This is a guest post by Justin Brooke, author of SEO Lies. Justin has helped everyone from home business start-ups to 9 figure earning CEO’s, so you can rest assured he’s got a wallet-fattening tip for you too. You can contact Justin on Facebook here.

How I Taught My Wife To Be a Marketer

As an internet business owner we’re always looking for more and more ways to get more subscribers onto our mailing list. Not too long ago I brought my wife home to work full time with me from home.

In order to do that I needed to give her a foundation of how this business works.

So, I had her start from scratch like our customers are doing just a few months later she had a list of 600 and was making sales – this is how she got the ball rolling.

Here first step was to pick a niche. She picked teaching, since she had just left the classroom and it was something she was really good at and passionate about. The next step was for her to start building a subscriber list while she created her product.

I gave her an assignment to research the forums and question sites (like Yahoo Answers) for questions that teachers had. Her research showed that the majority of teachers searched the internet for lesson plans. Not just any lesson plans, but technology lessons plans.

So, she scoured her own internet resources, and then searched the net for killer resources that teachers would love that related to lessons plans, technology in the classroom, etc. Then she went out to find products in the niche that related to what the people in the niche were looking for.

She found 2 products that she could be an affiliate for…

She was now armed with what the customers were looking for, and a way to make a profit from it. Now she just needed a delivery method to get her resources to the subscriber once they opted in.

The Secret Resource For High Converting Squeeze Pages

When I think “lots of weblinks” I think “toolbar” so I pointed her to Conduit.com. They are an online software generator that allows you to build toolbars that install into your Internet browser. Software has a higher perceived value than an ebook, report, or newsletter. Which made it so great for her squeeze page and no one in this market was doing this.

The next step was to build her toolbar. She spent the day organizing her links by subject and grade level and adding them into the toolbar. Another bonus here is that the links aren’t shown – only the title of the link – so you can easily add in affiliate links and the subscriber is none the wiser.

Not that you have to hide your affiliate links, but this toolbar masks them for you and the user never realizes.

Once her toolbar was complete, I gave her a basic introduction to a squeeze page. You need a headline, a picture of the toolbar, 3-5 bullet points on the benefits of your toolbar, and then the opt-in box.

I also gave her my headline swipe file, and a short lesson on copywriting. I didn’t expect her to be a master copywriter, but she needed to have some tools :)

She spent the next day building her squeeze page using Google Page Creator (which isn’t available now, but the equivalent would be something like Weebly.com). She wrote her headline, bullet points, and even added the optin box all by herself.

When she showed it too my I told her that she did good (definitely didn’t want to discourage her, but WOW she needed to learn to be a better copywriter fast). After that I pointed out that there were a few things that would never work and we needed to change.

For example, she needed a MUCH better headline. Hers was, “The Key To Success In The Classroom Is A Killer Free Teacher Resource.” She didn’t do to bad – the benefit was to be Successful in the classroom, and her target keyword was “free teacher resource” and she managed to get them both into her headline, but I knew she could do better.

Well… she’s stubborn and didn’t make all the changes I told her and ended up putting it live on the net anyways.

You Have To Break Eggs to Make an Omelet

She broke so many rules with the site – the headline was off, her bullet points were mostly features with a few benefits, but for some reason it all worked. In fact – once she started driving traffic to it, she was getting a 60-70% conversion rate. It was insane!

I’m sure you’re wondering where all the traffic came from… it was all forum traffic. She added the link to her “free resource” into her signature box, and then spent the next 3 weeks chatting in the forums for an hour or two every day.

She would answer teachers’ questions, greeted new members in the introduction area, etc. All of her traffic was free and within months she had a list of over 300 subscribers and made her first sale just 5 weeks after her squeeze page was up.

What’s even more incredible today is that this “free resource” that she created still gets her new subscribers every week, and about 1 sale a month and we haven’t touched the site in 3 years.

It was seriously a set it and forget it project that she used to learn the ropes and just doesn’t have the heart to take down. Every year – right around the beginning of the school year she gets another boost of teachers opting in for her toolbar and some go on to purchase her products.

The lesson here… software gives your “free opt-in” bonus a higher perceived value to the subscriber. They’ll enjoy the resource, and you’ll enjoy the affiliate commissions you can earn from the links inside the toolbar. Let’s not forget the awesome list you can build too.

Here’s How You Can Do It Too

It’s easy, first you want to research what you’re niche is looking for. Search Google for ‘your niche “forums” – this will search your niche or a topic area and find any forums related to the topic. Register to be a member and start reading their questions.

Be sure to copy paste their questions (so you can use their words against them when you build your squeeze page later).

Then head over to sites like Yahoo Answers and search for questions in there. You can also find the answers people liked most – those will help guide you in finding the answers they liked.

Once you’re armed with your questions – research the answers. Find links to sites that answer the questions, tools that help solve the problems, and don’t forget to search for products in Clickbank, on Amazon, etc that you can also link to. This will help you make a random affiliate sale from your subscribers.

The next step is to go to conduit.com. Sign up for an account and build your toolbar. Don’t get too fancy – they have a ton of extra widgets you can add to your toolbar now, but those make them too hard and overwhelming for your subscribers. Just add in the links you collected a widget or two, but nothing more.

Now that you have your toolbar, you’ll need to create a squeeze page for it. Conduit gives you an image of your toolbar on the download page they provide for you. I use this picture on my squeeze page.

Now, if you don’t know how to build a website from scratch, don’t waste months learning. Go to Weebly.com and build your squeeze page using their very simple drag and drop system. It’s amazingly easy to piece together a professionally designed website on there.

Be sure that you have a headline, sub-headline, picture of your product (the toolbar), 3-7 bullet points, a call to action, and the opt-in box.

The last step is to add in your optin box. You’re going to need an autoresponder service provider of some sort. We use Aweber, but you can choose one that works for you and in your budget. When you set up the web form, the submit button should say something like – “Send My Free Teacher Resource” Or “Instant Access.”

Once your subscriber opt-ins, they’ll be redirected to a thank you page, a salespage to your product, or you can send them directly to the download page that conduit.com provided for you when you built the toolbar.

My wife, now sends them to an upsell page for a $7 product, but in the beginning they went straight to the toolbar download page and the autoresponder messages directed them to different products and affiliate products.

Whatever you do, don’t sit their playing mind games with yourself about whether this works or not. Go out there and try it for yourself, it’s completely free to setup. It could mean thousands down the road!

If you have any questions, leave them as a comment below and I’ll stick around for a few days to answer them. I also accept all forms of compliments ;-)

Go Bigger,
Justin Brooke
Internet Mad Scientist