Viral Marketing Tips

Viral marketing may be a new concept for you, and you need to know that it is one of the biggest keys to attracting new prospects and clients to your online business. Most businesses don’t take advantage of this like they should, and you can set yourself apart if you take some time to learn about it.

So, what exactly does ‘viral’ mean?

It’s essentially the process of having other people and websites recommend you and your product to others. It’s another word for referral advertising. It’s different from affiliate marketing in that no commission changes hands. This is quite common in the offline, brick and mortar world and is now catching on in the online world as well.

The great thing about it is that it doesn’t require any additional expenses on your part. And if your prospects or customers provide word of mouth advertising, this will give you more credibility. This is because what others say about you matters more than what you say. When you visit a site that has many testimonials you automatically assume they are more credible, right?

So how do you make your marketing viral? Here are six of the best ways:

1. Offer A Compelling Free Giveaway

Also referred to as an ‘ethical bribe’ your free giveaway must be irresistible to your target market. One way you can instantly get more opt-ins for your newsletter is to spend the time to put together the exact information your prospects are looking for. Then encourage those who opt in to share it with others. Try this – it works!

2. Freebies

Another excellent strategy is to give away your own and other people’s products (with their permission and preferably through an affiliate link) to your community. I do this regularly with both the NAMS weekly trainings with David Perdew and an eBook about the Earn 1K a Day event with Dennis Becker.

3. Provide Excellent Resources

The best way to generate referrals is to give away a lot of valuable free information. A lot of times marketers don’t give good content with the free eBooks, because they are trying to save the best information for the product.

The problem is, if your free content isn’t good, people are going to assume your paid content isn’t going to be worth it either. The free information is supposed to wet their appetite. This gets them thinking, ‘if the free information is this good, just imagine how good the paid stuff will be.’

4. Write A Book For Kindle And Give It Away

I’ve written nine books, and every few weeks I am able to give one of them away for free through Kindle’s KDP Select program. This is a way to connect with your community and set yourself apart from others in your niche. Take a look at my books on Amazon to see what I am referring to.

5. Create Excellent Content For Your Website

Probably the best way to go viral is to simply have excellent and relevant content on your blog and other sites. Use a plugin like the one I have here to allow visitors to easily share your content, and encourage them to do so regularly. In many instances, other sites will pick up your content and post it on their sites.  This will give you additional traffic without having to do any more work. However, you have to stand out from other sites for this to happen.

How do you stand out to increase your viral marketing?

Storytelling remains the best way to stand out from the crowd. Incorporating your story into the body of your writing and relating it to your topic can be crucial to your success. I’ve shared stories related to hosting young people from eight different countries in my home over the past seven years, stories about my involvement with Rotary and other charities, and even stories about being a multiple cancer survivor. Storytelling fleshes us out as three dimensional beings to those who only know us online.

6. Use Channels To Share Your Information

Putting videos on YouTube and other popular video directories will encourage people to pass them around. Again, just make sure the content is good. Record your teleseminars and add them to iTunes as podcasts (my podcast is available here). Create pages on Facebook to get the conversation going.

The bottom line is, making your marketing viral is how to skyrocket your efforts. The best way to do this is to create and then give away lots of great free information. Get started with this marketing strategy today and watch your business grow.

This month I am hosting a Japanese student through my Rotary Club’s involvement in the Rotary International Student Exchange Program. Over the past seven years, since I’ve been working exclusively online as an entrepreneur I’ve had the pleasure of hosting young people from eight different countries, including Norway, Mexico, Sweden, Nepal, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, and now Japan. They range in age from fifteen to twenty-two, and it’s lots of fun to be a part of someone’s life as they get to know you, your family, and our country and vice versa.

