Steve Wagenheim’s Home Business Blog

Okay, I’m breaking out the big guns today. Lots of folks say to me, “Come on Steve…what are your top marketing strategies?” Well, I’m going to reveal my top three in this article. I’ve been using these for so long that I don’t even think about them anymore. I just do them naturally. Trust me on this. If you do these three simple things, you’ll find that you’re making sales on a regular basis with no problem at all.

First on the list is keeping up with what’s hot. Everyday, something is coming out that’s new and exciting. Yes, I’m talking about products. And when this happens, EVERYBODY starts talking about the product. Well, what I do is rush out and get myself a copy of it. Yes, you’ll have to spend a few bucks. I try to confine these to ebooks that aren’t too expensive. After I read the book, I write a review on it. This is the key part. I then post that review up on my blog and write a relevant article about the topic that I submit to article directories. The article directs people to the review, which directs them to the sales page. Instant sale.

Second on the list is list building. I know you’ve heard it many times before but it’s true. The money really IS in the list. What I do here is simple. I write up a brief report on some topic and give it away for nothing. Of course, in order to get it, the prospect has to opt into my list. After they do that, I follow up with them and send them more information. I give them as much valuable info as I can in order to help them with their problem. Eventually, they are converted into a buyer.

Finally, I hang out at forums. This is the best way to get to meet people and make them aware of you and your products. The key to forum participation is NOT to spam. Simply help the other members there by answering their questions. Once people get to see that you’re a helpful person, they will begin to look at your signature to see what you have to offer. Gradually, you will notice a number of sales coming from these forums.

That’s it. Nothing fancy. I have been using these methods for years and they work just fine. If you use them yourself, you’ll find that you’ll be on your way to making sales on a regular basis.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

Ever see a sales letter and you said to yourself, “Man, this is a darn good sales letter” and wished you could write one like that? Well, believe it or not, it’s not all that hard. In this article, I’m going to share with you three tips for classic copy that are going to have you well on your way to writing just like the big boys.

The one thing that you need to know above everything else is that your headline is going to account for about 80% of your sales. You’re probably wondering why that is. Well, it’s simple. And if you think about it, it makes sense. If people don’t like your headline, if it doesn’t get them all excited enough to read the rest of your sales letter, guess what? They won’t read it. That is why the headline accounts for 80% of your sales. So the very first thing you want to do is slave over your headline. Make sure it screams out to read the rest of the copy.

After your headline, the next most important piece of your sales letter is your offer, believe it or not. There are so many offers out there that they tend to get lost in the soup. So, if you want your offer to be acted on, it has to stand out. This means giving away lots of value for pennies. The best way to do this in your copy is by showing the actual value they’re getting. For example, if you’re selling a book on acne cures and most of these books go for $47, let your prospect know this and then show them YOUR price. When they see how much lower it is, they’ll realize what a great value your offer is.

Finally, there is the close. This is where so many copywriters drop the ball. You don’t want to close your sales letter with something weak like, “Here is the link to order.” This is NOT going to get the sale. You want to put the words into the prospect’s mouth. “Yes Steve, I want to have muscles like YOU do.” You have to tell them what to do and remind them of what they are getting. You want to direct them to an action and one action ONLY. That is how you close the deal.

Follow these simple tips and your sales letter will improve tenfold.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to write copy just like the pros? Visit my site at http://www.bcipe.com/ and discover killer copywriting tips that have allowed me to write my own copy for years and earn myself a 6 figure a year income selling my own products.

Email marketing can be one of the most profitable things you can do in regard to your home business. It can also be one of the biggest blunders if you don’t do it correctly. Email marketing blunders abound and there are more of them than Nike has sneakers. If you want to run a successful email marketing campaign, what you don’t do is almost as important as what you do. This article is going to cover three major blunders that email marketers commit with their campaigns. Avoid these at all costs.

Probably the biggest of these blunders, and the one that costs the most money, is not proofreading your emails before you send them…especially the links. I can’t tell you how many times I’ll get an email from somebody and the link is broken, in the wrong format or worse…missing. How long does it take to read over a 500 word email? I can do it in about five minutes. If you can’t spend five minutes checking over your work then you have no business being in business.

Next we have the worthless emails. These are the ones that are nothing but a sales pitch. There is no information in the email worth reading. Heck, there isn’t even any information about the product you’re pitching. At least if you’re going to pitch something, explain why it’s going to help the person. Tell something about the product. Give people a real reason to want to get it. Just sending an email that says “Hey, check out this great new book I just found” is not going to cut the mustard. People need info. Give it to them.

