Itay Paz | On Internet Marketing, Entrepreneurship & Life

The opportunity of your lifetime is laid across the ocean

The past 2 years has clearly outlined the fact that focusing on one market only, has its downside. Most of the internet marketers who focused only on the US market felt reductions in conversions and sales. But some of the affiliates were able to fill their income reduction by expanding their business overseas. Sure, US is huge and maybe still making the most to any internet marketer but I am telling you now, straight forward in your face, if you are not involve with any international you have to stop everything and get a game plan. You are missing, the biggest market in the world, the world itself with its amazing economy and money to spend the offers and products you promote.

Here are a few reasons why most internet marketers & affiliates do NOT cover the international market:

1) Language Barrier – this is a huge thing for people and I would say is more mentally than actually a real barrier to overcome. Think about the first time you ever landed in Paris, France and most people don’t speak English. How will one cope with creating ads, keywords, optimize campaigns and landing pages without knowing the language? Well, the world has changed and today you can hire online, people to work for you that know any language and for very low cost.

2) Offers – not too many offers are accepting international traffic. This statement is true but in the past 12 months I believe more and more offers are being designed for the international market and today in any area (even diet) you can find products shipped worldwide and offer accepting users from almost everywhere. Search for these offers, they are there.

3) Comfort Zone – this is also a mental barrier. You already making money of something and it’s easier to be lazy (yeh, it is) and not leave your comfort zone and build yourself a new adventure. Well you can do that but you can also expand your mind, cross your own barriers and explore new opportunities.

4) Didn’t really think about it – so now when you know it, no excuses…

so…what is your excuse?!

Content is the King, Long Live the King!

Have you heard this before? Did you think it is a simple bunch of crappy statement? Well, you couldn’t be wrong more. Content is the King!

When I started, long time ago, learning the basics of SEO, one of the key elements was have good and valuable content. Nothing has changed in the past decade.  Content is still extremely important.

Let me tell you about a project I’ve done 2 weeks ago. A simple website with a wordpress template. I’ve added 3 pages with good content written related to 3 pay per lead programs. I’ve set 10 incoming links and simple keyword tag on the page. After 2 weeks, the site was picked by google and one page has already generated 25 highly targeted clicks and 4 conversions. At $25 commission per lead I was able to score pure $100 from a simple good content page. How difficult is it to make this kind of website. Proving my point, that content (and simple SEO) still the king, I am now expanding this site to 100 different products. Now lets do the math. If each one of them generates only 1 sale a month at $15 commission, I will be making a minimum of $1,500 per month just from this site. And if I put more efforts, this site could generate thousands of dollars per month. So what are you waiting for?

Content is the Kind, Long live the king!

Buying a List For Online Marketing – Are You Crazy?

10 days ago I had someone approaching me to sell an already working product on ClickBank and a list of 4,000 highly responsive email list (all optin) for a small price of $4,000. While I don’t buy these things, I’ve decided to play along and talk to this guy. He said his list generates 10-12% sales every time he emails. While the numbers didn’t add up I’ve made him an offer he wasn’t able to refuse. I’ve told the guy to send a mailer to a new product I’ve just released. Price of the product is $97 so I figured, 10% is 400 sales x $97 it is just about $40,000. Sounds great doesn’t it? I said, if you convert 10% you will get $5,000 (and again think about it, the numbers are not adding up, why he would sell for $5K a site and list that can generate $20,000 commission if I pay 50%). 2 days later, he pinged me on Facebook… said he cant really do the mailings and that he has some issues but he is willing to sell it to me for only $300. Wow this is really cheap! But doesn’t even worth $1. Not even a lousy $1.

If you haven’t figured the point of this real story from the past few days, then I will spell it for you – Actually 2 points:

1) Don’t be tempted to buy fast cash machines (I am all for doing it the right way).

2) If you do decide to look into buying, don’t be a sucker and fall into the hands of people I would not even want to have coffee with.

Using Your Signature To Get Traffic

How many emails are you sending a day? 5? 10? Much more?

Have you ever thought about the fact that every email going out can generate you traffic to your website?

Simple, but very effective.

Here is my email signature:

………………………………………………………..
Itay Paz – New Media & Innovative Performance Marketing

Blog: http://www.itaypaz.net
Twitter: http://twitter.com/itaypaz
Skype: itaypaz77
AIM: itaypaz777
………………………………………………………..
Get my FREE report on How to
Avoid These 10 Common Mistakes
that Most Affiliates Make:
http://www.itaypaz.net/freereport/
………………………………………………………..

Looking at my simple, yet smart signature you can see that I drive traffic to my site, twitter followers and also potentially getting subscribers to my mailing list with my free report page.

Now I send about 50 emails to new people a day. This is about 1,500 emails a month to new people. Some of these people are forwarding my email to others, so let’s say that out of these 1,500 new people, I would get about 150 emails (over time) to be forwarded. This means every month I create a potential new traffic of about 1,650 people and over the year almost 20,000 highly targeted visitors! And don’t forget the emails I sent to people I know already that might generate at least 3-4 times more than that!

And this is just the email signature. What about the blogs post you make, the posts on different places on Facebook. You can create yourself thousands of visitors per month and get incoming links that stay forever (which are also good for your SEO efforts).

Simple, but powerful!

What’s In It For Me?

It is Saturday morning relaxing time and I was wondering, do you have 5 minutes for me? I want to tell you something…

Can you please listen to what I say?

Read my great article with discounts!

Please check my cool video!

Why should you do it? I am seriously saying, why should you take 5 minutes of your time to listen to me? What’s in it for you?

I will tell you why, because it is one of the most important lessons you can have when are marketing something to anyone (offline and online).

