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Chapter 1:

Intro to Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing, at it’s core, is pretty straight forward. It’s the use of email messages sent to a list of subscribers to advertise or promote brands, products, offers, events, or pretty much anything you want. Now that “core” definition of email marketing may be simple, but email marketing has come a long way in recent years and there’s actually quite a bit more to it than that, today. We’ll be discussing those advances later in this guide, but first, let’s go over WHY you need email marketing in your business.

Why Email Marketing?

The need for email marketing is one of those things you just can’t argue with because the numbers are just too clear and astounding to ignore. According to a report by DMA, the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing these days is $38 for every $1 spent. And 80% of business professionals report growth in customer acquisition and retention resulting from email marketing. There’s nothing else like it. Not even social media comes close. Leads are twice as likely to opt-in to your email list than they are to engage with your business on Facebook. And if you thought social media and search engines were the key to growing your business,

think again. Email conversion rates are higher than both search and social combined!

This should come as no surprise, really. Consumers have repeatedly insisted that they LIKE getting promotional messages via email. Over 70% of consumers say email is their preferred channel for business communication and 60% even say they want to receive your marketing emails weekly or MORE often. So, in light of all the recent trends and data, there’s really no questioning the critical importance of email marketing in your business. If you’re not using email marketing in your business, it’s time to start, right now. The only question is where to start.
Where to start Email Marketing.

So, as you’ve probably guessed, robust email marketing operations can’t exactly be run from your personal email account. You need an actual email marketing platform, commonly called an “autoresponder” service. These platforms can handle a wide range of email marketing processes from basic things like initial autoresponder sequences and weekly newsletter scheduling to more advanced stuff like automation workflows (which we’ll discuss later).

Popular platforms that can handle most of these functions include:

GetResponse
Aweber
ActiveCampaign
ConstantContact
iContact
CampaignMonitor
MailChimp
SendReach
ConvertKit
SendLane
SendGrid
VerticalResponse
MarketHero
InfusionSoft
Ontraport
As you can see, there are a ton of email marketing platforms out there for you to choose from. You should dedicate a day

or two to researching each one, comparing features and pricing, and determine which one is best for your business. Once you’ve chosen an autoresponder service, it’s time to start thinking about email marketing strategies.

Chapter 2: Email Marketing Strategies

There are a number of ways to leverage email marketing for your business. These range from super basic to super advanced and everything in between. Let’s start by differentiating between the two main types of email marketing messages.

Newsletters

Newsletters are one of the oldest types of marketing models. Both in the case of print mail and email. Basically, you send out broadcasts to your list in “real-time” to notify them of offers, promotions, events, and any kind of updates. By “real-time” we mean specific dates on a calendar, rather than “X” number of days after subscribing. Newsletters are great because they provide a lot of flexibility, can be planned well in advance, and allow you to adjust your marketing and customer relationships “on the fly” based on what’s going on in your industry at any given moment. Also, their “real-time” nature means everyone on your list is on the same page at any given time, which is great for moving large amounts of traffic at one time.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Why You Should Market Your Business on Pinterest

There are so many social media platforms to choose from, that most business owners focus their time and attention on one or two. When deciding which sites are the best to brand and market your business, you must not forget the visually engaging Pins and Boards found on Pinterest.
There are a few standout ways in which Pinterest varies from other social media sites. While you can “follow” users, and they can “follow” you—it’s not about friends and followers.

Instead, it is about generating instant access to engaging visual imagery and informative Pins regarding any and every area of interest. These Pins can then be added to a user’s personal boards for future reference. Anyone can access any other users Pins by the category or keywords related to the Pin. While each Pin can have a bit of text or even a URL, the goal is not the “here’s where I am or what I’m doing” topic of most social media platforms. Instead, a relevant comment regarding the post, and what it represents is standard. Most importantly, unlike Facebook and Twitter where your posts peak engagement is rarely more than 5 days (or a few hours) Pins can continue to show up in search results indefinitely.

Still Not Convinced, Check Out These Statistics

If you're inclined to stick with the major players, like Facebook and Twitter, don’t write off Pinterest until you take a closer look at the statistics. First off, let’s talk about the shear size of your potential audience. Pinterest boasts an insane 150 million active users. Yeah, you heard that right. 70 million of those are in the US, with 80 million outside the US. As can be expected, Pinterest activity is proportionately astronomical. There are over 75 billion Pins, which have been posted to over 1 billion public and private user boards. Over 2 billion shopping pins are posted daily. 87% of users make purchases after seeing products or services on Pinterest and 93% use it with an eventual purchase (online or offline) as their primary goal, which makes Pinterest a no-brainer platform for those seeking to sell goods and services to a shopping-minded audience. And 72% of users make offline purchasing decisions based on Pinterest content. So it’s not just a goldmine for online businesses.

