• Many people in Asia are not comfortable writing in English.
• Writing is a tedious process because it is not usually a habit.
• It’s a tedious process to even generate good ideas for articles even if you can write.
• To submit completed articles is a barrier because you want maximum exposure, and submission is an administrative process that wastes time.
• Even if you do submit articles, you end up not really knowing which is the best category for you.
• There’s a gazillion different software that confuse rather than help leverage.

photo credit: Adam (adamjinj)

So how do you address this? Here’s my suggestion. First of all, you have to remember that article traffic can be done by you, but you don’t have to be the only person doing it yourself. Even if you’re proficient at writing, and you really want other people to do this so that you can automate the article marketing process.

Next, you need to hire people who are reliable. It’s a common sense question – how do I hire people to get this done for me without creating more work for myself? My suggestion is to split up the work. Instead of just hiring individuals, hire a team or company you can outsource to. This way, if there is any problem, it’s the company’s responsibility to ensure that the work of writing is completed.

Then it’s the process of submission. Get another group/team to submit your articles for you.

So, at this juncture, you probably think that it’s going to be hands off for you? Wrong. You should set up a checking system where another individual is hired to police the submissions and writing. If you can do this, it will definitely save you lots of time and effort while generating a huge amount of traffic.

I also know people who have bought submission tools for their team so that the team can be more efficient in submission work!

Why do I NOT recommend using the commercial approaches to article writing and submission? Well, because there are too many people who are using those services and I have no clue as to the quality no matter how many gurus recommend those services. Personally, I would rather set a private system for myself and let that be my own secret weapon, not need to share this with other people!

So, in summary, you need:

1. a team of writers
2. a team of submission grunge workers
3. a project manager to handle the tracking and supervision

Wow – isn’t that going to increase your costs?

Well, if you do this effectively, you will need to set a target in the first place. What is your goal? Is it to submit 100 articles in a month? Hmm.. here’s a calculation. You could do this at around $5 per article, meaning $500 a month.

So, you will need submission assistants, right? If you want to submit 100 articles to at least 10 article engines, that may cost you another $300-$500.

The question is how much does that bring you? Investing $1k is not a small sum, right? Well, how much traffic will it build? How fast can you opt-in your visitors? That’s the real question. After you’ve got subscribers, shouldn’t you think of the offers to bring to them? That means you really need an autoresponder system to handle that. You’ll also need a way to write your autoresponder sequence!

Wow, some more work? Well, the truth is you need to manage your business model. If the business model is not properly formed up, you will not be able to have any clarity on the business approach in the first place. Lack of clarity will cost you more money, and therefore you need to systemize your process, email writing and so on.

I hope this article will give you a starting point at least. Start drafting a basic business model surrounding article traffic, and use outsource talent to move toward your desired goals in internet marketing.

I thought about it, and I realize that sometimes, the full brick and mortar business plan has probably not been thought out. The business or income streams that should be built around your internet marketing business should include the following:

1. Public speaking. If you don’t do any form of speaking, you will be severely limited in your ability to earn, not to mention the fact that public speakers are able to develop teleseminar skills as well as coaching skills more readily. Take the time to learn about running events like this. How big. How to charge.

2. Coaching programs. If you have an area of expertise, then develop a coaching program. Sometimes, you need to tweak your coaching program to feed demand. Many internet marketers fail at “feeling” the market – that’s why they can’t “feed” it. Just putting up something that is “coaching” may not be received well by your market. I mean, do you really want to set up a coaching program to pump tyres for bicycles?!

3. Create product! If you don’t create product, you are basically leaving money on the table. You may think you need talent, or you need ideas, but really, you just need common sense. Look at people who have created product, and you will realize that a lot of the content that is created comes from research. Look at Shrek – it’s a bunch of digitized pixels. It’s a multi-million dollar project! I’m not asking you to be a producer. I’m asking you to consider that it’s just information. Information that you could put together as well. If you are not an expert, become an expert. If you are not well read about the topic area, you can even hire a coach for it. Information products sell well especially if you have a good brand. Build your brand to increase your value.

4. Physical merchandise! You thought I would only think of creating digital products? I actually have a whole host of products that are created as offline products. Things like posters, post cards, t-shirts, caps, etc. If you don’t do these when you have a following, then you will be left to a point where you’re not carrying your brand further. Yes, they require a little more spending, but if you calculate the raw costs of it, it increases the revenue you have. Period.

5. Membership sites. If you have good content, structure high quality stuff in your membership site and sell it. It works well if you want to have a higher chance of monetizing by having members be involved in high-quality content (see, content again) that they can’t get from anywhere else.

