What is Reverse Marketing?
If you are trying to sell a product or service on the web, then you understand how hard it is to get traffic to your site. Web business seems to be completely driven by the sheer volume of traffic you can get to your web site. It doesn’t seem to make sense because you know in your heart that thousands of mass e-mails and site hits do not always equate to sales. There has to be another dimension to your goods and services, and you are probably curious as to how to market these quality items without seeming like a complete pest.
The truth is that traditional internet marketing techniques can plain wear you out. It is not enough that you have a good product and a good web page, but now you have to try your hand at viral marketing, advertisements, e-mail lists and catchy web gimmicks. For most people this means flooding the market with news about your product or services. Sometimes this can make you feel cheap and like you are annoying to potential customers by continually spamming them all the time. Sometimes the traditional type of marketing can actually backfire on you, driving potential customer away.
Well if you are interested in marketing your goods and services in a less invasive way then reverse marketing might be something you want to look into. For some people this is a much better approach because they can back their quality products and services with supportive content that sheds an attractive light on your company. In this way you can gently sway buyers to purchase your products. You will earn a great reputation and will have a more loyal fan base.
Sounds great, but what exactly is reverse marketing? Reverse marketing is a simple concept but you still need to have a great plan of attack. Rather than running web banners or advertisements on TV and radio, in reverse marketing you might strategically place essays or e-books on various topics that people look up on the web. You could post helpful tips or a website dedicated to home repairs. Of course, you place a tag line for your website at the end of the helpful “how to” article. This way, you attract people after demonstrating that you know what you are talking about.
Reverse marketing seems like a great way to attract customers because you are showing your expertise in an area or many areas. People who have been helped by your article or tip will tend to purchase a product from you before they go somewhere else. It is all about putting seemingly unbiased information out there but woven into a thinly veiled advertisement for your goods and services. You can plug your product out in the open, but not too overtly.
Reverse marketing can seem like a godsend for those who are sick of running the rat race of traditional internet marketing techniques. Instead of just spamming the world to see if you can convince someone to buy your product, you simply be ready to capture those quality buyers who are all ready to make a purchase. This kind of marketing—allowing customers to seek you out—can feel much better for you
Neil Bartlett is the founder of MyIMCoach.com. My IM Coach provides aspiring Internet Marketers with Tips and Techniques for getting started and/or improving their marketing skills. To learn more INSTANTLY grab his FREE report “How To Make It Online”
Create a Need – Make Them Want What You Have
If you are a regular person trying to start a web business for the first time, then you know how hard it is. You may have a great product, may have put together a nice web site but you still are not generating the attention that you want. You may have tried various internet marketing techniques but to no avail.
It is very competitive out there in the world today. With everyone trying to start their own internet business, you have to go up against a lot of products similar to yours. You may even be up against someone who knows internet marketing better than you, and this person seems to be all over the web. You cannot help but feel small and insignificant. So just what do you need to do to create such a need for your product that people cannot help but purchase from you? How do you create that overwhelming need?
A lot of what you have to say about your product can either make or break a sale for you. If you have content on your website or articles written about your product with the intent of directing buyers to your website, you may want to review it to see if it matches some specific criteria playing on consumers’ emotions so that they will purchase your product.
Customers’ emotions? That’s right; it means that in your content or ad for your good or service, you will make an attempt to evoke an emotion in your consumer. Advertisers do it all the time and it is a very effective marketing tool. As you write content for your pages, you can keep some of these emotional triggers in the back of your mind. These will help you develop a content style that will help you evoke consumers into buying your product.
So what are some of the emotions you will play upon in your content? There is flattery, greed, guilt and anger, to name just a few. For instance, if you are trying to play on someone’s anger, your content will be geared to showing how you can relate to the customer’s frustration. You can show how your product can help them alleviate their frustration and achieve “victory” in the end where other products have failed for them in the past. For greed you can show them how they can use your product to get ahead of everyone else they know at a much cheaper cost to them.
There is certainly an art form to advertising based on the emotional aspects of every day consumers. It might seem challenging at first, but with a little work you can create a need for your product based on some very powerful human emotions. And if the customer is satisfied with your product, they will convey their pleasure to friends and family, and you will gain return sales from your efforts.
