The Internet Business Academy

One of my subscribers asked me the following question:

My biggest question is how do I promote a site from scratch? I mean I don’t know how to make a link or exchange a link, or anything like that. My other question is how do I link or put a link on another website?

Here is my answer:

There are many ways to do that, and I am currently writing a book on how to build a huge list and I am including an in depth study on how to drive traffic to your site so you can build a list.

But for today, I have a few questions for you. Do you have a web site to promote? If you do not, that is step one. If you do have a website to promote, and you want to get links, the easiest thing to do is to stop thinking about just getting links for the sake of getting links.

Do this instead: write articles. Short articles that are full of strong information. Like 300-500 words. At the very end of the article, write something about yourself (a bio). Then put a link to your website at the end of your bio. Submit your article to a lot of article directories. If you have written something rational, almost all of them will publish your article.

Two things happen. 1) People read your article. They like what you have to say and click your link. That creates traffic. Most of everyone on my list came here through an article. Don’t get me wrong. I do AdWords and I participate in giveaways, but my strongest traffic source is articles. By the way, it is also the hardest work I do. It is much easier to pay Google $100 and get 100 subscribers. It is much easier to send an email to a safe list and get a few subscribers. It is much easier to participate in a giveaway and get 100 subscribers for free. But the articles are solid. They are not gone tomorrow. They are read every single day, unlike a Google ad. I have articles that I wrote 9 months ago that still get clicks today. And I don’t have to do anything to keep getting traffic. But it was hard work at first writing them. No question about it.

In fact, I am planning to write a few articles today. But I would much rather be communicating with you. I would much rather add a few keywords to my AdWords campaign. But in my heart of hearts I know that if I write two articles today I have been much more productive than if I mail 10 safe lists or get 100 clicks in Google or pay for 1000 visitors somewhere.

2) The search engines pick up the link you placed in the bio and give you credit for having links. Just for fun, copy and paste the following (including the quotes) into Yahoo’s and Google’s search engine: “5 Secrets Your List-Building Competitors Hope You Never Find Out” I wrote that article about 4 weeks ago and submitted it to about 6 article directories. Now if you looked it up just now you see that I have many more links than that—and it took 15 minutes to write and about another 15 minutes to submit it to 6 (maybe 8) directories.

I hope this has been helpful. Over the next few days I am going to try to answer as many more questions as I can. I want to strike a good balance between getting this info to you and not inundating you with emails.

Again, send me your questions and I will answer as many as I can (a lot of the questions that came in were variants on the same question, so if I answer another question that is really similar and the answer would be the same for both questions, I probably won’t address both–I am sure you understand!

By the way, do you want to add a coaching program to your business? If so, download my brand new free training here: coaching program training

Sean Mize is the author of Anyone Can Coach, the definitive guide to starting your own coaching program fast.

One of my subscribers asked me the following question:

How quick can one start making money when one is desperate?

Here is my response:

I am going to jump right into this one first. That is a great question, and contrary to all the hype you see online about getting rich overnight, this is not a get rich quick business, although some people do get rich in a hurry. Some really do. But it is an inconsistent business when you are first getting started. If you have a list or are promoting a product already, you know that some days you only get 3 subscribers and some you may get 100. Some days you do not sell anything, and others you get four orders for $67 each. When you have 100 sales a day, then if it fluctuates by 10 sales daily it is no big deal–one day you get 90, the next 100, the 110, etc, and maybe down to 80 on another day. But when you have a small list and only 100 visitors a day–you get 1 one day, none the next, 2 the next day–not enough to pay the bills.

So if you are really desperate, and you cannot afford to go a few months without much income if it happens that way, then you probably shouldn’t be gambling on the internet to make you rich fast. But if you are not so desperate that you can take a few months and really learn the ropes, then maybe if you work really hard you can build a business.

