Hello everyone. This is Charlie Page. I’m the owner of The Directory of Ezines. I wanted to share some questions and answers about marketing that have come my way.

I think it will help you. Before we get into the first question, I want to share where these questions came from. These came from The Directory of Ezines lifetime members during my consulting calls with them.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been taking consulting calls from DOE lifetime members for free. Rather than charge them anything or make them part of my consulting practice, I’ve let them call in and ask questions to see where people are and what kind of help they need.

It’s tough out there. Sometimes you get confused. There is too much information. You try something and it doesn’t work. You don’t know what to do next.

Rather than sell my time off, I thought, “I’ll give it to my lifetime members. They’re good people.” These are free one-on-one consulting sessions that are offered to lifetime members.

The questions have been fascinating. I want to create a series of short videos like this one to share the questions and answers that have helped them hoping that it will help you, too.

Let’s get into the first question. The most common question I get is, “I need more leads.” That’s technically not a question. It’s a statement. Boy, do they make it.

I understand. I’ve been there. I’ve been to the place where I had a pretty website and no one was coming. I didn’t know what was going on.

That’s the most common challenge of everyone who wants to make money online whether you want to sell a product and don’t care what the product is, you just want to make money or you have a passion for a particular product. Getting traffic is tough. Let’s take a look in more detail.

There are only two ways to get leads. You can buy leads or you can earn leads. This is true about traffic to any website.

There’s traffic you can buy and there’s traffic you can earn. Those two sources of traffic are different. Whether you go after one or the other depends upon your situation. It’s completely custom to you.

Here’s the question you have to ask yourself right now. Do you have more time than money or more money than time? If you have more time than money, I know how that feels.

I was there when I first started as a member of The Directory of Ezines. If you have more time than money, you can go home at night and crank out two or three hours of promotional effort.

You can’t spend $5,000 or $500 right now. You’ll want to focus on these techniques.

Let’s go through them one by one. I’m going to give them to you in a nutshell.

Let’s look at them one by one.

The first is viral marketing.

This is creating a piece of information that other people can give away. When they give it away, it does something good for them.

Why would other people want to give away a piece of information you’ve created? You’re the creator of the viral marketing piece. They’d want to do it because they have something to gain.

They can put their affiliate link in it. It’s a piece of content they don’t have to create. They can use it to build their list.

You can make a piece of marketing material like a video, an audio, a book, a report or a series of email messages. Let’s say that you know how to write or you’re persuasive but you don’t have a lot of money for marketing.

If you can create a viral marketing piece then it will get out there to everyone. It will contain your contact information and your website. That will help drive traffic to your site.

There is article marketing.

I have a site called Article Marketing Live. I teach article marketing. Everyone and their brother is talking about article marketing right now.

Here is the essence of article marketing. Write an article that contains useful but incomplete information. I don’t know who coined that term. It was either Alex Mendoza or Jimmy Brown. I think it was one of those two.

It is useful but incomplete. That’s what the article does. It provides useful information but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

That creates curiosity. When people read your article they learn something. They want to know more about that topic. They go to your website.

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

It’s absolutely free. You spend time on your website trying to get it ranked highly in Google.

It’s not free if you buy these crazy products that promise you the first page in three minutes. I hope you don’t fall for that. It is free if you take time to research keywords and make sure that the content of your pages are good.

The internet is about content. When people search on Google, it’s job is to return relevant websites back to them. If your website is relevant and contains good quality content, Google will reward you and give you more traffic.

There are joint ventures.

Many people I talk to say, “I can’t do a joint venture. I’m not anyone. I’m not a guru. I’m not a well-known name.” You’d be surprised how many so-called “gurus” do business every day with people who are not well-known names.

These people trade services. They write copy. They post articles. They go into forums. They do things like that as part of the joint venture.

The joint venture doesn’t have to be “we are two equals who are going to work together.” A joint venture can be “I can do something you need you need done and you can do something, like a promotion, that I need done.” You trade your time for promotion.

Teleseminars are a good way to promote if you have more time than money. There are a lot of free teleseminar services on the internet now.

Perhaps you’re an expert at a particular thing whether that’s teaching people how to fly, how to build web pages, how to make video or what to avoid.

You can share stories of your successes and failures over time. You help people know what to avoid. Those are all worthy of teleseminars. These teleseminars are durable content that work very well.

You can publish your own ezine if you’re knowledgeable about a particular topic or if you’re a person who likes to do research. Publishing an ezine is easy. All it takes is an auto responder account.

People can sign up. You can email it right out. There are many courses on how to publish your own ezine. You can get a free auto responder account online. These things don’t take money.

You can participate on forums. This is a great one. Go to the Warrior Forum room. Go to Anthony Blake’s forum room. Go to Michael Green’s HowToCorp.com.

You have to participate. The key is to give. Reciprocity will bring that back to you. If you give, you will receive.

Participate on these forums. Answer people’s questions if you can. Ask questions that are meaningful. Don’t ask, “How do I earn $4 million next week?”

Everyone is doing that. That’s crazy. No one will go from $0 to $4 million in a week or even a month. Participate in the way that you can.

You can publish a blog using Blogger. You can provide endorsements. This is a backdoor technique that many people don’t know about.

If you purchase products and like them, go to the website. Find the contact form for the person or company and provide them an endorsement.

They’ll put your testimonial on their homepage. They will often provide a live link to it. We do that at The Directory of Ezines.

Then there is social networking like Twitter and Facebook. These are free methods that help you get the word out to a lot of people.

You can combine these techniques. Let’s say you have a viral marketing piece written or cool articles. You can put them on Twitter and Facebook. Now you have a two-for-one deal. That’s one way.

Let’s talk about if you have more money than time. If you have money, you want to promote and you need leads, then you need to buy advertising. That’s the bottom line. It’s very simple.

You can buy ezine advertising. There are solo ads, sponsored ads and classified ads. The place to do that is The Directory of Ezines. The place to learn about that is Ezine Advertising Live.

You can buy pay-per-click advertising. Google has tremendous tutorials on how to use Google AdWords and do pay-per-click advertising. They teach you a lot about it for free.

Banner advertising is still effective and it should definitely be done. Banners can be tremendously effective if you do it right. There are many sites online that will teach you how to do banner advertising.

There is email marketing. I separate that from ezine advertising. You are buying an ad in ezine advertising.

In email marketing you’re either renting a mailing list or cooperating with someone who has a mailing list. They will send out your advertisement. They might not publish an ezine.

You can run your own affiliate program. It takes a bit of money to get that set up properly. Affiliates can be a powerful source of traffic.

They’re out there swimming in different ponds than you’re in. They’re talking with different people. It’s logical that they will contact and meet people, know people and promote to people that you’ll never reach. It’s one of the most powerful ways to promote a product.

You can also repackage for success. That means that you can purchase resale rights products and repackage those combining three or four into a super pack about blogging, ezines, banners or video.

If you have money, you want to purchase advertising and tools to help you succeed. What about your situation? Have you been trying to make money online for more than three months and you’re frustrated and not making any money?

Are you suffering from information overload and not really sure what to do next? If you spent money on programs that didn’t work or if any of these apply to you, then I’m going to pitch that you become a Directory of Ezines lifetime member.

I’m going to ask you straight out. My consulting offer is designed for these situations. That’s what it’s designed for.

I’m giving this consulting time to Directory of Ezines members in order to help them answer and solve these problems. Consider becoming a member. If you’re a member now, log in. On the home page for members, you’ll see exactly how to get a hold of me.