Brainstorming – If you know what your target market wants/needs, then you’re already half way home. If you still havn’t figured this out, then I recommend you jump on this.

I’ve found the best way to brainstorm is to write your ideas, experiences, and knowledge down on a piece of paper, then do research to determine what people are looking for on the net.

Research – To determine if your product, idea, or info-knowledge will fly, you must do research. Go to Google Keyword Tool and see how many times people were searching related phrases on what you want to create your product around.

This will give you an idea if it is a viable product. Also do a straight search in Google and Yahoo for your keywords and see what turns up. Investigate some of the sites, you may be surprised that you have a completely unique method differing from your competitors – which is a good thing.

Visit forums, blogs, and even Yahoo Answers to see what people in your niche are asking. Obviously if you see 50 people asking the same thing, then you’ve stumbled upon something!

Writing – If you think your ebook or guide may fly, then it is time to get down and dirty and start creating it! It’s as simple as starting to write in a Word or other document file. I prefer Open Office. It’s 100% free not to mention it exports to PDF with one click, something Microsoft Word does not have built in.

Next, you can create an ebook cover. Yes, I know, you’re on a tight budget, so . . .
look to the Warrior Forum to find someone that can create an ebook cover for under $10.

So now you’re probably wondering… why in the world would you want to create your own product if you are just starting out?

Simple… it’s an 8 letter word…

LEVERAGE!

Once you create your own product, you can virtually do anything with it. Sell it, give it away as a bonus, or even give it away for an opt in. Product creation is some of the best time you can invest into your business as this product is something you can reuse over and over again. No one will be able to take that product away from you.

Let me know what you think guys. How many products have you created? What ways have you leveraged your older products?

1. First, make sure you put up a good landing page. Your landing page should only be asking for 1 simple action… to have your visitor supply an email address. An excess amount of buttons and page links will only take away from your subscribers.
2. Offer your visitors the opportunity to opt-in to your mailing list for something of value. This is niche specific. If you have a website for “weight loss” you can give away a specific workout or diet for an opt in. The process of opting in should be considered the same as any monetary transaction.
3. Make sure any freebies you give away are of the highest quality, because the subscribers on your list will judge the worthiness of your products and services based on the freebies they get.
4. Make sure you keep your lead’s information private. If you tell your leads you will not share his or her personal information, then don’t share it with anyone. You will ruin your reputation, and word spreads fast on the Internet.
5. Provide top-notch customer service. This is THE number one way to stay ahead of the game. If your customers are happy and you resolve their questions and complaints immediately, then you will win their loyalty and trust. I personally get 2-5 emails a day asking for additional information and help. I spend probably an hour each day providing this additional information.
6. Like the previous bullet, respond to your leads’s complaints or inquiries immediately. The goal in mind should always be to satisfy your potential customers. Obviously there will be people out there that complain about anything, but if enough people complain about the same thing, you know a greater problem exists.
7. When emailing your list, be sure to provide quality content. One of my biggest pet peeves are the self-proclaimed “gurus” promoting product after product to their list. This will make money, but you’ll also have no relationship with your subscribers. Always build a relationship with your leads. A blog is a great way to do this.
8. Remain truthful and honest in all you do. A customer will sniff out a scam faster than a dog will a bone. Don’t lie, don’t trick, and don’t steal.

If you are not building a list or collecting leads in your online business, whether as an affiliate or product owner, then you’re seriously leaving an unmeasurable amount of money on the table. Leads and traffic are the lifeblood of any business, so list-building should be one of your main priorities!

Leave me a comment below on what your major concerns are with list-building.

Let me know what you think!

Just looking at many of the products on Clickbank or the Warrior Special Offers Forum, I notice that most of the products are trying to be the “end all, be all” product. Unfortunately, this type of mentality is extremely unsuccessful.

Okay, lets take a timeout to explain more about what your USP can include.

