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If you are here for the first time, WELCOME! If you’ve been here before, welcome back.

If you got here from the emails I have been sending the past couple of days, THANK YOU! And if you found me by accident through surfing, here’s a perfect opportunity to listen/read to the rest of the post and then go to the upper left hand corner and sign up for my Relationship Marketing ecourse because that ecourse goes hand in hand with the topic of this post:

Squeeze Pages – Your Bait Just Isn’t Working

Now you’re saying, “What?”

Let me explain.

There are a LOT of people coming online each and every day with the aspirations of tapping in to the ginormous amount of money that is being spent on the internet. I mean there are people in search of information and these newcomers need to learn the process of gathering names and emails addresses and providing that information the correct way.

Now, this isn’t going to be a lesson on ‘how to sell’. Well, yea it is sort of, but one of the first things that they, and maybe you, need to learn is how to build a list so that they can have some people to send their messages to and make some money.

But before you can start building a list, you need a basic website online with an optin form to capture the names and email addresses of the people who are visiting your site.

A squeeze page.

And that’s where I say, your squeeze page bait isn’t working.

Now, if you have been reading my emails recently, I have been talking about ‘what’ a lot of the marketers are doing wrong.

Here’s what I mean.

I am on a LOT of mailing lists! Wayyyy too many if you ask the average person and I wouldn’t recommend being on as many… well, yes I would, but that’s for another post, but I digress…

I am on a lot of lists and here’s what I see; these ‘marketers’ are using squeeze pages to collect your name and email address and now you have given them the permission to send you emails. But what they are sending out with each email has nothing to do with the report or ebook or software or whatever they were giving away to get me on their list in the first place!

They are sending out promotion after promotion either trying to get you to sign up to someone elses list or they are trying to get you to buy an affiliate product that they will get a commission on. I really DON’T have a problem with that, I mean, I do it from time to time also. That’s just what we do, but most of these people don’t even have their own product and I would venture to guess that a lot of them don’t realize how easy it is to flip a plr product and make sales on their own.

Of course, that’s assuming that the product that they are going to sell has something to do with the product they are giving away on their squeeze page.

I mean, if I sign up to get a report or ebook about dating and how to read body language, why in the world would I want to be sent to another squeeze page that is dealing with forex trading?

Now let me ask you – you work hard driving traffic to a squeeze page and offering something of value in order to get people to sign up for your ‘newsletter/ezine’ right?

Say ‘right’

Why would you not provide them with excellent content dealing with the report/ebook/whatever that they signed up to receive?

I don’t have the answer to that question, do you?

Instead, most of the lists that I sign up for start right away blasting me (and hundreds if not thousands of others) with other offers, other sales pitches and other things that I can go buy that have nothing to do with their original product.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are several lists that I am on that I get fabulous content from and when they send an offer out for one of THEIR products, or an affiliate offer for a RELATED product, I will typically click over to take a look at it because you just never know when another product is going to come along that is going to help your business out.

And that’s where you come in; leave me a comment on why you think people market this way, or am I completely off base.

After you leave your comment, go up to the upper left and sign up for my Relationship Marketing Ecourse and find out why it’s important to build a relationship with your readers.

Once you are signed up, you will start receiving the ecourse and you will also receive the remaining messages in my squeeze page series which will include an announcement for the live webinar I will be holding on April 19th where I will show you EXACTLY how to fix this problem.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks in advance for your comments.

If you remember in the last post, I was talking about how to article marketing effectively in your niche of choice.

I am confident that you’ve started writing some articles specifically targeted at your niche of choice, whatever that may be. Right?

Well, first off, don’t worry about whether or not the content of the article is good enough, all you need to do is get words down on ‘paper’ (notepad, wordpad, open office, etc) and then organize it into a logical flow.

Once you do have it in the order you want, you can do one of several things with it. Firstly, you probably want to post it on your blog. Hopefully you have found a good domain name for your niche and have gotten one of the numerous wordpress themes installed and configured (that’s a subject of another series I am working on).

Again, don’t worry about content because once you put it up on the Internet it will begin to be viral. If you have an RSS feed attached to your blog, then those people who are subscribed to it will receive notification that you have new content. There are also a number of ‘plugins’ you can install on your blog to make it go viral, including tools that will automatically ‘tweet’ your blog post.

The next step (and I am not listing these in any particular order) is to take your post, or article, and ‘spin’ it a bit. The reason you want to do that is because you are going to submit it to various article directories. You can do this in a number of different ways also. The way that I recommend doing it is through Article Marketer and through EzineArticles.com.

Why?

Well as you can see by the graphics below, a submission to Article Marketer gets distributed far and wide which means that any number of ezine publishers, or blog writers, can pick up your article and publish it as long as they keep your author resource information intact. You’re probably asking yourself why I would submit separately to EzineArticles.com. Here’s why, EZA is the article directory with the most traffic to it and articles that are published there tend to be indexed by the various search engines quicker.

