Building Your List Of Customers

It’s time to attract visitors to your Internet business and to build a list of customers. Your customers will be your lifeline and without them, your Internet business cannot survive.

Build Your Foundation – The Email List

In the online world we communicate with our customers via multiple mediums and ultimately we need to collect their email address. Email addresses are used to send orders, updates and more information from your e-commerce website. Building an email list is very important because you will be able to deliver more information and convince your customers to buy more from your website. I strongly recommend you start building an email list at the beginning.

Here is a simple process of how collecting an email address is used to create sales:

1. Sign up subscribers to your online newsletter through your website and send updates of new products and promotions
2. Build rapport with these people who will be interested in receiving your online newsletter. Be sure you offer great advice and resources they can access.
3. They become a customer of your website because they trust you and will recommend friends and family to buy from you.

This is a short process that is quite simple but very powerful. If you can build strong relationships with your customers via email, then imagine what your e-commerce business could achieve.

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Getting Business Offline – Partnership Marketing

Most business owners who run Internet businesses heavily rely on generating a majority of their revenue from customers online. That means they are potentially missing out on opportunities found offline. This is why I want to explore in this post the idea of partnership marketing, which will compliment any Internet business.

What Is Partnership Marketing?

Partnership marketing is a strategic way to aligning one’s business with other organisations and businesses to equally expose partner brands to one another’s customers. Typically these partnerships are formed when two or more companies find value for their customers in each other’s products and/or their services. This type of partnership marketing is happening all the time on the Internet and an example online is John Chow’s partnership with Market Leverage. John Chow has an audience that Market Leverage can promote their products and services to, which in turn John Chow also receives greater exposure through Market Leverage’s existing client base. This makes it a win-win situation for both businesses.

Then we come back to the offline world and partnership marketing is about finding people who offer complementary services and products that work alongside your business or help expand the offering for your customers. Some more examples could be an arrangement between an electrician and a painter, or a hairdresser and a beautician. As you can see both businesses compliment each other and provide additional value to a consumer over and above their experience compared to just one product or service offered to them.

Where Can You Find These Partnerships?

The best way to find partnerships is to go about it the old fashion way – network with people by getting out, mixing and meeting them personally. It is about your brand being seen and the benefits are substantial. It gives you and your business the opportunity to:

• Introduce your brand, your products and services and your company background
• To learn new ideas and concepts for your business
• Find out what is happening in and outside of your market
• Meet new people
• Be referred
• Find new suppliers and consultants
• Generate new leads and prospects who could be your potential customers
• Connect with people who you know and like
• Increase your sphere of influence

Through networking you will be able to also establish new ideas and share your thoughts, so be prepared to listen and learn. It’s also a great way to present your Internet business in a personal way.

Why Is Partnership Marketing So Powerful That Makes It Work?

When we start our Internet business, we have found that finding a customer and building a relationship with them is the key to creating a sale. Without customers you do not have business. The same is true, without a relationship with potential business partners your Internet business will struggle to grow and it will eventually die. This is what makes partnership marketing so powerful. Most business relationships start off either in reputation or directly in sales by referral or word of mouth. In my personal experience, 80% of the business that comes into the Dragonboat business comes from referral or word of mouth due to the business relationships I have build with clients over the years. This is also known as third party endorsements and is usually spontaneous, objective, honest and free! Therefore it carries more weight than most other marketing tools available. Additionally I still believe that face to face contact is vital to any Internet business.

How To Manage Partnership Marketing Effectively?

When you establish a partnership with other business and create a program that will benefit your customers you will want to manage it correctly. Here are five tips to help you:

1. Brainstorm what you can jointly sell and who can sell if for you. Are you finding businesses to partner with formally or informally? What other businesses around you have the same target market? What are your expectations of return on investment (ROI)?
2. Find Your Partners that have already build a database and would benefit from your business offer. Your offer should be win-win for both businesses and the customer.
3. Create great sales copy and provide your business partners with the sales pitch and the related promotional material. Make it easy for your business partners to promote your products and services. The less work they have to do the more likely they are to promote your business.
4. Continue to look out for new business partners. Once you have established a few business partners, continue to recruit new partners to add to your business. It helps to cast your net out and to have back up business partners just in case others do nothing with your products and services.
5. Look after your business partners. Contact them regularly, update them with new promotions and changes. Give them tips on how to successfully promote your products and services and how it will compliment their business.

Review and Monitor Your Partnerships.

Keep track of where you get your business from through scripts you can implement on your website or when you give a link to your business partners. Make sure you are measuring your responses from customers and to track your business partners who are bringing you the most traffic to your website. You can always reward them for their efforts when you are able to get good statistics and the results. That way you can be sure where to spend your time and resources on.

Good luck and get out there!

