WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
In our last lesson, we gave a brief description of the first five of
the 10 most common Internet SFI Affiliates.
In this lesson, we will briefly describe the last five. While space prohibits
us from giving you more than a brief introduction to these last five methods
in this lesson, future lessons will address each of these methods in more
detail.
MARKETING METHODS
Recall from our last lesson that we enumerated the most common Internet
marketing methods, particularly useful in promoting the SFI affiliate
program, as follows:
1) Gateway Pages and Search Engine Registration
3) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Online Classifieds)
4) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Affiliate and Paid Placement)
5) Building Your Own Content Rich Website
6) Utilizing an Opt-In Program
7) Hosting FFA Pages
8) Using Safelists, Announcement Lists, and Viral marketing
9) Press Releases, Relationship Building, and Offline Promotion
10) The Latest New Technique
2) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Exchange Programs)
Also, in the last lesson, we briefly described the first five. Here's
a brief description of six through 10.
UTILIZING AN OPT-IN PROGRAM
E-mail is a vehicle that works in conjunction with other interactive
features of a Website to create a flow of communication with your prospects.
In order to avoid spamming, you have to have consent from a prospect to
send them e-mail. The best way to get that consent is to have them do
something on your Website that establishes that consent. Such devices
are called "opt-in" programs.
The simplest example of an opt-in program is to have a line on your Website
which says "Join our Newsletter" and provides a form for the
viewer to submit his or her e-mail address. From there, the extent and
variety of opt-in programs that can be created is limited only by imagination.
Often effective are contests. Viewers enter a contest to win something
by entering their e-mail address. Often, there are interactive games which
pit the viewer against other players around the world, and the scores
and results of the games are communicated to the participants with e-mail.
Particularly interesting is one which has a slot machine interface on
the site which you can play for free, but if you accumulate any winnings,
you have to opt-in to collect your money.
There are many types of opt-ins. You can sign up to receive news, weather,
stock tips, pictures, and many other types of information to be received
by e-mail. There are many educational opt-in programs for school children
(and adults) including "science facts," "strange animals,"
"today in history," and other education subjects. A prayer of
the day, week, or month is available from many different sources.
You can also allow people to post information on your Website and thereby
gain consent to e-mail them. Examples of this are business directories
and FFA pages (discussed below), among many others. Remember, imagination
is the only limitation.
It is both intuitive and supported by research that an e-mail inbox is
a much more effective place to communicate with a prospect than a Website.
But, it takes the Website to get the necessary permission to communicate
by e-mail. Thus, the "Opt-In" program is a crucial step in an
effective Internet marketing campaign.
One of the most effective opt-in programs on the Internet is the SFI
marketing Group's affiliate program. As an SFI affiliate, you need only
point people from your Gateway page to the SFI page for this very effective
opt-in to be made available to your viewers.
HOSTING FFA PAGES
"FFA" stands for "Free for All" which is short for
"Free for all to post here." FFA's are Websites where you can
post a link and perhaps a short description to your Website without having
to pay an advertising fee. When you post on one of these FFA sites, you
will receive an e-mail from the site host confirming that your link was
placed and, in all likelihood, containing an advertisement as well.
It is not an effective use of your time to individually post your link
to these sites. These sites are actually rarely seen by anyone. Plus,
almost all these FFA sites have a maximum number of posts that will be
displayed. The old ones are dropped to make room for the new ones. In
many cases, this process occurs in just minutes or hours so that your
link is not on the site long enough for it to do you any good at all.
There are FFA submission services that will post your link to hundreds
of these sites at once. That makes it somewhat more time effective, but
even with that, this is still not a terribly effective way to promote
your Website. Should you use one of these submission services, be sure
to create a separate e-mail address to use. You will receive confirmation
e-mails from several hundred FFA sites after using one of these submission
services. It will choke down your e-mail. Thus, do not use your everyday
e-mail address when making such submissions.
An effective way to use FFA sites, however, is to HOST an FFA site. When
you host an FFA site, you get to send out all the confirmation e-mails
- with YOUR ad in them! There are services on the Web which will allow
you to host an FFA site on their server without charge or for a small
fee. There are also autoresponder services available (for free or a small
fee) which you can connect to your FFA site to send the confirming e-mails.
USING SAFELISTS, ANNOUNCEMENT LISTS, AND
VIRAL MARKETING
Safelists are e-mail lists which allow you to join and post advertisements
in exchange for receiving advertisements from others. You and other members
send your e-mail to a list address and from there it is distributed to
the members of the list. There are several such lists at Yahoo! Groups
and other e-mail list services. These also are only effective if done
in bulk. That is, you must create a separate "throw-away" e-mail
address to sign up for these and use group mail software to send to hundreds
of lists at once. The e-mail you will receive from being a member of hundreds
of lists will be in the thousands per day. Thus, it is imperative that
you use a different e-mail address from the one you use for daily correspondence.
It is not easy to use safelists effectively. Until you are experienced,
you should seek the tutoring of a more experienced Internet marketer in
setting this up properly. You can begin to learn, however, by going to
Yahoo! Groups and searching for lists that allow advertising. For now,
just join one or two groups to become familiar with the process. Do not
expect any results from the ads you post to just one or two groups, but
use it as a learning process. It will be much easier for you to master
the skills necessary to effectively market with safelists in bulk if you
have had some hands-on experience with the lists first.
Announcement Lists are similar to advertising lists but with a slant
toward announcing new sites rather than advertising per se. Unless you
obtain a list of "safelists" from a very trusted source, carefully
read the rules for each list before you post and keep your posts within
the guidelines for the list.
