Rob Bell's Notes from a Yorkshire Internet Megalomaniac

Marketing is not Promotion People – Get that in Your Heads.

Promotion and Advertising are tools used within a Marketing programme when a product or service is ready to be launched. There’s lots of marketing needs to be done before that stage  though.

There are so many people around claiming to be marketing experts because they’ve undertaken promotional actions to some degree of success – that doesn’t make you a marketing guru that makes you a promotions guru.

Marketing is much more than just promoting products – it’s researching markets, identifying opportunities and problems, developing services and products to solve those problems in a manner a customer would like  setting up and testing Marketing campaigns, using above the line-, below the line- and digital- methods to formulate, execute and analyse the success of each actitivy, something that is particularly easy online given the availability of data, constantly testing and refining promotions as needed. And eventually, the product is ready to go, hopefuly with a well-armed knowledge of the new market that will allow him or her to dominate.

Market Research

A true Marketer knows that any product needs research prior to committing, here are just 15:

1. What’s the size of the market?
2. Who are the major players?
3. How competitive is it?
4. Have you done any Keyword Research?
5. What’s the customer profile?
6. What are people in the market desperate for?
7. Are there any problems there you can solve through your product or service?
8. Are you asking people in the market if they see a place for your product?
9. Would they buy it or try it out and give it a mark out of 100 for you??
10. Are you doing usability studies?
11. What’s the best way to reach your target consumers? It’s not always going to be online, many niches can found away from the computer.
12. What are the best factors to identify in order to do competitive analysis? Price, Features, Quality, Exclusivity – they’ll be different  for each market
13. Does your product represent what you want to sell to them, or what they want to buy from you?
14. How could you change the former into the latter?
15. Where can your potential customers be found?

Next time, I’ll look at competitive positioning and discuss how understanding a fairly simple topic to grasp can help you know more about your market than most others

This post is a direct copy of a page I just uploaded to my personal website, Rob-Bell.com – so the bit about ‘coming soon’ applies to that site, not this I thought the page worth sharing with you, my dear blog readers, so here it is, in all its’ glory including what I now consider to be quite an embarrassing video from a couple of years ago!

Beware the Newbie Trap – Watch That Wallet!

After 4 years of being disabled, I no longer had any savings and found myself living hand to mouth on incapacity and disability benefit, unable to afford to do much, rotting away quietly at home. Some days I couldn’t even afford to eat – but once I caught the internet marketing bug, I found myself forgoing meals to invest in courses I’d been recommended… as a Newbie (Complete Beginner) I didn’t know what was good or not, and I bought quite a few courses that were no use other than taking up space on my hard drive. I’m lucky that I have a degree in Business Management and Marketing, so already knew the rules, many tricks of the trade, and had a good eye for spotting what can only described as BS! I bet you’re just like me – you want to fill that knowledge gap, but you’re just not buying the right stuff…

If you’re new to making money online, it’s really easy to get sucked into spending lots of money on courses far too complex for the new or faint-hearted, which leave you frustrated, skint and feeling overwhelmed – resulting in an early exit before your new activities come to fruition.

The gurus all tell you to spend all your money on their course – which is always the best and fastest way for you to get millions, a massive house, a brand-new shiny Ferrari in your garage, and your own private jet to fly to your own private Island!

You and me both know that the only things that can really give you the lifestyle you dream of are free – Determination, Focus, and Effort.

If you’re just getting started and you’ve never done any marketing before, what you need is a way of learning the principles so you can build a long-term business that provides for you and your family for years to come. The best way of doing this generally is not to buy a thousand dollar web-based program and then convince others to buy the same program to make some money.

Some people are good at this, but most are not which is why network marketing and internet marketing have such high failure rates – I read it’s something like 97% of people who fail in these markets, probably because they find out the truth, which is:-

Even though you were told you would get rich quickly and easily by simply buying these programs, the truth is they will not make you rich on their own. Unless you are good at promotion, sales, and forming relationships with potential buyers, chances are you will struggle until you begin to understand better ways of marketing and promoting your cause. Your first sale is perhaps the hardest, especially if you don’t know how. I have a degree in marketing, but I still struggled at first, so I know and feel your pain, believe me!

