Personal Blog of Forest Marie

Whether you have made these mistakes or seen them, they are amazingly abundant in forums. They are ridiculously stupid mistakes that are ridiculously easy not to do.

If you want forum advertising to be effective in your marketing arsenal and position yourself as an expert, you must avoid making these 3 credibility killing mistakes.

Forum Advertising Credibility Killer #1: Adding Meaningless Posts

This is HUGE! Why would someone create meaningless posts on a forum? Some think if they can get their post count big enough more people will check out their website. This is wrong, you will seem more like a spammer or lamer while someone with 10 quality posts will get the traffic instead. It’s not about quantity it is about quality and adding value to the community. So a “Hey that was a great post” is not enough. Try pointing out what you liked or if you agree why you do and either way add valid points and more value on to the topic.

Forum Advertising Credibility Killer #2: Arguing/Fighting

This tactic is NEVER going to boost your credibility; rather it is going to make you look immature. It’s one thing to voice your valid points, it’s another to argue. Remember, your entitled to your opinion and so is everyone else. If someone lies or tries to attack you make your case professionally and leave it at that, do not get caught up in a back and forth war. Being professional will gain you more credibility and waste less of your time.

Forum Advertising Credibility Killer #3: Self-Promotion Threads

Remember #1, add value. If you have a topic that is not already covered in the threads than by all means create one on that topic and add value. If your intent is merely for self-promotion it will show and there goes your credibility out the window. It’s best to become an active forum member before starting your own threads regardless of your intent. You will get a much warmer response when your name has been seen around the forum as a value adding member.

Business, Internet Marketing, Prospecting and Closing forum advertising, forum advertising mistakes, forum advertising tips

Postcards are still in. Most people consider them old school and while that may be true, they are still a very viable and lucrative means of generating leads and sales.

Just like in any advertising medium you have to grab the consumer’s attention. If you do not grab their attention you can be sure that your postcard will be visiting the trash soon.

To do this you will want to create a compelling advertising on Side A (the side without the address and stamp) to get them to read the card from front to back…

Here are 15 ways to save your direct mail postcards from visiting the trash:

1. Have a photo of your product in an unusual setting or some other wacky photo.

2. Be creative with your copy. Make true claims but be bold with them.

3. Cater to their problems and tell them how your product/service can solve them.

4. Offer something of value, i.e. %15 off of their order or something free. Make it BOLD and OBVIOUS!

5. Feature a compelling testimonial or two.

6. Show Before and After pictures, this is especially great for wellness products.

7. Have a quiz or questionnaire with an incentive to fill it out, like a free report.

8. Is a famous person using your product? Spotlight a photo and testimonial of them using the product.

9. Put a picture of you the sender on it with a personal note.

10. Create compelling copy listing the benefits rather than the features.

11. Create urgency by having a deadline for your offer; make it noticeable by circling in red.

12. If you are not offering a discount, visually show how much money the consumer will save with your product/service.

13. Make your postcard look like a special by-invite-only event.

14. Ask a wacky question or some true and false question and have the answer on the other side or have to go to a website for the answers.

15. If you are using black ink only make sure the postcard is a bright color that stands out. You could also use textured paper to grab their attention.

Remember the goal of your postcard is to grab the reader’s attention.

The goal of Side A of the postcard is to grab their attention and peak their curiosity to get them to flip it over and see what is on the other side and to then take action.

Business, Internet Marketing, Leadership, Prospecting and Closing, Reviews direct mail marketing, effective postcard marketing, postcard marketing tips

It’s not just about making a sale; it’s about making a long-term client.

Attraction marketing is about the experience not about selling. When people can feel and see that what you have to offer is what they want they will be drawn to you.

There is no struggling or lack mentality when it comes to Attraction Marketing it is about creating immense value and being of service. It’s not what is in it for you, but what can you do to provide the greatest service and value to the consumer.

Here are 7 tips to get your Attraction Marketing plan in action:

1. Start with your business. What is the purpose if your business, what is the outcome that you want from it? Think about what you want the outcome to be in the next 3 years and what the outcome will be for your clients as well.

2. Get clear on the results. What amount of income do you want to generate in the next year, 2 and 3? What are the changes that will happen as the result of this extra income in your life? Think about how it will impact your life and how it will feel.

