Using Video To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet Perry Lawrence from AskMrVideo.com at lunch along with Buzz Marketer Dean Hunt and my Dad (Barry Dunlop).

Perry clearly knows a lot about his niche - video production and video marketing. After a chat with him over lunch I have become even more inspired to use VIDEO as a means of driving TRAFFIC to RetireAt21.com.

Here is a short video of Perry and I at lunch talking about what the quickest way for a Young Entrepreneur to get online today!

Check It Out: (More Videos to follow soon) - and yes, I will be practising my Interview and On Camera skills

It was great to meet you Perry, I look forward to seeing you again at Yanik Silvers Underground 5 seminiar in 2009

Dave Conklin, Get Your Home Valued!

OK Folks, another great interview for you.

CHECK OUT THE INTERVIEW HERE:
Interview with Dave Conklin of GetMyHomesValue.com

Some fantastic answers - like:

Dave, At the bottom of one of the emails we exchanged - it says: “If you don’t risk anything… you risk even more” I really thought this was spot on advice - can you explain your own philosophy on risk?

Yeah… this is something that I definitely live by.  When I started this company I had absolutely nothing.  And I mean nothing.  We had no investment capital from anyone else, and I was making a move to leave real estate and develop this whole new entity.  My wife was certainly a bit shaky about the whole idea.  I’ve always been in sales or marketing and typically had a commission based income, so it didn’t really bother me that much.  But the bottom line was this… if nothing changes, nothing changes.  In other words, if you wake up every day and never ever try to do anything different.  You need to expect that you’re going to wake up the same exact way every single day.

I drive through the city as I live in and see the people there.  While I’m sure some of them have had a rough start to their lives… many of them don’t even realize if they would just step out of the box at the surround their self in everyday and take a risk, that something absolutely amazing could happen to them.  The more risks you take, the lucky year, you end up being.

Interview with Dave Conklin - Founder of GetMYHomesValue.com

To find out more about Matt and AruaRose visit www.GetMyHomesValue.com

Hello Everyone,

Yesterday I was sitting at Starbucks thinking about my business and how hard it can be sometimes. I asked myself would it be better for me to work at Starbucks instead of running my own Internet business. I decided to write down what’s best about both jobs:

Income - When working for Starbucks you know you can only earn $7 a hour but if you were running your own Internet business you could earn as much as you like a hour and as little as you like.

Reliability - the best thing about Starbucks is that you know you will always have a job there and every month you will make the same money and it will appear in your bank. With a Internet business you don’t know if there will be much work and how much you will earn.

Stress - Running your own business can be very stressful, you constantly have to worry about making sure you make enough money to live.

Responsibility’s - when you work for someone else you typically don’t have much responsibility, if you do something wrong you may get fired but you can always find another job. If a business owner makes a mistake they can loose everything! Recently a restaurant in my area decided to fire a young girl who worked for him because she was pregnant, she ended up taking him to court and won $20,000 and he had to file for bankruptcy.

Life Style - You can have any life style you like with a Internet business, you can choose when and what you want to do. Working for a company means you have to be somewhere at a curtain time. If you want time off you have to give notice and are only allowed so much time off.

Social - The worst thing for me working from home is that I don’t get to interactive with other people. At Starbucks you get to see 100s of people every hour and work with friends.

Opportunity’s - Everyday I get emails from people offering me opportunity’s to joint venture, partner up and requesting to advertise on my website’s. My friend has worked for Starbucks for 2 years and hasn’t once been offered a raise or promotion!

To Your Success,

Michael Dunlop

A Beginner`s Guide To Affiliate Marketing

Very pleased to present this excellent guide from John Lamerton Director of www.lammo.net

Affiliate marketing is, essentially, an online joint venture between a website owner (affiliate) and a merchant, where the revenue is shared. The three most popular ways in which affiliates can earn money through affiliate marketing are: Pay Per Click, Pay Per Sale and Pay Per Lead. In most cases, the affiliate will promote the merchants products or services on his or her website, either through writing reviews or placing advertisements or affiliate links on the site. This will all be in exchange for a percentage of the sale made or commission earned.

So, how do you go about identifying suitable merchants? For most affiliates, the easiest approach is to sign up with an affiliate network such as Affiliate Window, TradeDoubler, Commission Junction (CJ) or Buy at. There are numerous established networks in the UK and globally. These act as middlemen, recruiting both merchants and affiliates and providing reporting, tracking, analysis and accounting tools for both parties. For the merchant they help in identifying relevant affiliates. For the affiliate, the provide
a rich source of established merchant programmes, organsied and searchable by category. They take the headache out of maintaining multiple separate relationships with individual merchants. Networks also provide creative and trackable affiliate links, together with a variety of tools to allow you to generate code for your site with the relevant products or services.

Once established, you may decide to set up direct relationships with some merchants as the commissions on offer may be slightly higher (although not always because of the cost of servicing individual affiliate relationships from a the merchant`s perspective).

Most importantly, you need to identify merchants that offer goods and services in categories that will be both appealing and relevant to your site visitors. If you are, perhaps, a sports specialist, offering sports
merchandise may be an obvious route. If you do not already have a site or a sector-specific focus, it is worth spending some time analysing the programmes on offer. Most affiliate networks provide statistics such as EPC (earnings per hundred clicks), EPM (earnings per thousand) etc. which should provide some idea as to likely value.

Also assess the competition in the light of your planned marketing activities. Are you planning to drive traffic via natural / organic (unpaid) search by ranking highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for
relevant terms. If so, how achievable is this? Are there thousands of high quality sites already high up in the rankings for relevant search terms? The most likely answer to this is yes! Assuming this is the case, are you able to create a high quality site and attract links to it via a link building campaign? Can you identify “longtail” search phrases that are searched for but for which the competition is less overwhelming? You can use the Google AdWords keyword research tool, type in a relevant phrase and see related phrases together with the degree of advertiser competition for the phrase and the number of times it is actually used by consumers in the search engine. This should give you some idea as to the feasibility of a
particular subject area.

Equally, you can choose to promote your site via pay-per-click (PPC) using Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing. You will still need a decent website and, again, will need a well-defined, well thought-through keyword strategy as competition here is equally fierce. However, unlike natural search rankings which may take many months of hard work to achieve, PPC traffic can be flowing within minutes and you can constantly refine your search terms and targeting to ensure maximum effectiveness. You will of course need to ensure you adhere to the merchants keyword bidding restrictions.

In all cases, you will need a website, the content of which should be `sticky` which means it encourages people to stay on the website for a while, so increases the chance that they will click through to a merchants website. Information on the website should be in short easy to read chunks.

As you can see from the above, affiliate marketing should not be thought of as a quick rich scheme, it is hard work and should be treated as a proper business. If all of this sounds intimidating, just remember that almost all of today`s affiliates started out with little or no knowledge and have learned along the way through hard work and many honest mistakes. To get some sense of what is out there, have a look around the various networks and at a Affiliate Marketing Program Directory.

You will be pleasantly surprised