Continuing with my series about lead magnet creation, I’d like to have you explore the idea of offering teleseminars for your “ethical bribe”.

I know I’ve talked a lot about building relationships with people through video and
webinars, because people like visual presentations.  But I wouldn’t discount the power
of the telephone, either.

In fact, the argument could be made that telephone calls are even more intimate than webinars and videos.  Consider doing teleseminars that feature, or at least conclude with a Q&A session.  At this point, you can unmute your attendees and give them a chance to speak with you.

There’s almost nothing that can build stronger bonds than a phone conversation.  True, people only hear you rather than see you.  But that also allows them to build their own vision of who you are rather than being limited by actually seeing you.

Radio or TV

It’s a bit like the difference between radio and television.

Half a century ago, people were thrilled when they got to “see” shows on television screens instead of only “hearing” them on their radios.  But there’s no doubt that many people preferred radio because it stimulated their imaginations more, and allowed them to create their own images.

Easier Presentation

Another benefit to doing teleseminars is that you can be invisible.  People don’t know if you have your notepad in front of you, or if you’re sitting at your kitchen table.  You don’t need makeup, a nice outfit or even a pleasant smile.

Many people simply “come across” better on a telephone call than they do in a video or coordinating a webinar presentation.

The Preview Call

For a lead magnet, “preview calls” are ideal.

Offer people your free tutorial.  Let’s say your subject is “how to write an eBook.”

You can do one of two things.  Either tell people up front that you’ll teach them how to write an eBook via teleseminar, or give them a “blind offer” to teach them about writing eBooks without mentioning the format you’ll use.

When they opt in to your offer, they’ll get a link to a web page with a recording of your teleseminar.  If you really want to build some “know, like and trust”, you’ll offer a live teleseminar once a week, and when people opt in to your list, they’ll get the opportunity to register for the next one.

Your Preview Call teleseminar would tyupically give people a great summary of how to write an eBook (using our example, here).  But even more, your new list subscribers are being introduced to YOU.

From this day forward, your emails will stand out because they “know” you.  You’re not just an email marketing hack, you’re a “real person”.

Call To Action

At the conclusion of your teleseminar, after teaching people some really powerful techniques, you can invite them to take further action.

They can sign up for your full course. (Set your price).

They can call you for personal consulting. (Set your fees).

Or, at the very least, they can watch for your upcoming email series that will follow up on what they just learned. (This is free, but gives you continued opportunities to offer your products and services to a friendly and eager audience).

The Technology

I won’t get into all the teleseminar and video conferencing services that are availabe.  Suffice it to say that some of the better free ones are Free Conference Call(dot com), Instanteleseminar(dot com), and GoToMeeting (dot com).

You can search for others, too, and some of the paid ones are exceptional.

The important thing is to deliver a smooth presentation. 

This means, use a land line telephone rather than a mobile one.  Have an outline in front of you so you don’t ramble and confuse people.  Address people’s questions at the end of your presentation to enhance the interactivity of your event.

With many systems, you can even play a recorded version of your tutorial and dovetail it seemlessly into the Q&A session, when you will be available for live discussion.

Make sure to record all your teleseminars so you can use them as future lead magnets, or even intertwine them into paid products you’ll eventually create.

I welcome your social shares, as usual, and would love to have your comments below.  Have you used teleseminars?  Are your ready to give it a shot?

Webinars are among the more compelling lead magnet creation formats you can use.

Some marketers are hesitant to use webinars for delivering content because they think it might be too technical.  Others suffer from “stage fright” related to presenting material to an audience.

While both of these issues are real concerns that must be addressed, webinars are far too popular for us to abandon the idea out of hand.

Overcoming Objections

As for the matter of webinars requiring too much technical expertise, let’s outline the skillset you should come to the table with.

Webinar Services

To deliver a webinar, you’ll need to have some video conferencing service.  The most widely used one is “Go To Webinar”.  But it’s not the only one.

There are several excellent webinar systems you can use.  In a future post I intend to review various options for webinar systems.  Whichever one you use, you’ll obviously need to learn how to use it and how to record it.

Learning to use your webinar service will require time and effort.  It will also require that you conduct many real-time “dry runs” before you go live.  It’s good to do these trials, or dry-runs with a friend who is in close physical proximity to you.  They might be in the next room, for instance.  