6. Licensing! Once you establish yourself as a brand, then go for licensing. Part of this licensing can go into what we know as private label rights (which sells for more) as well as resell rights. By increasing the distribution channel, you can turn this into a residual stream of income. Franchises come under this as well, and you might want to consider this as part of your eventual plan. Preferential rates, at-cost products, management fees are all part of the licensing route.

7. A service department. A good service can earn a decent amount of income right now. If you are going to set up a service that can create huge amounts of convenience, you can then become far more flexible in terms of time. This way, your employees can then be responsible for running your department instead of yourself.

For example, do you just have “thank you for subscribing”, or do you have an upsell page? Do you have a freebie giveaway? What do you do with that? I’ll bet this simple strategy of plugging gaps in your website structure could easily double your income if you did it right.

In other words, these internet gurus do not leave visitors ANY holes to leave without at least seeing an offer or seeing an upsell. They use so many different opportunities to monetize, I am grimacing at the amount of money I myself am leaving on the table. Sheesh.

Let me go review my own sites as I taste my own medicine…

Spike Humer, COO for Jay Abraham’s company, and one of the board members, was having a chat with me the other day. I thought he was kind of interesting because he is far more insightful than a 20-30 minutes that he was given on stage. I think the genius of the man is the fact that he knows how to exploit a business opportunity and take it to the next level. If you don’t know Spike Humer, you might be missing out on something big!

Especially where local marketing is concerned, I would recommend that you devise your own channel for marketing. In other words, create your own newspaper, create your own media, create your own whatever, and then generate value on it. For instance, you know that one offline media you can use is a CD. If you know how to create audio CD content, you can basically create one every month. Each month, leverage on the advertising real estate on your CD covers to generate wealth for yourself.

Of course, few people have actually thought about doing stuff like that.

Remember the ZO cards? They CREATED the media.

Another way to look at this is to buy ambient media. Ambient media refers to outdoor advertising like banners on lamp posts, stickers on the floor, etc. Now, I know many of you are thinking… wait a minute… that’s expensive.

Well, it’s your thinking that makes it expensive. In reality, creative ways to manage these ads can be done. What you have to do, as what Jay Abraham says, is to get the rights of distribution. Then you’re in business!

This itself is a $10 million opportunity for anyone who has a little bit of brain, and a lot of heart to take it on and get the business done.

Now get this – as a marketer, not only has he generated a huge following, he is also one of the first authors to reach billion dollar sales… from getting contributions from other people. That’s a cool idea, and now he has used the brand to generate income for himself. I think that’s an awesome idea, and is a powerful way to generate residual income.

Also, I wonder how many of you realize how powerful the internet business has been for him. All he needs to do is to leverage on whatever that he already has. I’ll bet he gets lots of cool ideas from Alex Mandossian.

Anyhow, if any of you see this man running around in Singapore (or anywhere else in the world), go say hi, and tell him you heard it on this blog… lolz.

Ah, yes… it’s me going into my mode of “nothingness”. I think internet marketing has a very interesting set of revelations. As far as I have found, people who are doing well in internet marketing treat it as a part of their lives.

Some people, however, lay blame, abdicate responsibility, and fail to produce even the slightest reason why they must learn it. As I mentioned, this is a business that you cannot “fail” in except by not taking action.

Everyone fails in life or business. Over the last few weeks, I’d been meeting people who have been very unsuccessful in business. I don’t know why. I just feel that many people who start off in business do so for hte wrong reasons. If you are confused by information, you have to sort yourself out because nobody can sort you out. This sentiment is shared by ALL successful business owners and marketers.

If there were anything I wish I could do, is to find the gene for complaints and blame and destroy it.

Too bad, it’s not my responsibility to do so. It’s yours!

Still, there will be people who will not want to do any kind of internet marketing. The fastest way to turn an internet marketing expert into junk is to tell him or her that it’s their fault for not making you a millionaire (lol). It’s YOUR business, so YOU take responsibility for your own actions.

Giving Up

I suspect that the same rules we laid out in our own training program will come true in internet marketing. Out of 100% of the people in the world who start their online dreams, only 5% will ever succeed. That’s great, in my opinion, because this will give me additional leeway to provide more support for those who are really serious about internet marketing. Experts know that in order to succeed, the winning first begins in the mind.

Are you the kind who easily gives up, or are you willing to build your plan and then stick to it? I know some of you must have thought about giving up before, and I do know that it’s always a difficult to keep committed to something you perceive as technical.