My Japanese student is a seventeen year old boy named Ryosuke (ree-OS-kay). During the first few days my family and I got know him better. His English is not very good, so we had fun with Google Translate and a pocket dictionary to better communicate back and forth. We wanted to learn which foods he liked (loves eggs, hates tomatoes, allergic to peanuts), if he was into sports (plays tennis on a team, plays baseball for fun, and is not involved with any others), what he most wanted to see in southern California (Disneyland and as many beaches as possible), and more about his family (he’s the youngest of four, lives in a city of almost a million, loves astronomy, has never had a pet).

Based on this information we offered him eggs every morning in the form of scrambled, poached, hard-boiled, and French toast; got rid of the peanuts and peanut butter in our home; took him to play tennis twice; spent two days at Disneyland; visited several beaches; dug out our telescope and set it up in the back yard; and made sure he had time to get to know all of our little dogs.

As the days went on I saw that what we were doing was very similar to what we do when we are trying to reach our target market online. We get to know them over time by offering them more about what they came to us for in the first place, never offering them anything they have not asked for, and asking them questions to learn more about them and their dreams for success. If you are doing this every day you are probably already seeing your business grow. It’s when we get off course and start marketing to our community in a way that does not resonate with them that our business begins to stagnate.

One Saturday we took Ryosuke to a field day event hosted by our city. I was hoping he’d get a chance to participate in a tennis clinic or throw a few pitches, but both of those activities were set up for much younger kids. Then we saw the volleyball nets and encouraged him to give it a try.

Ryosuke was a natural! Because of his years of playing baseball and tennis he had many ‘crossover’ skills that served him well in this sport. The high school kids added him to their team and we watched in admiration for almost an hour while they played. It was only afterwards that they learned he had never played volleyball even once in his life.

As you are exploring how to reach your target market, think about the crossover skills you have from your previous job, career, or educational training. Most likely you also have skills that could be helpful to those you are now coming to you for advice. I had been a classroom teacher for twenty years, as well as working as a residential appraiser and broker and used that as a basis for teaching adults how to write and market their content and to build a profitable online business.

Having an exchange student in your home also allows you to spoil them. This is an interesting process as you find yourself doing things for them that you might not have done for your own family members for many years, including preparing special foods, listening to every word they say, and taking them to places they have expressed a desire to know more about. If you do this in your business you will see how quickly people respond, as we all like to be made to feel special by those we are interacting with.

I love how real life situations can be beneficial to us in our businesses. When you learn how to reach your target market, whether it’s people you are connected to within your family or those you are doing business with, everyone wins.

Online Marketing Tips Podcast

Do you need help with your online marketing? In this episode of the Online Marketing Tips Podcast With Connie Ragen Green, my newest podcast series, I discuss the importance of attending live events. The events included in this podcast call were NAMS (Novice to Advanced Marketing Systems) where I have been on the faculty since 2011; Dennis Becker’s Earn 1K a Day seminar where I have spoken the past two years; and my own upcoming event, the Weekend Marketer Live workshop in Las Vegas October 11-13.

My calls are interactive so that you may be heard. During this call I am joined my many of my students who share their questions, concerns, and accomplishments with their online business in regards to attending live marketing events, seminars, and workshops. This time we discussed how to add audio to presentations, tools for taking screenshots, article marketing and content creation, WordPress themes, hosting your own teleseminars, choosing the best events to attend, and much more.

These are the reasons you’ll want to attend live events:

• Learn new strategies by continuing to be a student
• Connect with prospects, clients, and friends
• Move out of your comfort zone
• Find people to Mastermind with after it’s over
• Make JV (joint venture) connections

This podcast and these online marketing tips are intended to teach you how you can take your business to the next level quickly and effectively, and as a way for me to share my very Case Studies, secrets, and advice on creating a profitable and lucrative online business using the ‘multiple income streams’ approach. Each session is first recorded live as a teleseminar, and then repurposed into a podcast to extend my reach to the world. Please join my list to be included on these calls, and be sure to introduce yourself and share your site for optimal exposure for years to come!

If you’re looking for the Study Guide for this podcast, go to this page and choose ‘August 14, 2013‘. These are intended to help you to get the most out of my training and resources as you build your online business.