So what does having an article published in one of these two

directories mean to you? It means more publicity of your product or your business or your blog. That in turn increases the chances of someone reading your article, visiting your site, and buying your product.

The more your article is circulated through these various channels, the more people will read it and know about your product and business or blog. That is the basic point of any advertisement.

Since it does not cost anything to dive into article marketing, the revenue that you earn through it will be pure profit for you. Every time someone clicks on your author resource links and visits your site, the higher your odds of making a sale. The return on your investment is unmeasureable. So, if you can post a few articles daily, you will begin the deluge of traffic to your site and begin to reap the rewards of article marketing.

So I hope you are grasping the power of article marketing in whatever niche you choose to get involved in. I will cover a few more points in my next post, but before I go, there one item of importance I need to let you know…

Mike Steup released his Ready Made OTO, which, if you go back a couple of posts, you will realize the importance of this. Mike has come up with  set of 10 One-Time-Offers (OTOs), each with 25 e-books in the bundle. You get the sales (OTO) page, the download page and of course, the e-books for each of the 10 bundles. Unbelievably, that’s 250 ebooks with Master Resell Rights! Even if you don’t use the OTOs for your own benefit (which you should), the price you are getting the ebooks for is a downright steal.

Pay attention though, once you purchase the package, he has another offer that is even more incredible. Unfortunately, I can’t give that one away…you’ll have to find out for yourself and you can do that here.

Until next time,

Here’s to YOUR Online Successes

Ron

One of the easiest to implement yet most overlooked ways to get the subscribers of your newsletter, or your customers, to warm up to you and feel like you value them and want to help them is to ask them simple questions.

Everybody’s favorite subject is himself or herself so why not show some interest?

Ask questions and do things that require some sort of interaction from your readers. It doesn’t really matter what you ask. You can ask questions that are completely unrelated to what your newsletter is about so long as you get people to respond.

When you get them used to doing things you ask them to do, no matter what it is, it’s easy for them to keep doing things you ask them to do like buy the products you recommend.
The more you can get your readers to communicate with you, the more they will feel like they know and can trust you.

A relationship (as far as an online newsletter or email course goes) is nothing more than two people (you and each individual subscriber) knowing what their place is in relation to each other.

You are the provider of helpful information and someone who wants to help your reader succeed at something.

You must get that across.

Your reader is someone who will learn to trust your advice and listen to your recommendations because you have built up a history of doing things that seem to benefit them more than they seem to benefit you. That doesn’t necessarily have to be true, as long as it seems like it’s the truth to your readers.

Remember, perception (or what people believe) is the only truth that really matters as far as they’re concerned.

As attractive and inviting as this website looks, it’s just one of millions of pages/sites on the internet and just like email messages, can be a very impersonal place, unless you make it otherwise.

What it boils down to is: The Internet is a cold and distant place. It’s just a series of tubes where people dump text and images (or at least that is what you would get out of this video)

That’s actually to your advantage because if you can consistently get across to your readers that you are a real person with real concerns (just like them) and you know what it’s like for them to be in the situation they’re in because you’ve been there, you won’t have any trouble getting people to warm up to you.

People in general tend to like others who look out for them because people (again, in general) think about themselves first. If it seems like another person is looking out for them first then that person will automatically take a high position in their eyes.

In other words, when you’re writing, not every link in it has to be an affiliate link for a product you’ll get paid from.

Understand this…

Your readers are buying products and services all the time that aren’t putting money in your pockets so it doesn’t hurt you at all to tell them about a product or service that you won’t make money from.

This sets you up to make money when you do have something to recommend that will put a commission check in your pockets.

To set yourself up to make money you have to give, give, give and then give some more. Now it’s important to note that you don’t have to give everything away.

Giving (as I’m using the term) means to give of yourself. Share stories with your readers, point them to helpful resources and let them know about things they probably haven’t found on their own.

In other words, offer your guidance. That’s what they signed up to your mailing list for. Not for a bunch of ads they can find on their own.

Are you publishing your own newsletter? Are you stumped for content? No worries, my friend Doug Champigny has the solution for you. Newsletter in a Box is the perfect solution for you. There is over a year’s worth of content for your newsletter, article submissions, or create your own info product from the content! It’s a GREAT resource!

Looking for more ‘Inside Information’ like this, subscribe to my K.A.R. Newsletter (Knowledge, Application, Results) and receive a few unadvertised bonuses for signing up. You can sign up in the upper right hand corner of the page.

Stay tuned for Part II – Guys…you also stay tuned…I will be launching a new website later today that you will be VERY interested in…I guarantee it!

Until next time,

Here’s to YOUR Successes,

Ron