Understanding our digital future
Posted by: In: Blog, Get Rich Click 06 Dec 2010 0 comments

I found this piece of Harvey Mackay’s (here is his website: http://www.harveymackay.com) and I found it to be very insightful. Any entrepreneur should always be growing his/her network.

The alphabet is a great place to start as you build your network — organize your contacts from A to Z. The ABCs of networking:

A is for antennae, which should be up every waking moment. Never pass up an opportunity to meet new people.
B is for birthdays. It’s always advantageous to know the birthdays of your contacts. You wouldn’t believe how much
business our sales reps write up
when they call on their customers’ birthdays.
C is for contact management system. Have your data organized so that you can cross reference entries and find the
information you need quickly.
D is for Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty, my networking book.
E is for exchange and expand. When two people exchange dollar bills, each still has only one dollar. But when two people
exchange networks, they each
have access to two networks.
F is for Facebook and all other social media. These sites open unlimited possibilities for networking. Use them wisely.
G is for gatekeeper. There usually is a trusted assistant trained to block or grant your access. Don’t waste their time,
and make sure you acknowledge
their significant role in reaching the boss.
H is for hearing. Make note of news you hear affecting someone in your network so you can reference it at the appropriate
time.
I is for information. You can’t (and shouldn’t) talk about business all the time. Learn everything you can about your
contacts’ families, pets, hobbies and interests. Humanize your approach.
J is for job security, which you will always have if you develop a good network.
K is for keeping in touch. If your network is going to work, you have to stay plugged in and keep the wires humming.
L is for lessons. The first real networking school I signed up for after I graduated from college was Toastmasters. Dale
Carnegie schools are designed to achieve similar goals.
M is for mentors. In the best of all possible worlds, your role models can become your mentors, helping you, advising you,
guiding you, even lending you their network as you build your own.
N is for a network of contacts. A network can enrich your life.
O is for outgoing. Be the first to introduce yourself, lend a hand, or send congratulations for a job well done.
P is for people. You have to love people to be a good networker.
Q is for quality. A large network is worthless unless the people in it can be counted on to answer in an emergency at 2 a.m.
R is for Reciprocity. You give; you get. You no give; you no get. If you only do business with people you know and like,
you won’t be in business very long.
S is for six degrees of separation, the thought that there is a chain of no more than six people that link every person.
Someone you know know someone who knows someone you want to know.
T is for telephone. Landline, cell, internet — this is a critical tool for staying in touch with your network.
U is for urgency. Don’t be slow to answer the call, even if you never expect to have your effort repaid.
V is for visibility. You’ve got to get involved in organizations and groups to get connected, but don’t confuse visibility
with credibility. You have to give in order to get.
W is not only for whom you know, but also for who knows you?
X is for the extra mile. Your network contacts will go the extra mile for you, and you must be willing to do the same for
them.
Y is for yearly check-in. Find a way, even if it’s just a holiday card, to stay in touch.
Z is for zip code — do you have plenty represented in your network?

Mackay’s Moral: You don’t have to know everything as long as you know the people who do.

more at http://www.harveymackay.com

Posted by: In: Blog, Get Rich Click, New Ideas 30 Nov 2010 0 comments

You can do the work of researching merchants that offer affiliate programs, or you can turn to affiliate networks. These are brokers that mediate between you and the merchant with whom you’d like to affiliate. In return for their services, affiliate networks typically get a small override from each of your commissions.

Affiliate networks are attractive because they have access to a wide variety of affiliate programs and can match you with merchants you may not have considered. They also make sense if you are among those who would prefer not to manage the details of your affiliate arrangements.
Creating and managing an affiliate network is a way to apply the Get Rich Click™ mindset: Make money by simply connecting two parties that can benefit from each other.

The concept I’m about to describe can work for any industry, but let’s look at wristwatch affiliate programs as an example. Start by creating a website called “My Top Ten Gold Watch Sites.” (www.mytop10goldwatchsites.com).

Next, do your homework: determine what criteria make for a really good online wristwatch site.

Then identify the top ten wristwatch affiliate programs on the Internet. Enroll in the various watch sites affiliate programs. Make sure you understand what action a referred visitor must take for you to earn your commission.
Design your site so it looks professional and appealing. Create copy that explains what a particular gold watch site offers and why the site made your top ten lists. Pay careful attention to search optimization strategies that will allow your site to place higher in organic search engine results (see Chapter 5.)

