Running An Efficient Internet Marketing System.

CLOCKS AND SHOES AND BROOMS MAKE MONEY.
Many people labor under the misconception that you have to be brilliant--or at least quite smart – to become wealthy. But you do not. The secret to financial success is not necessarily intelligence, but rather efficiency. Many extraordinarily brilliant people have been poor all their lives, while many people with only average intelligence have amassed great fortunes.

An example of the former is John Harrison (1693-1776), the clock maker. King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory in 1675 to solve the problem of keeping accurate time and finding longitude at sea. In 1714, the British Government offered £20,000 for a solution which could provide longitude to within half-a-degree (2 minutes of time). John Harrison, a working class carpenter, invented a very accurate clock that could be used at sea (no pendulum involved to be affected by the rocking of the boat) to solve this problem. The British Government, however, found excuse after excuse for not awarding him the prize. He was over 80 years old and near death when he finally received the money. Despite his brilliance, over 80 years of his life were lived in extreme poverty.

In contrast, Seth Thomas (1785-1865), a Connecticut manufacturer, who contributed nothing significant to the science of time-keeping, amassed a huge fortune efficiently manufacturing clocks designed by others.

Thus, the trick is not to build a better clock, but to sell clocks more efficiently than the next guy. The trick is not to build a better mouse trap, but to sell mouse traps efficiently.

Many fortunes have been made selling clocks as well as other ordinary, everyday items, such as shoes and brooms. Everybody wears shoes and every floor needs sweeping, at least occasionally. The more ordinary the item--the more it is used by more people--the more you can sell it.

Thus, to be successful in Internet Marketing, you need not create any brilliant new products or strategies; rather you simply need to efficiently employ the proven strategies to promote available products.

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WHAT IS EFFICIENCY AND HOW DO YOU GET IT?
It is the person who counts his or her pennies who accumulates wealth. Efficiency is, as much as anything else, paying attention. Efficiency is counting and measuring and knowing where your resources are coming from and where they are going.

Simply stated, the notion of efficiency has to do with comparing what you put into something with what you get out of it. Generally speaking, what you put into something is time, energy, and money. What you get back is often referred to as “production” or “return.” In Internet Marketing, the ultimate “return” you seek is profit from sales.

To create an efficient Internet Marketing System, you seek to increase your profits relative to the time and money that you invest. You do this by paying attention to each facet of your Internet Marketing system.

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CREATING A SYSTEM
You can’t even begin to think about efficiency until you start thinking of your Internet Marketing efforts as a system. Take a blank piece of paper and draw a box in the middle of it. On the left side, draw arrows pointing into the box. On the right side, draw arrows coming out of the box. Now, think of this box as your Internet Marketing System. The arrows going in represent time, energy, and money. The arrows coming out represent profits (in this case, money from commissions). The value of the profits coming out relative to the time, energy, and money going in gives you the ultimate measure of the efficiency of your system.

Do not be distressed, however, if you see that, time and energy aside, you have more money going in than you have coming out right now. This will be the case for many of you and here is why: There are two kinds of time that go into your system. Over one of the arrows going into the box in your drawing, write “My Time.” Over another of the arrows going into the box in your drawing, write “Passage of Time.” Not only do you have to put in your time and effort building a good system, but then you have to wait for the “passage of time” for your efforts to produce results. This “passage of time” is something that has to go into the system before it will work properly. This passage of time is necessary for your Website to be noticed, both by the search engines and others who may link to you, and is necessary for your other promotional efforts to accumulate into a “critical mass.” That is, it takes time to get enough ads and other promotional material “out there” floating around (on Websites and in people’s e-mail inboxes, for example) to begin to take effect.

As time passes, however, you hope to see the profits coming out of your system increase relative to the time, energy, and money that you put into the system. To ensure a constantly accelerating increase in return, you should be constantly improving the efficiency of your system.

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FINE TUNING YOUR SYSTEM
Grab another sheet of paper and draw a bigger box on it. This box, again, represents your Internet Marketing System, only this time we are going to write inside the box. You need to sketch out the components of your Internet Marketing System. While there are many different approaches to Internet Marketing, the most common type of system focuses on a Website--your Website. Draw a rectangle inside your system box to represent your Website.

