If you’re relying on Google’s search engine for getting traffic to your website, your entire income could be hanging by a thread. That’s the point that Chris Rempel makes on the intro page for his new Rapid List Profits Formula. While Google can be a GREAT way to get a stream of targeted, free traffic - sometimes for years - anyone RELYING on Google is also subject to the whims of the “Big G” itself. What this basically means is that at any time, and for seemingly any reason, your site’s ranking could drop and your entire income could dry up overnight. Not a pretty scenario. But what if there was a way to put your website traffic “on call” so that you had the ability to make sales any time you wanted to, regardless of Google’s hiccups?

This is where Chris’s Rapid List Profits Formula enters the picture. RLPF is a 41 page blueprint for building a responsive list of opt-in email subscribers from the ground up. The course covers quick, free methods for generating initial traffic to attract opt-ins, how to build an actual RELATIONSHIP with your list so that they actually look forward to getting your emails, how to continually sell to your list without looking like a “cheesy bastard” (Chris’s words, not mine), how to grow your list more quickly by cross-promoting with other marketers, how to come up with regular content, and more.

Two issues that Chris addresses in the report (and what makes the strategies he outlines effective in my opinion) are that many people new to internet marketing are put off by list building either because they think they need a list of hundreds of thousands of subscribers or expert ad-writing skills in order to make money from sending out emails. He points out that if you build the right RELATIONSHIP with your list, you can make a very nice income with a relatively small list size, and without being an expert writer. The reason for this is simply because if your list likes and trusts you, they’ll be more likely to open and read your emails and to have faith in products that you recommend to them.

The report itself was an easy read, and took me about 45 minutes to finish (though you’ll definitely be going back through it to take notes). If you’re familiar with any of Chris’ other materials like his Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate or his VIP reports, you know that his products are all very straightforward. No hype or filler, basically just pure content that you can immediately take and start using.

I would highly recommend Rapid List Profit Formula to anyone looking to build a long term list of responsive email subscribers the RIGHT way, so that both you and your subscribers benefit from your relationship, everybody makes money, and nobody is left feeling like a “cheesy bastard”. I think I may just have to steal that phrase.

Are you as effective in your business as you could be?

I mean, sure you get things done, and you’re always busy. But are you really focusing your energy every day on the things that are REALLY important? Is your business living up to it’s potential and the vision you had in mind when you began on your entrepreneurial journey? If not, then you may want to take advantage of a few lessons on personal and professional effectiveness from business management expert Peter Drucker.

In his classic book, The Effective Executive, Drucker explains the difference between being effective in business, and merely being efficient. He states that personal effectiveness boils down to the following 5 skills:

1. Managing your time

2. Choosing what to contribute

3. Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for maximum impact

4. Setting the right priorities

5. Effective decision making

Here’s a quick breakdown of each…

Managing Your Time - Don’t start by managing your tasks. Start managing your time instead, by finding out where your time actually goes (actually record where it goes, since memory is often unreliable). Once you know where your time is going, you can cut back on or delegate unproductive demands on your time. Finally, consolidate your “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units. This means arranging blocks of uninterrupted time (no checking e-mail, no phone calls, etc.) devoted strictly to working on the parts of your business that are vital to your big picture strategic goals.

Choosing What To Contribute - Ask “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the results of the institution I serve?” Focusing on contribution turns your attention away from your own specialty and towards the performance of the entire enterprise. This is key because in a business, it’s the organization itself, not the individual, that produces the largest results.

Making Strength Productive - Evaluate your own performance as well as those of your peers and determine which tasks appear best suited to which individuals based on their unique skills and abilities. As Drucker states, making strength productive “…is the unique purpose of organization…Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.”

Setting The Right Priorities - Make a habit of deciding which tasks deserve your priority attention, and which ones can wait or be delegated. As Drucker points out, the more challenging part of this skill isn’t so much deciding what to tackle, but making a decision about what tasks NOT to address at the moment, and sticking to the decision.

Effective Decision Making - Personal effectiveness comes down to making effective decisions, and effective decision making is achieved by concentrating on the most important strategic goals of the organization, and making your decisions based “on the highest level of conceptual understanding”.

