Day 18 (Thursday) - Forum Posting to Discussion Boards, “Run your Numbers”, Catch Up

Lesson Objective:

Today you will:

· Make at least 3 forum / discussion board postings in response to other people’s
questions

· “Run your numbers” so far

· Catch up on any items you’ve overlooked or put off until now

Skills Needed:
· Basic Word Processing
· Basic Surfing



Part 1 – Make at least 3 forum / discussion board postings

Yesterday you picked out 10 to 30 active discussion boards or forums and today you are
going to post answers to people’s questions.


Today you will post at least three responses to demonstrate your knowledge as “the
expert” and you will do it in such a way that it will entice other people to come to your
site as a result.


Whenever you're answering a question you should use a compelling title for your post to
pull readers into your posting.

Most other posters will simply reply to the post so the original post's title appears as "Re:
Original Title" – not very exciting :-(


Take a look at a few examples and see which one of the posts you would read if you were
in a hurry:

· Ad Tracking Software
Mike xxxx - Saturday, 14 October 2003, at 5:41 p.m.


o Here's A Great Way...
Yanik Silver - Tuesday, 17 October 2003, at 9:14 p.m.
· What ONE book would you recommend
Donna - Friday, 20 October 2003, at 3:06 p.m.
o I've Read This One 7 Times...
Yanik Silver - Saturday, 21 October 2003, at 8:35 p.m.
$ Re: I've Read This One 7 Times...
Don - Sunday, 22 October 2003, at 4:56 p.m.


o Re: What ONE book would you recommend
Willie xxxx - Saturday, 21 October 2003, at 6:52 a.m.
o Re: What ONE book would you recommend
Tom xxxx - Friday, 20 October 2003, at 11:45 p.m.



Important Dos and Don’ts To Posting

I believe there are a few points you should keep in mind:

1. Obviously you shouldn’t ‘spam’ a board with your blatant advertisement. You
can’t just post to the board announcing your new product (unless you have
explicit permission from the board owner).

2. Don’t put your URL unless you’ve got something to contribute. I always like to
contribute something before I list my link. I won’t simply say something like “I
agree” and then give people my link. I don’t think that makes you look very good
to visitors of the board.

3. Also, whenever I post a question I will not put my link because that really isn’t a
contribution I’m making.



Using Your ‘Sig’ File

On some boards they don’t have an automatic way to add your URL or text link – in that
case you simply add your ‘sig’ file (or signature) at the bottom.

This is a simple way of promoting yourself ethically on the web. A sig file is just 4 or 5
lines that appears after your name on every email message you send out. This is VERY
similar to your resource box at the end of your ezine article.


Part 2 – Understanding and Analyzing your “critical numbers”

Your website stats are also referred to as your “critical numbers”.


Here’s why your stats are so important:

The Hidden Fortune in Your Website “Stats”

Most people never bother to look at the statistics program that comes with virtually every
website because few realize the gold mine of information it contains.

Your website statistics hold a key for understanding your traffic, improving sales and
increasing the overall effectiveness of your online selling.


Whether you realize it or not, your website has “critical numbers” that enable you to
measure the overall success of your Internet presence.

Any serious website operator should understand the four most important numbers:

· Hits

· Unique, Targeted Visitors

· Leads

· Sales


Hits - Hits are typically page views, whether by the same or different visitors, and they
indicate overall activity on the site.

A lot of hits shows activity (usually a good thing), but doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve
had a high number of actual visitors.


Search engine “spiders” snooping your pages and website surfers hitting their back
buttons also increase the hit count.


Research has shown that, depending on the size of your site, the ratio of hits to visitors
will range anywhere from 2 to 1 all the way up to 12 to 1.

Unique, Targeted Visitors - people surfing to your site who have not been there before
within a certain period of time.

Depending on the statistics program you use, a unique visitor may be someone who
hasn’t been to your site in a day or a week, while in other programs a visitor remains
unique until you reset the stats.

You must understand how your stats program classifies unique visitors so you don’t
mistakenly believe your site is getting 30 unique visitors a day only to find out it is the
same 30 people coming back day after day!

A “targeted” visitor means that the visitor has an interest in what you are selling or
promoting. This interest is usually demonstrated by keyword searches at a search engine
or by clicking targeted advertisements in ezines.


It does you no good to attract general traffic to your site – you want unique, targeted
visitors with a high level of interest your product or service.


Leads - a valid email address usually makes the best “lead” since people can and do give
fake names and phone numbers online.

If someone won’t give you a valid email address, chances are they won’t give you their
credit card to make a purchase either.


Email leads enable you to measure interest and to follow up with prospects.

Once you know the number of unique visitors to your site, you can calculate the
percentage of leads you develop and concentrate on ways to improve your sales
conversion by testing different offers and headlines.


