eSpire Marketing

This past year has been a really tough one for a lot of people. The economy turned south on all of us. Even worse, it happened so fast, that we all felt like we had just gotten punched by Mike Tyson repeatedly. Well today I’m going to pull out the smelling salts, and talk about something I think everyone should be thinking about and that is getting back to the basics of everything you do.

When times were good for you, you just expanded, things happened so quickly that you didn’t even have the time to do everything exactly the way you were supposed to, because you were just worried about maximizing profit right away, am I right? Thought so. Well most companies were no different. New shiny technologies were emerging faster than ever, new sales avenues, new products, new social media platforms. It was exciting, who can blame you for jumping in with two feet and no shoes on. That was then and this is now. The following is a step by step guide on how to rebuild a foundation for affiliate marketing success.

Step One

Rebuilding a foundation for marketing success is all about getting back to the basics of affiliate marketing. Take a look at your current affiliates, which ones are performing? Which ones aren’t? Which of your affiliates were performing well last year, but have since fallen off the deep end? Identifying where you and your affiliates stand is step number one.

Step Two

Step Two is to lose weight. Slice off some of the fat with regards to affiliates that take up a lot of your time but don’t yield a high financial gain. Then take a look at your offers, are there too many? and is your companies overall main message being spoken through every ad? Identifying these issues is vital to step number three.

Step Three

Get Organized. You’ve identified all of your problem areas, get all of your ducks in a row, and get ready to take action on your problem areas. Prioritize which areas need the most help and will have the most effect on your business and get ready for the next step.

Step Four

Take action. Now we’re ready to go forward with our plan for rebuilding the foundation growth. Clean up your message, start contacting those affiliates who used to perform well, take the areas that used to work well, and get them in solid working order.

It really is all about getting back to the basics, getting back to what used to work well for you. Once you get those right, your network will start to see small gains. After a short time those consistent small gains will give you the foundation that you need, in order to really start building your affiliate programs out even further. We all have a tendency to over think things. Especially when we’re fearful of losing our businesses. Trust your instincts, continue to learn, work your butt off, and I promise that you will get back to where you want to be.

Google Buzz. If you haven’t heard of Google Buzz yet then you’ve probably been in some sort of coma for the past few weeks. Just to recap for all of you who might be behind the curve, Google Buzz is Google’s attempt to get involved in the social media scene. There have been all sorts of complaints about it’s privacy issues which apparently they have apologized for and even taken the time to fix the problem.

While that is a great job at PR by Google, I’m not buying it. Google really messed up here for a number of reasons. One, they forced all of the users of their gmail service into Google Buzz. Two, they forced each user to auto follow all of the other gmail users in their contacts list. Three, they made the default setting post your “buzzes” publically. Hello PRIVACY ISSUES! A simple apology is just not good enough from a company of that size. They didn’t just lose email files, their server didn’t just shut down. They essentially made everyone’s private issues public. Google, the largest search engine on the face of the earth, one of the most influential companies in the history of commerce, and the single largest holder of information in the world, made a big no no.

I don’t know if you’ve been reading about the latest search battle news but I’m pulling for Bing. Besides, competition in the search engine marketing world will be good for most internet marketeers. So the next time you search, I’m encouraging everyone to Bing It!

Hey all. I wanted to apologize for being away for so long. Many of you have sent me emails and twitter requests to start posting again. Life has taken me to all sorts of crazy places lately, opened a lot of new doors, and given me great opportunities. Some in internet marketing, some not. Regardless, I am going to get back to regular postings.

I can not tell you how great it has been for me to hear from all of you and hear how much my writing means to you and how the things that I’ve shared have helped you in one way or another. I believe that the internet is the single greatest communication device ever created (DUH!) and I am happy that I have been able to inspire some of you to try new things, but more importantly to continue your studies as an internet marketeer.

In closing for today, I just wanted to say thanks again to all of you, your support has been overwhelming to me. Until next time…hit the books.

Recently the Federal Trade Commission has put the clamps down on the use of testimonials for website. This is more than likely to protect the vast majority of people who fall for the get rich quick schemes, pyramid schemes, or any other quick fix schemes that you can think of. My first reaction to this was a pretty disheartened feeling. One of the things that I love about the internet is how the government really seems to stay out of most of the content posted online. While this will protect people from falling for get rich quick schemes, it’s also going to hurt many legitimate online businesses from making top dollar for their goods.

