CBIntuition

If you have ever bought a downloadable ebook or video package online, the chances are that when you arrive at the download page, you will see a number of “unannounced bonuses”. These are usually free products that are related to the item that you have just purchased. The whole concept of these bonuses is part of building a rapport with your customers. They buy a product from you and you get more than you bargained for. It makes you feel better about buying the product (if it was quite expensive, you might now feel justified in buying it because of all the extra content you have received).

Feeling good about something you have bought usually reflects on the vendor – you feel good about buying from that vendor. This in turn builds trust and you are more likely to buy from them again, knowing that they usually over-deliver.

Keeping up with The Joneses
Now let’s look at it from the vendor’s point of view, because if you’re running or starting a business, you become the vendor. You might be thinking it would be a good idea to include a number of unannounced bonuses with your products, and you’d be right – you also need to build a rapport with, and gain trust from your customers. Looking at it a little more cynically, you might fell obliged to include bonuses, just to keep up with the competition in the online world.

Bonus Material
So now you need a source of bonus material. Perhaps you found it difficult enough to get your first product together, so you’re not looking forward to creating more. Well of course, you don’t have to – there’s plenty of MRR (Master Resale Rights) and PLR (Private Label Rights) material out there that you could use.
These are sometimes available for free, but the better-quality stuff needs to be purchased.
Now wouldn’t it be good if instead of paying for your bonus material, you got paid for it? Believe it or not, it IS possible.

I recently bought a package that, like so many others, came with 5 unannounced bonuses. The first item on the list of bonuses was an ebook, which I simply downloaded from the vendor’s site. The other 4 items, however, were all affiliate links to other free products. Obviously, affiliates don’t make money from free products, but they do get a cut from the OTOs (One-Time-Offers) that are presented to the customers when they sign up.

So, if you are an affiliate for any free products that pay out on the OTO, or you have other related products that you giveaway, why not use them as a source of “unannounced bonuses”? If you know any other marketers who work in a related field, why not strike up a joint venture with them to promote each other’s product as unannounced bonuses?

Finding free products with affiliate programs is not difficult – you’ve probably signed up for some yourself. Did you ever use those affiliate links after you signed up? Probably not. What a great way to resurrect them and potentially make some money.

Why Unannounced?
You often see sales pages offering bonus items, so why include unannounced bonuses?
There are a few good reasons:

1. The customer already feels good about getting the advertised bonuses, but to be given even more once they’ve paid makes them feel even better. It all helps to build the relationship with the customer.
2. They might be added at the last minute – especially if they are part of a JV with another marketer. They can be added to or removed from the download page at will. It’s likely that the sales page will be cached by the search engines, but the download page will not, so the download page can be changed at any time without causing any problems.
3. You might not want your competition to know that you are giving them away – especially if it is one of your own products that you are testing. They’ll find out eventually, of course, but by then it might be too late.

Marketers don’t give away additional products because they are feeling generous – it’s because they know they get more sign-ups and sales if they do. Start delivering bonuses and “unannounced” bonuses with your products and see what difference it makes.

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Code of Federal Regulations, Title 38: Pensions, Bonuses and Veterans Relief, Department of Veterans Affairs

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It’s amazing that most people who set up their first website still seem to think that the old saying “Build it and they will come” still applies. After creating their web pages, they sit back and wait for the money to come rolling in.

Believe me, if you make a website and then sit back and do nothing, the only visitors you will get to your site will be virtual dust and virtual tumbleweed!

The only way you will get visitors is to promote it. This means getting links to it in the search engines and other sites. Here’s a list of things you could try – or rather, things you should try. If you’re serious about promoting your site, you need to use every method available to you.

Blogging

Blogs get indexed by the search engines very quickly. If you have a hosting account, consider installing a WordPress blog on your site. A standard installation of WordPress is set up to “Ping” your posts to a number of blog directories.
Alternatively, a Blogger blog is a good bet. Blogger is owned by Google which indexes them frequently. I have seen a new Blogger blog appear in Google within an hour.

Article Marketing

Article Marketing is basically the submission of articles to any one of hundreds of article sites. The articles discuss topics related to the author’s website and then links to the website. Article Content King is an excellent choice. Articles get indexed quickly, and you can actually earn a share in their advertising revenue.
A great advantage of article sites is that many other sites and blogs syndicate good quality articles from them, which means your article could appear on many more sites.

