Ever heard about the Purple Cow? If you haven’t, you’re probably missing out on one of the best concepts ever to come out of internet marketing. No, it’s not the kind of thing you see on an LSD trip – it truly is a workable, feasible internet marketing concept that will make your business stand out like… well, a purple cow.

The color purple

The Purple Cow is also the title of the book written by Seth Godin (title: Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable). Godin is an author, speaker and one of the world’s most renowned internet marketing gurus who has helped many internet entrepreneurs improve their businesses by leaps and bounds.

The Purple Cow concept, Godin argues, is about building an internet business or idea that will be more noticeable than the rest. The markets of today according to Godin, are too saturated with products that look like each other’s cousins or worse, clones. This is like walking past a group of cows standing placidly in a pasture. As you walk by, sure, you know they are cows but will you notice one bovine beauty in particular? Probably not.

Now imagine a cow with a difference. A cow with a star-shaped dark spot, for example or a cow with a green head. Better yet, a purple cow! Now wouldn’t that make an impression?

According to Godin, internet marketers must make their businesses like purple cows – unique and difficult to ignore. A purple cow internet business is better at generating more buzz with potential customers than a business that relies on just being familiar.

So how purple is your cow?

Being one of the cows is not a good choice for an internet marketing business. Being a clone, even if you’re a good clone, means you’re only good enough. In an internet market where a certain sector gets pummeled by dozens of new entries each day, it’s only a matter of time until you find yourself having to compete with younger, fresher businesses that look surprisingly like your own. Generic is simply not excellent enough.

There is comfort in the familiar but in internet marketing, it can spell the deterioration of a well-designed plan of business. The truth of the matter is that internet marketing businesses must remain competitive and it would be a mistake to be complacent at any time. With the way the market is these days, it’s quite easy to get lost in the thick of the competition.

To become a purple cow, you have to be a one-of-a-kind internet marketing business that offers the kind of reliable, quality product that people are more likely to buy over a prolonged period of time. A purple cow internet marketing business is a business that survives the arrival of new entries and still manages to look fresh, interesting and highly relevant.

But what about getting better? Godin, during his talk in Canada during the conference on Search Engine Strategies, remarked that being a purple cow is not about being a better or improved cow – it is about being worth noticing. And according to him, it all begins with being able to sell to people who are willing to lend an ear. Those who do will be more than glad to promote your business.

Is fear getting in the way?

In a virtual market where competition gets stiffer and stiffer, a strong idea can get challenged and sometimes, the challenge becomes too tempting to believe. If an internet marketer is not willing to swim upstream and fight off the temptation to go where others go, it shouldn’t be long until his business disappears into the background.

Yes, you will have to innovate, even change and that is always a scary thing. However, these steps can make your brand that much more remarkable, something people will stop to inspect, consider and buy. If there were purple cows in the real world, you can bet that they will fetch a higher price, never mind that their milk tastes the same.

Turning pink?

Godin also emphasizes the need to remain competitive. In an interview with Andrew Goodman of Traffick, Godin says that every internet marketing business considered as a purple cow is in danger of fading unless it finds a way to become extraordinary once again. It’s the struggle to develop aggressively that will make a difference between remaining a purple cow and becoming a pink calf.

To Your Miking In Profits,
Duncan Chua

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Just what are the things needed to be able to succeed in affiliate marketing? What must one have within himself to be able to do well in this industry?  There is a lot of competition involved in affiliate marketing, and to be able to rise to the top, one must be equipped with just the right stuff necessary to push him forward. There are five things one must ultimately possess if he wants to achieve the glory, and these five things are a must for him to possess to be able to stand out among the rest.

The very first quality is the willingness to learn and be trained. Treading through unfamiliar territory is scary stuff if one is not properly equipped, and he might get lost amidst a jungle of the unknown.  Learning the tricks of the trade is also an important aspect of the game, and one’s willingness to know it all will give him far better advantages in the business than he could ever imagine.

The second quality is the willingness to invest time and effort even if direct results do not seem at all apparent.  Although several months may pass without good news, it is important for one who has his foot in the industry to hold on and wait.  It is this quality which would save him from giving up after investing a lot of himself in the business.

The third quality is self-determination.  If one wants to conquer the affiliate marketing world, he must have the ability to push himself ahead.  Never having to say die is every affiliate marketer should possess, and the ability to motivate oneself into scaling greater heights is an ability which would actually take an affiliate marketer there.

The fourth quality is discipline.  If one knows how to teach himself to work everyday with all the energy he can muster, then he is close to achieving what he has set his heart to having in the first place.

The fifth and last quality is optimism. Negative attitudes and hearsays should not discourage an affiliate marketer from pursuing what he has to in order to make life better for himself and for everyone concerned. Neither should anyone influence his attitude toward the business, because once in it, it is a must for him to be the captain of his ship and the master of his soul.

The ingredients to success in a business such as affiliate marketing are diverse and manifold, but the most important thing one needs to be able to make it big lies in himself alone.  It is he who has the capacity to do everything to be able to realize his prospects, and the desire which fuels his heart in doing so is the gasoline which should keep the engine going.

Affiliate marketing is all about putting one’s fate into his own hands.  The right attitude is the key to being able to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing.

Thanks and Good Luck,
Duncan Chua

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You probably already know what viral marketing is about. It’s a marketing technique that encourages readers and website owners themselves to pass the messages ostensibly for free, but really to the benefit of the original maker of the message.

Here’s an example for you..

Remember The Hotmail Explosion?