Drucker then goes into the specifics of HOW to make your decisions more effective for your organization. If you want to know more, definitely get down to your nearest bookstore and grab a copy. This is stuff that I’m personally using in my own business and seeing great results with in terms of the amount and quality of work I get done in a day. Check it out and let me know what you think.

An ideavirus, that is…

One of the best books on the subject of marketing I’ve ever read is Seth Godin’s classic Unleashing The Ideavirus. If you’re not familiar with Seth, he’s the guy who Google (among many others) calls up when they need help with marketing ideas and thinking outside the box. Here’s a video of him doing a presentation at Google Headquarters about his book All Marketers Are Liars.

What Seth explains in Ideavirus is the concept that ideas can be spread in a manner similar to a virus, and that by learning and implementing a system to create and spread ideaviruses about your product or service, you can essentially turn ordinary people into your company’s best salespeople and get them to spread the word to others in an ever-increasing cycle, with little to no additional effort on your part.

If you’re thinking that might be a way to grow your list of customers, you’re right!

You can download the entire book for free here:

Unleashing The Ideavirus (Note: You must have Adobe Reader in order to view the book)

And feel free to let me know what you think of the book, and if you’ve discovered any ways to use ideaviruses in your own business.

Got publicity? Well, here’s an excellent post I found over on Quicksprout.com, where Neil Patel interviews Search Engine Optimization expert Chris Winfield, who’s been featured in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and my hometown paper, the New York Times, just to name a few. Chris shares 7 tips that anyone can use to gain publicity for their product, service, idea or cause by appearing in major media publications. You can read the full article here:

The Secrets of Public Relations Revealed

And as always, please share your thougts in the comments section. I’ll see you there!

As we all know, it’s much easier to make a sale to an existing customer than it is to acquire new customers. However, could you be missing out on sales simply by not letting your customers know the full range of services that you offer?

For example, let’s say you design websites for a living. Over the years, you’ve built up a loyal customer base of satisfied web design clients. However, little do your clients know that you also offer search engine optimization services…either because they were never made aware, or they simply forgot. What happens is that your clients end up consulting another company for their SEO needs, and you miss out on what would have been additional sales. Not only that, but having to search for and evaluate another SEO firm costs your clients time, which could have been avoided if they’d simply known you offered those services.

John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing has an excellent article where he discusses how to let your customers know your full range of products and services offered, so that you can increase your lifetime customer value while also making their lives easier. You can read the full article below:

How To Sell More To Existing Customers

Please post comments with your thoughts. Thanks!

Everyone wants to have their site rank well in Google.

And why not? Not only can Google send you a boatload of free traffic - it’s also highly targeted, and it’s one of the best ways to drive business.

The problem is, that exact same ideal is shared with thousands of your direct competitors. This creates an environment where you’ll always be fighting, kicking and scratching to maintain your traffic - along with the ever present fear that your livelihood is only one “algorithm update” away from vanishing.

And that’s if you can even get ranked for any decent keyword, to begin with…

In fact, only the largest, most-established authority sites can reliably see consistent traffic from Google. And even then, their rankings fluctuate constantly - several times a day, in some cases.

The fact is - it’s getting harder and harder for the “little guy” to get any kind of meaningful web presence on the web these days.

Getting ranked in Google is almost impossible unless you’ve got a major promotional budget and some time on your hands to “wait” for your domain to become trusted (Google favors older domains). And advertising with pay-per-click ads isn’t affordable like it once was.

Search marketing has finally become what everyone feared it would - a game reserved for big business.

But what if there was still a way to legtiimately rank for keywords with tons of traffic?

And what if you could do this without having to spend months and even years building up an authority site to do so?

In fact - what if you could systematically create one-page minisites that could rapidly rank in the top 3 spots (consistently) for basically any keyword you target within a matter of a week or so?

Is this for real?

YES.

But not with Google.

It’s happening right now, as we speak, on MSN.com

Now - before you think it - yes, I know, MSN doesn’t have nearly the reach that Google does. But, it still does receive millions and millions of search users daily. After all - MSN is the default home-page for anyone who first uses Internet Explorer.

And, to put it in perspective, which would drive more traffic?

Occupying the #1 ranking for your most desirable keyword target on MSN?

