WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
In this lesson, we will enumerate
the 10 most common Internet marketing methods used by successful SFI
Affiliates. While space prohibits us from giving you more than a brief
introduction to the first five of these methods in this lesson, we will give a
brief introduction to the last five in our next lesson and future lessons will
address each of these methods in more detail.
MARKETING METHODS
The most common Internet marketing
methods, particularly useful in promoting the SFI affiliate program are these:
1) Doorway Pages and Search Engine
Registration
2) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Exchange Programs)
3) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Online Classifieds)
4) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Affiliate and Paid Placement)
5) Building Your Own Content-Rich Website
6) Utilizing an Opt-In Program
7) Hosting FFA Pages
8) Using Safelists, Announcement Lists, and Viral marketing
9) Press Releases, Relationship Building, and Offline Promotion
10) The Latest New Technique
2) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Exchange Programs)
3) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Online Classifieds)
4) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Affiliate and Paid Placement)
5) Building Your Own Content-Rich Website
6) Utilizing an Opt-In Program
7) Hosting FFA Pages
8) Using Safelists, Announcement Lists, and Viral marketing
9) Press Releases, Relationship Building, and Offline Promotion
10) The Latest New Technique
Many of these methods overlap or
have much in common. Depending on what you read, there are various ways to
describe each of these methods and various names with which to identify them.
There is no particular importance to the order in which we have listed them
here. The only reason to enumerate them into the list above is for ease of
learning. We will take the first five in turn and give you a brief introduction
in this lesson. The next lesson will give you a brief introduction to the last
five. Subsequent lessons will cover each of these methods in great detail
(although not necessarily in order). Let's get right to it.
DOORWAY PAGES AND SEARCH ENGINE REGISTRATION
A "doorway page" is a Web
page that is used to lead people to the target interactive site. The doorway
page contains a link to your target page. The target page is where you hope the
user will take some action, such as purchasing an affiliate product or opting
in to your program. The target page sells. The doorway page gets their
attention and leads them to the target page. Doorway pages serve two main
purposes: they are used to optimize search engine placement and they allow you
to target your initial approach to different demographics.
When you join SFI, you are given
links to different target pages that you can use to sell SFI products or
recruit affiliates. Because these pages contain what is called a "CGI
variable" to identify you as the seller or recruiter, they can not be
individually registered in the Search Engines. That is, because there is a
"?" in the URL (Website address), search engines will not accept them
or will truncate off the most important part—your ID number.
To work around this problem with the
search engines, affiliates use doorway pages. Savvy SFI affiliates design and
host a Web page on another server with a different name so that the URL does
not contain a question mark. This doorway page then links to one of the SFI
target pages, and the link, of course, contains the CGI variable identifying
the affiliates ID number to ensure proper credit. Really enterprising
affiliates create several different doorway pages, each appealing to different
types of people.
Even when there is no need to work
around a cgi variable in the URL, Internet marketers use doorway pages to
target different demographics. Different things get different people's
attention. Many of the affiliates that come into SFI do so because they are
very serious about creating a successful home-based business. They find SFI
while searching for information pertaining to home-based businesses or network
marketing. They understand network marketing terminology and are seeking a
comparison of this program with the ones already familiar to them.
Other affiliates come to SFI because
they want an Internet business. They may have had little experience with
home-based businesses or network marketing. These people understand Internet
terminology and are looking for a great affiliate program. Obviously, you have
to approach these different types of people differently to attract them to the
SFI program.
Thus, it is best to have one doorway
page for those seeking a home-based, multi-level business and another doorway
page for those seeking a lucrative affiliate program. SFI well serves the needs
of both, but they need to be drawn to that realization in different ways. You
may also want to have different doorway pages for younger prospects and older
prospects; one for the highly educated and one for those with little formal
education; one for those who are already financially successful but want an
Internet income and one for those who are still struggling daily with bills and
creditors. There are many different demographic groups that you can target with
different doorway pages.
The best doorway pages are pages
that attract the targeted demographic by providing useful information or
entertainment, while remaining easy to navigate. Stay tuned to future lessons
to learn how even the technically challenged can easily create useful content
for their Websites.
(Note: In SFI, doorway pages that
you design yourself must be approved by the SFI administration if they do more
than just contain an approved link or textual ad. That is, if you provide
information or opinions about SFI above and beyond insertion of an approved ad,
you must seek prior approval.)
When you have your doorway pages in
place, you need to register them with the search engines. There are many
factors involved in doing this properly. You need to prepare your pages
properly with metatags, keywords, descriptions, keyword balancing, content
indications, as well as incoming and outgoing link considerations. You then
need to know the right submission procedure and schedule your submissions
properly for each major search engine or directory. There is much to say on
these subjects and each will be the topic of a future lesson in this course.