3. Get clear on your contribution. What impact will your products or services have on your clients? What impact do you want it to have? Keeping your client in mind and their benefit will significantly increase the amount of satisfied clients you have as well as the amount of referrals you will get.

* It’s a good idea to start and end each day visualizing the results you intend to create with your business and how it will impact your clients’ and your life. This will help you to stay focused.

4. Are you passionate about your business? You can make money and be successful at anything whether you like it or not. However, if you are not passionate about what you do it will hinder the amount of money and success you have. If it doesn’t make you happy, then find something that does. What is your passion?

5. Provide your client with excellence. It’s easy to provide your customer with excellence when you love what you do. Think about what solutions you like to offer your customers. Concentrate on the services, solutions and/or products you enjoy offering vs. being a jack-of-all and master-of-none. Your enjoyment of offering these select things will show in your bottom-line.

6. Define your niche. Clearly define what is you do and offer. Some people feel this limits your audience when it actually enables you to target your audience and make the biggest impact in that market. This means bigger and easier results than attempting to cater to everyone. Know your target market, their demographics, what is it they want and need? Get clear on your niche and your audience will make running your business a lot smoother and abundant.

7. Where are you right now? Knowing where you are right now with your business is just as important as knowing where you intent to be a year or more from now. What are your strengths? What area should you improve on? If anything is hindering you from making money and/or going after the life you want… Figure out why that is happening and how to eliminate it. Eliminating your self-defeating thoughts and ways will remove any blocks from you becoming a major magnet in attracting what you want in your business and life.

Do not take these 7 steps lightly, put them into action today, right now and watch as your marketing turns from struggle to ease. Attraction Marketing is not just a method but a way of life and it will affect your life just as much as your business.

Business, Internet Marketing, Leadership, Prospecting and Closing, Real Estate, Success attraction marketing results, attraction marketing tips, using attraction marketing

So I’ve been talking to a lot of people on my newsletter and there’s been a lot of demand for help with article marketing, so I’m pleased to reveal my kick ass article marketing strategy.

Article Marketing is one of my favorite marketing methods because the methodology allows you to:

• Attract your target market to your blog or Web Site
• Brands yourself as an expert that can solve your target market’s problems
• Create hundreds, thousands, or even millions of back links (think of them as popularity votes) to your blog or Web Site

Even if article marketing only did one of the above three benefits, it would be well worth it. The fact that it does all three is a testament to how effective article marketing is.

After getting well versed with article marketing this year (yes, yes, I’m late to the article game), I created my own article marketing strategy that brands myself via my blog through articles. If that sounds a little confusing, hang on and it’ll crystallize in a second. Just know this: it works!

Of course to make all this work requires a little work. How much depends on you and your budget, but there is no free ride…no silver bullet. You’ll have to weigh your ego with your bank account and see which one weighs more. Like all things in marketing and business, you leverage either time or money.

That said, here are the main 4 components of my kick ass article marketing strategy.

1. Choosing Key Phrases and Topics For My Articles
2. Getting The Article Written
3. Posting The Article On My Blog
4. Distributing The Article To Hundreds Of Directories

So let’s talk about each one of these and put the pieces of this not-so-complex puzzle together.

Choosing Topics And Keywords For Your Articles

The first thing you need to do when you write an article is determine the key phrase (aka keyword) you want people people to search for. You can write a masterpiece article or blog post, however, if no one finds it because it’s something no one is searching for, well, you get the picture …

In Internet Marketing, there are few things as important as keyword science. You must understand it and the great news is it’s not very difficult. The best way to learn is to get your feet wet, so head on over to this Free Keyword Suggestion Tool and type in a key phrase related to your product or service.

TIP: If you are in a network marketing company, I suggest you not only use the name of your company but also type in key phrases related to the problems your products or service solves. For example, if you’re in a health company, you might consider testing the key phrase back pain or vitamin benefits.

After you type in a phrase and press the ‘Hit Me’ button, you should get a list of key phrases related to the one you typed in. This will immediately give you insight into what people are searching for that is related to your market. The number of searches is on a per day basis. For example if you type in gardening tools, you will see that it gets around 126 searches a day (at least at the time of this writing).

Once you get a key phrase that is being for, all you need to do is embed that into your title and make a good title.

Other great resources to get key phrases and to give you insight into what people are searching for is SEO Book and of course Google’s Keyword Tool.

