Conquer The Net Blog

Hi,

Russ here.  Welcome to another issue of the "Conquer The Net" ezine.

This issue includes…

 1) "A Quick Adwords Overview"
 2) "Marketing Freebie"
 3) "60-Second Marketing Tip"
 4) "Featured Article: Testing Your Way to Success!"
 5) "Your PC Security Tip" – NEW feature this issue!
 6) "Offline Marketing Strategies"
 7) "Tell Me What You Think!"
 8) "That’s A Wrap"

Remember, this and all other posts on this blog are available through the RSS reader of your choice.  Why subscribe to my RSS feed?  Because you may prefer receiving the posts in preview form via a well-formatted email.  Then you can easily decide whether or not you want to click through to the blog to read specific posts in their entirety.  Big efficiency builder…

Ok, now down to business.

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      >>>>> A Quick Adwords Overview <<<<<
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Google Adwords is, at time of writing, the most popular pay-per-click advertising program on the internet.  Including Adwords in your marketing strategy has many advantages, some of which are obvious and others are not.

First - your ad is displayed immediately, which means you get instant exposure for your product.

If you waited for your site to be listed in the search engines it could take months, and then you could be listed in position 682 on page 68, which of course would mean no one would even know your site existed.

With Adwords there is no waiting. Basically you can begin driving visitors to your site and making sales in as little as five minutes.

Second – your audience is highly targeted to your market.

With Adwords you are in complete control of exactly who gets to see your ads and who doesn’t through the keyword search terms you use in your campaign.  You can choose to make your keyword phrases as tight or as broad as you want.

Naturally the more targeted you make your keywords the less traffic you will receive, but by doing this you know that your visitors will be laser targeted potential customers who are willing to fork out a few bucks to get what they want.

Third – Adwords allows you to run several campaigns simultaneously, so you can test the results and experiment on-the-fly to constantly improve the quality of your ads or sales copy to increase sales.

Testing is the one of the cornerstones of creating online success.  The more you can test, track and tweak every element of your business, the more successful you will be.

With Adwords you can even track the "conversion rate," or the actual number of sales generated by your ad.  This is precision marketing.

Now all these advantages are great, but if you’re promoting an affiliate product, there is one single element of your marketing strategy that you MUST implement to get the maximum benefit from your campaign…

If you’re sending your visitors to an affiliate website, make sure that your Adwords link takes your visitors to YOUR optin page first.  This way you can first convince them to signup to your list BEFORE you send them to an external page.

Listen, you’ve done the hard work finding the right keywords.  You’ve worked hard to set up your campaign.  You’ve paid good money to grab their interest…

…so why on Earth would you simply send them to someone else’s page where that person can get their contact details so they can sell them a backend product at a later stage?

You get absolutely no benefit in doing this.  So if you do nothing else, at the very minimum you must at least try to get them to on your list.

If you can get their details prior to forwarding them to an affiliate site, then if they don’t make a purchase you’ve still got a chance to make additional contact with them at a later stage to convince them to make a sale.

Whether or not you choose to use Adwords in your business strategy is up to you, but using this as part of your overall marketing can significantly improve your exposure… and your profits.  So it’s worth considering.

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      >>>>> Marketing Freebie <<<<<
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[Read the rest of this entry...]

Ok, I’m back. 

The holidays kinda got in the way of me posting a follow-up message about the blogging course Mark Joyner is offering for free.

But yesterday I went through the entire course and I want to let you know what I thought of it.

First of all, it’s actually one of the "elective" modules within the Simpleology site.  

Hopefully you’re familiar with Simpleology.  If not, you’re probably very new to the IM world.

And that’s perfectly alright if you are.  Welcome. 

Since I brought it up, here’s a quick overview of what Simpleology is.

It’s essentially a series of courses that teach you how to get what you want out of life.  All areas of your life – simply.  And that’s the basis of it all – simplicity.

In fact, the first module, Simpleology 101 (which is completely FREE, by the way) is entitled: "The Simple Science Of Getting What You Want". 

It’s a set of tools that teach you how to manage yourself better.

The better you manage yourself, the more productive you’ll be. 

It may look like a time management course on the surface, but let’s face it, NO ONE CAN MANAGE TIME!

So, it’s a SELF management course and well worth your time.

The next two modules – Simpleology 102 and Simpleology 103 – deal with the Simple Science of Money and the Simple Science of Personal Energy.  They come with a price tag, but are not unreasonably priced for the life-changing material you receive.

Anyway, I highly recommend you take the free Simpleology 101 course.

Now on to the Simpleology Blogging Course review:

•   It’s a series of 16 videos (the 1st is an intro) coupled with brief review quizzes that help to "set" the material in your mind.

•   Each video is short – the longest one is six minutes and twelve seconds long.  The majority are less than five minutes.

•    I watched all the videos and took all the quizzes in about an hour.

•   The videos are narrated by Mark Joyner himself and are full of descriptive cartoon figures that help the material be visually interpreted/recognized and sink in.

•  The course is perfect for new to intermediate level bloggers, but I believe experienced bloggers will also find a few valuable tidbits as well.  And if you’ve been blogging for a while, this course will at least be a good refresher and possibly a reminder of some of the things you should be doing, but aren’t.