On your Website, you will certainly have some product links. Draw some symbols inside your Website to represent these product links. Then, draw some right-pointing arrows from these links out of your Website and on out of your system to the right. Place a “$” at the point of these arrows. Selling products from your Website links is a successful event. It produces the ultimate return of commissions. This is a good thing. You like these arrows!

Not everyone who visits your Website will buy a product, however. The ratio of people who buy a product from your Website to the total number of people who visit your Website is a measure of the efficiency of your Website in selling products. If you have a poor ratio, you will want to improve the effectiveness of your Website to sell products.

Let’s back up a step. Draw another symbol in your system box (away from your Website) to represent your search engine ranking. Then draw an arrow from your search engine ranking to your Website. The higher your search engine ranking; the more people who will visit your Website. If you have a low search engine ranking, you will want to work to improve it.

Now draw yet another symbol inside your system box to represent one of your ad campaigns. Draw an arrow from this symbol to your Website. Then draw arrows connecting the arrows that represent time and money coming into your system box to this symbol. The amount of money flowing into this ad campaign compared to the number of visitors coming from it to your Website measures the efficiency of this ad campaign.

Notice, however, that no matter how efficient your ad campaign may be, if your Website is not efficient at converting these visitors into sales, your overall system is not efficient. Or, consider the reverse. Your Website may be very efficient in converting visitors to sales, but your ad campaign may not be sending enough visitors for the money you invest in it. It is important to analyze the inner workings of your system to know which parts need attention the most.

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GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR TRAFFIC.
Numerous studies have shown that it takes several “exposures” before a consumer will buy a product. Your system should be designed to deal with this reality. You are setting yourself up for disappointment if you believe you will sell enough products to first-time visitors to make a profit. This rarely happens. Thankfully, there are ways to overcome this problem.

Realizing that most of your first-time visitors will not buy from your site is the first step toward becoming a true Internet Entrepreneur. You have expended resources to get these visitors to your site. Those time, energy, and money arrows pointing into your system go, for the most part, to getting traffic to your site. An efficient system will make the most of this traffic. An efficient system will eliminate waste. It is downright wasteful to let these visitors leave your site--most likely never to return--without getting some sort of hook in them.

If these first-time visitors will not buy, perhaps they will join. Your site should have a newsletter signup and your site should be designed to entice your visitors to join your newsletter. The great advantage of having a newsletter is that you can continue to expose a visitor to your products through your newsletter content, which you can send out periodically. This way, you can achieve the number of exposures necessary to maximize sales of your products.

OVERVIEW
Your system should focus on having information (and selling specific products related to that information) on the “front-end” with the newsletter and affiliate program options (such as SFI) on the “back-end.” Then you should also have an “exit-fee” strategy. Remember that you attract visitors into your system with information. You also trigger their need for a product or service with information. You take advantage of their continued search for information when exiting your site. For this process to work, your system has to be streamlined with respect to the flow of this information.

Single-subject Websites work better than crowded hodge-podges of various banners and links. Thus, if you want to promote more than one thing at each level, you should consider using multiple Websites--or at least multiple entry points (pages) into your Website. You should have one entry point for nutritional products, another for Internet and phone services, and yet another for informational products. Each of these entry points should follow distinct paths designed in light of the information that attracted the visitor in the first place.

It is fine to let one Website (or entry point) be the “back-end” for another Website or entry point; but, if you do this, make sure that “flow” is preserved. Do not distract your visitor with a new type of product or service until they have had every opportunity to buy the primary product or services that corresponds to their entry point and the information that attracted them.

As with all things, direction and timing are crucial to efficiency. Do not lose sight of the directional flow of your system. Do not lose sight of the timing involved in product exposures.

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CONCLUSION
To be profitable, you should take a systematic approach to Internet Marketing. Being systematic means counting, measuring, and comparing what goes into your system; how it flows through your system; and the return that flows out of your system. It means, as much as anything, paying close attention to what you are doing and what is happening as a result of your efforts. If you are not getting the results you desire, identify the part of your system that is failing to perform to expectation and then fine tune it. Always be striving to fine tune your entire system to achieve greater efficiency. An efficient system is the key. Brilliance is not required. Luck is not required. Efficiency is required.

Things You Must Not Do - SPAM.

INTRODUCTION.
The first thing you want to know when starting any new endeavor—and the first thing you are usually told—is what NOT to do. You need to know what to avoid in order not to get in big trouble while learning the ropes of Internet Income. You can get into big trouble by using unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCC), commonly called "spam."

