Affiliate Marketing Business Blog

Yesterday I posed the question, “What Is A Real Business?” A real business is made up of two basic elements and these two elements should be the main focus of every business owner. If you find yourself working on other things, you need to shift your focus.

So what are the two elements? They are Traffic and Conversion. Any business activity, whether the business is online or bricks and mortar, can be summed up in these two elements.

Traffic:
This is perhaps the most important element in building your business. Lots of people think that if you have a good product, the customers will come running. But most of the time, that isn’t the case. Here’s an example why. Lets say, there are two men who own hotdog cart businesses and they want to sell hotdogs around the superbowl stadium. The first one has all the best hot dog toppings one could imagine, and he gets a spot a few blocks over from the main entrance to the stadium. The second man just has the basic toppings but he gets a prime spot located right in front of the superbowl stadium. Which one is going to make more money that day? Of course the guy with the basic toppings but a prime location. This is the reason why McDonalds is so successful. McDonalds focuses on prime traffic locations. That should be your focus too. It isn’t uncommon for a savy internet business owner to start building traffic before they finish or even start the website.

Conversion:
The second most important aspect to running a business is conversion. Once you have the traffic, you’ve need to get them to buy. You might be asking, “Don’t you need to worry about your product before thinking about conversion?”

My answer: No. Athough both are elements of conversion, good marketing is more important than a good product. The product is important in the sense that you want happy customers who buy and keep buying from you. But no one will even understand the value of your product without good marketing. It’s up to you to let them know that you’ve got something of great value and why it’s of greater value than the amount of money you’re asking for it.

Now, pretty much any aspect to business will fall under one of these two categories. Your job as a business builder is to find the most effective ways for you to achieve these two things. Sometimes that depends of the market but often when you’re starting out, much of it depends on you.

A Real Business’s success depends on how well you can focus on traffic and conversion.

I could go on, but I’d like to hear from you. What are the most important activities you find that fall under one these two categories?
Or would you like to share what your thoughts about traffic and conversion, feel free to leave your comments below.

Matthew Glanfield

You may not know this but it was just a few short years ago that I launched my internet business. It all started with a little niche website that I setup with no intention to make money. I simply put it up as a resource for myself and others in that niche. Soon I noticed lots of people were coming to my site. I figured I might be able to make a little money from Adsense. So I put some Adsense ads on the site and made a some money but nothing to write home about.

After a short while I purchased a small ebook from a guy named Joel Comm about improving your Adsense revenue. I figured I might be able to make a bit more money so I bought it. I followed Joel’s book to the ‘T’ and then something totally unexpected happened. My revenue didn’t just improve, it exploded! Joel and I later became friends and I’ve had several occasions to work with him and several other big name ‘gurus’ out there. But it was that little website and Joel’s ebook that launched the successful business I run today.

So what can you learn from this story?

* First, Stop trying to make money and start providing something of value to people. If you do, the money will follow.

* Second, that your education is key to making money. When you need to move your business forward, find someone who can teach you what you need to do to take it to the next level.

If you follow these rules, I have no doubt that you’re going to do well this year!

If you have any other suggestions for those struggling to start their business or just want to comment, please scroll down and leave your comments below. I’d love to hear what you think.

Matthew Glanfield

You can’t make money online if you don’t have traffic. In fact, you can’t make money anywhere without traffic.

Today I want to talk to you about a great free resource to help explode your Online Traffic and Marketing. It’s called TubeMogul and if you use it, it will help you start driving major traffic to your website. What does TubeMogul do? It allows you to upload your videos once and have TubeMogul send them out to a ton of different Video and other Web 2.0 sites. And Google loves Web 2.0 sites and ranks them high and fast. You can often capture multiple pages on the front page of google for your keywords in a relatively small amount of time. Your videos can start appearing at the top of Google within hours for major keywords. And it’s FREE!

This is not just a time saver, but it helps you get something done that probably wouldn’t get done otherwise. It’s just too much work to upload all of your videos to all of those websites manually. It also does analytics for the videos you upload through TubeMogul. They have paid memberships but also A Free Membership so you can get started at Zero Cost!

Now you may have already heard of a similar service called Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser does everything TubeMogul does and more. It will send more videos to more sites, do more analytics, helps you create videos without a camera, and just more of everything.

So which one is better? Well, TubeMogul is a little like ‘Traffic Geyser light’. Doesn’t do quite as much and only lets you send out 100 videos a month before you have to upgrade and become a paying subscriber. Which is fine if you are just starting out and your budget is tight. It will definitely suffice for those new to Video Marketing. However, TubeMogul’s paid subscriptions cost way more than Traffic Geyser. So if you’re willing to pay a little more for awesome analytics, more traffic, ease of use, and more videos on more sites, Traffic Geyser is a way better value than going with TubeMogul.