The average Pinterest user session is just over 14 minutes, which is very impressive when you compare that to most other social media platforms. 14 million rich pin articles are posted every day and a whopping 5% of all web traffic comes from Pinterest. 80% of Pinterest users access the site from a mobile device, so mobile marketing and mobile-friendly content is very important here, and 2 out of 3 pins are posted by businesses or brands, so you’ve got some competition. Oh, and if you happen to be in the culinary niche, guess what: there are over 1.7 billion recipes on Pinterest.

As for your audience make-up, 81 percent of Pinterest users are women, so the “Pinterest is for girls” stereotype clearly has some truth to it, at least from a market research perspective. But don’t worry, if your target audience is males, the percentage of men on the site is increasing rapidly, making up about 40% of new users recently. In case you were wondering, the most popular categories for these new male Pinterest users are technology, food and drink (big surprise, right?). As for age, millennials are using Pinterest just as much as Instagram. The median age of users is 40 years old, but the most active “pinners” are under the age of 40.
So, now that we’ve established why you should definitely be marketing on Pinterest, let’s talk about some Pinterest goals.

Chapter 2:
Pinterest Marketing Goals

Establishing marketing goals is critical to the success of your Pinterest marketing. Countless entrepreneurs and businesses have setup a Pinterest presence, made a few posts, and then let it sit untouched for months or even years. This is usually due to a lack or absence of goals. So, before you even begin establishing any sort of Pinterest presence or strategy, you need to establish clear marketing goals.

Your goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. They can be long term, short term, or a mix of both. Deadlines and milestones can be helpful as well. “I want to increase my social following” would be an example of a bad goal that will likely result in your marketing efforts petering out after a while because there are no specific milestones. “I want to gain 1,000 likes by Christmas” is an example of a good goal. It’s specific, measurable, and certainly attainable. Below are some examples of the various goal categories you might be interested in.

Traffic to Website (Sales, Leads, Content)

Probably one of the most popular goals of Pinterest Marketing is to funnel your Pinterest traffic back to your own web properties. After all, most businesses don’t do business “on” Pinterest. You’re leveraging Pinterest to obtain traffic and convert that Pinterest traffic into brand-followers, leads, prospects, and customers. So maybe your goal is to get people to a landing page with a free offer where they can subscribe to your list and become a lead. Maybe they’re being sent to a sales page or an eCommerce store. Maybe you just want to do some content marketing and send them to your blog. Whatever the case, the end goal for a lot of businesses will likely be bringing Pinterest traffic AWAY from Pinterest and over to their own web properties.

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Chapter 1:
Intro to Twitter Ads

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an incredibly powerful online news and social networking service. It’s in a unique league of it’s own due to several features that set it apart from other social networking platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and GooglePlus. Firstly, one of the main functions and uses of Twitter is as a news/events broadcasting channel. In many ways it’s more like a news ticker than a social networking platform (albeit a news ticker where you get to choose what news you want to hear about by choosing who you follow). In fact, it’s become a must-have resource for news networks and journalists who want to stay in the know about anything newsworthy in their areas. Journalists make up almost 25% of all verified Twitter accounts. Secondly, Twitter is all about short burst broadcasts. All posts consist of tiny bite sized messages, called Tweets, of 140 characters or less, or some combination of video/images and text. Users can broadcast and receive these messages via SMS, Mobile App, and the Twitter website interface.

Interaction with these posts can take the form of replies, likes, and retweets, with the latter being the ultimate sign of a successful tweet. For businesses and organizations, Twitter is used not only as a place to network and broadcast news, but also as a way to keep audiences updated about content published elsewhere. For example, some businesses primarily use Twitter as the “hey look” step in their content marketing plan, in which they simply Tweet every time they publish a new blog post on their website or a new video to their YouTube channel.

Bottom line: Twitter is a powerful, “short & sweet” social broadcasting platform that can play a very significant and positive role in any business’ online marketing strategy.

Why Advertise on Twitter?

Advertising on Twitter could be one of the most impactful decisions you make in your business’ online marketing strategy. Why? Because of the shear numbers, for starters. There are well over 300 Million active users on Twitter (nope, not a typo) and that’s nothing compared to the total created accounts which is sitting at over 1.3 Billion (yes, with a “b”). Of that gargantuan amount, around half, 550 million, actually ever Tweet and another 500 million visit the site each month to read tweets and news without logging into their accounts. One-third of all US social media users are on Twitter and 80% of active users access the site via mobile. These days, anyone who is anyone is on Twitter, including over 80% of the world’s leaders.

So that’s all well and good from a purely personal perspective. Clearly the numbers are there. But what about business? Why should you market and advertise there? Well, if it’s any indication, 65.8% of US businesses with 100+ employees are marketing on Twitter. 58% of the world’s top brands have built and maintained enormous Twitter followings (100K or more). And how active are all these businesses on Twitter? 92% of them Tweet more than once per day, nearly half of them (42%) Tweet up to 5 times per day, and 20% of them go crazy and Tweet up to 10 times each day. Yeah, there’s a good bet that these companies have a very good reason for putting so much marketing energy into Twitter.