Regardless of how you decide to approach the prospect of creating a need for your product, remember that your content should always be tweaked. Be sensitive to the results of your sales and tweak your content to suit. The bottom line is that you are never done!
Neil Bartlett is the founder of MyIMCoach.com. My IM Coach provides aspiring Internet Marketers with Tips and Techniques for getting started and/or improving their marketing skills. To learn more INSTANTLY grab his FREE report “How To Make It Online”
The Internet Marketing Revolving Door
I don’t want to sound like I’m all high and mighty because I’m making a full-time living online because I used to do all of those things when I started out. I felt like an idiot and a failure. I wasn’t either of those, but I felt like I was.
How bad do you want it?
I always ask people that because, if you want it bad enough you can do it. It’s just like anything else in life. A buddy of mine, Willie Crawford and a bunch of members of his membership site got together and wrote an e-book over 200 pages long titled “20 Ways to make $100 a Day” or something along those lines, anyways.
Each person would write a chapter about a strategy to make $100 a day. $100 a day is pretty good money. That’s about $3,000 a month before taxes and about $36,000 a year before taxes. That’s a pretty good living. You could, of course make more than $100 a day from each strategy or use multiple strategies.
I talk about this because that is 20 strategies to make a full-time living online. I can think of a bunch more that weren’t in that e-book. The point of this is that the information to use to make a full-time living is out there and there are a TON of people making a full-time living online.
So, you can do it. You just have to want it bad enough to work hard and to build your online business. Want it bad enough to cut out the distractions and focus and finish.
When I started out online, I wanted to make a full-time living online, but I didn’t want it BAD ENOUGH! I didn’t put in the hours, I let the distractions get to me. I would sit on the couch and drink a beer and watch TV when I should have been working. I was going out with friends when I should have been working. I was partying too hard and getting up too late in the morning etc.
I was young and arrogant and would always say, well I’ll go out tonight and figure out this making money online thing tomorrow, I would keep saying that. Well, those tomorrows kept adding up and the bills also kept piling up. I finally wanted it enough to make it! You can too!
Promoting an Information Product
If they ever create their own information product, they don’t take the action to create a sales page. Some people do create their own sales page. There is one more step.
People have to promote that sales page. The key is that you focus on a number of different ways to promote the sales page.
You should be focusing on writing a free report to help advertise the sales page. You should be focused on pay-per click advertising. That is one reason why you should price your product higher.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a firm believer in charging what you feel your product is worth, but I feel like people aren’t charging enough for their products. Information is the most valuable thing that I know of.
Why not charge a lot for great information?
I have noting against it. It makes perfect sense to me. A lot of times a person will lose more weight than the next person because they have better information for doing so.
Yes, following through with the routine and being committed is very important. The thing is, that if you don’t have the information in the first place, you don’t have a chance at success.
You simply don’t have a model to follow and you don’t have something to abide by. A person that can provide that, is very important. You’re providing something that is a void in a person’s life.
You don’t have to be the smartest person in the world to provide them with this information. You just have to do your research and stand behind it.
You have to remember one very important thing. Most people are living very fast lives. They don’t take the time to try and research the solution to their problems, they want someone else to provide that solution to them. You can be that person.
It’s going to be up to you to be that person. You have to take action and put your abilities to work. Do your research, write your sales page, get your traffic and simply cash in!
The Best Paying Products to Promote
Let’s face it, the people that don’t make it online don’t make enough money to pay their bills. One of the reasons why they can’t is because they don’t sustain and maintain a steady stream of income.
Income level goes up and down up and down. With recurring income you can pretty much set a bottom level on the low end of your income and set the bottom. From there you can’t go anywhere but up!
What can you do to get recurring income? Well, one great thing that you can do is find products or services to promote that provide a recurring commission and become an affiliate.
Membership sites that provide recurring affiliate commissions are great things to promote. You want to make sure that the membership site is very good and provides good value to it’s members and has a good sales page, but once you find them, they can be a gold mine!
I don’t care what niche market you’re in or what niches you want to pursue. Chances are that there are plenty of paid membership sites and most of them have affiliate programs that you can sign up for.
Other things that you want to target are services that offer recurring commissions. The possibilities are really endless for this. There are so many different niche markets and there are so many different services for each niche.
