Setting Up A Mini-Site that will Dramatically Increase The Rate Of Opt-Ins

As I mentioned before using a mini-site (also known as forced opt-ins, and squeeze pages) is one of the best ways to get opt-ins. Why is that? It’s because you aren’t giving them many choices. They have the choice of signing up for your mini-course/newsletter or leaving the page. More than likely they’ll sign up for your mini-course/newsletter if you give them reason to. Notice that I said ‘give them reason to’. No one will sign up for your newsletter if you don’t give them a good enough reason to do so.

So here are some steps for setting up a mini-site:

1. Location - Where will the squeeze page be located on your domain? If you want it to be on your index that’s fine then you’d just make the page on www.yourdomain.com, but you could also make it a subpage on your website such as www.yourdomain.com/squeezepage.html. Of course no one’s going remember the url, that’s why you’ll want to use anchor text in your links.

2. Design - The next part is going to be the design of the page. If you don’t make the page appealing, interesting, and worth while no one’s going to sign up for your mini-course/newsletter. It’s as simple as that. I couldn’t possibly explain what to use to get the best results in this post, but I’ll give you a few tips on how to increase responsiveness and credibility.

First, you need an attractive headline. Most people who visit your website are not going to read the rest of the page if the headline doesn’t grab their attention. You now want to add a picture of yourself. Why? It increases credibility. It shows that you are actually a person. Another great thing to increase credibility is to add a signature. You can do this by writing your signature on a paper and scanning it or using a writing font (it’s best to make it a picture because some computers might not have the particular font you’re using, and won’t get good results).

The next part is to make bullet points outlining what problems they might be facing. What solutions you would provide them in your mini-course/newsletter and so on. Then below that you want to put your opt-in form. This is where they put their name and email. If this is based on selling your own product, and you have sold some copies, then get some testimonials, and put them on your site.

Last, make sure that you put legal information. Such as a Disclaimer, Terms of Service, Earnings Disclaimer, and Privacy Policy.

Just to side note, if you’re going to be using paid advertising such as Google Adwords, then I’d recommend you watch this video before doing so:

Jim and Perry Slap Google

Are you selling to your readers or are you providing them with good useful content?

This is a good point that I want to stress upon. You could instantly lose a reader if you try to sell to them right away. The reason for that is because then you look like someone who’s only going to try to sell them something.

The reason they signed up for your newsletter was because it is free information. They don’t want to hear you telling them to go buy joe’s product today, and buy john’s product tomorrow. They want to hear some stuff for free right now to get them started.

Then you might ask “Well if we’re going to be only giving them free information how do I make money from my list?” The key is to show them that they need the product. You have to give them a mindset of they need investments to make things work.

Going into the internet business field - A great way to incoroprate what I just said would be to show business owners how they can make more money with doing less work. This is the key to selling to internet marketers today. Trying to sell an internet marketer a get rich quick product would be next to impossible. If you can show them how they can reduce their efforts and increase their productivity then you have a sale. A great example of this would be James Brausch’s products.

Now how to incorporate this into an email. When sending an email to your list remember to start off with a question. Bring up some curiosity. Curiosity is what keeps them reading. Without the curiosity there’s no interest. Next you want to tell them a story of a related experience. Then you still want to leave them curious and direct them to the sales page or where ever your goal location is.

With this method you then generate a form of interest to the reader instead of blatently saying “click on this link, and buy this product”. That has no interest towards them. Just remember to be in the mind of the reader and answer the initial question of “what will I get out of this”, or “how will this benefit me?”.

What you say could be the result of your readers staying or unsubscribing.

Increase Website Traffic

This is the problem everyone has. They might have a highly optimized site with a great opt in forms, but you can’t get any subscribers without any traffic. Website traffic is the key to getting subscribers. Today I’m going to explain to you the many ways of getting traffic to your website (well the ways you should be spending your time on).

Buy Website Traffic - You can pay for traffic by the click. This is called Pay Per Click advertising (also known as PPC). This is a very effective way to get traffic to your website. It’s the most targeted that you can get. I wrote an article on PPC advertising, and you can read it here:

PPC Advertising Should Be Your First Source Of Traffic

Forums - Forums are another way you can get traffic to your website. All you have to do is put your website link in your signature. Whenever you make a post at the forum, your website will appear at the bottom of each post. Remember not to spam. Posting on forums is a very risky thing to do though, because what you say affects the emotion on people towards you. So, always make a good impression, be helpful, and don’t self promote.