So the businesses and companies are clearly on board. But what do consumers think? Well, the average Twitter user follows 5 companies and 80% of them have mentioned a brand or business in a Tweet. 54% of consumers on Twitter reported that they have taken action in response to seeing brands mentioned in Tweets (e.g. Retweeting, going to the brand’s website, searching for the brand, etc). To finally drive the point home, Twitter revealed in 2016 that total paid ad engagements had grown a whopping 208% year-on-year. Yikes.

So, to conclude, the question clearly isn’t whether or not you should be advertising on Twitter. The question is: What are you waiting for?

Chapter 2: Establishing Goals

Establishing marketing goals is critical to the success of your Twitter advertising. Countless entrepreneurs and businesses have setup a Twitter presence, made a few posts and ads, and then let it sit untouched for months or even years. This is usually due to a lack or absence of goals. Also, your goals are will help you determine everything from your campaign objective to your budgeting and bidding. So before you even begin establishing any sort of Twitter ad strategy, you need to establish clear advertising goals.

Your goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. They can be long term, short term, or a mix of both. Deadlines and milestones can be helpful as well. “I want to increase my Twitter following” would be an example of a bad goal that will likely result in your advertising efforts petering out after a while because there are no specific milestones. “I want to gain 1,000 followers by New Years” is an example of a good goal. It’s specific, measurable, and certainly attainable. Below are some examples of the various goal categories you might be interested in.

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Chapter 1:
Introduction to Product Launching

Why Launch a Product? (The Super List)
So, what does every guru online tell you to do if you want to grow your internet marketing business? Give away lead magnets to freebie-seekers. Build your list. Market affiliate products to them. Make commissions. We’ve all heard it, right? And you know what? That strategy worked. Back in 2012...

Problem is, it doesn’t work anymore. Nowadays, freebie-seekers have secondary “junk” email accounts that they reserve for collecting lead magnets but otherwise they never log in to them. Your emails are going to inboxes where they are left untouched, floating in a sea of thousands of other marketing emails. This, combined with the fact that many people even use fake email addresses, is what has led to such severely low email open rates throughout the industry. And not only does a list of freebie-seekers almost never open your

emails, but the few of them that do will almost never buy anything. Why? Because they’re freebie-seekers!

So, what is it that successful internet marketers are doing differently? They’re each building a “super list”. A super list (phrase coined by the great Alex Jeffreys), is a list of real people, with real email addresses that they actually check, who actually habitually take out their credit cards and buy things online. In other words, it’s a buyers list. The difference between a buyers list and a freebie-seeker list is night and day. One makes you money and the other makes you angry.
So how do you get a buyers list? Easy. You launch a product and you get affiliates to send traffic to it. Then you simply integrate your payment platform with your autoresponder service so that buyers get added as subscribers automatically. Don’t worry. It’s not as crazy as it sounds and, more importantly, it’s the only way you’ll move forward in internet marketing.

Now we should note that this guide assumes you’ve already got a core product created. It’s okay if you don’t have a sales structure set up yet, such as sales pages, a funnel, or a member’s area, because we’ll cover all that next. But at a minimum we’re assuming you’ve already got a product created, whether it be an eBook, a video course, or a software tool. If you haven’t created a product yet, just grab our Product Creation guide which will have you cranking out digital products in no time.
How Do You Launch a Product?

There are a few ways to launch a digital product. One way is to do a “soft launch”. A soft launch is a low-key opening of the doors, so to speak. You set up a product,

On the other hand, there’s a “hard launch”. A hard launch is a publicized launch period with a specific beginning and end date. The idea here is to drive large amounts of traffic to your new product in a short period of time. In most cases, there’s a special discount during this short period which encourages people to adopt the product early. Ultimately, the goal of a hard launch is to bring in a large number of new customers (and revenue) and to make a very visible splash in the marketplace.
Since the goal of this guide is to get you a buyers list as quickly as possible, we’ll be focusing on how to accomplish a hard launch.

The most important “how” of your product, however, is traffic. Where will you get it? You certainly COULD drive your own traffic with paid ads and hope that you make a profit, but the most popular approach is to recruit affiliates (also called “JVs”). If you can convince and incentivize several affiliate marketers who already have their own audiences and email lists to promote your product, you’re basically handing off the problem of traffic generation to someone else. It’s also great because you don’t have to worry about spending your own money in advance. You’re simply paying commissions using money from sales that were already made by the affiliates. You also have the benefit of not having to worry about targeting and tweaking and other stuff you have to mess with when you pay for your own traffic. All the people on these affiliate marketers’ lists are already interested in your niche and are likely already habitual buyers of products like yours. So, for the purposes of this guide, we’ll be focusing on getting a bunch of JVs/affiliates to promote a hard launch. But before we start recruiting JVs and sending traffic, you’ll need to set up your launch structure and that’s what we’ll be covering next.