Now of course keyword science and selecting great key terms can be much deeper this, and you will master keyword science as soon as your investment in Traffic Secrets 2.0 is delivered to your doorstep.

Get The Article Written!

With your key phrase and title in place, the next step in my article marketing strategy is to get the article written. You either write it yourself or you pay a writer to write articles for you. Again, it’s the leverage time or leverage money decision. I personally prefer to leverage the money as you probably do too.

Should you decide to write your article, however, the main thing is to write something valuable that asserts you as someone who brings value to other people by solving problems.

As many of you have already told me, you really admire and appreciate my work because I solve marketing problems for you by not holding anything back.

When you hire your writers, I recommend you contact me for for my source and as a second recommendation, search for writers at on elance.com.

Posting The Article On My Blog

Once the article is written, I take the content of the article and the same title, same key phrases, etc. and I make it into a blog post. Because the article directories do not allow pictures, videos, formatting, etc., I do that in my blog. And I also inject my own personality and change the content just a little.

Most article marketers do not do this, however, so this might have come as a surprise to you if you are an article marketer. Most marketers using article distribution write an article, distribute them to directories and have the resources box (aka “About the Author” box) (I’ll explain this later) point back to their primary Web Site. Let’s tie the picture together in the next part.

Distributing The Article

Well, the article is written and I’ve pasted it on my blog and customized it.

Now all I need to do is distribute it to as many directories as possible. You can do this manually or if you will use Article Marketer to distribute your article to thousands of directories for you. They also have proof readers before your articles are sent to the directories, ensuring a grammatically clean article. This is really kick ass!

I cannot say enough good things about how easy this service makes my article marketing. Distributing articles manually takes more than time than you probably have and you will see how simple and cost effective it is when you visit this site and read about it.

Briefly, it’s as simple as copying your article, picking a category and filling out the About the Author box and that’s where the magic of my article marketing strategy works.

IMPORTANT: Most article marketers use the same “About the Author” text for every article they distribute, which is basically put out a basic information about who they are and a link back to their main Web Site. What I do here is I put a link back to the blog page and with the anchor text being the key phrase of the article.

Tying It All Together

That was a lot of information to digest, so I’m going to give a fictitious example and tell you my business work flow.

Step 1: Keyword research. After playing around with the keyword tools, I decide to write an article based around the key phrase “viral marketing”

Step 2: Determine a title. Let’s call the article “13 Reasons Viral Marketing Works” That’s a title that would grab my attention.

Step 3: Get the article written. I pay my writer to write this article for me. Again, you can write it yourself although you will rather outsource it.

Step 4: After I get the article back, I take the contents of the article and publish it on my blog using the same title as my article. I change up the content a little and make it more search engine friendly by applying the concepts that you will master as soon as Traffic Secrets 2.0 arrives at your door.

Let’s assume this piece is accessible on my blog at:

http://www.forestmarie.com/13-reasons-viral-marketing-works/

Step 5: Using Article Marketer, I paste the article title, content, and keywords I’m optimizing for. I select the category of the article.

Step 6: The “Magic” Step … I fill out the “About the Author Box” and I put a link back to the blog page itself that the article is about. For example, I typically use something along these lines:

This article was originally published at: <a href=”http://www.forestmarie.com/13-reasons-viral-marketing-works/”>viral marketing</a>

Ah, ha…

We now have some advantages!

The word viral marketing is known as the anchor text. Now when Google crawls the hundreds or thousands of article directories that I distribute my article to, it will find that many Web Site are linking back to my page using the key phrase I want them to find me under, which helps out tremendous for off-page search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

In this make believe scenario, we’re talking 1000 pages pointing back to my page for the key phrase “viral marketing.” That’s a lot of votes for my page!

After you consider this with 1000 blog posts and 1000 articles each distributed to 1000 directories, you understand we are talking a lot of traffic and a lot of self promotion. Indeed, content is king.

So now you know my kick ass article marketing strategy. After you do it once, you’ll see how simple and automated it is. It’s even more effective if you optimize your blog posts using the methods you’ll learn about in CD 4 in your Traffic Secrets 2.0 investment.

Remember, the writing is outsource-able and so is the article distribution itself!

