For some reason people are scared to negotiate and they are doing their business an injustice.  Everything you can think about is negotiable; whether it be real estate, supplies, inventory…  I’ve saved such an incredible amount of money by negotiating, you probably wouldn’t believe me.

I don’t go to Walmart and try to negotiate a mirror, but if they have one of those open box specials, you can negotiate the price down.  Although you can negotiate with major retailers, it’s not as easy and you can’t always do it, unless it’s stock they really need to get rid of.  Of course there is nothing stopping you from trying.

The most effective places to negotiate are smaller to medium sized businesses.  Believe it or not a lot of companies are expecting you to negotiate so they’ll quote you a higher price than they actually expect.  If you say, “Is this the best price I can get?”  Most likely they will say, “Yes.”  That’s not a good negotiation tactic.

A better way to negotiate is just throwing a number out there after they’ve thrown out there number.  For example you’re buying a bed at the furniture store, the salesperson says the bed is $1000.  You tell him, “I’ll give you $700 for it, I saw another bed that looks similar and that’s what the other company was asking for it.”  (By the way if you’re bluffing sometimes they will call the other company to see if it’s true, but usually they won’t unless it’s an actual price match scenario.)  You might not get that bed for $700 unless you really fight it out, but imagine you got that bed for $800-$900, that would be a $100-200 savings for a couple of minutes of your time.

Another thing don’t pretend like you’re not interested.  If you pretend like you’re not interested in the item the salesperson will think to themselves, “Is this person even going to buy?  I shouldn’t even bother negotiating with this person because they probably aren’t going to buy even if I give them the price and add-on features they want.”  A better way to go about it is telling them you are definitely interested, but the numbers aren’t working for you, or you can’t afford those numbers or you only have a certain amount in your budget allocated for that particular item.  A good salesperson will bend over backwords to try to create a win-win situation.  Sometimes a deal can’t be made, but you have to try.

There are too many tire kickers around that waste a salespersons time with no sincere intentions of purchasing.  If you can distinguish your self from a tire kicker they will be more receptive in hearing what you have to say and will work and negotiate with you.

I have several friends that always take me to the car dealerships with them.  Cars are the same as everything else except you can get much bigger discounts than with most other negotiable products (due to the high mark up). You can get literally thousands of dollars off of the cars asking price by negotiating the price down.  A car dealership will give you a hard time on the pricing and keep coming back with counteroffers.  Only you know what you can pay and if you stick to your guns you’ll be surprised how low these dealers will go.  I’ve had to negotiate with dealers for 3-4 hours straight, but guess what I saved $8,000 off of their asking price and that was just with my last car.  Yes it was time consuming, but is $8,000 worth 4 hours of your time?  It’s definitely worth it for me.  I’ve negotiated several of these deals for myself and for friends and it’s always worth it.  On the same note if the deal is great, I’ll try to get something off the price, but I won’t fight it very hard if I can’t get a steep discount.  Some deals are just so good there is not much room to fiddle with the price.

I’m not telling you to go to McDonald’s and fight for 20 cents off of a burger or going to Walmart and trying to get a discount on most of the items, but for services and physical products especially with smaller companies you can most likely get a discount since a lot of the prices aren’t set in stone.  This is especially helpful if you buy products overseas, those companies are customarily expecting negotiations and won’t give you the best price unless you fight for it.

It stands for, “What’s in it for me?”

Any time you create a lead capture page, try to generate leads or even on a sales page you should always ask yourself the question, “What’s in it for them?”  No one wants to give out their personal information whether it be as simple as an email address or as complex as a social security number or credit card number.  There always has to be something in it for the reader, viewer, whatever.

You have to offer something of value.  It could be as simple as exclusive disounts, a free report, and if it’s for sales they have to believe it’s the best price/service they’re going to get.

If you forget about your target audience you will not fully appreciate high converting lead generation.  I know I’ve created a good lead generation tool when all I ask for is an email address or a phone number and somehow I end up with social security numbers and tons of private information.

Keep yourself up to high standards and others will regard you in the same way.

In the real estate business it’s called OPM (other peoples money), in the online world it’s called leeching.  What I’m about to tell you is about leveraging other peoples work and getting that important link back to you.

