Web Marketing All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies Due March 2009
Posted by Marty on Aug 26, 2008
I finally came out of my cave Monday afternoon after finishing the required 70% complete deadline for my portion of the Web Marketing All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies book due in bookstores everywhere March/April 2009 (Wiley Publishing, publishers of the “For Dummies” books). John Arnold of Constant Contact (E-mail), Ian Lurie & Elizabeth Marsten of Portent Interactive (SEO, AdWords, Social Networking, blogs), and just added, Michael Becker (Mobile Marketing) from Iloop Mobile (personally can hardly wait to see what he’ll be adding about THAT very hot topic!).
It is a true honor to be sharing pages with these industry experts as we make our contributions to what I believe will be the most talked about Internet strategy book in years.
When I was asked what I would like to write about, I immediately said, “the money part of course” So, I get the first section of the book which will be covering topics like:
- Converting more visitors to paying customers
- Writing promotional copy that sells
- Shopping cart setup
- Finding and promoting affiliate products
- Starting and building your own affiliate program
- Joint venturing
- Which website type is the best for you
- Design components that sell
- Hiring helpers so you’re not doing everything yourself
More coming on this topic coming soon but I have to mention that something else has happened in the process of writing this book, which is now listed on Amazon by the way. I think I’ve had more leads for business in the past two months than the first six months of this year combined. How could that be? I haven’t been doing anything differently in my promotions than usual. Must be the book. Just by telling people about it, people are talking about it. The book isn’t even out yet and people are talking about it. We’re not even finished writing it yet and people are already talking about it. Strange but true.
How to Create Squeeze Pages
Posted by Marty on Aug 23, 2008
The combination of squeeze pages and affiliate programs are a match made in heaven. You can churn out a squeeze page in under an hour with no web design experience and begin promoting affiliate products within the same afternoon.
Creating squeeze pages and promoting affiliate programs came up as a topic on one of my favorite forums, SitePoint.com, where I replied as much as I could in the public area but there just comes a time where you have to show examples and give links to your examples. Forum moderators hate when you post links for fear that you’re self-promoting.
So, I replied to the original poster and then offered if anyone else wanted to know what I sent to him, I’d be glad to forward a copy. Now I’m getting enough P.M.s from readers where it’s just easier to put my response into a blog post so I don’t have to dig up my notepad file and copy and paste the response.
Guess we’re kind of taking the forum conversation to-the-blog as you are welcome to post your comments and questions here and I will respond personally.
But, first, here is the response I gave for the “how to create squeeze pages” part and I have made a separate post for how to promote affiliate programs.
Hello [poster] and thanks for writing. I’d like to start off mentioning that my goal for the rest of the year is
to add a new squeeze page to promote a new product every month. My most recent I did just in a single afternoon last friday (e.d. that was in mid-July by the way). That’s how easy it is once you get the process down). And, 3/4 of that time was writing the 14-page free document as part of the incentive for people to
opt-in. You probably don’t have to go that overboard to start selling.
By the end of this week, it looks like I’ll be on track for $400 a month in affiliate revenue or so. Takes a few days to figure out the right google adwords to get the right kind of traffic. Here’s the link to it so you can see an an example:
www.LaughAtLayoffs.com (Has averaged 15-25% opt-in rates)
To create everything that you see there, the page, the layout, the auto-responder series, the form, the thank you page, everything is in one simple online product tool. I purposely did not use any fancy graphic design because I wanted to show that even such a basic page can bring results as incentive to others who are on the non-technical side of the spectrum.
Here’s my affiliate link for the online tool. Hopefully you won’t mind if I get a few bucks from recommending it to you if you sign-up. (Incidentally, since this post was written, I’ve created a cheat sheet of sorts for using this product I’m recommending. So, you will definitely want to sign-up through my affiliate link and let me know when you do so that I can get the checklist to you.)
The same product does have a built-in feature that will let you send email to the list of people who have opted in as well. So, it’s all there.
That’s pretty much all you need to get started.
All the best,
Marty Dickinson
Denver CO
P.S. Check out my part 2 of this response related to how to promote an affiliate program.
