Author Archive | Ronald Aqui

You have to admit – the online world is CROWDED with marketing messages.

It’s hard to start out and get noticed, and it’s become more difficult every day.

Ironically, some of the older methods have once again become more effective. As everyone else vies for attention online, consider doing something old school, such as…

1: Sending Postcards

When you send an email, it’s easily ignored or deleted. A message on social media carries even less weight.

But a real life, physical piece of mail that lands in their mailbox is something they will take notice of. And postcards are cheaper to mail than letters.

Here’s what to do: Decide on the goal of your postcard – do you want them to join your list? Attend your webinar event?

Go to a sales page?

Once you have your goal, use testing to find just the right slant for your offer. A postcard is a relatively small space, so every word and every image has got to pull its own weight. But once you find the magic mailing piece, you can continue to mail it out for months and even years, as long as it remains effective.

Know the lifetime value of your customer. This will help you determine what kind of conversion rate you need with your postcard mailers to be in profit.

Send the postcards yourself, or use a postcard mailing service. Simply Google “postcard mailing service” and you’ll find a company to match your needs.

2: Sending Lumpy Mail

What’s the best way to get your mailing piece to stand out?

Make it lumpy.

If you’ve ever received a non-profit solicitation for a donation, you probably know what we’re talking about. They send pennies, pens, calendars, packs of greeting cards and all sorts of things to get you to open their envelope. And of course once you have their free gift, the law of reciprocity kicks in and you want to send them something back.

For our purposes, think of something unusual and cost effective, such as…

A pebble (because of the rocky time they’ve had, or the rocky time ahead if they don’t get your product)

Seed packets (to ‘grow’ their business, grow their profits, etc.)

A compass (so they can find their way)

A thumb drive loaded with your promotional materials

Worry stones (because they’re up at night, worrying about their business or how to pay the bills)

Poker chips (because they shouldn’t gamble on other products or providers)

Aspirin in a packet to ease their pain

A paper wallet because you’ll show them how to fill it with money

A sand timer for when they’re running out of time

And so forth.

Again, there are services to help you accomplish this. For example, http://lumpymail.com is a good starting point.

3: Print Ads

The trick here is to make your ad look like an article in the magazine or newspaper you’re advertising in. Let’s say you’re advertising in a magazine – get an issue and see how their articles are formatted. Two columns? Three? What font do they use? What about picture placement?

Write your ad as more of an advertorial than a regular ad.

You might have to put the words, “Paid advertisement” at the top of your ad, but it will still convert better than if your ad looks like an ad.

Have a great headline and use lots of sub-headlines to keep the reader on the page.

Have a strong call to action for an irresistible offer. The offer should be so good people simply cannot resist it, whatever it is.

4: Get a local column

This is an excellent technique for local business consultants. If you live in a small to medium sized city, your local newspaper might be thrilled if you would volunteer your services to write them a column each week on a topic that interests their readers.

If not, you might consider taking out a weekly ad and making it look like a column. In some respects, this is actually preferable to writing the column for free, since you’ll have more control over your topics.

Be very helpful in what you write. Only the last line or two should promote your business. The bulk of your column should be helpful information that people can use.

This will set you up as the authority and the person people turn to when they need your services.

5: Birthday cards

Here’s something that used to be common and no longer is, which is why it will make you stand out from the crowd of marketers like a beacon on a hill. Send REAL birthday cards through the mail to your best customers.

You might collect their birthday (Month and day, not year) when they check out. You might even tell them WHY you’re collecting it. Let them know it’s optional, but you’d really like to remember them on their birthday.

Most people will be eager share their birthdate with you. Or you can hop on Facebook and discover their birthday there if they have it listed.

If you don’t want to send the cards yourself, use a service such as postable.com, sendoutcards.com or thegreetingcardshop.com.

Now then – a person might interact with a few hundred people and companies online over the course of a year. But odds are you will be the only one who remembers their birthday. That makes you pretty special.

You might include an offer of a free birthday gift in your card, too. Perhaps a video you recorded for their birthday (you can use the same one for everyone) and a download link for a free product.

Guaranteed they will be opening your emails and following you closely on social media after that.

How to send a birthday card on Facebook – okay, this is obviously online, but I wanted to include it because many of our readers won’t want to send actual cards (although we HIGHLY recommend it!)

Here’s how to send an electronic card through Facebook:

Go to the Birthday Card Maker app on Facebook by typing in “birthday card app” on the search bar.

Click “Okay” for the app to access your basic profile information.

You’ll see a calendar with pictures of your friends and dates of their birthdays. Choose which friend to send a card to.

Click “send a birthday card.”

Pick out the theme of your card.

Post the card to your friend’s wall by clicking the “Send this Card” link on the card itself.

Note: If you have a lot of Facebook fans, you might want to outsource this task.

When it comes to things like investing and marketing, doing the opposite of what most people are doing is often the winning course. Now that everyone else is online, be sure to look for offline opportunities to win the hearts, minds and wallets of your customers.

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

Short and sweet: Are you going wide instead of deep?

For example, if you’re in online marketing, are you trying to reach every new marketer out there?

