Mirror, Mirror on the wall,
What kind of marketer is coming to call?

The way you go about marketing yourself, and your products, will have a big impact on the way your customers, and potential customers, will view you.

If you come over with a brash, agressive sales pitch, your customers will, rightly or wrongly,  assume that you are brash and pushy too.  Likewise if you are too timid and appologetic with your marketing, your customers will assume that you are too.

So, you need to decide what kind of image do you want to convey to your customers, and what kind of image are you actually conveying with your marketing material?  If you are using a pre-formatted sales copy, then you are stuck with the company image – which is fine if that is the image you feel is appropriate to you, but disasterous if you do not.  Remember, you may respond well to one style of marketing, but this may not be the image you wish to project.

Using your own material will give you far more control over what you are saying, and how you are saying it – plus it will help you differentiate yourself from other people promoting the same company – branding YOU and not the COMPANY ie.

Now you do not need to throw away everything that you have been given, often the material will contain useful information and if nothing else will act as a clue to what the company sees as its best selling points.  Use the material as a starting point, and adapt it to suit you and your marketing methods.  If the company has a long sales page and you are promoting it on Traffic Exchanges, especially one like Traffic-Splash,  where your actual exposure is going to be a few seconds if you are lucky, then take 2 or 3 key points (or things that make the company/product stand out) and Highlight them in a splash page.  If you do not know how to make splash pages, or do not have the time, then get someone to do it for you.  If you want a free splashpage maker, with hosting and built in roatator and tracker, the TEToolbox is a great solution. Alternatively consider an independent Web Design provider, such as HawkinzWeb Designs

Once you have identified your style, adapt it to the medium you are going to be promoting in:-
if you are sending out emails, you want to have a snappy, attention grabbing subject line that is still accurate (nothing more frustrating than mis-leading subject lines) Put the Key point you want to emphasise in the first paragraph.
if you are promoting on Traffic Exchanges or Paid to Read/Click then the simple fact of life is that most people will be viewing several pages at once, so you need again to get their attention FAST, splash pages are good for this – they are short and to the point.  You can use either as a lead capture page, or as a lead-in page to your main sales page.  Your initial page needs to be attention grabbing and ‘different’ to the run-of-the-mill pages they normally see.

Remember YOU are are what your customers SEE on the internet, so make sure your IMAGE says what you want it to be saying.

I recently came across the following item, and it raised the question of Exercising Due Diligence when online -  Truth About Internet Marketers

Now, you will often hear ‘experts’ telling you to “exercise due diligence”
but what is it, and how do you do it?

Due diligence is nothing more than taking the time to research the company / individual you are planning to do business with. The amount of research will be in proportion to the amount of money and time you intend to spend. (remember – time is money)

One of the more bizarre phenomenon is that often the same people who are advocating due diligence will be the same people who then send a mass email asking you to join their latest program, and that “you want to get in now before everyone else does”

Having done your due diligence – Act on it!
If you were invited to join a program and your research reveals something of concern to you, share it with the person who invited you – this is the essence of relationship marketing – a 2 way dialogue.  Ultimately, you will have to make the decision – not everyone will share the same criteria and requirements of a ‘suitable’ business opportunity.  If you decide not to go ahead with a business opportunity, and someone else does – this should not of itself necessarily be a stumbling block, although it may ultimately impact on your future decisions.

A lot of traffic exchanges ban so called ‘investment surfs’ and auto-surfs, and with reason.

BUT, and this is a big BUT, many are confusing facts with perceptions and heresay.

Before I explain, I want to clarify what I mean by certain terms, so that there is no mis-understanding.

Autosurf – sometimes called non-click surfing, are traffic exchanges that automatically rotate advertised websites in your web browser without requiring any additional intervention by the ‘surfer’
Manual Surf – sometimes called click surfing, are traffic exchanges that rotate advertised websites in your browser when the surfer ‘interacts’ with the page – either by clicking on something, or hovering their cursor over something.
Investment Surf, sometimes (inaccurately) called Paid-To-Surf or autosurf, are traffic exchanges (Autosurf OR Manual surf) where to earn money surfing, members must pay a fee and are then promised a certain return on their fee. The “investment” is claimed to be a membership or upgraded membership fee and the “return”, a per-site commission.This fee can usually vary from a few cents to tens of dollars, and the minimum and maximum is set by the site operator. The program then offers a commission based on the member’s account level for viewing a minimum number of sites, for example, for a period of X days, every day that the member views Y sites, Z% of the upgrade fee will be credited and can be withdrawn from the site. The product of Z% and X is always over 100% to ensure that the member makes a profit.