This is helpful because you can’t always get immediate feedback from your “audience” in any other way.  It allows your friend to come into your room and let you know you’re camera is not set up right, or you’re screen capture is not clear, or whatever technicalities you’ll want to know in real time.

Once you’ve done this a few times, you might be surprised to see that it’s a lot easier than you thought it would be.

Powerpoint Presentations

You can present your webinar using the teleconferencing platform by displaying whiteboards, browsing the internet, opening a mindmap or anything else.

One of the more popular methods is to use a Powerpoint (on PC) or Keynote (on Mac) presentation as your screen share.  

What’s nice about this is that your slides are created in advance and you simply have to follow them for your presentation.  Many people find this easier than browsing the internet and chatting off the top of their head.

Regarding the matter of technical skills, learning to use either Powerpoint or Keynote is fairly simple.  You should be able to master it rather quickly.

Screen Capture Video

You won’t necessarily need to learn to use screen capture videos.  You can simply record your webinar from your webinar service.  

If you simply want to record a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation with no audience present at all, you can capture the “event” with screen capture software like Camtasia or Screencast (for PC), or Screenflow (for Mac).  Then upload the video to YouTube and share the link as your lead magnet “webinar”.

Stage Fright

As for stage fright, the best thing I can suggest is to do as many dry runs as you need to start feeling comfortable.  Then, when you’re ready, do your first live one and let your audience know… this is my first shot, so please bear with me if things are not perfectly coordinated.

This will help you lower the bar of expectation and will actually get your audience to root for you if you run into difficultly, rather than judge your “performance” too harshly.

Live Webinars

Live webinars are the cadillac of webinar presentations.

If you can offer people a solution to their problem, and promise to go over this solution in some detail on a live event, you should have little trouble getting people to subscribe to your list in order to register.

Deliver the webinar, give some Q&A, and people will be excited to follow you.  This is a real relationship builder.  Personal branding doesn’t get much better.

Not only will you get subscribers to your list, you’ll immediately earn their respect and trust.

This will breathe instant life into your email list.
 

Evergreen Webinars

Probably the next best thing to live webinars, are “evergreen” webinars.  These are the recorded events that appear to be live.  

There are some really great softwares and services that help you pretty easily record a live webinar, or even record a webinar with little or no audience, and deliver it to your subscribers in a way that they appear to be live.

These are very effective because even if people realize that they’re not really live, they’ll still get the feel of being at a live event.  As for Q&A, you simply ask people to email you their questions and let them know you’ll respond to them as soon as possible after the event is over.

One of the keys to using evergreen webinars effectively is to never promote them as live events.  They are not.  So don’t say they are because some portion of your audience is sure to know the difference.  Simply promote them as “webinars” and don’t qualify them as either live or recorded.  Let each audience member decide for himself if it is actually live or not.  The majority of them won’t even question it.

Recorded Webinars

It’s not a bad idea to simply offer a recorded webinar as your lead magnet, either.

Simply tell folks they’ll get your secret sauce in a recording of a webinar you recently recorded and let it go at that.  When they join your list, give them the link to a webinar you recorded as a simple screen capture, and your lead magnet creation is done.

Please share this article on your social sites.  Also, let me know in the comments section below, what you think of adding webinars to your lead magnet creation arsenal.

Interviews make for pretty enticing “bribes” to get people to sign up for your email list.  And when it comes to lead magnet creation, this is really one of the simplest forms of content you can create.  So, it’s definitely worth considering for a free product offer.

Many people steer clear of conducting interview because they think it’s hard to find a good guest, and to then get them to agree to being interviewed.  But the truth is, even the highest profile experts and personalities are usually far more eager than you’d think to be interviewed by you, even if they have no idea in the world who you are.

Just take things a step at a time.

Finding a Guest

The best way to find a guest is to think about what problem you can solve for people in your niche.  People will value your interview first and foremost, if it offers a solution to a major problem they face.

For example: If your niche is financial planning, you might determine that “locating high-yield, affordable long-term investments” is a common problem your clients, readers and followers face.

Now, you know who you want for a guest: someone who can offer advice on finding these types of investments.

If financial planning is your niche, you probably already know who the top bloggers, authors and other personalities are to offer this advice. If you don’t know, a quick Google or YouTube search should give you more than enough prospects to consider for your interview.

