My most favorite thoughts from Seth Godin

Words cannot express how happy I was in finding this video. Seth Godin has influenced how I think and approach business and his words came at a time when the WOW Network was only a question in my mind.  Would it work, would people like it and can I really do this? Mr. Godin has given me permission to do business my way and know that it will work. This particular piece is very important because he speaks about tribes and what it can mean to us in life and business. If you have ever wanted to know how you can influence your bottom line just take a look at this video and see that it’s more than your bottom line that needs to be influenced.

Learn the lesson and move foward. Tell me what you think. ~De

Tweet This Post

Monday Mind Test
How ready are you for the week? Test yourself below…

Tweet This Post

As an affiliate marketer one of the biggest parts of your job is finding good ideas for products to write about on your blogs, websites, and HubPages etc. Sometimes we kind of get what I call affiliate marketing writers block where we can’t come up with good product ideas for affiliate marketing. Well, there are actually NO excuses for not being able to find good niche ideas! In this hub I’ve put together a list of the best websites for finding good affiliate marketing products. As I use all of them for my online marketing I’m not going to put them into any sort of order. As an affiliate marketer it’ll be up to you to go through my list and see how you can leverage these sites to making money online. Please stay with me as the list is kind of long. If you find this hub useful or if you find I’ve left out any important websites please let me know in the comments section and thumbs up below!

Yahoo! Shopping
Yahoo! Shopping is one of my favorite sites for finding good ideas for affiliate marketing niches. Actually, in my opinion Yahoo! is doing a much better job than Google on this webpage. Here’s how to use this wonderful tool to find niche ideas. Scroll down to the middle of the page to Shopping Categories. Click on anything – Sports & Outdoors for example. Now on the right side of your monitor you’ll find Top-Ranked Products. This is your source for ideas. You’ll see you can click on sub-categories such as cycling, skateboarding and golf equipment. Click on any category and start browsing the products. This list will provide you with TONS of niche marketing product ideas. Pick a product and start writing your review and see how it goes!

Amazon Bestsellers List
Amazon Bestsellers is the grand-daddy of tools for finding niche marketing ideas. At the top of the page you’ll four amazingly helpful links: New Hot Releases, Most Gifted, Most Wished For and Movers & Shakers. Scroll down and you’ll find all of Amazon’s product categories. Click on any of them. For example, click on Watches at the bottom. You’ll find a huge list of popular watches within the watch category. Scan down these product lists and you’ll be sure to find a terrific affiliate marketing niche.

Shopping.com Top Searches
Shopping.com provides a wonderful tool for finding keyword niche ideas for affiliate marketing on its Top Searches page. Here you’ll find all of Shopping.com’s categories. Click on any of them and you’ll find the list of 100 most-searched keywords for each category. This list list is updated every two weeks so it’s always updated. Browse around and you’ll be sure to find a good affiliate marketing niche idea.

MySimon Top Searches
MySimon, a comparative shopping website, offers a great page for finding affiliate marketing niches on its Top Searches page. Click on any category and start browsing down the list of keyword niche ideas. This tool is very similar to Shoppng.com’s top searches page and is equally useful for finding niche marketing ideas.

eBay Pulse
eBay Pulse is an extremely useful tool for finding niche marketing ideas. Next to category on the left of your monitor you’ll find a drop-down menu. Click on that and choose a category. After that you’ll see a list of products. If you’d like to dig deeper into eBay’s categories just click on the drop-down menu and pick a sub-category. You’ll find even more niche ideas. Please note that a lot of affiliate marketers are already all over eBay Pulse as a tool for finding niche marketing ideas. So, for best results you might want to find ideas deep within the sub-categories.

eBay Want It Now
eBay Want It Now is an extremely powerful tool that you can use for finding affiliate marketing niche ideas. eBay’s Want It Now site is a place where buyers can come and key in specific items that they’re looking to buy online. At the same time sellers can come in and announce that they have a product meeting the buyer’s demand. You can enter broad keywords into the search box or browse by category. Personally, I prefer to browse by category. You’ll be sure to get lots of affiliate marketing ideas here.

Google Product Search
Google Product Search is another Google tool which can offer ideas for niche marketing. Check in on this page every day and sometimes you can find ideas here. It’s a very quick check as there’s nothing to click on. Just visit the page and you’ll see a list of items that were recently searched on Google Shopping. These are basically popular highly searched keywords. If you can write a good review around one of these keywords you’re sure to get lots of hits.