Also, you can now pick up my popular training on winning affiliate contests and other online marketing tips for only seven dollars at Affiliate Contest Secrets. Use the discount code CONTEST to bring the price down to $7. This training has been updated for 2013 with the latest information, strategies, and Case Studies for you to use in your own business.

List Building Tips

As a business owner you have many assets, including your land and buildings, your inventory, your staff, and your intellectual property. But have you ever stopped to think about your list? The list, or database of your clients is the most profitable asset your business will ever have. Hopefully you’ve been adding email addresses to the names, physical addresses, and phone numbers so that you can reach out to your prospects and clients with just a moment’s notice. Here are some list building tips that will be helpful to you as your business grows.

Building your email list will ensure that your business grows steadily over time. But there is much more to it than that. Your list will also provide feedback as to what you have to offer, saving you a tremendous amount of time and money. Additionally, an email list allows you to reach out to new prospects and existing clients without having to see them in person or send them a costly direct mail piece.

Danielle wrote to ask me about how she could start building a list for her brand new business. She has started a company that works directly with people who have retired and are in need of additional income. In order to reach these people she has started a blog, has written a book that’s available on Amazon as both a Kindle version and in paperback, and is starting to visit local groups to share her message.

This is an excellent start, but I would also encourage her to start building an email list from the very beginning. You can get started with a reputable and accepted autoresponder service called Aweber for only one dollar. This service creates the html code you need to easily add an optin box to your blog or website. When visitors come to your site you can offer them a short report on exactly how you intend to serve them in return for their name and email address. Over time you will stay in contact with these people and move them from visitors to prospects to clients.

One point I should make here is that by using an autoresponder service you are providing a way for people to join your email list that fully complies with federal law and the CANN-SPAM Act. A permission based list is the only way to do business in a legal and straightforward manner that protects your reputation.

If you have written a book, even a short one to be used as a lead generator, be sure to include a page at the end where your readers can go to your site and opt in to your list. Otherwise you will have missed a great opportunity to further engage the people who purchase your book.

When you create, or have created for you a website for your business, you will also add an optin box there. Anywhere your name and/or your company name appears online or in print should include this form so that list building becomes the way you generate more business on a daily basis.

Other ways to build your database list include posting videos on a YouTube channel, hosting an audio that can be turned into a podcast series on iTunes, and paying to run an advertisement in local print publications – such as this one – and in magazines and on Facebook. All of these methods work well to get your name out to the world with the message of how you are serving others.

You may also want to partner with complimentary service providers to spread the word about what each of you is doing in the community. I have seen this work extremely well in the trades, with plumbers sharing information on a local handyman and carpenters sharing painters they recommend. It becomes a type of ‘coopetition’, with everyone cooperatively competing to bring in more business for everyone over time.

I hope you can now see the importance of building an email list for your business and that you will begin using some of these proven strategies right away. Years from now you will be glad you took this step when you see how much your bottom line has increased. No matter what happens in your industry or with the economy, your list will continue to be your most valuable asset. There is an excellent training, of which I was a part of, through NAMS called the 30 Day List Building Challenge that I highly recommend.

List Building Tips

List building is an activity you must engage in on a regular basis in order to build your online business, so you might as well do it in an effective way. I’ll be sharing several of my best list building tips with you here.

There are many ways to go about building a responsive list, and I would like to focus on the importance of building your list with your blog, a separate opt in page, and a teleseminar page. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these marketing strategies.

It is my strong belief that you absolutely must have a blog to get started online. By this I do not mean a free blog on one of the free blogging platforms, but a blog that you own and control on WordPress. You’ll need to get hosting first, and a good c-panel hosting account will allow you to set up as many sites as you would like to without any additional fees or cost. My preference is BlueHost or Hostgator for this purpose. You will then be able to install WordPress on your new blog in about five minutes and without any other expense. If you get stuck while doing this, Google for help or go to YouTube to search for videos showing you how to do it.

