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Segment One



Armand: We are officially muted and if George is listening, if he could make sure the beeps

are turned off and also make sure we have the recordings going that would be ideal

as well. Thank you very much for doing that. We’ll get started shortly, we need to

turn on the recording on my end as I mentioned previously. So what we’re going to

do is start a new session here.



What we are going to do is get started on the call this evening. First of all I’d like

to welcome everyone this evening to Internet Marketing Explained. We are on call

number 13 today, so congratulations to everybody and we are going to get started

on this particular call with a lot of information.



Tonight’s call is primarily going to be about traffic and search engine optimization,

so we’ll start with traffic generation techniques and end the latter part of the call

with search engine optimization and the basic elements for proper search engine

optimization. It’s not as complicated as you think it’s actually quite simple once

you understand the basic elements and we’ll tell you more about search engine

optimization as we go.



Before we get started on today’s call we have some questions from the previous

calls. Before we get started with that let’s just make sure everyone has the email

address to send questions in because you may have several questions you want to

ask and the email address where you send your questions is bret@sfsmail.com.



Let’s start off with the questions and Bret, why don’t you go ahead and give us the

last minute questions from our last call about website design and things of that

nature from some of the people listening, so why don’t we cover those questions

first.



Bret: We’ll start off with a softball for you Armand. Where do you go to recommend

someone go to hire a webmaster?



Armand: You know there’s not a definitive place for someone to hire a webmaster per se, but

here’s what I would do first of all. The easiest and most simplistic way is for them

to go to a place like Rentacoder.com and put what you’re looking for. Be very

definitive as far as what you’re looking for and prior to doing that you need to

define what you’re asking people to do.



It’s key that you understand what you want someone to do. Remember what a

webmaster is. A webmaster just puts up your website according to your instruction,

so you have to be very specific for your webmaster in order for them to do what you

want them to do.



A webmaster is not a copywriter you have to understand that. You also have to

remain in control, meaning a webmaster or a website designer specifically may not

agree with the techniques you’re going to tell them because they’ve never seen



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them before. Remember we’re using direct response techniques and they have their

own idea of what a website should be.



Don’t let your webmaster sway you in any way of creating your website. They will

try to do that and that’s probably the biggest complaint that most people have with

webmasters. My webmaster doesn’t want to do that. My response is, get a new

webmaster its very simple. Why do I say that? Because you are the marketer they

are not the marketer. They work for you and ultimately all you want them to do is

what you ask them and what you tell them to do that’s it.



It’s not a debate, keep that in mind this is not a debate with your webmaster. This is

not you asking them for their advice. Tell them this is what I want and it’s their job

to now figure out how to do it, very simple, so next question.



Bret: What does a webmaster do that a web designer doesn’t do?



Armand: A webmaster as opposed to a web designer, a web designer is actually just going to

design the outline of your website and that’s it and its mostly just a one time job

where a webmaster on the other hand is going to basically help you take your copy,

put it up online and by putting it up online its going to make sure it looks the right

way. It’s going to look the way you want it to look and you’re going to work with

them on a more regular basis.



You’re going to continually work with them day in and day out in many cases until

you get what you want done the right way, so what they’re going to do is basically

be responsible for implementing the changes that you want on a continual basis

where a website designer is more of, on a one time basis.



Bret: A follow-up question to that is how much should you expect to pay a webmaster, I

guess in two parts? One for the initial setup and secondly for on-going

modifications and how much of that do you think a person should control

themselves?



Armand: Let’s start with the last question first. For most people you really only want the

ability or at least the knowledge to go in and edit minor changes, meaning changes

such as misspellings, correcting paragraphs, or minor things having primarily to do

with text. You don’t want to have to actually go in there and change layout because

if you’re the one going in and changing the layout and everything you might as well

have done the entire thing yourself.



So again, my opinion for what you should be doing or what you should control is

just minor edits to your website. If you need to go in and change the copy in certain

areas that’s great; if you need to change a headline that’s great because you could

do that in a couple minutes, but if its going to take you longer than a couple minutes

than its going to be done primarily by the webmaster you choose to work with and

that’s their job.





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What was the first part of that question again?



Bret: For an initial creation?



Armand: How much should they charge for the initial creation and then how much for on-

going? That’s a hard question for me to answer because we primarily do most of

our web design in-house. The initial creation is really going to be dependent upon

several factors like what you want done, how you want it done, the design, the

whole works it could vary and I’m going to give you a broad range.



It could vary from a couple hundred dollars to at most for the type of sites we’re

looking at, again at the very most and this is border line and that’s like $1,000. I

wouldn’t pay more than up to $1,000 to have someone make me a website initially,

but I believe most of your websites those that are listening, unless it’s a very

complex site meaning there is a bunch of programming and everything else and

that’s a different scenario.



As far as actual design goes you should have your site designed easily within

$1,000 without any problems. As far as on-going maintenance and what you should

pay a webmaster again it really depends upon what you want the webmaster to do

and how often, but usually they’re going to give you some kind of an idea. To keep

a webmaster on retainer it could range from a couple hundred bucks to $500 to even

more depending upon how much work you want them to do.



Remember though, once your initial setup is done you’re going to be using them

very little, so it may be best for you to, if you’re going to keep them on retainer, a

very small retainer on a monthly basis in order to keep them. Again that’s if you

choose to go with a retainer whatsoever. You may just need to hire them on a piece

by piece type basis which may work out better for you.



So again it’s going to depend on the webmaster. I would definitely ask around first

when I’m choosing a web designer or webmaster, ask around to other people that

you know and find out who they use to do their website design, who would they use

to be their webmaster. Once you find a good webmaster keep them, over pay them

and I seriously mean that. Pay them more than what they’re worth in order to keep

them to do work for you.



The other thing that you don’t want to do is outsource or tell other people about

your own webmaster. Your webmaster may not like that very much but for you, if

your webmaster gets too busy than you’re going to lose them so that’s a very key

aspect of your business.



Once you find a resource that’s working well for you, you don’t want to go around

telling everybody else about that particular resource or webmaster because if it’s a

time based scenario like a webmaster is they may get overbooked and not have

enough time to do your projects, so be very careful about that.





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Bret: Armand where did you find your webmaster?



Armand: I actually believe it finagled its way through you Bret and I believe Frank was your

original webmaster is that right?



Bret: That’s correct.



Armand: Now I have Frank on a retainer and Frank doesn’t really do web design for me, but

what Frank primarily does is programming for me, he and Zack at Frank’s

company. I’m speaking of Frank Deardurff and I keep Frank and Zack busy every

single day. I pay them a lot of money to do that too and they’re well worth it,

they’re worth every single penny that I pay for them, but I keep them doing all sorts

of programming.



They’ve helped me redesign my entire shopping cart system. They’ve helped me

with all kinds of different functions in automation that we need inside our business,

so again when you keep someone like that pay them whatever you need to in order

to keep them. For example, in this case, I happen to know Frank for a number of

years I think I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Bret. I know Alex Mandossian

was using Frank for quite a while as his webmaster as well.



I’ve known Frank, I started him doing some simple programming for me then it

became more complex and now I don’t even know how he really has time to do any

other projects at this particular point because of how much business they do for us.

So again its key, but I keep Frank very, very happy.



Bret: I was just teasing Armand.



Armand: No you weren’t I think that’s a deep rooted issue that you have.



Bret: I have another question. Should you give copy to the webmaster already with the

fonts, cover, and font size or should you mark the copy with how you want it?



Armand: Let me make this easier for your webmaster. The hardest thing for a webmaster to

work from is a Word document. The reason is because Word puts this funky html

coding into it, so they’re going to have to do something else with it anyway. It

would be easier if you just give them a text file and say here I want this in this font

and this in this font and just give them directions on what you want.



It will make your webmaster’s job that much easier and he/she will be able to get

the job done a lot faster as well, that will make their job easier. If someone gives

me a document in Word it takes two to three times as long, and if you’re paying

someone by the hour you don’t want to make their job harder you want to make it

easier, so give it to them in a text document it’ll be easier for them to copy and

paste and put it into the actual template and then just give them the directions.







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For example tell them I want these sections in Arial font, I want these sections in a

Tahoma 16 pt. bold font and then once they put it up online and you can give them

further instructions. The initial viewing of your particular website is probably

going to be the worst, meaning you’re going to have to go back and make some

changes because it’s probably not going to look exactly how you want it. Expect

that to happen, so again make sure you give them instruction but don’t expect it to

be perfect on the first round.



Bret: What browsers Armand do you take into consideration from a website design

standpoint?



Armand: I really only take into consideration two browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The reason is because those are the two most popular browsers on the Internet

today. People that were using the Netscape browser, Netscape primarily works

almost identical to Internet Explorer. Firefox works a little bit different.



You could go as far as Opera, but it’s not necessary because it’s such a small

percentage. When I look at my website stats as far as the number of people using

an Opera browser it doesn’t even take that into consideration, so I just look at two

personally and that’s Internet Explorer where I look up my website to see how it

looks and I look at what the same website looks like in Firefox.



Everyone on this call you should download Firefox and you should certainly have

Internet Explorer at the same time. The other option you want to have that’s

available is, if you have a Mac you definitely want to pull it up on a Mac, but if you

don’t have a Mac you can go to this website and this is how you can check your

website in various browsers and see if there are any problems. Its called

AnyBrowser.com allows you to basically take your website, enter it in and see what

your website looks like in the various browsers.



There’s a tool section here called site viewer and you simply load in your site and it

tells you what it looks like and if there’s any problems in it as well. If you’re using

basic website design you shouldn’t have any problems. If people get really fancy

they may come into one or two issues but for the most part it should be okay as you

go along. It will show you what your browser looks like at various widths and

things of that nature. So again you can use that tool it’s called Anybrowser.com.



Bret: Quick review Armand, we talked before about graphics, what is your

recommendation on the best place to go when you need graphics, elance, and

scriplance or was there some other site?



Armand: As far as graphics go, if you need someone to create your graphics and again if its

not a banner or anything like that I would recommend simply going to

DesignOutpost.com. Just put up a contest and have a contest run and that would

probably be easier.







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Bret: We talked on the last call a bit about form site if I remember and somebody wants

to know if you recommend using a site like forum site where the site appears to be

outside the 800 x 600 size and people have to move the scroll bar to see an entire

page.



Armand: Do I recommend having a site like that?



Bret: Using a site like a forum site, I’m not sure I understand the question.



Armand: I think they misunderstood what my directions were. Here’s the basic response to

it. First of all the forum sites that I told you about were SitePoint.com and

DigitalPoint.com and using the forums there to use a contest to design your site.

Now, do I recommend using those services they have there where you can basically

put up a contest? Absolutely that’s the way Design Outpost works that’s the way

the contest section on Site Point works as well as Digital Point works as well also.



So do I recommend it? Yes absolutely I mean you can get some great designers like

that and I would suggest you go back and listen to the last call and by listening to

the last call you’ll definitely be able to pull in a little bit more as far as what we

talked about on the last call and how to use those two services.



Bret: I’m going to read this next question verbatim. I am assuming that the website

design for Internet marketing one-page mini sites is to have a template for the page

essentially with a header and how the page is limited. Orders, rounded corners,

outline creating a shadow effect, etc is that correct?



Armand: Not necessarily I mean it doesn’t have to have the whole design is a very basic and

simple design. Whether you have rounded corners or whether you have a shadow

in the background is irrelevant. It could be something with just a simple table in the

middle of the page, but the main focus of what the person did gather from this is

that it’s a simple straight to the point website design and the answer is yes.



Remember, graphics can change the whole look and feel of the site meaning if you

have a great design header graphic it can set your site apart from anything else. For

example, if you look at many of my sites you’ll see that I use the same header

graphic its nothing complicated its nothing difficult, but its enough with some

shading and its enough with some beveling to make it look different, to give it a

more high end look and feel without really competing with my headline design and

that’s the important thing to understand about a graphic at the top of your website.



You don’t want to have a bunch of wording at the top on your header graphic. You

don’t want the graphic to compete with your actual headlines on your web page.

The graphic is there for branding purposes only that’s it.



Bret: Would the same be true, is there any difference at all in the design related to a blog

website?





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Armand: No it’s pretty much the same. In fact a blog design is much easier because you can

get a pre-existing theme and have it modified. If you look at the overall layout you

can go to a place like WordPress.net and there are a ton of free blogs for that matter

that are on this particular site and they’re all simple blog designs that are straight to

the point.



They all look good and you find a layout you like and then you can have someone

customize that particular layout that’s a simple way to get started with a blog design

or you could have your own custom blog design like we’ve mentioned on previous

calls. Have someone actually design you one from scratch starting with a graphic

and then have that graphic sliced in order to turn it into a blog and I believe the

service we mentioned was CodeYourDesign.com.



Bret: Now I have a related blogging question just for my own benefit. I finally joined the

21st century and have a blog at sfsblog.com and we basically modeled the look and

feel of our regular site. Where does one go to get that RSS feed or where people

can sign up for an RSS feed on your blog?



Armand: It’s actually already built into your blog.



Bret: It is?



Armand: Yes, in fact let me just pull up your blog, ww.sfsblog.com. On the right hand side it

said valid html/xhtml and xfn, xhtml friend’s network; actually they don’t have it on

your site. Oh there it is entries at the very bottom of the page, RSS that’s your RSS

feed. What I would do is take the link to that and make a bigger graphic and put

that up towards the upper right hand corner of your website then you should be

good.



Bret: One final question, do you have any step-by-step parameters you’d recommend for

creating a website in Front Page?



Armand: I personally use Front Page that’s my editor and that’s how I make all my websites.

As far as, is there a simple step-by-step, no there’s not a simple step-by-step

mechanism, but what you can do is, if you’re dead set on creating the website

yourself which I don’t recommend I would actually tell you to start off with a

template of some sort first and then use Front Page in order to edit that template

that’s the easiest way for you to get started.