Articles - This one is my favourite. It’s writing good articles, and submitting them to article directories, newsletters, or where ever someone could post your article. This one technique will be one of the most beneficial way to generate traffic to your website. To learn how to get the most out of your articles with Turn Words Into Traffic.

Search Engines - When I say search engines I don’t mean submitting your url to the search engines. I mean using SEO (search engine optimization) techniques on your website so the search engine finds you. This is greatly connected with writing articles. If you know how to benefit from articles then search engines will find you, and start adding your pages to their listings and you will see daily traffic to your website without doing anything! To learn how to optimize your page, download this fr-ee ebook by Brad Callen

Search Engine Optimization Made Easy
(right click then save link as)

The biggest thing is you should be mainly focusing on writing articles and getting your site on google, and getting lots of traffic from google.

If you have some money that you can spend I would recommend joining Google Adwords. The best person to learn Google Adwords from is Perry Marshall

Of course there are other ways to get traffic to your website, but I find these to be the most highly affective.

Now you have all your opt in forms on your webpages, but you have no traffic, and no follow up messages set up. Let’s work on creating the first message.

Log into Aweber.

Click on the messages tab. Next, you’ll want to click on the link that says ‘create message 1′

I usually turn on click tracking to keep stats of what messages get the most clickthroughs. Also, it’s a great affiliate link hider.

You’ll see that there are many templates you can choose from, but I like to use text only template (no template selected).

Now it’s time to write the email. In the subject you want to first address them by name. To do this first click on the subject box, then click on insert field and select {!firstname_fix}. This will enter their first name that they entered when they signed up for your newsletter/mini course.
It should look something like this:

{!firstname_fix}, welcome to the widgets mini-course

or

{!firstname_fix}, part 1 of your 7 part mini course

You can chose however you want to welcome your new subscriber.

Now let’s get to the message itself.

First you want to address their name. People love being greeted by their name. It makes the email seem more personal, and not like a robot. So start out by saying.

Hi {!firstname_fix}, or Hey {!firstname_fix}:

However you want to greet them. It’s up to you. All you have to remember is to be yourself. Pretend that you’re writing an email to one of your friends.

Now you want to thank them for signing up for your newsletter, or minicourse and explain what it’s all about. After that you’ll want to explain what you are about, what your company is about or if it’s a mini-course the first part of it. There’s so many options to go with this.

It can be confusing and frustrating on what to write. What I discovered is to learn what successful email marketers write, and incorporate it into your writing. You might be asking yourself “How do I know which emails were successful, and which aren’t?” I know that because I was asking the same question.

So I did some research and discovered “Million Dollar Emails“. This ebook is the greatest investment in email marketing I have made. Especially for $19. It answers the fundamental question of “which emails are successful”. It even reveals the subscription rates, and clickthrough rates. So get reading, and soon enough writing emails to your list will be second nature.

Where To Put Your Opt In Forms

Now you might be confused on what pages to put your opt in forms on, and where to put them on the page.

You should put your opt in form on every page of your website (besides your privacy statement page, contact, or any other page that doesn’t have useful content). Every page of your website is a possible landing page for a potential sign up. Why do I say that? Because when the search engine crawls your site, it’s not going to only index your homepage. It’s going to index the pages inside of your site (assuming you have a index,follow in your meta tag). So when someone searches for a keyword, and your page about that keyword pops up it’s going to take them to that page, and not your homepage.

There are many spots that you can put your opt in form. The first is in the main body at the bottom of the page. When someone’s done reading the page you give them an option where to go. There’s also the visitors that visit your page, but don’t make it much further then the top of your page. So another good spot would be directly below your header at the top of the page (making sure it’s visible without any scrolling). Rosalind Gardner uses this method on her forum

One other spot that you can put it, that a lot of guru internet marketers suggest is to use a pop up after leaving the page. Some people are against pop ups, but I think this method works great if you’re writing a one page sales copy.

Now that you know where to put them, start adding them to your webpages.

Setting Up Your Autoresponder and Opt-in page

For those of you who are new to internet marketing, and email lists here’s a bit of an overview. Whenever you go to a website, and you see a sign up form and you put your name and email in it you receive an email. In that email you are welcomed personally, and then given all the information about the list that you signed up for. Some of you may think that there’s a person doing this manually, but in reality it’s just a computer sending out emails to people who fill out the form.

You may be wondering how they include your name in the email also. Well, there’s certain coding that you can put in your emails through your autoresponder that includes the name of whatever the person puts when he/she is signing up for the list. It’s a very simple process that only takes seconds to do if you have the autoresponder service.

Without an autoresponder service, you would have to manually record all the sign ups, and send out each email to everybody in your list. Trust me, that would be the biggest waste of time in your internet marketing career. The first step to building a list is to sign up for an autoresponder service.