Chapter 2:
Building Your Launch Structure

Before you start recruiting JVs and sending traffic to a hard launch, you’ll need your actual launch structure in place. Your launch structure includes your sales pages, your sales funnel, your pricing model, as well as the marketplace or payment platform you’ll use.

Your launch structure also includes the backend infrastructure you’ll need for delivering your products to buyers and your initial interactions with them after they purchase. This includes setting up a support desk, a member’s area (or product delivery apparatus), and an autoresponder welcome sequence. (Note: many would argue that these last three items are better categorized as CRM rather than part of your launch structure, and that’s a valid point, but we’re dealing specifically with the immediate post-purchase interactions that often make the difference between happy customers and angry refunders, so we’ve included them as part of your launch structure). Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

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Chapter 1:
Why Product Creation

If you’ve been looking at starting an online business for a while, you’ve probably seen several different business models floating around. Probably the most popular one is affiliate marketing. You’re told you should use lead magnets and free gifts to build an email list. Stick those lead magnets on a squeeze page and send traffic to it, right? Well, if you’ve tried it, you’ve already discovered that it doesn’t work very well.

After spending time and/or money on sending traffic to that page, you’ll usually notice most people aren’t exactly giving you their best email address. In fact, about one-third of them are giving you a fake email. And of the ones that are giving you a real one, it’s usually one they reserve for “junk” which is how they think of your promotional material. That means it’s an address they don’t check regularly and so it’s about as useful as a fake one. And keep in mind, they’re called freebie seekers for a reason! They don’t really buy things. Usually what happens at this point is that a struggling internet marketer starts to realize his or her marketing emails are getting open rates of around 4 or 5% and generating zero sales and that all their effort in creating a lead magnet and landing page and driving traffic was a giant waste. So, they give up on IM and assume it’s all a big hoax. Sad story, but it happens every day and it’s the ultimate end of about 95% of would-be internet marketers.

So, what are the other five percent doing differently? Easy. They’re creating and selling products of their own.

You see, when you create and sell a product of your own, you’re creating a different type of list. A buyers list. Unlike freebie seekers who make it a point to never buy anything and also rarely give you their real contact info, buyers actually buy things (crazy right?). These are people who are serious about internet marketing and actually regularly pull out their credit cards and buy things. And because the email you collect comes from their transaction info, you’re finally getting real email addresses that people actually check!

And beyond list building, selling your own products carries another benefit. You control your profit. You don’t have to split sales revenue with anyone (although you certainly can if you’re having affiliates help with a product launch). So, you’re either keeping all the profit for yourself or you’re choosing how much to share with affiliates. Either way, you’re in control.

Furthermore, if you do choose to pay commissions to affiliates and have them drive sales, it’s essentially free traffic. You’re paying a pre-determined commission to people ONLY when they make a sale, so there’s none of the risk or gambling that usually accompanies something like paid display ads or solo ads. You finally switched places with the successful marketers you’ve been looking up at and now you’re letting THEM handle the problem of how to get traffic to YOUR offer. What a difference that makes!

Finally, creating and selling a product establishes credibility like nothing else. In a market packed full of so-called gurus and celebrity marketers, you’ll absolutely need credibility. Your credibility affects several things. Firstly, it affects the likelihood of people buying your future products. Secondly, it affects how many people will recognize your name and bother to open your emails. Finally, it boosts your ability to network and recruit affiliates and JV partners. And having a product of your own to point to is one of the quickest and easiest routes to increasing credibility.

You might be asking yourself if product creation is for you. Well, take a moment and look through your inbox right now. Look at all the emails coming in from top internet marketers. Sure, they’re all promoting other people’s products with affiliate links. But what’s the one other thing you see each of them doing at least once every month or two? They’re creating and selling their own products. It’s very rare that you encounter a successful marketer without their own products. So, if that’s the one thing that all successful marketers are doing in your inbox, then guess what: yup, you need to be doing it too. But don’t worry. It’s easier than you think and there are a ton of different types of products you can make. We’ll cover that next.

Chapter 2: Types of Products

There are a ton of different types of products you can create. In this guide we’ll be focusing on digital products because those are the quickest, easiest, and least expensive to make. Digital products are great because you don’t have to worry about things like inventory, production costs, wholesalers, warehouses, and shipping. Here’s just some of the potential digital products you could create starting right now.

eBooks

Ebooks are an excellent starting place for product creation. They aren’t as attractive or likely to convert as video ads or software these days, but they can still be a solid core product and will also come in handy down the road when you’re looking to compile bonuses to sweeten the pot on your other product launches. Ebooks can be anything from a how-to guide on a specific tactic or activity to a more general book covering a broad topic in a more general manner. Although ebooks aren’t as attractive these days by themselves, they act great as a sub-component of a larger package offer or a companion to a core product like a video course or software.