Booking a Guest

Almost everybody, no matter how important they are, like to give interviews.  It feeds into their ego, plus, it gives them additional exposure when they know you’ll be promoting to people in their field.  So, it shouldn’t be difficult to get a heavy-hitter guest to interview.

If you need to entice them further, you could offer him/her a promotional plan. Promise, for instance, to make a podcast of the interview and promote it through iTunes and a wide variety of social media.

A little bit of promotion is usually more than enough to convince an author, expert or personality to give you 30 minutes of their time for all the exposure they can get.

When you approach your prospective guest about doing the interview, give them a Q&A sheet already written out.  Most people like to know what they’ll be asked, and often they will appreciate the opportunity to tweak the Q&A’s to their liking.

Producing the Interview

Now, all you have to do is conduct the actual interview.

There are many ways you can do this.

Raw interview: You can simply record the interview and offer it in it’s raw form as a video, audio (podcast or mp3) or verbatim transcript.  This format will brand the guest as expert of course, but interesting and provocative interviewers can gain considerable authority for themselves by the way they conduct the interview. 

Just think of Oprah Winfrey.  You can get a lot of mileage out of interviewing others.

Processed interview: Alternatively, you could write an eBook or special report based on the interview.  This may not be as interesting a product in the sense that the reader does not get to hear the actual interview.  On the other hand, it has the benefit of allowing you to introduce your interpretation of the interview.  This allows you to seize an opportunity for branding yourself more actively.

For additional assistance in producing an interview using these various formats, see the other segments of this series dealing with audio production, video production and eBook creation.

Delivering the Interview

Once the interview is completed, offer it as an ethical bribe to get people to sign onto your email list.

Something like this: “Learn the secrets to ‘locating high-yield, affordable long-term investments’ from my enlightening interview with ‘Mr. Expert’.  Just enter your email address below and I’ll send you the video/audio link immediately.”

Interviews are a fun and interesting product to offer, and an important tool to add to your lead magnet creation kit.

I welcome your social shares and would love to have your comments below.

Lead magnet creation can be a complex process, but producing audio downloads is as close to “easy” as it gets.

In previous articles, I described how you can create eBooks and reports, and video tutorials to ethically bribe folks to sign on to your email list.

In this one, I will briefly describe how to offer your material as mp3 audio downloads.

The Technical Stuff

Now, keep in mind, this is not about the technical “how to”.  Let me just say that it’s pretty simple if you do some simple information searches for “how to make an mp3 with …”.  You’ll need to fill in the blank depending on what sort of computer and operating system you have.

I will tell you quickly, that I use a MAC, and have a ridiculously simple method for making audios.  I create a “video” on Screenflow.  It is formatted to pick up audio from an external mic.  I use the “Blue Snowball” that can be purchased rather cheaply from the Apple Store.

After I’ve completed the “video”, I use Garage Band to “rip” the audio track and have it processed as an mp3 or podcast.

Now, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry.  Whatever computer and equipment you use has easy solutions for the actual recording and processing of an audio product.

The Production

Now this is the really important part.

It’s time to sit down and actually record your audio.

I have a fairly simple method for doing this.

Decide what valuable information or training you want to give people so they’ll be compelled to opt in to your mailing list.

Make a simple outline of 5 or 6 key points that you want to talk about.  

Now, summarize those key points in an ending wrap up to your audio.

Last, write an introductory paragraph that tells people you are going to tell them all about “xyz”, and that when you’re done they will have learned whatever your “wrap up” says they learned.  Basically, you just insert your summary paragraph into the introduction.

You can actually read your introductory and summary paragraphs if you want.  Or you can just talk from your experience and expertise.  What’s important is that it should not sound like you’re reading.  Whether or not you are is immaterial.

You should be familiar enough with your subject matter that it’s not necessary to do anything more than outline your key points.  However, if there are things you need to remember, especially facts or figures, you could have those written in front of you.

Practice, Practice, Practice

If it’s your first time around the block with mp3 production, my best advice is this: just do it.

Don’t make it great, maybe not even good.

Just do it.

Again and again and again, until you start feeling comfortable producing audio products.  I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be really surprised how quickly you’ll start feeling like a pro.

The more often you practice this skill within a short period of time, the better you’ll get at it.  But do it over a short period of time.