On a template usually they have some way to edit that template. One of the places

you can go for a template is …



Segment Two



Armand: Here it is its oswd.org and what this is, is a site called open source web design.

There are 2,080 free website designs here and what you do is simply search through

the various web designs for something you like or you think you could at least



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modify and by going through here you download the files and you can open it up in

something as simple as Front Page and start making your edits.



It’s really that fast that quick and that simple. For example many of these things

follow a standard website design meaning there might be multiple columns. It’s a

matter of just merging some of those columns together to get your one big table

underneath the main header graphic its just playing around with it. Here’s the great

thing, if you copy a design what you want to do is take that design itself, copy the

entire folder let’s say and by copying the entire folder what you’ll be able to do is

take the design, copy it and this way if you make a change to it you can always go

back to the original design so you can’t really mess it up too much.



The way you learn and again it sounds like this person wants to learn how to edit or

create their own website. The way you learn how to do that is by simply going

ahead and practicing on a template or if I find a site that I like I’ll hit view source

and I’ll look to see how they did it. Website design isn’t that complicated.



Another great tutorial or a place if you want to learn how to design a website you

can look for Front Page tutorials if that’s your favorite editor. Another editor you

can use is Dream Weaver and you can look through Dream Weaver tutorials. They

are similar in most cases. People say Dream Weaver has a cleaner code than Front

Page but it doesn’t matter that much, it really makes no difference.



What you want to do is look at both of those. You can look at tutorials in both of

them and they’ll show you how to use it. If you actually want to know how to write

html code you can go to this website and it’s probably the most popular website to

learn from to do most technical things on the Internet. It’s called w3schools.com

and here you can learn various things to do whether it is html, php or a number of

different things.



It has some simple tutorials that will walk you through that show you how it works

and all these tutorials are free on this website. It’s a very popular site. Many

people come here to learn many different things. For example under html they have

100 different examples that you can do with html that they walk you through step-

by-step and you can learn it right online it’s very quick. They encourage you to edit

and change as you go.



So you can actually teach yourself html very quickly. It’s not complicated really.

Anyone can learn html in probably about an hour once they understand it. You can

start coding your own website even without an editor. I don’t recommend that

because I find an editor like Front Page or Dream Weaver you can simply start

typing and if you use something as simple as Microsoft Word before than you can

actually go ahead and start making a website right away.



Another editor that you can use that’s available is NVU.com and it’s a free html

editor. It’s like a Front Page. It’s like a Dream Weaver but its free and you can

download it for free right now. You can go to the website NVU.com and download



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it. You can start using it immediately. It’s fairly simple to use and you can simply

start using it today.



Bret: Armand I have a request to please repeat the URL for the web templates.



Armand: Its oswd.org and that’s for the templates. The other website I just recommended a

moment ago was w3schools.com and then this website we’re currently on is

NVU.com and that’s a free html editor you can use. Another free html editor is if

you go and download the Netscape browser, just go to Netscape.com and download

the Netscape browser you’ll be able to use Netscape’s built in editor.



In the full Netscape browser, not Firefox, but the actual Netscape browser they have

a website editor built into it, it’s free and it’s actually fairly good. I’ve used it many

times, in fact many times when I’ve spoken at seminars I’ve actually gone ahead

and used that browser because it was free to create a web page within a couple

minutes live on the fly because it was free and I feel anyone can make a website

within just a couple minutes.



Let’s look at this. What we’re doing is we’re basically taking a website and we’re

actually making a page and all it is, is just a simple table in the middle of the page.

So what we’re doing is, for example, this is how fast you can make a web page.

I’m starting from scratch with a blank screen up in front of me and I just opened up

my Front Page and all I’m going to do is hit insert table and I’m going to make a

one cell table and I’m going to make sure the pixel width as we mentioned, the max

we said we wanted on a website is about 760.



So let’s just make this 750 and I’m going to put a padding inside it of 20 to make

sure we have enough width around the edges and again this is very simplistic I’m

not taking into account graphics or anything else. Now what I’m going to do is

make sure the border around this table is a darker gray and the background of the

table I’m going to make it white and I’m going to click okay.



Now I have my basic table and now I can click my page properties and I’m going to

make the background of my table light gray to make it easy. I’m going to make this

a light gray like on many of my websites, so I click okay and now the only thing

I’m missing on this is actually some text. Remember that website we went to a

minute ago NVU.com I’m going to take some text from that page so you guys know

I didn’t preplan this.



I’m going to take some text off the page and I’m going to copy it here. I’m going to

copy that text and put it into here and then I’m going to make sure my text as I have

mentioned as always should be Arial and at 10 point. I’m going to make the first

line of it into a headline so I’m going to take the headline and make that in Tahoma

at a 16 point font, bold and we’re going to center it to make it look like a headline

and then I’m going to save this to my desktop as testsite.html and I’m going to

upload this to my own website which is ArmandMorin.com.





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I’m going to log in via ftp to ArmandMorin.com and I’m going to find this to my

left and I have testsite.html, I upload it and let’s see if it worked. So if I go to

www.ArmandMorin.com/testsite.html and sure enough there’s our website. Let me

give you a hint here. What I did was in two minutes I just made a simple template

that you can put a sales letter in the middle of right now, replace my headline with

your headline and put your words where my words were.



So pull this up on your browser hit file, save as and there’s a simple template.

Nothing major, nothing crazy by far but its simple enough to get you started in the

right direction to at least put a website in. Again it took me all of what, two minutes

and that’s because I was talking most of the time. It’s not complicated to do. You

guys are all capable of doing this and editing it if you want to.



Is it best worth your time? To do something simple it is worth your time to be able

to go in and edit and do things of that nature, but if it’s a major website design then

that’s not worth your time I mean if you really want to learn it that’s one thing but

don’t let that hold you up in the process. If I told all of you hey you should all learn

how to edit or work with html. Well, now what I did is I just gave you an excuse to

not get started with your project and you will then take the time and think I can’t

launch my project yet because I’m still learning html.



Don’t use that as an excuse. Don’t use that as a crutch. Just get the job done. Get

someone else to do it before you get started and that’s the best way you can do it

and that’s the way you can get started. At least if you want to do something, play

around with something yourself download this template, download NVU.com and

open it up and you can play around with it, start typing and you could make a

simple website tonight if you wanted to.



Do you have any other questions Bret?



Bret: That concludes the introductory Q&A session this evening Armand.



Armand: That concludes the introductory Q&A session. Well, what we’re going to do

tonight on this call and again this is call number 13; tonight we’re going to talk

about two things.



We’re going to talk about traffic and we’re going to talk about search engine

optimization. Traffic is very critical to your business. Search engine optimization

is a method that we use in order to generate traffic and it’s a possible method but

believe it or not it is not a mandatory method and you’ll see what I mean as we talk

about traffic and getting traffic to your site.



Let’s start off with this itself, traffic, again the importance of traffic is very simply

this. If you don’t have traffic coming to your website you don’t have a business,

bottom line. If you don’t have traffic coming to your website you don’t have a

business. You could have the greatest copy in the world but again if no one knows





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about it it’s not going to do you a single bit of good. So traffic, the art of getting

traffic is very key.



Remember, I did not say the art of search engine optimization. I do believe you

should take search engine optimization into account in some aspects of your

business and you should do some basic things for search engine optimization.

There are some things I will teach and show you that are straight to the point and

will generate you traffic via standard search engines themselves. If you follow

these other methods in conjunction with that you’re guaranteed to get traffic.

Everything has to work synergistically together in your whole marketing campaign

and traffic itself is going to be one of the key points.



So let’s start off with some basic traffic methods. Some of these methods we’ve

previously talked about but we’re going to go over them again in order to make it

very easy for you to understand and to keep everything in one place for you. If you

just want to listen to this over again and when we talk just about traffic, so let’s get

started in that direction.



The first thing when we look at traffic is you have to define what it is. Traffic is

just any visitor that we can get to our website that’s what traffic is defined as. That

can be from search engine optimization, from article placement, from joint ventures,

from affiliate programs, from viral eBooks, from viral videos, it could be from

resell right products and we’ll talk about that as we go along. That could be from

resell right software, we’ll talk about that as well and any other method that’s

designed to get traffic.



It’s also your basic advertising such as Google AdWords, pay-per-click and other

places as well. Pay-per-click is key in order to generate traffic to your sites,

probably the quickest and fastest way in order to generate traffic coming to any

website. You can literally start getting traffic within 15-20 minutes in many cases.

So we need to focus in on the types of traffic and how to generate that traffic in.



There are always going to be variations to these methods I’m talking about

meaning, once you understand the basics of these methods then you can implement

them in many different ways. For example number one let’s just get right into it,

article submission and article creation. Article submission and article creation

there’s a whole new method and we’ll talk about this a little bit but the basic

concept of article submission and article optimization is very simple.



We take an article that (a) either we write or have someone write for us and we

submit them to different article submission services who in turn submit them to 300

to 1,000 different places and by submitting them to these various places they

include them in their Ezines, their directories, in their article directories specifically

and people see these articles and then they from these other places take those

articles and essentially repeat the process.







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Use them in their article directories use them in their newsletters and such and that’s

the basics of this. Let’s get down to a little bit more specifics on this particular

concept. We have talked about article submission in two distinct places and there

are many other places you can use but let’s just talk about two of them. The first

one is ArticleMarketer.com. We look at this site; we can get an account at this

specific place.



The way it works is you simply go there and place an order. Depending on the

amount you pay is going to determine how much you’re going to be charged but its

going to range from just a few dollars ($20 a month) to a couple hundred ($300) for

their so-called lifetime submission which is a very good deal. So depending on

your level and what you can afford will determine what you purchase there, but

what they do is they submit your article to several directories.



Again it’s very easy to use the service. I could use various software. Now the

software is very good that many people have; Jason Potash has a software out there.

Many other people have software that submits your articles to the various

directories and once you buy the software you never have to pay again that’s an

advantage.



There’s also a disadvantage. The disadvantage is that you have to go through and

set up the software. You have to sign up for all the various services in many cases

and that takes time and that’s where people stop because they don’t take the time to

go to the different places and put in the information even though the software

requires you to do it only once people don’t do it. That’s why I recommend the

quickest, easiest and fastest way.



If I have an article right now I can go to this website, submit my article and it’ll be

submitted very quickly to all the various article directories and what not that they

have in their network. The question some of you may be asking is where do they

submit them to? First of all you can see on the website they have their category list

as far as what type of categories they accept and then you can see their distribution

list.



You can go here and look at all the different places they recommend and by looking

at these different places you can see very quickly there is no way you would ever

want to submit these things to these places yourself because of how many different

places they actually have. I don’t know the exact number here. They may say it

somewhere on the website but it’s a lot of different places that you can get your

articles submitted to.



So it’s very receptive in generating traffic to your websites so this is key for you.

Now once you have the article there are a couple elements that you need to

understand. Number one what’s going to get ranked in the search engines and what

is going to get ranked in the search engines nine out of ten times is going to be the

subject line of the article.





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Think of the words that a person would type into a search engine in order to find

your site, your product or information about you. We want to work those main

keywords into our subject line somehow. Why is that? Its because if you go to

Google and type in your main keywords that article should come up in some way

shape or form and if that article comes up multiple times guess what? At the end of

the article is usually a little Johnson box that has a link back to your website

anyway, so you’re still getting credit for that information and that’s making your

name known.



Now another aspect, another point in doing this is that, if you use

ArticleMarker.com and another service we use for example

SubmitYourArticle.com.



Segment Three



Armand: Go to SubmitYourArticle.com, singular, you’ll find out that, well if you submit to

both places what you want to do is use a different subject line even though it’s the

same article use a different subject line for both places. Why is that? Because we

don’t want the same subject lines all over the Internet we want to be able to go

ahead and use a different subject line so this is going to get us the maximum amount

of traffic.



For example, if we submit to one that says making money with seminars is easy

that’s the title, obviously my main keyword is seminars. The second one I’m going

to rework, even though it may be the same article I’m going to rework that subject

line at least and this way I could occupy one, two or three different places in the

search engines by using the exact same article and it may be something as simple as

Seminar Marketing Can Be Simple and Profitable. Although I’m saying the same

thing it could be the subject of my second article.



So that’s another way to submit your articles. Now you have to have a definitive

call to action on your articles and again a very definitive call to action. Look at

some of the different ways and this just amazes me at what people do and here’s a

great way to look at what people do when they submit their articles.



If you go to EzineArticles.com which is definitely a place you should be submitting

your articles to because they do get a lot of traffic, if you look at their Alexa ranking

currently right now its 453, so again it’s a great place to submit your articles

because they do get a lot of traffic.



So if you look at EzineArticles.com and let’s just pick an article I’m just going to

pick the first one here, now the first one that’s on the page I see and if I scroll down

to the bottom of the page to the person who wrote this particular article it gives the

person’s name. This person is a former acne sufferer who has bid good riddance to

acne forever. Visit his website to receive his free digital book and audio reports

now.





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That’s great and it gives his website there. Let’s make it a little bit more definitive.

Could they have made that sound a little better? His free digital book and audio

report on what? It eluded to the book and audio report was on getting rid of acne

but it didn’t actually say it, so just say get your free report on how to get rid of acne

in seven days right now or for a limited time this person is giving away a free report

on how to get rid of acne in seven days, click the link now.



Look at it as a call to action don’t just look at it as, well here’s my little tag line.

Let me give you another example. Let’s go to another person on this particular

website because this is what you don’t want to do in some cases or we want to

modify what they’re doing, some of these could be very good let’s take a look.



The author has a life long interest in self-knowledge and self-improvement, for

more information about personology and a free face reading, again I don’t know

what this topic is about and a free face reading eBook visit self-improvement,

you’re welcome to use this article and providing the active link within the signature

box is included.



Again it’s putting the copyright and two things I liked about this is it gave the

copyright of the author down at the bottom of the article which is neat. It also gave

directions. You’re welcome to use this article providing the active link within the

signature link is included. I like that it’s very specific, but I didn’t like what they

said about coming to their website. For more information, again that’s a dead give

away right there to the wrong thing you should do. For more information about

personology and a free face reading eBook again give it a title.



Everyone wants a title give it to them. They want to know what they’re going to.

Give them a reason to come to your website. We’re talking about two sentences

roughly then it gives their website address as well.



Let’s look at one more. Here’s one called Cold Calling Techniques and How to

Increase Sales. This person sounds like a sales person so let’s see if they did a good

job at selling at the end of their article. This is actually much, much better. They

have a much deeper signature line. If you want to quit wasting time cold calling

and start bringing in hot targeted leads then visit my site at and then they gave their

domain name.



Right now for free information on how to market yourself and your products or

services and stop using cold calling techniques. It says the owner of

blahblahblah.com is dedicated to providing the real fact about cold calling and new

marketing methods for sales professionals. This article may be reprinted as long as

the article is left unchanged and the links stay active that’s great. Do you see how

that one read much better?



This person actually sold me on coming to the site. If you want to quit wasting time

cold calling and start bringing in hot targeted leads then visit. What they did is a





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headline technique. If you want to do this then do this. If you want this then do

this, so they sold it much more in this particular website.



Bret, you have a couple questions?



Bret: Could you submit an article or a press release with an affiliate link in the Johnson or

resource box?



Armand: My initial reaction would be, don’t do it. What I would do is buy a domain name

and then redirect it. I don’t know if they’d necessarily reject it but I can tell you

this it will look a lot better if you simply buy a domain name and then redirect that

domain name.



Bret: I just put five articles up on EzineArticles.com last week. Based on what you were

just saying I need to go in and rework the resource box at the end. If you update a

resource box on these sites does it automatically update it in all of your articles?



Armand: Yes. If it’s using the same resource box and it’s under the same account name I

would imagine so. Does that make sense?



Bret: Makes sense. On the article marketer site, just a little FYI from that, it’s a lot more

challenging to work with than the other sites. They’re very picky on how they will

accept articles and you’ll typically find that they’ll pounce it back to you three or

four times with little nit picky things they want changed before they will actually

release it to their list.



Armand: Basically though, once you understand how they want it its pretty simple at that

point isn’t it?



Bret: It’s fairly straight forward. The main thing is to make sure you’re using Notepad or

Word-pad or something, a basic text editor because they get messed up with

characters they can’t interpret. If you do it as a Word document and try to put it in

there it will create issues.



Armand: Right and that’s the same thing I was talking about with the html issues earlier. Its

easier to copy from text to text than it is from a Word document. Word is a great

tool by the way. It’s a great product. I love it and it has certainly made millions of

people’s lives easier but it has its downfalls when you’re going to copy it because it

has its own unique coding that, if placed into a text document it doesn’t recognize

it.



So you need to be very careful about that or, if you’re going to write your article in

Word hit file save as and then select text document and then go back and check it to

make sure that the characters, as Bret is talking about right now, are correct. If they

require certain links as far as your articles width wise then make sure you simply

provide it to them in that format.





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My main point, when you are submitting your articles is sell it at the end; don’t sell

it in the article, because people don’t want to see that. They want content. Think of

it as content, content, content and then earn the right in order to place your Johnson

box at the bottom in order for them to get more information from you. Make them

want it so bad in your article and again the article we’re talking 300-500 words

roughly and then having a maximum of four to five sentences at the end talking

about why they should come to your website and pick up something.



So give away something, send them to a specific page on your website or a specific

domain that’s redirected. For example, if I was going to do and this is one of the

projects I’m currently working on, if I can only finish it and that is I want to have a

website on my main domain. For example ArmandMorin.com it’ll be like

ArmandMorin.com/newsletter and now I could write articles and put at the bottom

of that come to ArmandMorin.com/newsletter and receive a 52-week digital

newsletter on blah, blah and blah.



So I would sell it in there and I’m just giving you the highlights of it, but if you go

to ArmandMorin.com/newsletter.html that doesn’t look very good. If you go to

ArmandMorinNewsletter.com that makes a lot more sense and it looks neater and

tighter than it is with an extension and everything else, even though people are just

clicking on it and they’re not actually going to copy it.



Some places may be copying it but for the most part they’re just going to click on

the link it still looks easier and it looks better. For example, in that particular case

maybe I would want to own a domain like FreeNewsletter.com. I mean that would

be ideal I wish I did own that website but I don’t, but I could come up with some

deviation of that word that would be the perfect domain.



This is how I think of domains. When I think of domains I’m looking at what’s the

most obvious domain that I would want and then I would check and see if that’s

available. If that’s not available well then what’s a variation of that that I could

think of that would sound just as good and would work in that particular scenario?

FreeNewsletter.com would be perfect. I could put ArmandMorinFreeLetter or

ArmandFreeNewsletter or TheFreeNewsletter or something of that nature if that’s

what I was doing and that would be very appropriate to do.



That just makes sense and that’s driving traffic to that particular page. I would

again send it to a domain that redirects to whatever pages I wanted to, for example

in that particular case it would be /newsletter and then it would be an Opt-in box

again for them to claim a free report and now I would be generating leads off all the

articles that I’m putting out there in that particular way.



If I’m sending them to my website and I don’t have a problem sending people to my

website from an article because every one of my websites uses a forced Opt-in

page. Do you see how easy that is now because I have a forced Opt-in page on

every one of my websites I can put the name of any one of my websites at the





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bottom of an article? By putting any one of my articles it’s easy for me to collect

addresses from that particular website.



Here’s another thing that I urge you to do because I like to track. I like to know

where my traffic is coming from. I like to know the results that I’m getting. If I’m

using the domain name and I’m redirecting via the domain name I can put a

tracking link to let me know that I’m getting this much traffic, I submitted to these

article sites and this is all the traffic, these are all the Opt-ins that I’m getting from

that link from my article submissions.



I could then tell you exactly how many I’m getting as a result of my article

marketing and now I know how effective it is. Now I can say okay I’m getting this

much traffic, I’m generating this many leads, and I can also track down the number

of sales that I’m getting from that as well and that is extremely important as well.



So again the key is in the bottom, but it starts off with two things, number one when

you’re submitting to the various article places is your subject line, now this

particular one I happen to be looking at is actually very well laid out and here’s

what I’m referring to. What they did is, in their subject line let’s look at their

subject line their subject line is Cold Calling Techniques that’s the first part. Then

they have a dash and then they put How to Increase Sales.



This is brilliant really because Cold Calling Techniques, How to Increase Sales and

what they’re doing is they’re trying to optimize this particular article for those

particular wordings. They use the words Cold Calling Techniques several times in

the article which is certainly very appropriate and also helps to increase search

engine optimization for that individual article which is very important as well.



This way they’re driving traffic to this site and because this site is ranked very well

inside Google, Yahoo and MSN it’s getting a lot of traffic. This site is more likely

to generate higher in the search engines and we could then get this article ranked

inside the search engines and then when people search on this they come to the

article first. It’s more of a two-step process and by being a two-step process you’re

going to be able to find out that people will go to that website, click on your link

and then come to your website.



So it’s a way to get into the search engines without having your main site in the

search engines if you will and that’s very powerful in order to make this whole

process work better for you as far as the idea and the object of using articles, but

again articles are just one technique in order to generate traffic.



Let’s go on, what’s another traffic generating technique? One technique we talked

about earlier was the use of blogs and how blogs can actually generate traffic for us

back to our website and there are a couple different techniques specifically on

blogs. We’re not going to talk about blogging but we’re going to talk about traffic

from blogs themselves.





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So let’s assume that we’ve done what we should be doing in the blogs as we talked

about earlier in the call when we talked about blogs. Now, as our next step, how do

we get the person from our blog to our website? Here’s how we do that. The way

we do that is through the use of advertising on our own blogs. Many people use

blogs and they have advertisements on them, but they usually advertise in

something like Google Adsense or one of the various other advertising mechanisms

that are out there on the Internet, different companies.



Why not just advertise your own products if you have other products? The problem

is that most successful bloggers actually that’s what they do is they just blog they

don’t have any other products in many cases they’re not direct sales, we are. So

what should we be doing? We should be advertising our own products it only

makes sense. These people are most likely to be interested in your products

because they’re interested in your content that you’re writing.



The way you do that number one through a simple plug-in and the plug-in itself is

called Mighty Adsense. It’s a Word Press plug-in that you can use. You can plug it

in its called Might Adsense and we talked about it briefly in a previous call but

Might Adsense is the name of the plug-in and when you use this plug-in you can

use it for Adsense meaning there are 10 different places that you can place Adsense

ads in it and if you put the ads in all the different places it will basically cover your

whole blog in Adsense with as much as you possibly can.



The method that you used with that is, instead of placing your Adsense code in

these 10 different places you simply place the banners or advertisements for your

product. Now, let me be very specific here. First of all you can put any html in that

area and it will show up in the various places automatically without you have to edit

manually your blog. There are 10 different boxes basically if you want to look at it

this way where you can place text in.



You can open up something like Front Page or NVU like we talked about earlier or

Dream Weaver and simply create an ad and if you created a table for example, let’s

say I wanted an ad that was going to be 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels high that’s

the same size as a banner, so what I would do is I would go into my html editor and

I would make a table that high.



For example here’s the table, I go in the pixels to 468 wide, I want to make the

height 60 pixels high and I’m going to use that as an example, but I want the

background color red then I would click okay and it would make me an html table

with that size. That’s like a banner ad but I could simply type inside that table

anything I want. A classic example, an ad, many people are doing this same format

and just typing their ad the way they want it to look and then taking a screen capture

of that particular page and using that as their banner ad in Google.



Let me see if I can find a website here real quick that has something very similar

because this person usually does it in one place or another.





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Segment Four



Armand: I can’t find any off the top of my head right now but many places that have a big

block ad will display more of a text ad, just a big text ad on the page. Not a lot of

words, we’re talking about one great big sentence and then a couple lines

underneath it. Think of it like a Google Adsense ad and that’s how you want it laid

out except you’re going to put it inside a table that’s it that’s the only difference on

it.



You could center it inside that table and you can do the same thing for any size that

you want whether it is 125 x 125, 120 x 600 pixels high and then you can place it in

the various places using Might Adsense and that will automatically place your ads

for you. Now, using this method I’m talking about right now by simply going in

and using an html editor and making your ad using it with this text it’s very easy

now for anyone to put an ad any place on their blog and you’re putting an ad for

your own website.



Another method you can use, we’ll get a little bit more complicated but not much is

just go to 20DollarBanners.com and order some banners for your own products or

services.



Bret, you have a bunch of questions is that correct?



Bret: We have a number of questions on articles still Armand. I’m sorry to distract you

but before we get too deep into the blogs we have discriminated listeners who want

to know.



On the Cold Calling Techniques article you were looking at, at the bottom of the

article it indicates how many times it was viewed. Do you happen to know how

often that is updated on these sites?



Armand: On that particular site I think those are just as they come in. I’m not sure on Ezine

Articles itself; I have no idea quite honestly.



Bret: That number should be significantly up if you go look at it again because of all the

listeners who went and looked at it while you were talking about it.



Armand: It says from today, Tuesday, February 13, 2007 so I would assume this is a new

article that was just put up that would be my idea. The article was submitted on

February…



Bret: If you have a sales letter can you track all the visits to that particular page? Does it

know the IP the visitor came from? This may be a tracking question we want to

defer until later on.



Armand: The answer is quite simple. The answer is yes it will track all the different IPs that

it came from, but will it track down to the specific website? It will track the



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referrers from a specific website and the answer is yes. For example, I could tell

you how many visitors I’ve received from EzineArticles.com because my referrers

will show me exactly where the person was before they came to my website so I can

see the site responsible for sending me the traffic.



So yes we could look at it there but what’s easier is to simply go to a place where, if

you use 1ShoppingCart, you could use a tracker, again using a domain and then

using a redirect from that domain through a tracking link basically it will just click

off. You’ve got four, five, six or seven leads and it will count it that way so we can

see exactly how much traffic we’re getting from that particular website or that

particular article for that matter.



Bret: If your article is picked up by somebody else for use in their Ezine or on their

website or whatever how do you know about that usage and how do you track

things back to that particular specific user?



Armand: You can’t. All you can track is from that URL that we used, so for example for that

particular article, every place we submitted an article from we know that we’re

getting this traffic from our article submission and that’s all that we know. If that

was picked up by 10,000 other sites it doesn’t matter and if we had five articles we

would have five different tracking links, therefore what we would be able to see is

which article out of those five was the most popular.



That’s helps us later on in writing a new article because now with the new article

we write we can then go back and say this topic didn’t do well because not many

people picked that up, but this one went ballistic and look how popular it was so

that’s how you would do it.



Bret: Now the tracking links are only in the resource box correct?



Armand: That’s correct. I shouldn’t say the tracking is only in the resource box but you can

only put a domain name in the resource box. If the domain name is active in the

article itself it wouldn’t be active. Most places don’t allow that.



Bret: Do you try to capture names on a redirect page?



Armand: Yes, absolutely. See here’s when I’m referring to a redirect and let me be more

specific on this. When a person comes from the article, they click the article it hits

a redirect its redirected through a tracking link and that tracking link ultimately

redirects them again to, essentially an Opt-in page and at that point we are

collecting the names and email addresses and we’re bribing them with some sort of

free report, an audio or whatever.



Bret: I have a couple questions getting into the blog area that you’ve just begun

discussing. What does the person see when they click on the Adsense ad on the

blog?





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Armand: Well I’m not recommending you use Adsense that’s my point. There are two ways

I could answer this question and I’ll answer it both ways. First of all if you thought

I was referring to using Adsense on your blogs I’m telling you not to use Adsense.

