Big Manta » Internet Marketing

Using the 80-20 Rule to Maximize Your Productivity & Income

BigManta — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:35:49 +0000

Working on things that produce the highest returns in terms of productivity and income is vital to the rate at which you grow online. You may have heard of the “Pareto Principle” (often referred to as the 80-20 rule) and why you should be applying it to the way you tackle projects and your overall business.

What is the 80-20 rule?

The 80-20 rule as it applies to being successful - simply states that 80% of the results arise from 20% of the effort. It’s not exact, but you will find your numbers to very often correlate with the 80-20 rule.

80% of your income will come from 20% of your work
80% of your complaints are from 20% of your customers
80% of your time is spent on 20% of your projects

As you can see, many of these numbers will probably ring true for you in several facets of your work. Whether you’re writing, selling, marketing, or providing customer service, understanding this principle and applying it to achieve maximum results is crucial to your success.

How can the 80-20 rule help me?

You can maximize both your income and productivity by understanding how the principle affects your everyday actions and results. We often get caught in the trap of spending the majority of our time on things that tend to have very little impact overall on the results we get – when we should be spending our time on the 20% of things that produce 80% of our income or the headway we make.

Once you have identified your core/key areas that provide the most return, you need to then start focusing on those as much as possible. In addition to simply revenue or income numbers – you can look at:

Customer service
Income and revenue
Marketing and advertising
Content creation
Promotion of your services
Time spent on graphic design

The list can really go on and on. When you are working, think about whether or not it’s worth the time and effort to spend 3-4 hours working on a footer design that really won’t enhance or build upon your current offerings. However, it may be worth it to spend a week on product pricing because it can have a huge impact on your business.

I tend to focus on the things that can provide immediate or long-term results relative to their time commitments. The key is to identify the most profitable and results-producing parts of what you do and pour your energy into those things.

Adapting the mindset

Probably the hardest thing about integrating the 80-20 Rule into your daily routine is making it a habit to continuously focus on the things that provide the largest return. While there will be some aspects that you may not enjoy about some of the things that you know you need to focus on (but you don’t really want to) – it will help propel your business, productivity, and income – very rapidly.

Cross-Selling Your Content With Related Posts & Pages

BigManta — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:00:47 +0000

An excellent way to market services, products, or articles on your site or blog is to display related content on your posts or pages. Often referred to as cross-selling – you are providing your site visitors with information or products that are (hopefully) something they might be interested in learning more about. Since you already have them on your site, the goal is to get them to stay longer, dig deeper, and become more connected and informed with what you offer.

Whether you are promoting content or products, cross-selling or cross-promotion can be invaluable to your visitors.

How to Cross-Sell

There are a couple different ways that you can cross-sell on your site or blog:

WordPress

If you use WordPress to power your site or blog, then you are in luck. There are several plugins that will automatically display related posts and pages on your site. Here on BigManta, I use this strategy to provide useful information to my visitors as well as show off content that they might not have otherwise found. The plugin I use is called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – and use it on several of my other sites as well. YARPP automatically combs through your content to find posts that are relevant to each other, it then displays a list of links at the bottom of your post.
Manual Linking

Whether you run on WordPress or not, manually linking items that are mentioned in your pages are an excellent way to bring value to your content. Simply choose words or display a list of related pages that are linked at the end of your page of content – and you will see immediate results.

Great for affiliate marketing

A great way to convert people into buying is also by using text links to promote affiliate products. If you’re interested in increasing conversions (and making more money), you can check out my post on how to maximize your earnings here: Using Contextual Links to Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Income

A Guide to Making Passive Income

BigManta — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:05:13 +0000

Passive income is something that many of us dream about. The ability to do what you want, when you want, and how you want is an appealing proposition for most people. Getting to the point where you can rely on passive income can be an arduous journey – but the rewards can be well worth it.

A couple years ago Collis Ta’eed of FreelanceSwitch created a mini-site/guide to walk you through some of the aspects of generating passive income. While the guide doesn’t focus solely on making money online, it provides a great overview of some of the ways that you can get started making some extra (passive) income for yourself.

The guide is completely free with no hooks or strings attached, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t take five minutes to hop on over and check it out.

In addition to the site, there is also a free download of the report in a PDF format that you can download here: A Guide to Making Passive Income.

I always love coming across these types of things because you know that someone has put a lot of time and energy into creating something of this caliber. Check it out and start making some money!

Creating The Perfect Business Card: The Essential Elements

BigManta — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:43:13 +0000

I’m sure there have been times when you have given (or been given) a business card and had to scratch out the old phone number, scribble a new email address, or add your website address because you forgot to include it. I know – I’ve been there and it’s frustrating and a tad embarrassing to have to take a minute to update your information on your card.

