The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (25 page)

appears, like the one in Figure 5.2.

FIGURE 5.2 Google Has a Different System for When You Want to Get Found in Your

Local Market

These maps are powerful marketing tools because people’s eyes are immediately

drawn to the map and who is listed first. The map appears at or near the top of the first

page of Google results for that term so it gets great visibility.

How you get on that map is a whole separate skil from how you appear on the rest of

Google’s results. Notice the little marker with the letter ″A″ on it and how the Shedd

Aquarium has 211 reviews. That gives you a clue that getting reviews of your product or

service is very important to Google. Keep in mind that visitors of the human variety are

also highly influenced by lots of solid, positive reviews.

On the other hand, notice how the company in fifth position—letter “E”—has only 39

reviews but is above the company in letter “F” with 137 reviews. Therefore, the fact that

you have lots of reviews is not the only factor Google considers.

One way to boost your ranking in this sort of page is to type in Google Local Business

Center and register with Google. The more they know about who you are, where you’re

located, and what people think of you, the better. If you don’t take this little-known step,

Google may not know you even exist and you could easily be left off the map entirely.

There are many more factors involved in getting a top geographical ranking in Google.

If you would like more information, go to www.sixfiguresecondincome.com and type the

term “Local Search” into the search box and I’l send you a more detailed report.

Article Marketing

Google loves good-quality articles and so do humans. Think about your own way of

searching for information on the Web. If you type in a search phrase and are taken to an

article with answers to your specific question, think of al the good things that happen:

• You like Google because it quickly delivered a good search result to you.

• Google likes the article writer because it was solid, helpful information.

• The article writer has credibility because he or she delivered useful content

without screaming: Buy Me! Buy Me!

Throughout al the fads in the Internet marketing world, article marketing has continued

to be a highly potent way to become visible, and new web sites can benefit from articles

just as wel as established sites can.

The reality is that most marketers are too lazy to write a decent, short article. Instead

they squirm in their seats and look for any way to avoid writing solid content.

For instance, they decide they’d rather use Twitter and leave messages like,
″I′m

eating a ham on rye right
now.″
That isn’t going to do anything for your reputation within

Google, let me tel you.

Marketers sometimes resort to robot article writers, which promise to turn out

thousands of articles while you sleep. They operate on a simple principle: You tel me the

key phrase you want to be found for, and my machine wil pump out an article for you in a

nanosecond.

These were al the rage for a few years because they held the promise of making a

fortune for the laziest, most slothful marketer. Unfortunately, the type of article they

produced read something like this:

“Want to know about Schnauzer grooming? You’ve come to the right place

about Schnauzer grooming because when it comes to grooming

Schnauzers, we’ve been at it a long time. See, Schnauzer grooming is

different from other dog grooming because . . .″

A machine could turn out this garbage because al it had to do was use a template

and replace “Schnauzer grooming” with “kite flying” and the article would then be al

about kite flying.

The only people who made money with these scams were the marketers peddling the

article robots to unsuspecting newbie marketers. Google quickly caught on to this

nonsense and stopped recognizing such articles, whereupon the scam artists moved

overseas. They dumped the robots for humans—in other words, poor people in third-

world countries. They often spoke broken English but would create human-written

articles for pennies.

These services may have fared a little better in Google but any American reading the

article would be left thinking,
″Huh?
What was that? This article isn’t helpful at
all.″

That brings us back to writing simple articles with an emphasis on simple. Here’s al

you have to do:

• Know your specific topic and have two or three genuinely helpful pointers or

examples.

• Write an article of between 250 and 450 words. That’s real y very little.

• Create a compel ing title that arouses curiosity and is highly relevant to a

search term you want to be known for.

• Incorporate that search term a few times in the article without overdoing it.

• Have a resource box at the bottom that says a few words about you and directs

readers to your specific, targeted web page for more detailed information.

One guy I know is a Captain on active duty in the U.S. Army. He works long hours but

comes home, relaxes a while, and then knocks out an article or two each night on

targeted topics. Within a short time his article revenues exceeded his military pay and

he’l soon retire from the Army with a six-figure income purely from his article writing.

He didn’t attend any fancy col ege or discover any whiz-bang super-secret gimmick for

scamming the search engines into giving him high rankings. No, he just put one foot in

front of the other and cranked out tiny articles on a regular basis.

If you would like to find out my current recommended resources for using articles to

get found in the search engines, go to www.sixfiguresecondincome.com and type

“articles” into the search box.

Social Media

By now you know my opinion that a great deal of social media is hype. As Seth Godin so

accurately phrased it, many of these sites like Facebook and Twitter are fabulous ways

to burn up hours per day being unproductive.

Nevertheless, I would not dismiss them without giving them a try for your business. Of

course, I cannot know what sort of info product you have in mind. Certain age groups

seem to have some of these social media sites surgical y implanted in their brains, so

reaching them via a Facebook video or other posting might be highly effective.