A lot of online businesses have embraced how powerful the blogging community has become and how great a blogger can be at helping sell your products to a target market. One of the tactics that we use is to contact a blogger from one of our niche’s ask them if they’d like to review our product, and then we sponsor a contest in their honor. Well when they are reviewing the product, now they’ll have to make it blatantly obvious that they are receiving the item they are reviewing for free.

We never ask for a good review, we specifically ask them to be honest in their review of the product, and to tell all of their readers exactly how they feel. It’s a risk we take that they may or may not like the product. With this new FTC lock down on testimonials it is going to significantly hurt a portion of our revenue model, in an already down economy. Now we have been doing online commerce for years now, so chances are we’re going to survive, but what about all of the others who are just getting online, also trying to run successful businesses, and are already feeling the crunch of these poor economic times? They are going to be the ones really hurt by all of this. This is just another example of how government regulation in business does a lot more harm than it does good.

This is just my opinion. I feel very strongly about this issue and I’d love to hear what each of you think about it. In a time when sales are very hard to come by for almost EVERY industry, the government wants to make it even harder to sell. It’s just bad for business and bad for capitalism.
Click Here to read more on this issue

This is a trend we’ve been seeing for awhile now (not just this administration). In my opinion it needs to be brought to a screeching halt.

I was stumbling once again along the Warrior Forum to find an interesting thread where a person was asking is Twitter worth the effort?

Unfortunately the answer is not all that simple. First you have to ask yourself a few questions. One, who is your audience and are they on Twitter? Two, what are you trying to do with Twitter? Three, does Twitter fit into your time budget? And Lastly how will you measure Twitter Success? I’m going to be attempting to clarify each question for you throughout the rest of this article.

The first question is a question that everyone should always ask themselves before getting into any endeavors with their business or marketing plan. Who is your audience? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you had better find a new profession and quickly, this economy is not a forgiving one, and there is certainly no room for businesses that don’t know their market. Is your audience using Twitter? do a little bit of research behind this one. Use Twitter Search and search for some of your market’s main keywords, if there is a lot of conversation about your product, genre, or niche then you might be onto something. If not, don’t waste your time. There are plenty of other great places to spend your time trying to acquire customers.

If you decide that you’re going to set up a Twitter account for your business the next question to ask yourself would be, what are you trying to do with Twitter? Just like anything else you have to have a common goal in mind and a plan to reach that goal. Do you want overall brand awareness? Another place to share your blog links? Or do you want to drive direct traffic and sales through Twitter. Whichever way you decide to go there are a different marketing techniques and best practices in order to get you to that next level.

Does Twitter fit into your time budget? We all know that Twitter is a free service and that Dell claims they made $1 Million in sales on Twitter last year, but are you Dell? The answer to that question for most of us is a definite NO! It is going to take time to build your Twitter following, and in my experience from a direct sales standpoint with Twitter, it takes a longer time to actually get people to want to purchase from you. So figure out if it is worth your time to start the campaign before you do.

The last question you’ll want to ask yourself is how will you judge Twitter success? This should go hand in hand with the reasons you are joining Twitter in the first place, but if you aren’t getting those sales right off the bat, how will you measure success? How are you going to measure the amount of brand awareness Twitter is bringing you? These are generally answered through whatever analytics program you use for your site but make sure you have this in mind as well.

After you have asked yourselves all of these questions I think you’re going to be well on your way to getting started with Twitter. You’ll certainly be well ahead of about 85% of the Twitterverse anyway. The reason my company has stopped spending time on Twitter is because of the infestation of the spam community and the lack of sales directed through Twitter. It has however been a great traffic driver to specific content that we are trying to push. Now that you know the questions you should ask yourself, start answering them already will you!? I mean time is money people! Have a good one.

Extra, Extra, Read all about it! Facebook changed the home pages for every user once again. The New Facebook Layout now allows people the ability to check the “News Feed” and a “Live Feed”. The News Feed is a feed of all of the most interesting posts from the previous days activity, the live feed, allows you to watch your friends Facebook activity in real time. Why is this a good thing for you?

