Since you are reading this post, you have probably heard the favourite sentence of all marketing gurus:

“Money is in the list”.

The first time we heard it (Me & Tib) was during a seminar on online marketing and to be frank, we did not quite understand it. Our tip – translate the word ‘list’ into a more traditional ‘data base’ and you will probably understand quicker if you are like us – from the traditional marketing school.

I wondered then why would a database be so important. I have studied the topic since and I came up with a simple analogy that clearly illustrates the need for a list, or data base.

Imagine now that you have a product to sell – say Swiss cheese (or eBook, or affiliate link, or other product more relevant to your field – it really doesn’t matter at this point). Let’s say that the Swiss cheese you offer is a premium quality product and all of your friends love it. Selling Swiss cheese to a group of friends can make a great business … if you have thousands of friends. But what if you only have a few? (don’t worry, we like you J). Your possibilities to sell the product are significantly diminished. Do you agree?

Purely for the case study purpose, imagine you had a thousand friends, maybe even two thousand, and you found an easy way to inform them all about your new product – Swiss Cheese. Thousands of potential customers instead of two?!  Wouldn’t that be great? Think about it. Even if say only one percent of your friends decide to come over and try your cheese, wouldn’t that be something to start with? Because of the friends database, you achieved 10-20 visitors coming over with an intention to buy cheese. Not to mention – you managed to get it all with no marketing budget, time consuming advertising campaigns and no time wasted.

You got 20 visitors just because you had an amazing database of friends. You managed to inform thousands of people of your new product within minutes. You may repeat this step as many times as you like –offering your products, services or knowledge to people who gave you their contact details.

This quick example shows clearly how important it is to build your own customer , or as we prefer, friends database. You simply have a chance to present your product or service to highly targeted group of potential customers at your fingertips. Building an extensive data  base, or list, may take some time (and it will), but it is an effort worth taking.

Once you started building your database, you need to think of another issue – how to contact your customers, or friends, in an easy, time efficient and cost effective way? This is almost as important as having a list. Because what  is the worth of the list if your customers simply don’t like you, don’t respect you and don’t buy your products? ZERO! You need to work on building a good relationship with your list. There are many techniques for that, but you may sum it up in two words: VALUABLE CONTENT.

You may ask: what is the best way to contact your list? Well, I would not recommend phone calls. Would you like people to call you at home? Home visits may not be such a good idea either (especially if you don’t quite like the feeling of the door smashing into your face). Sending an email would be an acceptable option for small lists. But emailing hundreds, or thousands of people may be a little time consuming. And this is where auto responders come in handy.

So what is auto responder?

An autoresponder is a computer program, web application, software tool or agent running on web servers, that automatically answers e-mails sent to you. Modern autoresponders offer multiple additional functions, such as sending newsletters, providing email authentication services and other  useful tools used to create and maintain a good relationship with your list.

Auto responders are not there only to answer emails sent to you. It is also a way to send newsletters, updates, freebies. It is basically like an auto pilot for your business. It limits the time you need to spend on your customer service to minimum. The art is – to create a system. The rest is history.

Firstly, I have to admit that I am not a ‘Facebook person’. I am not a Facebook person at all. I created my personal profile not earlier than a year ago. Moreover, despite the pressure from my friends, I do not login to my profile everyday. I do not update my galleries often. I hardly take part in any quizzes. I really dislike people’s urge to update their status every hour or so. Because I am just not ‘the kind of girl’ it is very difficult for me to admit that social media and making money online are nowadays closely coupled.

Since we started here, in Become Rich Café I encountered social media topic in pretty much every interesting article about making money online. I started asking myself a question: what is it about social media that internet marketers love so much? What dirty secrets will I uncover when researching it?

You probably won’t be surprised if I tell you that most of the articles try to sell you ways on how to build your list and popularity using Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, You Tube, Delicious etc. You have came across some of them, haven’t you? Unfortunately, most of the bloggers or ‘gurus’ try to sell us ‘dirty techniques’ which I would call spam rather than Internet Marketing. To cut the story short – give them something for free in exchange for their email address and from that moment onwards keep sending them emails trying to sell something. Or – every day follow 100 random people on Twitter so that they visit your profile and check your website generating more valuable traffic. This all sounds just too sneaky to me.

So what exactly are SOCIAL MEDIA?

Social media are internet based tools, platforms and communities that exist to increase and enhance ways of sharing information. Social media make it easy for internet users to share their personal details (often by creating personal profiles), communicate with friends, create circles of interests, research internet content, bookmark websites they particularly like, and finally … to share their personal monologue with wide audience (we all know this constant need for fame, don’t we? J). Social media are modern way to meet peoples need for socializing and belonging. According to Wikipedia, because social media are so popular in recent years, our times may be called ATTENTION AGE in the future.

I was inspired to write about social media by a free video I have seen yesterday – Crowd Conversion by Ian David Chapman and Robert Grant. For the first time I heard someone talking about Facebook fans differently than as if they were ‘machine to make money’. I really liked it. Crowd Conversion video brought up one question that according to me is crucial when using social media:

Is it possible to do ethical social marketing?

David Chapman and I believe that it is possible. It takes longer to succeed, but it gives you much more in return.

The free video gives some interesting information on social media marketing. For example, what are the three biggest misconceptions about making money with social media?

You need something to sell

Apparently – you don’t. It is easy nowadays to get involved in affiliate programs and sell someone else’s products or services. There are hundreds of affiliate directories out there. However, what we would recommend is to find a product that you really like and only then become its affiliate. Only refer products that you know people will love.

