Internet Marketing Articles

Anyone starting a Multi-Level Marketing business or any type of home business will need a lead company to provide targeted prospects for your business. One thing you need to ask yourself is how they generate the leads. Good companies will generate potential contacts through a range of methods.

Today, lead generating companies use the internet along with telemarketing, ad campaigns, and direct mail campaigns. They will then use a software program to provide you with business opportunity leads that fit your business.

I personally have been in network marketing business for over 10 years and know how deep the shark infested waters of bad lead companies that over promise and under deliver. There are 7 Myths about mlm email leads and the companies that provide these services that you should be aware of and avoid when choosing a lead company.

Myth 1 “We will give you 50 FREE Leads to try out with no obligation”

Many companies will offer you free leads to try out their service. First, the leads that you get are not very good, responsive, and often more than 72 hours old which means the leads are not “hot but “cold”. Secondly, and more importantly, when you sign up to get the free leads, you just became a lead.

Myth 2 “We generate our own leads”

This is false. 90% of lead companies do not generate their own leads but purchase their own. They in turn resell them to you. These leads have been “turned” so to speak anywhere from 5-10 times. Your response rate will be significantly lower because of this important factor.

Myth 3 “Our leads are Targeted Leads to your home business specialty”

One of the ways to “capture” a lead is to put up what we consider a “pop-up” window on a website that might be asking you if you want more information on a “credit card offer”. Then that company turns to any lead company and sells it. Now if you have a home business and looking for people who are interested in starting a home business, you go to Lead Company A and buy some mlm email leads. You will get leads from people who wanted information on credit card offers, not a home business. Is that targeted? What are your chances of converting a sale? Slim to none.

Myth 4 “Our Leads are 24 Hours old or less and “fresh”.

90% of leads sold are over 24 hours old if that fresh. The reason is modern technology, detailed work, time spent to gather the leads captured, and to upload them to you through an excel spreadsheet or other form of communication takes time. Make sure you read all the details about how the company obtained the mlm email lead in the first place.

Myth 5 “Leads were not offered an incentive”.

Lead companies will tell you this so that you don’t think the lead was offered any payment or free gift for filling out a survey. Most lead companies fail to disclose this. Make sure you do the research and ask questions of the company before you purchase the leads.

Myth 6 “Leads are Company Specific”

Many lead companies indicate to consumers that their mlm email leads are company specific. For example a website has a “popup” window if someone is interested in a earning money part time and they turn around and sell you the leads because they are interested in SFI (Six Figure Marketing) a popular home business opportunity on the internet. Does that mean its company specific? No where does it say that person who filled out the form and became a lead they were interested in that specific company.

Myth 7 “Millions of people are looking for a home business”

There are not millions of people looking for a home business. There are thousands everyday but not millions. If a lead company tells you that….they are stretching the truth just a bit.

Now that you know what NOT to look for: Here is a summary of how to be successful with your mlm email lead:

1. The quality of the lead source is only one factor…important but not the only thing to consider. You as a contributor are just as important. You are the determiner of the real success with any lead source. That’s why peoples experiences can vary so much.

2. Success with leads is mostly about numbers, time, & “your” effort. Sufficient numbers, followed consistently over time (minimum of 3-6 months), & applying a disciplined method of follow-up emails will show results with most any lead source and a very good autoresponder. I use GetResponse to follow up with all of my leads. The best leads in the world are no good if you dont have a quality email series or a reliable autoresponder in place or a to follow up.

3. A quality generic lead source is a good thing (must be pre-qualified, 48 hrs old or less, non-shared, & exclusive to warrant quality label). Company specific leads are even a better option. Generating quality leads yourself is the best way. Doing all 3 in unison is the best campaign you can have to be successful. Everything else is a waste.

In conclusion, using the techniques and advice described above, your mlm email lead campaign can bring the fruits of success, with a good follow-up program in place, a reliable autoresponder, personal perseverance, and avoiding the lead companies that offer more “fluff” and “flash” than real, fresh, responsive leads.

Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant with sales over $25,000,000. For more info on lead generation: MLM Email Leads. Details on best lead source company and how they will help your conversion rate increase by over 50%.

If you work from home, chances are you already know that you’re really pulling “double duty”. You probably work on your business while doing the laundry, corralling the kids, or fixing dinner… and let’s not forget all the phone calls from family and friends expecting you to run errands or just “go out” for an afternoon of fun.

One of the hardest parts of running a home business is separating your work from your family and social life. Here are six proven ways to keep your home life running smoothly while keeping your business on track.

1. First, create a work schedule and stick with it. It may be tempting to answer personal calls during the day or take business calls after-hours, but doing this actually shows that you’re expendable - not dependable - and people will take for granted that you’ll “always be there” for any little things that come up. Even though family comes first, stay true to your business hours and resist the urge to chat with friends or pick up groceries during working hours.