I’m telling you its going to be more profitable if you advertise your own products

on your blog.



So again if you’re talking about us designing our own Adsense type looking ad, if

they clicked on that ad they’d be directed to one of our sales letters somewhere on

another site, hopefully because another site would be our Opt-in page and our sales

letter. Again we always want to send them through an Opt-in page then to the sales

letter that’s the concept that’s how we do it. Do you have any other questions?



Bret: If you need an example of a banner ad on a blog I have a URL I’m going to text

you, so use it if appropriate.



Armand: I’ll take a look at it.



Bret: Those are all the questions right now Armand.



Armand: Let’s get back to this. Let’s look at the fact of advertising again, the concept on the

blogs, what I was referring to essentially is advertising on your own blog. Here’s

the basic simplicity of this all. If you have your banners on your own blog,

meaning advertising your own products/services then its going to make it easier for

you to get sales from it because people are interested in you and what you’re saying,

so chances are the likelihood is they’ll also be interested in the products you’re

offering as well that are tightly woven into your blog.



So advertising on your blog is key, so how do we do that? We use banner

advertising. The technique is very simple we use a plug-in called Mighty Adsense.

It’s a Word Press plug-in that’s free. If you type in the words Mighty Adsense

plug-in into Google to be specific you will find that very easily. You simply upload

that into your content directory inside your plug-ins folder, activate it and then

when you log into your admin section in Word Press under the options there will be

a section called Mighty Adsense.



What you do is simply place the location of your banner ad and it automatically

inserts the banners into your blog at various areas and what I did, here’s how I

learned how to use it. I didn’t read any instructions I just placed the banner in every

single one of those boxes and all 10 areas to see where they came up on my blog

and then I said I’ll get rid of the one’s I like and I’ll keep the ones I like and that’s

one method to advertising your blogs.



Number two, how else can we advertise on our blogs and not make it so obvious

each and every time. Well at the end of your blog if you post to your blog, again

many people will post to their blog like they’re writing an article. At the end of that

article put an advertisement, put a Johnson box, just like you did for your article site





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well put a Johnson box and send them to another website in order to get more

information, offer a free report or something of that nature as well.



So at the end of each one of your posts, in fact you can even preprogram that into

your Word Press blog. You probably won’t want to do this yourself because you

have to deal with all this coding but you could have someone else code it into your

Word Press blog so every time you post something it automatically adds this

message at the bottom of every single one of your posts, very easy and that could be

another method that you advertise to your blogs.



On the right hand side or left hand side of your blog there’s usually what’s called a

blog roll and that’s just a listing of sites and other blogs that you like. Personally on

my blog I have a listing of all my products on the right hand side of my blog, why?

Because I generate traffic from those and people come to my website and therefore

I get sales as a result of people visiting my blog, people may see a product they’ve

never seen before and therefore they click on it, they like it and they order it.



That’s another way you can generate traffic is just simply by directing people to it

and here’s the key part, here’s what you have to understand. Every single one of

my sites I have an Opt-in box, a forced Opt-in page on the front end of every single

one of my products so they can never see a sales letter without giving me their name

and email address. So every one of my sites are working for me to build my list at

the same time that’s why I’m so into and for Opt-in pages on an actual website

because they work.



They work and they work fantastic and its an easy way for you to build a list,

especially if you don’t have one, so again another way for you to build your list in

that particular method. Another way for blogs, what’s another way you can

advertise on your blogs or use a blog to drive traffic is to write a review. Write a

review on your own product or number two you can run a contest.



This is something very few people use but it’s a viral way in order to get people to

generate traffic to your blog. Run a contest, you know I’m thinking of renaming

my product for example, we’re going to run a contest and whoever’s name that we

choose for the naming of my new product you are going to get a copy of my free

product and this encourages people to comment and at the same time for them to

properly rename your product what do you have to do?



Give a link in order to go to your product that’s another way. You could run

various contests like that, design names for the product, header graphics for a

product, e-cover boxes for a product, run designs like that and you actually get

people entering on your blog which is another method that you can use in order to

do this. This is something people use to drive traffic periodically to their blogs.

I’ve seen it done many different times.



Michel Fortin and I ran a contest. It was a contest to raise money for breast cancer

and what happened was Michel shaved his head and I shaved my goatee. I had this



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whole series of pictures on my blog of me shaving my goatee and what I looked like

and I had a bunch of comments on it. Michel posted to his blog about him shaving

his head and he got a bunch of comments, so we made a $1,000 bet and whoever

had the most the other person would have to donate $1,000 to the breast cancer

organization.



What happened was, we both ended up donating $1,000 so it worked out really well

but we both got a lot of traffic to our blog, so we didn’t make money per se on it but

we got traffic by combining two different websites together like that and we saw a

huge spike in traffic as a result of doing that. That was something that we both

coordinated together and it was kind of by accident and us kind of messing around

but in the end it was a great technique in order to drive traffic to each one of our

blogs.



I shared a lot of my visitors with him and he shared a lot of his visitors with me so

that worked in both our cases, but it was more viral because we had pictures to

show of him with his head shaved and me with my goatee shaved. So again those

are techniques that you can use, something shocking, some kind of contest with

another blog as a co-contest and you can do it that way.



Another technique for example are these tagging techniques that many people have

going around now. I play around with these things, for example, Michel Fortin got

me again today speaking of the man himself. He wrote something on his website

and it was one of these games where you get tagged and you have to tag 10 other

people about it. So we went ahead and I wrote the five things of what people don’t

know about me and that was a comment to my blog and then I tagged five other

people and then they went on and they tagged a bunch of other people and so on

and so on.



One of the reasons to do that is because everyone involved actually increases the

traffic to their blogs so that’s why I do it I don’t do it because I like writing about

that stuff I do it because it’s a method to generate traffic, it’s a legitimate traffic

building method, so that’s another way to generate traffic with your blog.



Reviews, review your own products. Write consumer interest stories on your blog

about a particular product and how it helped somebody that’s content for your blog

and really what its doing is taking a testimonial, expanding upon it and using it as a

blog post and telling people about that particular product and what it did for this

person, what their comments were and if you can get an audio from that person and

post it to your blog that’s another great way in order to do it.



Again reviews, specifically reviews of your own products simply saying free

newsletter and typing a blog about why you’re giving away this free report or why

you’re giving away this free CD or whatever it may be. For example, one of the

methods this is one of the things this is actually a true story, tonight after this call

what I’m going to be doing is sending out an email on a class that I’m promoting

and that’s going to be a video that I send out.



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What am I going to do with the video? I’m going to post it to my blog, why?

Because its easy and simple for me to do and I know I get several hundred people a

day coming to that particular blog and I know I’ll be able to pick up sales from that

very easily by simply posting that and other people will refer people to it because

it’s a video, its of interest to my blog as well and its selling a high end product as

well.



So that’s another method you can use in order to create that as well. So there are

various methods you can use specifically just for a blog in order to generate traffic,

but what we’re going to do right now is we’re taking a five minute break. We’re

about halfway through the call this evening. Its 10:23 eastern time so what we’re

going to do is take a break and then come back at 10:28 and we’ll continue on

generating traffic and how you can get traffic to your various websites and we’ll go

on from there.



We are back and we’re going to continue on and the first question before we

continue on this evening is, Bret do you have any questions so far?



Bret: I do have some more questions that have come in. This question is not specific

about tonight’s topic but it’s a quick answer for you so we’ll sneak it in. Do you

ever use online chat in any way or for any purpose?



Armand: Yes, when I’m doing these teleseminars. The only reason I use online chat is if I’m

communicating with someone and we’re doing a teleseminar series like this. Bret

and I are on Instant Messenger and he can interrupt me while I’m doing it. I know

many people Perry Marshall, Yanik Silver have been testing with different services

that allow you to place a call to order a product or service once they, when they’re

on your site they can call a number for chat with a person live like live call or live

messenger and things of that nature where you could do that.



They have tested that and on a higher end product I can understand the use of it but

on the lower end product depending on your setup, depending on how you have

your customer service people set up that may be an option for you, but that requires

a live person to be on the other end of it, so personally I haven’t set up my business

like that. On a higher end product its worth considering and having a person for

that period of time that you’re doing that promotion, in my particular case would it

be advantageous for me to have a person monitoring that for a seminar?



It’s something we thought about for quite some time and it’s something I would

definitely consider for a high end ticket like a $2,000+ product, but for a low end,

$97 product I don’t know. I personally haven’t used it. I haven’t personally had

anybody do it, so again I would test it out and you can see for yourself how well

that would work for you.



Bret: If you have a blog Armand and are doing reviews of your own products do you do

this incognito or does the reader know the blog owner is related to the product being

reviewed?



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Armand: I would definitely be very blatant about it. If you have your blog set up right they

should know its your product, but I would tell them. It’s not something you want to

do every single time you just want to review your own products periodically and tell

people about it. Tell people what the product is and why you created it and you can

put it in segments just like that. This is what the product is. This is the problem it

solves. This is the benefits of the product and this is why a person should use this

product and here’s a special link to order with a discount specifically for my blog

readers, so I would be very transparent



Segment Five



Bret: When you create a banner ad for your own products that you’re going to place on a

blog how and where is the URL link created? Is it coded when creating the banner

ad?



Armand: Yes, you would have to take the banner and actually place it in an editor like Front

Page and make a link in there using that banner and then copy the code from Front

Page or Dream Weaver and then put it in there. For example, what I did, I signed

myself up for my own affiliate program.



The only benefit to that is that I can track the sales that are coming from my blog

specifically, so if I’m advertising a specific product or service and I can track those

sales from there.



Bret: You run that through a coded link?



Armand: Yes it’s just a standard affiliate link. Let me give you an example and this is one

for everybody right now. I just redesigned my blog so it looks a little bit different

than maybe the last time you’ve been here and I removed some of the advertising

but on the main page you’ll see at least one ad right there. There’s an advertisement

for my E-cover Generator Products.



It’s a little banner it’s a 125 x 125 pixel right there on the main page and if you

hover your mouse over the picture and you look down in your status bar on your

browser you’ll see that its an affiliate link. It happens to be my affiliate link or my

own affiliate program.



Bret: I’m looking at your blog in Firefox and you have to scroll left to right to see the

entire page.



Armand: Yes this is a wider set up and we haven’t actually edited the whole thing yet, so I do

know that.



Bret: Is there any way to capture names from an RSS feed covertly?



Armand: The answer is, not that I know of. Now I would imagine and I don’t know too

much about coding RSS feeds but I would imagine if you could hire someone to go



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in and code your RSS feed to ultimately display, first let me describe what this

person is asking to everybody that’s possibly not following me right now.



For example on my specific blog I have a big orange RSS feed symbol at the top of

my blog and if you clicked on that and added it to an RSS reader you would be able

to view my blog from your RSS reader. That’s fine, but the thing is you have to

look at, if a person subscribes to your feed and I actually subscribe to my own feed

on my Google home page which is what I use to track the various blogs and if I

click on one of the feeds itself I can actually see what it says depending on how my

blog is set-up.



I can see exactly what it says on that actual feed. What you can do and this will

answer this person’s question. You could possibly and I’m not sure on this but I’ll

give you my opinion. I believe you could edit the RSS feed so at the end of the feed

you could probably put an Opt-in box and that’s just a guess, but I think that may be

possible to do knowing how RSS feed is actually submitted.



Ultimately an RSS feed is really only reading a coded or an xhtml code and then

displaying it in a reader so that could and should be possible. I don’t know if it’s

definitely possible, but it’s worth taking a look at and I think that’s a great idea. In

fact, what I would tell you to do is, if you knew how to do that and you made a

plug-in for that I would actually tell you to create it into a product and sell it

because a lot of people would want it.



Bret: I have somebody who would like your opinion on something. They purchased a

large database of radio stations but were told, don’t use it unless you have a call

center set up because its getting a lot of traffic because its drive time radio stations,

100,000+ people listening. It costs over $1,000 just to set up a call center, so what

do you think about trying to direct these people to forced Opt-in pages and decide

with a giveaway to capture them rather than trying to do the old call center routine.



Armand: Absolutely, I mean if you’re doing a radio interview and you were going to get on

these various radio stations, first of all you’re making the assumption that you’re

automatically going to get on these radio stations that’s one assumption, don’t

assume that because of the fact that its not as easy as you think. It’s not just a

matter of hey they want to interview everybody that’s not true you actually have to

work at it a little bit.



The second part is, let’s assume they do interview you live on the air and you’re on

the air doing these radio show interviews, sending them to a website is much of a

standard now days, so by sending them to an Opt-in page and giving away a free

report is the greatest thing you could say on a radio station. Say hey you can find

out more information on my website, in fact we’re giving away a free report right

now that’s titled this and simply go to www.blahblahblah.com to pick it up.



You could say something like, we have a special offer for our readers and here’s

another method that you can use in order to do that. You could program your



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website, basically take the same Opt-in page and with a little bit of coding and I’m

going to use my own website in this example to give you an example. So, for

example if I’m doing an interview with WQDR and again if you go to the website

we set it up specifically for WQDR listeners, if you go to ArmandMorin.com/wqdr

you’re going to see a page there specifically for listeners here and it’s a free report.



Other people have to pay for it but you guys get it absolutely free, so go to

ArmandMorin.com/wqdr and you can pick it up right there. What this script would

do, it’s a simple script I could put any letters instead of WQDR I could put WPDQ,

WABC whatever it may be and it would take those letters after my domain name

and insert it into a specific place in my headline.



It would say something like this, special offer for WQDR listeners, special offers

for WPDQ listeners, special offers for WABC listeners and that would make it very

much appropriate and it would probably increase your conversion quite a bit. It’s a

technique that we had developed specifically for the radio promotion for a good

friend of mine named Michael Lee Austin.



Bret: To be covered more in-depth later.



Armand: Which we’ll definitely cover more in-depth at another time.



Bret: Back to you.