•  It covers everything from what a blog is and why they are so powerful, to choosing a theme, how to write posts, monitization techniques, how to drive traffic, etc.

•  It also includes downloadable PDFs  – the Blogging Virtuosity ebook and Memory Joggers as well as bonus interviews with some serious bloggers like:  Jason Cain, Joel Comm, Lynn Terry and Priya Shah.

•  Additional bonus PDFs include: "How To Create Interesting Titles", "How To Overcome Writer’s Block" and "Which Blog Software Is Right For You?".

•  It doesn’t teach you about configuration or plugins and the like, since this is a generic blogging course and there are a bunch of blogging platforms out there.

•  Finally, the entire course is included on downloadable MP3 audio files you can upload to your MP3 player and take with you.

All in all, a killer course and mess of bonuses for nothing but a blog post.

To summarize:  If you have a blog and don’t know every thing there is to know about blogging (I doubt anyone does), this free course will be of value to you.   

It seems that Mark Joyner has done it again.

What has he done?

Well, he’s figured out another mega-powerful way to “Get Viral” on this wonderful thing we call the web.

If you don’t who Mark Joyner is, Google him. I won’t spend time or space in this post going over his lengthy bio.

Suffice it to say, when Mark talks, PEOPLE – including the biggest, most successful marketers today – LISTEN.

And so should you…

Why? He knows what he’s talking about, that’s why.

How else would such a man earn the nickname of “The Godfather of Internet Marketing”?

Pretty lofty title, huh?

Not something haphazardly assigned to someone, because those sorts of things typically aren’t accurate and therefore, don’t “stick”.

Anyway, here’s something Mark asked me to post on my blog. You’ll soon see why I say he’s done it again:

***

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out.

Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

***

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this little bit of text in one post of my blog gets me free access to a blogging course Mark and his dream team put together.

In the mean time, Mark and his course get blogged about in thousands of blogs across the world. Tagged and pinged and posted about like nobody’s business across the entire wild, wild web.

And I’m probably going to blog about the course once I’ve taken it (like his message says I will – also very clever), so Mark gets more exposure.

All for free! You see how smart this is?

And since you’re reading this and probably interested in the course, there’s a good likelihood that you’d be willing to write a quick post about it, too.

It’s as viral as viral gets.

Like I said before, the name “The Godfather of Internet Marketing” isn’t one you can declare yourself as or buy… it just wouldn’t stick and you’d be the laughing stock of the IM community.

Rather, it must be EARNED and bestowed upon a person by those qualified to do so.

I’ll sign off with this. If you get a chance to watch and learn from Mark Joyner, don’t let it slip by.

Read his books, listen to his audios, watch his videos, take his courses and watch how he markets!

You’ll be much better off for having done so.

Click on the graphics in this post to visit the site!

If you’ve been involved in developing an online presence for a while now, chances are you’ve found yourself in a position where you needed some high-quality, but inexpensive graphics for one of your sites.

And, if you’re like most people, you probably couldn’t afford to hire someone to create
them for you when you were first starting out.

So…

Like with most “newbies” to internet marketing, you decided to do it yourself.

You may have accumulated a few pieces of graphics software along the way, too. And
gotten better at it as time went on.

Personally, I’ve done the Photoshop 30-day trial, used Gimp, Paint, Paint.net, Powerpoint, Jahn’s various Kaleido Color softwares, Website Header Wizard and multiple HTML editors and the like. Probably more stuff that has slipped my mind.

I found Photoshop too expensive for my taste at $300 (though a great piece of software), Gimp too difficult to use (despite being open-source, i.e. free) and I still use the others on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, it seems that no single piece of software can do it all.

Maybe Photoshop can, but it takes a big comittment to learn all the ins and outs of such a complex program. Few people have the time or money to invest into such a piece of software. Which is no doubt why graphics designers don’t come cheap.

So, for small jobs when I don’t see the need for hiring a designer, I do it myself.

Nothing too fancy or complex, mind you. But nice, just the same. And a heck of a lot better than no graphics at all!

Recently, I added another fine resource to my graphics arsenal.

In fact, it only took about a minute of reading what was offered at what price and I was hooked.

Essentially, it’s a web-based piece of software that allows you to quickly and easily design your own graphics and then download them in one of three formats for immediate use.

I think what it does is use a series of scripts to take complex adjustments on super-advanced software and make them one-click easy for your graphics project.

In other words, I think it’s based off of either Photoshop or Gimp, with built-in shortcuts (done behind the scenes with specialized code) that make all the fine tuning faster and easier.

Here’s the best part: This membership is currently selling for a ONE-TIME price of only $6.95.

Actually, that may NOT be the best part. He’s also giving 100% commissions for all new referrals!

Bottom line: Less than seven bucks (one time) for a great tool, 100% commissions and the ability to create your own high-quality UNIQUE graphics with ease.

Unless you’re already a genius with Photoshop or have deep pockets, this is one tool that really delivers huge value for a truly rock-bottom price. In other words, one that virtually every webmaster will need and use regularly.

Five Stars – Highly Recommended!

Russ

PS: The graphics in this post were made with this service – in mere minutes. Also, you can see what I did on my other blog: http://websuccessmasters.com. I made the header as well as the graphic block with the RSS subscription icon (top right) using only this tool and Paint.net (free, open source).