Colin Klinkert Dot Com

The Power of Partnerships

So you’ve heard about online and affiliate marketing and have learned that they are a great way to make money online, but are you new to the process and don’t know where to begin?

If so it’s time to objectively take stock of your skills and learn what you need to in order to succeed.

At its most basic, online marketing breaks down into two principle parts:  search engine optimization (SEO) and sales copy.  The SEO will drive traffic to your sites, and good sales copy will convince those visitors to buy the product from you.  When you begin to get traffic and sales, you will have the basis of your own ‘list’ of clients. But what if you don’t know a lot about either?

Focus on one or the other to start with and once you have something to bring to the table, you can look for someone to partner with for a campaign.

Sales copy will likely prove to be the valuable skill, and as such is a great place to start.  Look for online resources, books from the local library about copywriting, anything you can get your hands on.  Also, read through the websites that other online marketers have produced.

For every person that wants to be an online marketer and has good sales copy skills, there is another person who is good at SEO but has problems stringing together words into compelling sentences.  Check with forums devoted to online marketing, and you can probably find somebody who is willing to team up with you.

Especially in your early stages of internet marketing, it is better to split all the profit generated than not make any profit at all.  Once you gain some experience, you can strike out on your own, or you may find that you like the partnership and continue with it.

Either way, by combining your skills and somebody else’s at the beginning of your online marketing career, you can start making sales faster.

Where To Find People

For ViralUrl, Frank and I teamed up as we had skills that complimented eachother. ViralUrl has been a big hit and we have plans to take it to the next level as well. I met Frank a while before we partnered through networking. A great new Business Social Network that you can use to meet people to partner with is ViralNetworks! I am on ViralNetworks as well as 18,000 other marketers, so come join us and get networking!

Video Intro To This Post Can Be Viewed Here: http://viralnetworks.com/view/CCI0x

Keywords are Important in Marketing

Before you begin an internet marketing campaign, it is crucial to have a specific set of keywords that you will be focusing on.  If you don’t have a list of keywords, your efforts are likely to be ad hoc and aimless, and your campaign could lose focus.  It is far better to have good rankings on a select set of keywords than mediocre rankings on lots of keywords.  Brainstorming is an easy way to come up with keywords.

This is an exercise many of you might remember from grade school, but it works, so give it a try.  Write the name of your product in the middle of a sheet of paper.  Around it, write down the first words and phrases that come to mind, connecting those words to the original with a short line.  Then, for all of those words and phrases, write down what comes to mind when you think about them.

This is called a Cloud Diagram or a Cluster Diagram, and it will give you options you didn’t know you had.  For example, if you were selling web design software then you are already focusing on keywords like “web design” and “how to design a website.”  But you may have missed more focused keywords like “writing HTML” or “coding PHP.”  These are more specific, meaning a smaller audience, but that also means less competition.

If you are conducting a PPC (pay per click) or PPV (pay per view) campaign, using the right keywords and key phrases is imperative.  Choosing the wrong ones can cost you dearly, but by being more focused, you can target your prospects (potential customers) with laser-like precision.

There are also some great tools available to help you select keywords, many are free, like the Google Keyword Tool, which, although designed for Google’s Adwords, can be used by anyone. It is powerful as it shows searches so you know what ones are worth your time and what ones aren’t. Rule of thumb, if it gets less then 1,000 searches a month, scrap it (Unless you are doing PPC and it is a very targeted term that will lead to high conversions.)

You can also use the Google Keyword Tool if you are doing SEO strategies to try and get to the first page of google on those terms. If you find one with a decent amount of searches, search it in google with “keyword” and see how many competing sites there are… of course, the less the better.

Researching and using the right keywords can make or break an internet marketing campaign, particular in the launch phase in affiliate marketing.  So it makes sense to include  keyword research in the early stages of your project planning.

More Tools

As well as the Google tool there are other, more advanced tools available. I use PPCBully to spy on competitiors who are bidding on keywords I have brainstormed to see if they are profitable or not. PPCBully works well, but does take a bit of time to gather the data

Network With Me

If you want to say hi, please feel free to join ViralNetworks, my Business Social Network of choice. Looking forward to hearing from you.