An easy way of doing this is going to free template or theme sites and downloading as many themes as you can get your hands on.  Make sure you read the licenses and terms included…now that gets my disclosure out of the way.  Most templates or themes require a link back to the original designer.  What’s not included in most of those terms is that you can’t add your own links or content to those pages or distribute them yourself.

Now we open up all of the themes and templates and add our beautiful hyperlink with anchor text.  If we really want to get crazy we can slap one of our advertisements right on the template.  Now we go to all of the free template sites we can think of that accepts submissions and add our templates to the site and we can also create our own.  Don’t forget the warez sites and forums.  A lot of people hate warez sites but these things can spread anything like crazy even legitimate products and items (as long as you are distributing them for free).

Now everytime someone installs one of your altered templates/themes you get a link back as long as they don’t erase your links.  If you put up ads you’ll get traffic through your ads also.  Be careful do not use Adsense or a similar program with your templates because you have no control over the content of the sites and you don’t want to get banned for having your ads on a porn or illegal warez site or for fraudulent clicks.

This technique doesn’t only work for themes and templates.  It works for scripts, ebooks, programs, videos, and just about anything online that you are given rights to manipulate.

Warning: You might piss a lot of people off doing this.

This is what I call By Any Means Necessary SEO.

When creating a site a lot of times you need images or pictures that you didn’t personally take.  The hard way is to go out and actually take those pictures.  The easy way is finding someone or someplace that has the image you want and using it.

Before you go out to google images and start snatching pictures, remember images are protected under copyright law.  You don’t want to get cease and desist notices or in a worse case scenario sued for using someone elses pictures.  There are ways to avoid any problems.

What you are looking for is usually stock photos.  The best kind of stock photos is usually royalty free stock photos.  Do a search for royalty free stock photos and if you find something you like you will either have to pay for it or you might get lucky and find a free stock photo site.  Remember each site has different licensing rules and each site dictates how you can use their images so read their terms and/or licensing agreements.

Another way is just visiting a website that has an image you want and asking the site owner if you can use their image.  Some will say, “yes,” some will say, “no,” and some will want you to pay.  The main thing is your conscience is clean and you won’t have any legal issues in the future.

A couple of good resources for stock photos are:

Stock XChng A large assortment of completely free stock photos.

IStockPhoto Stock photos for cheap.  Small sizes are only $1.

There are tons of other good resources out there, but these are two of the biggest and most affordable services out there.

In the internet marketing world it’s called private label and in the retail world it’s called white label.  Basically these are products created by one company and renamed or rebranded by another company.  It looks like 2009 is going to be a bigger year for this.  90% of my work over the years has been “private label” meaning people buy from me to resell to others at a higher price.  It’s no problem, I can afford to do that and my ego doesn’t need the credit as long as the cash is in my pocket.

Since the end of last year I’ve been getting more and more requests for private label offerings.  Of course my standard is to do everything without branding anyway so that’s not an issue.  A lot of companies want to brand themselves through your site and design.  It’s not a bad thing, but I think you can build up your reputation without the need of adding your link in random places on someone’s site.  Ummm….let me rephrase that, if someone is paying you a decent rate than you shouldn’t have to do that.  If you’re giving something out for free or at a discounted rate, definitely brand yourself where ever and when ever you can.

Any way this year with economy problems world wide and people wanting to make money by any means necessary, it looks like there will be a bigger trend than normal of rebranding.  That’s not a bad thing.  It means you’ll have other revenue streams if that’s not part of your business model already.  The biggest internet marketers and largest retailers all have some form of affiliate program and private labeling things is just another form of an affiliate program.

The big boys do private labe/white label so why not you?  It’s always good to have a new source of revenue.  You can even go the extra mile and add your client’s name to the items and shipping label (aka drop shipping).

A lot of the internet works off of a simple principle…common sense.  The Pay Per Click world is no different.  Some companies don’t ship out products, they only work on a local level, so you have to think locally, if that’s the business you’re in or targeting.

Let’s say I’m a doctor that performs lasik surgery in Toms River, NJ, and I’m getting ready to launch a pay per click campaign.  To get more bang for my buck I want to advertise locally.  It doesn’t really make sense for me to target the whole country or world for my keywords.  If someone in San Francisco, California finds my ad, what are the odds of them coming to Toms River, NJ?  Very slim unless I have a very unique selling proposition (USP) or they’ll be in town for a while.  So that scratches out buying lasik worldwide, unless I can sell my spare leads to companies around the world.