If your niche is gardening, are you trying to reach every vegetable gardener on the planet?

And if your niche is dating, are you targeting every single male – period?

Then you’re going too wide.

By appealing to everyone, you appeal to no one.

I once coached a woman who wanted to start a newsletter for parents.

All parents. Of every age of child, 0-18. Who lived anywhere on the planet.

I spent half the coaching session trying to talk her out of this strategy, or rather, lack of strategy.

She could not be dissuaded.

And I never heard from her or her newsletter again. My guess is she’s still stuck working the 9-5 job she was trying so hard to leave.

What should she have done?

Targeted brand new first time parents, or parents of 0-2 year old children, or middle class working parents of annoying teenagers, or adoptive parents, or frustrated foster parents, or… you get the idea.

Broad niches will keep you broke and frustrated.

Narrow niches will make you rich.

It’s that simple.

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

Okay. Need lots of targeted traffic fast, but haven’t got a large ad budget to blast through?

I’ve got you covered.

All it requires is a skill you likely already possess, or you wouldn’t be attempting online marketing.

The method I’m talking about here is guest posts.

Simply put, a guest post is where you arrange to have a unique blog post you create posted on a (preferably) high traffic, authoritative blog in your market.

There are several reasons why this works so well.

The blog owner is usually looking for great content for their readers, and you are in turn looking to get visitors to your site/offer, which is exactly what happens when your great content spurs them to want more, and click the link in your post. A win-win for everyone!

How many visitors can you expect to glean with this method? That’s really a function of how good your guest post is, and how many daily readers the blog you post on has. Many times, it will astound you!

This is also a great way to build a list, as many times sending visitors straight to an offer after but one piece of content is usually too much.

A best practice would be to create a great post, and then with your link offer them more, perhaps a free report related to what you wrote about, in order to get them onto your email list. You’ve now given them two awesome pieces, and now you’ve also earned the right to mail to them!

So how do you find great places to write guest posts? Simply do a Google blog search using a search string like this: “guest post” + fitness

Or whatever your market happens to be. You’ll find a lot of candidates, and once you’ve sorted through them, you’ll certainly have some great places to approach.

An easy (and free!) way to get in front of a targeted audience fast!

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

We’ve all used social bookmarking to one degree or another.

You may have sent a link to a friend recommending a new restaurant, or book. What used to be in the purview of a letter or phone call is now a mostly online activity.

How social bookmarking works is that you are saving sites that used to find their way into your Favorites or Bookmark file on your computer, to an online site that stores them for you.

But that’s not where the fun ends!

Because this is SOCIAL bookmarking, the tags you use to tag the site with are saved and made public, thus enabling everyone to share the wonderful new resources you’ve found!

This is particularly useful for marketers hoping to help their pages not only get found in the search engines, but also to rank higher!

Why this works so well is that many of the more popular social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon all have monster authority, and are some of the most highly trafficked site on the Web.

This means that the links you get from them to your site are worth significantly more than many of your run of the mill links, and will help you rank higher in the search engines, which will get you more traffic.

Get it?

There are services where you can outsource this work, as you need it to come from a few sources outside yourself.

But that’s a topic for another time!

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

RSS feeds are simply an electronic data feed of digital content on the Web. You can view your favorite blogs, news and more streamed right into your reader. Most web browsers are now equipped with a feed reader, and if you have an older machine, simply installing Google Reader will take care of this.

So what uses can you make of this for your marketing?

Many!

First and foremost, getting your feeds listed in the various RSS feed directories will result in a number of good inbound links to your site.

These sites can also deliver up a fair amount of traffic on their own, as they are searched on and also indexed in the search engines. This can help your page rank higher and get more traffic.

There are several other benefits to making use of RSS. Here’s just a few:

Follow your favorite bloggers. Collecting your favorite feeds into your feed reader makes it very convenient to stay up to date on the people you are following.

Publish your company’s feeds on your website so people can easily find and subscribe to your content.

Add a widget that pulls in feeds from specific topics to display on your blog or website.

Track specific Google searches. A great tool for searching for new blog articles and news is Google itself! Google has ‘Google News’ and ‘Google

Blogs’ search functions, which are both great tools for collecting and searching for articles that are important to your business.

These are but a few ways to generate links, traffic and buzz. There are many more. Don’t ignore the possibilities!

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

If you haven’t heard about solo ads, you’ve got a pleasant surprise coming!

Basically how solo ads work is that you purchase a mailing from someone in your market that has a list. They then mail your email to their list, and you include a link to (generally) a squeeze page, where they can get a free report, or whatever other freebie you have chosen.

You usually don’t want to sell though solo ads, and most of the time you aren’t allowed to, but they are terrific for getting people onto your list, where of course you can market to them at will.

This is very good for those of us who don’t as yet have a list of their own they can mail to. There are many list owners more than willing to rent their lists out as such, and you can build your own very quickly.

How it works is that you buy a certain number of clicks from the buyer.

They usually know the open rates of their list, and can predict with high accuracy the number of clicks you’ll get. Normally most sellers over-deliver, sending more than you paid for.