Armand: Let’s continue on here. The number one method that I’ve used for many years in

order to drive traffic to my website is definitely affiliate programs. Having my own

affiliate program to be precise and for various reasons. Number one it’s a bunch of

people working on a commission basis. I don’t have to pay them if they don’t

produce I don’t pay them anything, so if you don’t have an affiliate program set up

right now you need to set it up and the various elements in order to increase your

odds of generating more traffic with your affiliate program are some basic tools.



Here’s the first piece of the puzzle, if you are using a service like Click Bank I

would figure out some kind of script so you could redirect your affiliates. For

example I would have an affiliate sign-up at my particular website that would

ultimately take their information first then give them the codes for their Click Bank

link, but the Click Bank link would not be the standard Click Bank hop link.



Click Bank uses a hop link system which means they have the word hop in it

somewhere for whatever reason but, instead of giving them their standard link like

that I would want a script on my site that would give them a URL, something like

this, and I’m going to use my own website as an example. If my Click Bank ID was

ebookgen then I would use ArmandMorin.com/ebookgen that’s the link that I would

prefer to give my affiliates over hop.clickbank.net/ebookgen.whatever because that

is what a normal Click Bank affiliate link looks like.







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Who’s getting the benefit out of that link? Click Bank is. What benefit are you

getting? Absolutely jack out of the whole deal, why? Its very simple, search

engines; search engines themselves, if people are linking to your website, if they’re

going through Click Bank you’re not getting any search engine benefit from it

whatsoever, but with various scripts that you can purchase and I would look for

Click Bank affiliate scripts that exist out there.



You can have a person sign up for your affiliate program and basically you would

create somewhat of a redirect that would force people from

ArmandMorin.com/ebookgen that would redirect them or go through their affiliate

link and come back to that particular page this way it gains you maximum search

engine rankings from this.



Why is that important? Its because it’s the number of links that people are coming

in from, to your website that are using that affiliate link, which is going to help your

search engine rankings overall. It will actually help your website rank higher in the

search engines and other sites will be linking back to you through that. For

example, if Bret at one of his websites say SpeakerFulfillmentServices.com, if he’s

at his website and he links to one of my products and I’m using Click Bank for

example to start off with.



Again if he’s going through Click Bank that does me no good, but if he links back

to my website using ArmandMorin.com/sfsaffiliate then I’m getting a back link

from his website back to mine and that’s going to count in my search engine

rankings. So if they’re linking to me all over the place that’s why the more

affiliates you have that’s why when you look at these sites they have much higher

search engine ranking as a result of, not what they’re doing necessarily, but its

because of the number of affiliates they have.



Those affiliates in many cases will link back from their blog, and other various

places, so that’s very important to have. Now, if you’re using a service like

1ShoppingCart, it has a built in integration script which is what they refer to it as.

This integration script is installed on your website so it will make your domain

name look something like this ArmandMorin.com/cmd.php?af=123456; the fact is

they’re still linking back to my website using my own domain name which is very

important.



So let’s revert and go back a bit and repeat to make sure everyone understands what

I just said using these two systems.



First of all with Click Bank itself, if you’re using the standard affiliate link through

Click Bank you are not getting any search engine benefit from it. Number two you

also don’t know who your affiliates are, so here’s what I would do. In reality you

could do this with some minor modifications to your existing website and you could

do this with something as simple as an Autoresponder.







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Here’s how it would work and I’m going to tell you, if this script doesn’t exist,

because I personally haven’t used Click Bank in quite some time, but here’s the

deal here’s how you make it work. If you use Click Bank, I would go ahead and set

up an Autoresponder and here’s how the Autoresponder would be set-up. The

Autoresponder would sign them up into your affiliate program, so now you have a

list of all your affiliates key, or the majority of your affiliates because some people

could have gotten their affiliate link directly at Click Bank if you were one of the

top selling products over there that’s another story.



So now let’s say they sign up from your website. They sign up into your

Autoresponder, one of the fields we’d ask them for is, what is your Click Bank ID

and they would enter in their Click Bank ID and I’m going to use my own ID as an

example, ebookgen that’s my ID. So I would sign up, my name is Armand Morin

this is my email address and my email address is .ebookgen and my Click Book ID

is ebookgen and then what I would do is simply take out information and store it in

my Autoresponder.



The message when they come back I would use a custom field and I would insert

their affiliate ID into a URL and that URL would actually be, using mine as an

example ArmandMorin.com/ebookgen. Here’s what would happen. What I

ultimately did is I had someone modify a simple php script that would take the

extension of ebookgen and redirect it based upon that extension and it would

redirect it through the proper Click Bank link I should say.



Again it would take ArmandMorin.com/ebookgen and redirect it through the proper

Click Bank affiliate link on my site, so what happens is, when they link to my site I

get the search engine credits. I also get a back link for them from the search engine

and I have all these people linking back to me from their sites, from their blogs,

from their newsletters and other various places. If they’re advertising, anything it

will always revert back to my actual domain first and then redirect them on the fly

at that particular point.



A classic example of this, if you want to know if some people have done it right, or

some of the places that have done it right or a person in particular and this is who I

would go to and I would sign-up for their affiliate program. If you go to Jim

Edwards who markets a lot of products on Click Bank and still does because its

very hard to move once you start using a system like that, but go to ebookfire.com

and sign up for Jim Edwards affiliate program.



First of all Jim has some great products, so if you want to promote his products that

is a great place to promote his products and you’ll earn a commission from it as

well, but also look at how Jim has set up many of his affiliate links. Not all of

them, but many of them are going through his primary domain name. Why?

Search engine rankings for one thing.



If you’re using a service like 1ShoppingCart, 1ShoppingCart has an integration

script that’s what it's called is an integration script and it’s actually in your back-end



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already in 1ShoppingCart. It’s a php script and you would copy it to your desktop

and then upload it to your website. So your new links that you would give your

affiliates at this particular time would be for example,

ArmandMorin.com/cmd.php?af=123456 (their affiliate ID) and that’s what it would

look like.



Again the key is that everyone is linking back to you through your actual own

domain name with their affiliate link. So it goes to your site rather than someone

else’s site. So many people are lazy and they don’t set up 1ShoppingCart properly

or set it up all the way.



One of the people we have inside Am2, our coaching club, is Christina Hills and

she has all the information. She’s an expert on setting up 1ShoppingCart and she

has several products available. If you’re using 1ShoppingCart I definitely

recommend you go to her website and that is ShoppingCartQueen.com. If you go

there you can Opt-in to her website, she has a lot of great information there, but she

also shows you how to set up this integration aspect and everything else.



Go to her site ShoppingCartQueen.com and you can see what she’s doing over

there. She’s got a lot of great things and what you can do with the use of

1ShoppingCart, so definitely go and take a look at that, but the integration script is

the key in that part of it. So we want to gain the back links from the search engines

through our affiliate program.



Now the other benefit and how else we increase the back links from our affiliate

program, well one of the most common things is one thing we’ve been talking about

an awful lot and that’s blog. Give people pre-existing blog messages and what that

does from a search engine standpoint is again it’s a back link from someone’s blog

back to your website. That’s another site therefore its another back link as well and

you basically wrote what they should put in the blog.



So they’re basically copying and pasting what you already placed in there. I hear

the grumblings going on in the background and they’re saying well if you give

everyone the same message to post in their blog isn’t that going to be duplicate

content? Don’t worry about it. I think the whole duplicate content thing in my

personal opinion is way over rated as to what many people think it is.



You’re not going to get hammered with duplicate content so don’t worry about it so

much. What you want to do is give it to them, they’re going to link back to you,

you’re going to get the link, the valid link so take it. This is a very powerful

method in order to get people to back link to you, so again give them pre-existing

affiliate post reviews of your products that they can copy and paste in their blog as

well.



That’s another method you can use in order to generate back links and again back

links are probably one of the key pieces that many people talk about when they talk

about search engine optimization and having your own affiliate program is one of



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the easiest ways that you can generate not only traffic but back links specifically to

your various websites. People do it and they do it automatically without thinking

too much about it it’s not this big hub-bub about traffic and link exchanges and all

this other good stuff it’s very simple.



If you want to be an affiliate of mine here than link to my website it’s a passive way

to generate sales on their end and it’s a passive way for you to literally generate a

ton of back links. The more affiliates you have the more possibility of back links

that you’ll have. The more you encourage them to link to your site from their

various websites the better off you’re going to be, the higher the search engine

rankings you’ll receive again over time and that’s another method.



Segment Six



Armand: Using your own affiliate program though, again how do you generate products?

One of the methods we’re using and we’re starting to do this year actually is we’re

going through and promoting one of our products every single month, meaning

we’re having our affiliate manager actually promote with pre-existing messages a

new product every single month.



Now I have I believe 20 different products and every month we’re choosing a

product and we want to feature that product and we can run an affiliate contest for

that particular product. What does that do? That causes our affiliates to drive

traffic to our website. That causes our affiliates to promote that particular product.

It causes an increase in that particular product every single month as well and this is

something most people don’t do.



The one thing that people do and I’ve mentioned this before is, I just find it so

strange that people are more apt to do a joint venture and promote someone else’s

product than they are to actually sit back and actually write a special offer or to

write a campaign for their own product. It’s always greener on the other end of the

fence it seems. Well that doesn’t make sense for me and when I start thinking about

this more and more I mean yes is it more selfish in a way, in a way it is but we’re

talking about business here.



We’re not talking necessarily about a relationship. I mean joint ventures are great

and I will always continue to do joint ventures. What I’m ultimately saying though

is that we need to spend more time focusing and marketing our own products rather

than thinking its going to be easier to market someone else’s product as affiliates.



Think about this, if you only have one product its very difficult to market another

product to them so you have to revert to an affiliate program or to do a joint venture

with someone else in order to increase your income, but think of how many

products, if you have multiple products say more than five you should be promoting

at least every other month another product to your list.







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So what if some of the people are actually getting this information on a product they

already own you should be able to separate that from the list anyway they should be

on a separate list and you would know not to email those specific people, but run a

promotion to those people that didn’t buy your product and look at what you can

advertise to them. Look at the things you can advertise to them and give them a

reason to buy your product today as opposed to waiting.



Offer another bonus or some kind of special but, do that at least every other month

if you have enough products do it every single month, run a new offer or a new

special. Get your affiliates to start promoting that special out to their list as well.

Work on your own products and getting your affiliates to market your own products

and if you’re not excited about your product then, how can other people be excited

about your products?



Bret, we have a few questions?



Bret: If an existing Click Bank category doesn’t seem to fit your product how do you

notify your affiliates about your product?



Armand: You’re assuming that you’re going to generate traffic from Click Bank itself in the

marketplace that’s not how you do it. You only get traffic from Click Bank or

people seeing your products in Click Bank really only after your products become

successful which is actually a catch-22 situation.



So what you need to do is basically turn every one of your customers into an

affiliate first and then sign up to it. If one of the existing categories in Click Bank

doesn’t meet your needs the only way is to go to the closest category that you could

possibly use in order to submit it into Click Bank, but again it’s a catch-22, people

are not going to see your products from Click Bank unless they’re spotting or

watching the new products entered category in Click Bank.



Like I said it’s a catch-22 because affiliates aren’t going to see your product until

you get sales but you can’t get sales until you get affiliates, so the ultimate answer

is don’t depend on Click Bank to get affiliates. What you need to do in order to get

affiliates is you need to start submitting it. Submit them to the various website

submission services, the affiliate submission services that exist out there in the

marketplace and then get those people involved.



Market to your own customers and get them to promote, give them a reason to

promote I mean the average person doesn’t understand what an affiliate program is.

So depending on your market they may or may not understand what an affiliate

program is, but they could understand what a referral program is. There’s a

different way to word it. An affiliate program no one knows what it is. A referral

program, most people would know what it is.



So depending on what you call your affiliate program for your particular market

will also help you determine it, but simply say this, how would you like to get a



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rebate on the product you just purchased? Think about that I mean think of the

difference of how we phrase that, how would you like to get a rebate on the product

you just purchased? Well of course I’d like to get a rebate.



How does that work? Simple, you sign up here for our affiliate program and then

by you referring other people who might also be interested in our product we pay

you a commission each and every time. We pay you a percentage of that rebate out,

in fact, here’s the key on an affiliate program, and the key on an affiliate program is

to pay at least bare minimum 33% out, why? So you can use the simple phrase

three and you’re free.



If you pay 50% out it makes it even easier because they could just refer two other

people and it’s free. Now here’s the thing, again in this referral program that you’re

telling your existing customers about this could be one of your initial emails that

you send to them, how would like to earn the money back that you spent on my

product yesterday?



Here’s how you do it. If you find three other people that would also like to get the

same exact information that you received that could benefit from it then each one of

those sales will pay you a 33% commission, so if you referred only three people

you’re going to get essentially a 100% rebate back in just a few short weeks and

that’s how you explain it to them.



That makes it a lot easier for them to understand the rebate program as opposed to

an affiliate program depending on your market. If they’re Internet savvy then

they’ll understand what an affiliate program is and you don’t have to play the game,

but you can also use the same concept. How would you like to get my product for

free even though you’ve just paid for it? Here its simple, we have an affiliate

program and you earn 33% commissions each time here’s the link to sign up and

again if its 50% then insert 50% where I said 33%.



Bret: Armand do you have any recommended URLs for affiliate submission sites?



Armand: Yes. Here it is its Affiliate-Announce.com and you can submit your website to

more than 100 affiliate directories and they have various other things there.

Affiliate program announcement, distribution, press releases and all this other good

stuff, but I’ve used this service before this guy has been around forever. So I would

definitely give this a shot.



Bret: Are we talking about Alan Gardine?



Armand: No, he doesn’t actually do affiliate announcements I don’t believe, but Affiliate-

Announce.com and you can see they’re recommended by some of the big affiliate

companies, so I would take a look at this. When I first launched my affiliate

program way back when this is what we used in order to announce it. It’s well

worth it to get you started and off the ground.





