We’re nearly 40,000 words in and at this point you should have a working knowledge of every last corner of Internet marketing. On top of that, you’ve hopefully got some good ideas starting to bounce around in your head and if everything has gone to plan then you may be feeling inspired to succeed.
But now you need to come up with a plan and start taking real action. In this last chapter, we’ll put it all together into one effective action plan.
To Start
The best place to begin is with a brand and a mission statement. This mission statement will come from whatever your desire is with regards to building your business. What niche do you want to be in? What kinds of products or services do you want to sell? Do you have any existing opportunities, connections or routes to market? Most importantly, which areas do you know a lot about and do you enjoy enough to write about regularly? Remember, there’s nothing wrong with creating new niches or combining multiple topics to come up with something new.
Obviously your topic of choice will also greatly impact on your goals. Think about what you eventually want to achieve and whether it’s possible in the niche you’re choosing. Are you content to set up a business that makes you money but that never becomes anything bigger? Or do you one day hope to create a startup or to scale your business into an agency or franchise. Again, your choice at this point will drastically impact on your business opportunities.
From here, you can then think about your value proposition. What problem are you going to solve? Or what lifestyle will your products promote? Either way, this will let you come up with a mission statement which you can subsequently use to tie together your business and to create a name, a brand, a logo and a theoretical web design. Your business name will greatly inform your website URL, which means it should be memorable and SEO friendly.
Next, you can start setting up. This means getting yourself:
- A domain name
- A hosting account
- A WordPress website
- An autoresponder
- Social media accounts with
- Facebook (see http://FacebookSecrets.sec.bz)
- Twitter (see http://TwitterSecrets.sec.bz)
- LinkedIn (see http://LinkedInSecrets.sec.bz)
- Google+
- Tumblr
- Pinterest (see http://PinterestSecrets.sec.bz)
- Instagram (see http://InstagramSecrets.sec.bz)
- At least…
- A YouTube account (see http://YouTubeSecrets.sec.bz)
You’ll then create the same consistent branding across all of these different channels, so that wherever someone finds you, they will be getting a consistent experience. This will help to make you look more professional and will mean every interaction is able to strengthen your brand identity.
Creating Value and Building Trust
With everything in place, you then need to start creating value and building trust to start building your audience and to put yourself in a position where you’re an authority on your chosen subject and where people look to you for information and advice.
To do this, you need to demonstrate your knowledge by providing free content. At the same time, this will give people a reason to follow your blog, to subscribe to you on social media and to subscribe to your mailing list.
Post regularly, high quality content as often as you can and make sure it is unique and offers something interesting that you would read. Think of your social media channels as products in themselves and ensure they are providing value, they should be ‘standalone’ and give people who have never heard of your business a good reason to follow you. Have a persona in mind for each of your articles and look for communities and groups to share in.
During this process, you will also use SEO, content marketing and potentially PPC to build and grow more eyes on your products. CPA is a particularly powerful tool to consider for Facebook if you have some cash to invest. In terms of SEO, the key is to focus on quality not quantity. That means you need to work to try and reach the very best blogs and the very best other platforms to promote in. If you can land one single link on a top blog, this can potentially transform your fortunes overnight.
Meanwhile, you should also spend some time developing a relationship and a rapport with your followers, subscribers and friends. This means responding to comments, retweeting, asking your audience for their opinion – etc. In all these ways, people will feel more as though they know you and you’ll be able to build more loyal fans.
Make sure as well that you are actively participating in forums, in Google+ groups and hangouts and anywhere that you can interact with people interested in your niche. This is another opportunity to demonstrate your know-how and to make fans and friends that can later help you to promote your products and services.
Note how we placed this before the part where you start selling anything. That’s because you ideally want to build up an audience before you go on to start marketing. Likewise, you want to demonstrate your authority before you appear to ‘want something’. You can more easily create marketing opportunities this way and you’ll find you have a more engaged audience when they don’t suspect anything you say is just a bid to push some kind of product.
What’s more, you won’t have much luck trying sell before you have anyone to sell too – so put some time in here before you get ahead of yourself!