Think of it like this, before when you made a posting on your Facebook Page, or a status update that you really wanted everyone to have a chance to see, it was quickly pushed to the bottom of the pile by other status updates from other users. Now, your page updates, (contests, blog posts, and promotions) will still be able to be seen for a much longer time. This is about the single greatest thing that Facebook could have added for business promotions.

From what I can tell their doesn’t appear to be any real algorithm for success just yet for how to make it into these news feeds, even the Facebook Blog post at the end says “Raylene, a Facebook engineer, hopes this blog post made its way into your News Feed.” I guess it is once again even more important for you to post a lot of interesting content in order to reach your audience effectively. Good luck!

This is the First edition of “The Best Internet Marketing Blog Carnival” I’m pretty excited with what we’re bringing to the table this week. I’ve picked the best of the best articles from all of the submissions that were made. If your article didn’t make it in this time, keep trying, I am picky but that’s only because I want my readers to have the best!

Tim presents Link Building Factors & The Aspects That Really Drive Results posted at Search Engine Optimisation.

Case Ernsting presents Marketer’s Guide to Google Alerts posted at MetaSpring Blog.

BWL presents How I make money with my blog posted at Christian Personal Finance. Normally I wouldn’t post something like this because it appears to be spammy but this is pretty
detailed stuff.

Jason Small presents Top Facebook Fan Pages: 25 Most Fanned Pages posted at Social Media and The Big W.

That wraps up the first volume of the Best Internet Marketing Blog Carnival. Thanks again to everyone who submitted. If your submission was cut this week try another one for next week.

Traffic is obviously what everyone is looking for when they first start up their site. People have high asperations for their sites when they first start them, but those dreams can quickly fade away and die hard, if you don’t start seeing some results. I was no different, I used to start a blog, fall in love with it, then just forget about it because I didn’t really care. Today I was searching around the local forums and found an awesome way to gain traffic to your site that not a lot of people use. Again I’m going to give props to another warriorforum.com user for teaching me this idea thanks to Kim Roach!

Step One

Go to google and perform the following searches -

“Daily Link Roundup”
“Weekly Link Roundup”
“Monday Link Roundup”
“Friday Link Roundup”
“Link Roundup”

Step Two

Find Blogs that are similar to your blog and contact the owner with some of your best content attached. Make sure you spice up the email a little bit with some information about their site, and maybe even comment on a specific article of theirs that you read.

By Buttering them up a little bit I can 100% guaruntee you that you will see more responses than if you were just to send them the content. It makes them feel good because it makes them feel like people are paying attention to them, and really care about their site.

Step 3

Go to Blog Carnival and find some blog carnivals that are related to you topics of discussion and submit.

Not only will you start to see an increase in traffic, but each piece of content that you get in either one of the daily link round-ups or a blog carnival is a solid link back to your site. It’s the perfect way to start getting more easy traffic to your site.

click here to see the original post on warrior forum

Starting this week I’m going to try something new that I’ve never done before. Every week I will be hosting a blog carnival right here on espiremarketing.org. The blog carnival will is called The Best Internet Marketing Blog Carnival if you are interested in submitting an article to be added to the blog carnival send your submissions here.

The Best Internet Marketing Blog Carnival will have everything from SEO, PPC, Social Media, Linkbuilding, and other Internet marketing news. I am starting this carnival because I believe it is important for each of you to find the best tips possible from as many sources as possible. As you know I always preach about how you should continue to learn, and seek out information. I hope that this blog carnival will bring a lot of great new ideas to all of you. Thanks everyone, now get out there and start reading and learning some more!

In a post from makeusof.com an apparently angry individual actually threatens to sue another site owner for tampering with the rankings. That begs the questions, do we have the right to sue for higher search rankings?

I think that this gentleman actually makes a compelling argument, even worse I think that some of our lawmakers might feel the same way. Could this be the potential knockout punch for affiliate networkers? It’s got me a little bit worried. I don’t know what the rest of you are thinking but I’d be very interested in finding out.

Below is a screen shot of the image from the original post: