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Easy Networking

Social networks have made building and widening your social contacts extremely easy. In the past, you might have had to attend numerous functions and paying for gas, food, and clothing just to show up and hand out a few business cards that later got tossed. With online social networking, the costs of networking are zero, but the rewards are immeasurable. Creating a list of social contacts online can lead to opportunities worldwide, something that local networking could never do for you.

LET PEOPLE COME TO YOU

Instead of trying to push people into getting acquainted with you or your company, wouldn't it be great if you could get up each morning and find seven to ten new people wanting to befriend or follow you? This is completely doable with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Once you establish a profile and a following, just your everyday activities online can draw people to you without you having to go out and find them. Even if you do choose to find people first, it's still far easier to connect with them online and far less intrusive than trying to schedule a meeting, a phone date, or any other old-fashioned method of networking.

WHICH SOCIAL NETWORK SHOULD YOU JOIN?

You've heard of MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but which is the best to join? The answer to that is that you can and should join at least three of these networks, depending on your demographic. The more you join, the better and the wider your exposure; however, not every social network will match up to your business profile. MySpace, for instance, tends to be visited by a younger crowd than Facebook and Twitter. If you're marketing to teenagers, then it's a great place to network, but if you're more into college-age professionals, then Facebook will be a better match for you. LinkedIn is for any working professional, although some people use it to locate jobs when they're in the market for that too because of the number of working professionals on it.

Twitter is in a class all by itself. It can appeal to many different groups of people, and it is also the easiest platform to generate a large following on. It may take a little while to get used to it, but getting on Twitter can help you create a large social network in as little as one month if you do it right. Imagine having close to 1000 followers in little more than a month? If only 1/10th of those people look at your services or offerings when you post, you will have 100 new eyeballs to market to. Let's be clear, however, that marketing or building a list on social networking has to follow some guidelines that we will discuss in the next section.

The Rules Of The Game

Social networks have special rules that you must follow to keep your account active. Administrators frown on spamming people with unsolicited emails and other types of commercial activities. If your goal is to build a list for commercial purposes, it's still doable; it just has to be done more casually than you would on your own website. Selfpromotion is allowed, but any time you take an email off of someone's social networking site and add it to your email autoresponder campaigns, you are spamming them, unless they offer you permission to market to them first. Harvesting emails from these sites is thus very difficult, and this is done deliberately.

BUILD YOUR LISTS WITHIN THE NETWORK FIRST

That doesn't mean that you don't want people to befriend or follow you on these sites. It means that you have to take care as to how you end up harvesting their email addresses. Just because someone befriends or follows you doesn't mean that they are open to your marketing campaign and want to receive commercial solicitations. In fact, if you do send them that information, they're likely to report you as a spammer, and you can have your account revoked. Thus, the best thing to do is to start by building your lists within the network without harvesting the emails provided there directly. You can still post status updates that promote your business or offerings, but direct emails of this variety will have to wait until later.

MOVE THEM OFF TO AN INTERMEDIARY SITE

You should have an intermediary site ready to capture their email address later. It can be a blog that allows them to subscribe. It can be a website that isn't that commercial. It can even be some article marketing site where they can land, read some more of your content, and then follow the resource box links back to your website. As long as the final destination offers them a chance to subscribe to your email marketing lists via some free offer, then you will have permission to market to them off of the social networking sites, where you can be a little more straightforward.

HOW TO MARKET TO SOCIAL NETWORKING CONNECTIONS

Before then, you will want to create a highly targeted list of friends and followers who have the potential to follow you back from the social networking sites to your other websites. You can do this by carefully crafting profiles that appeal to your demographics and updating your status updates with information that draws attention from that demographic. As you continue to do these two activities, more and more people will find you, and you will have a wider exposure.

Getting Targeted Lists

You don't just want to build a large list of people who have nothing to do with your market niche; you want to have a list of people whose interests mean that they might want to buy your products and services later on. Social networks are excellent mediums for creating targeted lists because it's easy to see what people's interests are via their searchable profiles, and they can see yours too!

USING YOUR PROFILE TO ATTRACT THE RIGHT DEMOGRAPHIC

The first step to getting a targeted list together is to clearly project the right image and interests in your own profile. To do that, you want to fill out the profile as completely as possible. You also want to use your real name, as this profile should be as authentic as possible. For Facebook, for instance, you would want to add as many details of books or movies relevant to your market niche to attract the right demographic. In Twitter, you would want to give as many keywords that are relevant to the niche you are marketing as possible in the 140-character description of your profile. In LinkedIn, you would also want to give a good, accurate description of your interests and accomplishments as they relate to the market niche that you are marketing to.

FINDING OTHERS WHO HAVE SIMILAR INTERESTS

Once you've got your own profile filled out, you can start searching via the keywords you've used to find others who are in your market niche and invite them to follow or befriend you back. In Facebook, they track everyone with similar interests, so all you have to do is to click on the link in any of the categories in your Info tab, and you'll get a listing of people who have similar interests.

On Twitter, it's just as easy to find people who have similar interests by using the Twitter search engine and looking up keywords. The Twitter search engine is separate from Twitter and can be found at https://search.twitter.com. You won't just be able to locate people via their profile keywords, but also via their tweets.

Facebook and LinkedIn also have groups that you can join that can lead you to people with similar interests. You can even create your own group if that's something you want to do. By networking with people who are in the same group as you are, you will be able to build your list fairly quickly. People like to network with people of similar interests, and this works well when you are trying to market to a specific niche.

The Bigger, The Better

You will want to build as big a list as possible within each network. The reason for this is that the bigger your list, the more possibilities to market to later on. Also, a big list has a magnetic effect on other people who will join just to find out what all of the fuss is about. It is easier to build a big list on Twitter than on any other social networking site, but it's possible to do it on all of the social networking sites. Here, we'll discuss a few ways to get a jumpstart on building a big list quickly and easily.

START BEFRIENDING AND FOLLOWING PEOPLE

You jumpstart every social network list by befriending or following people you know, whether they're in your niche or not. This way, you aren't the person with only a few people on your list. That's never attractive. Start with people who you already know who are online. They can be work colleagues, neighbors, friends, and family. As long as you can get them to befriend or follow you back, you have the basis of a good start. Once you have a few of those, you will start to target people better so that your list can be used for marketing purposes later.

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The Pros And Cons Of Outsourcing

Internet marketing for one website can include many different tasks, from email marketing to website development. Even if you wanted to do everything yourself, there will come a time when you realize that it will be far easier and less expensive to hire out some of the work and to outsource it to others than to do it yourself. Handing over your baby to a total stranger, however, can come with some risks. It may free up your time to do more and get more done, but you have to start slowly and build up a relationship that you can trust before you hand over the keys to your kingdom.

THE POSITIVE ASPECTS OF OUTSOURCING

Outsourcing works because of the difference in wages that you pay someone else versus the value of your time to do the same task. If you've figured out that you can make $60 to $120 an hour marketing online, and the task you are trying to complete on a daily basis, like answering customer emails, can be outsourced for $8/hr, you stand to profit immensely from that arrangement. The wages are so depressed in other countries that you can get virtual assistants to help with email and with other tasks for as little as $200 a month full-time. In general, however, you get what you pay for, and you can expect that if you want English proficiency to be a part of the requirements of the job, that the wage will increase.

It's not only a question of economics, however; it's also a question of your time and how it is best utilized. You really don't want to spend your time focusing on the nitty-gritty, boring, and repetitive aspect of your websites when those don't contribute to the bottom line. You want your time going towards creating income with the time that you have available.

THE NEGATIVE ASPECTS OF OUTSOURCING

One of the biggest risks to outsourcing is that the job doesn't get done to your satisfaction. It's one thing to save time, but it's a complete waste of money if you aren't getting the quality of work that will keep your reputation intact online. That's why when you start to think about outsourcing, you have to focus on reputable companies and job boards or get some idea of the quality of work of an online individual first before hiring them even part-time. You don't want to hand over sensitive areas of your website to people who are incompetent or who can use it for nefarious purposes. Keep tight control of what you allow others to access and have a back door key that can lock your operation up tight should the need arise.

Research People Online

In order to gauge the level of trustworthiness of your intended outsourcer, it's best to start the relationship slowly. There is bound to be piles of work available for just the right person, but flooding them with deadlines and work when you first start out can cause major havoc before you've even established if the relationship will work out or not. If this introductory period doesn't work out, then have someone in line to test out next. At some point, you will find someone compatible who can also do the job for you at the price you want. It just may take a bit of time to locate that person.

UNDERSTAND YOUR NEEDS

The first thing you want to do is to figure out what you want to outsource. You can outsource website design and maintenance. You can outsource social networking. You can outsource content creation. You may simply want someone to answer phone calls or emails. Whatever your needs, make sure you have a good idea what tasks need to be completed and how you will measure the time that is spent on each project. Also figure out how much you are willing to budget for the project. Once you know what you need, you can start to look for people who match those needs.

HOP ONLINE TO RESEARCH PROFILES

Depending on your needs, there will be different job boards where you can post your project online. If you are looking for virtual assistants, you will need to go to places that hire these people out. If you want a website designer, you might take a look at Freelancer.com. If you want a content writer, you might want to check out Upwork.com. On each site, you will be able to post a project and to review the online profiles of the professionals who are there offering their services. Once you think that you have found a match, add them to your list of potential people who you might use for outsourcing purposes.

CONTACT THEM WITH PROJECT DETAILS

Send out private project requests to the individuals you've targeted and see if they're interested in the small project that you have to offer. Let them know that it could lead to more work if the first project is done satisfactorily. Give them a two-week trial and outline the details of the project as accurately as possible. For a writer, provide writer guidelines. For a programmer, provide a specification document for your intended application. If they do well, you can start sending them more work and then see how they do for a few months. Hire them as independent contractors to avoid employee issues. Now, the only thing you have to worry about is keeping them busy.

Where To Get Outsourcing

There are many online sites that deal with outsourcing. People from all over the world can put up a profile and try to bid on jobs that are posted within these sites, so you aren't just limited to people in your own country. Rules differ between sites, as do the fees. You have to check each site out and decide whether you want to join and use their services or where you want to try to contact a freelancer by targeting people who don't have a profile, but show some writing skill online in other areas.

THE BIG THREE

The three most popular sites, it seems, are Freelancer.com, Upwork.com and Fiverr.com They all offer different types of freelancers. If you want someone who does obscure programming, for instance, you can get him/her at Freelancer.com. Other sites will offer programmers too, but they may not be as highly specialized. If you want a site where you can hire a virtual assistant, you can find them by Googling “virtual assistants.” Many virtual assistants today can manage websites, do search engine optimization, and perform some business development tasks as well.

BUYERS CHARGED DIFFERENTLY

In general, it's free for most people who are looking for work to look for jobs. In some cases, even posting a job online is free too. However, there are sites that offer memberships at different levels that let you bid on different jobs. The sites take their fees off of each job as a percentage of the total cost of the job. Your bid may or may not include the fees to the site for their commission, and you need to be sure when you set a bid range that you take that into account. Even if you bid a specific price, it doesn't mean you'll get it. Freelancers will bid on how much it will take to complete your job, and then you can choose to award someone the job on the basis of his/her bid from all of the respondents. It's not always the best thing to hire the cheapest bidder. There are other factors involved that should be considered as well.

CHECK OUT THEIR RATINGS

Sites will post feedback on freelancers to give you some indication on whether they will perform well or not. Be sure to check out what other people have to say about them before awarding a bid. You may find that someone who has a very low bid has awful ratings too. You want to check to see how long they've been on this board and whether they are a new profile or not. Freelancers with a longer and better track record will work better than those with questionable things in their ratings.

Website Outsourcing

As a serious Internet marketer, you most likely have more than one site, one social networking profile, and one project going on at any given time. Online, you can set up websites very quickly, but managing them can quickly become unwieldy. You don't want to spend too much of your time trying to get backlinks, writing and posting blog posts, optimizing content for SEO, or keeping track of online problems and outages. In addition, you might not want to take the time to learn HTML and a host of other Web languages, and someone else may already have taken the time to learn all of that. All you would have to do is to hire them to manage the sites for you.

LINK BUILDING

One of the best ways to get a higher Page Rank (PR) on Google that places you higher on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is to just get a bunch of non-reciprocal incoming links going to your site. You can do this by paying sites to post your links, adding comments to popular blogs and news areas, and listing yourself in directories. All that takes time, and it's a job that is best left to someone who is getting paid far less than you are. Outsource link building during the times when things are slow.

WEB PAGE DEVELOPMENT

This is one area where it really pays to get help. If you don't know how to set up a blog, add a membership area, or just plain update an HTML page, you can't even get started with Internet marketing! While you're learning some of those skills, you're wasting valuable time! Outsource the website development to someone else. Just find a site that you like and then list the features that you want. Give them an idea of your color scheme or choose one from the templates that they offer you to view. Once the site is done, make sure everything is in your name, from the domain name to the administrative contacts. In fact, if you don't want to go through the development phase, just look up Internet marketing forums to find people who are offering websites for sale that are already in working order! It saves tons of time, and you can have them customized quite easily.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

This is another topic that is best left to people who already know what they're doing. You can order sets of keywords from companies and outsource the creation of SEOoptimized web pages to the people who are developing your site. In other cases, you may want to hire ghostwriters to fulfill the same purpose.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BACKEND PROFITS

Most businesses spend too much time trying to gain new customers and fail to recognize the immense goldmine that they have in their existing customers. The fact is that the people most likely to buy from you are those people who have already bought from you! That's why backend marketing can help to boost your profits, even when new customers are few and far between. As a strategy to survive and thrive in a recession, it's hard to beat backend marketing.

WHY IT WORKS

Backend marketing works because people are the most suggestible in buying behavior just after they've made a decision to buy. Once they overcome resistance to purchasing from you, they've given you their trust. You no longer have to market to overcome buying resistance; instead, you market to them to have them buy even more from you.

For the business owner, it works because it's easy to implement backend strategies, whether you are an online or a retail business. It just takes a bit of conscious attention to the actual purchasing transaction and understanding when to offer customers an upsell or a more expensive item. Once you get the hang of this, it's a very easy way to increase the bottom line without spending tons of time advertising.

STRATEGIES ARE SIMPLE

Strategies are deceptively simple and work best when implemented with consistency. While it doesn't take much to ask someone if he/she wants a pair of socks to go with a set of shoes he/she just bought, if you don't have that step planned out, you can miss that opportunity. It works best when you use these strategies at specific times and quite consistently.

When planning your sales funnel, you should include deliberate methods to sell backend offers. It shouldn't ever be an afterthought; it should be a carefully planned marketing strategy. It may look like a simple question or an additional ad that is carefully placed on a thank you form, but it's a planned attempt to get your visitors to open their wallets wider. Don't miss an opportunity to increase your bottom line, particularly when the customer is in the mood to buy – which is usually when they've just agreed to buy. By paying attention to your sales funnel and strategies, you can set up a maze of offers that are subtle yet powerful motivators to sell.

THE PLANNED SALES FUNNEL

A sales funnel is the way that you can get an unidentified visitor to self-identify himself/herself and to join your marketing program. The first step is to turn anonymous visitors into real live email addresses that have given you permission to contact them. Without knowing who is visiting your site, you'll never be able to execute a successful sales funnel. That's just the mouth of the sales funnel. After that, you should have some steps set up to place people in particular demographic groups that you then intend to market to in some way.

Whether it is a new or an old customer, they should all be in some area of your sales funnel. Your sales funnel should include backend offers at regular intervals, in emails, in forms, in various types of promotions. It should include various email campaigns. It should track the sales of your offers and how to upgrade people to other lists if they selfidentify themselves as big spenders.

THE DOUBLE OPT-IN FORM

When people first visit, your priority is to get them to register via a frontend offer. This can be a free report, ebook, discount coupon, or some other offer that is given to them in appreciation for subscribing to your email list. Once they've entered the mouth of your sales funnel, the double opt-in form, then you have a perfect right to market to them in any way that you choose, frontend or backend.

The double opt-in form also works great as a way to start the process of marketing to new clients because it weeds out spammers and fake email addresses. In order to receive the freebie, the customer has to verify his/her email address by going to his/her inbox and clicking a link to verify. This then verifies the account, and he/she is fully registered and is sent to the download area where he/she can see the freebie.

WITHIN THE FREEBIE, DO A BACKEND OFFER

While your first few emails should remain friendly and casual, whatever it is that you've offered them as bait to sign up, it should include some backend offers. If it's a report, you should include a description on some good tools or services that you're selling or on other products, even affiliate offers. Ask for referrals too for anyone that might like a free copy of whatever it is that you are giving away. Next, add their name to a particular marketing campaign. If they haven't self-identified themselves yet, just add them to a generic email list for low-income offers and start to send out these emails once a week or as often as they allow you to. You can set this all up through AWeber.com to automate it.

MARKET SOMETHING UNTIL IT SELLS

Once people are in a sales funnel and on an email list, you just continue to market to them per your plan until a sale is made. If they are your existing customers, they've already identified who they are and how much they are willing to spend. If they spend a lot, put them on an email campaign that offers them larger frontend and backend offers. If you don't know whether they'd be willing to spend more, offer them a low-income frontend offer with a high-income backend offer, just in case.

HAVE MANY, MANY OFFERS IN YOUR FUNNEL

If you want to do backend offers, you have to have many products in your inventory. They don't specifically have to be your own products; they can be affiliate products. However, you need sufficient inventory to mix and match your offers so that people won't get tired of seeing the same offer every time and get more resistant to being marketed to out of pure boredom.

THE THREE-TIERED SYSTEM

In your inventory should be three categories of products: low-, mid-, and high-range products. The reason for this is that you are going to cycle through the entire line up of products in whatever demographic your customer is in. If they self-identify themselves as being willing to buy in the mid-range, then you can shift them out of the low-range products and start cycling them through the mid-range products, and so on.

This three-tiered system works well because it allows you to keep track of what part of the sales funnel they are in, what they've already bought, and what you still need to market until it sells. After that, it's just a matter of learning when to give incentives to have them buy more on the backend.

GAIN TRUST WITH YOUR LOW-END PRODUCTS FIRST

Some strategies work best with different tiers of products. You can't really do an immediate backend offer the moment someone buys a low-end product, unless it's very subtle, like something that is included within the content of a freebie. Otherwise, it's not enough time for customers on that tier to really ascertain the quality of your products and to trust that you will deliver what you say you will deliver.

If that's the case, you might want to offer more significant freebies to move them up a notch, like an invitation to a teleseminar or a free coaching session. That way, they can test your products before you actually move into marketing to them for bigger amounts of money.

LIMITED ONE-TIME OFFERS

Once you've gotten a mid-level product sale from a customer, you can start to offer them one-time offers on the backend. These offers are great deals for your regular customers, who now understand that you have good products and they have enough trust in you to purchase more. Once they've identified themselves in this category due to their moving into the mid-priced level of products, you can start to market the limited one-time backend offer.

BE CLEAR IT IS “ONE TIME”

After the sale of a mid-priced product, send the customer to a sales page with some related product on it. Tell them that because they've bought a specific item, they are given this “one time” chance to make another complementary purchase at a discounted price. Make it clear that once they leave the page, that price will no longer be offered. Sweeten the deal by adding some bonuses to your special deal that are also included in your “one-time” offer. These bonus items will no longer be available for free with other packages unless they make this deal. Should they leave the page, the offer is gone forever and so is the discounted price. This really lights a fire under people's butts and is a great way to make use of a backend offer at just the right time.

WHY IT WORKS

The customer who is led to this backend offer has already indicated that he/she is willing to buy mid-priced products from you, so money is not an issue. They probably are also highly interested in your lineup of products. They might decide to wait until they have more money to come back and buy some more from you later, but if you showed them how they would save tons of money from you by buying now, they are more likely to buy the one-time offer. In addition, one of the psychological triggers that people have is a fear of loss. If a deal is really good, they already trust you, and they know that they will most likely want this product in the future, the fear of loss will get them to buy now, knowing that that offer will never appear again and that they will only have themselves to blame for missing it.

TRY A ONE-TIME OFFER ON YOUR THANK YOU PAGE

Instead of going to a totally separate page upon buying the mid-level product, you can include the one-time offer on your thank you form as a special way to thank people for patronizing your site. This is also a nice way to show people that you are paying attention to your buyers and rewarding them for their loyalty.

BONUS OFFERS

Along with the regular lineup of products in your sales funnel, you should set up multiple bonus offers that you can offer on the backend at various times. You can offer them in an email that confirms a download of a product. You can offer them in email campaigns at specific times when some action is taken, whether it's joining a forum or participating in a survey. Once you have someone's attention, it doesn't hurt to offer him/her something special by way of a thank you during his/her interaction with you.