Monetization
Eventually though, monetization will come. At this point you should consider which monetization option is best for you.
Try to avoid the temptation to go straight for PPC just because it is the fastest and easiest way to start making some money. This puts you at the bottom of the pyramid and means you’ll cap your earnings considerably.
Instead, a good place to start with is just to sell affiliate products. With the right product, you can make up to 60% per sale (and for membership sites you might even make money for the lifetime of each member you create!). To see how quickly and easily you can make money with affiliate links and how much more profitable they are than PPC, just find a good product in JVZoo, write an article around it and embed the link, then promote that product on Reddit.
Alternatively, you might decide you want to build your own product. Ultimately, this is how you get to the top of the food chain and there are plenty of options for you here. A good one is to create an eBook, an app or another type of ‘digital product’ as you can sell these without any overheads. But there are countless options!
If you’re going to create a product though, then a good tip is to always verify the idea first. This means selling it before it’s finished just to make sure there is an audience/market there for it. This way, you can avoid spending large amounts of money on an idea that nobody wants! When you sell affiliate products meanwhile, the verification is built-in – in the form of previous sales. Choose what has already been proven to sell very well and you can make a lot of profit with a cut and paste business!
Hone Your Business and Create Sales
Remember the importance of looking at your numbers and creating a real business model to maximize your profits. This means you don’t just pick a random product and start selling it at any given price. Instead, you calculate your overhead based on your advertising, hosting etc. You look at your conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become buyers) and you look at the markup and how much you’re selling for. You can then workout how to maximize your revenue/turnover and your profit margin. Again, this is something you must do before you start investing too much time.
At the same time, this is also when you can start creating a landing page and an eCommerce store. There are tools out there to help you do this like Volusion and Optimize Press and they can streamline the process for you and ensure that your end product looks professional, is secure and makes sales.
Use persuasive writing here, create sales funnels and come up with a smart autoresponder sequence. This way, you can lead people to feel compelled to buy. You also need to employ the correct pricing strategy and consider running promotions and other offers to drive more sales.
Finally, look at your numbers and see what is performing best for you. Tweak your design, your pricing and other elements and compare the results. Use your data to effectively ‘evolve’ your funnel and marketing strategies to be highly optimized and as efficient as possible. The more you do this, the more you can maximize your efforts.
Growth Hack
With everything in place and new, stunning content churning over regularly, you’ll find you gradually grow and your perfect sales system starts to bring you more and more funds.
But this takes time and to accelerate your progress you can try numerous growth hacks. One that is seldom considered as such is to use crowdfunding. This can bring you direct cash and preorders for your product and it can help you to market yourself and to build a big, loyal audience. What’s also great about this is that it makes your backers feel like a part of something, which is huge when it comes to creating that feeling of a ‘movement’ versus a single marketer.
You should also look at influencer marketing. This means using LinkedIn and other tools to try and communicate via someone who already has a huge audience. Make sure you spend time developing these relationships, build your way up slowly to the biggest fish and try to arrange an in-person meeting wherever possible.
Finally, don’t forget to use press releases – when perfectly pitched they can drastically accelerate growth.
Scale!
Now you’re making money predictably and supplementing your income and it’s growing at a rate of knots. But it could be faster. And it could grow further.
This is where scaling comes in. It means taking your business and multiplying it, either by simply replicating elsewhere if it’s a passive model, or by pouring more money into your advertising. As long as you created the right business model, you can genuinely take it as far as you want to go!
OR you could decide that that’s not what you want from life. Once you have a reliable source of passive income that’s constantly growing, you can retire, spend more time with your family, or work on something you’ve always dreamed of. How about writing that dream book? At this point, you’re completely free to start your own lifestyle design. There’s more you can learn – we haven’t yet touched on force multipliers, automation, virtual assistants… But rather than keeping on growing and trapping yourself more and more, try to remember why you started in the first place. Try to remember the value proposition that originally attracted you. You are in the rare position to have any lifestyle you could possibly want!