You want to tell them what‘s in it for them, as why should they take their time to listen to what you have to say. You have to give think carefully and present it smartly.

Lets see an example. You are promoting a cool appliance at Amazon.com which is now on Christmas deal of 15% off. Sure, you can turn everything about the discounted price BUT think at the end of the day, they don’t buy the appliance or the discount. They are buying something else, a kitchen aid, something to save them time, something to make their dinner at home to a 5 starts restaurant dinner. Excite them about what it can do for them or ‘What’s in it for them’

Never ever forget to think about your visitors. If you write to them like you would have expected it, as a user yourself, you would sell anything as fast as you would sell fresh cupcakes

Give Them Value, They Will Give You Money!

Everyone been wondering why Google is slapping affiliates around. When I talk to some of the people who were slapped, most of them do understand they been playing by the rules but stretching it out. What does it mean? Well, let’s see, what does Google really want? The answer is simple. Give value to the users. Simple hu? At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if we are talking about Search Engines (paid or organic), it doesn’t matter if you are doing media buy or mailings – it all comes to the same issue – Give your visitors/followers value, they will love you! Not only that they will love you, they will buy the products you want to sell.

Makes sense wont you agree?

It makes sense and very simple. Let’s say there are 2 affiliates with competing websites that promotes information products on how to make your own electricity. One affiliate site has 3 top products, the images and 3-4 sentences about each program, very well designed. The other site has 8 reviews, with 3-4 sentences but also a link to a dedicated page (for each product) where you can learn more about the product, the author and longer review. Which site would you say gives better value to its audience? Which one would the user likes? Which one would Google? If you haven’t figured it out yet, the answer is simple, the second one.

One more sample, let’s say my blog was basically just links to other people’s opinion and posts rather me doing the links but also giving you valuable information from my own experience… which one do you think has more value? Again simple, the second one.

To sum, give value to your traffic and users, they will love you and reward you with money!!!

Planning on Advertising on Facebook? Here are $100 For You!

If you haven’t done it until now, you should definitely look at testing this paid social media. It has its pros and cons, but as I always say, it is all about testing. I am using to some of my activities and some of my best friends are using it too.

While I was in Ad-Tech expo last month, I’ve got two coupons for new trial customers. Since I am already a customer, I am sure 2 of you can enjoy these 2 coupons, each for $50 (you can only use one per account). You can use this coupon only if you are one of the first two who enter their code to your account.

Enjoy and good luck!

Why I (Love to) Meet People?

I’ve just worked on my next week schedule and saw that if you look at my weekly schedule (any week), you will find that I have at least 2-3 meeting outside my home office in one of the Starbucks or a good restaurant with executives and internet marketers (worldwide).

No matter where I am in the world, I do it. Other than the fact I get some fresh air for your sole and time to see my good friends, I see it as a great opportunity for mastermind talks, create new opportunities, help each other in simplifying complex things, and seeing issues in other angles and in a different way. Even in some of the meetings, where I am the expert meeting a newbie, giving from my knowledge and I enjoy it as well.

My advice to you, find yourself these people, go to meetings, create your own group, get fresh air and create new business opportunities. This is how I do it…and this is why I said, wanna pick my brain, lets get together over a good cup of coffee … follow where I am http://www.itaypaz.net/events-calendar/

It’s About Nothing! Making Money With Nothing…

I worked last night until 2.30am and got up at 6 so I am very tired. I have a few tasks to do and I thought, na…too tired to do anything and then I thought I should write a blog post, I called it It’s About Nothing… see this short video clip from the amazing-best comedy Seinfeld:

So what is my point? If you can not find an idea to what to do, I suggest you open a blog – about what? About NOTHING! like they say… just write what you did, where you go, what you think, you will find your followers and income will follow you. I know some of you might be thinking, Itay us really crazy thinking about this BUT I think someone else (see above) proved it can be done – making money of nothing (and lots of it). Good luck!

Google Slapped You? Slap Google Back…

Are you a beginner or Google has already got you too?

I am not going to bitch about it (although lately, everyone does and it seems like an interesting trend). I even had an idea of ‘Stop Your Adwords Campaign” day …if you are in, LMK

Let’s go for a second back to the origin of the problem. Do you know why Google is so strong? Why is it so controlling and powerful (maybe even more than Microsoft)? The answer is: Traffic Control! Surprised? They basically control the traffic you desperately need for your website. So simple yet so powerful…

So what do we do next? We grew this monster of us and now it is coming all over our internet marketers.

Don’t be alarmed. If you are a newbie or already worked your way around the complex sides of the page quality score… you have to look at everything differently and Slap Google Back!

I didn’t mean to go to the next conference, approach Larry Page and slap him in the face (although I am sure some of you had this thought crossing their minds…but no!). Google is big, Google is strong and yes controlling the traffic you need BUT Google doesn’t control all the traffic you need. What do I mean? People say that researches say Google controls 15% of the internet traffic. It is a high number but hey! Wake up!!! There are 85%, yes 85% of traffic out there waiting for you to take. If you develop your skills to harvest this traffic as you did for Goolge’s, you will have about 6 times more traffic!!! Yep, 6 times more – makes one wonder hu!?

So what are your options for other sources traffic? Sure, you can find other search engines but none of them (and all of them together) are not as big as Google. You need to develop your own media buying skills. Yeh, buy banners and contextual ads. Simple as that. I made this post to make one point, you don’t have to be afraid of Google or any slap what so ever. You need to develop new targeted traffic sources that can help you generates sales. Waiting for Google’s next slap and the cry wont help. Do you want to put all your eggs in one basket? I wouldn’t.

there is another great way to do it which is List Building… will talk about it in my next post