There are two choices here. There are free autoresponders that you could use, but you are limited to everything, and it’s not the greatest service that you would receive. I would highly recommend using a paid unlimited lists, campaigns, follow ups, and newsletters autoresponder. The service I highly recommend is Aweber. The service is great, and it only costs about $20 per month.

Now that you’re signed up with your autoresponder, let’s set up a opt in form. But before we do that, let’s get an idea of what some successful ones look like. Take a look at the following sites. Pay close attention to where the form is located, what intices the viewer to sign up, and where the sign up brings you after you sign up.

Rosalind Gardner’s Net Profits Today
Jim Edward’s I Gotta Tell You

and there are many other great ones out there.

In this example, we’re going to be using Aweber.

Sign into Aweber

At the top right of the screen click on the link that says customer & affiliate Login. Now sign into your account. Once logged in click on the tab that says ‘Leads’. This is where all the information about your sign ups are, and the link to the web form generator. Below the tabs you’ll see buttons. Click on the ‘Web Form Generator’ button. Now you’ll be taken to the web form generator page.

Click on ‘create new web form’ in the middle of the page. The first field is form name. You can name this whatever you want, because nobody’s going to see it. Now there are many different kind of forms that you can choose from. In this example we’re going to choose a form that’s on a webpage. For this we choose in-line (which should already be chosen). Next you’re going to fill in the headline field. This is what is going to appear on your page. This is your form. So make it look good, use an attractive headline, bold, colours, but don’t go overboard. Remember to keep in the line of the examples I showed you earlier. Don’t worry about the boxes, because they will appear automatically below your headline.

The next field is the input fields. You’ll want 2 fields on this one. A name field, and an email field. I like to put the name field before the email field, but you can switch it around if you want. This next step is very important. If you’re hosting your own website, you’ll want to change the ‘Thank You Page’. One thing I don’t like about the Aweber thank you page is that all it says is Thank you for subscribing. I know they didn’t mean to make it spectacular in anyway, but I highly recommend creating your own unique thank you page. Also, on the thank you page remember to tell the subscriber to check their email because they will have to confirm their subscription. When I made my first web form for one of my newsletters I used the aweber thank you page. The results ended up that only half of the people were confirming their subscription. Then I came out with a mini-course, and made my own thank you page. The results were drastic. Out of about 40 subscribers 1 didn’t confirm. So creating your own thank you page will help you out a lot.

Now you need to save your form, and now it’s created. You’ll be taken back to the web form generator page, and all you have to do is click on the ‘Get HTML’ link, and paste that code into your website. Simple as that.

So now you should have a good idea on how to get started with your list. Aweber provides a great load of useful information for email lists, promotions, and a lot more so take a good look around the site, and you’ll find a lot of useful information.

Well, that’s all for today.

See you tomorrow.

Setting Up Your Website Or Blog

So you have your website host, and your domain set up (if you don’t know how to do this refer to Day 2 of this series)

We’re going to cover two things in this section.

How to set up a website, and how to set up a blog

How To Set Up A Website

First, sign onto your website’s cpanel (http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel)

In the list you will see many different icons. Click on the ‘File Manager’ one.

Click on the folder (not the text link) public_html

This is where all your website pages are stored. Everytime you want to make a page on your website, make sure to save it to this folder.

Now, we’re going to discuss how to design your website. You may have some, a lot, or none html knowledge. If you have a lot, then you’re on your way. If you have some or a lot read this story.

When I first started making websites on the internet, I had some html knowledge. So I thought to myself “Well, since I know how to write html code I might as well design and manage myself using the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) html editor.” I did this for 3 months, and I got so frustrated. I got so angry at manually going into each file, and editing it. Also, when I wanted to add a link to the navigation bar or make changes to the design I had to do it to each page seperately. I was just wasting a whole lot of unnecessary time. Then I was introduced to

XsitePro

When I started using it I knew this program would increase my productivity by at least 100%. It’s so simple to use (by simple I don’t mean not flexable, you can design and tweak your website). Also, XsitePro uses ftp which means that you can upload your site from the software right to your website in the click of a button. No messing around with files. I also find that I now have motivation to write. I have motivation to keep building my website and blogs. When I was doing everything manually I was starting to loose a lot of motivation. I knew I had to find something or else everything would just start going down hill (well it was). XsitePro has drastically helped me out.

How To Set Up A Blog

Setting up a blog is so much easier with Cpanel.