Search Engine Submission

New websites can be submitted directly to the search engines. However, it can take some time before your site is indexed if you do it this way, so it can actually be slower than other methods.

Directory Submission

There are numerous website directories which publish categorised lists of sites. Submit your site to as many of these as possible to build up a collection of good quality links to your site. This will not only help your site to appear in the search engines, but the number of links will improve its position in the search engine results pages.

Forum Submissions

Join forums which are related to your website. Read as many posts as you can to get a “feel” for the forum before contributing your own posts. Add links to your site in the Signature of your posts, but don’t fill your post body text with links – you will be considered a spam poster. Links in your signature are totally acceptable, however, but don’t overdo it.

Blog Comments

Find blogs related to the subject of your site and comment on posts made. Most blogs let you add your website URL to your comment. Whatever you do though, post useful, genuine comments. If you write something generic or inane such as “I found your post interesting and look forward to reading more”, it may be rejected by the blog owner, or even caught by the blog’s spam filter.

Submission Services

If the above sounds like a lot of work, you’re right. Running an online business isn’t the gravy train that most people think it is. You have to work at it to achieve success. Thankfully, if there’s a job to be done, there’s usually somebody who will do it for you for a fee.
Submission services can submit your site to over a thousand website directories for just a few cents per submission.  The submission service that I recommend is such as Directory Maximizer.  They submit your site by hand to ensure that your site will appear in the correct category in the directory. As a result, you will gain a large number of strong, permanent backlinks to your site. These backlinks will help to push your site up the ranks on the search engine results pages.

Using a submission service such as this will save you a LOT of time.  What is your time worth per hour?  $10?  $20?  $40?  More?  How many hours would it take to submit your site to over 1000 directories, bearing in mind that you would probably need to register at all the sites first?  Using a good quality submission service is a no-brainer.

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Twitter has captured the imagination of many on-line marketers. If you follow a lot of Tweeple, you’re bound to see many promotional links passing through your Twitter timeline. If you have managed to pick up a lot of followers, it’s a good way of reaching a lot of people very quickly with a short message. However, this technique has its limitations. Trending Topics can be used to overcome some of these limitations.

How Twitter Works
When you Tweet, your message goes into what is known as the Public Timeline. This is a huge list of Tweets, sorted in chronological order. When you log into your Twitter account, you are shown your Personal Timeline. This consists of Tweets taken from the Public Timeline that were sent by people you have chosen to follow.

When you send a Tweet, your message is added to the Public Timeline, but if nobody has chosen to follow you, then nobody will see your message. It will stay there, moving further down the line into obscurity. This is why you need followers. Without them, your messages are pointless.

Tweet Saturation
If you have 1,000 followers, you have probably followed them in return to keep them as followers. People quite rightly expect a reciprocal following, and will soon “unfollow” you if you don’t follow them.

The problem then is that if you are following those 1,000 people, your Personal Timeline is now being swamped by the Tweets of 1,000 people. The messages pass through your timeline so quickly that you don’t have a chance to read most of them. In fact, many marketers who attract a large following tend to have multiple Twitter accounts, keeping one aside for personal use, while the others are used as “mailing lists”.

Others use programs such as TweetDeck in which you can selectively choose the Tweets from people you are genuinely interested in and display them in a separate timeline.

In marketing, people often quote 2% as being a typical, expected response rate to a promotion. So if you send a Tweet to your 1,000 followers, you might expect 20 people to respond. However, that assumes that all 1,000 of those people actually saw your Tweet.

If your followers, like you, are following a lot of people, Tweets will pass them by unread. Your message will not reach 1,000 people as you thought. It might only reach 200 people, in which case, the number of responses at a 2% response-rate would be just 4. Twitter is not the gift to marketing that you thought it was.

Obviously, the more followers you have, the more will see your message, so one solution is to obtain more followers.

However, there is a smarter way to get your message across to more people, and that is by exploiting Trending Topics.