It’s far better to make 10 audios in 5 days, than to make 20 over 3 months.  Don’t ask me why, that’s another article altogether.  Just take my word for it here, and complain to me later if you didn’t think it worked for you.  (But it will).

Make Your Pitch

Once you’ve got an mp3 audio download link with your lead magnet creation, you’re in business.

So, now it’s time to pitch it to your readers and visitors.  

Don’t tell them what they’ll learn, tell them how their lives will be improved and their problems solved by your fantastic and free mp3 download.

Invite them to leave their name and email address on your optin form, and they’ll have a link to your audio emailed straight to their inbox.

Pretty simple, as product creation goes.

I’d love to have your social shares and comments below.  Are you ready to make an audio download your next lead magnet creation?

Lead magnet creation is an essential aspect of list building.

In this article, I will give you yet another way you can quickly create content to ethically bribe readers to subscribe to your email list. In a moment, you’ll see how easy it is to construct video tutorials to use as your lead magnet.

Bear in mind, marketing research indicates that video is an instructional method vastly preferred by prospects under 40 years old, while text is slightly preferred by prospects over 50 (see my previous article on creating eBook lead magnets). The 40 to 50 year old crowd is not as clearly defined, with mixed results from varying studies.

Regardless of the demographics that your visitors are comprised of, video tutorials are a great method for lead magnet creation.

Video tutorials can be created with face-view videos where you simply sit in front of a camera and talk to your viewers, or screen capture videos where you “capture” your internet browser as you speak, or a keynote/powerpoint presentation.

Consider what you are most comfortable with, of course, but also consider what your viewers might like best.

At one time, I did face-view videos almost exclusively, mostly because I didn’t know how to do screen capture and presentation videos. I think a viewer’s attention tends to drift, though, when they are exposed to only one image, even if it is me talking to them – lol -

Screen capture videos tend to “move” more fluidly from one image to another, and therefore heighten viewers’ engagement. On the other hand, you sacrifice a great opportunity to build a personal relationship with your viewers by avoiding face-view video.

For that reason, I tend to mix my tutorials (which are typically a series of videos) with maybe a 2-minute face-view, followed by an 8 minute screen capture, and so forth. Another method you can easily used is to embed a thumbnail-sized face-view of yourself into a larger-sized screen capture. This is actually a video within a video. It’s a great way to go for those of you who see the marketing value of face-view, but are too shy or self-conscious to do them. It’s a nice little way to hide away in a dark corner, but still be there… lol

In upcoming articles, I’ll review other product creating methods. For now, though, I’d love to have your comments below. What do you think of using video tutorials for your lead magnet creation?

In an earlier article, “Lead Magnet Offers”, I discussed the general nature of lead magnet offers. In this one, I want to give you an idea of what the process of lead magnet creation looks like in the form of free eBooks and reports.

Free eBooks and reports real common lead magnets. Many marketers believe they have lost some of their lustre in the last year or so. It’s true that many people have come to value audio and video products far more than text. I also think that free ebooks are much more likely to remain downloaded but never read than audio and video products. However, I’ve found that many bloggers have pretty devout “readers” among their followers, and they actually prefer to get their information in text form. As the age demographic of your blog visitors increases, you are also more likely to find good success with ebooks and reports as opposed to audio and video products.

Free eBooks

Creating an ebook is really simple.

You just write the information you promised, in a clear and concise manner.

So, if your offer is for an ebook that gives the “5 Best Natural Remedies for Joint Pain,” here’s what the process may look like.

First, do your research.

Check ezine articles, other blog posts, buy a book or two or three from Amazon or even your bookstore (if your town still has one). Don’t forget encyclopedias and natural remedy reference books (remember the library?).

List your 5 remedies.

Write a paragraph for each. Then illustrate each with a story, either your own or one you read about. If you’re taking material directly from sources, cite the sources and give credit.

Grab some screen shots of good websites to visit for more natural remedies, or more expertise on joint pain. Paste those screen shots into your text where appropriate.

Give a link to your own product sales page, assuming you have one (and you should). At the top of each page, your ebook should have a header that reminds readers to “click here for more tips for overcoming joint pain”, or whatever is pertinent to your product. When people click on it, they’ll get a sales page or sales video asking them to buy your product, or your affiliate product, or join your MLM which has great products for joint pain, and so forth.

As for length, anything 10 to 40 pages is fine. With double spacing, a lot of screen captures and images pasted in, this is pretty far easier to accomplish than it may sound).