You see, I think that one of the biggest disservices online is when someone sells something with the premise that if you will just do this and this exactly like I have done it, then you will get rich. What we can do online is show you what we have done, so you can model it. For example, if I share with 100 people the exact same methods that I use, and tell you to go out and do the exact same thing, what is going to happen? Have you ever gotten 7 of the exact same email from 7 different lists that you are on? The market simply becomes saturated with the one product that is claimed to be the end all and be all. So all you can really do is model what someone else is doing, who is successful.

I hate to say this too, but I do not believe it is possible to set up a true ‘cookie cutter’ online system. If you see a web site that promises that all you have to do is promote that one web site and you will get rich, I think that is bunk. Sure, if you are one of 10 people promoting it, yes, maybe you will make money. But if I sell the same web site to 1000 people, what happens? Nobody gets rich.

Think about this. I could sell my entire business. I could sell all my articles, all my auto responder campaigns, and all my squeeze pages. If I sold them to one person, he could do just as well as I do with them. If I sold them to 2 people, maybe they could do just as well. But what would happen if I sold them to 100 people? You know the answer.

By the way, do you want to add a coaching program to your business? If so, download my brand new free training here: coaching program training

Sean Mize is the author of Anyone Can Coach, the definitive guide to starting your own coaching program fast.

You have been told an autoresponder is necessary to create long-term viable business on the internet.

But why?

An autoresponder campaign is probably the single biggest differentiating factor between the success of the big boys (and big girls) in internet marketing.

An autoresponder allows you to remind your visitors and send them back to your web sites again and again and again. If a visitor makes it to your web site and does not buy from you, if he or she does not become a part of your autoresponder campaign, you have likely lost him or her forever. Forever. Unless you pay for the click again. And by the way, just because you aren’t paying Google AdWords for the clicks, you are still paying. You pay when you write the article and it takes you 20 minutes of your time. You pay when you send out a JV mailing. You pay when you advertise in an ezine. You pay.

So make the most of your visitors. Give them an irresistible offer to opt in to your email list. Then give them irresistible information repeatedly so they will not dare leave your mailing list. Give them the best, they will never leave you. Send them junk, you give them to someone else. You choose.

Send them quality emails. Recommend only the best products. Send them freebies from time to time. Court them. Win them for life. Autoresponders rule.

By the way, do you want to add a coaching program to your business? If so, download my brand new free training here: coaching program training

Sean Mize is the author of Anyone Can Coach, the definitive guide to starting your own coaching program fast.

1) Not building to a niche

When you are building a list, the more general your list demographics, the more difficult it is to sell to the list (and isn’t that your purpose?). For example, if you build a list of animal lovers, that might include pet owners, environmental activists, nature walkers, and people who just enjoy watching animal movies. So when you try to mail this list what do you mail? Anything you mail will not be a strong fit for the entire list, only for one segment of the list. Correction to mistake: Tightly target your list or create multiple lists, one for each category of animal lovers.

2) Not creating a relationship with your list

It is easy when you first begin building a list to think more about building a list and driving traffic to the list than to be thinking about the people on the list. If you subscribe people to this list, but do not mail them after the confirmation email for two months, when you do mail them they do not know who you are and are likely to unsubscribe. Correction: immediately begin to build a relationship via email with your list, even if you only have 5 on your list.

3) Mailing your list rather than the people on the list

Think about when you receive an email. If the email reads, ‘Sean, I’d like to share something with you today’ are you more or less likely to read it than one that reads, ‘To all my newsletter subscribers, I’d like to share something with you’? You must treat your list like it is a group of friends, not a list of email addresses.

4) Trying to sell all the time.

We all know you are in business. That is what your signature line is for. When you simply try to sell hard in every email, you will get unsubscribes, and the ones that don’t unsubscribe aren’t reading your emails anyhow. Correction: Give your subscribers useful information in your emails. You can occasionally send a recommendation to a product you personally use or know will be useful to your readers, but do it sparingly.