Now, the problem with this model is that in order to generate the funds necessary to make this payment, the program owner has to get the money from somewhere else. If the program is not generating enough non-membership fee revenue to meet these payments, then the only options are to not pay, or use the fees from newer members to pay older members and so heads straight into the realms of ponzis and pyramid schemes.

However, it is possible to generate enough revenue from other, non-member fee sources to cover this. Possible sources of revenue are:

• Banners
• Text Ads
• Upgrades
• Credits
• Non-Member adverts

The other aspect that will affect the feasability of the payment structure is the amount and frequency of payments made – it is going to be harder to maintain a 110% of investment every 10 days than it is to maintain 105% of investement every 50 days.
The problem being, the first option is going to attract more people than the second one, even though the first one is less likely to be sustained.

So, to run an investment surf over a longer term, you need to actually discourage the traditional ‘quick buck’ member, for one who is prepared to look longer term and accept lower payments, as in addition to meeting the members payments you will also need to pay for the normal running costs of a online program. Ironically this is actually the type of member often found on the traditional non-investment surf traffic exchanges, yet often these are the members who are frightened off by the tales of scams and failed programs.

Now I started by saying that many exchanges ban investment surfs with reason, and that is because many owners do not plan how to grow their exchange in a sustainable manner, and so the exchange runs into cash-flow problems and fold leaving members unpaid. Which creates bad feeling, and bad publicity, for the Traffic Exchange industry as a whole.

So, in summary:

A investment surf, if carefully managed, with sustainable investment and payment models can survive and prosper amongst other non-investment surf models.
Many investment surf programs will fail due to poor management.
Because of these 2 facts, a newcomer to the traffic exchange industry would be advised to avoid starting their first exchange on the investment surf model until they have more experience of how traffic exchanges work from an administrative perspective.

mis-conceptions of internet marketing

Many new-comers enter the world of internet marketing lured by promises of ‘riches to be made on the net’. Firstly let me make it clear, some people are working exclusively online, and making a very comfortable living doing so; but the majority are not!

So what is going wrong – what happened to those fabulous riches for all that we keep hearing about? The majority of these programs are designed to make themselves appealing (it’s called marketing folks) but the reality is not quite the same – it is possible for anyone to acheive the results promised, but they have to be extremely dedicated, and know what they are doing! Lets face it – virtually anyone can learn to read, but if you are not taught how to do it – the chances of acheiving it just by looking at a book are pretty small.

There are some programs which are sadly designed solely to attract as much money as possible for the program owner, with no intention of sharing that wealth – the old adages of
“buyer beware”
and
“if it looks too good to be true, it probably is”
are just as true online as they are offline.

More interesting is the case of the ‘offers’ where they tell you that this ebook, or program is worth $57 or $89 (or whatever price they pluck from the air) but they are offering it for only $9 but you have to buy RIGHT NOW or you will miss this fabulous offer! Next time you see one of these offers, STOP and think – if I buy a burger for $1 and tell you I would normally sell it to you for $5 but as a special, one time only offer, I will sell you it for $2 how much is this burger worth? If you said anything other than $1 then you have been hoodwinked!

Too often people lead with their wallets and not their common sense – a “great deal” is only a great deal if it is actually worth it to you. Do you need what they are offering, or could your time and money be better spent learning to use those tools you already have more efficiently?

I often hear people saying that they are leaving online marketing because they are making no money at it, and yet when you examine what they have been doing, too often you see that what they are experiencing is a lack of realisation of a dream because they were not understanding what they were doing, or what they needed to be doing to change things; or just simply had unrealistic expectations.

Remember, in all business there will be a hierarchy – some businesses will be bigger and do better; and some will do not so well; and some sadly will fail. Many times these failures are due to poor preparation or unrealistic expectations.
Again consider your realistic expectations – a corner store is not going to have the same turnover that a giant supermarket chain will have. In the same way – be realistic about what you can expect; both from yourself, and from your programs. Have a plan, work at it, review it, and be prepared to adapt your plans and expectations based on your results.