Google Trends
Goolge Trends is a list of the top most popular searched keywords on Google. It is updated every day. While this is a wonderful list of words that you can use just to see what’s going on in the world it can also serve as a good list for article and niche product review ideas. Check in every day and scan down the list. From time to time you’ll see names of products on the list. If you see one start researching and write your product review immediately.

Technorati Popular Tags
While Technorati Popular Tags is not necessarily geared towards online shopping it offers an excellent overview of the most popular searched keyword items on the Internet. Technorati categorizes and provides updated lists of the top blogs and Internet searches. At the bottom of the page you’ll find top videos, top movies, top tags and Today in Pictures. Often in the bottom-left of your screen you’ll see a product tag which can offer an idea for affiliate marketing.

Yahoo! Buzz
Yahoo! Buzz is Yahoo’s in-house social bookmarking page. As far as social bookmarking and getting my links to come up in Google and Yahoo! search engine queries I’ve had mixed results. While Yahoo! Buzz isn’t the greatest for finding products for affiliate marketing it can serve as wonderful tool to inspire ideas for article writing. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see a list of most popular searches. If you can write an informative and entertaining article on any of these keywords it will get lots of hits.

To your online marketing financial success!
I hope this list has helped you to find some good ideas for finding good affiliate marketing niche product ideas. With this list you have no more excuses to say I don’t know what to write about! Now go to it and go out there and make some money!

Original post by Dwei888

Tweet This Post

It’s Friday and time to wind down from a busy week. I generally like to have a fun or inspirational post on Friday since it is so important to stop to reflect and have a good laugh from time to time. Today, I’m combining work & fun with a great post I found. This appealed to me because I simply love music – especially dance music.  Anything that will get your heart pumping while allowing you the freedom to dance! (It has always bothered me that I was just too young for ’Disco’ in its prime) Anyway, I found this post purely by accident while checking out different videos of my favorite artists. As a lover of marketing and the art of the sale, I was especially intigued how this model has worked over and over again  for various entertainers and how with just a bit of out of the box thinking these same techniques can work for you. Check them out and see if you agree. Post your thoughts ~ De

** If you don’t know who Lady Gaga is, you are probably living under a rock… her rise to fame can only be paralleled to her use of wacky, outrageous costumes used on stage which leaves me ’speechless’…

Here are my top 10 ways to market yourself successfully like Lady Gaga:

(1) Use a weird stage name. People will remember your name because you are unique. Otherwise, make it easy for others to remember.

(2) Have an inspiration. Lady Gaga is heavily inspired by David Bowie, Freddy Mercury (Queen), Madonna and Michael Jackson. Do you have an Internet idol you can follow and emulate?

(3) Learn to JV with top marketers and leverage on their brand and credibility. You may have to do ‘more’ work on your part because your partner is already established, but it will launch you to success quickly.

Gaga has opened for acts such as New Kids On The Block and The Pussycat Dolls. That’s good ‘JV’ if you asked me…

(4) Do something crazy and outrageous in your business. Gaga worn a costume made out of an entire collection of Kermit the Frogs! (ooh… the poor Kermits murdered for fashion) People will remember who you are!

(5) You must constantly promote your products! Gaga promoted herself like crazy working in all kinds of projects and world tours. And she’s only 23. If you wanna make it big in Internet marketing, let others know who you are!

(6) Succeed by appealing to the crowds! You have to give the market what they want. Lady Gaga’s songs appeals to the dance and pop market – even though she is outrageous, she sings songs that people love to listen to. So should you.

(7) Make your products easy to slip into. If your products are NOT user friendly and requires rocket science knowledge, then you are not relating to your target market in a language they can understand.

Just take a look at Lady Gaga’s songs. She ain’t singing opera and most of her lyrics are so easy to sing and get into (imagine singing songs that goes ‘doo doo doo doop, just dance…’, ‘p-p-p-p-p-p-poker face…’ or ‘eh eh, nothing else I can say’ Don’t you think it’s easy for people to get into her music singing a lot of doo doo or eh eh?

(8) Be true to yourself! This one needs no explanation as most artistes are kings and
queens of expressing who they are – being authentic and letting people feel you. Do
your subscribers FEEL you?

(9) Use your creativity to BEAT the competition! Gaga has been compared to Madonna and Gwen Stefani. But that doesn’t stop her from making big bucks in her industry with others like her around…. In your Internet marketing business, do you out maneuver your competitors with your wit or are you drowning with them?

(A picture of a Malaysian dish called ‘Rojak’ – Means fusion, mixture or anything…)

(10) This is the MOST IMPORTANT point of all! Gaga is the queen of Fusionizing her music!

