The Web’s largest social network is taking a jab at the Daily Deal industry with its newest launch of Facebook Offers, which is a tool for engaging with and driving new customers to businesses.

The offers are created from the sharing tool at the top of a Page’s timeline. Page administrators must click on the Offer, Event + button, and then create an offer headline, upload a photo, choose a limit for the number of claims, add terms and conditions, preview it then post the promotion.

Although Offers is a free service, Facebook suggests that businesses run an ad or Sponsored Story so that the offers receive more visibility.

Consumers can redeem offers from brands that they have liked. The “liked” brand’s offer will show up in the consumer’s news feed, which is where the consumer can click “Get Offer” to receive the promotion. Then Facebook sends a follow-up email to the consumer, which needs to be shown to the business in order to receive the discount.

Offers are free for administrators to create and share, however only a small number of local business Pages are currently able to take advantage of this new feature, with Facebook claiming that it plans to “launch Offers more broadly soon.”

The online retailer announced on Monday that it is acquiring Kiva Systems, a maker of robots that service warehouses, for $775 million in cash. Amazon, a customer of Kiva’s, is buying the robotics company as it builds out its vast network of warehouses and tries to improve its margins.

Kiva advise how their system works: “Using hundreds of autonomous mobile robots and sophisticated control software, the Kiva Mobile-robotic Fulfillment System enables extremely fast cycle times with reduced labor requirements, from receiving to picking to shipping. The result is a building that is quick and low-cost to set up, inexpensive to operate and easy to change anywhere in the world.”

You can check out Kiva’s smart robots in action in the ‘Day in the Life of a Kiva Robot’ video below from the Wired Business Conference in 2011.

Kiva ranks as Amazon’s second-largest acquisition, behind its $847 million takeover of the shoe and accessories retailer Zappos.com in 2009.

More and more companies are waking up to the fact that social media is not just a platform to blast your content out by, it’s most important function is to listen to what your customers and prospects are saying. Then armed with that information you can engage with your customers and assist them with any questions, issues, or concerns that they may have.

One of the best examples of this is Dell with their Social Media Command Center.

Surfstitch.com achieve 200 Brands in Under 3 Years

Brad Sugars teaches that every business has what he calls a business chassis, and you can make it run like a VW or like a Porsche with simple proven modifications.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “The money’s in the list”, even read it in this issue of Internet Marketing Magazine. But how much money and how big does the list need to be? To find the answer to this question, I interviewed some of the most successful business people in the world and grilled them on how much money they make from their lists, what size your list needs to be and what list building methods get the best results.

The people I interviewed had very different businesses and styles. Some were known for their rapid list building techniques while others were known for creating smaller targeted lists with high conversion rates. Some built their lists using mainly “offline” methods, others used paid advertising and others used social media. Despite their differences, every one of them agreed on 2 things:

1. You can only make impressive money from your list if you have created a strong suite of products and services with increasing price points. This is sometimes called “the Backend”, or “Ascension Model”. In other words, you are not going to get rich by selling a $20 eBook if all you have to offer your customers is that book. However, you will get rich if you can offer the buyers of your $20 book other products that solve their problems, ranging from $20 to $500 to $2000 to $20,000 and beyond. The other thing they all agreed on was:
2. Not all traffic (places you find your ideal customer) are created equal.

Not All Traffic is Created Equal

This is where quality beats quantity every time. A small list created by attracting subscribers from a high quality source will out-perform a larger list sourced from less effective methods. So in this case “Size really DOESN”T matter”. So let’s look at the list building methods that attract the highest quality subscribers to your list. By high quality, I mean people who are much more likely to join your list in the first place and then far more likely to purchase the products and services you have to offer. So let’s look at the top 4.

1. Presenting in person to a group: OK I know what you’re thinking. This is a magazine about Internet Business so why am I recommending a method that is the exact opposite to hiding behind your computer screen? That’s because the people who join your mailing list after seeing your present on stage (this can be a small local business group or a large multi-speaker event) will be subscribed to your email list and be added to your Internet Marketing strategies. Without fail, people who have seen you present have greater trust in you and a better understanding of the solutions you provide. They will usually become your best customers.
2. Being Interviewed on a Teleseminar: I love this method and every person I interviewed mentioned this as a powerful list building technique. You are seen as the expert because you are being interviewed, you are endorsed by the interviewer who has invited their own subscribers to listen to the interview and you have often a whole hour to develop trust and respect from the listeners. This has all the benefits of presenting to a group in person except you don’t have to dress up, travel and pay for accommodation.
3. Referrals from other list owners: People who are referred to you by someone they already trust and respect will transfer some of the trust and respect to you. This means they are much more likely to buy from you (and join your list in the first place) because they figure you must be great as someone they trust said they endorse you. The lesson from this? Spend a lot of your time nurturing relationships with potential Joint Venture Partners. They will help you grow your business faster than you can ever do on your own.
4. Social Media: Surprised? A high quality list is created from people who trust you. Social media, especially Facebook, Linked In and Google + that allow people to have extended dialogue with you (or at least read your dialogue with others) allows people to quickly judge if you are trust-worthy and know your stuff. Using social media effectively to grow your list is not an area you can afford to ignore. Done correctly, you will have an excellent and long-term return on your investment.