Paid newsletter’s that send out a newsletter to their subscribers. There are newsletters in all kinds of different niche markets. Think about all of the services that are provided online.
They have online services for pretty much everything now. Everyday more and more things are getting automated. That’s more opportunity to affiliate online services.
Think about it this way. You’re making one sale and potentially getting paid every month for it, for potentially years! That’s a great thing, my friend. You’re making a lot of money doing that and it’s a lot less work to promote because one sale can equal many sales if you’re promoting products or services that pay a one time commission.
Just remember that recurring income is your friend and you should seek it out anytime that you can!
The Pre-selling Process is Vitally Important
I had an understanding of it, I went to college and majored in Business Management with Marketing emphasis. Well, bookwork is one thing and the real world is another thing.
Went I got out of college, I worked as a salesman for Best Buy. I didn’t give the whole sales process much thought. All I was concerned with was talking to someone, gaining their interest and closing them. That is about all that I really thought about, but there was a lot more to it.
You see, Best Buy, just like any other business that sells products has a pre-sell campaign in place. They spend millions of dollars on it every year. I saw their commercials and their ads, that they sent out, but I didn’t think about it much.
I think that the reason I didn’t concern myself with it is because I wasn’t involved with it. It wasn’t my job. My job was to sell people, in the store, when they came.
I thought that I was doing a lot of the work. I was personally selling them because of my talent as a salesman. That was all true, but plenty of them had experienced a sense of pre-selling before they ever even walked in the store.
Sure, some of them were just casual shoppers and were just walking by and I pitched them and sold them, but most of them had seen some form of advertising for similar products that I was pitching to them. They had probably come to my section of the store because they had seen an ad somewhere.
So what is so different about the sales process when you’re running your own online business. The answer is, not much of anything, the only differences are that it takes place online and that a lot of times, you’re responsible for it.
That is the big difference. When you’re running your own online business, you either need to be in charge of the pre-selling process or hire someone to be in charge of it. If you want to sell a product online. Having a good pre-selling campaign cannot be understated. You’re going to have a much better conversion rate with that process in place, believe me.
Remember it is About the Offer and Not Just the E-Book
I get people who ask me, how do you price your info product? The main factors are how much time and effort I have put into the offer and not just the e-book. The main determining factor is what the market calls for.
I look at the competition, but I also let the customers decide what they’re willing to pay. If the sales letter keeps converting and the customers are happy with the offer, I will keep on raising the price.
One mistake that I see so many people doing, that are selling information products, is that they don’t offer bonuses or if they do, they don’t offer enough. Sure, the main product can be the main part of the offer and get a lot of attention from your sales copy, but don’t forget about the overall offer.
People could be charging so much more if they would just add some good bonuses. If you’re really involved in a niche, chances are that you have acquired some rights to certain products or know of some great free information products or videos to offer.
They probably don’t know that they’re free resources. The Internet is a really big place. You just have to make sure to check the rights of the product.
Even if you’re providing links to free websites that will help inform someone. I’ve even put links on my download page for people to sign up for certain mailing lists that I find very helpful. The download page can be a one stop shop for your customers. They can keep coming back to the download page and from there they can navigate to all the links over and over again.
You can augment the offer with other e-books, software or videos that you acquire the rights to. It isn’t that much work to upload some more bonuses to a download page. I just get the sense that some people are just too lazy to do it.
You can even get creative. I offer free consulting to my customers of an e-book that I’m selling. That can be very important. The vast majority of people who sell e-books, just send you to the download page and you never get to talk to them again.
I know that just by offering that, my conversion rate has grown by quite a bit. It is an e-book about making money online and people love the fact that I will help consult them on their own business for free. Some people just read the e-book and don’t bother with the consulting, but the people that do are really thankful that I offer that.
Promote High Quality Products
I see so many affiliates these days just going to www.clickbank.com grab a high converting product and pitch it. They may make some good money doing this.
The problem with this is if the product or service is crap, you’re going to get a bad reputation. Reputation is so vitally important for any business and especially an online business.
Make no mistake about it. If you’re an Internet Marketer you’re running a business and if you’re running a business you need to have a good reputation as a straight shooter, if you want your business to survive for the long-term.