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You would be far better off to join a low cost, even free, programme where you’re given the right training to get you started properly – where a community of your peers and experts come together to help each other learn the right techniques to generate a full-time income online. I joined Affiliate Funnel for those reasons, and 2 years on I’m still a member – and always recommend the program to friends and business contacts who want to learn about Internet Marketing, without spending their hard-earned money.

You can join and use Affiliate Funnel for free, or there’s a paid option which I have that costs me £4 ($6) each month -it’s easily worth every penny, although I don’t pay myself anymore – the program more than pays for itself every month.

Things don’t have to be complicated – anyone can generate income online, at whatever age. Several highly successful online business people are in their teens, and many are way past retirement age – the Internet shows no favours to any age. People of all skill levels and abilities just like you are able to find a system that’s right for them, and launch their new online career. No matter what you are doing now, you can start to earn money online – a lot of people I know never studied a day’s marketing in their lives before they took up internet marketing, and started applying it to their businesses and personal money-making ventures.

I’m teaching my Mum, who’s in her late 60s how to achieve stuff online, and have already taught a 71 year old who now writes and publishes a website with hundreds of, maybe even a thousand, pages about ancient history, numerology, and ancient wisdoms. It also features a selection of his artwork – the Sunday Times called him the ‘greatest Surrealist since Salvador Dali’.

Affiliate Funnel Will Get You Started, Quickly and Easily

My personal recommendation for this first stage of your online business career is Affiliate Funnel. It’s easy to get started, and the regular training will provide you with the essential information you need during this first stage. Affiliate Funnel helps you develop your online brand and begin to generate money from the Internet, and you don’t need to have sold or marketed or been a business whiz before.

You can ask questions of experts at the weekly saturday and monday night (and often other nights too) seminars, and they often give away industry secrets that will help you increase your income.

Give Affiliate Funnel a try-out today – it doesn’t cost you anything to join, and it could make you a lot of money.

Traffic Exchanges – The Easiest Way for You to Get People to View Your Offers

Traffic Exchanges are one of the easiest ways for newbie Internet Marketers to start to generate visitors to their websites, product pages and affiliate offers. They work on a simple basis – you earn credits by viewing other marketers pages, which you then use to get your own pages seen. So all you have to be able to do is look at a screen and click on a mouse – simples!

I still use Traffic Exchanges as one of the best sources of signups to my email lists, by providing quality materials in return for a name and email address – this is called permission-based marketing, and makes sure you’re never accused of spam, because every person on your list requested to be there, then confirmed this desire by clicking the confirmation link your autoresponder sends them when they sign up.

The reason I still use Traffic Exchanges two years later? Easy – most of my subscribers come from them.

You get laser targeted access to Internet Marketers – everyone there is one, so you know who you’re talking to, and what motivates them. They are also the simplest promotion method online – once you have a page to promote, you just click other sites to get people to view yours. Don’t tell anyone, but I often surf traffic exchanges while I’m watching TV or listening to a Webinar or watching an online video… the hours can fly by and you find yourself with thousands of credits to spend!

I use Traffic Splash, Dragon Surf, I Love Hits and SWAT as my main traffic exchanges, although I sometimes use others. SWAT in particular is good because they also provide private weekly training where big hitters teach you the things that enabled them to become big hitters in the first place.

Here’s a video I did a couple of years ago showing you how to use a traffic exchange, the link doesn’t work anymore (don’t try going to jointrafficsplash.info, it doesn’t work anymore – I didn’t keep the domain name!) To visit Traffic Splash <—- simply click on this name.

Coming Soon

I’ll be building up this section of the site over the next few months, when I get time between client jobs. I aim to provide information and resources to help individuals and businesses build successful brands and revenues online. Ironically, because I can only do it between client jobs, the more successful I become the longer this will take to build, so you really should be hoping for my failure… Although if I were to fail, why would you want to learn from me?!?!? Aaaah blessed irony!

If you want to receive my daily email series, 35 Free Websites, Applications and Tools to Help You Make Money Online, sign up here now – I’ll throw in a free copy of a book that can help you get started online when you confirm the confirmation email you’ll receive when you sign up. If it doesn’t arrive in under 2 minutes, check your spam folder – sometimes Gmail and Yahoo are overzealous in their filtering – heck the other day my Mum sent me an email and they spam foldered that!

