FTC Internet Marketing Regulations Shake Things Up a Bit…

Hey everyone. Today’s post is a bit of a downer in some ways. Some might consider it a good thing though. Basically, the FTC just issued some new rules that are going to have a HUGE impact on the way we do Internet marketing. It doesn’t just affect fake blogs either. It also has a huge impact on anyone who uses testimonials.

To be honest, there are a bunch of unscrupulous marketers out there who need to get a kick in the pants, and these rules provide just that. On the other hand, there are other marketers who have integrity, and these new regulations are certainly going to make things a bit more difficult for them as well.

Anyway, without further ado, instead of typing my own post outlining what is going on, I’ll just forward you to Frank Kern’s blog where he did a pretty decent job of summarizing what the FTC has cooked up for Internet marketers. Check it out. FTC Declares Shenanigans On All Kinds Of Stuff!

Why Begin List Building and How Do I Start?

When people are new to Internet marketing, they often get started in the wrong direction. Sometimes, it’s the promises made of untold wealth and freedom that catches them and they wind up in a dead-end program where only the founders make any real cash. Or, they get caught up in the hours of clicking it takes to advertise on traffic exchanges which for the most part, aren’t very effective. But it’s hard to break away from the excitement and from what you’ve been told. So, if you’re one of those Internet marketing people, it’s time you realized the most important part of any Internet marketing business. If you want to succeed, build an email opt-in list.

Building a list is the most important job any Internet marketing person has. Without a list, you’re just another random person out there trying to sell something. People are sure you’re out to cheat them, and it’s hard to sell anything at all. People don’t know you, and if they can’t trust you, you won’t make much money.

You can’t ignore list building, and it should have been your first priority when you moved into the Internet marketing world. But many of us put it off and don’t give it the attention we should. We are short sighted and want immediate profits by selling, when all along an email address is a commodity more valuable than one sale, because with it you can make multiple sales to the same person.

Now that you realize the importance of having a list, the first step after deciding your niche is to buy a domain name. It should be a name that’s easy to remember and that fits your niche. For example, if you’re selling natural perfumes, your domain should have “natural perfumes” in the domain title if possible.

Then, you need a web hosting account. If you’re serious about your Internet marketing business, it’s going to grow and you’re going to need to add more than one domain to your account. So, get an account that has mySQL database availability. That will be important when it’s time to start a blog or add an affiliate program. Look into the future when choosing your hosting account, and also look for reliability. You need your website to be up 99.9% of the time.

Your next step is to get an autoresponder service. The main concern here is deliverability. Will your email arrive at its destination? With spam filters in effect today, if you don’t have a great autoresponder, your email marketing efforts won’t be very effective.

After all of this is in place, you’ll need to build your first squeeze page. But don’t worry. It’s nothing more than a few bullet points, which provide the benefits of your offer, and and opt-in form, which you get from your autoresponder service. Images of yourself or of something you’re giving away in exchange for getting people’s names and email addresses work well, too. When you’re done with this step, you upload the squeeze page, and you’re ready to build your list.

Significant Internet marketing success rests on the size and responsiveness of your list. You need to gather a group of people who know and trust you, and who are grateful for the knowledge you can give them about your niche. When they get a recommendation from you, they’re more likely to follow it. If you follow through with the steps above, you’ll have your list growing in no time. All you have to do is concentrate on sending some traffic to your page. Then, get ready for your Internet marketing to start growing by leaps and bounds.

Your Favorite Guru is a Liar…Yeah, That One

A lot of the big name Internet marketers out there produce high quality products that do a good job of teaching people how to make money online. The big question is: at what price? I’ve had the unfortunate experience of buying certain products from big name marketers and seeing the sort of tactics that they promote.

One product by an Australian marketer states that you need to give products you review on your affiliate sites a high rating. Hmmm…what if the product sucks? I guess that doesn’t matter. Admittedly, the product is good. But stuff like that still rubs me the wrong way.

Another product, and this one rhymes with Commission Blueprint, teaches people to create a story around a character for a more persuasive sales tactic. These character based stories have become very popular in the past few years, taking the form of fake testimonials and fake blogs.