First, log into your cpanel account (if you don’t know how to there’s instructions in the how to set up a website section). Now scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you will see a button that’s named ‘Fantastico’. Click on that, and you will see a section that says blogs. There will be many to choose from. Personally, I chose Wordpress. It’s the most popular, lots of templates, it’s easy to use, and the support is great.

Once you choose which one you want to use click on it, and to the right you will see a ‘new installation’ link. Click that, and you will be given instructions on how to do that rest.

That’s all for today, we’ll see you tomorrow for Day 4.

Where To Start

There’s 2 directions that you can take here.

You could either build a website with useful content, or publish a blog (which can be a form of a website).

If you’re building a website I suggest you get paid reliable hosting, instead of free hosting. You won’t get very far with free hosting, with free hosting

• You get limited bandwidth
• You don’t get your own domain (you get something along the lines of freehost.com/youruser/page.html which doesn’t look too good)
• Most of the free hosts put their advertising on your website (You write the content, so you should get the advertising)

For hosting a website I would suggest Hostgator (link on the right hand side of the page). I have only encountered good things from them. They’re reliable, good customer service (24 online live help), good bandwidth, and decently priced. For $10 a month you can host unlimited websites.

Next is to get a domain. I go with godaddy because they have good service, and well priced. So you purchase a domain, and they will give you instructions how to set your domain to your host. It’s a fairly simple process, and should only take about 20 minutes or less to do.

Ok, so now you have your website set up, and ready to go.

Now you have have to decide whether you want to use a website or a blog.

With both a blog and a website you have the deicision of linking to different categories, and writing on different subjects. A website and a blog are just two different ways of presenting content. It’s just as simple as that.

It just goes down to the bottom line of how you want to present your information. Blogs is just a journal style format. The more successful bloggers categorize the content in their blog instead of just scrambling all the information. With the website format, it has a more traditional internet feel to it. Everything is there, and you can browse through the website using the sidebars (or where ever the navigation bar is).

Take some time to discover all the possibilities that CPanel has to offer.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to set up your website or your blog (whichever format you choose), and the mistake people make.

Coming Up With The Idea

So you want to build a list, have thousands of people that you can send email to, and they will click on your affiliate or product link and buy. Then you get a nice big fat commission check. Sounds great doesn’t it? Of course it does. Easy? Definately not.

One thing I’m going to tell you about Internet Marketing is it takes as much work to build your business as it would in a brick and mortor business. Maybe even harder. People are less likely to buy a product on the internet than from a brick and mortor business. So you have to come up with an idea. Sure you see ‘Get Rich Schemes’ all over the internet. You see people telling you that you could instantly get big amounts of cash from the internet. Truth is, the internet is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s far from it. It requires a great amount of discipline, effort, and creativeness.

The first thing you have to do is come up with a theme. A niche. What is this website/blog/idea going to be about. What topic is it going to be on? Cooking Recipes? Greek Cooking Recipes? 9 Ball Pool? Texas Hold Em? Texas Hold Em Tips and Tricks?

If you have a million ideas of things you want to write about or you can’t think of what to make your website here’s what to do.

• Pull out a peice of paper and pen.
• Go in a room where there is no computer.
• Write down as many topics that you would like to write about.
• Write down as many things you are good at.
• Write down as many things you want to learn about.

Good. Now you have to find out which idea has demand. It would be pointless to make a website, and find that nobody’s interested/searching for your topic.

Here’s a tool I use to see how many people search for terms on the search Engine:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

I suggest you bookmark that page as you will need it, and discover that it’s a very useful tool. Now look on your list, and look at your keywords. You’re going to now find out the demand and supply of your topics/keywords.

For an example, let’s use the term Texas Holdem

So we search for the term texas holdem using the keyword suggestion tool, and we get (They give you Wordtracker results, but we’ll just focus on the overture results)

Now if you go to google type in the first search result, and do a search.

Near the top right you’ll see the results which will looks like
Results 1 - 10 of about 11,200,000 for texas holdem”

Now that means that you have a bit of competition. 11,200,000 sites are optimized for the word texas holdem.

This is where we use a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel.

You’ll want to set it up something like this:

now the ratio is calculated by dividing the supply by the demand. I calculated everything and came with these results

The rule of thumb is the lower the rating, the better the niche.

So in this case the top three are texas holdem, texas holdem poker, and texas holdem strategy. Now you have to put a little thinking into this. Texas Holdem, and Texas Holdem Poker would be to wide of a category. So the best nice would be ‘Texas Holdem Strategy”. There would be tons of things you could write about in that niche.

So do that for each of your keywords, and see what your best results are.

That concludes Day 1. If you have any comments or tips feel free to post in the comments.