This is just 4 of dozens of different methods you can use to build your subscriber list to grow your business. I cover a lot more of these in the interviews I am gifting you plus some very clever strategies to increase the loyalty of your new subscribers (loyalty = profit by the way). If you try and use every list building method at once you will spread yourself too thin and get poor results so choose 4 methods at first; master them and then add more to your repertoire. If you focus on the 4 listed above you will be well on your way to creating a large and responsive list that will be the foundation of your business. Good luck and let me know how you go. I’d love to share the story of your action and success with my community too.

Janet Beckers, a.k.a.”The Wonderful Web Woman” is the founder of a successful and dynamic online community. She is an international speaker, best-selling author and mentor and has helped & inspired thousands to create their own success on-line. She is a multi-award winner, including most recently, Australian Marketer of The Year. She is passionate about helping YOU use the Internet to create a passionate and profitable business that is uniquely “you”. A business that allows you to “Shine Online”, attract the perfect customers easily and make a difference – while having fun.

You can access the entire series of interviews “Does (List) Size Really Matter” for a limited time at www.wonderfulwebwomen.com/magnovember

by Steve Plummer

Curiosity May Have Killed the Cat but It’s Also an Often Overlooked Key to Sales Success… How to Write Bullets Which Teases Your Prospects and Leads them to the Sale

Here’s a secret to selling, which is often overlooked, but if you master it, it could pay handsome dividends.

No, it’s not about inventing a better mousetrap.

Of course you have to have a good product or service but as you know this isn’t enough.

Nor is it enough to be able to convey the features and benefits of your product. It takes more, especially considering the increasingly savvy and even cynical outlook present in some markets.

So what do you need to do?

Tease your way to the sale… make them curious… get them hot for what you got.

Always remember, people buy based on emotion not logic. So it follows you should be doing everything to infuse your copy with emotion, doesn’t it?

Here’s how: fascinate them!

And the way to do this is by writing “killer” bullets. No, not ordinary or boring bullets… but carefully constructed, well thought-out bullets.

Quick marketing history lesson: back in the 70s a gun copywriter by the name of Mel Martin helped propel Boardroom Books to a $100 million a year company. Mel’s particular genius was what he termed “fascinations”, better known today as bullets.

So powerful were Mel’s “fascinations” some ads were almost entirely made up of bullets.

Here are Some of Mel’s classics…

• What never… ever to eat on an airplane
• Where to hide valuables in a hotel room
• How to buy a house with no down payment
• Sexual side effects – good and bad – of everyday medicines
• The smartest time to file a tax return if you want to avoid an audit
• Two famous cold remedies that can make you sicker if taken together

See… don’t you just want the “answers” to each of these? Don’t they get you thinking?

GOOD NEWS: there is a formula Mel used to become so good and help Boardroom sell so many books.

What he did was combine two aspects of direct response marketing (get their attention and build desire through curiosity) and add a third ingredient… instant gratification.

To sum up, here’s the formula: specific benefit of product + instant gratification it gives your prospect + intense curiosity.

Go back and re-read Mel’s fascinations above and look for the formula.

Note the success or failure of bullets is really determined by how specific you are about the benefit AND the emotional words you use.

To help, here’s a rundown of 5 main bullet types:

The “How to” bullet

Always remember, humans are curious beings and we all want to know “how to” do things we can’t; probably why there is something like 7,000 book titles which begin with How to…

Eg

• How to lose 5 kilos in 7 days without sweating it out in the gym or starving yourself on rabbit food!
• How to find the best insurance policy to protect you and your family

The Warning Bullet

Great for grabbing attention and pushing the fear button! Can be a very powerful way of getting an important point noticed and getting people to take action. I like to put the word warning in capitals for added impact.

Eg

• WARNING: What you must never eat if you want to lose weight!
• WARNING: Errors almost 97% of dieters make and what you can do to avoid them NOW

The Why Bullet

A very powerful way to get them curious… After all we all want to know why something is the way it is!

Eg:

• Why you should ignore the advice given by 99% of diet “gurus” and follow this all-natural method for losing weight and keeping it off
• Why renovating and upselling is up to 9 times more profitable than building and renting

The Secret Bullet

Everyone loves a secret… We’ve been brought up on them (remember the “Chinese Whispers” game for example?). What we love even more is finding out the contents of the secret and getting something new we didn’t know about! Holding secrets is also good for positioning you as the expert because it gives you “power” and makes others want what you have. Eg:

• The SECRET to negotiating deals real estate agents never reveal… You’ll be kicking yourself when you see how they do it!
• 5 Secret Strategies Revealed for adding value to your home with minimal upfront costs

The Right/Wrong Bullet

Good credibility builder again because it clears up common misconceptions. Eg:

• All diets must be supplemented by exercise, right? WRONG! Now you can lose weight without sweating it out in the gym all day!
• All bullets are basically the same, right? WRONG! Discover the proven formula for writing bullets which virtually guarantees increased conversions

Strongly recommend you practise writing bullets because when done well they really can make a huge difference to your success. Start with Mel Martin’s formula and then apply to the bullet types listed above.