It doesn’t matter if you have your own product or an affiliate website. This thought process should be done no matter what business model you are using.

1. Identify your USP.

The first thing you must do is identify your unique selling point. Remember, you want your USP to be the best in the industry.

Are you offering the lowest price? Are you offering the most bonuses? (works extremely well for affiliate websites.) Do you have a better guarantee?

I can go on and on asking these questions, but identifying your USP doesn’t have to be a difficult process. Simply find that one specific area in which your offer is the best, and stress that area in all facets of your business.

2. Implement your USP on your sales page.

Okay, so now you have identified your USP. Now you have to implement it into your sales-page, sales-video, affiliate website, etc. You want every single person exposed to your offer to notice your USP. Mention it multiple times and make it a big deal.

3. Implement your USP in your advertising.

Many people have no problem implementing their USP into their sales-page, but one thing I’ve noticed is that many people and companies forget to use it in their advertising.

Whether you’re using PPC or free traffic methods such as article marketing, don’t be afraid to mention your USP.

For example, if you are running a banner ad on a targeted niche site, the ad could read something like this:

“We sell the same product as Company A – at 75% Less”

Short and simple.

Let me know your unique selling propositions in the comments area. I always love to hear how people are making their offers more unique!

1. You need the ability to determine the needs and wants of your target audience.

When checking many of the Internet marketing forums, I see question after question asking what niche is the best to enter. I find these threads quite humorous because I just do not understand how an entrepreneur/marketer can ask that question.

Every market usually has buyers located somewhere, and it is just your responsibility to find the appropriate angle to sell to them. By understanding your niche’s strongest needs and wants, you will have no problem finding that elusive angle.

Its so simple, give your target audience what they want, and they will give you cash for it in return.

2. You need to take baby steps to achieve giant results.

Yet another bane to us entrepreneurs. We all want huge results fast with the minimum amount of work.

Unfortunately, this attitude is what makes 95%+ of entrepreneurs online fail.

Understand that results will have a snowball effect. At the beginning, you might see your business taking the baby steps I mentioned above, but as the ball keeps rolling, these baby steps will be those of a giant.

Focus on achieving a small result, then expand on that success. Focus on the stuff that works.

3. You must create a product or service that will genuinely help your customers improve their life in some way.

Never, and I repeat, NEVER put out a product that you would not buy yourself.

When someone buys your product, they view that product in a way that represents your reputation as well.

Back in bullet one you should have determined the wants and needs of your target market. Provide the solution to those needs, and you will will have no problem providing a quality product.

4. You always need to maintain an honest business through every transaction.

“The customer is always right.”

This might seem obvious, but you truly need to follow this well-known mantra.

If someone wants a refund, give them one. If someone is unhappy, find a way to make them happy. Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Do anything to make them pleased with your product.

Having strong customer support will keep your customers coming back to purchase from you year after year.

5. You need to develop perseverance for the days that your business might not be looking upward.

Failure is something everyone deals with at one point in their business career or another. The most successful people are the ones who overcame their failures and flourished because of them.

Not to sound all cliche, but when your back is against the wall, you will find out what you’re truly made of.

If something is bothering you, take care of it as soon as possible. I know there are tasks that all of us hate to do, but sometimes it’s better just to get them out of the way before they grow into something larger.

6. You must over-deliver with every product or service to keep your customers coming back for more.

Back in bullet number three, I mentioned that you should never put out a product that you wouldn’t buy yourself. In this bullet point, I want to take it one step further…

Over-deliver in everything area in which you will have communication with potential customers. Whether its a blog post or a bonus for a product; give your customers more than they expect. By giving more and providing your best information, your customers/leads will be happy to give you what you want.

7. You need to create a testing system to track every aspect of your business no matter what your experience level.

I see so many new marketers spread out way to thin. They want to be the master of everything before they start seeing results in any one particular area.

