Some say a good Twitter headline is as short as possible. This is due to the 140-character Twitter limit, but also because people need room to retweet it. Twitter culture dictates that you give credit to the person who originally exposed you to a tweet when you retweet, so extra space is needed. Too many people, however, focus on “short” and forget about “as possible.” A better way is as long as necessary, but no longer.

Brian Clark: From: The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines

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Although you may get affiliates who stick around and promote you for years, most come and go. They’re busy or they move onto new ventures, so you can need ensure you continue to bring in new affiliates.  Do this by contacting potential affiliates individually, inviting your customers to join your program, asking for referrals from existing affiliates, creating joint promotional tools with other product sellers… just make recruiting a regular part of your affiliate program.

Alice Seba, From: Getting Affiliates Working for You

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You have your sales page, now you need traffic… and buyers. Driving traffic can be done in many different ways. There are creative methods, and there are run of the mill type methods. I prefer traditional article marketing, back links, joint ventures, SEO. I find this to bring the best quality of traffic and to be the best long-term strategy. The focus is on quality. Write quality articles, get links from quality sites, JVs from quality partners. Everything about your business should ooze quality.

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It’s been proven on several occasions by case studies, heat maps, etc. that the most people scan information on the Internet.  They’ll start off with the title. If it’s compelling and targeted to what they are looking for, they’ll start to read. Then comes the “meat” — the body. If they get served a couple of big hunks of text, they’ll likely move on. They are looking for quick, easy info.

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If you are like most article authors, you probably have dozens or even hundreds of articles that you have written and submitted to major directories just taking up space on your hard drive. You also know that unless you change the content dramatically, there’s not much more you can do with them without incurring a penalty for duplicate content… ‘Til now that is.

By using Microsoft PowerPoint and Camtasia, you can easily convert those used articles into videos, which can be uploaded to a growing number of sites like YouTube. Simply break the articles into sections, copy and paste them onto PowerPoint slides along with some nice images, and use Camtasia to make a slide show presentation fit for uploading.  Now your old articles will start to bring in fresh visitors.

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What is marketing?

Ask the question of 10 business owners and you’ll get 10 different answers.

To some it is an activity…

To some it is a department where brochures are made…

To some it is ‘advertising’…

To some it is ‘sales’…

To some it’s more about the brand…

To some it’s about shelf space…

To some it’s about location…

and to some, it’s about getting out to shake hands.

The answer, of course, is that marketing is all of those things. But how does one make sense of all of those ‘things’ that marketing is?

In business school, I learned that marketing can be more or less equally divided into five Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

The way you work with these five Ps is called your ‘marketing mix’ which, if you get it just right, will make you rich.  You must have the right product, and the right price, delivered in the right way (place), to a warm audience (promotion).  If you are The Coca-Cola Company or General Motors, then this model of marketing might work for you. If not, it provides no real value in helping people understand what marketing is.

Right about now, the astute reader will have noticed that I only listed four of the five Ps.  I “forgot” the fifth P on purpose because it was added later. While engaged in marketing conversations in academic circles, those that remembered to include the new P were immediately understood to be astute marketers who were on the cutting edge of academic thought.  The new P, of course, was People. Makes you wonder how much research was required to justify the radical addition of this new P.

Also, later, a bunch of academics who apparently either didn’t like alliteration or maybe got tired of explaining that Place really isn’t a place but more of a word to describe a distribution channel, decided that Place should be changed to Channel. So now, instead of the 5 Ps of marketing, we have four Ps and a C, just doesn’t quite work as well. I personally, wish those fancy pants professors would have left well enough alone and let the 5 Ps drift off into obscurity.

I think the 5 Ps are, and have always been, a horrible way to describe what marketing is.

Marketing is more like a layer cake.

OK, it doesn’t look like a layer cake, but this is an old graphic and I didn’t want to try to actually make it look like a cake.  It’s the layer part that is important.  Marketing happens in layers — each has a different flavor and texture, but it all goes together in one fully-baked combination of different marketing ingredients.

It starts with a strong business foundation — the basics of doing business.  For Infopreneurs, it’s a computer, web hosting, some basic desktop software, a legal business entity, telephone, bank account, payment processor, etc.  Without the basic foundational elements of a business, marketing can only be in-effective.  But, fortunately, in the Infopreneur business model, it is not difficult to build a strong business foundation.  In fact, it’s probably the simplest business model you can find when it comes to business foundation.

On top of the business foundation, you have the Marketing Foundation — it’s made up of four blocks: Market, Product, Channel, and Brand.

These are the true foundations of marketing for any business.  You need a market — an audience of prospects who have needs that you can fill.  You need a product that matches the needs of your market.  You need to be able to reach that audience through a sales and distribution channel. And, finally, if you don’t stand for something, you will stand for nothing. Your brand communicates who you are and it is equally as important as the other blocks.

On top of the Marketing Foundation, you build a Promotional Structure. This is the series of steps your prospects go through on their way to becoming customers, repeat customers, and evangelists.  For the Infopreneur, the promotional structure is really a combination of copy, design, and technology.  Our customers follow a clear, one-way, path from sales letter to download page… to problem solved.  And, if we are doing it right, we have other solutions to offer to those same customers.

Your promotional structure is, essentially, your customer-making factory.  And we are fortunate. Just think how complex the promotional structure is for a business that has 50 or 60 field sales reps, 5 customer service reps, and 4 inside sales reps.  As Infopreneurs, the basic building blocks of our ‘factory’ are simple and measurable, something you won’t find in many other business models.

And finally, you drive Traffic into your promotional structure.  Traffic is the juice that runs the machine and, if you build your Marketing Foundation and Promotional Structure correctly, you won’t have much trouble generating all the traffic you want.

Now doesn’t that make more sense?

Sure, it takes a little explaining, and the words don’t alliterate nor do they rhyme, but I’m going to go out on an ego limb here and say that I think the Four Layers of Marketing makes a whole lot more sense than the Four Ps and a C.

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“It is true that what you measure, gets managed. But it’s also true that you should only measure the things that matter. And Google Analytics can often send people down rat holes and many different decision trees — spending time on many things that won’t necessarily have a huge impact”

Tim Ferris – From Tim’s Blog

This is a hugely valuable video for bloggers, but the ‘fact based’ mindset of Tim Ferris is it’s most valuable lesson.

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