Intro

Hi everyone, I hope I am in the right section, can a moderator kindly direct this post to the right one, thanks. That been said...

Just a little about me. I am Wale Bello, an Internet Marketer and I love to use the internet to better the results of my business. Like I mentioned earlier, I will not want to say too much of me here. If you will like to know a bit more about me, please visit [url]walebello.com/about-me[/url].

This thread is intended to show how I market my business online and the results I get with every strategy I implement, Basically, I’ll be sharing with you what I do, and letting you know what works and what doesn't.

My hope is that people who will like to take the path of internet marketing find some value with what I am sharing and will learn from my successes and not too good results. I will love some contributions from other internet marketers as well. As the saying goes, no man is an island. Let’s make this as interactive as possible. So, at this point I'd like some thumbs up, some energy boosting things... welcome on board.

Now this is public space I don’t own, and I really don’t know what can bring the hammer on this thread, so just in case, there is an alternative thread, so to speak, where I have some authority over. You can always get the whole gist here - [url]networkwithsocial.com/nwws-forums/topic/my-internet-marketing-journey/[/url]. For as long as I am still able to, I’d continue to post an update here.

First of all, I’ll like to tell you what exactly my business entails. I have 2 websites [url]networkwithsocial.com[/url] and [url]walebello.com[/url]. On network with social, I have 3 main products, an internet marketing course, consisting of 4 powerful video courses and six ebooks, I won’t be naming any prices here. The second product is a marketing system that does a lot for you on autopilot, and finally a membership program where you can download unlimited internet marketing resources from ebooks, to videos, ready graphics and everything in between. On walebello.com, I also have 3 products I offer. Something about three . One is a supplement drink, the other is a vacation membership, while the third is an online flight and hotel booking system.

I personally designed these sites and it has taken me about 2 years to come up with what you will see so far, when you check them out. On the surface they look quite simple, not too busy, but there are powerful back office inside these sites.

I understand vividly that there will always be room for improvements, so please bring it on…. your suggestions and realistic criticism.

Site Marketing Started
Well, I had to start marketing the site even when I kept seeing where to improve on, if I did not close my eyes to these stuff, I will never stop developing the site, and face what will put some food on the table, selling. Designers on board, am I making some sense.

To be continued……

Now marketing your business online is all about driving traffic to your systematized site that converts prospects to customers, clients, partners, reps or whatever your objective is. Driving traffic can be done on or offline which I will talk about in the course of this series. But the ultimate goal is to get the right people to your business website. There are also 2 types of traffic, organic and paid traffic. Organic traffic basically is free traffic, mostly through search engines and other means that are not paid for, while paid traffic, as the name implies, is traffic to your website that you pay for, e.g., PPC, affiliates, banner ads etc. All of these I cannot start to define and explain here. However, if you would like to know what they mean, and how they work, you may want to check out the Internet Marketing Courses and Digital Library at networkwithsocial.com.

That being said, it is only logical that you want the cheapest traffic for maximum profit right, and that’s where organic traffic comes to play. Now you need good content on your website for people to find you via search engines. And that’s where I started my marketing.

I started writing blog articles for my websites that are targeted at my desired prospects and was sharing them on various social media platform, including FB, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, YouTube and other article directories. I even syndicated content from other websites to fill up my blog, so that, at least I have something to show, not the very best practice for search engine ranking, but of course I will eventually replace them with my own articles.

Now, at this point I realized it was not going to be easy doing this for both of my business websites, i.e, writing original and unique articles. Though both websites are in the home based business category, one of the websites is targeted at those wanting to learn how to build their businesses effectively online, while the other is specifically targeted at those looking to start a new home business, or looking for business opportunities. If I was going to effectively market both websites, I’ll need 24 hours of the day, seriously.

There have been significant changes in the ads system of many of the social media since the last time I used them for marketing, so some learning have to be done. Now this is in addition to the other marketing strategies I will be implementing. I did not mention this, I am still in a 9-5 job, so I do my business part time, leaving me with very limited time to achieve a lot. Again I should also remind us that I am the designer/marketer of my websites and businesses. Thus, I believe you will understand when I say I will need 24 hours of the day to market both sites effectively.