Most of the time the prices range from $25 to a few hundred, depending on the quality of the list and the number of clicks promised. You end up spending somewhere between $.25 and $1 per subscriber. Not a bad deal.

You can perform a Google search for (“solo ads” + your market) to bring you highly targeted lists to mail to.

Make the content (the email) compelling and value-packed, and soon you’ll find a number of people wanting to find out more of what you have to offer!

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

Strange as it may sound, there are still a majority of marketers who haven’t yet discovered what a massive goldmine YouTube is when it comes to huge number of highly targeted visitors.

We are indeed the generation that would rather watch than read, and nowhere is this better reflected in the fact that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, gets more than 3 billion views every day, and has 35 hours of video is uploaded to it every minute.

So how can you take advantage of this for your business?

Does your business have a channel? Are you doing anything to promote it?

Do you know whether or not video is being used effectively by your competitors, and if there are any opportunities there?

It doesn’t matter if you feel squeamish about appearing on camera: you actually don’t have to these days. Many people utilize slideshow style videos, or animation to get their messages across, and this works very well.

There are also many ways to spread your videos all over the Web to reach a huge audience. The power of social media comes into play here, and a video posted on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter can have a wide grasp.

You can also outsource this if you need to, and by doing so scale you marketing efforts even further.

However you choose to get it done, please don’t ignore the power of YouTube, and the vast audience there waiting to hear from you!

You will regret it!

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

LinkedIn isn’t just for suits anymore!

In fact, it really never was.

What may have been at one time a peachy place to post your resume has evolved into is a full-blown social networking platform, with a lot of extra goodies you may not be aware of.

Some of the things marketers are using LinkedIn for these days include lead generation, introducing and selling new products, finding work, getting new employees, professional networking and not least of all, massive traffic!

LinkedIn has the capability because of its social nature to be able to deliver a lot of traffic through many of the functions on the site. The connections you make can lead to many places, and there is also a paid traffic option on the site now.

There are some basics you need to have in place before you can begin tapping into any of this, and some those include things like completing your LinkedIn profile, joining relevant groups, reaching out and making lots of connections, and updating your status regularly.

If you already do this on Twitter and Facebook, you are not only familiar with how it works, you might also know you can automate this part with services like Posterous or Ping.FM. It will save you gobs of time in the long run.

Be helpful on LinkedIn. Comment and post to groups, answer questions and utilize every opportunity you can to raise your profile. It will pay off!

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

Think you knew all there was about utilizing articles in your internet marketing? Think again.

Have you taken advantage of the various document sharing sites?

They are the new “hotspot” for posting articles for public consumption. Before, the conventional wisdom was to write your article, and then post it to as many of the top article directories out there.

Problem was, these directories long ago became saturated with not only lots of really crappy content, but much of it exactly the same. Consequently,

Google initiated what has become known as the Panda Update, which hit the article directories, and other spots that relied on low-value content and slapped them hard. EzineArticles, arguably the top article directory on the Web, lost about 30% of their rankings!

So what was a content marketer to do?

Enter doc sharing sites.

Document sharing sites are not new, (though there are more of them now) and they have fast become a favorite to place your new content. There are several reasons for this. Here’s a few:

Very fast and easy to post to.

No (or few) editorial restrictions.

No approval process.

Far easier to drop links in your content.

The search engines trust and rank them!

Right there is enough for most of us.

Here’s a list of some of the top doc sharing sites:

Scribd.com

Crocodoc.com

docstoc.com

slideshare.net

issuu.com

Free-ebooks.net

There are lots more, but this will get you going! Take action today!

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com

This is super easy and can be done by most anyone trying to get into the Internet marketing arena. In fact, I know people who make $5,000 and more (sometimes a lot more) just about every time they do this.

Your results, of course, may vary.

Here’s what you do…

Find a good WordPress plugin with PLR rights. It needs to come with a license that allows you to make any changes you want to it, along with the source code. You’ll find lots of these in PLR membership sites.

Google the plugin and find out what bugs it has (if any.) People will tend to complain on forums about plugin problems, so this should be easy to research. Make note of any bugs.

Now get creative. Look at your plugin and ask yourself what change or addition you could make that would improve the plugin. It just needs to be one thing that truly makes it your own unique plugin.

And it needs to be something buyers will appreciate having.

Once you have this, go to Upwork and get a quote for what it will cost to make the change to the plugin, as well as fix any issue it has. $300 or so is fairly typical unless there is a major issue.

If it’s not super expensive, get the work done. If it is super expensive, go get another plugin and start over.

Tell your coder to also rename the plugin to the name of your choosing.

Pay for a professional looking e-cover and register a domain name.

Write your sales copy and put your new plugin on Warrior Special Offers or JVZoo.

Plugins tend to sell really well. Gather the names of all of your buyers and let them know you’ll alert them when your next plugin comes out.

Rinse and repeat.

Yes, it really is this easy. Your first time you might have a few questions and challenges to work through. Like anything else, there is a learning curve. But this is one of the fastest ways you can start making serious money online very quickly, and if you take action now you could be pulling in your very first WordPress plugin profits within the next few weeks!

Ronald Aqui – https://ronaldaqui-homebusiness.com