Tyrone Shum
Partnership Marketer

Internet Business DoFollow Forums To Help Build Traffic

Building links to your Internet business is a crucial aspect of your marketing campaign. It helps improve your search engine ranking and increases traffic to your website. If you are interested in other traffic generating strategies, I suggest reading my series on: Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic.

The main focus of this article is to provide you with a list of DoFollow forums that you can participate and share information with. If you spend two to three hours a day browsing through DoFollow forums, write at least 10-15 posts in at least two DoFollow forums,  you will start to see more traffic flow to your website. Here are the top three reasons why you should implement this:

1. It will generate FREE traffic to your website. If forum members see value in your information, they will click on your link to find out more.
2. Helps create a backlink to your website, which will increase your search engine ranking and site popularity much quicker.
3. You contribute to others and learn from experts within your industry.

Let me address what DoFollow means. Otherwise if you already understand the concept, scroll down to the list below and take action today by contributing your resources to others that will drive more traffic to your website.

What Is DoFollow?
The easiest way to understand what DoFollow is, I will explain what NoFollow is first. NoFollow was an attribute created in 2005 to help bloggers and webmasters manage comments and control the number of inserted links. It was to stop spammers placing unwanted links on blog posts. By adding the Nofollow attribute automatically to your links it tells search engines to not follow them, thus stopping spam.

Now, DoFollow is the opposite of NoFollow, isn’t that simple? The main difference is, DoFollow is only available on limited websites restricting comments and links that are relevant to the topic. This stops spamming and is beneficial to websites who are actually contributing to the community. By submitting comments on DoFollow blogs or websites you get free quality backlinks.

“DoFollow links are links which help you improve your search engine ranking results.”

List of DoFollow Forums

1. 5Star Affiliate Forum – An affiliate marketing forum
2. Abestweb – An affiliate marketing forum for both beginner and experienced affiliates
3. Abundance – A forum that allows you to post advertisements for free
4. Blogger Talk – A forum for bloggers
5. Blog Mastermind Forum – An excellent forum with like minded bloggers who share strategies on how to make money with blogs
6. Business Forum – Business related topics discussed in this forum
7. Capital Theory – An online money making forum
8. Clickbank Success – A forum dedicated to people making money from Clickbank
9. Clicks Forum – Internet marketing business forum
10. Digitalppoint – A large forum about internet marketing and search engine (over 10 million members)
11. Dreamteam Money Forum – One of the hottest money making forums
12. Entrepreneur Forum – A forum started up by Evan Carmichael about entrepreneurship
13. Ewealth.com – Internet marketing and webmaster forum
14. Free Advertising Forum – Unlimited advertising posting
15. Internet Marketing for Business – Internet marketing and business forum
16. SEOForum – Dedicated for SEO discussions
17. Small Business Forum – A business forum for small entrepreneurs and online moneymakers
18. Startups – A business start-up and innovation forum
19. Warrior Forum – One of the most helpful and highly recommended forum to discuss business on. People are always ready to help and assist with your enquiries
20. Work-at-Home Moms – An Internet marketing message boards for mums

Please comment below about any of the forums you have tried and let me know how helpful they have been for you.

Tyrone Shum
Forum DoFollower

Social Bookmarking Will Help Grow Your Internet Business

Social bookmarking is a very powerful strategy to help drive free traffic to your website, particularly when your Internet business is brand new or has been laying dormant for quite sometime. Combine this strategy with other traffic generation tactic discussed about at Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic and this will definitely boost your website on search engines.

What Is Social Bookmarking?
Rather than redefine this term, here is a definition taken directly from Wikipedia:

“Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.

These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service’s features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.”

How You Can Use Social Bookmarking To Get More Free Traffic?
For your website to rank top positions on search engines you need a high amount of incoming links with the combination of keywords. Social bookmarking can help you achieve more incoming links very easily. When you submit to multiple social bookmarking sites it will automatically create incoming links to your website. This give you more results of your website on search engines.

Let’s take for example, I submit the following post Farming Your Crop Of Clients to 20 social bookmarking sites. This post can show up as 20 “unique” results on the search engines. Therefore, instead ranking only once on a search engine, it can be ranked 20 times. As you can see, it is 20 times more effective and gives you a higher chance for your website to be found.

I previously mentioned for social bookmarking to work properly, the combination of incoming links and keywords are needed. It boils down to selecting the proper keywords that are targeted to your article or product. The more targeted your keyword phrases are the higher chances that your website will be ranked higher. For example, if you have a highly competitive product like the “Apple iPod”, then you will need choose more specific keywords including model numbers and specifications like the “iPod Nano 4GB Black”. This way it will help you capture those keywords and help you rank higher.

Use SocialMarker.com To Leverage Your Social Bookmarking Promotions
So how do submit to 20+ social bookmarking sites as I mentioned above? It’s easier than you think, and you won’t have to sit there clicking through hundreds of social bookmarking sites as well. There is a website called SocialMarker.com which will help you submit to over 20 social bookmarking sites. When you visit this site, you will see a list of the top Social Bookmarking sites available such as propeller.com, technorati.com, twitter.com, and so forth.

