Dennis Edell commented on one of my posts to let me know he was curious about my linkbuilding strategies and I promised to write a post about it, so here it is.

Before I start sharing, there are a few things I really need to confess:

• First of all, I am a pretty lazy person and prefer to do as little work as possible.

• Second, I have a big sense of perfectionism in my personality, so I tend to overthink things.

• Third, I have a very short span of concentration, too many ideas I want to put to work and lose interest rather quickly.

Now, in order to become more successful in my online business, I completely realize that these three character flaws desperately need to be corrected and I have spent way too much time trying to find solutions for these flaws, reading all sorts of advice, even self help programs are no strangers to me.

Having cleared that up, I found that the only way to actually be able to set up a linkbuilding and promotion strategy is to go step-by-step… teeny tiny steps that is.

If I would go “big and huge”, spending hours and hours at a time along a set strategy of many many links a day, the task at hand would seem way too big and I’d probably don’t even start.

So, something that is really important to me is build on consistency, make things a daily habit and breaking patterns instead of shying away from big efforts, becoming overwhelmed and thinking that it won’t work in the first place and all other excuses I make to myself in order to avoid taking action.

So here is what I am doing at the moment:

I have made a list of all the websites that need promotion and highlighted different things I want to do for each of them, whether it be article marketing, directory submission, social book marking, commenting strategies etc.

I made a pretty little worksheet so I can hold myself accountable each day and put a timer on my desk so I can work in short spurts, making it easier for me to focus. After all, I tell myself that I only need, say 15 minutes of submitting to directories on one site, 15 minutes of social bookmarking on another and after completion I tick off on the list.

As you can see, it is really about taking baby steps at this point in time, crossing off every little task per site per day,

However, I have noticed that this seems to work for me at this point in time because of a few things:
1. Each task completed is one step in the right direction
2. I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore
3. I am noticing productivity level going up

I have set a list of minimum daily link building goals per site, very attainable goals which really only take around 2 hours to complete, again for building up daily consistency and try doing that first thing in the morning, breaking it down that would lead to about 50 new links per site per week, roughly, through directory submission, social bookmarking, commenting etc.

Apart from that I write a lot of articles daily, and submit part of them to article directories. 2-5 articles weekly per site, through article marketer, depending on whether a site is new or has been around for a longer time, which gives me another 50-100 links per article submitted.

Hope that gives you a basic idea of my linkbuilding strategies,

care to share yours?

Any comments are of course more than welcome

and *cough cough* needed!

Popularity: 2% [?]

The other day a friend of mine wrote a post about a certain “Internet Marketing Big Shot” who is apparently part of the 2% who make huge amounts of money with Internet marketing.

Now, nothing wrong with people making a lot of money, I firmly believe there is enough to go round for people who are willing to do what it takes to become successful and I can only applaud those who really do.

However, I do have a problem with people selling stuff that is not up to scratch, which got me to think about the following.

In order to be a success online nowadays, it seems more important than anything else that your sales techniques are up to scratch and that even worthless products can generate a huge income as long as you know how to sell “air” (or freezers to Eskimo’s).

A few months ago, when starting this blog, I made a serious decision to not buy any more ebooks since most all of them only ended up crowding my hard disk and gather dust. Besides, if you are willing to spend some time, all information found in ebooks is readily available for free, and I have come to the believe there really is no secret to internet marketing, although so many guru’s are trying their hardest to make you believe there is.

Going back to the product my friend wrote about, it kind of did sound interesting enough to have another closer look and in the end I did sign up through his affiliate link, because after all, in his post he said the product looked good so far.

It is actually a real product instead of another ebook and all I needed to pay was $11.99 postage to get the book delivered to my door, and with summer offering plenty of time reading books while sunbathing a bit, I decided to go ahead and order.

Now, here is where things get tricky.

First of all I made sure to directly cancel a monthly subscription for a magazine about Internet marketing. I will receive the first copy for free along with the manual, but knowing myself, I better cancel straight away otherwise I forget and end up paying a monthly subscription without realising it (sorry pal!).