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Chapter 1:

Introduction

LinkedIn isn’t just for helping you recruit top talent or finding your dream job, but is a powerful means of organic B2B marketing. You can of course leverage paid marketing on LinkedIn, but even with paid marketing every business needs to invest in building their organic presence. Just as with other social media platforms, LinkedIn is a global site—which is an effective means of growing your business well beyond your local service area. While B2B marketing is the most effective, don’t discount LinkedIn for B2C.

The Numbers Are Impressive

LinkedIn is a site dedicated to professional so the mindset when joining, posting, searching, and networking is quite unique when compared to Facebook or Twitter. While the site may not be as saturated, that is something you can use to your advantage. Users join and log in for professional purposes, meaning you have a built-in captive audience. Just take a look at some of the stats:

• There are over 467 million users in over 200 countries around the world.
• The US has the largest number of users, followed by India, Brazil, Great Britain, and Canada.
• LinkedIn is available in over 24 languages.
• There are 1.5 million professional LinkedIn Groups in hundreds of industries.
• 57% of users are male and 44% are female.
• 41% of millionaires use LinkedIn.
• 13% of users are between the ages of 15 and 34—including over 40 million students and recent college grads.
• 94% of online marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.
• 71% of professionals believe LinkedIn is a credible source for professional content.
• 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
• 46% of B2B social media traffic comes from LinkedIn.

So obviously, LinkedIn is the perfect place to market your business. Next, we’ll talk about establishing marketing goals.

Chapter 2:

LinkedIn Marketing Goals

Establishing marketing goals is critical to the success of your LinkedIn marketing. Countless entrepreneurs and businesses have setup an LinkedIn presence, made a few posts, and then let it sit untouched for months or even years. This is usually due to a lack or absence of goals. So, before you even begin establishing any sort of LinkedIn presence or strategy, you need to establish clear marketing goals.

Your goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. They can be long term, short term, or a mix of both. Deadlines and milestones can be helpful as well. “I want to increase my social following” would be an example of a bad goal that will likely result in your marketing efforts petering out after a while because there are no specific milestones. “I want to gain 1,000 likes by Christmas” is an example of a good goal. It’s specific, measurable, and certainly attainable. Below are some examples of the various goal categories you might be interested in.

Traffic to Website (Sales, Leads, Content)

Probably one of the most popular goals of LinkedIn Marketing is to funnel your LinkedIn traffic back to your own web properties. After all, most businesses don’t do business “on” LinkedIn. You’re leveraging LinkedIn to obtain traffic and convert that LinkedIn traffic into brand-followers, leads, prospects, and customers. So maybe your goal is to get people to a landing page with a free offer where they can subscribe to your list and become a lead. Maybe they’re being sent to a sales page or an eCommerce store. Maybe you just want to do some content marketing and send them to your blog. Whatever the case, the end goal for a lot of businesses will likely be bringing LinkedIn traffic AWAY from LinkedIn and over to their own web properties.

Social Following (aka LinkedIn as Autoresponder)

In this goal category, your aim is to build a large number of followers. The reason we also refer to this as “LinkedIn as Autoresponder” is because the main sought-after benefit here is to increase the number of people who will see your posts in their feeds. In this sense, your LinkedIn posts become similar to sending out email broadcasts via your autoresponder. If you grow a large enough community, this can be very beneficial and if your content is engaging enough to get a lot of traction in the form of likes, comments, and shares, you can significantly increase the range of your organic reach into people’s feeds.

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Chapter 1:
Introduction

Instagram is a powerful photo sharing app. When it comes to leveraging this social platform for business, it’s all about visualizing your brand. While you can certainly post photos to any and all of your other social platforms, Instagram differentiates itself (even from Pinterest) with filters which empower absolutely anyone to turn their photos into engaging and brand-building works of art. When it comes to deciding which social platforms to add to your website, and post to regularly—Instagram certainly can’t be ignored.

Instagram Is a Mobile App

One of the most noteworthy differences between Instagram and some of the other sites you might be considering for your brand or business, is that Instagram is a mobile app. While you can head to Instagram.com after you have created an account and perform limited functions, the majority of the functions must be used within the app. Downloading the app is free for both Android and Apple. If you are using Instagram for your business, set up your Facebook account first. Even if you are not yet active on Facebook, you will need to link your Instagram account to its parent company (Facebook) to transition it from a regular account to a business account.

