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hat universe are you from?Where is your community? Okay. You’ve found The Irresistible Offer. Now where is your dehydrated market? Here are a couple of creative ways you can meet them in the middle of the consumer desert and offer them the first addictive glass of sparkling, refreshing water.
Welcome to the Blogosphere!
Meet them where they flourish, where they’re already ac- tive and interacting. There are a couple of ways to meet up in the public gatherings of the Internet: blogs and forums.
I know you hear about these often, but they do work.
And here’s how you can make use of them:
First, search Google, Yahoo!, Blogger.com, and tons of other blogging directories for blogs relating to your niche.
Here’s a way you can meet your target market head-on where they dwell. These are the folks obsessed with your niche—so much so they dedicate hours a day to writing, debating, and reviewing their biggest interest—your cash crop!
The quickest and easiest way to locate blogs within your target market is to use Blogger.com’s new “Blog Search” fea- ture at www.blogger.com/blogsearch.
Now that you’ve found them, take the time to comment—
and if you like your niche this isn’t going to be a chore. An- swer questions. Give feedback. Include a little mention about yourself and your related product or site. Don’t forget to men- tion where they can find you. If you provide genuine, helpful information, you’ve just gotten a foot in the fire. Be careful from this point on—you’ve just found the secret portal straight into the interactive community of your consumer base. Prepare yourself for tons of awesome feedback, product ideas (just pay attention; they’ll tell you what their drink of choice is), and a myriad of ways you can fine-tune your product or service to be the best.
If you like to write, another way to get involved is to start your own blog. Become one of the community. Some of the
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largest companies in the world have started blogging their re- search, test results, product descriptions, and release dates.
You can also obtain general information for any given niche from articles and news releases. But do everyone—including yourself—a favor, and encourage the interaction of your new community. Give your readers the ability to leave comments and subscribe to your RSS/XML feed. It’s like having the ulti- mate opt-in, unblockable, very interested prospect list.
(Quick side note:You can find a list of the top 55 blog/RSS directories you can submit to for mega surges of quick and easy targeted traffic at www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55.)
Now you know where to hit up the thirsty masses where they hide and multiply by the thousands every day. There are also a couple of new additions to the RSS world. Audio blogs—often referred to as Podcasts—give listeners the abil- ity to subscribe to your audio feeds and listen to your lovely voice on their computers or download it onto their portable MP3 devices.
And the latest development—which has not yet been used for any real marketing purpose—is video blogging. Mostly in this format you find individuals recording and posting their personal journals and short films. For someone with strong vi- sion and lots of passion and creativity, here’s your opportunity to burst this subscription format wide open.
You’ve got your foot out and prepared for the blaze. Be sure to submit your blog (if you make one) to the various blog direc- tories, giving yourself overnight surges of free targeted traffic.
Don’t forget to include shameless promotions in your posting.
It’s also a good idea to have a separate main site that links to your blog, and vice versa. Have a capture or gateway page to your main site. This is not a pop-up, but more of a special offer and a name and e-mail submission area. Visitors click the
“Sign me up” button and are directed to your home page from there. So this is the setup process, and there are two ways it can go down:
Mad Scientists Using The Great Formula
1.Prospects are online reading your blog via your RSS feed, or your comments you leave on related blogs, and want to know more, so they check out your main site and land on your squeeze page. They enter their name and e-mail and are now in your autoresponder for follow- ups. Then they are redirected seamlessly to your main page, sales letter, or other direct offer.
2.Traffic is directed to your web site through other means (paid sources, search engine optimization, articles, and referrals). They first hit your squeeze page, where they enter their name and e-mail—adding them to your au- toresponder. From there they are directed to your main site with your sales letter and main information. From there they can link to your blog, where they can get to know you and read all the articles you’ve written.
Prospects can contact you and add ideas, and they can subscribe to your RSS feed (aka the ultimate opt-in list).
What’s the point to all this?
Multiple points of constant bombarding contact equal in- stant top-of-mind awareness. You’re everywhere. And guess what? Poof—you’re an expert!
Prospects who sign up to your squeeze page (proven to be wildly successful when list building) will begin re- ceiving e-mails from you right away.
Your web site is now linked to constantly updating con- tent via your blog, and you’re encouraging repeat traffic.
Prospects who visit your blog and like your content will subscribe to your feed, and every time you post they will be notified to come check it out, or your entire post will show up in their aggregator or feed reader.
We have recently started to test and track one of our main sites with this awesome formula. It has the capture page system
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with the main site linking to a blog that is updated with both au- tomated articles and hand-submitted content, as well as affiliate test results and reviews (see www.JasonMangrum.com).
Of course you need to be keeping track of where all your traffic is coming from and what their actions are. We use sev- eral services to submit, track, and promote the site and blog, and guess what? You can find all the sources we use on our blog at http://tested-affiliate-marketing.blogspot.com.
As for the Second Glass, what you’ve created here is a life- time of contact with your target audience. A blog in itself cre- ates a direct personal connection with your prospects. And it’s easy to keep it updated. All you have to do is keep your con- tact list up to date with every new product you create using your autoresponder and your updated blog. This can also be a very easy way to promote any related products of which you are an affiliate.
There’s your Second Glass sold, as well as the Third Glass (and as many others as you choose to promote), to your con- stantly growing list of readers!
In the past, squeeze pages and other methods of rapid list building have created the perfect conditions for the Second Glass offer.
The gold really is in the list. Past customers and prospects alike are privy to the back-end offer through e-mail follow- ups.
Simple, direct, and constantly growing—now there’s an unblockable follow-up system via your blog. (Plus, you’ll never receive a spam complaint with your blog’s RSS feed, and you’ll never have a problem with deliverability, either!)
We are the guinea pigs in these and other methods of rapidly changing multimedia promotional formats. You can see all of our adventures, tests, and pure unadulterated results at http://tested-affiliate-marketing.blogspot.com.
Mad Scientists Using The Great Formula