The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (26 page)

for good English and a clear message, it wil be posted quickly—typical y the next day.

More good news: It’s possible for your press release to be picked up by Google and

other major search engines in a matter of hours. That’s because Google is voracious for

fresh information so it has a pipeline right to the press release services. I’ve had press

releases issued at midnight and by 5:00 AM Google, Yahoo!, and other major players

already had my information built into their search results.

In this new world your information can stick around longer, too. Because there is no

space constraint, Google and the other services wil continue to index or show your

information for months or even years.

Before you get too excited let me give you a couple of pointers. First, your press

release must have a clear, crisp theme. Remember our discussion about how Google

determines the theme of web pages and ranks them accordingly? The same is true with

press releases. If you issue one about dog grooming it wil be so vague that Google wil

bury it under a heap of other items related to dog grooming.

Your best approach is to use that crisp key phrase like Schnauzer grooming advice

—or whatever your keyword search told you was popular and searched for. In just the

same way that you constructed a page or an article around the key phrase, you now

construct a press release. You can literal y be found for that term overnight.

If you would like my current recommendations for press release services then go to

www.sixfiguresecondincome.com and type “press release” into the search box.

eBay

I suspect if you asked your friends, “What is eBay?″you would hear, “It’s an auction site.”

Though that’s true, eBay is in reality a search engine for people who have their credit

cards in their hands and are ready to buy.

For instance, a great deal of eBay transactions occur not through auction, but at a

fixed price. eBay also al ows the sale of info products. Because eBay is such a vast

marketplace, you’l find plenty of garbage products along with the good ones, but that

should not concern you. Instead you should focus on having eBay list your product for the

specific terms you want to be known for. They make that easy—you simply tel eBay what

you want to be listed under and pay a few extra pennies for that service.

There’s another entire hidden use for eBay that few people take advantage of—the

classified section. You can pay around $10 and have a whole ebay page up for 30 days.

The best part is you’re al owed to include a phone number and also capture names of

people who are interested in your materials. That’s powerful because you can capture

not only buyers’ names, but just tire-kickers or leads. For around 10 bucks eBay wil give

you visibility for a month—that’s a great deal.

Here’s another powerful technique that few people have a clue about. If you create a

Featured Listing in eBay′s auction system, Google wil pick up that listing right in the

Google main results—the left zone we talked about earlier. This is good stuff. Remember

how I said that section is reserved for people who earn those organic listings through

their reputation and page quality? Wel , in this case, you get to piggyback on eBay′s

monster reputation so, when you pay eBay around $20, you get high visibility under both

ebay and Google for that specific term.

Again, don’t expect to rank highly for a real y general term because the competition is

not only fierce, but you’l only get wishy-washy leads partial y interested in your product.

Go for highly specific terms and you can own them, one by one.

“What good is my Featured Listing visibility on Google after that particular

Question:

auction expires on eBay?″

If you take ful advantage of your auction listing, you’l fil out the About Me

section in the upper-right corner. That al ows you to show people a smal

video that, when clicked, can take them to your web site. It’s beyond the

Answer:

scope of this book to list the programming necessary, but it’s an

inexpensive task to get a programmer to do it for you once, and you can

then use it over and over.

Inexpensive and Great Offline Strategies for Getting Found

I’m a big fan of al the excel ent online strategies we’ve just covered, but I don’t want to

fal into the trap I told you about before—the trap of saying that the traditional stuff is

dead and only the new techniques work.

It’s for that reason that you should consider a number of offline techniques to generate

leads. We already discussed how e-book reports can be fine but sometimes you’re

better off with printed reports that hang around and get read more. It can be the same

with other offline techniques in the sense that they’re tangible.

Local Newspapers

These can be solid sources of leads because they’re always looking for content. You

won’t be paid anything when you contribute a story and you might not realize much fame

other than the most local variety. Stil , you’re likely to find a wil ing editor and audience for

your message.

One added bonus: Many local newspapers have online versions where your story can

live long after it runs in the daily paper. Be sure to mention your target key phrases in the

article or interview. That way, when the piece is in the online version of the newspaper,

there’s a good chance it wil get picked up by Google, which, as you now know, likes

anything news-related.