The next step is to add an optin box to this blog site where people can type in their name and email address in return for a report or something else you will be giving away for free. It must be enticing for your prospects to be willing to exchange their name and email address in order to receive it. Take a look at other sites where you have opted in and see what they offered that compelled you to join their list. You’ll need an autoresponder service for this, and I highly recommend that you get started with Aweber for only one dollar and then nineteen dollars a month after that.

Now that you have a WordPress blog site where you can post about your niche topic and have people opt in to join your list, you have done the very minimum to start your online business. It’s time to take it a step further by giving people more opportunities to find you and join your online community via your list.

This is accomplished by setting up a page that is devoted to only one thing – offering a different free giveaway when someone joins your list. This is known as a  squeeze page or optin page and it is a stand alone page on its own domain. I recommend doing this to attract different segments of people within your niche by age, gender, specific interests, and so forth. For example, in my business I have stand alone opt in pages that are directed at women, moms, men under thirty-five, and so on. The idea is to relate to the people who may benefit from what you have to offer.

The next way to build your list is to offer free teleseminars where you will discuss a topic and answer questions. This can also be on its own page, allowing visitors to sign up for your call and then access it right away. i did this for eighteen months straight, offering a free teleseminar every single week back in 2007 and 2008. I now do it twice a month and repurpose the call into a podcast (take a look here). This continues to build my list, but that’s an altogether different strategy.

Set up a dedicated page where you will be able to make the changes yourself. Describe in some detail what you call will be about, and ask people to opt in to receive the call details. Use some bullet points to explain what you will be sharing and why it will be a benefit for your prospects to sign up. When they opt in and join your list, take them to a page where you give the details of how they can join the live teleseminar you are hosting.

These strategies work extremely well in building your list while you are serving others by sharing your knowledge and expertise in your niche.

Local Networking Events

Local networking events are an excellent place to connect with other like-minded individuals.

Attending Local Network Meetings to Build Your Client List

It’s natural for an online services business professional to seek out other online businesses to work with, but did you know that you can also find clients locally, too? The key is to strategically attend local network meeting events that meet your criteria. There are probably many local business events in your area. Let’s take a look at the possibilities.

Chamber of Commerce:  Every community has a local chamber of commerce. Many times you do not need to be a member to participate. I have been to events at the Chamber in both Santa Clarita and Santa Barbara over the past seven years and I do not belong to either group. If you can get involved in events using your skills to help, people will start recommending you.

Your Strategy: Align yourself with the smallest businesses and if they have a sub group, those who work from home or do business exclusively online. If they don’t have this already, offer to start the group and host it at your home, the library, or somewhere else that works for everyone. You’ll become invaluable to the organization if you do this.

Women in Business Meetings: Women sometimes prefer a group that caters just to them, and women’s business organizations are now more popular than ever before. Many local women’s business meetings like to have an expert speak on various topics and you can learn from those who are active in specific areas, such as business blogging or social media marketing.

Your Strategy: Share your knowledge and expertise openly and see where it leads. Offer to be a speaker or to assist in any way you can to show that you are sincere and dedicated to helping others succeed.

BNI International Meetings: Business networking groups like this are excellent ways to find clients to work with. I have not attended these meetings personally, but have many friends who have made great progress with the connection they have made. The way it works is that only one business or person from each profession can join each group. The members agree to recommend each other. It can be pricy to get in and you have to be comfortable giving a presentation to the others before they accept you, but it can be very lucrative in the long run.

Your Strategy: Showcase your business in the best light during presentations, and become a resource to this group of networkers. Recommend them to others in the rest of your local networks and they will return the favor many times over. The great thing about BNI is that within a group, you’re the only one in your niche, so you can offer a lot to the other members.