When you use these services, be sure to keep your ROI meter on at al times. Even

though services like Twitter are free, the question becomes: What kind of return are you

getting for your investment of time? If you can deputize your niece or nephew with the

brain implant to become your surrogate on these services, you might have stumbled onto

a moneymaker. Just don’t be romanced into doing this or any other single marketing

technique simply because someone gives you a line about
“Everyone’s
doing
it,”
o r
“I

have 85,000
followers.”
Nod your head and then say, “That’s nice. If you’re trying to

impress me then show me the money you can prove came from this tool.”

Blogs

These are a hybrid between social media and articles. A few years ago blogs were

touted as the new phenomenon that would revolutionize the Internet and render al other

techniques obsolete. It was kind of like teenagers concluding that older generations

were idiots and world peace was coming as soon as they got a chance to run things.

Wel , even though they haven’t revolutionized the earth, blogs have matured into

valuable tools. You can’t watch the evening news without seeing a political analyst who

writes for a blog. They also have the benefit of incorporating a technology cal ed an RSS

feed, which al ows the blogs to bypass e-mail spam filters and be delivered right to the

subscribers’ news-reader tools. That can be very handy in our spam-saturated world.

A number of blogs also have achieved recognition by Google as being influential

sites. Simply type any current event into Google and you’re likely to see some of the top

results being occupied by blogs. You can usual y identify that a site is a blog because it

has the long comments section at the bottom of every article or entry, though the line is

blurring between blogs and other types of sites.

One real y excel ent way to bring attention to your info product is to search for blogs in

your field of interest. Go to Google and type in directory of blogs and then search for

your topic at one of the big blog sites. Also, just search for the topic directly in Google.

Now look at the articles and entries you see and determine how you can add value.

Notice that I said determine how you can add value and I did not say tel them what you

have for sale. You need to give before you get and you must make it clear from your

helpful comments that you know something about the topic. Then at the bottom of the

comments where your name appears you can usual y mention your web site. No overt

promotion is necessary, but just a simple mention. That way you won’t annoy casual

readers but stil can be contacted by people who think,
″Hey
that was good stuff—I

wonder
if she
has any
more?″

YouTube

Google bought YouTube years ago because Google could see the direction the Web

was taking toward exponential y more video. Smart investment.

Is it the be-al -end-al for your marketing efforts? Probably not, but as with everything

else we’ve discussed it’s worth uploading some relevant videos to YouTube to see what

kind of results you get.

Instead of creating a special report for your info product you could do a demonstration,

short presentation, interview, or anything else that might grab the attention of your

audience.

One of my favorite examples is the Wil it blend? series of videos by a company cal ed

BlendTec. They make food blenders. On the one hand, who could blame them if the

company thought,
″But
our situation’s different—we make blenders! We’re not a rock

band or a cool new flying car. Who’s going to watch us make a
smoothie?″

They could have thought that but they didn’t. Some genius decided to blend golf bal s

in front of the video camera and the blender reduced them to powder. Then they made

another video where they blended a broomstick, and later a digital camera, garden

hose, marbles, and final y a brand-new, just-introduced, hard-to-find iPhone.

The videos were an online sensation, getting more than 83 mil ion viewers! When they

ground up the iPhone, they sold the powder on eBay for $901. And if you think al this

was just a sil y publicity stunt, revenues at BlendTec have gone up more than 700

percent. That real y is the genius of thinking outside the box.

If you can come up with a great demonstration of something then more power to you

—but don’t even try to hit a home run at first. Just talk about your product as if you were

tel ing another Schnauzer enthusiast about some of the techniques you’ve found to be

most helpful. Let the quality of your message do the sel ing for you.

You don’t need fancy equipment to record video for YouTube. Go to Amazon.com and

search for highly rated video recorders. One bit of advice: You real y should try to get a

camera with an external microphone jack. Otherwise, you’l sound like you’re recording in

an empty tank and it wil distract from your message.

Press Releases

This is yet another example of the Internet revolutionizing a previously painful process.

How painful?

In the Bad Old Days you had to spend hundreds of dol ars to hire a publicist, or you

could spend less money but way more time learning the craft of writing press releases.

Then you had to study the publications you wanted your press release to appear in. You

wrote your press release, faxed it to the editor, put your hands together, and prayed.

Then you waited. If you cal ed the editor you ran the risk of appearing pushy or at least

a pest. Maybe you got lucky and your press release got published. In that case, it most

likely gave you 24 hours of visibility until the fol owing day’s paper got published, or you

got perhaps a month of traction if your story got into a magazine.

The Internet shattered that model. Now you can go online and for somewhere between

free and $200 you can send out your release. The online services have helpful guides to

writing effective press releases and it’s also easy to see lots of current examples right

there on the site. For a few dol ars more you can have a professional editor review and

tweak your press release.

In the old model, editors had to pick and choose their press releases for only the most

newsworthy items because they had only so much space to work with. The Internet has

no space limitations, so as long as your press release meets certain basic requirements