Why Instagram? Check Out the Statistics Below

We know that you only have so much time in the day, so you might be in search of some quantifiable facts as to why Instagram is where you should be investing your time and resources. Here are some statistics that businesses across every industry simply can’t ignore. Instagram has over 700 million active users (yup, you heard that right), 400 million of whom use the app every single day. 80% of these users are outside of the U.S. Over 80% of Instagram users follow and engage with multiple businesses, products, or services. Over 250 million Instagram users engage with the Instagram stories (paid advertising) each day which makes it a dream come true if paid ads are your focus. Users share over 95 million photos and videos each day. Most Instagrammers are between 18 to 29 years old. 38% of women use Instagram and 26% of men. Over 8 million registered businesses use Instagram. Over 120 million Instagrammers engage with brands directly after their Instagram engagement—visit their website or profile URL, direct message in Instagram, email, call, visit other social platforms, or get directions. By the end of 2017, 70% of brands will be on Instagram. Over 60% of users have learned about a new product, services, business, or brand after finding them on Instagram. Instagram posts with hashtags receive over 12% more likes, comments, tags, and shares. The average business or brand posts 5 times per week.

So, clearly Instagram is where you should be marketing, based on audience size, usage and engagement, and demographics – not to mention that every other business is marketing there, which should tell you something. Now that you know why you should be marketing there, it’s time to talk about establishing your Instagram marketing goals.

Chapter 2

Establishing Your Goals

Establishing marketing goals is critical to the success of your Instagram marketing. Countless entrepreneurs and businesses have setup an Instagram presence, made a few posts, and then let it sit untouched for months or even years. This is usually due to a lack or absence of goals. So, before you even begin establishing any sort of Instagram presence or strategy, you need to establish clear marketing goals.

Your goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. They can be long term, short term, or a mix of both. Deadlines and milestones can be helpful as well. “I want to increase my social following” would be an example of a bad goal that will likely result in your marketing efforts petering out after a while because there are no specific milestones. “I want to gain 1,000 likes by Christmas” is an example of a good goal. It’s specific, measurable, and certainly attainable. Below are some examples of the various goal categories you might be interested in.

Traffic to Website (Sales, Leads, Content)

Probably one of the most popular goals of Instagram Marketing is to funnel your Instagram traffic back to your own web properties. After all, most businesses don’t do business “on” Instagram. You’re leveraging Instagram to obtain traffic and convert that Instagram traffic into brand-followers, leads, prospects, and customers. So maybe your goal is to get people to a landing page with a free offer where they can subscribe to your list and become a lead. Maybe they’re being sent to a sales page or an eCommerce store. Maybe you just want to do some content marketing and send them to your blog. Whatever the case, the end goal for a lot of businesses will likely be bringing Instagram traffic AWAY from Instagram and over to their own web properties.

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Chapter 1:

An Introduction to Banner Ads

Banner advertising has come a long way since its humble beginnings centuries ago. Yes, that’s right… centuries ;)

Flip through any old newspaper or publication from the American colonial era and you’ll find rectangular banner ads pitching everything from beer to stockings, complete with a main image, carefully chosen brand colors, a motto or unique selling proposition, and even a call-to-action!

Of course, we’re not here to discuss old print banner ads for stylish powdered wigs or state-of-the-art wooden dentures (although it is useful to remember how long the ancestors of today’s digital banners have been around). In this guide we’re going to discuss modern digital banner ads in all their glory. So, for starters, what are they?

What are banner Ads?

Basically, banner advertisements are actionable, clickable, tappable images that invite web visitors to buy, learn about, or receive something in exchange for a click-through. These ads can appear anywhere and are typically seen within and around the content of various websites such as the header area on a forum page, the sidebar of a blog or news site, or even squeezed in among the paragraphs of a news article.

These banner ads come in all shapes and sizes (typically variations of the trusty old rectangle) and will either be static (.jpg, .png, or .gif) images or animated (.gif or Flash) banners. In more recent years, some businesses have been leveraging “Rich Media” banner ads that do all sorts of whacky stuff like send a car zooming across your screen in front of the article you were reading. And these ads aren’t going anywhere soon. Banner ads still make up around 34% of all online ad spending, second only to Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

So, since they’ve been around for hundreds of years and businesses are spending a ton on them every year, clearly they work. The question is, should you be using them in your business?

Chapter 2:

Why You Should Be Using Them

There are a host of reasons you would/should use banner ads in your business. We’ll cover several of them here:

What Are Your Goals?

The general goal of banner ads is to take a visitor, who clicks on one of them, through to one of your web properties. But beyond this you may have more specific goals. This could include bringing them directly to a sales or product page in hopes of them making a purchase. Or perhaps you’re simply doing a list building campaign and trying to gain leads or contact info by forwarding them to a landing page with a free offer or gift. Maybe your goal is to learn more about your market, in which case you might be sending them to a survey or questionnaire.

The final goal for click-throughs that we’ll mention is simply content marketing. Perhaps you’re simply trying to get your blog posts and articles in front of a lot of visitors in order to build a following, provide useful information, and perhaps even make a “soft pitch” within this content. Another sub-goal of content marketing worth mentioning is building a retargeting audience. There’s plenty of data justifying this approach. People who are retargeted via banner ads are 70% more likely to convert! So the idea here is to simply stick a retargeting pixel on your site when you send visitors to your content (check out our retargeting guide for more detailed info on this). You can then retarget them wherever they are on the web with more relevant banner ads now that they are familiar with you and this time you can aim for something more desirable like a sale or an opt-in.