I must admit, I was the same way. When I first started out, I bought information product after information product hoping to find that magic bullet that connected all the dots. Fortunately, I realized that magic bullet doesn’t exist.

You should not and do not need to know everything to get started. Find something that has worked for another, and make it work yourself.

Obviously, make sure this task interests you. We all know article marketing works for traffic generation, but if you hate writing articles, then do not waste your time!

By testing, you’ll be able to see what technique is most worth your time. You can then focus more on that aspect of your business to increase your results dramatically.

8. You always should reinvest a certain amount of your revenue back into your business for growth.

This pretty much speaks for itself. I mentioned baby steps to get the snowball rolling above, but by reinvesting the money you already earned, that snowball will start rolling a hell of a lot faster.

Once you have some spare cash, I recommend you create a system and outsource that system. The more people you have focusing on the task you found that worked, the more money you’ll make.

I hope this post points you in the right direction and allows you to have the right mentality in this online marketing world.

I would love to know what you think. Leave me some comments below!

If you like to see huge numbers to your site, then this technique is not for you.  But if you like to see excellent conversions and super targeted traffic, then this traffic generation technique is going to rock your world.

Okay, I’m done with hype.  Lets cut to the goodies.

My number one traffic generation technique which gives me the most leads is through forums.  That’s right folks… forums.

Marketing is all about getting in front of the people that are looking to solve a particular problem.  Forums are where these people gather.  Additionally, you can gain some authority within your niche by simply posting to forums.

Before I get into a step by step process on how to get these visitors to your site, I want to show you a great way to find forums in any niche you are entering.

Step 1: Find Your Forums

www.Big-Boards.com is an awesome forum directory.  Simply go there, type in your main niche keyword, and you’ll get a great list of forums in which you can begin posting.  Every forum you find might not be worth posting to though.  Using Big-Boards, find the top 2 most active forums with the most members.

If Big-Boards didn’t help you find any smaller niche forums, simply go to Google and type in “YOUR KEYWORD + FORUMS”.  You should be able to find a few additionally forums using this simple search.

Step 2: Setting Up Your Signature

The main way you will drive traffic to your site is through your forum signature.  Most forums allow you to have a signature at the end of every post where you can include a link to your website.

This link should include a specific call to action.  Tell the people what they are going to get and how fast they could see results.

For example:
If I was posting to a “relationship break up” forum, my signature would be something like “Click Here To Receive 10 Ways To Get Your Ex Back Within 1 Week”.  I obviously would be linked to a blog post or squeeze page providing the information I am advertising.

That’s all there is to it when it comes to your advertisements.

Step 3: Exposure

Now its time to get some exposure.  Having a posting schedule is a great way to keep things organized and see the best results.  Remember, posting for a single day and expecting to see hundreds of targeted visitors to your site will not happen.

Persistence and diligence is key!

Each day you should try to make 10-15 helpful posts to threads asking questions within the forum.  You need to contribute.  Like in blog commenting, do not post something like “great post” or “thanks for the information”.  Always try to contribute some additional information to the conversation so you can be noticed.

Additionally, you should try to start 1 thread every single day.  This is almost the same as a blog post.  After you post, be sure to continue to comment and answer others questions within that thread.  Not only will this increase your authority, but your thread will continually be bumped to the top of the active threads allowing your signature to be seen by more people.

That’s all there is to it.  Stick by a posting schedule for a few weeks/months, and you will be astonished at how many targeted leads you will get.

If this seems like too much work, outsourcing this is extremely easy.

Let me know me what you think.  Be sure to share some of your results in the comments area!

Obviously by reading the title, you can probably figure out this post is going to concern Twitter.

The first time I heard of Twitter, my response was: “What in the world is a Twitter?”

I’m sure many of you had the same response.  To this day, I wonder how micro-blogging (I guess that’s the fancy term they give to status updates) became so damn popular.  Twitter is absolutely huge, and I’m sure most have heard of it (and if you haven’t, crawl out of that cave!)