You have to have a list (potential customers database)

Naturally, having a good database is amazingly helpful. However, it is not necessary to start with. Every marketer knows that it takes time to build your list. More importantly, it takes time to build good relationship with your list. Database without a relationship is worth nothing. Good relationship will give you a good response rate. And response rate is what matters.

You must have your own website

The most beautiful thing about Facebook, and other social media, is that anyone can go and build a Facebook website or social media profile for free. This gives you a possibility to start building a community around your products and services before you have your own website or blog.

What are the 3 common mistakes people make with social media:

1. They don’t have a blueprint

Most of us start using social media with no strategy, just blind trying. This is just like opening a business with no market research. Wake up people! Invest some time in gathering information on how the best ones out there did it. We are in attention age, you will find it with ease.

2. They waste tons of time for little results

Ever heard of 80/20 rule? It says that 80% of our results is generated by 20% of our efforts. This means that if we concentrate on the 20%, we will have pretty much the same results but much more free time.

3. They enter social media with the wrong mindset

Most of the people will offer you an ‘easy way’ or a ‘fast track’ of success. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t believe in a quick way to success. In fact I believe that there is one. But as far as Facebook, social marketing and internet marketing is concerned – good content is all that matters.

Key concepts to monetization with social media:

Building Core Relationships (20% effort gives 80% of results)

Giving great value to people builds a relationships. The most generous internet marketers get the best results.

Gathering Your Crown

You need a network of people around you. This propagate your valuable content quicker and eventually bring you money.

Engaging Your Audience

You can achieve this with your own, or with someone else’s content. Don’t be reluctant to directing people to content created by someone else – people will associate you with a good feeling they will have when reading/viewing the content.

AMPLIFYING your message

If your audience appreciates your content, they will share it or mark it as the content they like. This in turn will give you more traffic and enhance your chances to succeed online. It is a good idea to leave conversations open to invite them to comment. Also ask for people’s opinion and feedback.

Magnetizing Your Extended Network

After you have built your crown,  word of mouth will bring people to you without you putting effort into it. Your fans will share the content and their friends will share it with their friends – snowball effect.

Skimming the Cream

At this stage it is important to make people get closer to you. A good way to do so would be organizing  teleseminars, webinars, sharing free ebooks etc.  Remember, make your fans feel special for getting closer to you. Create a feeling of society, everyone and  belonging .

Offering Risk Free Product/Service

Once you prepared your unique, highly valuable product or service, make it easy for your list to take a new step and offer the new product  risk free, 100% money back guarantee. Happy customers will bring you new customers. Unhappy customers will destroy your business.

Leverage Your Success

Put effort in the right direction and apply it in the right place. Check what works best for you and concentrate on it.

After researching the topic of social marketing, I know one thing for sure: Getting on social media is no longer an option. It is a necessity. Do you agree?

If you find this topic interesting, here are some relevant links:

Social Media Blue Print FREE VIDEO by Crown Conversion

Social Media Will Change Your Business – Stephen Baker & Heather Green, Businessweek

The Importance of Social Media Marketing: Why You Should Learn and Master it, Maki

Categorized List of Social Media Sites, Traffikd.com

AdBrite, dubbed “The Internet Ads Marketplace” and based in California, is yet another way to monetize your site. AdBrite is a marketplace to buy and sell online advertising. It cooperates with over 118,000 sites (it’s ads reach in average 277 million impressions).

You can work with AdBrite as an advertiser (buy ads), or as a publisher (sell ads) similarly to Google, where you can buy ads (AdWords) and publish them (AdSense).

What does it mean?

If you are a publisher AdBrite puts relevant ads on you website and pays you when your visitors click on them.

If you are an advertiser AdBrite allows you to create online advertising campaigns targeting keywords and choose specific websites that you would like to advertise on.

AdBrite offers publishers many types of advertisements:

• Text ads - Customizable layout, colours, and fonts

• Banner ads - IAB standard sizes

• Inline Ads - The Inline ads format allows you to display an ad only when a user scrolls over a given word—saving you a lot of space.
  
  

  Inline Ad_AdBrite

• BritePic - this format allows you to monetize photos on your site with interactive text ads. Captions slide out whenever a user hovers over the image. All you have to do is use a BritePic tag instead of the <img> tag in your site.

• Full Page Ad - this format allows you to earn the highest CPM (cost per thousand impressions) in AdBrite’s marketplace, running ads from some of their advertisers.

Of course you as a publisher have a big influence on which ads appear on your website. You are able to block ads with inappropriate content, or those that come from your competitors. You can also adjust the way ads appear by amending the fonts, colours and other features.

The important thing is that AdBrite works well alongside other ads programs, such as AdSense (there are some specific requirements you need to meet).  Another important feature is that AdBrite customers can choose to buy ads that will specifically appear only on your site.

AdBrite is free to sign up. You can register by simply filling your contact details, Tax File Number. You get paid by cheque which has a minimum amount of USD 100, but you can set a different amount if you prefer. Payments come monthly, but two month after you accrue them. This means that you will normally get paid in September for earnings from July etc. Cheque takes 7-10 business days to arrive (if you are in USA) and up to 21 business days if you have a non-US address.

AdBrite provides statistics in which you can view your earnings by month, by ad zone & by ad format. Statistics will also give you access to information on when your last cheque was processed. However, you rarely need this information as AdBrite usually sends you and email to let you know when a cheque is coming your way.

We will sign in for AdBrite and let you know what we think soon. If you wish to find out more yourself, go to http://www.adbrite.com/.

There are many people out there who earn substantial amounts of money with AdBrite and AdSense. The only catch is to generate traffic to your website/blog first. There is no need to have ads appearing on your website if no one is clicking on them, right? We will get back to ways to generate traffic in future posts.