Sometimes, we simply overlook something or forget to add something that we wanted. In these instances you then have to go reprint your business cards with the updated information, spend more of your money to have them printed, and sometimes (aaarrgghh) something changes on the brand new cards you just printed… and you’re off to the printer again. It can be a vicious process, but if you plan ahead – you can sidestep some of the major problems that arise.

To help any of you getting ready to print your first (or next) set of business cards, I’ve put together a quick checklist so you can be sure to include all of the ways someone can contact you if they need to and the information you might want on your business cards. I want to note that you should only include information or contact methods that you actually use and try to keep it simple as the goal of a business card is to give people a way to easily contact you.

The Essential Elements of a Business Card

Below are a list of the things that you may want to include on your business cards:

Your logo
Your name
Your company
Your title
Tagline or slogan
Physical address
Website address
Email address
Phone number (local)
Phone number (toll-free)
Fax number
Social Networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
Brief description of what you offer, sell, or do

As you can see, there’s not a whole lot of information that you should (or can) include on your business card. It’s not meant to be a report or brochure and you shouldn’t include everything listed above. Your goal is to give a brief overview of your company and provide someone with the necessary information you would need if they needed to contact you.

Don’t overdo it and stuff every possible bit of information on your card – keep it clean, simple, and professional.

Guarantees Are Only as Good as the Quality of the Product

BigManta — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:00:24 +0000

It’s funny to note how companies or marketers feel that by simply placing a guarantee on a product – they will make more money and sell more stuff. While guarantees or “risk reversal” tactics have been proven to remove hesitancy and doubt from customer’s minds, you must have a quality product to begin with in order to take advantage of the benefits of offering a guarantee. You may have come across a product or service that offers a 100% money-back guarantee – only to read reviews from people that the product is garbage and it’s near impossible to get your money back.

Develop a long-term strategy instead of chasing a quick buck promoting or creating inferior products – because even guarantees can’t save bad products.

I believe Chris Farley in Tommy Boy said it best:

Tommy: Let’s think about this for a sec, Ted, why would somebody put a guarantee on a box? Hmmm, very interesting.

Customer: Go on, I’m listening.

Tommy: Here’s the way I see it, Ted. Guy puts a fancy guarantee on a box ’cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.

Customer: Yeah, makes a man feel good.

Tommy: ‘Course it does. Why shouldn’t it? Ya figure you put that little box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter, am I right, Ted?

Customer: What’s your point?

Tommy: The point is, how do you know the fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer? “Building model airplanes” says the little fairy; well, we’re not buying it. He sneaks into your house once, that’s all it takes. The next thing you know, there’s money missing off the dresser, and your daughter’s knocked up. I seen it a hundred times.

Customer: But why do they put a guarantee on the box?

Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That’s all it is, isn’t it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer’s sake, for your daughter’s sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.

Customer: …Okay, I’ll buy from you.

Using Contextual Links to Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Income

BigManta — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:00:04 +0000

When promoting affiliate products, a great way to greatly increase the money you are making is to link words or product names in your content with your affiliate links. While banner ads are decent at making money with affiliate products – I have found that text links far outperform their image counterparts. The reason why text links tend to work so well when promoting affiliate products is two-fold:

People are becoming increasingly banner-blind and clicking on images less.
When promoting affiliate products via text links in your site’s content you are referring them to relevant, related products, that they have a high chance of being interested in buying.

Take a subtle approach

The key to using text links in your content for affiliate products is to take a subtle approach. Your content is first and foremost, with the affiliate links providing some context and an additional way to generate some income. If every page you have or post you make, has affiliate links plastered all over them – your readers will start to notice and your trust factor will start to diminish.

The links must be relevant

When using this method, you want to only promote or link to products that are extremely relevant to the content on the page and could be helpful or interesting to your visitors. If you’re talking about convertibles and place an affiliate link to flat-screen televisions – you will start to lose your credibility.

If you have products with a more mass appeal, then you are probably better off placing banner ads that are displayed on every page of your site compared to inserting random text links.

Don’t overdo it

You don’t want to bombard your readers with content that has every few words hyperlinked to an affiliate offer. A great example of how to effectively link is by taking a look at a page on Wikipedia and see how words are linked there (take a look at this page on Wikipedia about “Affiliate Marketing“).

Let your content determine your links

While there are times when you will create blog posts or pages that are primarily designed to promote affiliate products, you don’t want them to start crowding out your content. If each new piece of content you produce is filled with affiliate links (with blogs in particular) your readers will come to trust you less and less because every post or page feels like a sales pitch.