Another terrible blunder that email marketers make is not checking their emails for spam content. It doesn’t matter how well written your message is. If you have a ton of words in it that are going to trip the spam filters, your email isn’t going to get delivered. Trust me on this. Some of these spam filters are extremely aggressive. I can’t tell you how many emails I don’t get that I expect in my in box.It’s very frustrating. So go to Google, look up, “Spam checker” and make sure your score is as close to zero as you can get it.

These three simple things…proofreading your email, providing quality info and making sure you lower your spam score, will greatly increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns and add thousands of dollars to your bottom line each year.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

Well, it’s a new year and affiliate marketers are looking for new things to do in it. We all have high hopes that this year will offer us some great new ways to promote affiliate products. So the question is simple. Is there anything new out there or is it just more of the same old song? Well, this article is going to prove to be interesting reading for some and not so interesting reading for others…depending on what you’re looking for.

Let’s begin with what IS actually new. As far as products to sell…tons. There are new products coming out daily. Just head on over to the Clickbank marketplace, pick out any category and then choose new products. You will find them by the bucketful. My suggestion is to go with new products that have some sales history to them. If you can find one with a gravity of at least 30, that would show an established seller and something that should be quite easy to sell.

But what about promotional methods? Well, that kind of depends on how long you’ve been around. For some, Squidoo is something that is brand new, even though it has been around for some time. The Conduit method is pretty new and also quite effective, but it is certainly not new and earth shattering. The truth is, marketers have been putting up Conduit sites for years. They just didn’t know that’s what they were.

And that really brings me to the crux of this article. See, marketers are always looking for something new. The truth is, marketing itself is as old as the hills and really hasn’t changed much over the last 100 years, if not longer. Sure, there are some new tools and shiny sites, but for the most part, affiliate marketing is affiliate marketing. Go back to the early days of Avon. What do you think that was? The only difference is that it was done off line. Today, the Internet just makes things more convenient.

Here is the bottom line and it has nothing to do with shiny and new. Get a good product in front of a hungry crowd with a message that conveys to them why they need that product and you’ll make the sale. The avenue you use doesn’t have to be new and quite honestly, it doesn’t even matter what avenue you choose, just as long as the message gets across.

No, there really IS nothing new under the sun.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of being an affiliate failure? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin like I am? Want to land in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion you tackle just like I do? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and start earning a solid income as an affiliate marketer.

Well, it’s a new year and you’re hoping that your home business is going to be better than it was last year. But what are you doing to improve it? After all, it’s not going to just get better on its own. YOU have to be proactive and make things happen. Not sure where to start? No problem. This article is going to provide you with a few tips that should help improve your business for the new year.

At the top of the list is to go over what you did for your business in 2008 and see what worked for you and what didn’t. For example, I took a look at some forms of promotion that I used in 2008 that didn’t perform as well as when I first started using them. So I got rid of them. In turn, this saved me $200 a month in expenses. I know it’s not a lot, but every little bit helps. If you do this same thing for YOUR business, you’ll find things that you’re doing and spending money on that aren’t working well for you either. You can then discard them and move on to something else.

Another thing you can do is look to see what you can add to your business for the coming year. There are always new forms of promotion coming out. Staying on top of the latest is almost a must in this business. If you don’t know what’s out there, you won’t know what your competition may be up to. And if your competition gets a jump on you, you could lose a very big part of your market. So keeping up with the latest trends is critical…even if you don’t use everything that’s out there.

Finally, you need to take a look at your business model itself. Is there a way you can streamline it? Are there things that you’re doing that you could outsource and have others do for you, thus freeing up time to concentrate on things that are more productive and bring in more money? Time is something you can’t get back and wasting it means you’re wasting opportunities to make more money.

These are just a few things you can do to take your business to the next level this year. Get rid of what’s not working, see what’s new that you can jump on and see what you can get others to do for you in order to free up more of your time. And then watch your business explode in 2009.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Looking for a solid 4 step plan to building your own business…FREE? Pick up my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/4steps.html and get started TODAY!

What goes up must come down. Basic law of gravity on this planet. Well, gravity, as applied to affiliate marketing, does not follow the same laws. For that matter, the laws of gravity, when it comes to affiliate marketing, are quite different from what most beginning affiliate marketers believe to be true. Well, if you’re going to have any chance of being a successful affiliate marketer, you better get a solid handle on the laws of gravity. This article will get you started.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term “gravity” as it applies to affiliate marketing, it’s a term that Clickbank uses to represent the number of affiliates who are making sales of a particular product. So for example, if a product at the Clickbank marketplace has a gravity of 100, it means that there are 100 affiliates who are making sales of that product within a certain period of time. The actual formula for computing this is a little complex so I won’t get into it here.