Think about how you promote products. You promote them on websites, write articles etc. People think that they can only get repeat business from people who buy products from them, not true.
Affiliates can get repeat business too. If your website helps them and the product or services that you promote help them. They will remember that and come back. If you don’t help them, they won’t.
If you become an expert in a certain market and write articles about it and affiliate products. They will remember your name for one of two reasons. You helped them or hurt them, it’s plain and simple. You could get repeat business and good word of mouth publicity or it could work the other way.
I’ll give you an example. When I got into the make money online business I bought into the hype of taking online surveys and thinking I was going to make all of this money online.
Didn’t work that way. You had to be in certain demographics to take most of them and there weren’t that many to take and you had to give your e-mail address and get 100’s of e-mails and they are always asking you to sign up for offers. I made exactly $2 from my online survey experience.
Well, after I found out it was over-hyped and people were peddling it because the products were converting so well. Any website that promoting that stuff or any person that promoted it, I not only avoiding like the plague, I went on and told everyone that would listen about my bad experience with it.
That’s a big reason why you don’t want to promote garbage. They might of got my sale one time, but they certainly won’t get business from me again and I have told countless people about my bad experience and they won’t get their business either.
Is Affiliate Marketing for You?
People get into affiliate marketing for many reasons. They don’t think that they can put together a product or offer. That may or may not be true, but the important thing is that they believe that they can’t. If they can’t, they don’t really fancy having to hire someone to write it or do it for them.
They don’t think that they can create a good sales page. Again, that may or may not be true and they don’t want to shell out the big bucks and hire a professional copywriter. They might not want to handle the customer service.
Affiliate marketing can be a great thing. Anyone can get into it and you can make a ton of money without having a lot of resources, but it can be a lot of work.
There are reasons why people like me create our own products and write our own sales pages and handle customer service or pay the big bucks to outsource them. One of the reasons is that we can get affiliates to do some of the dirty work for us.
As an affiliate you have to realize that you may have to really roll up your sleeves and get to work. It will entail a lot of research. You have to research products that you want to affiliate. You have to see how their sales page converts, how much you can make a sale, what their refund rate is etc.
You also have to research how you’re going to market this product to people or the group of people that you have built relationships with. You have to research how you’re going to stick out from the crowd and the competition and just how you’re going to go about this.
You have to figure out what strategies that you’re going to use to promote the product or offer. A lot of successful article marketers will write between five to ten articles a day.
For most people, that isn’t an easy task. Not with all the distractions that come with the proposition of working from home. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone, but it’s the truth. I don’t care what strategy that you use, you better realize that you’re going to have to put some real time and effort into it, for it to start bearing some real fruit.
Finding Ideas to Improve your Online Business
I’m the type of person that is always trying to improve things. I want to be in better shape, I want to eat healthier, I want to improve my online business etc.
One thing that you have to do if you want to improve your online business, is to come up with new and innovative ideas. Where do you come up with or find these ideas?
There are a lot of ways that you can generate ideas. There are simple ways that are often times overlooked. I’m a product creator and I get people asking me all of the time, how do you come up with so many ideas?
One thing that I do is take advantage of the mundane times in my life to think about new ideas to write about and to improve my online business. Think about all of the times that you’re waiting in line or in a waiting room or driving etc.
I try to think about business while I’m in these situations. There’s nothing else better to do anyways. What are you going to do, sit there and space out while you stare at the floor?
No. You’re going to be thinking of new ideas. I always keep a pen and paper on me at all times, so I can write down these ideas. That’s just one way that you can think of new ideas, but there are plenty of other ways that you can find new ideas.
I love to visit Internet Marketing forums. I do it to network and build relationships, but also to generate new ideas for improving my online business.
Forums like www.warriorforum.com are breeding grounds for generating new ideas. You know the old saying that two heads are better than one. There’s about 50,000 heads on that forum, you should be able to come up with plenty of ideas.
There is just such a wealth of great information on there for improving your online business, it’s scary! I don’t care what type of online business you run, there is more than enough great information on there for everyone!
When I visit these forums I come up with new ideas, each and every time that I visit them! I feel like a kid in a candy store. The possibilities are really endless and you are really missing out if you don’t utilize them.