These fake blogs are very common in the health niche, especially in the weight loss market. A storyline is created around what is often a female who lost a considerable amount of weight using a weight loss product, like one of the Acai weight loss products, or the Rachael Ray Diet.

The problem is that oftentimes a man wrote the blog, and the picture of the women who allegedly lost 40 or so pounds was bought from a photo site. So basically, some guy searched the Internet for a before and after picture of a lady who lost weight, then the guy makes a blog posing as that lady and telling everyone a completely made up weight loss story designed only to sell an affiliate product without any regard for whether the product really works or not. There is one picture featuring a German model that is especially popular, being that at least 80 different fake blogs have used. Of course, the woman in the picture has a different name depending on which blog she is on. Scandalous behavior in my book. The marketer just plays on the vulnerability and the desperation of people to get fatter pockets.

The FTC has kept up with things as best as it can, and it is cracking down on these fake blogs. There are new rules that have really shaken up the affiliate industry. People now have to *gasp* actually be honest when promoting products. Wow, picture that. You can see an overview of some of the laws the FTC enforces here. Pay close attention to the section on testimonials and endorsements.

Anyway, there are certainly plenty of ethical marketers out there. I just wish there were more. The marketers that are less than ethical should be warned that the government is cracking down, and the chickens might just be coming home to roost sooner than they like if they don’t straighten up their acts.

Discover Four List Marketing Advantages that Demolish Any Excuse for Not List Building Today

With list marketing, you can do things that just aren’t possible if you aren’t engaged in list building and marketing. Your Internet business success will be greatly enhanced if you focus on list marketing and make it a central part of your business. Read on for four key advantages that make a list centered business model superior to other business models on the Internet.

One key advantage of list marketing is that you can offer the same product to people multiple times to increase your conversion percentage. If you only have a simple web page up, once the visitor leaves, you have lost the sale. The truth is that most buyers don’t buy on the first exposure, but rather usually the sale doesn’t occur until someone is exposed to a product at least 3 or 4 times at a minimum, often more times than that. That is the benefit of an email list. You have control over how much exposure a subscriber gets to the product you are promoting.

Second, instant web site traffic is one of the most powerful aspects of list marketing. The fastest way to send traffic to a page is to send an email to your list. If you have a list with thousands of people, you can literally get thousands of people to visit the web page of your choice in a matter of a few hours. And the best part is it’s free. So if there is a promotion that is ending in a few minutes, or in an hour, there is no better way to send traffic than through your email list.

Third, you can also pre-sell or warm up your list and increase the chances of conversion. If you have a product of yours or an affiliate product that you want to promote, you can send a series of messages introducing the appeal of what you want to offer without overtly selling. You also can build anticipation for it. When the product is finally released, it will be much easier to convince subscribers to buy it, because they are already anticipating it. This is very easy to do through list marketing.

And fourth, no more leaving money on the table – maximize the amount of money you can make. Traffic is expensive, so once you have it, make the most of it. To get people to your web page, you either exert time and effort or money. Wouldn’t it make sense to only have to try to work once to get a customer for life? That is what building a list does. Once you get email addresses, you don’t have write articles or use pay per click or other traffic techniques for customers anymore, because you now have them in your funnel. Save yourself the effort and get the customers’ email address on their first visit, then you don’t have to use any traffic techniques for that customer.

10 Quick Ways to Build a List

Growing a list of 1000s of responsive subscribers
by Fabian Tan

The importance of list building is talked about all the time. But just HOW do you build a list of responsive subscribers on a daily basis?

I’ve created a 10-point cheat sheet that you can use to grow a list of 1000s of subscribers, mostly on autopilot.

Here are the 10 steps:

1. High Leverage Article Marketing

With article marketing, I’m not just talking about the usual step of submitting articles to article directories. That still works very well. What I’m referring to is submitting your articles to popular authority sites in your market. For example, if you’re in the Internet marketing niche, popular sites like Entrepreneur, About, Associate Programs and even popular blogs like Site Fling are possible places to submit articles.

Submitting your articles at these places means you’ll have less competition and receive more traffic without having to compete with thousands of other articles.