Create your eBook on a word or text document. Get any free PDF converter (just Google it, easy to find). Primopdf.com is a good one, and it’s free. Convert your text to PDF, grab the PDF link and email it out to your new subscribers.

Your free ebook is done!

Free Report/s

I’ve included free reports in this article because they are pretty much the same as free ebooks, except they are shorter in length. So I won’t say anything special about the free reports except this.

Free reports give you more flexibility than free ebooks from this perspective. Say you have a blog in the horse racing niche. Now, you may want to offer people free information on “how to buy a top notch race horse” for your lead magnet. So, you write an ebook about “How To Buy A Top Notch Race Horse”. Sounds good.

Now, all you have to do is write a shorter version, same title, and call it a report instead of an ebook. Right? Yes and No.

Yes, if you just want a shorter version of the same information that the ebook has.

No, if you’d like to introduce your readers to other topics you cover in your sales funnel and blog. For instance, your lead magnet could be: “Get My Free Horse Racing Special Reports”. You could now list several reports by topic. How To Buy A Race Horse, How To Train A Race Horse, How To Breed A Race Horse, How To Groom A Race Horse, The Race Horse Whisperer, and on and on.

So, rather than offer one 40-page ebook on one topic, you could offer five 7-page reports covering a whole range of topics that would interest your readers, and guess what: one single report might get you the opt-in because of the title, whereas with an ebook, you’ve only got one shot to dazzle, because you only have one title.

A series of reports can also brand you as a more well rounded authority and expert in your field.

Now, as far as researching, outlining, writing and converting your reports, just read the instructions above for ebooks, and you’ve got it. The process is exactly the same.

One BIG CAUTION, here.

Many people get their ebook and reports content from PLR’s (private label rights). That’s fine, BUT, please, please, please… do not copy and paste even though you have the rights to do so. Make the material your own by twisting and turning, spinning and squeezing it into your own personal mold. Otherwise, you’ve got a bunch of duplicate content to offer your readers and believe me, they’ve heard it from someone else before.

Not only that, but I’ve hardly ever seen PLR content that is good. I mean, really good. So use PLR’s, but only for organizing, outlining and filling in some basic facts that everyone in the world has access to. It saves you some time researching, but it is NOT suitable content out of the box.

So, now you have a pretty good idea of how to create ebooks and reports as lead magnets. In upcoming articles, I’ll show you how to produce audio, video, and other products that you can use as lead magnets.

I’d love to have you share this article, and I’m anxious to hear your comments below. What lead magnet creation tricks, tools and techniques have you used, or would you like to learn more about?
Image credit: adamr / 123RF Stock Photo

In the scheme of things, the world economy keeps closing in on workers and employers alike.

Wage earners and the working masses find fewer and fewer places to shop their skills, or offer their services.  Many of the private businesses that once hired them have closed up shop, sized down, or been nationalized by governments.

Employers and capitalists, meanwhile, have seen their enterprises largely regulated, litigated and marginalized into virtual oblivion.

That leaves ever burgeoning hordes of workers frequenting the doorsteps of government and non-profit agencies that never seem limited by budgets or fiscal realities.  In most of the developed world, these public entities become the new capitalists.  They offer the capital (publicly obtained rather than privately funded), and the workers do the labor.

Not much has changed given this scenario, other than the fact that management now consists of public agencies instead of private conglomerates.

For workers, the beat goes on.

Get up in the morning, catch the a.m. 6:25 to the j.o.b., do a day’s work, and get home just in time for p.m. 6:25 dinner; get paid Friday, catch some weekend recreation, and climb back into the saddle on Monday.

For a long time, workers caught in this daily grind have sought their escape mostly through running their own business or professional practice.  But as governments become increasingly intrusive, and private business portals ever narrower, greater numbers of people seek refuge in the internet.

The internet has become a focal point of liberation for the new generation of workers seeking an independent lifestyle coupled with incentives and rewards that once were offered by private industry.  The new elitist work corps derives more from political favors and less from production incentives.  So, those who want to get off the grid have few places to go outside of the internet.  And the flocks heading there are heavy and increasing daily.

Internet marketers, network marketers, bloggers, e-commerce site owners… these are the new pioneers in our economy.  These web-based entrepreneurs… what I call “webpreneurs”… seek their fortunes and fair profits in providing digital information, brokering discounted deals for tangible goods and services, and offering business opportunities to those who might join their business opportunities.