So here’s my verdict:

If your budgets hovers somewhere around $0, a free TubeMogul account is a great place to start driving massive traffic using video and Web 2.0.

If you know that you’re going to make money if you can just get your offer in front of people, I recommend going with the one most real marketers use, Traffic Geyser.

But either way you cut it, you need traffic and these are two of the greatest Web 2.0 Video Tools out there for Marketers.

Whichever you choose, just go and do it and help make 2010 Your Year!

Matthew Glanfield

(I’m going to share an important traffic tip in this blog post. I’m not selling anything - I promise. You can get more free traffic tips and tricks here: http://www.bbotrafficseries.com)

I get a lot of emails asking for the best sources for free traffic.

The only problem with this question is that there is really no such thing as free traffic.

Sure, there is traffic you don’t pay money for, but every source of good-quality traffic will either cost you TIME or MONEY.

And since we all know that Time = Money, good-quality traffic really costs you MONEY or MONEY.

Think of it this way: If you spend 10 hours on a “free” traffic generation method, and you value your time at only $10 per hour
(it should be worth far more than that), then you have just “spent” $100.

You could have been building your business by many other methods, such as developing products, building relationships with JVs,
hiring, outsourcing, tracking and testing your opt-in pages and sales pages, but instead you were driving traffic.

Is there anything wrong with this? No, of course not, especially if you are working on a low budget.

However, eventually you are going to want to outsource any “free” methods so you can focus on more important aspects of your business.

For example, right now in my hobby-niche business I have two employees who focus on traffic. One creates awesome videos and
posts them to YouTube (and soon to other sites as well). The other posts on forums, finds links, and will soon be managing affiliates and banner advertising.

That frees my time up for product creation, website optimization, and business development (actually, I have an employee doing the product creation as well, so I have more free time sometimes than I want!).

There is a fine balance between saving money by doing things yourself and growing your business as fast as you can by outsourcing, without going bankrupt.

The general rule I use when hiring is this - if the new employee makes me no extra profits, can I still afford to pay him? If the
answer is yes, then I hire. If the answer is no, then I wait a little longer.

This rule might not work for you - you might instead have a lot of money that you are putting into your business. If that is the case, then hire sooner than later so you can grow your business faster.

Trust me, you will eventually grow tired of managing Adwords campaigns, creating videos, writing articles, and posting on forums.

You are the business owner, and as such you need to manage more than you already are, growing at a pace that works for you and your budget.

So what is your next step? Sign up for more free traffic tips (not just about free traffic, but the tips are free) here:

http://www.bbotrafficseries.com

Work on what you can, outsource the rest. Eventually you shouldn’t be doing any of the traffic generation in your business, although it might not be until you’ve been in business for 3 or 4 years that that happens completely.

Have fun!

Matthew Glanfield

Do you ever wish that you could look at a successful online business and find out what they do to generate traffic?

Well, that is what this article is all about.

After looking through my Google Analytics I decided that I wanted to share my top traffic sources for 2008-2009 (well, March 2009).

Ready?

Traffic Source #1 - Affiliates and JV Partners

I decided to lump these together, although really the JV Partners is the larger aspect of this.

The BBO Institute has paid out over $112,000 in commissions. That is a hefty advertising cost, but one that I would love to increase (how often can you say that).

JV Partners were the glue that held my Internet Marketing business together in 2008, and will play a fundamental part in this year as well.

If you aren’t spending a good portion of your time developing relationships with potential (and actual) JV partners and affiliates, then you are losing out big time.

Traffic Source #2 - Google and Yahoo

In my non-Internet Marketing business (i.e. the one where I don’t teach Internet Marketing), the search engines bring in a LOT of traffic.

Google brings in 11 times more than Yahoo, but Yahoo is still there plugging along and helping build my business.

If you are running an info-marketing business (i.e. you sell e-books) it is a lot harder to do search engine optimization, mainly because you need a lot of content on your website for it to work.

If you run an ecommerce store (i.e. you sell physical products online) then SEO is definitely an avenue you are going to want to explore.

Traffic Source #3 - YouTube

Video marketing is awesome. It has allowed us to engage our customers, build fanatic loyalty, and sell a lot of products.

We have mainly focused on YouTube, growing our subscriber base to almost 10,000 viewers.

We are now expanding to many of the other video sharing sites, which will hopefully help us to substantially increase our traffic.

Traffic Source #4 - Word of Mouth

We get a surprising amount of word of mouth advertising. I define word of mouth advertising to be when people post about your website on forums or on their websites without you asking them to.

I have found that the more unique high quality content that I post (either as videos, articles, or pictures) the more word of mouth traffic we get.