A subsequent lesson will address the formal definitions and rules of spam. For now, let's take a few minutes to just talk about spam. Unless you are very unusual, you will never memorize all the definitions and rules pertaining to spam (for there are many) and, thus, will never have a foolproof system of avoiding spam technically. If you gain a relatively simple understanding of it, however, you can safely avoid spam just by using your good common sense.


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WHAT IS SPAM?
There are many definitions of spam. For example, Netscape defines spam as the sending of more than five e-mails in bulk to persons you do not personally know. Most others define spam more strictly. The most general definition of "spam" is "the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail."
When you open your snail mailbox everyday and see numerous unsolicited commercial advertisements that have been delivered to you by the postal service, it makes you wonder why unsolicited electronic e-mail is outlawed. Like all laws and rules, however, we should look more to history than to logic to understand why they came to be. Although the Internet did not become popular with the public until the early 1990s, the Internet has been in existence for a long time. Prior to the early 1990s, the Internet was used primarily by the military and university scientists. These users were conducting what they justifiably felt was important business which could not be interrupted by any commercial correspondence. For most of the Internet's history, ALL commercial correspondence was completely banned. Only recently has commercial use of the Internet been allowed at all. Although this total restriction on commercial use was lifted, a restriction on unsolicited commercial e-mail remains—and for good reason.

E-mail is for communicating, not for advertising. Unsolicited commercial e-mail is annoying! Without restriction, it has the capacity to come in such large numbers as to render your e-mail completely useless and even to shut down your e-mail server altogether. This is due to the fact that, unlike snail mail, e-mail can be sent in tremendous bulk with very little effort and very little cost. Because it is so cheap and easy to send, we would all receive thousands of messages a day from each of thousands of sources were it not prohibited. Since many people break the no spam rules and send it out anyway, we all have had some taste of what it would be like if it were not prohibited. Spam understandably makes people mad. When they get mad, they report spammers to their ISPs or other organizations or to the government authorities. Bad consequences, such as losing Internet service or even facing civil and criminal penalties, result from spamming. Therefore, you want to make sure that you never spam!

The Internet covers the entire world. There are many different laws in many different jurisdictions pertaining to spam. Plus, losing your Internet service or having your domain blocked due to spam is a matter of contract that varies from provider to provider, each having its own specific rules about spam in its "Acceptable Use Policy." So, how can you possibly avoid spam when there are so many different rules and regulations? The answer is to use common sense. In a subsequent installment we will discuss the technical rules and contracts, but for now, let us just show you how to use your common sense to avoid spam.


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THE RULES OF THUMB.
Here are the Rules of Thumb you can use:
1. Never use e-mail for advertising with one, and only one, exception: when you have a clear "opt-in" event.
2. When advertising with e-mail in an "opt-in" situation, always supply a working "opt-out" mechanism.
3. Never annoy anyone with any kind of e-mail.
4. Never mislead anyone (in either the opt-in process or in the e-mail subject header).
Now we will discuss each rule of thumb in turn.


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RULE OF THUMB NO. 1—NEVER USE E-MAIL FOR ADVERTISING UNLESS YOU HAVE A CLEAR "OPT-IN" EVENT.
Again, e-mail is for communicating, not for advertising. The same is generally true of Newsgroups (Usenet), Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Web-based Discussion Boards. Your own site on the World Wide Web (or another's site - with permission) is the only Internet Resource where advertising is generally acceptable. Many marketers are resistant to this, but the sooner you accept this simple truth, the better off you will be. There are many effective ways to use Websites to market on the Internet. These techniques often involve using the one exception to the e-mail rule—the "opt-in" exception—as part of the process. But, the process begins with a Web page, whether that Web page is yours or another's with your ad on it.

The spam rules usually refer to UCC. If the e-mail has been "solicited," it generally is not considered spam. (Also, if the e-mail is not "commercial," it is generally not considered spam—more on this in later installments.)