2. Your friends may consider “working from home” an invitation to chat during the day or just go out for coffee or shopping for an afternoon. Make it clear that your business hours are just that - for business. Leave personal calls for after-hours, and you’ll find that your friends will gradually accept your schedule without feeling slighted.

3. Just because you have to set up a work schedule, doesn’t mean that you have to keep the same hours as everyone else. One of the benefits of working for yourself is setting your own hours to fit your most productive times. Whether you’re an early bird or a night owl, you’ll find that you’ll get much more done when you’re attuned to your body’s own natural rhythms. Some people work in the morning, take a break in the afternoon when the kids are home from school, and work again in the evening. Schedule your work time when you feel the most productive and you’ll find that things get done easier, faster and better than when you were dragging along during those same rigid work hours that everyone else has.

4. If getting after-hours business calls or work day personal calls is a problem, it helps to have a separate business phone line, or at least an answering machine or voice mail, to take the incoming calls. This also gives your business a more professional appearance to clients than if you and your family make and receive calls from the same phone line.

5. If at all possible, try to separate your “home office” from the rest of your home. If you don’t have the luxury of a separate room, a room partition or screen can be just as helpful. This also serves as a visual cue to family that you’re working and shouldn’t be bothered.

6. Dress and act professionally while working. Some people find it helpful to dress in casual business attire during their working hours. This reinforces that just because you’re working from home doesn’t make you any less of a professional. Answer the phone with your name, or business name, and keep your children off the phone during business hours. Also, spend money investing in the tools you need to do your job right. A cell phone, fax machine or even a budget computer can help turn your home office into a true workspace.

If you follow all of these tips and stick with them, chances are you’ll find a routine that not only makes you feel productive and active in your business, but also projects the message that you mean business - literally!

Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant with sales over $25,000,000. His “Top Ranked” Earn Money at Home Directory gives you all the information you need to start and prosper with your own Internet Home Based Business.

The Internet has changed how people do their business. Even small business owners are able to reach global market inexpensively nowadays, selling anything from apparel, collectibles, to computer software, service and coaching.
The core of every business is sales. Many of the strategies to increase sales offline are applicable online, but not all of them. On the Internet, everybody can effort to fail fast and learn from it. Better still, after years of testing and tracking what works online, people can just learn from other people’s experience and cut the learning curve tremendously.

Here are 5 of the surefire ways to increase sales:

1. Establish a sound affiliate program

If it is just another affiliate program, then don’t expect to have different results. Focus on building a sound affiliate program, with the tools and materials to support affiliates to promote a program easily. After all, affiliates work like clockwork and should be seen as a team. Provide them with the right promotion tools and they will more likely promote the program.

Give the customers an option to join the affiliate program after purchase. Satisfied customers are one of the best marketing for any business. Spread the good words through word of mouth. Best of all, they are paid just for doing that.

2. Follow-up after first purchase

The hardest task in any business is acquiring the first sale. Make sure that capturing customers’ name and email addresses are the least information gathered from a sale. With that information in hand, follow-up with existing customers, probably through an automated mechanism like timely autoresponder.

This effort has been proven to decrease refund on products and increase customers’ satisfaction. Every once in a while, mention a related product that might be of interest to the customers. Write a review and provide real results. Such promotion is extremely inexpensive, but very effective in practice. The product can be anything, including an affiliate program.

3. Use up-sell technique

Just before a customer check out to the payment gateway, prompt for optional upgrade to the better, bigger, or nicer product for a fairly steep discount, preferably not available elsewhere.

A certain number of customers will choose the option, which translates into additional sales, almost without additional effort.

4. Provide discount coupons

Coupons urge customers to come back and shop. Promotional coupons work for both advertising and some forms of joint venture. Customers love to know that they get lower price for what they buy. Coupons make it so real and tangible.

5. Cross-promote with other related products

There is no limit as to how this could be accomplished. Joint venture with other business or even competitors is feasible as long as it brings a win-win situation.

One example would be to give away sample of other product or service as part of the whole package. As long as the sample is relevant to the customer, this promotion could only be seen as an added value instead of pure advertising.

There are many other tactics to increase sales but above tips have been proven to work again and again. Choose one at a time and take action. Good luck.

Jeff Casmer will help you setup your very own money making website today that’s 100% ready to take orders and pull in MASSIVE PROFITS for you right now…GUARANTEED! Plus, you’ll get your own pre-written ezine-in-a-box customized and setup for you absolutely free WITHIN 24 HOURS!! Get started immediately at: www.24hourwealth.com

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It’s the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.

Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it’s going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a “pretty” website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site…after all, isn’t that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively.

This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords.

When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites.

How many times have you heard or read that “this is the Internet and it’s ok” to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don’t do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to your website.

Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as “sex”, the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn’t have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing.

Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the “alt=” HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying on hidden text.

You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn’t hurt. Wrong…. Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text.

This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same.

Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting.

Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements.

Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will increase.

