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Have You Seen FreeIQ?

I'm still learning the ins and outs of FreeIQ but I think there's tremendous potential for marketing there.  By all means go see what you can find on your own (there's a ton of information on their pages) but here's what I learned from just a brief overview of it.

This is a place people can go to find free information about nearly any subject.  There are audios, videos, pdf files, you name it--they have it.  This free information is offered by people who would also like to promote themselves so some of the free material might not have as much value as we would like but some definitely will. 

When we find something/someone we like and who looks like someone we might want to business with, we can go to their very own page on FreeIQ and see what else they have available that we might want to purchase.  Some people won't even have merchandise to purchase--instead they may be looking for coaching clients or business clients. 

There are a couple of things I really like about this.  First of all, I get a chance to "interview" people before I decide if I want to purchase their product.  So often, in order to see a sample of someone's writing, audio ability, video expertise, etc., we have to sign up to be on their mailing lists.  Sometimes I want to hear from them regularly, other times I just want to see a little more about them.  On FreeIQ I can see something about them without the sign-up.  Secondly, I can not only see their FreeIQ page, I can get a link from there to their website if they have one. 

I see this as one more way we can learn more about people we may want to do business with, a great way to obtain no-cost information, and, even more importantly for those of us who would like to earn a little money through Internet marketing, a way to provide another avenue for people to find our products and services.

They have done a great job of making everything easy to do--great help menu, intuitivel design pages, audio tutorials, the works.  I'm still learning about them.  I'll be building my own page so I have more expertise to share with my clients.  As I learn more, I'll be sure to share it with you.

Sometimes it's Not the Content

I finally bit the bullet and decided to learn what the heck Digg and del.icio.us were all about.  I know, I know, everyone knows that--but I didn't, so I went in search of answers.  I got some and it's pretty interesting.  While searching for answers, though, I came across a guest post on Guy Kawasaki's blog, How To Change the World.  No, this isn't all that interesting except for one huge thing.  Guy wrote a post about how easy it is to make millions of dollars on the web, No Plan, No Capital, No Model...No Problem.   The guest post, On the Other Hand: The Flip Side of Entrepreneurship by Glenn Kelman, talks about how hard it is to make millions of dollars on the web. 

So what?  When Guy Kawasaki wrote his post about making money, he told us what he believes to be true.  When Glenn said whatever he said to Guy in disagreement with the post, Guy either offered to take something Glenn had already written or perhaps asked Glenn to write something original to address that.  Hang on--the point really is coming. 

Here it is:  Guy got more visitors to his blog as a result of that guest posting--the one that totally disagreed with what Guy wrote--than he probably got from his original post.  I'm one of those people.  I went there because, while researching Digg, I found a list of posts that had big Digg numbers.  Hundreds of people have voted for that post.

My point?  Guy Kawasaki is someone who is confident enough in himself that he can allow someone to not only disagree with him but to publish that disagreement on his blog.  I always say it's important not to feel threatened by people who disagree with us but I've never really been faced with anything like this and now I have a real-life example of how this can be done--graciously and with a great unexpected results.  Good going Guy!

More on Article Marketer

I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago about signing up for Article Marketer.  Since then I've been using it for two of my clients (there will be three of them any second, now) and I've learned a few things that might help you compose your articles before submitting them that will keep you from being as frustrated as I was at first.