The next Internet marketing technique, VIRAL marketing, is interesting
but not very effective. Viral marketing is designed to circumvent the
spam rules by hoping the recipient of the e-mail will forward it on to
the people on his or her forwarding list. Since you have not sent the
e-mail to these other persons directly, you can not be accused of spam.
The concept is that the e-mail will spread out to many recipients like
a virus - being passed from one to another to another. Each recipient
receives the e-mail from someone with whom they have a pre-existing relationship.
Since a pre-existing relationship is an exception to most spam rules,
the e-mail is not considered spam.
All of us have had the misfortune (or perhaps good fortune, if you have
a lot of spare time) of being on a number of our friends' e-mail forwarding
lists. Every time they receive a joke that they think is funny or the
latest urban legend ("Watch out for AIDS-infected needles hidden
in theater seats or gas pump handles."), they very generously pass
it on to us and the 15 or more other people on their list. Many of the
people on their list then pass it on to 15 or more other people. Observing
this phenomenon, it occurred to a number of enterprising Internet marketers
to try to harness this distribution technique for marketing.
A consulting group I organized ran an experiment on viral marketing about
18 months ago. Our results were interesting. What we found was that in
order for the distribution to be effective (i.e. for people to keep passing
it on) it had to be either of a "hysterical" nature (ex: hidden
AIDS needles or people stealing your kidneys) or it had to be humor or
complete nonsense. Otherwise, it died in two generations (that is, it
was not passed on more than twice). In theorizing about these results,
we considered the effectiveness of an ad traveling along with one of these
hysterical or nonsensical e-mails which would survive several generations.
We concluded that the state of mind induced by either the hysteria or
the nonsense of the primary message was not conducive to generating response
to the ad. In other words, the ad did not flow with the material and thus
would not be effective.
One of the funniest things I have seen was the viral e-mail that convinced
the reader that the technology now existed for an ordinary computer monitor
to take someone's picture like a camera. You were then given a link to
a page where you were instructed to hold your face in front of the monitor
and then click a "shutter button" and count down the exposure
time. To see the results, you were taken to a full screen picture of a
surprised looking monkey - which was a pretty accurate picture of you
at the time! This particular viral achieved extremely wide distribution.
However, it could certainly not be used effectively for marketing. Who
wants to buy or join something when it has just made a monkey out of you?
Thus, while viral marketing per se does not appear to be an effective
Internet marketing technique, an understanding of its limitations can
lead us to consider the most powerful technique of all - sincere communication.
People decide whether to pay attention to e-mail based on two obvious
factors: the source and the subject. Viral e-mail, by definition, comes
from a trusted source. It also has an attention grabbing subject. Its
limitation is that it is either not serious at all (just humor or a practical
joke) or it is too serious (warning of some bizarre danger).
There is a somewhat slower, yet very effective process, however. You
can send sincere communication to someone you know (and who you know does
not mind receiving e-mail from you) and sincerely tell them about your
successful experience with an affiliate program such as SFI. Do not make
it sound like an ad in any form or fashion! Rather, let it just be a sincere
sharing with them of your experience. Mix in other things about your life
and inquire about their lives so that it is not just a single subject
e-mail. They, in turn, may become interested in your program and may later
join. If they do, they may later share their successful experience with
others that they know. And so it continues and grows! Let's not call this
process "viral marketing." Let's call it "infectious enthusiasm"!
PRESS RELEASES, RELATIONSHIP BUILDING,
AND OFFLINE PROMOTION
While the offline world does not exist to the exclusion of the online
world, neither does the online world exist to the exclusion of the offline
world. Although the SFI program is primarily online, you can certainly
use offline marketing in conjunction with your online techniques. You
should combine offline and online efforts in effective ways. For example,
you can send classified ads and press releases by e-mail to newspapers,
which will then appear in print publications. The printed announcements
and ads can then direct people online to your Website. Successful SFI
Affiliates use the two together effectively.
You can use the relationship building techniques effective in the offline
world in the online arena as well. Relationship building and "infectious
enthusiasm" are things that occur both online and offline. You can
meet people online and then build a relationship which carries over to
the offline world. You can communicate with people online that you have
met and known from the offline world. The bottom line is that it takes
trust to induce someone to buy or join. It takes a relationship of some
sort to build trust. These principles have always been true in the offline
world and they are still true in the online world. The relationship begins
when people first see your ad and they continue to judge you by everything
that follows. An ad does not sell—it starts a relationship. The resulting
relationship sells—provided it becomes a trusted relationship.
THE LATEST NEW TECHNIQUE
Have you heard of "vortals"? They are single subject portals
and they are the latest buzz. And, hey, what are "portals" anyway?
Isn't that what we used to call "Search Engines" before they
added a bunch of new features and some personalization capabilities? The
only thing constant about the Internet is that it is constantly changing!
The latest tip is that you should be on a constant search for new subject
specific portals (vortals) dealing with your subject and make sure your
site gets listed there. Search for these vortals through the search engines
by searching for words dealing with your product or service. When you
find them, read the rules for posting and post a link to your site there.
One constant is that you should always stay on top of what's new on the
Internet and be one of the first to take advantage of each new technique
as it becomes available. You will need to stay informed and be adaptive
to be successful in Internet marketing. How can you do that? There are
a bunch of experts at the SFI sites just waiting for you to read their
articles and ask them questions. Hang out with the right people and you
can not help but be successful.
CONCLUSION
Remember that these last two lessons have been just a brief introduction
to many different concepts. Do not be concerned if you are still a little
confused. Things will become clearer as we address each method in more
detail as this course continues. You can get more information immediately
by becoming an IAHBE member and accessing the expert advice there.
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