Hotmail was able to flourish magnificently in the Internet simply through viral marketing:

Free Services – They started with the most basic of incentives: they gave away email accounts and related services for free.

Signature – For each message sent by users with free email accounts, a simple, non-irritating signature was attached: it was a hyper link invitation to have a similarly free email account.
How to virally increase your traffic with Resale Rights

The Building of an Empire – Without even knowing, email owners are participating in the viral marketing campaign of Hotmail every time they send an email to other people. Upon reading the tagline, recipients may be induced to have their own email account in Hotmail as well. When they’ve successfully created one, each message they send to other recipients contain the very same invitation, and the cycle starts all over again.

So what does viral marketing got to do with Resale Rights?

The further you read into this, you will understand the link between Resale Rights and Viral Marketing.

When you sell your products with resale rights, not only you gain income from selling the rights to the books, but you also indirectly profit from increased exposure. As long as the works you’ve sold contain specific and beneficial information about your company, each time your customer sells them to other people will instantly means one more reader getting acquainted with what your company’s all about.

Thus your readership and awareness will increase.

Through viral marketing, you’ll need to give your customers more reasons to resell the works they’ve bought from you and consequently solidify the presence of you in the Internet.

Here’s a list of characteristics for starting your own viral marketing virus. Your strategy should have all of the following characteristics:

Free – There must be something for free! If not the resell rights themselves, then think of something else that you can give away for free.

Simple and Easy Transmission Items – Articles, ebooks, and eCourses are easy to send. Podcasts, although possessing more than the usual number of bytes, are still not that difficult to transfer as many people nowadays have their own MP3 or MP4 players. Whatever format or medium you choose to convey your marketing campaign, it must be something that won’t give people headaches just to send them!

Encourage People to Spread the Word – There must be something psychologically or socially appealing about your message vehicle that will motivate other people to spread the word or work. If your article’s totally funny or witty, it will encourage customers to sell the article to other people because they’ll be providing valuable entertainment to their customers. Find a way to appeal to your readers’ ego or greed as long as it works, that should be good enough for the business.

Paid Advertising- Although accompanied by certain fees or charges, paid advertising have the advantage of greater and more specifically-targeted exposure. Paid advertisers can ensure that the right people are seeing your ads at the right time. Examples of paid advertising are classifieds and press releases.

Free Advertising – Don’t underestimate the use of free advertising because more exposure is still better than none. You can advertise for free in giveaways, forums, blogs, and your very own newsletters and auto-responders.

Rely on Your Network – Don’t forget to have your links displayed by your affiliates.

So here you are. You are holding “Virus” button. Do you want to swarm your website with traffic, or do you want your website be a deserted island?

FACT: The choice is yours.

Thanks and Good Luck,
Duncan Chua

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In the internet world where everything relies on online marketing and virtual selling, it is important that you have a comprehensive list of subscribers that you can sell to. Subscribers are the people who have agreed to receive your letters, marketing promotions and selling materials.

In order for you to create a good list of people who will subscribe to you, follow these suggestions:

1. Make a pop-up opt-in check list on your website. You should have a program that can detect the first time viewers of your website. As you sense these people, you can activate your pop-up invitation wherein they can choose to receive announcements, promotions, and other related materials from you. People who find your site helpful and useful to them would gladly accept that. Some would prefer not to, but that’s still fine. You’ll still be able to gather enough people who would likely to go for it.

2. Promote a member’s page. In your own website, you can also make an exclusive member’s page wherein the would have the ability to customize the page, import essential links, and make the page really personal as if they have programmed it themselves. A lot of people would like to express their own selves over the internet in any way possible. That’s why blog spots are so popular. With this strategy, a lot of people will horde into your site ready to sign up. You’ll get a considerable number of subscribers, for sure.

3. Give out member’s benefits. Compensate your members. You can give them a little something as they sign up. You can give additional free space for their personal files. You can give your new members discounts in your own internet stores, or shops affiliated with, if you don’t have one. You can also give tokens to your loyal members like a free download or other similar things as they complete a number of daily log-ons. This way, you can entice other people to join in, if only to get these benefits.

4. Create a refer-a-friend template. Since you already have people regularly visiting your site, make it simpler for them to refer some of their friends to you. This is used by a lot of sites as a marketing strategy and it works. It would definitely work for you too. If each of your subscribers can refer even a single friend, you can double your subscription list in no time. And if your friend’s friend would refer as well, just imagine how many people would be on your list.

5. Give freebies. You can give freebies to those people who will readily give their email addresses to subscribe in your list. These freebies need not be something big. It could even come in a form of a web money that is not convertible to cash but can be used to buy some of your products. A lot of people like free things. They love to get something out of practically nothing. Try it. You sure have a lot of subscribers to gain.

6. Come up with a contest or a promotion. A contest or a promotion is something that can draw a massive number of people to you. A single contest with a good prize at stake could lure as many as a thousand joiners. Of course, before they can join, they’ve got to fill up some form and give their email addresses to you, together with the consent of adding them to your subscriber’s list. And a thousand email addresses is already an impressive number to add to your list. How about holding three contests? Have you estimated how much subscribers you can gain?

7. Purchase mailing lists. Do you want a subscriber’s list that is real fast and easy? Well, you can readily purchase one. Although you must make sure that you get a list of people whose preferences fall under your line of business. Otherwise, the list may prove to be useless.

These are some tips on how to build a real responsive list of subscribers. These strategies are already done by many. You can try your hand in it and see how these works for you, swiftly and simply.

Thanks and Good Luck,
Duncan Chua

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