or talk over a power point presentation or just speak into your web camera or a flip camera. It can be extremely difficult if you want to create TV quality action videos with green screens and special effects.

You only need the easy version to be able to get traffic from it.

All you would need to do is take an article you created and convert it to a power point presentation, read the article as you go through the slides while recording it. A software like Camtasia can handle that quite easily.

If you are tight on dollars you can do it with free tools like Open Office and Cam Studio. It is bit more work with the free tools but what isn’t? You always pay with time or money.

Either way create the video and upload it to the various video sharing sites. (Tube Mogul is a free service that will upload to multiple sites for you.) Use the url you would like to see people visit to start your description, add in your keywords and you have a video that others can use. (Note: Always do the full url http://yourdomain.com not www.yourdomain.com so that it will be clickable in your description.)

This will give you another venue for people to find your information in a format that they like. It works well using the same content.

In fact quite often I will use the same content for each of the 4 ways I have written about this week.

Create a blog post –> Use it to submit an article (just add a sig file) –> Convert the article to power point and record you reading it –> Strip out the audio and use that as a podcast.

The power in using your content in all of the ways is that you can reach a different audience with each form but you only need to create the basic content one time.

Once you have your initial blog post you can easily make that into the other 3 forms in a half hour once you have done it a few times. The Sunday Night Cash Plan will walk you through exactly how to do that.

I hope you have found my visit here to be helpful in growing your business and leveraging what you already do to get even more traffic.

The Old Bald Guy Blog Tour is going on a hiatus for two weeks to spend time with family and friends over the holidays. It will return in two weeks and the next stop will be at Twitter Marketing Products beginning January 4th.

Have a great holiday and I’ll catch up with you next year.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends.

You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

Follow Mike on Twitter

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