1. If you have Word 2007, don't compose there!!!!  Any specially formatted text (like those pretty quotation marks, or when 1/2 turns into the cute, little thing you see in real, printed books) won't change to ASCII text no matter what you do to them. (I'll probably do a quick blog post on how I sort of got around that but not today.)  Compose in Notepad.  Then you can copy and paste it into Word to see if it finds any misspelled words or possible grammar problems and you can fix those and then copy and paste it back into Notepad where you save it.
2. You can only have 300 characters in your Bio (Resource Box).  This isn't much so make it count!  If you can have them link to a page that packs a punch, that's far better than just linking to your home page (unless your home pages packs a real punch).
3. You get a few more characters in the box where you can put html text for an alternate Bio.  They use that for sites that accept html.  Copy and save this Bio because, unlike the text one, it doesn't get saved from one article submission to the next.
4. I haven't actually counted the number of characters allowed for keywords or the summary but it isn't as many as some sites allow.  Be sure to keep them short and to the point.  In both, make your more important points (or your most important keywords) the first part and if it cuts off any, you can just clean up the end of it and go on rather than having to re-write the whole thing.
5. Go back and check out your account shortly after posting an article there.  If there are any problems, they will actually tell you what they are so you can go in and fix them rather than just deleting the article as some sites do.  I'm very good at formatting articles for submission since I've been doing it for so long and it was very frustrating for me to see three or four things I needed to change before it could be accepted.
6. Do not send people to anyone's web site.  On the same general subject, do not suggest people go buy a book (a "call to action").  It's annoying not to be able to recommend someone else's stuff but I understand why they instituted that rule--many people were top-loading their articles with self-promotion.  This prevents that.  You can always direct them to a specific blog post where you discuss the subject of the article, complete with links to how to purchase or what to read or whatever else you want and put that in your Resource Box (Bio).  Of course you would definitely want to make a very prominent link for how to get to your main sales page or whatever but this is a way to get around that rule.
7. This one is pretty petty but here it is:  You can't use Title Case in the body of your article.  I actually sent in a trouble ticket over this one because one of my clients used section headings.  They really need to be capitalized the same way as the title but I had to find a way to rewrite it so those were no longer section headings and had standard, text capitalization.
8. OH!  This one probably should have been the very first one!  When you get ready to sign up for Article Marketer and you want to pay them for it, be sure to have at least one article ready to submit because that's the easiest way to do it.  Just click on the "Submit an Article" link and put everything in.  Then, at the very end, it will ask if you want to sign up for lifetime, two year, or quarterly (I recommend two years unless you know for sure you're going to be doing this for a very long time).  There is a free option but I don't think you get nearly as much exposure with that option.

Even with all the little rules we have to deal with, I still think Article Marketer is the very best way to submit articles!  I can submit one article to hundreds of sites in the time it would take me to submit to just one (possibly two when I have to go back and make a few changes).  That saves my clients a ton of money and it saves me a ton of time.  Even if you're doing your own article submissions, your time is worth so much more than $8.30 a month to get this kind of coverage.  Go get 'em!

The eBook Coach

I know many of you are in businesses other than information marketing but for those of you who want to have a book to help promote your business or to BE your business, here's the woman you need to know:  Ellen Violette, The eBook Coach. 

I've been taking Ellen's eBook Profit Marketing Secrets Hom-Study Course.  Actually, I opted to take a private coaching with Ellen as we go through the course.  When I talked to her about which would be best, she said it depended on my personality.  Many people have great discipline and can go through each of the segments in a week or two and others just aren't good at that kind of thing and need help getting through it.  I know how I am--I can be disciplined when I need to be but that generally translates to when I need to get something to a client.  I knew which method was going to be best for me--Ellen and I work together every week or two so I can have someone I need to "report" to.  If I haven't read/listened to my materials before we talk, why in the world am I going to be there?  I won't know what she's talking about and I would have wasted that time. 

Oh, she does all kinds of other programs, too.  There's pretty much something for everyone.  If you click on that link up above it will take you to the sign-up for her no-charge hour-long teleclass.  She gives a ton of great information in that call, alone.  Even if you don't want to write an ebook, I recommend it. 

It's because of Ellen that I'm writing not one, but two ebooks.  I have no idea what will become of them but I know that I can make either (or both) of them into a viable business as soon as I get make the time to get busy.  I would have thought it would take months and months but Ellen showed me how I can do this in less time than I ever would have thought possible.

I know you'll enjoy her information and her energy!

Until next time...

Using Your Shopping Cart

I've been listening to the tapes from Christina Hills about how to use 1ShoppingCart.  I have to tell you, this is the best training I've ever seen for this product (this is the same as Marketers Choice, 1 Automation Wiz, Kick Start Cart, and a few other names).  She gives clear and concise instruction for a program that is very complex and not at all easy to learn without her assistance. 

Yes, this is a blatant sales letter but if you've been reading my blog for any length of time at all, you know I never recommend anything I haven't used myself and would never suggest you buy anything that wasn't worth well over the cost.  This is definitely the case with Christina's Shopping Cart Secrets.

The best thing I did, though, was to join her membership club.  She has special calls just for us and lots of free content that no one else gets.  She even has information on how to start your own membership club.  It's not as tough as it looks!

Until next time...

More on Article Marketing

I promised you more information on marketing your articles to bring you more success in your business and here's the guy who can help you understand how that works.  Jeff Herring, The Article Guy, is pretty darned good at what he does!  I've been attending his teleclasses for ages and I continue to learn more and more from him.

He has free teleclasses as well as paid ones and I highly recommend his free calls (in addition to the paid material).  You know how some free calls are pretty much a sales platform to get you to buy a very expensive program?  Jeff always lets you know he has other programs but his free calls are jam-packed full of information that you can take away and use right this very minute.  I love that about him!  He'll also tell you about how his popularity skyrocketed when he started submitting articles--oh, did I mention his column was syndicated in newspapers that went into over a million homes?  He got more exposure from submitting articles to article submission sites than he did having a successfully syndicated column for years!  Go figure.