The idea is to submit an article or blog post you wish to rank high in the search engines to as many of the social bookmarking sites as possible. If you want your whole website to rank well then you will need to submit as many articles or posts to the social bookmarking sites.

Social Bookmarking “How To Tips”
Search engines are very intelligent to pick up on automated promotions and we need to make our social bookmarking promotions seem natural. Here are some handy tips to help you:

1. Run your social bookmarking promotions slowly over time. Send a few today, a few next week and a few next month.
2. Register multiple accounts for each of the social bookmarking sites. Start out with at least 10 unique accounts
   • use different usernames within one social bookmarking site
   • use free email accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, MSN to open up your accounts
   • repeat the process with the 20+ social bookmarking sites (should take no more than 15 minutes for each registration)
   • use roboform.com to remember all your passwords.
3. Rotate the accounts you use with social bookmarking sites for each post you submit.
4. Add new social bookmarking accounts to your promotions on a regular basis.
5. Include other people’s articles and post within your social bookmarking promotion. This shows randomness within your promotions.
6. Do not social bookmark every single post you write as it will be considered spam, so please social bookmark wisely.

Just like any type of traffic generation strategy, you will need to allocate time to work the process. Focus on a few strategies, test them and monitor the process. Give it at least a month to see the results and continue the process if it works for you. Remember don’t spend all day on this one process as social bookmarking should only be used to help “jumpstart” your traffic from search engines.

Tyrone Shum
Social Bookmarker

Finding Profitable Keywords For Your Internet Business

Over the last couple of days I have been focusing on optimising all of my blog posts and looking for profitable keywords. I was reading an article from Stompernet that triggered me to look into this because I found that my posts were not getting indexed in the search engines. I have written a post 8 Ways To Get Your New Website Listed In Search Engines and it explains what SEO is all about and a few techniques to use to optimise your website. If you don’t know what SEO is, I would suggest reading that article first.

How To Find Profitable Keywords For Your Internet Business?
There are hundreds of methods to use to find keywords in today’s marketplace and the main focus of this post is to find profitable keywords for your Internet business. I prefer to stick with one method that works very well and it is free. These keywords will help you generate organic free traffic to your website and in turn if you have the right mechanisms in place to capture leads, then these keywords become very profitable for you. I wrote a Converting Traffic Into Sales series that will show you how to capture these leads.

Since Google is one of the largest search engine providers in the market I lean towards using their tools as a start. Google provides a robust Keyword Search Tool that is used by many webmasters and internet marketers to find profitable keywords for their Google Adword campaigns. Simply go to Google’s Keyword Search Tool page and type in a generic phrase that summarises your product or service. For example, if you sell an ebook on car tuning you could type in “car tuning ebook”. Press Get Keyword Ideas and you will be provided with a long list of keyword phrases that are relevant to the phrase you typed.

The next step is to find keywords that have high search volumes with low to average advertiser competition. Pick these keywords out and note them down in a spreadsheet or piece of paper. These will be the keywords that you will need to include in your posts and for search engine optimisation (SEO). You will start to notice a long list of keywords as you hunt through to find them and I would recommend writing down at most 50 keywords.

This type of deep keyword research is a goldmine that few Internet businesses actually utilise. I have consistently been able to find keyword phrases that were completely overlooked by my competitors using this strategy. It is possible to dominate these keywords in a very short space of time from 48 hours to a week.

Linking Pages Together Using Profitable Keywords
After you have accumulated at least 50 keywords and started to use them in your website, the next stage is to link them altogether. This is a step that most people overlook as it can be the most powerful technique to sky rocket your ranking in a search engine and potentially dominate it. The idea is to take a topic that you have written with 2,000 words and split it into separate posts of 450 to 600 words. Each post will have a keyword in the heading that is linked back to each other. Let’s take for example a topic about lamps where we discuss about a banker’s lamp, bedroom lamp, and halogen desk lamp. Notice how each of these headings have the keyword lamp in them? We will take each of these examples and put them into separate posts. Then add the corresponding links to each page. Here’s an example of how to link your pages together:

This is how the entire web is build, how search engines find pages and how people find content they are looking. Though, what you see above is only our website which is still isolated from the rest of the web. To allow search engines to find our website with these pages you need links from the rest of the web, which is where SEO and other strategies come into play. As mentioned in the beginning, be sure to read 8 Ways To Get Your New Website Listed In Search Engines.

The Effect It Has On Your Internet Business?
By including more profitable keywords in your website will lead to having more pages with more content. It is why the term, Content Is King is very true on the web. Ultimately with more quality content will attract more links from the web leading to greater organic traffic from search engines and other websites. Use this traffic to capture leads and your end result is to convert them into profits.

Tyrone Shum
Profitable Keyword Hunter