Now, the problem with this formula is that it doesn’t take into account how many sales each affiliate makes. For example, a gravity of 100 could mean that there are 80 affiliates who have made only one sale each within that period of time, which is certainly no measure of how successful these affiliates are. That’s why the gravity figure can be so deceiving as far as how easy or hard it may be to sell a particular product.

However, if you see a gravity of 300, this most likely means that there are a lot of affiliates out there who are promoting this product, successfully or not. Okay, what does this have to do with you as an affiliate marketer? Well, if you’re going up against 300 plus affiliates who are trying to sell a particular product, regardless of how well they’re doing selling that product, you’ve got yourself a boat load of competition on your hands. This means that making sales is not going to be easy unless you can somehow stand out from the crowd.

Personally, I find it easier to sell products with a lower gravity just as long as they’re showing some kind of sales activity. A gravity of 30 to 50 is going to be much easier to go against and should be a good enough seller that you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting your piece of the pie.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of being an affiliate failure? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin like I am? Want to land in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion you tackle just like I do? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and start earning a solid income as an affiliate marketer.

Some of you may find this to be an odd title. Well, don’t worry…by the time you are done reading this rather offbeat article, you’ll understand exactly what I mean. Hopefully, if this sinks in, you’ll be on your way to be the unreasonable man…or woman.

So, what do I mean? To really make you understand what this is all about, a brief story is in order. Don’t worry. I’ll keep this short.

Years ago, a friend of mine wanted to get into business for himself. He wanted to do something that he had never done before in his life and in spite of this, wanted it to be more successful than anything else he had ever done. Many of his other friends tried to reason with him by telling him that there was no way he could do what he wanted to do simply because he didn’t have the knowledge or the skills. He didn’t care. He would do whatever he had to do in order to create and run a successful business. This was before the days of the Internet, where things are a lot easier and cheaper.

He had no money to lease a store and couldn’t get a loan because of bad credit. So he worked odd jobs in order to save up the money and borrowed the rest from family, promising to pay them back 100% interest. They thought he was nuts. But he got the money and was able to lease the store.

He had no money for training, so he got all the books he could on the subject and just read them, night after night until he was bloodshot from reading. He sometimes worked 48 hours straight to get the knowledge that he needed.

To make a very long story short, he now runs one of the most successful catering businesses in the state where he lives. That’s right…he learned catering on his own and paid for his expenses by working and borrowing from family, offering an insane payback amount…which he insisted that they take.

Today, he makes more money than all the people he borrowed from combined.

They called him unreasonable. They said he was expecting too much from too little. And yet, he proved them all wrong.

Sometimes we have to be unreasonable with our expectations in order to succeed. It is only when we truly reach beyond our limits that we can even reach those limits.

So if you want to make $100,000 a year, strive for $1,000,000 a year. Be unreasonable.

Sometimes it’s the only way we get anywhere.

To YOUR Success

Steven Wagenheim

Want to earn a 6 figure income like I do but get there in half the time? Please visit my blog at http://work-at-home-based-business.com/2007/12/06/review-of-nitro-marketing/ and read my review of the greatest info product ever to come out online in the 5 years I’ve been doing this.

You may not believe this, but even the greatest copywriters in the world don’t please everybody. If you think I am kidding, head on over to the Clickbank marketplace and read the product descriptions where the owner brags about a 7% conversion. Now I admit, that’s pretty darn good. However, if you really think about it, how good is it? We’re going to explore this figure and a few other things in this article to help you understand that as a copywriter, you won’t please everybody.

The industry says that your average “good” sales copy will convert at between 2% and 3%. Therefore, you’d have to say that 7% is a darn good figure and thus, that particular sales letter must be pretty darn good. But is it? Let’s look at the other side of this coin. If your sales letter converts at 7%, that means that 93% of the people who saw your sales copy were NOT impressed by it…at least not enough to make a purchase. I don’t know about you, but to me, 93% is an awfully large number. And the average conversion of 2%, which means 98% are unimpressed…well, that’s just darn right awful.