So I had to re-strategize. I decided to concentrate more on marketing [url=walebello.com]walebello.com[/url] fully and treat network with social as an affiliate product. I am also working on fully marketing network with social via affiliates, encouraging other website owners to make quite an appreciable commission selling its product, so if you are interested you may want to check out the affiliate program at networkwithsocial.com. A lot of referring by walebello.com and other websites to network with social will be done, using product banners, sending emails to subscribers, blogging, etc.

In the meantime, I have started building the social media audience for walebello.com, bearing in mind that I’d also be selling products from network with social. As at the time of this write-up I have close to 200 connections on LinkedIn, just over 50 on Facebook, about 70 on twitter, quite a few on Instagram, 2 subscribers on YouTube, some on WhatsApp and a few leads in my email list.

So part of my goals for now is to grow these audiences, of course they have to be targeted. You need a good number of people, fans, etc, to sell to continuously. That's part of what makes your marketing efforts economical. You don’t want to always look for fresh new prospects anytime you need to sell something, it just makes sense to always have readily available and willing people to positively receive your sales messages. Part of the strategy is to keep creating content to be shared on these platforms. Now this is what I have observed about my content creation strategy, at least on social media. The more you put out there, the more you get people attracted and interested in what you have to offer, so I see it as being a very effective marketing strategy. The downside is that the financial results may not be initially encouraging, but when it does eventually start to produce the results you desire, it is exponential.

That will be it for now. Next time I’ll let you into the first Facebook PPC ad I did, the results I got, the technical issues that came up due to high traffic to the site, how I try to build my Likes free of charge (not really working quick enough), and much more. So stay tuned.

Hi guys, well someday, hopefully, there will be "guys" responding to this story. And I hope sooner than later. Well. while in the waiting, let me just talk about what I have been up to lately. If you saw my last post, I ended it with a promise to share my first FB campaigns, the results and all. I also said I had a goal to increase my audiences on the various social media platforms. Well, as for the campaign, I actually ran a campaign and that has led me to what I am about to share with you today. But let me start with the audience growing goal.

I mentioned in the last post how I tried building fans for my FB page. What I did, which didn't get me much results though, was to invite people that liked my posts or the campaigns I ran to like my page. Well a few did like my page, but compared to the amount of likes I got on the campaigns, I didn't think it really worked. I think facebook as such designed it that to effectively get the number of fans you want for your page, you have to run a campaign for the page differently. And so, what I have decided to do is actually build my audience by posting content regularly and advertising for page likes whenever I am advertising my websites or products.

I guess the above analogy will apply to many of the other social media platforms except LinkedIn, that suggests people to connect with and who majorly accept your request to connect. LinkedIn has actually allowed me to build an audience faster compared to other platforms and for free too. Though, LinkedIn has got a company page feature which you can build followership for just like facebook's fan page, you can actually still do a lot of direct marketing on your personal profile unlike FB that doesn't encourage this. You have to use a FB page to do your marketing.

Before I share my ad campaign results, the errors, the mistakes and all, let me quickly share what the campaigns actually led me to. I mentioned in my first post that I was involved in three businesses aside selling my own products. Just for refreshers, I said I was into a health drink, a vacation club and an online flight and hotel booking business. Well, I started with advertising the vacation club, mainly because my membership expiration is close about 6 months from today. I really don't know why I am just doing this(marketing the club), probably because I am just beginning to understand the power of internet marketing. Well I started with that and I got the attention of the company. I was able to send a number of "seemingly interested prospects" the company's way and they were amazed at the number and frequency at which they got a list from me. I was immediately assigned a sales consultant that enlightened me more about the business, the company's expectations, and target market. It was also then I understood the compensation plan and realised what I have left hanging all these years.

So, I decided to fully concentrate on the vacation club, realising it was a high ticket product and it paid good commission. I redesigned the marketing system to accommodate the company's target market and created a video that will do selling and telling for me. So, basically I'll be running the business on autopilot. I have also written a couple of emails for my autoresponder. If you will like to see the system in action [url=walebello.com/to-biz-opp]start a tour with this link[/url]. Let me know what you think about the videos, the presentation page, and the capture page.