Start Your Own Meetings: Using a social program like http://www.meetup.com to plan and organize local business meetings. You can start it with your own presentation. You’ll need to find a space. A good idea for locating space is asking for free space from an hourly office rental firm. They might like the idea of getting some free advertisement for your weekly meetings being hosted with them. You can also rent space from your local public library, some churches, and clubhouses associated with local HOAs.

Strategy: Become an expert in your field on a local basis, such as with blogging, SEO, or email marketing. Get known as the go-to person regarding your niche. By having your own meet ups and conducting your own presentation those who attend will automatically see you as an expert and come to you if they need extra help. If you can align with an office rental agency you’ll be golden.

When you attend any local events go prepared to promote your business. Bring business cards that list your website or perhaps a QR code on them that will take them to a form to get on your email list. Get their cards too and contact them. Invite them to coffee. Give them advice if they ask for it and really connect with these local people and you’ll be surprised to find that you can find plenty of local clients to fill any open billable hours you have.

Service Organizations: I got my start with Rotary, and international service organization, so I can personally attest to the value of being a part of groups such as this one.

Strategy: Attend a few times to see if the group is a good fit for you. Every group is about the people, so you’ll want to make sure you like the members before going any further. If you do decide to join, do it from a purely philanthropic standpoint. Spend time helping with the group’s projects and learn to enjoy serving others in need. Rotary was the first service organization I had ever been a a part of, and I loved it so much I soon joined other groups as well, including the Elk’s (based only in the United States) and Zonta (an international business women’s group that works to advance the status of women worldwide).

In October of 1992 I found myself in the office of an oncologist who was telling me that I most likely had less than a year to live. At some point I stopped hearing his voice, and the words hung like a cartoon bubble above his head. I was nodding, not understanding what he was talking about, and as the ceiling fan turned I was aware that my face was cold, wet from my tears. I had two initial thoughts; thank God I do not have young children to care for and that even having a million dollars in cold cash would not be helpful in this situation.

The next week was a blur, filled with visits to two other doctors (I was hoping one of them would say something more encouraging) and grueling tests to determine how they would proceed next. I was forced to sort out all of this information and make a decision, and on Thursday, October 8 I underwent a radical mastectomy that would leave me exhausted and disfigured. A couple of days later I removed the bandages and peered in the mirror to see what my new reality looked like. I was hollow on my right side, with a twelve inch scar going diagonally down my chest. It wasn’t pretty.

What followed over the next six months made this first week seem like a visit to Disneyland. The treatment almost killed me, but it allowed me to discover who I was and what I was made of. It turns out that I’m a fighter, and that my life is more important than I ever knew. This may sound odd, but I did not fully appreciate the gift I had been given until it was possible that it would be taken away from me.

I faced each day and each new obstacle bravely. It got much worse before it got better, with additional operations and treatments necessary to keep the cancer from spreading to other areas of my body. At one point I even gave permission for my tissue to be shared with other hospitals around the country because of my rapid cell growth, and I was there when more than twenty people from the hospital carried little pieces of me in small coolers to get to the airport quickly for their flights. One day I looked around the waiting room and counted how many of us had a drained safety-pinned to our shirts. We were a sad bunch, but we felt like this was our second chance to make a difference in the world.

I was not the best patient. There was the time when I made a volunteer cry when I yelled at her to get out of my room. Another time I told the surgeon he was an idiot for making some of the suggestions he was forcing me to hear, like having my head shaved now to avoid the look of losing my hair over a few weeks. I am not proud of what I said or did, but it was my way of dealing with some of the pain and anger of what was happening to my body.

Now I treat each day as a gift from God. Each morning when my feet hit the floor I say a prayer of thanks for the life I have been able to create for myself since that dark period in the 1990s. when I came online in 2006 I looked up my first oncologist and wrote him a letter. I thanked him for saving my life, apologized for my ugly behavior, and told him what I was doing with my new business. I told him that I was devoting the rest of my life to helping others live the life they deserve.