Other Benefits

One very useful but less talked about benefit of banner advertising is brand awareness. You’ve seen this work a thousand times. Year ‘round you might see tv commercials for “Smiley Taxi Cabs”. It’s not like you’re sitting in your living room and suddenly bolt upright and call a cab at that moment. You don’t need one. But weeks or maybe months later when you’re leaving a birthday party after having a bit to drink and you need a cab, who are you going to google on your smartphone? Yup. Smiley Cab. The same goes for banner ads. Even when people don’t click on them, you’ll be subtly building top-of-mind awareness for your business and expanding the visual familiarity of your brand.

Another benefit of banner advertising is the ability to track, assess, and test effectiveness. There are several metrics that can be used to measure various levels of effectiveness. The most basic level of assessment is your Click-through Rate or CTR. You can gauge the financial success of your ads by comparing your CTR against your advertising expenses which gives you your cost per click or CPC. Beyond this you can actually track the results of click-throughs (sales or opt-ins) versus your ad expenses. This can give you your cost per lead and cost per sale. Using conversion pixels you can test for even more complex results such as how far visitors get into your funnel or which blog posts they read after landing on your site.

So that’s the “why” of banner advertising. Let’s talk about the “where”...

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Chapter 1:
Why Bonuses?

Vendor Bonuses
If you are a product vendor, then you probably already know why you need bonuses. Bonuses are an excellent way to increase the perceived value of your product or offer. They also can significantly increase your conversion rates. Many of your buyers, no matter how good your product is, are sitting on the fence waiting for one last nudge towards becoming a customer. Bonuses can often be this difference between a buyer and a page abandoner. Then there are also those people who absolutely love the bonuses for the bonuses’ sake and will actually judge your product based on the number of bonuses. So, making sure you have a good amount of attractive bonuses can go a long way towards maximizing your sales.

Finally, there is another, much less talked about, advantage of bonuses. They act as an excellent form of “collateral” that you can offer in your guarantee statement. Very few sellers do this, but it is incredibly effective and maximizes the amount of trust you can gain with potential buyers. Basically, what you do is you offer your standard guarantee, such as a 30-day money back guarantee, but then you state that you are going to “go above and beyond” and “reverse the risk”. In this second part of your guarantee you are going to promise that the buyers, upon requesting a refund, will even get to keep the bonuses. If you have appraised the dollar value of these bonuses at, for example, $500, then you can pitch it as a “100% money back PLUS $500 value back guarantee”. You might be asking “won’t that just encourage people to buy with the full intention of requesting a refund just to get the bonuses for free?” The answer is YES. But, more importantly, the amount of people who will now buy the product, and otherwise would not have, far outweighs the number of “professional refunders” you will attract.

Affiliate Bonuses

You may be asking yourself, why should affiliates bother with bonuses at all? Isn’t that the vendor’s responsibility?

Well, that might make sense if you want to be on the same even ground as all the other affiliates competing to make the sale with their affiliate link. But is that really what you want? Of course not! You want to be way out in the front. And it’s been proven that offering bonuses as an affiliate can 5X your affiliate sales.
You need to give your audience a reason to use YOUR affiliate link instead of somebody else’s. This is especially the case these days when people’s inboxes are full of dozens of marketers pitching the same product to them. What is there to set you apart from the rest? Bonuses. That’s literally it. Unless the buyer is your best buddy, all they really care about is which option gives them the most value. And rightfully so!

So the way this works is you create a quick and easy landing page, add bonuses to it and right at the top you tell them, grab all the bonuses on this page when you purchase “product x” via my link.

But you can’t just slap a bunch of bonuses on that page and expect them to buy through your link. You’ve got to do it in a way that makes sense in relation to the product you’re promoting and that is what we’ll be covering next.

Chapter 2: Keys to a Good Bonus

As mentioned previously, when you’re offering bonuses as an affiliate you can’t just do so with no rhyme or reason. The same goes for offering bonuses as a vendor. There has got to be some context and logical sense to the bonuses. Specifically, they need to have relevance, utility, and value. Not one or two of those. All three. Let’s take a closer look at each of those.

Relevance

You have to keep in mind you’re dealing with real, intelligent human beings here. When a buyer is considering a product, the buyer is aware of the category and type of product and their thoughts are aligned with a specific “sphere”. If the product is a list building product, they’re mentally in the sphere of list building or lead generation. If you slap a bonus down that is way outside of that sphere, like a course on product creation, they’ll notice a lack of relevance and they’ll likely dismiss what you’re offering. In fact, they might think you’re just plain dumb.

On the other hand, if you offer them bonuses like landing page editors or a course on increasing their opt-in rate or a pack of lead magnets to use for list building, they’ll immediately recognize that as something relevant to the list building product.