I think that the marketing elements in “internet marketing” have to be emphasized. If you can’t understand marketing, you will not be able to see the implications for internet marketing. You need to take the internet base and expanding your knowledge proactively. Many people who are just simply letting their knowledge come from one source will probably find it too constricted. It’s like having one restaurant to fill your needs. There will be diminishing returns. So what you will have to do is to find your areas of interest and begin to seek knowledge from other sources, be it teleseminars, webinars, workshops, coaching programs… the list will go on. However, I will recommend that if you are to learn, form up a proper learning environment together with other people. Differentiated information actually helps develop your knowledge even faster.

Conclusion – Doom For Internet Marketing Newbies?

Ha… er… if you are a newbie, you’re not doomed. You’re just going to have to bear the brunt of the force and pick yourself up. This molds your success, and as long as you keep moving, the more the “punishment” you can take, the more experience you can chalk up.

Personally, I’d say you should strive to be excellent instead of striving toward being rich. After excellence comes wealth!

After all, like I said – we are all focused more on the Marketing side of things rather than the Internet side.

One thing that strikes me the most about Guerilla Marketing is the fact that many people have to develop versatility in marketing, while establishing a higher value for the customer in question. Do you actually provide GOOD value for your market? Are you willing to get your hands and feet wet in order to establish yourself in your business? At the same time, Jay also commented at length about the “heart” side of marketing, which I believe is something we really need to develop.

It’s almost like the soul of marketing has disappeared because people constantly target only the numbers and profits, when in reality, we are focusing on the people. It’s literally the people who are the lifeblood of your business, and if you end up focusing too much on numbers and money, you’ll end up broke. Of course, you could say that we can’t take it to the extreme in either case. Truthfully, most of the things we discuss in internet marketing are really powerful strategies. Experts all over the world use it. However, to craft a strategy that takes a life of its own and to allow your business to grow to greater heights, you will need more than just tactics.

Basic Guerilla Marketing Philosophy

What I realized about the power of marketing, having interviewed a number of experts in this area, is that they have a grounding philosophy. Jay is no different. He is focused on what he wants, and several things strike me as I had this interview.

So in a sense, you could say that I was surprised that the somewhat ’spiritual’ side of internet marketing began to evolve from our discussion. To me, the pillars of success in marketing, therefore, are not removed from who you are. You need to literally align yourself with your marketing message. A lot of the time, the people who market successfully seem to be very powerful when it comes to ’selling’. Yet, when a brand is built, you are remembered for certain things like your character, your reputation and your resilience. In my opinion, a good marketer will have to stay the course, and find a path that enables people to latch onto you and stick with you over a long period of time.

The Seven-Line Marketing Plan: The Epitome Of Productive Simplicity

I admit, I’d heard of this before, but the simplicity struck me powerfully. If your marketing plan is not devised effectively, you will end up being lost in the rat race, ending up with a whole bunch of tasks rather than a real business. As the old saying goes, you have to stop working in your business and working at your business instead.

The simple approach to doing up a marketing plan tells me also that we might be mistaken in many of the things we do, that literally are a waste of time. How many of us actually hone ourselves to be far more effective every single day? I mean, if you practiced something and kept adding something new, you’d keep learning, growing and becoming masterful in your own right.

How does a 7-line marketing plan work? You can check it in the FULL INTERVIEW that I have made available for download. Feel free to discuss this in the forums.

So Many Tools, So Little Time

Jay talked about over 200 guerilla marketing tools! My gosh, if you implemented each of them, you’d have a sudden avalanche of profits instantly! Yet, we all know that these tactics need to be customized to your business and chosen wisely. Everyone has a way to reach out to their intended market quickly, and more importantly, we are on the search for meaning in our marketing message. How it brands, builds credibility and sustains competitiveness comes from the configuration of the marketing effort we put in.

In reality, all the tools we have at our fingertips can be powerful – what makes it an impenetrable force is the configuration of your guerilla weapons that actually are at your disposal. It’s a MacGyver/ninja approach – using everything within your means to reach the results you need to get at the lowest possible cost to it. Still, your total message should be aligned in order to maximize your returns effectively.

Implications For The Internet Marketer

So, are you running PPC campaigns that don’t work? How about banner ads that simply chalk up the cost? At the end of the day, you will realize that the marketing approach you have decided upon online may not work as voraciously as some other strategy. Somehow, I feel that your message and marketing mechanism will be affected mostly by what is most aligned with you as a person. It’s interesting, for instance, that I tend to drive more affiliate traffic through the use of teleseminars than PPC advertising. After all, I am a public speaker, and many of the guerilla tools that are available to me are not available to other people. As I’ve found, there are few people who can vie for the world’s best teleinterviewer. Fortunately because of the skills I’ve developed, I think I might just go for it.