Sales - the number of sales as compared to unique visitors represents your most critical
statistic because it tells you whether or not you’ve made a profit.


For every hundred visitors to your site, how many sales do you make and how much
money do you net?

Most failed dot-com’s in the late 1990’s never bothered to answer this simple question.


Selling on the web is a “numbers game” – learn how to make the numbers work for you!


Any potential JV partner who knows what they’re doing is going to want to know your
“numbers” so they can reasonably figure out how much money they’ll make if they work
with you.

Knowing your numbers ahead of time will make you look much more professional!


I keep track of my critical numbers every single day in a basic spreadsheet… that way I
can see how I’m doing day to day at a glance.

So right now go to your stats and figure out the following:


(If you need to, consult the help file for your stats or email your ISP if you have any
trouble reading your stats and understanding exactly what they mean.)


How many “hits” have you had in the last week?


Look in your stats program to see exactly what are “hits”. Are they individual
page views or something else?

This total number of “hits” helps you gauge overall activity on your site.


How many leads have you developed with your autoresponder in the last week?

Besides sales, adding targeted people to build your mailing list is the best thing
you can do online!


How many unique visitors have you had in the last week?

Let’s say for example you had 100 unique visitors in the last week.


How many sales did you make in the last week?

Let’s say for example you made 3 sales and you net $23 on each sale after hard
costs of producing and delivering the product.


Divide your number of sales by your number of unique visitors and this will give
your “sales conversion rate”.

3 sales / 100 unique visitors = 3% conversion rate

What this means is that for every 100 targeted visitors showing up to your site,
you sell 3 of them. A JV partner would be very interested in those types of
numbers!


Divide your net profits by the total number of unique visitors you’ve had in the
last week and this will give your “Visitor value”.

Let’s say your net profit on those three sales is $69 (3 sales x $23).

$69 net profit / 100 visitors = 69 cent visitor value.

What this means is that you can spend up to 69 cents to bring a targeted visitor to
your site and still make money.





Part 3 – Here’s what to do if your numbers are low

Since we’ve only been at this for a little over 2 weeks now and your Yahoo, Dmoz and
search engine listings haven’t even kicked in yet, your numbers probably aren’t very
high. However you could get numbers from your pay-per-click campaigns and some of
the others action items you’ve been doing.


Don’t get discouraged!


Our purpose today is more to get you used to looking at your “critical numbers” as it is to
actually start tracking results!


If your total number of visitors is low, here’s what you can do at this point:

· Increase your bid amounts at Overture.com and the other pay-per-click search
engines.

· Increase the total number of terms you’re bidding on with pay-per-click search
engines.

· Run another round of ezine ads (if the ones you placed on Day 15 have already
run)


If your total visitors seem fine, but your sales or your opt-in subscriber numbers are
low, here’s what you can do at this point:

Note: It’s best to run each of these changes in front of the same number of unique
visitors. Doing so allows you to compare your results and see what effect a specific
change has on your results.


Do NOT try all of these at the same time! Only make one change at a time to your sales
letter or you’ll never know what does and doesn’t work!


1. Test a different headline on your sales letter – you came up with 50 or more…
maybe it is time to try a different one.

2. Adjust your offer to include more benefits for the consumer. Do you focus on
their needs or is your sales letter all about you?

3. Add more bonuses. Sweeten the pot even further until no sane person could say
no.

4. Change your price up or down. Sometimes a different price point can get people
off the mark and make a purchase decision.




Summary of today’s assignments:

1. Post at least three responses to messages on active discussion boards.


2. Thoroughly analyze your “critical numbers” so you start getting in the habit of
looking at them daily.


3. Make adjustments to improve your “numbers” and your sales results.



Today’s Resources:

Forum Profits – This step-by-step guide will teach exactly how to bring in more traffic
and more subscribers using free forums (without getting flamed).

Day 15 (Monday) - Begin marketing to ezines

Lesson Objective:

To create and place your ad in 5 ezines and start writing your own article to submit to the
50 ezines by outlining your topic.

Skills Needed:
· Basic email
· Basic Surfing
· Basic Word Processing



Today’s Lesson:

Today is a big day – I hope you’re excited – we’re going to start doing some more
promotion!



Part 1 - Advertising in Ezines

An inexpensive way to reach a lot of people is to place ads in ezines. You can advertise
in ezines with huge circulations more and pay as little as a few bucks. It’s a really great
deal for the circulation you get.

And another great thing about advertising is ezines is that you can submit an ad today and
have it run in just a day or two and start making money.


2 days ago (on Day 13) you should have selected 5 potential ezines to run ads in. If you
didn’t contact those ezine editors about advertising guidelines, please do that now before
continuing with this section.