BANNER OR TEXTUAL AD PLACEMENT (EXCHANGE PROGRAMS)
To gain traffic for your Website,
you need to prepare effective banners and textual ads. In SFI, this is already
done for you. Having banners and textual ads prepared, you need to find places
on the Internet to place these banners and textual ads. One of the earliest
methods devised on the Internet was banner exchanges. You agree with other
Website owners to place their ad on your page in exchange for placing your ad
on their page. This process has been facilitated by the emergence of several
banner exchange programs. You register with the exchange program, upload your
banner, and your banner will automatically appear on other registered Web pages
throughout the world. In exchange, they provide code for you to put on your Web
page, which hosts rotating banners from other sites. These are not particularly
effective, mainly because placement in context on a page is rarely achieved.
Context placement is crucial to an ad or banner being effective in drawing
traffic.
Banner exchanges are very useful for
one purpose, however. Most of the exchange programs allow you to target the
types of pages on which your banners will be placed. If you happen to have a high-traffic
Website which appeals to one demographic, but your target in a particular
affiliate program is another demographic, you can "exchange" your
traffic through use of an exchange program. Say your site draws high traffic
from retired people who love to garden and travel. With a banner exchange, you
can have your banner targeted to sites which appeal to home-based
entrepreneurs. In return, you host banners on your site which target the group
which frequents your site (advertising, for example, gardening tools or motor
homes). Since effective context placement is much more likely to be achieved in
this situation, it usually works fairly well for all parties involved.
BANNER OR TEXTUAL AD PLACEMENT (ONLINE CLASSIFIEDS)
One of the easiest ways to get your
banners and ads on a high-traffic Website is to place them on some online
classified ad pages. Several major sites allow you to place classified ads for
free. There are others, such as Yahoo!, that charge fees for placement of
classifieds. These can be effective depending upon the volume of ads being
submitted at any given time. If it is a high traffic site, your ad will only
appear for a matter of hours before it is pushed too far down by new
submissions to be useful. Daily attention and resubmission is crucial to an
effective classified ad campaign on the free sites.
There are links to the many online
classified sites that have been effective for SFI affiliates on the SFI Team
Resource Center (http://www.sfiteam.com/). Starting with classified ads is a good way to get your
feet wet in Internet marketing.
BANNER OR TEXTUAL AD PLACEMENT (AFFILIATE AND PAID PLACEMENT)
You can also pay to have your banner
or ad placed on other Websites. This is a broad category that covers many
different possible arrangements. You can pay for placement for a period of
time. You can pay only for clicks actually received through your ad on a site.
You can pay only for sales or sign-ups that come through a particular site. Affiliate
programs encompass the latter of these options. There are services where you
can register an affiliate program and people who go to these services can sign
up to host your ads. When they sign up, they download your banner or ad to
their site. The service independently tracks and verifies the clicks, sales, or
sign-ups, that originate from particular affiliate sites and facilitates the
payments that are due.
Also included in this category are
ezine ads. Ezines are e-mail newsletters that people have opted-in to receive.
They are full of interesting content so that people actually read them when
they show up in their in-boxes. You can pay the ezine publisher to include your
ad and a link to your site in an ezine edition. Ideally, your ad will fit into
the context of the information in that particular ezine edition.
"Pay-pers"—services which
pay people to receive and read e-mail or host software which displays ads on
their screen—also fall under this category. You can pay to have your e-mail ad
sent to people who have agreed to receive the e-mail for a small fee per
e-mail. This is not spam because the people who receive the e-mail have opted
to receive it in exchange for a small payment per e-mail received and read.
These programs are very effective because the e-mails are actually read and the
links clicked.
BUILDING YOUR OWN CONTENT RICH WEBSITE
As explained in our first lesson on Spam, except for safelists and paid ads
purchased from opt-in programs, you cannot rely on e-mail for Internet
marketing. You must use Websites and opt-in programs instead. We discussed the
doorway site concept at the beginning of this lesson. Whether a doorway page or
an independent target site, the most effective Internet marketing method
available is to have a site with rich substantive content and entertaining
attention grabbers. There are hundreds of thousands of Websites on the Internet
now that consist of nothing more than banner ads thrown on a page. They are all
worthless! There is no point in creating a Website if it does not have content.
Your Website must have both value and ease of use to be effective in drawing
and keeping traffic. (As stated above, do not be dismayed if you feel incapable
at this time of creating such a site. Just relax and keep reading your SFI
materials.)
CONCLUSION
Remember that this lesson is just a
brief introduction to many different concepts. Do not be concerned if you are
still a little confused. Things will become clearer as we address each method
in more detail. If you are itching to get started with your Internet marketing
campaign, you can start with posting classified ads. You can move onto the
other methods as we discuss them in more detail in future lessons.
WHAT'S COMING NEXT
In our next lesson, we will give you
a brief introduction to the last five of the Internet marketing methods
enumerated at the top of this lesson. Subsequent lessons will discuss all of
these methods and more in great detail.