This growing class of webpreneurs pioneer various pathways to establishing profitable businesses for many of the otherwise unemployed and under-employed underlings of traditional economies.  They teach strategic marketing strategies that typically involve an extremely minimal financial investment.  In addition, the webpreneurs help people escape the grind of jobs and careers that offer subsistence-level financial rewards in exchange for the sacrifice of the personal freedom of many workers to make the best use of their natural skills and talents.

To the extent that the pioneer webpreneurs succeed in this mission, the new “liberation marketology” that they offer to the masses will have a profound effect on world economies.  In particular, it will offer a path to success and achievement for large numbers of otherwise disenfranchised and hopeless masses of displaced, unemployed and essentially “throw-away” workers marginalized and overlooked by traditional production-based economies.

This article is not the typical strategy or technique focused article that I usually write on this blog, but it is important that we occasionally take a larger look at where the internet marketing industry fits into the world.  This is my own viewpoint of the larger landscape of our role as marketers in what we’ve come to know as the “world wide web”, and I’d like to hear your viewpoints as well.

Please comment below, and as usual, share this post on  your social sites as you see fit.

One of the keys to list-building, is to offer people an “ethical bribe” in the form of a “lead magnet”.  

Lead magnets are usually free offers for information or products in exchange for people signing up to receive your emails, often referred to as your “newsletter”.

So, clearly, you are bribing people to join your list.  But the bribe is considered ethical in the sense that you are giving them something of value in exchange for their opt-in (or sign-up).

Compelling Lead Magnets

This is all nice, but it only works if the lead magnet you offer is compelling enough that people really want it.

Make sure you know your niche, and understand what people in your niche struggle with.  You’re looking for their problems so that your lead magnet can help solve them.

If you don’t know what the biggest problems are in your niche, try reading some forum threads, or facebook group conversations to get familiar with the concerns that dominate your niche.

Once you have that information, create a lead magnet to solve one key problem you have identified.

Then you can rest assured that your lead magnet will be compelling to your visitors.

Relevant Lead Magnets

Make absolutely sure that your lead magnet is relevant to the type of mailing list you want to build.

If your ultimate goal is to sell people weight loss products and information, don’t offer a lead magnet on good nutrition.

You may think that people interested in good nutrition will want to know about weight loss, but in fact, you will be attracting a large number of people who are only marginally interested in your main topic.

That means that a good many people who opted in to receive your “good nutrition” ethical bribe, will have a low level of interest in your weight loss newsletter, and will seldom open your emails, or they’ll unsubscribe altogether.

If you want to sell weight loss products, offer a lead magnet that is clearly focused on weight loss.

Types of Lead Magnets

Anything that conveys the information you want people to get is a good lead magnet.

It could be an ebook, an mp3 track, a video… anything that delivers the valuable information you want your visitors to have is a good idea.

That said, many folks in the online marketing industry seem to favor video products over text.  So webinars and video tutorials are generally thought to be more compelling than ebooks and special reports.

Keep in mind though, that if you have a “reading” public, you may still do better with text offers.  If your blog, for instance, revolves around a lot of text information as opposed to infographics and videos, you might very well be attracting visitors who prefer to read than watch videos.

In a follow up article, I will explore some different ways to create your own lead magnets, or obtain ones that are already done for you.

I’d love to have you share this article on your social sites, and look forward to your comments below.  

What sort of of lead magnet offers are you thinking of using, or have you used with some success?

Image credit: alluecup/ 123RF Stock Photo

Internet marketing, blogging, online networking… these and other online ventures of solopreneurs often call into play our inner acrobat, juggler and trapeze artist.

It’s not always a simple matter to know what we can learn to do ourselves, and when we need to hire others to help us out.  

Nowhere is this truer than in the matter of technical assistance.

Do It Yourself?

Have you ever tried to create a PowerPoint presentation to promote a product or service that you affiliate?

That’s not a big deal for many people. 

But I’ve seen others put entire campaigns on hold for weeks in order to learn acquire the skill and knowledge necessary.  They go through the trial and error process, and finally get a fair idea of how to put the presentation together, only to realize that the “big launch” has passed them by.

Can you juggle content creation with WordPress plugin maintenance?