I think you'll like Jeff.  I sure do.

Until next time....

Article Marketing on Steroids!

I found the most fabulous article submission site!  For a little bit of nothing they will submit your articles to a ton of sites, saving you time and money.

You need to check it out for yourself.  It's called Article Marketer and it's really very easy to set up.  If you have any problems at all, they have an excellent customer service staff who responds to email very quickly.

I know, people are going to tell you that it's much better to submit articles one at a time so you can customize them.  They'll tell you all about split testing and ad tracking and all of that.  They'll even say you should be careful not to submit too many articles (goodness only knows why anyone would say that unless they were your competition).  Here's what I say to that. 

• Yes, you can customize your articles and the information for the various fields when you do one at a time and if there are particular sites you want your articles on that are not on the Article Marketer site, by all means, submit them individually.  In the meantime, if just a few of the articles you submit through Article Marketer make it to someone else's newsletter or website, you could pay for a lifetime membership with Article Marketer with just one sale, client/customer. 
• Sure, it's nice to know which article submission site brought in the best response and, again, by all means, feel free to continue to submit them individually to the sites you most want to know about, but I'm more interested in rankings and sales than I am about fine-tuning which article submission site is better than another.
• As for the being careful not to submit too many articles, I've heard this from two of my clients, now.  Someone is out there telling people that if you submit too many articles you "devalue" your articles.  Good grief!  I guess I'd like to know who's saying it and why they say it because from everyone I've heard talking about this (Armand Morin, Jeff Herring, Ellen Violette, Alex Mandossian, Ali Brown) they all say the more articles you can get submitted (a) the more you increase you expert status and (b) the more your site popularity and sales increase.

You can do whatever you like, but this is a sweet little service that costs less than $5 a month (at the current sale price) and I'm here to tell you that as a VA, I can't get one article submitted to one site for that price.

Go forth and submit articles like crazy!

Hmmm, it occurs to me that I may not even have discussed the importance of articles to your business.  OK, I'll cover that one in the very near future--within the next week, in fact.

Until next time....

Business Expansion!!!

Great news!  I have a business partner.  Actually, Staci and I have been working together for months but we've been so busy there hasn't been time to even tell you about it. 

To celebrate a new partner, we have decided to change the name of the business (after all, Virtual Cynthia really doesn't work for two people) so we had that discussion this morning and we've decided to become Virtual Internet Professionals.  We'll be the VIPs working with our VIP clients. 

As time goes by you'll learn more about Staci and the fabulous knowledge she has to share (I'm actually going to encourage her to have her own blog) but for now, just know that she can run rings around me in the tech world and she's pretty amazing in the administrative world as well.

Look for more posts to follow--I attended a conference a couple of weeks ago and as I assimilate the info, I'll be sharing it with you!  I learned some fabulous things and I know you'll want to take advantage of how they can help your business soar to the top.

Until next time....

Promote Your Business by Writing Articles

I've been doing my readers a disservice by not sharing one of my favorite marketing resources--Jeff Herring, The Article Guy.  Jeff offers a few different teleclasses and programs I can't possibly say enough about.  OK, it's pretty impossible for me to stop talking about something when I really like it and these classes and programs are the very best!

Jeff has only been submitting articles and using them as a springboard for marketing for a year and he is amazingly successful at it.   You might want to start with the Express-Start Article Writing & Article Marketing TeleBlast but if you really want to get the very most from your experience with Jeff, I recommend the Article Empire Mentor Program.  I've been hearing some of the wonderful things happening for folks participating in that program.  I'm lined up to take it just as soon as I finish my ebook publishing program (I'll be telling you more about that later but in the meantime, check out Ellen Violette's site because she's totally awesome--tell her I sent you if the two of you have a chance to chat.)  I can hardly wait!  Not only does he have great information to share, he's just generally a very nice guy.  Isn't it lovely when someone who can help you improve your business is also a very nice guy?  I love it!

Until next time...      

More Marketing Stuff

Why don't I read Suzanne Falter-Barnes' blog more often?  No idea!  What I know is that every time I go there I find something I really like, like this post about sales pages.

Are you planning to write a sales page?  I'm not going to be doing that today but I know I will be doing it very soon and I wasn't happy about the typical pages that everyone seems to use.  Do they use that style because it works or because that's what everyone else uses?  Can I get the same (or better) response from using something different?  I suspect we'll see because I'm going to do something that doesn't include a lot of red and all caps.

I'll let you know how it works out.  In the meantime, be sure to drop by Suzanne's site on a regular basis and see what she's up to.