So… How Can Twitter Bring Some Free Traffic?

There is so much to learn about Twitter, but this post is going to be a quick crash course.

Let’s take a step back here and try to figure out why Twitter is so powerful.  Like all social media, the community makes up the strongest aspect.  Anytime people gather looking for information, it can be a marketing playground.  You just have to find the crowd.

Twitter is the same way.  Your goal should be to network and communicate with people interested in your niche.  Assuming you already have an account, the best way to do this is to follow them first.

I see so many people out there who only follow the people they are interested in and then wonder why no one follows them back.  Obviously Twitter was meant for this reason, but then again, we aren’t using Twitter just to communicate with people we are interested in.

By following other Tweeters first and communicating with these people via retweets and mentions (@replys), your follower count should increase rather quickly.  A lot of people (around 20-30%) will follow you back just for following them.

The best way to find people within in your niche is to use the Twitter search with specific niche keywords.  As you go through the search results, you can easily enter into other people’s conversations who are talking about your niche.

Your number one goal should be to get more followers as quickly as possible, but without going against Twitter’s terms.  Please do not follow 2,000 people in a single day, then come back here complaining that your account got banned!  From personal experience, I’ve found that following around 100 a day when you’re just getting started is perfectly fine.  When your account grows larger past the 2,000 mark, you can follow up to 250 a day.

By just jumping on Twitter every day for a half hour or so, you could easily have a Twitter of 2,000 within a month.

Also, if your account is relatively new, I wouldn’t go tweeting all your links just yet because people will just see you a spammer.

That’s pretty much all there is to it.  Later on I will write about more specific functions of Twitter, but for right now, this is enough for you to get started using Twitter!

Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think!  Also, leave your twitter profile for some exposure!

Make sure that you already have checked out the three previous posts.

• The Traffic Generation Kick-off: Blog Commenting Power!

• The Traffic Generation Kick-off: Document Sharing Case Study

• The Traffic Generation Kick-off: Video Marketing Made Easy

Tomorrow I’m going to write a post on my favorite traffic generation strategy.  Stay tuned!

I know what you’re thinking…

Right now you’re telling yourself that you do not want to get into video marketing until you have the funds to make high quality videos.  Hopefully by the end of this post, your opinion has changed.

Here are some statistics for you taken by comScore, Inc (NASDAQ: SCOR), a well known digital marketing intelligence agency:

* 78.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* The average online video viewer watched 385 minutes of video, or 6.4 hours.
* 107.1 million viewers watched 6.8 billion videos on YouTube.com (63.5 videos per viewer).
* 49 million viewers watched 387 million videos on MySpace.com (7.9 videos per viewer).
* Hulu accounted for 2.4 percent of videos viewed, but 4.2 percent of all minutes spent watching online video.
* The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes.

Now I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell would want to tap into some of those statistics.

Since Google bought YouTube back in 2006, many of their videos have been appearing on the first page of Google’s search results.

This is prime real estate for Internet marketers to get that coveted first page ranking for moderate traffic keywords.

How Powerful Is Video Marketing?

Well lets take a look at the keyword “How to ride a bike”.

Below is a screenshot of the Google search results:

As you can see, a YouTube video is within the top 4 spots with over 70 million competing pages.  Not too shabby!  When I clicked on the video, it was some low-tech 1980′s guy (sorry if you are a reader of this blog) showing people how to ride a bike.  It has 70,000+ views so far.

Additionally, I did some keyword research on this term to find out exactly how many searches this keyword gets per month.

(Click on the picture to enlarge)

According to Google, this term is getting 33,000+ searches per month!  Seems like a lot of people want to learn how to ride a bike.

Anyhow, time to get down to the important stuff… I’m sure you want to know how to get a ranking in Google.

I’m not going to try to explain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in this post, but basically Google rankings are a popularity contest.  The more backlinks (links from other people’s sites linking back to your site) you have, the better search engine love you’ll get.