She combines her glam rock influence with techno/pop music to create a powerful fusion of outrageous, yet mainstream and listenable songs that ANYONE can get into!

You have to learn to combine HOT niche markets together and you will arrive at the
best product with maximum exposure and NO competition! 

Original post: Khai on 8 Jan 2010 (Check out his posts. He’s awesome)

Tweet This Post

Posted on youtube.com

Tweet This Post

Here’s a quickie! I’ve been looking at a bunch of people who are doing a great job publishing their email marketing campaigns out to the web with a hosted version of the email, then using the subject line as their content for Twitter and Facebook.

For the most part your subject line is a great thing to publish, but here is something to think about when you do this. Think about all of the people who see your Tweet but don’t know who you are, what it’s about and don’t want to click on your link.

I’ve seen some of the following Tweets come through recently:

• March Newsletter
• Check Out Our Sale
• Best Buys for March
• Let’s See Your Collection

These are all fine subject lines for an email campaign, especially if your email From Label is recognizable to the list you’re mailing and they are expecting your message.

However it’s a bit different when you put your message out to Twitter and Facebook. There are people that might not be a customer, or be on your list. Heck, they may not know who you are. It’s a perfect opportunity to introduce yourself! You might try this on for those that don’t know you:

• March News from the Hingley Foundation to Cure Ailments
• Check Out Our Jewelry Sale
• Best buys on dog food for March
• Let’s see your collection of antique cocktail shakers

So your subject line is a great START, but make sure when you use your email marketing subject line in your social media campaigns you include your company name or the message you’re trying to get across.

Posted by Janine Popick on Vertical Response

Tweet This Post

No matter what you are selling, the first thing you need to do before anything else is “figure out the consumer” of your products and/or services.

This is your target market and the more detailed your profile of your potential customers, the better chance you have of developing a marketing campaign that they’re going to see and pay attention to.

So before you do anything else marketing-wise, you need to learn about your target market, their likes, their dislikes, what makes them tick, what they think of this and that, how to reach them… you need to know as much as possible about them so you can shape your marketing message to be as appealing to them as possible.

It all starts with market research. You can hire someone to do it for you or you can do it yourself. This Guide to Do-It-Yourself Market Research will get you started.

Defining Your Target Market

• How To Find And Sell To Your Target Market explains how to use market segmentation to zero in on the folks who are most likely to buy from you.
• Writing the Market Analysis provides a research guide for working up a customer profile.
• Writing the Marketing Plan – A step by step guide to develop a successful marketing plan, either as part of a business plan, or as a stand alone.

Posted By Susan Ward, About.com Guide to Small Business: Canada

Tweet This Post

By now, we clearly see the impact of social media on business performance. In this video, check out direct results of social media marketing on some well-known brands.

Posted on youtube.com

Tweet This Post

In an attempt to give you 5 new ways to build your email marketing list each month, here are new ideas you can put to work for your business.

1. Use Facebook – Each week send an email through Facebook to your Facebook fans and  friends asking them to join your list. Direct them to the website address where you have your opt-in form hosted and entice them to sign up by giving them a discount or special offer. If you have a Facebook Fan page you can put an opt-in form right on the page! After they opt-in to your list, direct them to a coupon page with a code or offer a print out, or send them a separate email-only discount as a follow up email.

2. Use Twitter – Each week Tweet to your list that you’ll give something of value to those that join your list. Use abit.ly link to send them to your hosted opt-in form and track it.

3. Use What You’ve Got – Export your list of personal friends and business colleagues who know you from your Outlook, Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo! accounts. Then send everyone an email from you personally asking them to join your list. Link off to a hosted version of an opt-in form so you can track them separately. Don’t forget to include the value they’ll be getting from you, like discounts, coupons or information that is exclusive to them. And since you know them, chances are they’ll join pretty quickly.

4. Use GroupOn – If you’re a in retail or in a local service business give a Groupon discount. GroupOn is a new and quickly growing service that gets your offer in front of tons of people. The way it works is that you give your discount ONLY if a certain number of people take you up on it in a given amount of time. Then make sure you ask for their email address in exchange for their discount. Best part? You give Groupon a percentage of the revenue, so it’s nothing out of your pocket up front. We like them because they use the power of email marketing to get the word out.

5. Use foursquare – Give a discount each time a customer buys something from you and shows you they mentioned your business on foursquare on their phone. This means that they’re  telling everyone in their network that they’ve just visited you or talked about you. Give a BIG discount to your “mayor” each month and ask them for their email addresses. More on foursquare.

Do you have any experiences with any of these?

Posted by Vertical Response on March 02, 2010

Tweet This Post