How do you know whether e-mail has been "solicited"? While there are no hard and fast rules that everyone will agree on, your common sense will provide you with a working definition that should be relatively safe. E-mail is not spam if it has been requested or consented to or if permission has been granted to send it to a particular recipient. There are two kinds of consent: express and implied. Express consent is where someone communicates directly to you permission to send an e-mail. Examples of express consent are when someone types in their e-mail address on a form on your Web page requesting more information or sends you an e-mail in response to a classified ad. Implied consent occurs when someone performs some act from which permission can be inferred. An example of implied consent is when someone posts a URL on your FFA page or takes advantage of some other free resource you are offering. (Be careful here, though, the extent of implied consent is very limited.) Implied consent also arises in many instances where you have a pre-existing relationship with someone. Ultimately, the question of whether implied consent exists is a question of fact to be decided based on all of the circumstances of a particular situation. Your opinion as the one accused of spam is not the opinion that matters. The opinion that matters is the opinion of your ISP or local authorities who will decide whether you have spammed or not.

When someone fills out a form or accepts a free service, this is generally referred to as "opting in." That is, they have opted to accept an e-mail from you. When we use the term "opted," we are referring to the same concept as "consent" or "permission" discussed above. Another example of an opt-in is the opt-in e-mail lists. There are a few such e-mail lists on E-groups, Onelist, Topica, and other such free e-mail list services available on the Internet. If the list's creator allows, and the hosting service allows, ads may be acceptable on the list. The people who subscribe to the list are deemed to have "opt-in" to receive commercial e-mails sent through the list. (Note that the extent of this implied consent is only for e-mail sent through the list. If you send the list members e-mail directly, rather than through the list, you will be spamming.)
If you are accused of spamming, you will need to be able to clearly establish a documented opt-in event to justify the e-mail. The e-mail you sent must also be within the scope of the opt-in, or you will be guilty of spamming.

So, the bottom line is that e-mail is NOT a tool you can rely on to generate leads or new customers. Rather, e-mail is a tool that can only be used in conjunction with some other resource through which an opt-in can first be established. However tempting it is to buy a CD of over a million e-mail addresses and blast your ad out to them, do not do it. You will be spamming if you do.


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RULE OF THUMB NO. 2 - ALWAYS SUPPLY AN OPT-OUT MECHANISM.
Even when you have a clear opt-in event (which is the only situation where you should be sending commercial e-mail), you must include an opt-out mechanism in the e-mail. You must give the recipient the option of communicating with you that your e-mail is no longer welcome. The mechanism you use must work to get that communication to you in a timely manner and you must immediately obey the opt-out request. Opt-out mechanisms are generally of two types. One is a line in the e-mail that states that one can reply to the e-mail or send an e-mail to another stated address, putting "REMOVE" in the subject heading. The other common opt-out mechanism is to supply a URL in the e-mail, which if clicked on, will automatically remove someone from your mailing list. Either one is fine—as long as it works.

A belief commonly held among Internet users is that opt-out mechanisms are untrustworthy. It is often advised that the process is used by unscrupulous marketers to confirm that you have a working e-mail address, which they will use for further spamming rather than to remove you from the list. Therefore, any mistake or negligence with your opt-out mechanism will immediately put you under a cloud of suspicion. Make sure that you timely and carefully attend to your opt-out requests.

An opt-out request must be immediately honored. Despite what many ill-informed people believe and say, you should know that it only takes one "no" anywhere in the process to void all prior expressions of consent. There is no way to trap anyone into being forced to receive e-mail from you. Nothing they do prevents them from opting out at any later point.

One tricky situation for opt-outs is the opt-in mail list. You send your mail to the list and the list then forwards it to the other members on the list. Often you will be sent a request to remove from one of the other members, but you do not have the capacity to remove them from the list. In opt-in e-mail list situations, you should always include a statement in your e-mail advising the recipients that the e-mail is being sent through a particular e-mail list and that they must remove themselves from the list to opt-out of the e-mail. Give them the name of the list and the opt-out address.


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RULE OF THUMB NO. 3 - NEVER ANNOY ANYONE WITH ANY KIND OF E-MAIL.
With respect to the gray areas, it helps to remember that you will never get in trouble if no one ever accuses you of spamming. If you never annoy anyone, no one should ever be motivated to report you. If you treat others as you would have them treat you, you are not likely to annoy them. Because some people have thin skin, however, and will be annoyed where you would not be, using the Golden Rule is by no means foolproof. It helps to think in terms of what annoys the average person, but to be safe, you need to think in terms of what annoys the overly sensitive person as well.