If necessary, you can stretch or “force” relevance for a category that is just “one step removed” from the category of the product. An example of this would be, “hey after you start building your list, you’ll need to start marketing to them, so here’s a course on email marketing”. With that statement, you’ve established relevance. It’s indirect, but it’s only removed from the product category by one logical step. Buyers will notice the truthfulness of that relevance claim and it’ll likely jive with them. If you try to go to many steps away from that original product category though, like “if you build a list you’ll need email marketing (1 step) and if you do email marketing you’ll need to do product creation to sell them something (2 steps),” then you’ll create a logical disconnect and your bonus will seem irrelevant (because it is).

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Chapter 1:

Choosing an Affiliate Market Place

Overview

This course focuses on aggressively leveraging the power of YouTube to make affiliate sales. Our goal will be to establish a working affiliate apparatus and to make it profitable in as little time as possible.

If you’ve been looking at affiliate marketing for a while you’ve probably noticed that YouTube is packed with affiliate reviews of all sorts of products. Some of them are webcam talking head videos, some are selfie videos shot with a phone while taking a walk, some are impressive semi-professional videos with people behind a counter or sitting on a couch with a physical product in front of them on a coffee table, and some are basic screencast videos. And then there are even the super cheap ones that consist only of photos and text or slideshows. All of them have the same basic conclusion: “click the link below to learn more”. Of course, that link is an affiliate link, and every time someone clicks it and eventually buys a product (even if it’s a few days later, thanks to cookies), the person who made that video gets paid a commission. That’s where we want you.

Why Video?

So why video? There’s a few reasons. First: videos are more readily consumed these days than text content. People would much rather get the info they need quickly by listening and watching than by having to read. Plus, video is easier for you. Review websites and blogs simply take too much time and effort. You’ve got to continuously create and add textual content, proofread it, and SEO optimize all of it. And good luck getting it ranked in the search engines. In today’s world, if you’re not on page one (or maybe 2) of google, you’re not going to get seen. For video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion, on the other hand, you don’t need to appear on the front page. You’ll be seen in the “related videos” side bar of other similar videos. This is why it’s so easy for even newbies to start seeing progress on YouTube, because everyone is constantly going from one video to the next and clicking on the related video results.
Why YouTube?

Now there are a handful of major video sites out there, but we’re focusing on YouTube for the following reasons: YouTube has over a billion users – more than a third of the world’s internet users! More importantly, those figures aren’t remaining static.Watch time increases by 50% every year and the number of people using the site increases about 40% every year. Clearly, if you want to be seen, YouTube is the place to be!

Now that we understand why we’re using video marketing, let’s have a look at what we’ll be learning in this course:

Chapter 1 covers affiliate networks or marketplaces. We’ll be talking about how to choose and get setup with the affiliate market place that’s right for you.
Chapter 2 is all about choosing a product. We’ll identify ways to identify which products will perform best for you.
Chapter 3 is going to talk about the traffic method, namely the YouTube videos and how to use them effectively.
Chapter 4 is where we’ll establish your battle plan and figure out how to implement what you’ve learned.

So, if you’re ready let’s dive into choosing an affiliate market place.

Why YouTube?

There are two key questions to ask before you choose an affiliate network or market place. What’s your niche? Are you targeting would-be internet marketers? Survival enthusiasts? Golfers? People trying to lose weight?

The next question is whether you’re trying to sell physical products or information products also called digital products. For some niches, like survival enthusiasts, you could do both. For example, an info product might be a video course or eBook on small game hunting while a physical product might be a fire starter kit or survival rations. On the other hand, some niches will primarily be one or the other. For example, the internet marketing niche will primarily just be info products while the pet reptile niche will mostly just be physical supplies. If you’re in a niche where you can do both, pick the one you want to start with first and just focus on that.
If you’re selling physical products, you’ll be looking for online physical product stores with affiliate programs. You’ll want to pick the ones with the best combination of high commission rate and popularity. For example, you might come across an online store offering a whopping 30% commission rate, but they might be lesser known and therefore you’re less likely to make sales. On the other hand, a big store like Amazon, for example, might offer a low commission rate like 5-10%, but due to its popularity, you’re more likely to make sales.

For info products you’ll want to join one of the major digital marketplaces like ClickBank. Really all you’re looking at here is ease of use and selection. Ease of use has to do with how easy it is to set up an account and start promoting products. Typically, they’re all pretty easy as far as account setup, but some market places like JVZoo require you to request approval for each product and wait to be approved by the vendor while others like ClickBank allow you to pick one and start promoting immediately. Regarding selection, your number one concern is whether they have a lot of products in your niche. If you’re looking for internet marketing products, JVZoo is pretty good, but ClickBank has a larger selection of both internet marketing and other niche products like weight loss, finance, carpentry, music training, and so on.