Can you back-flip through YouTube campaigns while learning how to create a widgetized Optin box for your blog?

How’s your balancing act on the high wire?

Are you moving steadily forward from Point A to Point B?

Or do you keep glancing downward to see if the safety net is in place, should you make a slip?

Get It “Done For You”

The next time you’re ready to fall off of your plan and derail your journey so you can learn yet another technical skill, you might want to think again.

Nobody likes to spend money for tech assistance, especially when they know they can learn to do it themselves. 

But consider the money you stand to lose by squashing your campaign in order to fix things yourself.  Usually, the money you spend for tech assistance is far less than the money you lose by failing to progress in your business.

The Balancing Act

Now, keep in mind, that there are some basic tasks that you’ll need to perform repeatedly.  You may as well take the time to learn these, because they are integral to your business operation.  You don’t want to have to turn to a web master each time you need to embed video code into a blog post.

But there are other tasks that occur rarely, like maybe designing your optin widget or header banner.  These things may be far better to outsource for a few dollars, rather than see your 2 or 3 month business plan, take 2 or 3 years to manifest.

This is where your juggling skills come into play.

Learn your business well enough that you can distinguish when to roll up your sleeves and learn the process, and when to outsource so you can continue along the creative and productive paths.

Show Time

When you do need tech assistance, there are some great online resources to turn to.

Fiverr (.com), Odesk (.com) and Elance (.com) are some of the more popular ones.  

Personally, I love Fiverr when I need a quick fix, like maybe putting together a Powerpoint slide show for me, or creating a banner or squeeze page.  All their “gigs” cost only $5, and you can find some real high quality folks there, and even establish some great working relationships with very talented and reasonably priced tech assistants.

Another avenue to explore though, is within your own circle of contacts.  Think about bloggers you know, people in Facebook groups or Forums that you rub shoulders with.  If you know they have certain skills you could use, don’t be afraid to private message them to see if they might be able to fill your need on terms that you are both happy with.  And who knows, they may even turn into a Joint Venture partner down the road.

Postscript

I’ve used all of these resources. 

Not all have worked out the way I’d like, but when I do find someone that’s really good, I clutch onto that resource for dear life. 

These are repeat performances that will have you taking one curtain call after another.

This is how you build the rolodex of your business. 

This is how you get in touch with your inner acrobat.

Internet marketing has many applications beyond the overtly commercial ones. 

As Donna (my wife, for newcomers to this blog) and I are situated at the precipice of our new joint membership site, it occurs to me that we will, indeed, be entertaining many new relationships around the world.

Many of these fellows, associates and subscribers, will be looking for training specific to creating profits online.  That’s fine, and there will be plenty of course material slanted in that direction.

However, I caution readers from presuming that internet marketing is a purely commercial undertaking.  Indeed, I’ve worked with a fair number of students that are interested in internet marketing for the express purpose of marketing, not products, but ideas and communities.

The same mechanics that I use to construct commercial websites or blogs, can be used in a much broader universe.  Not everyone online is developing and affiliating information, or even tangible products.  It may surprise you to hear that for every student I work with on creating commercially coherent online strategies, there are at least two, maybe three (not a scientific analysis, to be sure) students who are purely using the internet for personal branding, or community building activities.

Here’s a closer look at how this works.

Communications have trended historically.

• From sign language to verbal and postural cues.
• To the oral traditions established by ancient Greek poets.
• Textual transmissions via sketches, markings, symbols and written language.
• Musical lore and cultural traditions unraveled in the song and performance of the Medieval troubadour.
• Mass dissemination of written texts via the Gutenberg printing press.
• Electronic transmission of code and even voice, via the telegraph and telephone of the Industrial Age.
• Movies, radio and television of the 20th Century mass media era.
• Web 1.0 static information of the early internet era.
• Web 2.0 relationship and interactive communication sites and platforms that dominate today’s world of online communications.

From sign language to verbal and postural cues.

As communications have increased in size, the global community has shrunk.

Donna and I look forward to formalizing our trainings for people who want to keep up with the latest online communications trend, by applying information technology and constructing social media relationships that can help you build friendships, communities and even businesses.

We particularly look forward to assisting you in establishing an entrepreneurial presence, rooted in personal branding and achieved through personal development.

What are your online goals and challenges?

I’d love to have your comments below, and shares of this post across your social sites.