The term lasik is estimated to be at $7.62 – $10.69 per click at the time of this writing.  I don’t know about you, but with an estimated cost of  $3,500 – $6,140 per day those clicks can get very expensive.  The thing is they’re untargeted.  You can end up in a deep hole if you don’t use pay per click correctly is my main point of course.

Now let’s say we just targeted New Jersey.  The actual keyword doesn’t really get any cheaper, but we are targeting a reasonably sized area that are likely to be interested in what we have to offer and will actually show up for an appointment.  Now our daily budget is only $40-90 (estimated by google because of the amount of New Jersey clicks received), but we’re a local lasik center so it doesn’t make sense to spend thousands if we don’t have to.   You might want to reach into certain parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania, etc… for more traffic if your daily ad budget allows only because their aren’t that many clicks for New Jersey for that term.

You can also expand your keywords.  For example laser eye surgery is another keyword you might want to test out.  You have to keep testing to see what keywords give you the best return on investment.  You can also target within a certain radius of your company.  If you target within a 20 mile radius of your address and see your pay per click campaign is going great, you can start expanding and keep expanding until you see it’s dropping your ROI or you’re not making the profit you need to make to justify the cost.  It’s all about testing to see what works.

Another way to save money is to make sure your ad says exactly what your company is about and the benefits of clicking to see your site.

Lasik Surgery $750 Per Eye!

Get Better than 20/20 Vision Today.

No Money Down.

Note: My ad might not be accurate, it was just a sample ad I whipped up in 3 seconds.  So don’t kill me doctors.

I’m putting my offer out there, they are told their is a fee associated with my services.  They find what’s in it for them in a quick ad.  That’s all it takes, it doesn’t have to be complex.  If you make your ads to generic you’ll get tons of people clicking just to see what’s on the other side, let them know upfront the best stuff.

That’s a quick example of local uses for pay per click and how to save a couple of dollars.

If you’re shipping stuff out nationwide or offer a service that attracts clients nationwide or worldwide, then you don’t have to target down to the state or local level.

Also one or two keywords might be enough for your business, but I routinely have lists of a few hundred to thousand keyword phrases that match my niche and even if they don’t get clicks every day, when they do get clicks they have higher conversion ratios and of course they cost a lot less than just using the main keyword.

A lot of people think that to have a good site it has to have 400,000,000 links and options all over the place.  The only thing this does is confuse the user.  I prefer to have a nice clean design, with very easy navigation.  If you do have 1,000 navigation buttons you might want to add a drop down menu or something similar with more options.  A lot of websites trying to be the best just confuse the user and lose visitors.  It’s always good to start a site as clean and as uncluttered as possible.  You don’t want your site to look like a parked page.

This is where the K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple Stupid) concept should be used.  Too many webmasters and designers try to over complicate things.  If you keep it simple even the most novice internet users should be able to use your sites with no problems.

A lot of people think that if you use a pen name you have something to hide.  That’s actually the farthest thing from the truth.  There are several valid reasons why you would want to use a pen name.

The first is that one person can’t be an expert in several niches or topics.  Of course that’s not true, but if someone sees you giving out home foot fungus remedies, online money making tips, how to get any woman you want, and advice on how to improve your golf swing, people will start to wonder if you’re actually doing your own writing and they’ll also question the effectiveness of your techniques.

Now if John Bigtoe wrote about home foot fungus remedies, Tim Moneybags wrote about online money making tips, Alberto Lovedoctor wrote about how to get any woman you want, and Frank Caddy wrote about your golf swing, than their information must be good, because that’s all they do.

Everything is about perception.  If people perceive you to be an expert in one area, let them think that’s all you know, or slowly expand into other topics or areas of interest.

Some people are very prolific writers and can write about anything at the drop of a hat.  Don’t let your great writing skills be held back.  Just invent a pen name and start writing.

Remember all backlinks and information all points back to you, so no matter how you look at it you’re not losing anything by having pen name.