Then you’re going to those who will write to you and point out all your spelling and grammar mistakes. Well, here is what I have to say to that, and you can take it for what it is worth to you. If somebody doesn’t buy the product because you had a spelling or grammar mistake then they weren’t a real prospect anyway. These are people who are just looking for excuses not to buy from you. I get a kick out of very few emails I do get pointing out where I spelled a word wrong. Just got one today. Guess she won’t be buying my book on copywriting, will she.

The point I am trying to make, and I hope I’ve made it clear, is this…you aren’t going to please everybody. Because of that fact, and make no mistake about it…it’s a fact…there is no point in driving yourself crazy trying to make your sales copy the epitome of perfection. Sure, you want to make it as good as you possibly can, but we are all human and as humans we make mistakes…sometimes intentionally. If you read one of my earlier articles on grammar and punctuation, I specifically said to throw the rules in the trash because compelling copy doesn’t always follow the rules.

So the next time somebody criticizes your copy…take it with a grain of salt.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Want to write copy just like the pros? Visit my site at http://www.bcipe.com/ and discover killer copywriting tips that have allowed me to write my own copy for years and earn myself a 6 figure a year income selling my own products.

I often get asked what the keys to being successful on the Internet are. This isn’t an easy question to answer because there are so many keys to success. In this article, I am going to cover a few of them and maybe in future articles I will cover some others. These will be the ones that I feel, at least in my professional opinion, are the most important. In fact, all the others pretty much stem from these. So take notes.

The absolute biggest key to success (yes, might as well get this one out of the way) is customer service. I don’t care how much marketing you do, how great your products are or how handsome you are…if you treat your customers like dirt, they’re not going to be your customers for long. That means, if a customer has a problem with your product or has some questions, you help them. You do this in a timely manner and you do it courteously. I have stopped doing business with many marketers because they are rude or just plain don’t reply to my requests for assistance. This one thing will kill your business faster than anything else.

In my opinion, the next biggest key to success is honesty. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. I have had to tell many people that I was unable to help them because what they were looking for simply didn’t exist, such as a push button system for making money. Many of these people so appreciated my honesty and not trying to sell them something that they ended up asking me what I did have and what I suggested and ultimately ended up purchasing one of my products. Honesty goes a long way my friends.

Another big key to success is planning. You’d be surprised how many people just jump into Internet marketing and don’t have a clue what they’re doing. They have no plan at all and end up jumping from one opportunity to another. You MUST have a plan. That means sitting down, going over your interests and skills and deciding how you want to tackle making a living on the Internet. You must plan out every detail from the start…not as you go along. Those who wing it in this business are NOT successful. That’s all there is to it.

Customer service, honesty and planning. They are my top three. I’ll leave you with these for now and come back with others in another article.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

In a previous article I had written, I talked about how each person has a different personality that we link to a specific color. In this article we’re going to start looking at these various colors in detail starting with the blue personality. Hopefully, after you are done reading this article, you will know what the blue personality is, how to spot somebody who is a blue personality and finally how to deal with a blue personality in order to get them into your program.

In spite of what you might be thinking, that the blue personality is somebody who is very sad, actually the opposite is true. Blue people are fun loving party people. The word “work” is one of the dirtiest words in the dictionary for these people. They’d rather be boiled in oil and buried 20 feet under ground with nothing but Brady Bunch reruns to watch than to ever get stuck in a job. Their idea of life is going to gala affairs and mingling with the rich and famous. If you’re looking for somebody to do a lot of grunt work in your organization, the blue personality is pretty much the last person you’ll want to approach.

So, just how do you spot a blue personality? Well, since most Network marketing is done on the Internet, and you really don’t get to meet these people, you have to go by the email correspondence that transpires between you. Of, if you’re fortunate enough to get their phone number, a phone call will help. These people are very easy to spot. In communication, they laugh a lot. You’ll see a lot of LOLs in their email correspondence and if you speak to them on the phone, they’ll sound like they’re at a party and life is just one big joke. Don’t try to engage them in a serious conversation. You’ll be wasting your time.

In that case, how do you get a blue personality into your organization? For that matter, do you even want one? The answer is a resounding YES. Why? The blue personality is looking for fun. By pointing out the fun aspect of the business and the perks that come with it, this will intrigue the blue personality. In return, their love of partying and socializing with people will bring them out in full force when it comes to telling their friends about this great opportunity. A blue personality can actually be quite a recruiter if they are approached the right way. They need to see that YOUR program is going to be fun.

Hopefully, if you approach the blue personality in just the right way, you’ll gain a recruit who will bring you in a lot of members.

Even if they’re only there for the party.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html