2. List Builders

List builders typically work like this: you sign up for the exchange, and you’re allowed to promote to thousands of other members with an email promotion, but in exchange, you agree to receive emails from other members as well. Examples of such networks include List Joe, The List Auction, Viral URL and the new Viral Ads Unleashed system. I have personally used List Joe and The List Auction to add hundreds of new subscribers to my account every month just by sending out an email every 3 days. It is definitely worth a go.

3. Forum Marketing

We’ve got the old workhorse of forum marketing here. The problem with many people when it comes to forums is they don’t have a system. You’ll want to create a list of authority forums in your market, and then submit to them religiously almost every day. If you have a list of 5 forums, and you submit 5 posts to each of them every day, you’ll get a steady flow of new sign-ups each day. And this is just ONE of your traffic streams that you’ll be using to build your list.

4. Giveaways

Giveaways are another proven method of building your list. The idea is that dozens of list builders promote the same giveaway event so everyone grows their lists. The drawback to this is that you may be “giving” away your subscribers to dozens of other lists. Well, these days, you don’t even have to promote the giveaway if you don’t want to. Yes, you don’t have to! Many events provide the option of upgrading so you will receive additional points that will boost the position of your gift.

5. Ad Swaps

One of my biggest list builders is ad swaps. The idea is amazingly simple – find other list builders in your market, and propose to them that you will send an ad for their squeeze page to your list, if they will do the same for your squeeze page. This is a startlingly quick way to grow your list. I have personally added tens of thousands of new subscribers to my list from this method alone. It seems this method is picking up steam with other marketers as well.

In my opinion, this is like giveaway list building on steroids. But, unlike in giveaway events where the person who runs the giveaway is really the big winner, in an ad swap, 2 parties can be the big winners.

6. Blog Marketing

A blog is labor intensive but at the same time it can drive a flood of targeted visitors to your primary business. The great thing about a blog is that there are many ways you can leverage it for traffic – you can use it to tag and ping, it is easy to social bookmark, RSS is easily integrated and it is great for search engine optimization. Through my blog (which I have not been paying as much attention as I should), I have added hundreds of new subscribers.

7. Video Marketing

Video marketing is a highly scalable strategy for getting traffic. The hard part is getting the video created. Once that is done, promotion can be easy using automated tools like Tube Mogul and Hey Spread. These tools (or websites) submit your videos automatically to more than a dozen of the most popular video sharing websites online. Imagine if you create a short 3 to 5 minute video every week and submit it to more than a dozen of video sharing sites weekly. That should be enough to give you fresh inflows of subscribers.

8. Craigslist

The popularity of Craigslist.org has been growing immensely in the past year or so. In fact, in 2008, Craigslist’s popularity grew by 87%. This is probably because more people are going online to either search for bargains or to look for jobs or business opportunities. This means that Craigslist has never been a more fertile ground for marketers to tap into. I have not been taking advantage of it as much as I would like, but it is certainly something to put on your to-do list.

9. Ad Brite

Ad Brite is a banner ad exchange website where publishers and advertisers work out ad deals. I have personally advertised my sites on dozens of sites in the network and have reaped hundreds of fresh leads. The competition is also far less than it is on AdWords.

Here is a tip: Direct response, all-text banner ads seem to get the highest click-through rates.

10. Get Response Power Leads

If you’re looking to buy leads, then look no further than Get Response Power Leads. I have spent hundreds of dollars with them and have gotten a lot back in return. My list grows by the dozen daily and these people are highly responsive. Because the system is backed by one of the top autoresponder companies online, you can be sure of the quality of the leads, because they are real. I highly recommend checking them out.

There you go, my 10-point cheat sheet to growing a list of hot subscribers in ANY market. Apart from the List Builders tactic (which is more suitable for the home business niche), all the other tactics can be used for any niche.

All that’s left is to TAKE ACTION!

Fabian Tan is an Internet Marketing expert and author of the popular 59-page report: “Murder Your Job: How To Build Cash Sucking Autopilot Businesses In 30 Days Or Less!” Head over to http://www.MurderYourJob.com to get your FREE copy now.

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