Then embed your affiliate links. Visitors to your site click on a link. When they buy any product from ANY of those 10 links, you will receive your commission.

Posted by: In: Blog, Case Studies 24 Nov 2010 0 comments

The Internet is the ultimate machine for marketing “niche” products. Ravi Ratan figured this out early on.

Working in his family’s mulit-generational, custom clothing business, Ravi decided to register Cufflinks.com. For years, the domain sat dormant, until one day Ravi figured he might as well try to sell on the site. So, Ratan went out and bought products at a local retailer and put them on CuffLinks.com. They all sold. Quickly. He bought more, and once again, they all sold. A 21st century sartorial entrepreneur had been born!

These days, Ravi Ratan runs a $5 million a year business selling cuff links online. He’s the largest retail seller of cuff links in the world and sells more than most of his online competitors — combined! In addition to designing and manufacturing his own incredibly creative ones — such as a pair that include usable flash drives (featured GQin and Maxxam magazines) — Ravi sells name-brand products from other fashion designers, and has managed to obtain authorized distribution rights from the NFL, NBA, MLB and a host of NCAA schools.

In a very smart move, Ratan set up the firm so that he sells at every level of the sales channel. What started as an “online only” site has morphed into a small powerhouse selling retail, wholesale, custom, directly to customers, via affiliates, and even drop shipping for companies that don’t want to deal with order fulfillment! In other words, if you have a website, you can buy stock from Ravi wholesale and resell it. However, if you just want to market the products from the Cufflinks.com site, you can do that and CuffLinks.com will fulfill the sale and send you a commission check for your lead! The bottom line: Regardless of whether you want to sell on your own site, a friend’s site, through Facebook, or you want to work with a third-party wedding planning, tuxedo rental or high-end men’s clothing site, Ravi has found a way to help sell cuff links through all of these markets.

When I was growing up, there used to be a TV commercial for Shick razors in which billionaire Victor Kiam says, “I liked the company so much, I bought it.” Well, I’m no billionaire, but after ordering from CuffLinks.com and being impressed, and after meeting Ravi and being further impressed, I decided to invest and am now a proud co-owner! The lesson here, of course, is that no matter how small the product, or how narrow the niche, the Internet provides smart entrepreneurs a platform for reaching customers like we’ve never seen before. Just ask Ravi, who despite his incredible talent and penchant for hard work, always keeps his sleeves rolled down, not rolled not up — because you never miss an opportunity to market CuffLinks!

Posted by: In: Affiliate Marketing, Blog 19 Nov 2010 0 comments

How Affiliate Marketing Programs Work

Most affiliate programs are free to join. When you enter an affiliate relationship with a merchant, you agree to place links to the merchant’s site on your site. The merchant agrees to pay you a commission for the traffic you send.

Merchants offering affiliate programs pay in three basic ways:
• Pay-per-sale (or cost-per-sale). When you send the merchant a customer who subsequently makes a purchase, the merchant pays you. Your commission may be a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount for the sale. Amazon’s Associates Program is an example of this arrangement.
• Pay-Per-Click (or cost-per-click). The merchant pays you for every click on the link directing the visitor to the merchant’s site. The referred visitor does not need to purchase anything for you to get your commission.
• Pay-per-lead (or cost-per-lead). You send the merchant a visitor who subsequently signs up as a lead. This means the visitor completes an online form on the merchant’s site. The merchant may then pass the lead to the sales department or sell the lead information to another company.

Posted by: In: Blog, Get Rich Click 15 Nov 2010 0 comments

1. Buy a domain name that includes the specific Keyword for the product.

2. Set up an affiliate relationship with one or more firms in that field.

3. Create a simple website for the products.

4. You can obtain the photos you need from the firm for which you are selling, but be sure to ask permission first.

5. Create new copy for your website. Don’t use the same copy your partner uses; it can hurt your search engine rankings as well as other firms that have this copy on their sites.

6. Submit your website to the search engines.

7. Build links to and from your site with other related sites.

8. Create links to your new site from your Facebook and MySpace accounts. Consider asking your friends to list your site on their Facebook and MySpace accounts.

9. Write about your products on other sites, blogs, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to get more traffic.

10. Optimize your site to improve your search engine rankings and increase traffic.

Posted by: In: Blog, Get Rich Click 05 Nov 2010 0 comments

There is no exact right or wrong way to optimize website content for Search Engine Optimization. One of the best ways to rank organically is to make sure the search engines determine that your content is relevant to the topic that a user searches. It all comes down to understanding how search engines read your website’s content and how they rank your website based on how well your web site provides this information.

1) When it comes to using keywords, utilizing them properly can greatly increase your organic traffic. It all comes down to how you use the right keywords in order to make your content relevant.

2) Emphasize your keywords through the webpage titles and headers. These carry greater weight when it comes to keyword usage than the body of your content. Search engines read these labels as the “outline” for your entire content. Make sure to include your keywords in the page title and headers to let search engines and your searchers know what your site is all about. Use title and header tags sparingly though. The over use of keywords is called keyword spamming. If the search engine crawlers determine that you are keyword spamming, your website may lose ranking in the search results.

3) Accentuate the relevance of your content with internet searches by highlighting important terms and phrases in your content’s body through the use of italicized, bold, or underlined text. This would allow key phrases in your webpage to stand out. Having your keywords stand out helps readers quickly narrow in on the parts of the page that they are looking for.

4) Keywords have to relate to your page’s content. You can’t put keywords relating to cars on a web page about bicycles and expect either the reader or the search engines to respond favorably. Effective use of keywords truly depends on making your web page useful. If you try to “game” the system, eventually the search engines and the users will start to ignore you.

5) One of the best ways to research what keywords users are searching for is with online tools. Here at Get Rich Click, we use a tool called KeywordSpy, you can search for websites relevant to your industry, go through their keywords, and collect useful terms you can focus on at your website.  Along with keywords, you can find out how popular a keyword is with metrics like Search Volume and Search Results analysis. Having access to known keywords with quality searches will help with your site content.

6) Avoid overdoing it. The idea of keyword research and on page optimization is to make your website relevant with online searches in order to establish credible rankings. However, overdoing the usage of keywords and techniques can also cause a backlash effect. As much as it is a task to make your website appropriate it is also important to make the content coherent.

7) Proofread your final content with your keywords, read it out loud to see if it makes sense or causes confusion.  Avoid redundancy.  Have someone else read it to see if it makes sense.  If you have used the same keyword more than twice within four sentences, you have gone overboard.

Remember, you have to work to get the keywords for your web page right. Don’t give up too soon, and make sure that you follow the steps above.

Try a free trial of Keyword Spy today, complements of Get Rich Click!

Posted by: In: Affiliate Marketing, Blog 28 Oct 2010 0 comments

Essentially, Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice where you can sign up to sell your others products for a commission. In the Get Rich Click™ spirit of making money while investing little or no money of your own, affiliate programs are one of the very best ways to profit from the Internet. Affiliate marketing benefits both the affiliate and the merchant. As an affiliate, you can generate income from traffic to your website/blog. If you choose your affiliations well, you also increase the value to your site visitors. Meanwhile, merchants get more traffic to their sites. Because this traffic arrives through a referral, it’s predisposed to make a purchase. Assuming the customer is satisfied, affiliate marketing can be a win/win/win business model for everyone involved.

Businesses find affiliate marketing attractive because most programs use a “pay for performance” model. Compare this to traditional forms of advertising. Creating a television ad and buying the air time for it is expensive — and there is no guarantee the ad will be a success. In online affiliate marketing, businesses pay only for results.

For example, Amazon Associates, the affiliate marketing program of amazon.com, has marketed amazon.com across millions of websites since July 1996. Through this program, Amazon has acquired millions of customers without incurring the expenses associated with traditional branding campaigns or maintaining a dedicated sales force. Amazon Associates is among the largest and most successful online affiliate programs.

Amazon.com’s main site is made up of millions of pages. As an Amazon Associate, you can create an e-mail campaign that points people to any one of those pages and include your affiliate code as an embedded link. Whenever a recipient clicks through and buys that Amazon product, you earn a commission.

Posted by: In: Blog, Get Rich Click 26 Oct 2010 0 comments

One of my favorite Get Rick Click stories is of Zachary and Nathan Doctor,
two brothers who started a business in their dad’s garage when Zachary
was 10 years old and Nathan was 12.

The Doctor boys were your average pre-teens. They went to school,
played sports and found all kinds of ways to have fun. They also lived in
an entrepreneurial family. Zachary and Nathan did the typical entrepreneurial
businesses kids do, from setting up lemonade stands to finding
other ways to make a few bucks. Their dad is Lou Doctor, a successful
executive living in Silicon Valley. He runs a boutique investment banking
firm called Arbor Advisors.

Lou Doctor enjoys cycling. His sons also adopted the sport early on.
All three learned that in the world of cycling, special bike tires are the
equipment of choice. You must have the right tires for the right application,
from paved road to mountain path.

One day in 2002 Lou and his bike club ordered tires online from a specialty
firm in the United Kingdom. To get the best price, they had to order
in quantities of ten tires per type. When they received their first order, Lou
and his bike club were not thrilled. The tires were an odd color. No one in
the bike club wanted them on their bikes.

Lou Doctor struck a deal with his sons. He gave the boys the tires and
suggested they try to sell them on eBay. They could sell them for whatever
price they wanted, but he needed $30 a tire to cover his costs. Above
that, the boys keep anything they got above that as profit. The sons went
into action. They snapped digital photos of the ugly-colored tires, posted
them for sale on eBay and waited.

Not only did the boys sell them in quick order, but they sold them for
$35 each. Lou got his $300 investment back and the boys pocketed $50
for their efforts. The boys asked their dad to order ten extra tires next
time. The same thing happened. The boys sold the ten extra tires and
again made a tidy profit.

Zachary and Nathan wanted more! They were making money and having
fun at the same time. Soon there were more orders, more sales, more
customers and more profits. They went from ordering 10 tires to ordering
50 and as many as 500 at a time from the retailer in the United Kingdom,
who eventually gave them discounts for large volume purchases.
Then the boys opened an eBay store. They got up each day at 5:00 a.m.
and pulled the items, packed the orders, filled out the shipping labels,
and got to school at 7:30 a.m. When they came home, they went to work
printing out the orders and getting them ready for fulfillment. Every day
at 6:00 P.M., they took the packages to the local post office, where they
became known for pulling bins of boxes and placing them directly on the
back of the post office truck before it left for the distribution center.
It wasn’t long before the brothers launched BikeTiresDirect.com, their
own e-commerce website. The business kept growing — and in the Get
Rich Click spirit, Zachary and Nathan pursued online marketing, learning
how to buy the right keyword combinations to get higher rankings in
the search engines. They attribute much of their success to buying traffic
via keywords … thousands of keywords and keyword combinations
which increases the number of “free” hits they get on Google, Yahoo and
other search engines.

Thanks to the Doctor family, their tire supplier became the largest supplier
of specialty bike tires in the United Kingdom. Today Zach is 17 and
Nathan is 19. They have less time to work at the company, but they still
help with buying keywords and work during the summers. The company,
with over $8 million in annual sales at last count, now sells everything for the serious
cyclist. And it’s still growing.

Order Delivery Time in Five Minutes
Customers in virtually every country in the world order from Bike-
TiresDirect. Occasionally an order comes from a Silicon Valley customer.
For fun, Lou Doctor would drive his kids to the customer’s home, ring the
bell and deliver the order — allowing the boys to meet and get to know
some of their customers.

One day, they received an order from someone who lived only a few
streets from their home. They quickly fulfilled the order, jumped in the
car and drove to the customer’s home, arriving five minutes after the order
had been placed. When the customer answered the door, ten-year-old
Zachary and twelve-year-old Nathan were standing there, order in hand.
Needless to say, the boys had a new customer for life. Word of mouth
referrals from the delighted customer generated even more business for
BikeTiresDirect.

(The above excerpt is from the book, Get Rich Click!, due out May 2nd, 2011.)

If you implemented the two important steps from the last post, you are only three away from having your LinkedIn profile working for you. In this post I’ll let you know how to use your network, LinkedIn groups, and how to configure access to your profile.

NETWORK: Set a goal of 250 connections. For some this may seem daunting at first, but you will be surprised at how quickly you will get there. With a systematic approach of sending 5 invitations every day, you can reach you goal in a couple of months. You will go through stages of identifying and connecting with people on LinkedIn. For most of my clients it becomes a stream of consciousness…one person leads to another who reminds you of someone else and when you connect with them another person will pop up.

Start with your current database – it might be your Outlook or Yahoo or AOL email list but it is the best place to begin. Search by name to see who is already on LinkedIn and send them an invitation to connect. After you have exhausted this list, begin searching the companies you have worked for in the past as well as educational institutions you have attended. I guarantee you will find names of people you haven’t seen or talked to in years, but would enjoy reconnecting with you on LinkedIn. The third area to search is the connections of the people who you are now connected to. Take a few minutes every day and pick 1 or 2 people in your new virtual universe and see who their connections are. Chances are there will be a name you recognize and someone else to invite into your network.

GROUPS: The real secret to LinkedIn success lies in the Groups. You have the opportunity to join up to 50 groups (it took me 18 months to reach the maximum). The categories are: Alumni (look for all the schools you attended – whether you graduated or not); Corporate (join the groups of companies you have worked for or perhaps had business associations with in the past); Conference (many conferences today create their own groups to facilitate networking before and after the event); Networking (great for just common interests – mine is Starbucks Enthusiasts!); Non-Profit (great way to connect with other volunteers, fund-raisers, leaders, and members of non-profit organizations); Professional (more general groups to appeal to your profession – lawyers, doctors, CPA’s, etc.); and finally, if all else fails, there is a category for Other (covers any group that doesn’t fit into one of the other categories).

There are thousands of groups on LinkedIn and many have thousands of members. Once you are approved for membership in a group (sometimes automatic and sometimes requires approval by group manager), you can begin to dialogue with other members through the Discussion Forums. Be careful not to sell – be a valuable contributor.

ACCESS: Opening your Profile for everyone to see is the easiest thing to do and the very thing that most people do wrong! Once you have your profile ready to go, open the settings and set it to Full View. Remember, this is your online classified ad about you. What is the point if you don’t let people know about you? I am continually baffled by people who limit access to their profile. It makes total sense on a site like Facebook where you are sharing personal photos and information. But LinkedIn is your professional persona and there is no reason to hide the information.

Recruiters, hiring managers, potential clients, or new business associates will look to LinkedIn to check you out. If they can’t see the information you are slowing down the potential for new business. If you develop your profile the way you want yourself to be known, there is absolutely no reason not to make your profile public.

If you haven’t done so already, please send me an invitation to connect today.
www.linkedin.com/in/carolmcmanus

Also, send Marc Ostrofsky, author of Get Rich Click an invitation as well.
www.linkedin.com/in/ostrofsky

Posted by: In: Blog, Social media 29 Sep 2010 0 comments

If the read and followed the last blog post, then you are probably well on your way to making LinkedIn a powerful weapon in your social media arsenal. In this post we’ll delve into more detail about what you can do to start attracting more business today. Like an interview and a great resume, proper presentation yields bigger dollars!

PROFILE: It all starts with an effective and complete profile. An incomplete profile says as much about you as not having one at all and in either case, the message you are sending is not a good one. LinkedIn provides you an opportunity to present your personal biography in a positive, professional, and engaging way. It allows you to show the world everything you want people to know about you – your background, your capabilities, and your services.

The first challenge clients usually bring up is, “I can do all that on my website, and there I don’t have to compete with everyone else’s message.” And my answer is, “That is absolutely true – but – you have to first attract people to your site and then get them to stay long enough to seek out the information about you.” This takes time, talent and money, and there are no guarantees it will work. When people visit LinkedIn, however, it is with the purpose of finding people, finding out about them, and then taking appropriate action (which may be to follow the link to your website where your services are fully displayed). Think of your LinkedIn profile as your permanent classified ad about you!

PHOTO: Why is a quality headshot your best shot? It’s simple really. For people who know you (or have known you in the past), it’s reassurance and confirmation that they are connecting with the right person. For people who don’t know you, it puts a face to a name and goes a long way in humanizing you.

A quality headshot requires you to be well-groomed, looking into the camera so people can see your eyes, and above all – smiling! This postage stamp digital image is your best way to say to the world, “I’m real, I’m human, and I’m approachable.” Dress can vary depending on what you do for a living but should reflect how you want people to perceive you as a professional and what they can anticipate if and when they meet you in person. For example, if you are competing for corporate business, then a suit is appropriate. This would also be true for lawyers, CPA’s, insurance representatives, financial advisors, etc. If you’re a doctor, a dentist, or a chiropractor, then a lab coat could work very effectively. If you’re in a business where casual dress is the norm, then men might choose an open neck shirt or polo while ladies might select a blouse or sweater. While you certainly want to look your best, this is not the time for Glamour Shots as they tend to lean toward provocative rather than professional.

A little bonus tip about photos: you should seriously consider using the same primary head shot on all your social networking profiles – Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, Squidoo, etc. Why? So that when people navigate from one site to another looking for people, you will stand out as familiar and recognizable. That visual reinforcement will encourage connecting, friending, and following. (More on this in the 3rd series article).

The next post in this series will address the specifics of your network connections, group participation, and profile access. Look for that post next week!