Or occupying the #47 spot on page 5 of Google’s results?

Sadly, it’s actually more effort to make it to the 47th spot in Google than it is to literally dominate in MSN.

How does this work?

Watch this video to find out:

Grab # Rankings In MSN

Like I said - forget about Google.

Focus on something that you can actually WIN with, and win big!

I was planning to do a post on marketing lessons that could be learned from the 2008 Obama/McCain race for the White House, but I stumbled across this post by Noel Capon, from Columbia Business School, who did a great job of breaking down how the candidates used (or didn’t use) their respective Unique Selling Proposition to win over voters. You can read the full article here. Marketing Lessons from the 2008 Presidential Election.

What are your thoughts? Did the candidates do an effective job of “selling” themselves? What could they have done better?

Would you like to expand your business by using my marketing services? If you’re an entrepreneur or have a website and you’d like to form profitable joint venture partnerships with other businesses, or if you would like to set up an e-mail marketing campaign and get more profits from your list of customers, or you’d like me to build quality backlinks to your site so that you can rank higher in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN…contact me today for a free consultation at admin @ regispromotion.com (obviously with no space before or after the @ sign).

This one isn’t strictly marketing related, but I just happen to love this clip of Tony Robbins giving a motivational speech at the TED talks. Notice where he high fives Al Gore a few minutes in. If watching this clip doesn’t motivate you to get off your butt and make things happen, I don’t know what will. Enjoy!

As you’re probably aware, two important factors that Google uses when “deciding” how high to place your site in search engines are the number of incoming links to your website and the quality of the sites that those links are coming from. On average, links from educational (.edu) sites can mean a definite boost in your Google rankings, since these sites are generally universities and other prestigious institutions (high quality in Google’s eyes). Here are some tips that you can use to get links to .edu sites quickly by leaving blog comments:

Note: You’ll need Mozilla Firefox in order to use the strategy I’m about to show you. You can download it for free at www.mozilla.com/firefox.

1. Identify “dofollow” .edu blogs in your target niche. By “dofollow” I mean blogs that allow visitors to leave comments with a “valid” (again, in Google’s eyes) backlink to the commenter’s website. You can do this by going to Google and typing in the following:

site:.edu *your target market*+blog

Of course, you’d type your actual target market in between the asterisks. For example, if your target market is advertising, you’d type *advertising*. If you can’t locate a blog for your specific target market, try searching for a more general term. So say, If you can’t find advertising, try marketing.

Now using this technique, you’ll come up with a list of blogs that you can comment on. Here is where two free Firefox add-on tools will come in very handy:

Search Status, which will allow you to identify which blogs use the dofollow attribute. If a blog doesn’t use the dofollow attribute, you’ll see a pink highlight around the comments section. If you see this pink highlight on a particular blog, you’ll know to simply skip that one, since commenting on it won’t give you the search engine boost you’re lookng for.

SEO for Firefox, which, among other things, will allow you to see the Google pagerank, Alexa rank and other qualities of the blogs that show up in Google searches. In general, you want to comment on blogs that have a higher Pagerank (3 and above), as a higher pagerank will mean that the blog has more authority in Google’s eyes, and a link from one of these sites will have more “juice”, so to speak. Install both of these tools as add-ons to your Firefox browser. Don’t worry, detailed instructions are on the sites - It should take less than a minute to install each.

2. Once you’ve identified blogs that you’d like to leave a comment on, your next task is to leave RELEVANT comments on the blog. Don’t just say “Hey, great post! Come check out my blog www.ispammedyou.com”. You want to leave a relevant comment that actually contributes some value to the topic at hand. The best way to do this is to take a minute or two to actually read the post and find out what the author’s talking about, then offer your thoughts on the subject.

Most blogs will have a comment form with a box were you can enter your website url, so all you have to do is enter your url in the box and you’ll have a backlink pointing to your website from a high ranking .edu site once the comment is published by the blog author.

Doing this on a couple of .edu blogs a day can be a powerful way to build quality backlinks to your website. As time goes on and you build more and more of these links, Google begins to see your site as an “authority” website - why else would you have so many important educational sites linking back to yours? Your reward for having so much “link juice” will be higher rankings in the search engines and thus, more traffic to your website. Give it a try!