Articles and Press Releases, Internet Marketing, Prospecting and Closing Article Marketing, Internet Marketing

Let’s shift focus a little on this blog…

This tip may not exactly fit under prospecting tips or closing tips (aka sales closing techniques), but I want to talk about who is attracted to network marketing because when you understand it, it will help you prospect and close better if you start communicating with individuals who possess some qualities that make them open to network marketing.

First, understand this: There is a difference between someone who is attracted to it versus someone who will give it a try.

Early on in my career, I used to get excited about crossing paths with minimum age workers at local grocery stores, restaurants, etc. I mistakenly thought since they were making little money, something such as network marketing would definitely appeal to them.

I thought I would save them from the pains of minimum wage! Until I learned some very vital lessons:

Success is voluntary.
Success requires sacrifice.
Success requires commitment.
Success requires mental toughness (mindset).

I found most minimum wage workers simply did not possess these traits nor did they want to.

So WHO exactly is attracted to the sacrifices, commitment and mental toughness that network marketing requires?

If you just said not a whole lot of people, you would be right. But that’s a mystery of life, so just accept it.

Interestingly, most network marketing companies and uplines will tell you everyone will love network marketing. I mean, really, who doesn’t want to make money while they sleep and leverage out the efforts of hundreds or thousands of peoples efforts, right?

I have found that nothing is further from the truth. To discover who was really attracted to network marketing, I looked looked at my own personal profile.

And here’s my profile:

• B.S. in Computer Science with a 3.9 GPA
• Member of several honor societies
• Ridiculously outside the box thinker
• I love mastermind groups
• Young (I haven’t hit 30 YET…)
• Extremely optimistic
• Spiritual

Since then I have talked to many people that are successful in network marketing and discovered many things in common, and I’m going to list them now:

College Graduates/Professionals:

Most of my Network and Internet Marketing friends and business partners are college graduates.

Also, a few months back I went to a seminar for my own network marketing company and they asked all the college graduates to stand up. 70% of the room stood up.

Don’t let this surprise you like it surprised me. Graduating colleges takes commitment and work. It takes investing into YOURSELF. Period. It takes sacrifices and going through a tough process to arrive at an end goal.

The same is true of Network Marketing (it is another profession and will likely take years for you to really understand). And it requires you to invest in YOURSELF.

Outside the box thinkers:

Network Marketing is an outside the box profession, so it is a natural fit that outside the box thinkers are all over in network marketing.

If you can think outside the box, you can grasp the concept of money working for you instead of you working for money. When you can grasp that, network marketing is typically very easy to grasp.

Young people (under 30):

Now I’m not saying the 30+ crowd is not or cannot be attracted to network marketing. They certainly are and can be!

I’m stating this here because I see more and more young people coming into network marketing and flourishing. And this trend will continue.

Why is this? It seems to me that younger people are more open to learning new skills, ideas and thinking outside the box and it seems the older we get, the more prudent we become making us close-minded to new ideas and learning new skills.

Consider this quote by Pearl S. Buck:

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation.”

Sales professionals:

Everyone’s favorite bad guys also known as sales professionals are typically optimistic, outside the box, very personable, full of charisma and DO NOT have a problem getting paid what they are worth versus an hourly or salary-based pay.

By the way, sales is the highest paid professional in the world. And network marketing allows you to put a sales team together and leverage the efforts of others into a residual model. This becomes quite powerful over time. And, by the way, most sales jobs do not have any residual based pay built in, which is typically very attractive to sales professionals.

People with a mentally tough mindset coupled burning desire to design their life instead of earning a living:

Quite simply, the most important element. Just about every successful network marketer I know has a mentally tough mindset coupled with a burning desire to live life in big way instead of working hard for money their entire life and tip-toeing quietly to their grave. This is the group of individuals willing to sacrifice the 7 (yes, SEVEN) hours of television being watched everyday by the average American.

On this idea, I’ll leave you with a quote from the absolutely awesome Jim Rohn:

“When the end of your life comes, let the end of your life record your wins and your loses, don’t the end of your life record I didn’t try.”

Spiritual Individuals

Just about every successful network marketer I know including myself possesses a certain level of spirituality.

And there it is – a quick list of the type of people I feel are attracted to network marketing.

By the way, I am NOT saying everyone you know that fits these categories will be attracted to network marketing. I’m simply stating most of network marketers I work possess many of what was discussed in this blog.

Prospecting and Closing marketing, Network Marketing, Prospecting and Closing, sales