Last thing… cosmetics rules. Here are the rules I generally follow because they have proven to be most successful:

• No full stops at end of bullets (full stop signifies an end… you want them to keep reading)
• Use bold, underlines, BLOCK CAPITALS, italics, different fonts to make it interesting (but don’t overdo it!)
• The little black dot is usually most effective but by all means test other types of bullets
• Begin each new bullet with a capital letter

Good luck and happy bulleting!

Steve Plummer

Copywriter and Marketing Strategist

Steve Plummer is one of Australia’s highest paid and in-demand copywriters and is the personal copywriter for Australia’s “Millionaire Maker” Mal Emery. Steve’s marketing and writing savvy have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra sales for many happy clients.  Follow Steve’s blog at StevePlummerOnline.com

By John Fancher

One of Dan Kennedy’s golden rules of marketing is “The money is in the list”. The money is not in innovation. It’s not in products. It’s not in services.

The money is in the relationship you have with your list. No list = no money.

So, every internet marketer worth his salt knows the importance of building an email list of prospects, followers and buyers.

But then what? Well, most of us treat everybody on the list the same. We send the same messages out to the whole list as if everyone on the list had the same degree of interest and responsiveness to our offering.

Big Mistake.

Because the 80/20 Principle tells us that 20% of your list will be responsible for 80% of your revenue. And (if the list is big enough and your offers are appropriately priced), 0.8% of your list will be responsible for 51% of your revenue! Less than 1% of your list will give you HALF of your revenue!

So, if you’re talking to everyone on your list in the same way, that’s a big mistake.

Why Speaking to the “Average” is Marketing Suicide

First, a big chunk of your list will never buy anything. If you send them frequent, direct messages, they’ll get turned off and click “spam”.

Second, if you don’t communicate frequently and directly enough with your hyper-responsive 20%, 4% and 0.8%, you won’t maximize the revenue you could be pulling from them.

So, what’s the profitable middle ground?

Put Your Readers Through “The Maze” to Maximize Revenue

Build auto-responder sequences that automatically identify your more responsive readers. Once those readers have been identified, you send them more frequent, more direct, more intimate messages…while leaving the non-responsive ones alone.

The result? The readers on your list who like you, relate to you and want to buy from you get more from you. The glassy-eyed, bored, tire kickers don’t.

What else happens? By speaking more directly and frequently and intimately with your best prospects, you are able to create higher-ticket offers (products, services, coaching programs, etc.) that pull more revenue from your list.

A Peak Inside a Perry Marshall Maze

Perry offers an email series called “9 Lies of Sales & Marketing”. That series sends out 9 messages in 9 days. Then it tapers off to maybe one message every 2 weeks, then once a month and so on.

But within that series, Perry describes how writing white papers and free reports can help you generate leads. So, shortly after the 9 messages are completed, Perry offers them another email series on “How to Write a White Paper”.

Readers who click the link for the white paper series are then sent several daily messages on that topic. And that series offers “gateways” into other series. If they don’t click on those gateways, the frequency of the messages decreases.

What’s happening here? Readers are deciding whether they want to hear more from Perry or not. Those that decide they want more are getting more frequent, more direct and more intimate communication from Perry.

But something far more crucial is occurring.

Perry is learning who his best buyers are….and they are telling him what they want him to sell!

When Perry first offered the white paper course he wasn’t sure how many people on the list would respond to it. What if only a handful of people had responded? Well, he would have sent them a few email messages and that would be that.

But instead, many people opted in for that white paper series. So, Perry knew “I need to create a white paper product.” So he did – Two in fact. That’s revenue that he never would have known about had he not constructed a maze that allowed him to identify his hyper-responsive readers, segment them into separate lists and speak to them in an entirely different way that he speaks to everyone else on his list.

Cheap market research. Found money.

But John, Isn’t This Complex to Set Up and Execute?

With email programs like Infusionsoft it couldn’t be simpler. All it requires is placing a link within the email message. When they click the link they are automatically added to the other sequence. No landing page required. It’s a one step process!

So, when constructing your email sequences, be sure to include “gateways” or calls-to action that allow your readers to raise their hand and say “I’m different! I want more of you!”

There is no higher-leverage activity you can engage in as an entrepreneur.

John Fancher lives in the Chicago area and works as a copywriter, songwriter, band leader and Perry Marshall’s right hand man for their Autoresponder Bootcamp program. John has sold everything from insurance and copy machines door-to-door and is the author of “99 Questions to Jumpstart Your AR Brain” which you can download for free, here.

Perry Marshall and John Fancher guarantee to increase your conversions by 30% in 90 days using the power of an Autoresponder Maze. You can contact John directly at john@logosmarketing.net.

Siri on iPhone 4S lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you talk. Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back.

The Internet Marketing Magazine team tested Siri as soon as it was released. We found that it works well for simple things like asking it to make a call for you. It may be perfect for the travelling salesman who’s office is the car.

Here is Apples video demonstration of how Siri works.

Video Credits: Apple Inc.