Here’s to your success,

Rob

I’m not quite sure what it is… it’s not time, it’s not lack of ideas, it’s not lack of content… but something makes this blog harder to keep updating than any of the rest of my web estate! Those of you who follow me on social networks know that I’m online plenty, always researching new and quality information and applications, engaging with and sharing with people. I have almost 2,300 Twitter posts to my name at the time of writing this, so why oh why oh why do I find it such a chore to look after my blog? It’s been 6 weeks since my last update here – shame on me!

Does anyone else share this malady, and find their blog to be the hardest part of their web presence to maintain?

Of course, I have a bagful of excuses – too much client work, medical appointments, other jobs to do, things to learn, too busy talking to people – but at the end of the day, they are just excuses. I can make time for this blog, I’ve just failed to do so, and I aim to rectify this starting today. I made an agreement with my mentor to finalise the core of each of my sites – I’m going to include this site too, so a redesign to fit in with the others is imminent!

I always put pressure on myself to make my blog posts fit certain criteria – they have to be a certain minimum length, be original content that isn’t lifted from somewhere else, pass my rigorous quality standard… and I set the bar too high for myself, it’s so high I can’t realistically hope to fulfil all the requirements every single time – I have been paralysed by my own perfection-demanding nature. I read Seth Godin’s blog posts each day via RSS and they’re not often very long at all – why do I crave lengthiness in my own??!?

So today I’m giving myself a slap and reminding myself of the saying “You don’t have to be great to get going, but you do have to get going to be great”

What are you going to get going today to get great?

Rob Bell

p.s. I stayed up until ridiculous o’clock to ensure I got my vanity link on Facebook, so I’m going to use it lots – friend me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/robbell

p.p.s. And as if you didn’t already know, on Twitter I’m @robbell

The rise of web apps over the past year or two has been fast and extensive – I, for example, now run almost all my business processes through web apps – that talk to each other, passing data around to where it’s needed at that time. This helps me get things done faster, and to have far better contact with my clients throughout any business project. I also have applications that take away a lot of manual time-hogging processe, or give me greater coverage without extra work. I love it for a lot of reasons, of which 2 are listed here  – 1. because all my data is protected on servers in data centres, so a local hard drive crash won’t affect my business, and 2. because I can access the information and services I need from my business from anywhere there’s Internet connectivity – which includes on my Blackberry. I’ll have even greater integration next month when I get an IPhone because many of my application providers already have IPhone Apps, just waiting for me to integrate them into Robnet!

I keep an eye out for new web apps all the time, and look into any app that could offer me any of the following benefits:

1. It saves me money by reducing the cost of a business process
2. It saves me time by automating a process I previously did manually
3. It generates more income for me
4. It allows me to do something I couldn’t prior to using it
5. It allows for greater efficiency
6. It integrates with my existing application infrastructure
7. It improves my visitors’ experiences

Now the one I’ve discovered today is an absolute blinder – it has the most feature-rich interface I’ve ever seen, and eliminates the need to own Powerpoint or similar – it’s an online presentation application called 280 Slides, and here’s what I did on it in less than an hour – it’s a short intro to my new company Ex Ignibus. It was remarkably easy to do, and although not as heavily featured as Powerpoint, I can still access my presentations from anywhere with a Net link, and it has enough features to enable me to put together comprehensive presentations, on the fly. I recommend you check it for yourself – it’s free to use:

Since November last year, my natural sleep pattern – always a source of great annoyance, because I don’t appear to have one – has gone downhill again. The current time zone I’m living in has the following characteristics:

Wake up mid afternoon, and go back to sleep until dark. Wake at 6pm noticed it’s dark and 6 so it must be morning time – too early to get up…. then spot the 24 hour clock and realise you’ve actually slept all the way through daylight, except for that bit you saw streaming through your window just before you went to bed.

Swear lots because that’s another day you’ve missed and most things that involve people have to be done between 9am & 5.30pm – the traditional time for work, yet not the one used by this dojo!