Build trust for higher conversions

The most effective affiliate links are those that are built based upon trust. You don’t want to abuse this trust by promoting sub-par products or unrelated offers. Focus on things that could be beneficial to your readers and you will have a more satisfied audience – and higher revenue-generating site.

Capitalizing on Successes

BigManta — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:00:53 +0000

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, blogger, or business owner, one of the keys to growing your income is by capitalizing on the successes that you have. If you find something that is working for you, try to make it better and build off of that success. The idea is very similar to business models built around scalability that allow you to expand rapidly to gain more visitors, revenue, or business.

There’s no success too small

When attempting to capitalize on your successes, there is nothing that is too small. If there is even a glint of hope or promise shown in something that you are doing – you can build upon that to reap larger rewards.

Imagine you ran a promotion that gained you only 5 new RSS subscribers, newsletter signups, or customers. While you might think that this might be too low of a number to spend your time trying to improve – it is exactly these instances that can propel you towards success.

There is one product in particular that I was promoting on one of my sites, that was making a few sales a month. After forcing myself to sit down and put some effort into scaling that success, I now sell 1-5 products every single day with a commission payout of about $20. This isn’t a boat load of money, but it now adds up to an extra $500 – $1,000 per month in passive income.

Even a glimmer of hope can be successful

Sometimes even the tiniest glimmer of something that shows hope is worth trying out. The top affiliate marketers will tell you that with many campaigns, you will lose money in the beginning promoting an offer. However, after tweaking and testing you can turn that offer into a cash-making machine that almost feels like you’re printing money.

You simply need to capitalize on any successes you have – no matter how big or small.

The 5 Keys to Success – A Free Guide to Succeeding Online

BigManta — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:57:10 +0000

I’m very proud to announce my free guide entitled “The 5 Keys to Success.”

There are several essential components that I believe every business owner, marketer, entrepreneur, and aspiring online money-maker should be aware of in order to really be successful online. This guide outlines those elements and explains the reasoning behind why some people do very well online, and others end up with mediocre or disappointing results.

It’s a great guide even for those outside of the internet marketing and making money online world, so please feel free to pass this page on so other people you know might be able to benefit from it.

While the guide is completely free, all you need to do is join my newsletter and you will receive instant access to the free guide in a link via email.

In addition to the guide, with the free newsletter you’ll also receive exclusive content, free tips and tutorials, and a bunch of other really cool stuff to make your journey to making it big on the internet – easier and more profitable. Simply enter your name and email below to sign up and gain instant access to the guide:

Success is Cumulative: Take Things One Step at a Time

BigManta — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:59:55 +0000

A recurring theme that seems to appear frequently with those trying to either make money online or build their business, is the desire for instant gratification or immediate results. Becoming successful online (like most things in life) requires a methodical process that you must go through to achieve the results or goals you are aiming for.

The allure of the internet has given many people the belief that you can simply launch a website or blog – and it will immediately become popular and become a money-printing machine. While it would be great if that were the case (and in rare instances it is), to be successful you must continually work and put energy into your endeavors. Just as babies crawl before they walk – building your online empire requires taking baby steps before you eventually start running.

What is great with the internet, is that your work is cumulative and everything helps contribute to your goals. With each new post you create, tweet you send, or person you befriend on Facebook, these steps are all helping you move in a positive direction with your site or blog and laying the stepping stones for future success.

Laying a foundation

You must have a solid foundation that you plan to grow your business, site, or blog around – a foundation to build upon. Your foundation can be everything from your idea or business model to the technology you use to run your site or blog. These things are the fundamental aspects that you must have in place so you can start the building process. Taking the time to ensure you have a strong base will help you distribute your content and allows your message to reach more people with less efffort.

Taking your first steps

Once you have everything set up and a plan of attack, you can start taking your first steps. Write articles, connect with other people in your topic or industry, be useful and informative, and try all of the various ways to distribute your message – social networks, video, tutorials, the list goes on and on. Each piece of content you create moves you one step further towards success.

The power of compounding

Just like compounding is one of the most powerful ways to build personal wealth – the same principle can be applied to being successful and making money online. With each new piece of content or connection you make, you are increasing the chances of being successful. If you write just one blog post a week, you will have accumulated 52 pages of content at the end of one year – do one each day and you can see how quickly things can add up. The more outlets and content you create – the more places people will be able to find you and the more likely you are to succeed.

Tim Ferris on How to Build a High-Traffic Blog (Video)

BigManta — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:10:09 +0000

Tim Ferris is the author of the best-selling book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” I have read the book – and if you ever get a chance, it’s a great, quick read on time management and other aspects of your lifestyle. Tim’s blog has become extremely popular since his book release and in this video he shares how he built a high-traffic blog.

There are several really good tips that Tim shares with anyone who runs a blog or website.