There’s really no point for those of us who have terrible voices to use audio as a tool for marketing. Likewise, if you are bad in grammar, why bother with article marketing? Every marketer must be aligned. So now, we go from the broad-based mass marketing approach, to custom, talent-based marketing approach that I find makes sense.

These are tools that I have at my finger tips. It’s up to you to decide what works best for you. Are you great at writing content? Then focus on that as your money model. Are you good at doing work FOR other people? Then set up a service agency to do exactly just that. Do you have a knack for finding very good deals? Customize your business based on the value that you can provide. Improve on it time and time again, then this is exactly what your clients will appreciate and love about you.

Don’t crack your brains about your marketing strategy yet. Focus first on yourself – because according to Sun Tzu, if you know yourself and your enemy (I wonder if he was talking about the same thing) you will know the outcome of a thousand battles.

That’s what I gather out of Bill Bartmann, the billionaire that nobody knew. What a way to introduce oneself. I was just listening to Alex Mandossian’s virtual seminar week event on MP3 and listen to Bill being interviewed by Alex. Now, Bill has a flowery history – he made over a billion dollars only to lose it overnight when a former partner apparently cashed out (sold out?) on him.

CNN has the scoop here. Since then, hardly anything has been said about him, except the site he has of himself.

http://www.billbartmann.com/credentials.html

So what if he lost it? The fact is, he was good enough to make it there. I’m probably speaking to the only billionaire involved so heavily now in education, and willing to learn about it and get ahead.

Bill’s built a stong team and following of people who are supporters, catapulting him to even greater heights. On a blog I read, there are still former employees who hate this man to the core. Perhaps it’s the nature of the business. The Bill Bartmann I saw in my email box (would it have been answered in 5 minutes by a personal assistant?) gave details about his amazement by Alex Mandossian, something I expected from someone of Alex’s reputation.

It seems that the experiences are similar to Nanz Chong, who was also a multi-millionairess until her 1.99 shop disintegrated into pure debt. She now educates people in entrepreneurship.

Does this mean that we need to fail spectacularly in order to succeed? I think not. Bill’s taking his guns and blazing them in a direction I can’t imagine going wrong – education. Is it then that people who can’t do will teach? Well, what I do know is that the millionaire mind is hard to find enough. But to know how a billionaire does it is a completely different thing. Bill is a fascinating model, and with what is going on in his mind, I believe that he will be back at the billions he was at and beyond in a far shorter time than anyone can imagine.

And one day, I’ll have the opportunity to walk up to him personally and shake his hand!

(1) fills a need
(2) exceeds expectations
(3) produces results.

If your product is unable to do these things, you will have a crappy product and something that people will ask for a refund for. So do things right the first time around!

Next, once you have satisfied all the criteria for an excellent product, I want you to start looking at your website. Most people don’t look at websites and optimize the user experience. User experience will vary based on your purpose, so keep focusing on what you want your user to feel. They must have a sense of awe and pride in being on your website, based on the business model you have created. This will require tweaking and updating. People must feel that what you have has been made for them to use. That is what makes them come back over and over.

Finally, you must look at your marketing and traffic approaches. Kelvin Hui recently launched the Traffic Manuscript, which is something you ought to get yourself. It outlines strategy instead of tactics, which is important, even for an experienced internet marketer. Traffic also requires you to apply common sense knowledge about marketing. If your marketing is not working, you need a new strategy, not increased spending!

So, build your product first. If you don’t know how, the Internet Marketing Academy is coming soon, and you should register to take part in this as quickly as you can. At the end of IMA, you’ll have a product ready to be sold. What goes into the product is important – you have to have a great idea and benefit that can be communicated simply to your end buyer.

Next, you have to build a site that is convincing. That means adding functions to your site that make it positive for the user experience. Here’s a list of what people find useful on a site:

ease of navigation
clear instructions
less distractions
clean color scheme
user functionality
credibility devices
effective content (dependent on website purpose)

If you want to find out more about how to do this, again, I’d urge you to join the IMA. If you already have a concept and want someone else to do the development for you, contact me at www.InternetMarketingSingapore.com/custom.

Finally, start driving traffic based on the optimal channel you need to get all the traffic you want coming back over and over. Channel based traffic strategies are seldom talked about, but here are some ideas:

If you have a saturated channel, use a differentiated message
If you have a saturated channel, use a different channel
Use an underestimated channel
Use a synergistic combination of channels
Create your own channel
Borrow and launder someone’s channel (traffic laundering)