5) Not communicating with your list. Find out what they want to hear about. Ask questions. Send your list a survey. Ask them what are their top five questions for the niche they are in. Then when they answer the survey, be sure to answer all the questions in the next few emails.

By the way, do you want to add a coaching program to your business? If so, download my brand new free training here: coaching program training

Sean Mize is the author of Anyone Can Coach, the definitive guide to starting your own coaching program fast.

1) Trying to learn too much too fast, without applying what you learn.

It is easy to spend time reading and studying online, learning everything you can about internet marketing, and overloading your mind. When you begin to market, you are overwhelmed with the choices. Correction: Purchase one (1) book geared towards beginners and do everything it says to do, no matter how much sense it doesn’t make. Don’t cut any corners or leave anything out because it doesn’t seem logical. Just follow the steps, and once you have done that, you will have two things: 1) A internet foundation on which to build and 2) A basic understanding of how the internet works, from first hand knowledge.

2) Failing to simply get started with marketing.

When you first begin a task, for example, list building, you do not know exactly how to do it. And unless you learn the exact steps from someone who has done it, you will not know exactly what to do until you begin. Don’t know where to begin? Just start somewhere, in the middle, wherever. Once you have one piece of the pie, so to speak, you can build from there. But if you have nothing and start nothing, you will never have an online business.

3) Refusal to purchase products.

Some of you probably quit reading right then. That’s OK, they aren’t serious anyhow. And no, I’m not selling anything. You can always send me a donation via paypal (Just kidding!). Do you want to spend 1000 hours figuring it out or would you rather spend $100 and read it in a few hours? That should be a no brainer. Buy the manual. Worried it isn’t worth the PDF its uploaded into? Make sure there is a guarantee. By the way, don’t ask for a refund if you haven’t tried out the program and found it doesn’t work. Don’t just look at it and think it is too complicated, and decide you don’t want to market. Guess what? It is complicated. If it were easy, everybody would be working full time online. But its not. A few people get rich. The rest complain that it is too complicated. Go figure.

4) Refusal to buy tools and resources.

You may think that free traffic is free. But it is not. If it takes you 40 hours a week to generate 400 visitors to your site, you are wasting your time. Spend $100 a week and save yourself the time. If you are dead broke and cannot afford to buy traffic or advertise to get it, you must commit to reinvesting every penny you make back into advertising. So when you get 400 visitors from hard work and you make $100, invest that in next week’s traffic. Until you are making your monthly goal online, you cannot take money out, you must reinvest it.

5) Failing to trust.

This one probably gets me some flack. But that’s OK. I asked my list a few days ago what their biggest problems in internet marketing are. Some of my top responses were not knowing where to start and, get this, not knowing who to trust. My advice is this. Do everything in groups of 5. Buy 5 sources of traffic. Subscribe to 5 newsletters. Buy 5 manuals. The 1 or maybe 2 that are worthless you will figure out in a hurry. But you will know what traffic is good, which newsletters to promote, and where to buy the next manual. If you do nothing and are locked up in fear, you might as well just get offline. You see, the internet IS a scary place because you cannot shake hands as you do offline—but that is why it rewards those richly who take risks and win those risks. And you will lose a few. Remember, the most successful people in the world fail far more than the least successful. It is because they are willing to fail that they succeed.

6) Failure to track everything they do. If you do not track, you will never know what works. Everybody says their traffic is good, their list builder is the best, their web page is the best, their headline works the best. But if you do not test, you do not know. And if you do not know, you will surely fail. You will fail if you do not track. How to do it? Buy an adtracker. Or create multiple coded web pages. Or set up multiple auto responders in your auto responder account. But do something. Tracking is the difference between breaking even or losing money and making money.

By the way, do you want to add a coaching program to your business? If so, download my brand new free training here: coaching program training

Sean Mize is the author of Anyone Can Coach, the definitive guide to starting your own coaching program fast.