Question:

“If local papers are good, wouldn’t big-city papers be better?”

You can get plenty of exposure in big-city papers, but they’l charge you an

arm and a leg for it. They give great deals to huge car dealerships that run

Answer:

ads every day, but they real y nail the little guy in the price department. I

wouldn’t bother.

Free-Standing Inserts

When you get to the point where you have a few hundred dol ars this is a splendid way to

get your message across in local papers. You’ve no doubt been the recipient of free-

standing inserts, or FSIs. They are single sheets of notebook-size paper inserted into

the middle of newspapers. Because it seems that nobody’s caught on to this marketing

channel, the price is real y low. You can have the newspaper print both sides of a ful

sheet of notebook paper and they’l deliver it inside the newspaper for typical y less than

the cost of a two-inch-high ad in the paper. The difference is you have far more visibility.

Commuter Newspapers

If you live in a larger metropolitan area, you’ve seen these newspapers specifical y

targeted at commuters. What a great captive audience! They’re tired of working and are

on a train or bus with not much to do. They’l spend more time looking at your ad than if

they were home.

These papers are often free for readers and reasonably priced for advertisers. The

downside is you have a very general audience so your offer might work best if it’s

applicable to the road-warrior, cubicle-dwel er type of reader. One source for many of

these publications is www.echo-media.com.

Local Clubs and Events

If you use the meetup.com service I mentioned earlier, you may find local clubs or events

relevant to your product. These outfits often have mailers, bul etin boards, and online or

printed newsletters. Try these methods of getting the word out on your product,

especial y the news that you have a free special report. Then you can gather members’

contact information and market to them over time.

Direct Mail

People cal direct mail junk mail, but it’s only junk if the message is general and hyped.

Direct mail can be a fabulous lead generator when it’s a simple postcard to a targeted

audience with an offer of a free special report. Many national groups or associations—or

even those local clubs—are eager to rent their mailing lists at pennies per name for

relevant offers.

Warning: Direct Mail DOES Work. Don’t Listen to Naysayers

Who Wrote Lousy Ads and Now Blame Direct Mail for the Lack of

Response.

No doubt Uncle Moe once tried direct mail and it didn’t work. The truth is that he

probably tried a lousy offer of Buy me! Buy me! once, and of course that didn’t work.

With direct mail and most other advertising methods you need patience to give before

you get, and then try different offers. Once you have an ad and offer that works in the

Google AdWords world, you’l have some good market intel igence to try over in the

direct-mail world.

Question:

“What’s a good response rate if I do a mailing?”

Elsewhere you’l read plenty of conflicting answers to that question. Some

Answer:
people wil say a 2 to 3 percent response rate to a mailing is solid, and you

should get at least 1 percent.

That’s baloney. The only true answer is our old friend,
return on investment.
If I have a

tenth-of-one-percent response rate but my advertising costs are low and my profit

margin is high, I could have an excel ent ROI. On the other hand, people wil brag about

their 5 or 10 percent response rate without realizing—or admitting—that their costs were

so high compared to their revenues that they actual y lost money on that effort.

ROI is the financial compass that wil keep you pointed toward profits and away from

trouble.

We’ve come a long way so far—we’ve covered lots of myths and built a solid foundation

of principles for your info business. We’ve created a product, cultivated an online

presence, and attracted leads. Now it’s time to say and do the right things that wil

persuade those leads to pay you and thus become customers.

How to Turn Prospects into Buyers

Have you noticed how sometimes the most profound things are the simplest to state?

When it comes to getting people to buy your info product—or any other product or

service under the sun—there’s a plain, profound truth: Your task is nothing more than

attention and persuasion.

That’s it. You cannot hope to persuade them before you have their attention, but

attention is not enough. They may hang on your every word, but if you do not then

persuade them to buy, it’s al been for nothing.

Fortunately for us, most businesspeople have no clue how to get attention

constructively and persuade profitably. They blunder around and make our job easier

because it’s not hard to outdo them.

As we did at the beginning of this book, let’s look at the major mistakes marketers

make. We’l then go through a clear, step-by-step process for sel ing just about anything

under the sun.