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Bret: A blog/affiliate question Armand. If somebody has a free audio giveaway can that

be posted on somebody else’s blog along with an affiliate link?



Armand: Yes, why not. If it was an audio giveaway your affiliate could post it on anyone

else’s blog and people would see it from there, definitely.



Bret: Any specific recommendations Armand on methods for recruiting and retaining

affiliates?



Armand: No. The key to recruiting affiliates take a look at who’s available out there. Look

at your market because your competitors may be your best affiliates and that’s one

place to start looking immediately because they’re already generating traffic. Back

in the day when Popups were available many people were recommending buying

other people’s exit traffic and saying if a person doesn’t buy your product why not

advertise one of our products when they leave your site.



That’s another method that you can use, so you could contact people with a very

similar idea, hey if they don’t buy your product why not recommend my product

because they’re probably looking at my product already and you could use that to

justify it. Its one way you can use to contact people, but competitors are going to be

very crucial in getting your word out.



For example, I met with this person one time he was actually one of my big

competitors for one of my products. We met and we were talking and initially it

was kind of funny because he was playing this game and I hate playing games. I

can’t stand it because it’s a waste of time, but initially he was like I’ve never seen

your product before.



That’s absolutely bull it’s impossible that he could have missed my product, but to

make a long story short, ultimately he did recognize my product, he did know who I

was and all this other stuff and we started talking, began liking each other and we

started doing cross promotions. I promoted his products for a bit and he promoted

my products and we both made money, but the fact is we actually met face to face

in order to do it. I just happened to be in an area where he was, we had a mutual

friend and we met quite honestly by accident.



You can contact these people actively and see what it is they’re doing in order to do

that. Another way you can actively look for affiliates themselves is to look around

at who’s promoting other people’s products. Look in your industry whose actively

promoting affiliate products? Another question is whose promoting affiliate

training? Where do affiliates hang out? Where are the available affiliate forums?

Become active in some of the affiliate forums.



When I say active in the affiliate forums, many of you already know I’m not a big

person and I really can’t stand forums too much because I believe for the most part

they’re a waste of time in many cases, but when I say active in affiliate forums,

answer a few questions, post a link at the bottom of your message in the forum; you



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can legitimately answer some questions and post a link to whatever product or

service you may be advertising or advertising for your affiliate program.



Look for the affiliate forums themselves, where do affiliates hang out? In typing

those words, again we use my secret tool as always which happens to be Google. If

we type in affiliate forum and I type in affiliate program look at all the things I find,

affiliateforum.com, associateprograms.com, affiliatemarketingseoforums.com,

webmasteraffiliateprogramsforums.com there are a ton of places where you can

look for affiliate programs or affiliate forums and look to see who’s popular in

there.



You can contact these people one-on-one. Once you sign up into the forum you can

send them a private message saying I’m not sure if you’re interested in this or not

but we have an affiliate program. Now I’m not saying to spam the crap out of the

forum I’m saying be selective and choose a good affiliate and contact them one-on-

one saying hey, I have a product I think would be right up your alley. I think this

would be appropriate for you and then be selective.



Remember, here’s the thing, the majority of your affiliates will be totally inactive,

which means they’ll never do anything for you and that’s not to say that’s right or

wrong and its not to say you shouldn’t have those people because inevitably you

have to have those people because you don’t know who’s going to work and who’s

not going to work.



It doesn’t hurt you to keep that person in your affiliate program if by any chance

they may simply buy a product or two from you every now and then, so it doesn’t

hurt to keep them, but at the same time don’t fool yourself into thinking that every

affiliate is going to generate massive sales for you.



Let me give you a pretty stunning figure. I had before I restructured my affiliate

program around 18,000 affiliates, and out of 18,000 affiliate’s active, meaning

people that received a check every month I’m only sending out like 300-400 checks

out a month that’s it. Many of those people just aren’t active. Does that bother me?

No, because the people I do send checks to they get some pretty decent checks, so

I’m glad about that, but don’t think all your affiliates are going to earn massive

commissions every month.



Some will, some won’t and as the saying goes, so what? Do you have any other

questions?



Bret: No sir.



Armand: Let’s continue on then, affiliate programs as you can see are certainly a very

valuable asset for you and again what we’re talking about is finding affiliates.

Affiliate forums; again look for where they hang out like Google groups, any kind

of groups online. Look at Yahoo groups, another place you could find people in the





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various forums. Look at the biggest forums that exist, for example, let me give you

the gimmes.



These are the easy ones WebmasterWorld.com it’s a paid forum but join it its worth

your time. We talked about SitePoint.com the other day, well Site Point has an area

on there and let me just make this easier for you as well, if we click on forums at

Site Point we’ll be able to see what they have and let’s look at …



Segment Seven



Armand: …okay so we have Site Point forums, I believe they do here on the left hand side. I

think I might be wrong; Site Point doesn’t have an area, so Site Point doesn’t take

that off your list. Let’s try Digital Point, let’s take DigitalPoint.com and look on the

left hand side on this particular forum so we have marketing, we have a forum on

search engine optimization and then they have a program all on affiliate programs

and there are 45,845 posts in there right now, so it’s a pretty active forum.



They have it broken down. They have an entire forum dedicated to Click Bank so

that’s kind of neat, but they have a general form as well so you can advertise your

affiliate program on here. You can simply put a post on here that’s very easy and

you can read about affiliate programs. This is a very active forum to use, and again

WebmasterWorld.com again is a very active place as well. So we have forums at

Digital Point and you’ll see a category for affiliate programs on there also.



Look where affiliates hang out. Look for other places for affiliate forums. There’s

another place I believe there’s another place specifically for affiliates and I can’t

think of it off the top of my head let me see if I can find it really quick because what

we’re looking for is… its an affiliate forum I can’t find it, but type in affiliates and

then forums, affiliate anything related to that WickedFire.com that’s the name of it.



It’s a pretty popular affiliate forum that many people read, so you can look at that.

There are many different categories on the website, but that’s another place where

affiliates hang out and just keep looking, keep looking all around for the different

types. Also affiliate forums are broken down by the types of forums, meaning you

can look for forums if its affiliate programs for contextual advertising like an

Adsense type forum. You can look for people like that because they are forums

specifically for that.



There are several others. There are publisher forums for people that accept

advertising on their websites and things of that nature as well. There are all kinds

of different forums that exist and it’s just a matter of looking for them. These are

places where people hang out online, so you can look at what people want, what

they need, you can look at the questions they’re asking. It tells you a lot about your

affiliate program and what you need to do to make people happy.



You can see what they’re griping about and these are places you can go to

immediately in order to have that as well. So again, affiliate forums are another



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great place. What else can we do with our affiliate program in order to generate

traffic up to our site? Make it easy just generate mini sites for your affiliates.



Bret you have a question.



Bret: How useful are robots.txt for SEO? Is this essentially what the directories use to

submit your articles?



Armand: No. A robot.txt file is simply directions for you to tell a search engine what to look

at and what not to look at. Is a robot.txt file even necessary? The answer is no

unless you don’t want a search engine to look at a specific file. For example, if you

want all search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any of the others to actually

see all your actual individual pages on your website then you don’t need a robot.txt

file because the .txt file is simply going to say look at every page.



If you don’t have a robot.txt file it still tells the search engine to look at every page.

Now if you want to block them, let’s say I have three pages on my domain. In my

robot.txt file it says look at page one but do not look at pages two & three, so again

look at page one but don’t look at two and three and you can control what they see

on the website as a result of this.



Or, you can say to a robot.txt file look at my web page but don’t follow any of the

links on my website because I don’t want you to and they won’t do that because if

they follow the links they’re going to take extra band width on your part and you

can control that as well. Is it important for search engine optimization? No, it has

no bearing on it whatsoever.



Another concept we just started talking about was mini sites. Let’s stop here for a

second because this is a concept I think is very important for everyone to

understand. The way you succeed in business and the way you succeed on the

Internet is by doing the things other people aren’t willing to do. It’s a very simple

concept. You’ve probably been offered some sort of variation of that at one time or

another, but the fact is you have to really understand that concept.



You have to go above and beyond what other people are doing in your marketplace.

When you look at the very best affiliate programs out there here’s a great example,

another great example of an affiliate program that does a lot for its affiliates and

that’s Marlon Sanders’ affiliate program. If you go to Marlon’s affiliate program,

simply go to one of his popular websites like AmazingFormula.com.



If you go to AmazingFormula.com what you’re going to see is you’re going to see

one of Marlon’s original products and scroll down to the bottom of the page, click

on his affiliate program, sign-up for it and look at the different tools that he

provides everybody. The amount of tools that he provides everybody is very

important.







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Now, will people use all the tools? The answer is no, but if they wanted to it’s

available for them and that’s what’s neat about it. I learned a lot by looking at

Marlon’s affiliate program and how he had that structured and he did a very good

job. It’s very comprehensive and he’s done a great job in doing that, and you can

learn a lot there, but again why doesn’t everybody have an extensive list like that.



We have a pretty extensive list in our affiliate program. We’ve done things a lot of

people aren’t doing and we provide tools that people don’t have, but why doesn’t

everybody have that? The answer is because they’re not willing to. They don’t see

the value in it. They think again that all these other things they’re doing are more

valuable. Well, no, because you need to be able to leverage. You see, the beauty of

an affiliate program is its leveraging your time, your energy and the work that

you’ve already put out and that’s what’s beneficial in generating you traffic.



Therefore a lot of your time and energy should be spent as far as leveraging that

even further than what you’ve done already. We talk about the number of things

here for an affiliate program, but ask yourself how many of these things you have in

place and I would dare to say probably very little. Why is that? It’s because either

(a) you didn’t know about it before or (b) you weren’t willing to and you didn’t

want to put in the time and effort or you might even come up with the excuse that

you didn’t have time to do it.



Make time to do it.



Bret: Let me put you on the spot Armand. The number one thing you should do for your

affiliates is what?



Armand: The number one thing?



Bret: Yes, give them articles, banners, give them what?



Armand: Give them sample ads period. Give them something to start off that’s the number

one thing. Give them something as opposed to nothing, so let’s start off with

number one.



Here’s what I would do and here’s how I started out. I gave them three different ad

formats, number one a four line classified ad, a five line classified ad and a ten line

classified ad and here’s why. I gave them that and I gave them a list of Ezines in

order to advertise so now they could place ads in these various Ezines in order to

drive instant traffic to my site, so now they’re spending their money to advertise in

these Ezines. I knew that was the format for those Ezines so that was the number

one thing.



The second thing that you should do in today’s day and age you should provide

your affiliates with Google AdWords to give you an example. This is pretty new as

far as when I’m talking about this because this is something we have our affiliate

manager doing currently as we speak. Three weeks ago I called him up, I was on



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the road and called Stu McLaren who is my affiliate manager as many people know,

and I called Stu and said this is what I want.



I want pre-written AdWords ads for every single one of my products. He said for

all the products and I said yes. He said well how many do you want for each? I

said two to four AdWords ads for each and every one of my products, so that means

Stu’s got to write like 80 AdWords ads which is fine because that’s what I pay him

for. He’s got like 80 AdWords ads for my particular product, so AdWords ads are

great because people can advertise via pay-per-click and they can use them not only

for AdWords but they can use them for any pay-per-click search engine that exists

out there in the marketplace.



The third thing are banner ads, go through and make a list of the various banner ads

for each one of your products don’t just give them one banner for each product, give

them a whole slough of banners. I believe we give people about six different sizes

of banners for each one of our products that we have existing right now. So again

create banner ads like I use and I gave you the exact resource that I used

20DollarBanners.com.



I ordered the big package and that’s what we did for each and every one of our

products, so we spent some money on that, but we give them all the tools.



The next thing, blog posts, blog reviews, what can they post to their blog about our

product? Put those up on there so people can manage that as well and that would be

another tool that you can use in order to get people to do this. If you just did that

alone there are many other tools you can use for affiliates, but if you just did that

alone that’s more than enough to give your affiliates in order to get started and on

the right track.



Now the final piece of the puzzle is to give them some kind of order. What I would

say is to make a list of the various tools you have and talk about the results. If you

do this, this is when you can expect results, for example, if you place a Google

AdWords ad you can expect to see results in 15 minutes to two hours depending on

Google and when they get the ad placed so you’ll know if the ad is working or not.



Let them know their expected results. If you send out an Ezine ad, depending on

when they run your Ezine it could be a week to two weeks before you see results

and give them the guidelines so when you post to your blog you can see almost

immediate results. These are the various things you want to do to become

successful with our affiliate program. Let them know this is not just a one time

promotion this is an on-going promotion.



This is something you should do all the time because our products, and explain this

to them, your products sell not just today but they sell every day and explain that to

them in a very step-by-step format. So again that’s another way, now again we’ve

covered many different ways to leverage your affiliate program more so, but let’s





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talk about some other things that you can do in order to drive traffic to your

website.



I mentioned resell rights eBooks. This is a totally different method than many

people have been talking about. I’m not talking about private label product’s that’s

different. Private label means I can take your information off the product and add

my own in its place. No, I’m talking about selling people an eBook that you wrote.

You write an eBook it’s a completed, finished eBook and when people purchase

that eBook they get the resell right to that eBook which means they can sell to other

people and keep the money.



Here’s the difference though is that inside the eBook at the beginning and at the

end, first of all its branded with all of your name and in the beginning and at the end

and maybe throughout the book is links to your website or links to an Opt-in page

somewhere for you to generate leads off that eBook and they get to keep all the

money but you get to keep all the leads. Its kind of a fair exchange.



One person has done this very well his name is Michael Rasmussen and what he’s

done is, he’s got a great product when he normally does this and he does this

periodically, I’ve seen him release five or six different products and I want to read

to you what it says inside of this product in the beginning. The very first page of

his product, number one page has a picture of his product and he has resell lights

license registration and this is what it says.



Warning this is not a free book and you cannot sell or give it away to others unless

you’re an authorized dealer. To get resell rights and become an authorized dealer

please click on the link below then it says click here to become an authorized dealer

and that would take them to a registration page.



You receive the newest version of this book and be notified of future products with

resell rights, so if you click on that link it takes you to a page which allows you to

sign up to become a reseller of his for that particular product and you will get a

license in order to do that. So that’s another method that he uses and he’s done this

with multiple products.



Again let me review the concept, people buy the completed eBook this is a PDF file

and throughout the entire PDF file in the beginning, at the end and at the bottom of

every page it advertises your name, your website so you’re driving traffic to you

throughout the whole product. You’re branding who? You throughout the whole

product and they’re keeping all the money that’s great, but you’re generating all the

leads and all the traffic from it.



If it’s a great book, people know it will sell well and if you give them a pre-written

sales letter the whole website package it makes a lot of sense to actually use this

particular method. Why? Because again you benefit all the way around, another

method, and again you can think of a number of eBooks that you could do that with

in your own market. In fact here’s what I suggest is that every teleseminar that you



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do, if you do teleseminars or if you’re not doing teleseminars I suggest you start

doing teleseminars, but every teleseminar you do have it transcribed.



Take bits and pieces out of it, have it transcribed, have it formatted, have someone

write a quick sales letter for it and then give it away with resell rights. Why not?

Give away the resell rights and now you have a product that you can use this exact

method with and again it’s going to give you the opportunity to build your list as

you go along.



Another method that you can use is resell rights software. I’ve done this a number

of times, twice to be exact. The first time I did it wrong, the second time I did it

right so let me explain what I did. The first time I did it totally by accident and it

was one of the first times I think anyone did it on the Internet, but here’s what we

did is we created a product, a very popular product; one of the first products I

created on the Internet.



It was a product called Popup Generator, in fact if you go to Google right now and

type in the words Popup Generator you’re going to find out its on a large number of

pages, in fact right now its on a million five hundred pages the words Popup

Generator, which the product itself is more popular than myself online. What’s

interesting about this is that the product itself, we developed it to create pop-ups.

Several years ago it was very difficult for people to create a pop-up, but now days it

seems like anyone can create a pop-up without any problems at all.



Back in the day, but about five years ago it wasn’t easy for people to create a pop-

up. People wanted to know how to do it so we figured we’d take the process of

creating a pop-up and automate it which is exactly what we did. We automated that

entire product. We automated that entire process and we turned it into a product

and sold it with resell rights, which means you sell the product you get to keep

100% of the resell rights.



Now I really didn’t make a lot of money from that product. In fact what I made was

about $4800 on the first day or so from that particular product. Here’s the deal that

was coming off the initial product, here are the long term benefits. I branded the

website very precise with my name, with who I am and what I wanted to do.



Here’s my goal and this was very intentional, at the top of the website of the header

graphic it said Armand Morin’s brand new software and I wanted to associate my

name with software because that was a market that people were not covering online

very well, so I wanted to brand myself with creating software on the Internet and as

you can tell its worked out very well for me, but this particular product, everyone

that purchased and received it got the rights to it so they could sell it to other people

and those people could sell it to other people and so on and so forth.



Every single one of those people used the exact same header graphic, the same

cover on the product, eBook cover that we had made for that product, they used my

sales letter that I made for that product also and it worked out great. It gave me the



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branding that I wanted, here was the problem. It didn’t give me the emails that I

wanted. It didn’t give me the traffic that I wanted. It just gave me a good name, so

here’s what we did.



Segment Eight



Armand: A few years later we decided to do it again and this time we did it with another

project called Link Check Generator. With Link Check Generator I thought it

through more thoroughly and what we did was we sold the product with resell

rights. This time we gave them an instructional book with it and inside that book

the first page of the book was please sign up for your free updates, lifetime free

updates and that’s what everyone passed around. Everyone received the

instructions, they signed up for free lifetime updates which was one way that we

generated traffic from all the people it was sent out to.



The second method that we used was actually in the software. Every time you

opened up the software it says click here to go to GoGenerator.com or to sign up for

our free newsletter and when they clicked that button it went to our actual website

and then they would see all our other products as well.



That button was actually built right on the software itself and another method that

we used in order to do it, so again we learned from our mistakes and the first

mistake worked extremely well and was very popular. It went beyond our wildest

expectations except we didn’t have the long lasting impact from it. It did brand us

and I probably made a lot of money as a result of it and it did make Popups

certainly very popular on the Internet because it gave anyone the ability to do it.



Here is the mistake we made. We didn’t get the actual traffic to our website as a

result of it. So what I did is on the next round again we put it in the manual so

everyone that went to use it they looked at the manual, signed up for free lifetime

upgrades and on the main interface of the software itself we also generated that as

well.



Let’s talk about another method that generates, you can do this with any other kind

of software by the way too, so that will always work with various other types of

software you can see how that’s done very easily. Another method you can use to

generate traffic is videos. I think I’m going to save the video part, to talk about the

videos in another section when we talk about more of a viral marketing aspect

because that’s going to take us a little bit more time than what we have here on this

call tonight in order to go into that aspect of it.



Again let’s look at other traffic methods. What else can we use to develop traffic

on the Internet? Some of the methods people are using today is again, paying

people to Opt-in. Here are the methods that various people have used. For

example, a couple people have used it very well recently. Mike Filsaime was one

where he paid people, he literally gave people money for sending him Opt-ins and

here’s essentially how the method worked.



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I know he paid out an awful lot of people in a very short period of time but here’s

how the method worked. He initially advertised his site, this one web page and

when you went to that particular web page you would Opt-in to it and there was a

bribe for a specific report and then on the very next page when you opted in it was a

one-time offer for a specific product.



He paid people I believe it was around a dollar for each and every Opt-in that they

generated over a certain amount of time. I don’t know the exact numbers because I

never asked Mike his exact numbers on this but I heard through the grapevine his

numbers generated in just a couple weeks was around 80,000 Opt-ins as a result of

this.



Now he built a list of 80,000 people by simply paying other people in order to do it.

You may be saying that means he paid out roughly $80,000 and you’re absolutely

right, but now the question you have to ask yourself is; he subsidized it and

probably paid for the entire thing by the one-time offer on the next page. Think

about this, how many people did he have to really sell?



If he had 80,000 Opt-ins and the product he was selling on the next page was let’s

say $100 well that $100 now paid for 100 people each time a new person bought the

product, so if he knew his numbers good in the beginning he could easily self-fund

that entire operation by the Opt-ins. Now, if he made nothing on this whole process

would it still be good to do? The answer is yes, absolutely.



Why is that? It’s because he just generated a list of 80,000 people in just a few

short weeks that he didn’t have before and it didn’t cost him a dime. So, would you

do it? The answer is, of course you would so that’s another method, pay people and

again someone just did this the other day is they paid people .50 cents per every

name that they sent and they built a big list also. So they paid people .50 cents to

send them leads and that’s another idea people have used.



You’re banking on the numbers. If your offer is going to convert well than you’re

banking on the numbers to know that this is how much you could possibly pay out

and it’s basically a CPA model when you think about it. You’re paying people for

every lead, a CPA type model is cost per action, meaning you’re paying people for

every lead and then on the back end you’re using that money generated on the back

end in order to pay for the people on the front end.



That makes a lot of sense and it’s a brilliant idea, now various methods have been

around for a number of years but that’s been made recently popular again, the first

person I know that did it was Mike Filsaime and he did an extremely good job. I

believe Russell Brunson has done another idea very similar to it and there are many

people who have recently done ideas that are very similar to that concept.



So paying people for your leads and driving traffic, now again once you generate

those leads and once you have that list what can you do? You can do anything with

it. You can send them anywhere. You can send them a promotion of anything. Its



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80,000 to 90,000 people that are instantly notified of who you are and what your

name is, beautiful, absolutely beautiful, so again that’s another method you can use

in order to generate traffic to your site.



Let’s talk about press releases right now. Again we’re going to talk about press

releases more in detail on the next call but I want to talk to you about them right

now also and we’re going to look at the various press release models that are

available. I make press releases very simple. First of all a good friend of mine,

Marc Hardy he has a product called PRTraffic.com which I actually recommend

people purchase. I learned a lot from that particular product but here’s what I did

and once I looked at that product and how Marc described how to do a press release

in there then we started planning.



I know something about search engines that’s the good part and we’ll get to that

later, but here’s what I did. I went to PRWeb.com to submit a press release. Now

when you go to PRWeb.com you’re going to see all their latest press releases on the

main page. Here’s how this works, when you’re looki8ng at the main page they

have 2,899 press releases that have been submitted over the course of the last 14

days.



The ones at the very top are the people that paid the most money to be here, so how

does this work? Again it works like a bidding scenario, almost like a pay-per-click

type model but quite different and let me explain. Let’s take a look at what we can

do here and I’m going to log into one of my accounts and give you some numbers

first of all to give you a good idea as far as what’s capable and what you can do and

what can be achieved.



We submitted just a few press releases but we’ve had some really good responses

from them. I want to look at my traffic as a result of this. Let’s pull up my

management console for each one of my press releases. The first press release that I

did here are the final results from it and you’ll see where we headed with it at this

point.



The first press release I did I didn’t have any clue what I was doing but I figured I

better submit a press release. So I submitted a press release and this was all

promoting Michael Lee Austin, the first press release I submitted I received 85,000

people visiting my site and I had no idea what I was doing. Let me give you more

details. First of all 85,439 people actually read my press release, 2,353 media

places picked it up, which could have been websites, blogs or some place else.



From PRWeb.com 24 people printed it and 376 people actually downloaded it from

PRWeb.com and they can track that from their own website, so again 85,000 people

actually viewed it, so I had 85,000 read my article in my very first shot again, not

knowing what I did. The next thing, three days later I submitted a press release and

again still didn’t know what I was doing but I got a little bit better results. This

again was just three days later and I hadn’t learned too much at that point, still

fishing my way but this time I had 108,799 people that read my press release.



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Two thousand five hundred and eighty-six people picked it up at this point. Those

are the two most important numbers, we don’t need to talk about the rest and then

let’s look at the third one. With the third one I started figuring out what I was

doing. Here was the title in the third one and how I did this, the third one was

earlier this year we released this press release, it says country music artist Michael

Lee Austin hits number one on Amazon charts beating out Rascal Flatts, Toby

Keith, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban and all other artists worldwide.



We had the number one selling CD on Amazon and we held it there for four days

and we beat out all these people and I was basically telling everyone about that.

Now, we had a large number of people actually read this particular one and let me

give you the stats on this. In the first 48 hours this is what the total number was,

183,661 people read that press release in just the first 48 hours and we had 2,737

people actually pick it up and we also had a large number of downloads.



Again we were just getting started, so now I knew a little bit more and when you

look at that release I made a mistake and I did this on accident but I’m also going to

tell you what I did right. What I did right was the number one thing I put in was

country music artist that’s what I wanted in there I knew that. That was one of my

main keywords and Amazon charts was another one of my keywords. Rascal Flatts,

Toby Keith, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban were all music artists and those were all

parts of my keywords.



They’re very popular music artists but specifically two people were more important

than all the rest. Rascal Flatts and Toby Keith because Rascal Flatts and Toby

Keith released a CD the same week I did this which made it more newsworthy that I

put this release out at that time because they sold a huge number of CDs, but yet in

Amazon we still kicked their butts.



So they may have sold a huge number of CDs off line but on Amazon we beat them

so we made it very newsworthy and we put that out there also. So those were

searched on a lot that week and we knew that so we knew it would get more traffic

by putting their names and our additional keywords in it. I used the maximum

number of words in my subject line, as many as PRWeb.com will allow me to use.

The maximum number of characters and maximum number of words in my subject

line to put in as many keywords making sense as I possibly could.



In fact, my total word count for the whole press release is only 391 words, so it

doesn’t need a lot of words in your whole press release and that was the biggest

press release that I had released. My next one did even a little bit better.

Remember I knew what I did on that one so the next time I had something to talk

about was about a month later and here was my subject line.



Country music artist Michael Lee Austin tops billboard Internet music chart at

number seven beating out Rascal Flatts, Toby Keith, Keith Urban and Tim

McGraw. Now on the previous press release I made one of the biggest mistakes I





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ever made in my life and I spelled Rascal Flatts wrong, I used one ‘T’ instead of

two ‘Ts’ and I could have gotten more traffic if I had spelled it right.



So this time I spelled it right I made sure I did that and again it was a newsworthy

announcement and therefore we had more traffic. This time 259,454 people

actually read that particular press release and it was picked up 2,267 times and

again very strategically done at a very strategic place. Now each one of these press

releases at that time cost me $210 and $400 to submit and the rules have changed

over the course of the last six months on PRWeb.com, so what we’re going to do is

walk you through some of the things that have changed.



First of all it won’t cost you as much as it did me and here’s why. It won’t cost you

as much because of their new rules and what they’re doing here. You can actually

get the same submission as I did. I paid $400 you can get it for only $200, so you

can get it for half of what I paid. You have to create an account on PRWeb.com

first of all and then what you want to choose is advanced visibility. Advanced

visibility actually puts you in several different markets.



It gives you a lot more submission than they ever did before into the various new

services. They hooked up their distribution with another distribution company

called Emedia Wire and they will submit it through there as well. They will put you

in all the various press release submission services almost overnight. In fact here’s

typically what happens when you submit a press release. Literally within 24-48

hours you will be on every major news site across the country.



The major news uses press releases to fill their website content so you’ll be in

Forbes within two days. You’ll be in Yahoo News within a couple days. You’ll be

in Google News in a couple days. You’ll be on all the NBC affiliate sites in a

couple days. You’ll be in all these major places that you can use to write more

press releases to get more publicity because you’re in these. You can say as seen in

the Wall Street Journal, as seen in USA Today, as seen on NBC.com and you can

say that legitimately and that’s awesome.



That’s newsworthy, and you should think about adding those logos and things to

your website and legitimately saying that because that is the neat part about being

able to have that. So they give you a lot of extra services that are available and

ultimately you want to use the $200 service as well and when you go to submit you

can upgrade. You can do a podcast.



Many people I know that have done this highly recommend it. What it is; is you set

up a podcast and you’ll get interviewed by one of their staff members. What they’ll

do for like $100 or $200 they’ll actually call you up and do the interview. They’ll

call and say hi this is so and so from PR Web and we’re interviewing so and so

today. Its great to have you on the show, please tell us a little bit about yourself and

what you’re doing and then you get a chance in a 4-5 minute interview to do it.







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They have an extended podcast package which is 10-20 minutes long and the

people I know that have said, have tried this or use this rave over the use of this.

Apparently the people that do the podcasts are very good on the PR Website but this

shows up on the various sites and in the podcast and gets you more traffic as far as

that goes, so that can be advantageous to you as well.



At the same time you can actually upgrade your press release level and when you

upgrade it this is what it says. I’m going to read it word for word off the website for

you. You can put us in an additional rank for your press release listing. The level

of your press release affects your distribution in many ways. During which your

press release will appear on the front page of our distribution sites or in which your

release is delivered through RSS feeds, the feature is available in your press release

which separates search engines is distributed to the social media websites.



Basically they’re saying for an extra $10 you can get more features, so I would pay

the extra $10 and increase it up to $210 as opposed to $200. When you go to

submit your press release, let me repeat this, you want to choose the $200

package…you say Armand can’t I just choose the $80 package or $120 package?

You can I mean if money is an issue choose something just submit a press release,

but you definitely want to submit and use the $200 package because that’s going to

give you the maximum exposure.



Here is the thing there are essentially two different services you need to understand

and look at. There is the standard press release service with PR Web, just PR Web

itself within its own network of sites and then there is the Emedia Wire and the

bigger news type sites. We want to go to both. We definitely want to go to both,

why? The reason why we want to go to both of those is because they cover

different realms.



We get more distribution and we do want more distribution so $200 is well worth it

and the extra $10 to upgrade it is also worth it if you can afford the podcast

extension, definitely do that. So you could easily spend as much as $410 on this or

more to submit a press release but to get started $210 and you’re good to go and

you can submit your press releases.



Standard rules on a press release, again I mentioned some of them already, but

before you write your press release think of the various keywords that you want to

use in your press release.



Segment Nine



Armand: What I would do is write your press release off mine first. I wouldn’t go through

this and write it as you go. I would ultimately write it in a text file first before you

go through the whole submission process and this will make it easier for you. This

way you can pull it apart and can edit it online but you don’t have to write it 100%

online.





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By doing that you want to think about how, you see its not just an ad, a press release

is not an ad because if you simply write an ad for your product and try to advertise

your product its not going to work. No one is going to accept it. No one is going to

want it because it’s a big ad. No one accepts ads, if you want an ad then buy an ad

in their publication. What you want to do is turn the information about your

product or service and make it newsworthy.



Why would someone want to know about this? What makes this newsworthy and

what I suggest you do, the easiest and simplest answer to this is to go through the

various press releases on PRWeb.com and look at how they’re written. After

looking at a few of them you’ll see how they turned their product in many cases or

their service into a news story.



We as Internet marketers and as business owners online are using press releases in a

little bit of a different format than many of the other places, why is that? It’s

because we are using it for either search engine optimization, traffic generation and

the odds in many cases of us getting an interview or anything from a press release

are not very good. Let’s be honest you’re probably not going to get an interview.



You may, depending on your product or service but do you think someone is going

to call you up and interview you about an eBook? Guess what? You’re hoping and

it’s not going to happen. If it does congratulations and I hope I’m wrong, but the

odds are its not, so what we’re using this for, what it really boils down to is in most

cases we’re using it for search engine optimization and because of the various

places they get submitted to we can increase the traffic, the click through to our

sites and also increase the number of back links to our website.



So we can have as many as 400 to 2,000 places almost instantly overnight link back

to our website. How do we know that? Because when we write a press release we

put three links to our website in the body of the copy and also a reason why. Then

we put our contact information and with our contact information at the end what

else do we put? We put a link back to our website.



One thing I do suggest, when you’re doing a press release, if you’re going to put a

telephone number on the press release is not to use a personal number. I would

suggest putting it to a voicemail somewhere and answer those as you will because

of the fact that you will get all kinds of people calling you sometimes, not all the

time but every once in a while I get more calls than others.



When you submit people will be calling you and basically soliciting you for

products and advertising in different places and most people don’t need it so make

sure it goes to a number that you listen to, you’ll take the message but it’s not going

to come to you live and mess up your day as a result of that.



Don’t let people think you have to be some skilled writer to write a press release

that’s bull. Let’s put it this way I learned nothing about how to write a press release

I just followed the directions they gave me on this particular website and I looked



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up the other ads and that’s it that’s all you have to do is look at the other ads and

look at what they wrote and that will give you a really good idea about what to

write and what to put in the various areas.



So look at it and start reading the different press releases themselves. Again they’re

not very long. They’re not long at all. They’re not huge well written articles or

anything like that. All they are; are brief news stories about that particular company

and more or less a company update but again use three links in your copy back to

the actual website.



Another technique you want to use is you want to use an image; you want to submit

an image with your press release. What do I mean by an image in my press release?

If you go to Google News right now and search on anything it doesn’t matter you’ll

see some of the results in Google News come up with pictures to the left of it and

some of the results don’t.



Well when you put an image in your press release that means your submission into

Google News will come up with a picture next to it and you can put a picture of

anything you want and they’ll give you the actual size formatting inside PR Web, so

it’s very easy to do.



Bret you have a few questions.



Bret: I do have a few questions. How do you know if a press release has been picked up?



Armand: Actually PRWeb.com has a unique feature where they tell you. They track that it

was picked up they can’t tell you who picked it up though.



Bret: So if its picked up by NBC or Forbes or whoever you don’t really know that unless

you happen to catch it?



Armand: Yes. Some of the press release services that we’ve used in the past, its called a

clipping service and a clipping service basically scours the Internet, any kind of

news for when your name comes up somewhere and there are various places, like

the places I mentioned such as Forbes, NBC affiliate sites, ABC affiliate sites

places like that you can do a search within a day or two and they’re almost

guaranteed to be there.



Bret: Do you have a clipping service you recommend?



Armand: No and here’s why. A clipping service itself is very expensive. Its usually

somewhere between $400 to $2,000 or more per month, so I don’t actually use a

clipping service but what we do is we actively use things like Google alerts and

anything like that which indicates when our name or certain phrases that we use in

that press release come up and that’s one way we have an idea of what’s happening.







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Bret: Related to that what’s the quick and dirty way to search for how many people are

linked to your site?



Armand: The quick and dirty way is to simply do this, let me give you an idea here.

Basically you type it in like this, in Yahoo you just type in the domain name.



Bret: In the search box?



Armand: Yes. That will usually tell you what’s happening there and that’s how they do it on

MSN it’s typed in as linkdomain call in and then the website domain. For example

ABC.com and that will give you the results for that. In Yahoo it’s like I said just

the domain name and in Google its just link: the domain name dot com.



Bret: Back to where you were talking about paying for leads. How do you know if the

leads are valid and you’re not getting a bunch of junk names or people who are just

sending you names to get paid but its something they pulled off a spam list or who

knows?



Armand: That’s a good question. Number one you can kind of track where the leads are

coming from a little bit, but in that particular case if you were paying for leads I

would want to do a double Opt-in specifically. The reason is because you’re paying

for those leads, so I would definitely do a double Opt-in if I was paying people to

send me leads.



Bret: Speaking of Opt-ins, we have a listener who has a list that would be great for

insurance companies or lawyers and they’re interested in selling the names to third

parties. Do you have any recommendations on brokers or how somebody would go

about that process?



Armand: As far as selling leads I would do a search on that itself, search for brokers for lead

generation brokers and see what you can find. I don’t have a specific resource for

it. The one thing you could do and this is the way I would monetize it personally is,

if I’m able to generate leads for those types of companies what I would do is go to a

place like LinkShare.com or CommissionJunction.com and look for affiliate

programs I could use.



For example a mortgage lead, I mean a mortgage lead, if you can direct traffic with

mortgage traffic you can usually get between $20 and $40 just for them to fill out a

pre-application in most cases, so again that’s a huge deal



Bret: Armand when you were talking about free writing ads for affiliates to use you

talked about four, seven and ten line ads, do you mean four, seven and ten sentences

or do you mean four lines of 60/65 character wraps?



Armand: Four lines, when I said line I’m referring to 65 characters yes. For those of you that

may not understand that, the question is this. When I was referring to the lines and

said four, five and a ten line ad, when I say a line I’m referring to 65 characters



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long. The reason why I say 65 characters’ is because that’s what most Ezines will

accept as far as the width for an ad. That’s because most newsletters are formatted

to 65 characters wide so that’s why we use that.



Bret: Besides Alexa are there any other tips or methods to find out how much traffic a

website or a blog has?



Armand: A blog is probably easier. You can look at their blog rank using technorati and you

can see based upon that how much traffic they’re getting. In fact technorati works

like Alexa, the lower the blog rank the better or the more traffic its getting.

It won’t really indicate how much traffic an individual blog is getting per se or an

individual site in that particular case is getting at all but it gives you an idea of the

popularity of it. Other than Alexa there really isn’t any great tool I would

recommend telling people about as far as doing it. I would look at a couple

different things if I wanted to estimate if a site was successful or not.



Alexa is not accurate. Let me give you an idea. For example, I’ll send an email out

later on tonight for a promotion for a product and because of my market that I’m in

a lot more people, its weighted, a lot more people have the Alexa toolbar than not,

so the weight is heavily in my favor with Alexa. Now if I have another product I

could have a list of 300,000 people with Alexa but yet they are a non-technical

crowd.



Then I could send another email promotion to that list and my Alexa ranking

probably wouldn’t go up that much because Alexa is based upon the Alexa toolbar

and how many people use that, so its not that accurate but it does give us probably

the only indication we know as far as how much traffic a website is actually getting,

but other factors we can consider, number one how many back links does a site

have inside of Google, Yahoo and MSN?



We can also factor in what their Google page rank is that gives us not much

indication but a little bit more indication because you could have an old site that

still has a high page rank but is still getting very little traffic, so again there will

always be those exceptions also. I had a site one time that we were optimized for

specific keywords. We were getting about a quarter of a million visitors in a day

because of something that happened on the news and my Alexa ranking barely went

up on that site.



Why is that? It’s because those people didn’t have the Alexa toolbar installed. It

was a non-marketing or non-technical market so Alexa is definitely skewed for the

marketing crowd and the people that are more technical in nature, so again don’t

rely necessarily on that but you can look at a wide variety of factors such as how

many sites are linking to them, how many references are there made inside Google,

Yahoo and MSN to their product or product name or even the individual’s name?



That helps also to know how popular that particular person is. You can look again

at the page rank, if it’s a blog you can look at technorati. You can look at the



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various sites that are out there and that would be another method you can use in

order to estimate the amount of traffic that a site is actually getting as well.



Bret: Now you talked before about the link domain and all that, I’m not quite clear

exactly on how that works. Let’s say on Google you talked about link: the domain

name…?



Armand: Let me give you an example. As I said I took to my blog every now and then so my

blog isn’t a very highly trafficked site. Like I said I get 200-300 visitors a day and

here’s how I would find out the number of other sites and other pages that link back

to my blog so I would type in link:ArmandMorin.com and I would type that into

Google and right now it shows that I have 130 links coming into

ArmandMorin.com. Every one of these sites has a link back to me in some way

shape or form.



Bret: Okay so link: not linkdomain:?



Armand: No link:ArmandMorin.com link: and then the domain name that’s what I’m

referring to, so link:ArmandMorin.com. Now in MSN what I’m saying is if you go

to MSN.com and go to search you want to put linkdomain:ArmandMorin.com in

that particular example.



So linkdomain:ArmandMorin.com and in that particular case ArmandMorin.com

has 3,883 results come back for that. Now if I go to Yahoo again we just want to

put in the actual domain, so I would put http://ArmandMorin.com and I would come

back with the results, basically as in MSN which is 3,883. That’s how I would find

out about the back links for each individual search engine we have available to list

there.



Bret: I have no other questions right now Armand for you.



Armand: Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to continue this call on our next call

and in order to keep everything going in the same vane here, Bret is not going to be

available on Thursday so we haven’t talked about what we’re going to do on

Thursday, but I’m going to make an executive decision right here on the spot and

because I’m doing it live he can’t really say too much.



What we’re going to do is do the call on Thursday anyway and we’ll make

arrangements with the email address to send questions to on Thursday and we’ll

probably have George Callens fill in for that particular call and then we’ll continue

on from there. So again on Thursday you’ll get an announcement on that and if you

have any questions send them in to us, but we’ll give you an email address. When

we email you as far as what email address to send that into.



So we’ll be contacting everyone regarding the next call to let you know about that.

We’ll be operating the call in the same fashion we have been and certainly

recording it again for you and it will be posted into the download area as usual.



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We’re in the home stretch. We’re nearing the end of these calls. We have a little

more to talk about on traffic and I still have to talk about search engine optimization

as well so we’re going to continue on with that as well. So if you have any

questions let us know. We certainly appreciate everyone’s input. We appreciate

the questions you’ve been asking and this is going to be more and more, anything

you want to know just let us know and we’ll get to that as we move on.



Again, thank you everybody we’re going to wrap it up for tonight. Everyone have a

great evening and we’ll talk to everyone in the very near future. We’ll see you on

Thursday.



Bye, bye everybody.









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