Future Traffic Sources

In the next few months we are going to be working with other traffic methods even more, including:

-Google Adwords
-Banner Advertising
-more Affiliate Marketing (in our e-commerce business)

I’ll probably post a report later this year to let you know how these have gone (not that I haven’t done them before, just not extensively in the other business).

Matthew Glanfield

Ok, you know how much I love video marketing.

Well, I’ve finally decided to get off my lazy butt and start making real videos. You know, the kind where I actually appear in the video rather than constantly hiding behind Camtasia…

Now, I can’t promise you any star performances, as you will definitely see in this video:

Oh, and if you want to get the software that I am talking about in the video, go to www.SubmitVideosFast.com.

Enjoy!

Matthew Glanfield

P.S. Part way through when I switch to screen capture (yes, I hide again…) the volume gets quieter. I’m not sure why that happened, but hopefully I’ll have it figured out in the next video.

Sorry…

P.P.S. One of my employees makes a “guest” appearance in this video. See if you can find him/her…

Last week I told you about a man that I met that has discovered a simple way to make over $3,000 per month selling on eBay.

Well, now he is going to show you EXACTLY how he does it.

Watch this video to find out more: (more…)

Google Adwords used to be really easy.

It was easy to get tons of traffic for pennies on the click. It used to be a gold mine for marketers.

Then Google came in with a big “slap” (as it was affectionately called) and stopped all of that.

However, it wasn’t a Google-is-so-big-it-can-do-whatever-it-wants sort of thing, it was more that Google was trying to make sure that the end consumer got the best experience when they clicked on an ad, so that they would click on more!

In fact, if you learn exactly what Google wants, you will be rewarded with inexpensive, HIGHLY-targeted traffic that makes you a lot of money.

In my video course Rapid Google Adwords Traffic Generation I outline how to use Google Adwords to bring in a lot of traffic and a lot of cash.

I want to give you one of the videos here for free, specifically the one that talks about the Google Slap.

If you like what you see, make sure you go over and buy the entire course (which isn’t that expensive) so that you can get even more traffic to your website.

Here is the video: (more…)

I have had the pleasure of helping many clients start their online businesses, especially in my personal coaching programs.

I love to see the talent that people have, especially when they don’t ever realize it.

For example, one of my clients, Kevin Johnson, came to me to get help to promote his site that sold an e-book on how to make money selling on eBay.

I looked at his squeeze page, and it wasn’t that great. Overall I wasn’t impressed with what he had to sell.

That’s when I had him tell me his story about his experiences with eBay.

And I have to tell you, I was completely floored!

This humble 46 year old telephone worker told me about a system that he uses to buy products at ultra-low prices and then resell them on eBay for up to 5-10 times as much as he paid for them!

He casually mentioned how he was only making about $3000 - $4000 per month, but that wasn’t quite what he was looking for.

I stopped him right there and insisted that he listen for a moment.

I said: “Kevin, do you realize how many of my clients would pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to learn your simple system of making money on eBay? Do you have any idea what that is worth?”

You see, his product at that time was simply “How to make money on eBay” and not about the exact method that he uses to make an extra $3,602.24 per month while working less than 10 hours per week.

The light bulb went on over his head, and he realized what he had to do.

Now here is the funny part. While he was busy making his new course I decided to try out what he had told me he was doing.

I spent about 30 minutes to do the first step (which I won’t reveal here), and it actually worked! I was able to get products for dirt cheap (actually I even got some for free).

I then turned around and listed them on eBay for way more than I paid for them (and yet still below market retail price).

I couldn’t believe how simple it was, and yet I had never thought to do it the way he does.

If you want to learn this exact method that he uses, you won’t have to pay thousands of dollars.

You won’t even have to pay $500…

Or $300…

To find out how much this very simple yet highly effective system will cost you, click here:

Kevin Johnson’s Secret Program

To your success!

Matthew Glanfield

P.S. I think the thing you’ll like best about Kevin is that he is not a “guru.” I don’t think he even realizes how valuable the information he has is, or he’d probably charge more.

Grab his program before he comes to his senses…

My promotional schedule just opened up, so I want to offer it to you!

Two weeks ago I did the same thing, and the price quickly went up to over $1,800. This time I have decided to start the bidding at $0.99 with NO RESERVE.

That basically means that no matter what the final bid is, I will complete the sale, whereas the first time I set it to a minimum of $500.

That means you could get your website reviewed, a video created showing off your site, and the video emailed to my list of 22,000+ (and growing fast).

Click here to place your bid…

Also, if you meet our criteria, this could even lead to a joint-venture.

The person who won the $1,800 got the video made, an email sent, and now we have a JV set up! We will be doing a teleseminar together where I will be emailing to promote at least three times because his site qualified!

Maybe the same could happen to you…

Let the bidding begin!

Click here to place your bid…

Matthew Glanfield

P.S. Remember, bidding starts at $0.99. If you only want to pay $5, then bid $5!