The Online Sunshine Plan
Posts Tagged charles helfin
There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
Posted by robertworstell in Search Engine Marketing on October 30, 2009
If you’ve been following my learning curve over the past months/years, you’d have seen a constant attempt to narrow down to successful promotion/sales/marketing actions. This lead me to find out about buyers – through eBay, arguably still the biggest marketplace online.
eBay works if you are a discount retailer or a collectible sales outlet. I got in just as they lowered the boom on digital delivery and so for better or worse, dropped into a low-end scene for ebook profits. I’ve made some sales – and that’s kept me going. But not enough to date to make a living at it, which was my goal.
The training I paid for was pretty sad – even though it was a four-digit sum. (Before the decimal point.) And now, my credit cards are licking their lips as they know they have me… they think.
I’ve since gone through three or four more trainings – and am working on a fifth (actually an earlier version of two of these). What I’ve found confirms what I started out with.
You want to attract buyers and keep them happy.
(Traditional) marketing to social media sucks.
And studying Charles Heflin, among others, confirms this. Pitifully poor ROI.
But realistically, marketing is still marketing. You have to promote like a banshee mountain wind in winter to get people to know you exist. At least that’s what they tell us. Because this is based on the broadcast version, with only 2-3% of viewers taking the bait after 5-7 repetitions.
Because it’s “broadcast” based and not a personal conversation.
Bloggers who really connect with their clientele will have as much as 17-25% conversion on any offer. I just listened tonight to a blogger podcast, who is now making $4500 a month from her ebook and affiliate sales through her blog. Cute.
What did she do? Got into real conversations with her readers and asked their opinions – and then commented back on their comments – a real discussion.
That’s what Madison Avenue and the “great Jack Humphrey” are missing overall. It isn’t getting a lot of traffic to your site – but having real and consistent live conversations with your visitors (at least, until the traffic gets so bad you can’t keep up with individuals – other than the truly outstanding ones that even make you pause…)
And that’s the route to take.
Sure, I’ll keep selling on eBay, but this isn’t really good for ebooks, since the demand is not there, and eBay itself is based on cut-rate prices – so hardback books don’t sell for as much as it takes to print them on demand. To make a living, you’d have to sell some 200 CD’s a week at about $5 profit. You have to sell big retail items on a weekly basis to get that real sweet spot of large profits.
The new target is now back to ecommerce and online sales.
I’ll ramp up eBay with what I can scrounge up of suppliers and their drop-ship products.
And that will probably start paying its way pretty well. It’s not where my heart is at, though.
The key strategic and tactical point is to build up some following on my blog – which will be monetized with links that pay – ebooks and affiliate sales, like the girl above. Simple.
And, yes, to begin with, I’ll be using Jack Humphrey’s (and Howie Schwartz’) methods to get some name recognition. But I’m not doing it to become “an authority” – but to really find out what people are trying to solve in their lives and help them with that.
All that work I did years ago with “Go Thunk Yourself” really points to a universal solvent which can sort out and resolve any human problem. Any human problem.
The trick is to “go Archimedes” and find a place to stand, then get a long enough lever – and move the world.
Feel that? It just shifted slightly.
Some additional posts of interest:
Like Cookies and Milk, keywords make everything better…
Posted by robertworstell in Search Engine Marketing on September 3, 2009
An open letter to Bruce, Part II:
So, we have our cookie tasting, in that we know what our passion is. And now we are looking for the milk to dunk it in. That’s some product we can get behind – one that helps the community we are part of to solve its problems (or some problem) and help everyone live a better life.
Once we figure out that product, we then have to know what keywords people use to look for that solution.
Google Adwords tool (KeywordToolExternal) can sometimes be way off the mark. Mostly if that website isn’t optimized for adsense correctly, I would guess. Only seen this twice, but even when the keyword density says something, Google can somehow twist their LSI over into something else entirely.
OK, but say we’ve got a solution. Let’s take Ken Evoy’s Site Build It product line. A proven solution that’s survived and expanded over time. And it has an affiliate product, so we don’t have to arrange any ecommerce backend or dropship anything. So far, so good.
The next problem is figuring out what they are saying, and what keywords they are using to enable search engines to find them. (Most of the rest tackle this from the other end, finding where people are looking and then finding a product you can pitch using those keywords.)
Most of the tools I’ve used to reverse engineer someone’s site aren’t designed to do much down this line. Best free online tool I’ve found at this point is called Keyword Analysis Tool from Hoskinson.net – a nice and simple interface and effective in figuring out the keyword density for phrases. (It also has a nice Ultimate Research Assistant plugged into it, so you can do text mining and additional research along with esoteric mind maps and other fascinating stuff.)
The trick with Keyword Density is that the top SEO experts aren’t using it anymore. So it might or might not be accurate as far as the best keywords for that page.
Here’s the trick: grab (screen scrape – no export to text function, sorry) and plop the probable ones into Google Adwords Tool, with synonyms checked. This can then tell you demand, trend and CPC for the keywords on that page. A left-brained thing you can to do double-check this is to check “exact” on phrases and the export the data to a spreadsheet. Add another column where you multiply demand by the CPC – this gives you potential income from that keyword. (A keyword with high CPC, but low competition won’t rate as high as huge demand with a much lower CPC.)
I’m not going to get into KEI discussions with you here, essentially because “competition” in these days of social media is a moot point. Not only did Charles Helfin pretty much debunk those “millions” of pages Google serves up, but also the whole point that re-purposing content through various social media (video, podcasts, presentations, articles, documents) will have your same keyword-laden content competing with themselves for top positions on Google. (See Howie Schwartz’ “Conversation Domination” and Jack Humphrey’s “Bending the Web”. All their work is getting old now…)
Once you’ve tested the keywords, you can check with other tools for the competition for those terms and see who is doing what with these (like SEO for Firefox plugin). And you can check their incoming links, etc. You know, generally start your Marketing Research.
Then set up your Google Alerts to find fresh content and crank out your own. Add in some blog and forum searches so you can assist the community with your content, and you are now just cranking out routinely valuable content with a product that matches your passion.
Where Affiliate Marketing and Lead Generation like this has failed in the past is because some product or company simply folds up. So pick a long-lasting company with substantial background and history. You can always edit your template and old posts to include a new affiliate link – but that is a real pain in the butt.
Hope this helps.
What’s your view on this?
Some additional posts of interest:
Creative Commons License
This work by Dr. Robert C. Worstell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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