A quick way to determine your competitions backlinks is to use Yahoo’s site explorer.  Don’t worry, its completely free.

As you can see, this video only has 12 backlinks pointing to it!  Basically, in theory, all you would have to do to grab this spot (if you had a video on “how to ride a bike”) is to out promote your competition by building more backlnks.

Two posts ago I showed you how to comment on blog posts.  This is a great way to build backlinks to your content and gain some authority in Google’s eyes.

I hoped this opened your eyes to the power of video marketing.  Believe it or not, I find the competition to be much less in the video directories (YouTube, Metacafe, etc.) than in most article directories.

Don’t worry about the quality of your videos.  A simple PowerPoint presentation recorded with a free screen-capture software called Camstudio is all you need.  Throw in a voice-over if you’re feeling fancy and you’re done!

A pretty cool piece of software that has gotten some good reviews on the Warrior Forum is GFX Video Writer. (not an affiliate link)  Basically what the software does is create the video for you from an article you’ve already written.  Pretty easy if you ask me.

Okay, that’s all for today!  Get out there and start making some videos for your selected niche!

Monday and Tuesday I’ll reveal my two favorite traffic generation tactics!  Stay tuned!

I want to know what you think, so leave me some comments please.

This method might seem odd, you might even be in disbelief, but I highly recommend you go out and try it before you decide for yourself.

To start things, I have been doing article marketing for nearly 2 years.  I can honestly say that the competition is outrageous at this point.  I’m sure many of you can agree with that statement as most of your articles only receive 10-50 views in their lifetime and get anywhere from 5-10 clicks.

Now, I don’t know you about you, but my time is worth a hell of a lot more than writing a single article to only get 5-10 visitors to my website.  Not to mention, it is nearly impossible to get your articles ranked for good keywords with the major article directories (ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, etc.) due to your competition already beating you to the punch.

Not only that, but the article directories themselves are getting more strict by the month.  They are accepting less and placing more and more ads onto their sites, therefore lessening your clickthrough rate.

I’ve created a case study showing how I have had decent results using a different type of content site.  Now you have to understand that the numbers you are about to see are not all that impressive, but the potential is huge.  Not to mention that you’re going to be astonished with my final point (don’t go skipping to the end! Read the whole article!)

If you haven’t heard, Google has been giving lots of love to document sharing sites such as Docstoc.com and Scribd.com.

What sets these sites apart from other article directories is that you can upload a PDF or DOC file straight onto the sites.  Additionally you have complete control of the content you upload.

And by complete control, I mean there is no approval time (you post it, it goes live immediately) and you can post links wherever you want in the document (no bio box!)  I only recommend three call to action links though per document.  One at the top under your title, one in the middle, and one at the end of your document will suffice.

OK… So are these document sharing sites worth posting to?

In my honest opinion, yes!

DocStoc.com Case Study

DISCLAIMER: I have done this study strictly for this purpose.  The niche I cover is not something I’m interested in or would normally promote.  I chose this niche because it has the number one selling product on clickbank at the moment.  All my documents were direct linked to the sales-page which is not a recommended business model  (your conversions will suck!)

As I stated above, the “Farmville” niche is one of those fad niches that is becoming huge.  Many people have articles ranking in the search engines for all the high trafficked keywords, so the competition is relatively high.

In this study, I decided I would post 10 documents focusing on 10 keywords to DocStoc.com.

I used the posting methods I mentioned above (three links contained in my articles).

Without further ado, here are my results ranking in Google per keyword:

As you can see, all 10 of my articles are ranking in google for the particular keywords.  Two have already made the first page!  Now imagine if I would have promoted these articles further by building backlinks!  With some good promotion I could almost guarantee that I could get most of those second page rankings onto the first.

Now For The Astonishing Part!