It's a mystery to me why, but many aggressive marketers approach Internet marketing as a kind of war game. They want to kill your e-mail or your ad and strike you repeatedly with theirs. I don't know about you, but it sure as heck doesn't put me in the mood to join something or buy something when I have been defeated in an Internet war game of ads. E-mail autoresponders are the weapon of choice in these war games. For example, I place an ad on Yahoo! Classifieds. I receive an e-mail that says, "Responding to your ad." The content of the e-mail clearly reveals that the sender knows nothing of my ad and could care less. He only wants to put his ad in my face, using some ridiculous pretext that his reading of my ad (which he didn't do) demonstrates to him that I am a good candidate for his opportunity. Then, were I naive enough to respond to his e-mail and point out that I am not interested in his opportunity, I would immediately receive an autoresponse message with even more information about his opportunity. Also, in the process of responding, I would have gotten myself added to his e-mail list so that I would receive more info every week about this opportunity in which I have no interest. No matter how hard I search, I can find no way to actually opt-out from his list. Am I going to report him for spamming? You bet your bippy I am!

Another example of the war game is people who join the opt-in lists and then hook up an autoresponder to the account with which they joined the list. Even though every single one of these lists prohibits using autoresponders, they are quite commonly used anyway. When you send out e-mail to the list, you immediately get back autoresponses from hundreds of the members of the list. They will never read the list nor your e-mail, but they will stack the list with their ads and then, on top of that, will autorespond to yours sent from the list.

Such tactics are absurd, ridiculous, ineffective, annoying, and unlawful. People get away with them only because they are technically savvy enough to hide their identities and make it so time consuming to track them down that most victims will not take the time to do it. But these are the extreme examples. Let's look at some of the more subtle issues.

If you take care to always make sure that your e-mail is pleasant, you will not only be less likely to be accused of spamming, but you will more effectively develop relationships—which is the key to any successful marketing. You should take pains to be polite and sincere in all your e-mail correspondence. While you have to protect yourself from the war game spammers, you need to provide some way for people who read your e-mail to directly respond to you—where you will actually read their response. Only use e-mail auto responders in the most controlled of situations and use them with great care. In fact, there are really only two situations I know of where an autoresponder is appropriate. One is where someone fills out a form on your Web page and you need to confirm that the e-mail address they supplied is a valid e-mail address. The other is when you host FFA pages. Autoresponders should rarely, if ever, be triggered by an incoming e-mail in my opinion. The only exception would be form submissions. While automation is a goal for some tasks and is being made more and more possible by the Internet, communication should be personal, not automated.

Take pains never to annoy people with your Internet marketing, whether through automation, insincerity, rudeness, or as we discuss below, misleading tactics.


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RULE OF THUMB NO. 4 - NEVER MISLEAD ANYONE.
Being bothered by correspondence one did not ask for and does not want is something that annoys most everyone. Another thing that annoys the heck out of the average person is being misled. What most people want is good, solid, honest information about what they have expressed an interest in and no more.

People become annoyed when they are misled. If they request one type of information and get another, they feel used. This factor comes into play, among other places, in choosing a subject header for e-mail that you do choose to send. If the subject says "$50 deposited into your bank account tomorrow—no strings, no obligation," and then the body of the e-mail mentions nothing about a free $50, but proceeds to try to sell them something, they have been misled and will be understandably annoyed. I have read so-called marketing advice that recommends using subject headings that will get people to read your e-mail regardless of whether the subject has anything to do with your offer. Nothing could be worse advice! Such "bait and switch" tactics are dishonest, immoral, often illegal, and are guaranteed to annoy the dickens out of the recipient of your e-mail. Do not do it.

Another guaranteed way to annoy someone, spurring them to report you for spam, is to mislead them about the type of information they are requesting. If you have a Web page which collects e-mail addresses to send more info about an interesting subject, but you send entirely different correspondence from what they expected, you will certainly have trouble. Honesty is more than just morality, it is good business practice. You do not want to start any relationship with a client, customer, or affiliate by dishonest correspondence. As we will discuss later in this course, "trust" is the most important factor in any business relationship.

So, it is very important in both the opt-in event and the subject header of e-mail to be very honest and straight-forward about the information that will be in the body of the e-mail. To do otherwise, can only make people mad and get you in trouble.


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IN CONCLUSION.
A common response to the spam rules is to throw up one’s hands and say "It's too complicated and too risky, why bother with Internet marketing?" The answer to that question is that Internet marketing is a powerful, yet inexpensive tool, that can be used by people of few resources other than a will to succeed in obtaining financial success. To learn more, visit SFI FREE RESOURCES.