Trending Topics
On the Twitter home page and your account home page, you will see a list of Trending Topics. Twitter analyses Tweets and picks out the most popular words or phrases that appear in them. The top 10 most popular words or phrases become the Trending Topics.

When you click on one of the Trending Topic titles, you are shown a whole new Timeline. This contains all the Tweets from the Public timeline that contain the Trending Topic. If you Tweet a message that contains one of the Trending Topics, anyone currently watching the Trending Topic timeline will see your Tweet, regardless of whether they follow you or not. Suddenly you are accessing a whole new audience.

You will notice that some people are already exploiting this by Tweeting a message that is unrelated to the Topic, but adding the Trending Topic keywords to ensure it gets viewed in the Trending Topic timeline. These are obviously spam Tweets. Personally, I block those spammers. Many get reported to Twitter and their accounts are cancelled. It really isn’t worth spamming.

Use Trending Topics the Clever Way
There are two approaches to using Trending Topics. One is to make general conversation, which can attract new followers, and can be done at any time. The second is very similar but uses a more targetted approach.

Log on to Twitter and look at the Trending Topics. Click through them to view their Timelines to find out what they are about – sometimes it’s not always that obvious! Now join in the conversation! Tweet a comment or opinion on the subject. Your message has now gone out to all the people who are actively reading that topic’s timeline. As it is a Trending Topic, it’s currently very popular, so there are likely to be a lot of people reading.

Find a website that relates to the topic. If the topic relates to a breaking news item, find a news site that has an interesting article or video footage, and post its URL in a Tweet. I have picked up numerous new followers by doing this.

Read down the Topic timeline and respond to peoples’ comments and questions. Engage people in interesting conversation in that topic and the chances are that you will gain new followers.

Use Follow Friday
Follow Friday is a great opportunity. It is a Trending Topic that appears every Friday, and you can exploit it to get more followers.

For example, a newbie called JohnDoe123 Tweets a message saying “What on earth is Follow Friday?”. Tweet a reply “@JohnDoe123 Follow Friday is a tradition to recommend other people to follow”.
JohnDoe123 will be so happy that you answered his question, he’ll probably follow you, and maybe even send out a Follow Friday with your name in it, which will earn you even more followers.

Get your friends to recommend you on Follow Friday and do the same for them. It’s a good way of building up your following.

Targeted Trending Topics
The opportunities for exploiting Trending Topics in this way are much more limited, but when they arise, it can be a golden opportunity.

Check the Twitter Trending topics regularly – about once per hour is usually enough. Look out for Trending Topics that are in some way related to your niche. When one arises, jump on it and Tweet appropriate links to your own websites. I recently saw a trending topic come up which was the same subject as a blog post I’d made about 1 week earlier. Straight away, I tweeted a link to my post. Within a coule of seconds I had received 15 hits on my blog post, and hits kept coming for some time afterwards. I even found that people had Re-Tweeted my message, thus sending it to their followers and keeping it fresh in the trending topic timeline.

Using Trending Topics then, can be a very powerful tool as long as you keep on topic. People don’t like spam emails and they dislike spam tweets even more. Use this technique intelligently and you will gain followers, and reach other people who are not in your following.

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A new monthly competition has been launched at the popular article site, Article Content King.

All articles submitted within 90 days of the competiton’s end date, that have received member moderation scores of more than 15 qualify to be counted within the competition.

The scores are added up and the member with the highest score is crowned Article Content King (or Queen) for the month.

Similarly, articles submitted within the last 120 days in a particular category can earn their author the title of Prince or Princess of that category.

The score of each article is dynamic – it receives an extra point for every 100 unique visits, and can also be voted up or down by people reading the article.

What’s in it for me?
There are a number of very valuable prizes awarded to the King/Queen and Prince/Princesses.

As well as a cash prize for the King, winners will receive:
- recognition in a prominent place on the site
- a page devoted to their online business
- their online business promoted in a press release (worth $240)
- their status tweeted to at least 100,000 Twitter users
- receive bonus advertising credits which allow the author to display their own ads on the site.

Even if you have not submitted any articles to the site within the last 90 days, you can still be in with a chance of becoming Article Content King/Queen. As long as you sign up now and submit some really good quality articles, you could be crowned King/Queen or Prince/Princess of your chosen category.

Good luck!

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