Hi,
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Thursday July 23rd 2009: Update #138
This Update is normally published three times per week for opted-in subscribers only. Publisher: Rich Sale. Your comments are always welcome - to respond to anything you read here, please leave a comment.
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I have come to the conclusion that writing this newsletter actually speeds up time. So here we are on the run-up to the weekend again. Bright sunshine when I look out of my window which is in complete contrast to the downpour that made me abort the dog walking 15 mins ago. Ah British Summer, it’s the best.
This week has been one of mixed blessings on the business front. I think I have finally started to get my head together with regards to my businesses and in what form I should market them. Now I know that this may sound a bit daft coming from someone who has been working online since 2004. But I think that I didn’t really have a strong view about where I wanted to go with my endeavours. I just kept on doing things to make money to pay the bills.
I had the search engine promotion/marketing (SEP/SEM) side of things and the internet marketing (affiliate products, business opportunity, personal development) side of things. But for some reason that I don’t understand I always kept the two separate. I think that maybe it was because for a number of years I didn’t think that I would be able to make money through affiliate sales. This is probably because I didn’t make anything to start with.
The really daft thing is that I have never really had to advertise my SEP business because it just evolved from doing business websites. The one time I did try to boost my profile I ended up with the phone constantly ringing with people wanting something for nothing. I then spent all of my time writing proposals that came to nothing and not getting any work done. I tried cold calling some of the local businesses which ended up with a couple of new clients but a lot of failures and I decided that this was not the way I wanted to build my business. So I just concentrated on getting as much work as I could from my existing clients and new customers would just come from referrals which was great.
This was probably a flawed strategy from the start, but it did pay the bills. By focussing on my existing clients and basically doing whatever they wanted I actually got distracted from the things that I did best i.e. SEP/SEM and as I have said before I ended up with all my eggs in a small number of baskets. Which is OK when times are good but a poor strategy during bad recession times. But we have touched on this before.
So I have been making a conscious effort to start to (re)build my business around SEP/SEM for small to medium sized businesses. I have a couple of eBooks on my Silent Salesman http://www.the-silent-salesman.com/wakeup.html site that focus on how to get your site to appear in the search engines and how to build traffic. These are going quite well and the articles which we have been discussing in previous newsletters (updates) will help to push more free traffic to my site. So all of this is going well and starting to build a steady but small income from the sales.
But I have done nothing positive to attract any new fee paying customers for my SEM/SEP services because I cant quite decide who best to target. I am spending too long deliberating when I know I SHOULD BE TAKING ACTION.
Quite out of the blue, I received an email from the affiliate account manager for Tim Godfrey & Steven Clayton of Commission Blueprint fame (which I was an affiliate for last year). They were announcing the proposed release of Commission Blueprint 2 in September. But also (probably the main reason) they were announcing their new product SEM Business Blueprint. Which is all about how to set up and operate a SEM/SEP business. Whoever it is who pulls the strings in this life certainly works for me from time to time. It actually shows you how to target local businesses and promote them using AdWords. So you become their AdWords account manager but by using automated systems you can do this in a fraction of the time. Thus allowing you to offer a great service to a larger number of clients. Because you work on a local geographic area costs per click are low. So you can usually offer your client a better return for their advertising budget.
I eventually decided to purchase the product (and I am glad I did) because it pulls together a lot of the things that were just not jelling in my current business situation. It has certainly set my mind racing as to which businesses I will target next.
Now I am not expecting you all to rush out and purchase this but take a look at the video on the sales page http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/sembb with an open mind. If you are thinking of embarking on the business opportunity route then potentially you can make a lot more of a business for yourself by following this.
http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/sembb
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Article Marketing Update
In update #137 I talked about the AMA system http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/ama well my 2 articles have so far been published on 26 different blogs. My second article as an acceptance rate of 100% not bad for four days elapsed time. This means I have 26 unique articles on 26 different sites which will provide 78 links back to my silent salesman blog pages with varying link text.
I am certainly getting to like this system. I have also been getting some Google alerts for the articles.
The article I submitted to ezinearticles.com has been published today (so it took a week) and so far I have had 2 different Google alerts. But it is early days.
I also took one of my AMA articles and spun it for my Squidoo lens and within hours this had been picked up and boosted my search engine rankings.
I now need to leave it alone for a few days - it can become obsessive and time consuming checking the rankings.
But I will keep you posted on the progress.
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The next part of my FREE Affiliate Blogging course will be released on Tuesday. You can sign up here for free http://bit.ly/ZH5Dw.
The next newsletter will be on Sunday.
Remember you can request information from me or request topics just by leaving a comment.
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So until next time
To Our Success
Rich
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