In honor of twenty years since I was first given encouraging news regarding my chances of survival, I am walking in the Avon Breast Cancer Walk 2013 in September in Santa Barbara. I need your help to train for this thirty-nine mile (63 kilometer) walk over a two day period. I have also pledged to raise some money to help find a cure for this insidious disease. Please visit my page and also leave a comment here to let me know I can count on you.

This past weekend I was one of the speakers at Dennis Becker’s Earn 1K Seminar in Las Vegas. this was my second year attending this fantastic event, and the people and information shared there this time was just phenomenal. If you are able to attend next year, I can promise you it will be a game changer for your online business.

Dennis Becker’s Earn 1K Seminar – Takeaways

There were so many great ideas shared here, and I am always looking for ways to improve upon what I’m doing in my own business. You may already know that I am once again hosting my own events, with the next one to be held in Las Vegas October 11-13. I have now decided to do the first day of my three day event as a Mastermind, the way Dennis has done it at his seminar for several years now. This gives people the opportunity to share their ideas, thoughts, concerns, struggles, challenges, and successes with like-minded people who are able to help in so many ways.

Dennis Becker’s Earn 1K Seminar – Speakers

I knew most of the speakers already, but Justin Popovic was someone I had previously only known from being with him on a Google Hangout put together by Dennis a couple of months ago. Justin is an excellent speaker who works in the area of mindset. He really made us think when he talked about Entrepreneur Psychology: 6 Ways to a Winning Mindset. I saw myself in some of the struggles he talked about from his early days of coming online.

Dennis Becker’s Earn 1K Seminar – My Presentation

This year I spoke on the topic of ‘Positioning Yourself As An Authority’, something that has enabled me to quintuple my income over these past few years. The steps I discussed included:

• Deciding exactly what you want to be know for
• Being seen in the right places
• Showing your credibility quickly
• Using Storytelling to connect with your audience
• Becoming an author, something I’ve done nine times so far
• Having a consistent look and feel
• Leveraging the power of repurposing

The audience loved what I had to say and many of them made the decision to take advantage of the Authority Leverage System™ I offered. You’ll be hearing more about this over the next couple of months.

Dennis Becker’s Earn 1K Seminar – Forum

Now that the event is over, where do we go from there? Most of us who were in attendance in Las Vegas are also a part of Dennis Becker’s Earn 1K a Day Forum, where we are able to connect with each other to build relationships and further our businesses. This is a safe haven for online entrepreneurs who are serious about taking their businesses to the next level. In the picture on the left, Dennis is leading a Google Hangout on mindset for entrepreneurs, where I was one of the panelists.

Do you need help with your online marketing? In this episode of the Online Marketing Tips Podcast With Connie Ragen Green, my newest podcast series, I discuss all things online marketing and how self-publishing your own books for Kindle and Create Space is an excellent way to build a residual and passive income stream.

My calls are interactive so that you may be heard. During this call I am joined my many of my students who share their questions, concerns, and accomplishments with their online business. This time we discussed how to promote and sell information products when you don’t yet have a list, writing books for sale on Kindle and Amazon, where to find someone to design your book’s cover, finding help on sites other than Fiverr, using keywords with your images for SEO (search engine optimization), affiliate marketing strategies, the key difference between websites and blogs hosted on the WordPress platform, organizing email effectively, and much more.

This podcast and these online marketing tips are intended to teach you how you can take your business to the next level quickly and effectively, and as a way for me to share my very Case Studies, secrets, and advice on creating a profitable and lucrative online business using the ‘multiple income streams’ approach. Each session is first recorded live as a teleseminar, and then repurposed into a podcast to extend my reach to the world. Please join my list to be included on these calls, and be sure to introduce yourself and share your site for optimal exposure for years to come!

Also, you can now pick up my training on winning affiliate contests and other online marketing tips for only seven dollars at Affiliate Contest Secrets. Use the discount code CONTEST to bring the price down to $7. This training has been updated for 2013 with the latest information, strategies, and Case Studies for you to use in your own business.