NONE, I repeat, NONE of these articles were unique articles! I purchased PLR articles straight from this site:

http://www.scubbly.com/item/7190/

PLR stands for Private Label Rights.  PLR articles are articles in which you can claim full authorship.

Additionally, I made zero changes to the body of the articles!  I obviously added my links and changed up the titles to encompass my keywords, but besides that, nothing was changed.

You can take what you want from this case study, but all I have to say is that if you are not submitting some of your content to these document sharing sites, then you are missing out on some decent traffic.

The competition is very minimal at this point on DocStoc.com, so I recommend that site.  Scribd.com is much more strict and doesn’t like promotion content as much.

I’m ranking in Google with articles I didn’t even write!  They are PLR articles that other people already have.

Take some action and get posting!  Leave me some feedback/comments below and let me know what you think!  I would love to know some of your results!

Stay tuned for yet another “Traffic Generation Kick-Off” post tomorrow!

This has been a long time coming, but I finally got around to creating this brand spanking new Internet marketing blog.

So if you are reading this message, you’re probably wondering “what type of content will I be creating?”  Well, that is entirely up to my viewers.

If you have a question, send it my way via contact form or through a comment (which is the best way!) and I’ll write a post on it.

So to start off, I’ve decided to write a 5 post kick-off event about the best traffic generation tactics out there!  Don’t worry, all the methods I will be covering this week will be completely free!  None of that PPC crap just yet.

So, without further ado, lets rock ‘n roll.

Today, I’m going to show you how to tap into one of the best traffic generation sources out there.

What is it you ask?

Well it’s something called blog commenting… ever hear of it?

Well I’m sure you have, but I honestly want to know how many of you actually do it?

Blog commenting is a great way to get some serious traffic to any web-page you are promoting, but there is a little secret behind it.

Most people don’t have good results commenting and think that the comments are only useful to build backlinks on “DoFollow” blogs.  (By the way, MarketingPayDirt.com has all DoFollow comments! So be sure to comment away!)

What type of blogs should you leave a comment on?

Step 1 – Set Yourself Up To Get The Traffic

• You want to comment on high trafficked blogs with a lot of RSS subscribers, email opt-ins, or social profile followers.  Additionally if you see there are a lot of comments on the blog, its a sure sign it has a good following!  Go out and find 10-15 of these blogs within your niche that have at least 2-5 posts per week added to the blog.
• Next, you must be one of the first to comment on a new post.  The top 5 comments will get the most exposure.  How often have you went through a whole list of comments?  Probably never.
• The best way to be one of the first people is to subscribe to their RSS feed with your favorite RSS reader that you check throughout the day.  I’m not telling you to sit there and check non-stop, but if you check a few times a day, you’ll more than likely be able to get that coveted top 5 spot.

Step 2 – How To Stand Out From The Ground

• When you comment, please read the article you are commenting on!  I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people leave comments like “Great Info” or “Awesome post”.  I can tell you right now if you do that, you will fail.
• Write something relevant to the post that contributes to the conversation started by the poster.  Remember, blogs are an interactive playground where people respond to each other.  In other words, only write a comment if you have something to say on the subject matter.
• To stand out further, be sure to add value to the post.  I’m not talking about more information, but stating your opinion and experiences will grab people’s attention.  If you have a post on your blog related to the subject of the post, you can even link to that.
• When you are commenting on the blogs you have chosen, have consistency throughout all your posts.  Be sure to have an avatar set up!  Give people a face to put with the words you are writing.  Additionally, be sure to use the same name and email for every comment.  Many blogs have a plugin called “Top Commentators” which will place the people with the most comments onto the blog’s sidebar (look to your right as I have the plugin installed.)

One final tip – DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT spam blogs! Not only will you get your comments deleted, but your IP could be banned!

So that’s all for now!  Stay tuned, because every day this week a new post will be added with a different traffic generation strategy!

Let me know what you think!  Leave me some comment love!  Also, I would be SUPER appreciative if you could Tweet this post out or promote in any other way!