I did expect to see another offer page after ordering the initial book, after all, it seems to have become common practice to offer a “deal you will never see again” once signing up for a free product. This marketing guru however went a step too far in my opinion.

First he offered me another product for what he said “the best deal online” but after declining and wanting to go to the member area in order to download something that came along with the initial paper manual, he showed me another sales page for the same product, this time with a huge discount.

Yeah right, I thought, let’s skip straight to the member area, so again I optioned out of this “exceptional one time offer”.

Much to my surprise however, I landed on another sales page for the same product that had already been offered twice, but this time the price had actually gone down at least 75%! And as I was told on the sales page, I really could not live without this product if I were serious about making money online. And who would not believe this Guru, after all, he was showing his houses and cars and huge affiliate cheques and I could be just like him.

It was late though and I just wanted to get to the member area, so again I opted out of this offer, bad luck on me, now I will never make millions, but hey, I am pretty happy with what I do so far!

Guess what… apparently I had reached bottom price on product number one, because now I was lead to a sales page for product number 2, a marketing course that would normally go for thousands of dollars and wow it must have been my lucky day because now I could get full and exclusive access for only $997!

And even though I am like any other affiliate marketer and have thousands of dollars of cash saved under my pillow, I decided to pass up on this absolutely extraordinary offer, because I was sure I would see at least another few sales pages again lowering the price.

“No thanks (fill in name of IM Guru), I just want to go to the member area and I realise I will never ever see this great offer” and all of a sudden I had made 300 bucks!!!

That is right, by not taking up the offer; price had gone down to $697!  Needless to say I was very annoyed at this point and thought that I would finally reach the member area by passing up again, but this time I was lead to a sales page saying that maybe I did not have enough money to pay at once, so a convenient payment plan was offered and I could make 3 easy instalments, (because after all, if I couldn’t just dish out the initial big bucks, I really needed access to his exclusive program).

In a desperate attempt to finally go to the member area, although I really started thinking, “why would I even want to go to a member area?” and was about to just close the window, I again opted out of all these offers and free bonuses, “obviously” throwing away thousands of dollars, and clicked “go to the member area” button for the last time.

So why am I writing all this you might think, well there is a clue to this whole story.

The day after I received an email from my friend, saying that he had noticed I had signed up through his link and warning me to opt out of the subscription if I did not want the monthly magazine sent to my house. (Thank you for that!)

He said he had already received the paper manual which was supposedly filled with IM secrets and even though it was a pleasant read and nice to finally get something in print instead of all those e-books, he also said most information in the book is stuff we already now and he was yet to reach to the part were the real secrets were going to be revealed.

One comment he made though set off the trigger for me to write this long post, and it was down the line of “a lot to be learned from this guru’s sales techniques”.

Now, I am sure this guru is making a lot of money and I am sure not all he is selling is absolutely crap, but his sales page sequence and seeing just how much he was trying to sell his products for, and more importantly, see how much he was willing to drop his price, made me wonder.

Just how much can a product really be worth if there is a 75% drop in price within a few pages?

Plus…

If the free product he is giving out and obviously using in order to convince people to buy his (I believe well overpriced) program, does not really offer new information, will his program be any good to start with?

Maybe there is a lot to learn from this guru’s selling technique, but would I really be comfortable using this kind of stuff on people who just like me are trying to make a good living online?

The answer for me really is NO. I don’t want to trick people into signing up for monthly subscriptions along with a free offer, nor do I want to make money selling MMO products.

I still keep believing that the true secret of making money online can be put together in a few lines, no 100 page manual needed, no expensive exclusive programs needed, just common sense and a lot of hard work and dedication.

Plus, I am a bigger believer of Karma. What goes around comes around so I really don’t want to make money over the back of others.

And guess what? In order to be successful as an Internet marketer, there is no need to sell stuff you would not be caught dead buying yourself.

So what do YOU think is more important…. The product or the sales technique?

Popularity: 7% [?]