You’ll start off running classified ads in the ezines. If you can afford a top sponsorship –
that’ll usually give you better results. But go with what you can afford.

Most ezines will tell you what their requirements are for advertising. Usually you’ll get
5-6 lines, 60-65 characters per line and some other instructions (most times your link
does not count as a line).

Take out your Overture titles and descriptions and use those to help you create a few
classified ezine ads. They’ll be pretty close. Here’s a sample ad I’ve used with success…



===========================================================
===> Create A Sales Letter in Less Than 3 Minutes?
You can now! Just Fill In A Few Blanks And PRESTO...You’ve
Just Created A Powerful, Moneymaking Sales Letter –
*Without* Writing! Stop Writing Sales Letters The Hard Way!
Check out: http://www.instantsalesletters.com/ezine

Notice the “/ezine” after my URL – this is done for tracking purposes. You need to
realize that every ad you run should be tracked for performance and results or you’ll have
no idea what’s working and what’s not.


Let’s talk about tracking briefly…


If you sprung for your own affiliate program/software you’re in luck – because this
makes tracking incredibly easy. You’ll just set-up a new affiliate id# for every advertising
campaign you run. This should keep track of clicks and more importantly, sales.


Okay, but maybe you didn’t invest in a full affiliate system – don’t worry – I have
options for you too.


You should use some kind of ad tracking system to see how effective your ads
actually are and so you can compare one against another to find the “best” ad.


Here are a few of the better ones:

1. NitroStats – Nitro Stats gives a whole host of useful tools for webmasters
including tracking systems. Instead of advertising your URL you will be posting a
link that looks similar to this: http://www.roibot.com/r.cgi?R49498_campaign.
Then when people click on this link your tracker will count their clicks and then
direct them to your desired site.

This tool is used by many of today’s top marketers because of the power and
flexibility it offers!

2. Marketer’s Choice – integrates an ad tracking software system with shopping
cart and autoresponders. Will let you trace individual sales and total sales
volume to a specific ad – very powerful!

3. Click Tracker – a FREE script that runs in your cgi bin. Will require knowledge
of installing scripts in order to use it.


The one big downfall with just using free or stand-alone click tracking programs is that
you don’t have the sales data to go along with it.

You can track this data, however, if you use one of NitroStat’s ad trackers that comes
with your monthly fee, or if you use Marketer’s Choice, which integrates the shopping
cart data with the ad tracker.

Regardless of which way you choose to go, once you have written your ads and gotten
your click tracking software in place, go ahead and submit your ads to the 5 ezines.


Part 2 - Starting your Ezine Article

Okay, now that you’ve got your Ezine advertising squared away – I also want to think
about another aspect of Ezine marketing…and that is getting free publicity by submitting
articles.

This is how I generate thousands of dollars in free advertising every month (and you can
too!).


Not only will you get great results, but you’ll start getting known as the expert and
authority on your subject.


Using this exact information I’m going to share with you I’ve been published in Ezines
like DEMC, Eboz, SalesDoctors, WebPro News etc. and millions of people have read my
articles.


Sounds pretty good, right?


There’s tons of Ezines out there and they all need content… and you can be one of the
people that gives them content.

By giving them the content, you’ll find there is a kind of a quid pro quo relationship
where you get to stick this little box (called a “resource box”) at the end of your article in
exchange for your content – and this is how you get “paid”!

People who click on the link in your resource box will visit your site!


Your article doesn’t have to be a literary masterpiece – I’ve seen tons of articles that were
simple “10 secrets to….”. And for each of the 10 points there were 2-4 sentences.

Ideally, your article should be 500-1000 thousand words. That’s nothing. In fact, you
should easily use any of your existing information and use that as an article.


Right now… start brainstorming 5 ideas and start outlining your ezine article.

Today’s Assignment:

1. Submit 3-5 ezine ads (depending on your budget). Be sure each one of them has a
separate tracking code.

2. Come up with 5 potential ideas for ezine articles and start to outline them.

Today’s Resources:

Click Tracking / Ad Tracking Programs

NitroStats – Roibot.com gives a whole host of useful tools for webmasters including
tracking systems.

Marketer’s Choice – integrates an ad tracking software system with shopping cart and
autoresponders. Will let you trace individual sales and sales volume to a specific ad!

Publicity through Ezine Articles

“Turn Words Into Traffic” – Jim Edward’s world-famous system for generating a ton
of traffic through ezine articles and more!

See “Budget Cruncher” on the next page

“Budget Cruncher”!

Click Tracking Programs

Click Tracker – a FREE script that runs in your cgi-bin. Will require
knowledge of installing scripts in order to use it.