Jeff Casmer is 1 of Stone Evans’s Top Affiliates and will help you setup your very own money making website today that’s 100% ready to take orders and pull in MASSIVE PROFITS for you right now…GUARANTEED! Plus, you’ll get your own pre-written ezine-in-a-box customized and setup for you absolutely free WITHIN 24 HOURS!! Get started immediately at: www.24hourwealth.com

One of my clients recently created a new bundle of products and wants to find other people willing to sell them on her behalf. In return, they get a hefty commission.

She asked me for some advice about how to best approach these people, and how to convince them to be part of her extended sales force.

So I’m going to share some of that advice with you here.

This is known as an affiliate program, where you pay others to send people to your business, and you pay the affiliates a commission if those people buy from you.

This has become extremely common on the Internet, but it’s been around long before the Internet as well for example, real estate agents sending business to mortgage brokers, and vice versa.

Three key principles

A successful affiliate program - on or off the Internet - rests on three important principles. If you get this mix right, you’ve got a better chance of making your affiliate program work.

Not all affiliate programs follow these rules. But if you break them, make sure you know why. Unfortunately, most businesses ignore one or more of these principles, without knowing why. And that’s a disaster for their affiliate program.

1. Good Match

First, there must be a good match between the two parties. In other words, choose affiliates who have a list of the right sort of clients.

Otherwise, you’ll waste time trying to recruit affiliates who aren’t interested in promoting you, because they know you’re not a good match for them.

Even if you do recruit them, if it’s not a good match, you’ll waste time creating useless joint venture deals, handling queries from customers who don’t understand your offering, and processing refunds from disgruntled customers who were promised something that you couldn’t deliver.

2. Commission Only

Second, money changes hands only on a successful sale.

Affiliates don’t pay you to join the program, and you don’t pay them unless they refer somebody who makes a purchase. This makes the deal a low-risk proposition, which makes it easy for both parties to accept.

There are different ways of calculating commissions, but the basic principle is that it’s always triggered on a sale. You don’t have to worry about paying your affiliates a “salary”; and they don’t have to worry about paying you a “joining fee”.

3. Win-Win

Finally - and most importantly - the single most important element of a profitable affiliate relationship is that both parties walk away thinking that they got the better end of the deal.

How can both parties get the “better end” of the deal? Well, the two parties bring different assets to the deal. You’re happy to sell your product or service to new clients and give away part of a profit that you never would have had; and the affiliate has a list of potential clients, so is happy to refer them to you in return for a share of the profit.

Do you follow these principles?

If you’ve got an affiliate program, are you following these principles? If not, I bet you’re struggling to make it work. You’ll get greater leverage by following these rules - at least until you’ve got enough experience to break them deliberately.

RanjuKumar is assistant to Gihan Perera is the author of “The Seven Fatal Mistakes That Most Web Site Owners Make - And How To Avoid Them” and “Spin: Turn One Idea Into Hundreds of gihanperera.com/reach-new-markets.html” >Information Products and get your complimentary copies now.

Wondering what all this affiliate marketing is about?

To put it in very simple terms an affiliate marketer will promote merchant products for a slice of the pie. The merchant offers a wide range of assistance from promotional materials, payment set up and regular training and advice. This leaves the affiliate marketer to concentrate purely on promotion.

For the newbie affiliate marketer it would be almost impossible to start to make money online without the merchant, because what is delivered to him as a ready made package is usually beyond his skills. To start up on your own would be costly, you would need to create a product, promotional material and sales copy. You would probably need to hire an expert in your field to help you develop the product, all this would possibly beyond your budget. So why not take advantage of a merchant who has done all this work for you? The training involved is usually of the highest quality and allows most people to be able to pick up the necessary skills fast. Remember there are no set hours when you are entering into the affiliate world, so learning is flexible and you can work 24/7.

The learning process involved in being an affiliate can be gone through quickly and your new skills will then enable you to earn money online quickly. The main affiliate businesses online are based on information and once your aptitude for the business has been gained the opportunities to be rewarded are endless. You will learn how to promote products online through various advertising methods and you income will be in direct proportion to your knowledge and time spent researching and promoting your chosen product or products.

The secret in learning the process is to adopt one or two internet marketing strategies and repeat them over and over again and over again until you become an expert. The internet marketing gurus first started out by learning there methods and turn to affiliate marketing to earn extra revenue. They can makes thousands of dollars by taking advantage of their mass email listings; one email can generate a whole years salary for some gurus.

Affiliate marketing is quite simply the most popular income opportunity around as it is easy to learn and results can be seen in a short amount of time. You can use your skills on multiple products and income opportunities are quite literally endless. Remember affiliate marketing is a business that will ultimately give you what you put into it and you can work when and where you want as long as you have an internet connection. It should not take you longer than 3 months to learn and apply the skills effectively enough to see a real income.

I have been working online for 5 years now and have overcome the many stumbling blocks many online marketers make. If you are seriously want to earn money online you need to visit my site Money Making Truth as it is dedicated to providing you with honest advice and resources.