After an evening meal as breakfast, sit at the computer and start the day’s business… continue until 2.30am then contemplate going to bed to start getting bodyclock back to normal times. Then sit back down at PC, end up really getting into something that could wait until morning, and end up staying up until 9-10am (it was 9.23 this morning!) before going to bed and struggling to sleep before mask is applied that keeps light from your eyes. Sleep very heavily, with phone unable to wake me up – doorbell has a better chance, but it’s still not guaranteed!

Wake up at 3, but feel it’s cold so sleep again until 6 – go through exactly the same as yesterday!

That routine is fine when you don’t need to be to do anything, but this week I’m attending 5 lectures and an employment discussion – all starting at 9.30 in the morning – which has been my bedtime for some weeks… It’s really snowy so that could be a great excuse if I miss it, but it’s only 1/2 mile on foot, which may take some time and be a little painful thanks to my cripple’s hip, but at least I’d be there…

If I get off the computer now and go to bed I could get 7 and be up at 8…. although lets face it I have only been up for 5-7 hours today so I’m not exactly tired. Solution – popped a sleeping tablet, and will be sleeping after all!

So I have to attend lots of daytime events this week for which I must become a daywalker once again! This means I won’t be around as late on the US conferences and seminars I tend to follow – most don’t even start until 1 or 2 am here.

Working online can be great fun, but once you adjust to the later nights (due to our being 5 hours ahead of
Easstern Time) it’s hard to get back without pulling at least one all-nighter-and-next-day-too, where you stay up until 10 pm then go catch up on 2 days of sleep. Unfortunately, that night’s sleep oftens lasts 14-16 hours so you lose the next day and are still on nightwalker duty!!!

Last week was increasingly frantic as we finished all the server moves to their new all-singing, all dancing and full-featured new home at RobBellHosting

Just a few problems with transferring the .co.uk domains away fron Lycos and onto 123-reg – Lycos have promised me twice to update the data that’s stopping the transfer, and they STILL haven’t done it having had over a month and 9 letters requesting they get a move on. Lycos have ruined their relationship with me over this – they were always a good company, with an, albeit limited, grip on customer service. Now I won’t use any of their products henceforth – the profitable ones they haven’t closed down, that is.

At least the data’s all moved though – and everyone’s running off the new ips. Yay, glad that’s over – too many all-nighters pulled in 1 week, IMO!

Can’t believe the snow outside – good few inches on the ground everywhere, it looks great – might take my camera out in it if I get the chance tomorrow… between the 2 courses I’m taking. I’ll show you some of the sights in Wintery Wakefield, many of which are truly beautiful – the city always looks lots better with snow covering it!!!

I’ve been using a lot of Traffic Exchanges this week to build subscribers up for my mailing list – go to Rob-Bell.com’s About Rob page to subscribe if you’d like to get my fifty favourite free sites and tools for making money online too. I don’t generally finding TE work to be the most exciting, but it’s fine if there’s something on TV – yes I do both at once! Seen considerable increase to the subscriber numbers – it’s doubled, then that doubled, now we have a nice number!

My first Traffic Exchange recommendations are:
Traffic Splash
Royal Surf
Dragon Surf
I Love Hits
Start XChange and
Advertising KnowHow

I use all these regular and see great results. They’re all free to join, but you can upgrade to increase the rate you generate credits and the number of sites you advertise. I’m going to write more on Traffic Exchanges in the near future, but those 6 are great to get you started. 5 of them offer what is called “SuperSurfing” – if you surf all 5 exchanges at once (using a tabbed internet browser) you get extra credits for each site you view.

I an upgraded member in all of the above exchanges – over a year 1/2 in some of them.

Traffic Exchanges are a very cheap(free) alternative to expensive advertising yet the targeted users on there make them perfect when your product needs the Internet Marketer marketplace. Find out the things they need, and offer them – use sales to pay for exchange monthly upgrades so you get more credits to spend getting your site seen.

Eeek it’s 2.15 am, I haven’t actually had an early night after all – bugger!

To Your Success,

Rob Bell

Tomorrow I’ll be telling you all about the 2 Business Link courses I’m going on – exciting stuff eh?!?!