Here are some people that have used pen names:

Samuel Langhorne Clemens = Mark Twain = Sieur Louis de Conte

Stephen King = Richard Bachman

Joanne Rowling = J.K. Rowling

Isaac Asimov = Paul French

Robert Beck = Iceberg Slim

Theodor Seuss Giesel = Theo LeSeig = Dr. Seuss

Pauline Phillips and Jeanne Phillips = Abigail Van Buren = Dear Abby

Agatha Christie = Mary Westmacott

For more information on pen names and the reasons others use pen names you can read more here.  For more famous pen names you can find some here.

Spammers think they are getting a backlink from me.  They keep trying to post, but this blog is heavily moderated.  I will not let any bullshit comments be posted here.  If you want to post your Viagra advertisements search google for abandoned forums and blogs that aren’t moderated or at the very least post a decent comment and I’ll probably give you the link with anchor text.  If you’re going about it the lazy spammer way with 7000 links in your comments and nothing that adds value to any of the posts, they will never be seen here.

For everyone else,  abandoned forums and unmoderated blogs can be a great source of backlinks.  An easy way of finding them is following the Viagra advertisements.

Those strange porn and Viagra advertisements are a great way to find out where to get links form.  Although you probably don’t want your site associated with that type of content, they have a harder time of getting links to stick than a normal webmaster so if there link is up on a site that means it’s a free-for-all for everyone to post their links.  You’ll be surprised you can find some high PR pages by following the spammers.

Have you found a niche you feel is a good opportunity to make big money?  No nothing about the topic?  No problem as long as you have spare time for research you can become a “expert” in just about anything.

There are several ways to go about this.  First let’s pick a topic.  I’m interested in body weight exercises.  So the first thing I do is go to google’s own keyword tool, and see if there is any traffic for body weight exercises.

I already know it’s a money making niche because you have guys like Matt Furey literally making millions off of this niche alone, you also have the Iron Gym commercials on TV all day.  Plus their are several other programs out there and people are buying them because let’s face it weight loss is a big money maker world wide.

I type in bodyweight workout into google’s keyword tool.

bodyweight exercise keywords

As you can see “bodyweight workout” had about 6300 searches in December.  Not bad, but we’re looking for a bigger crowd right now.

Now what we do is scroll down on the page and we’ll find other suggested keywords/synonyms for our search term.

Bodyweight workout

Now we’re getting somewhere.  Now we’re into the millions of monthly searches.  And google also gave us over 100 choices most of them getting tons of traffic.  What we can do now is save all of the keywords.  From the first list and from the second list.  I save them as .csv for Excel so that I can manipulate the files later and sort them to my needs.

By doing this we’ve done a ton of research already.  In literally 5 seconds.  First we have some keywords we probably want to rank for.  Second we have keywords that can help us search for more information.

Next step find information that can help us.  A quick and easy way of finding anything about just about any topic and for free is to visit forums.  Forums are great they are filled with tutorials, tips, opinions that can help us decide if the information is good or even valid.  Let’s go to google, just the regular site this time.  Type in “body weight exercise” forum.

Body weight exercise google results

There are 9,220 results for the search term.  Remember if you don’t find what you’re looking for you still have a ton of other search terms because of the lists you created from the keyword tool.  And we haven’t even searched calisthenics which are just that, body weight exercises!

Of course taking a quick glance I can see there is some great stuff to be found on this search term in the first 2 pages of results.

I’m not going to get into too much detail, but basically once you’ve found a site/forum that talks about your niche, actually search that particular site. With most forum scripts you can even find the most popular topics by the most posts or view counts.  By doing this you can find exactly what aspects are the “hot” topics for your niche and start to pin-point what you want your article, book, video or whatever it is you’re trying to create.

Another couple of quick research techniques are Wikipedia, which is great if you are looking for definitions and more resources.  Yahoo Answers is good, but you have to sort the spam from the good.  There are several other similar sites out there.

Remember if you’re already visiting the forums and you have specific questions you might even want to ask on the forums you’re using to research your topic.  I’ve seen countless “gurus” and wannabe “gurus” find a hot topic on a forum, re-word what was discussed in the “hot topic” and then sell it right back to the same forum members or at the very least use that forum as a launching pad for their product.

Remember you don’t need to get fancy.  We used a free keyword research tool to get the results we wanted and got all of our information for free.  You don’t need to buy the $200 software program to do your research, you can get more accurate results by querying the search engines themselves.

Good luck with your research.  See you tomorrow.