At this junction, I'll have to take a break. Yeah, I know I promised to share the result of my first campaign, That will have to be the first thing I'll do in the next post.

So my goals before my next post is to run fresh campaigns, and now, to include google ads. There will be various campaigns this time. I don't know, now, what products will be included. but I am certain that the vacation club will. And I'll be sharing the results of the campaigns here. I'd also be sharing my one-on-one online prospecting results here. Yes, I have been speaking with a few people individually online, and it's been quite interesting, I'll share my techniques of doing this as well. And that's part of my goal, to talk to 10-20 people before the next post.

So see you soon. I expect your comments on the system I built and the videos. Hopefully they will still be here before the guys start to show up.

In today's post I will share the results of my campaigns so far and my observations. So let's get straight to business.

In creating a FB campaign, there are lots of factors you need to put into consideration. However, basically your target location is necessary. This could be as local as your LGA, or as broad as a continent or indeed, the whole world. Of course your choice of location depends on the product you are selling, the platform you use to sell. E.g, some payment platform do not accept payments from certain countries, so even when you wish to target such countries, you are limited by the payment platform available to you.

Your target demographics are also very key. You wouldn't be targeting men if you had a bra store. I don't why you would. Demographics also include age groups. Interests are another means to target your prospects. I'd give you an example, If you were selling sports items, say golf stuff, you wouldn't be targeting chronic football fans, would you. Rational as it seems, there is always the temptation target a broad spectrum of sports fans, probably hoping to get a larger number of interested prospects, but really it doesn't work that way. The more specific target you are able define the better your chances of getting a desired result.

Aside all these, you can define lookalike audiences, custom audiences, these will help in really making sure you get the right people at the lowest cost. I can't start explaining how all of these work here right now, however for a consultancy fee, I could consider it . But let me just give an instance of how custom audiences work. You may be soliciting for page likes for example, it wouldn't be necessary to show your ads to those that have already liked your page would it? So with custom audiences you could actually define those that will see your ads and that shouldn't.

In the past 2 months I rana a total of 7 FB ads, 5 of which were sponsored posts and 2, website links. 2 of the sponsored posts were videos, 2 were image ads, while 1 was an article. One of the website traffic ads was also a video and the other an image ad.

It is worthy to note that every other types of facebook ad that is not a sponsored post is displayed in various places on and off facebook, including instagram and other partner network sites, while sponsored posts are only placed in newsfeeds. I'd have loved to include the videos and images I used for the ads, but not sure if that's an acceptable act here, however if you go to my forum at https://networkwithsocial.com/nwws-forums/topic/my-internet-marketing-journey/ you will find the images and videos I used.

However, I will share the picture of the result/insight page here. See it below



My observation in this result is that sponsored video posts were cheaper than all other types of ads. They reached more audiences and their cost per click were considerably lower.

If you observe, the cost of many of the ads were quite small, I had to stop many of them because the traffic from the ads caused my website to temporary shutdown. Anyways, that has been permanently sorted and hopefully it shouldn't happen again.

How relevant was the traffic I got, well that is a story for another time.

In the meanwhile, I also ran some google ads, the results of which I am also sharing here today. I ran the ads for just a day. I had to stop running the ads because of the issue with my website I had mentioned earlier.

On the whole I ran 3 campaigns for three different products.

See a picture of the result summary below.

Trevo Ads


Here I am advertising a drink. I also have added an ad extension (can be explained on request) which appears beneath the main ad, which solicits for distributors of the drink. And that has greatly influenced the result.

VIP Vacations


In this image, you will observe that people searched more for business opportunities than for vacations. Making money and more money is uppermost on the minds of many. I think taking a vacation and binding with family and friends is equally important, because a well relaxed and happy mind makes a sound being.

Internet Marketing for business


In this image it is observed that people want to learn how to market more than they want a system to use to market. Probably they already have a website, a blog or customised marketing system. But what's the use of learning to market if you are not going use the knowledge anyways. Well there could be many other factors I am yet to scrutinize. Let's see as it goes.

Note that the maximum cost per click has been adjusted downwards in these images. I was previously using a Max CPC of $0.5 and this quickly ate into my budget. Well, I'd also share the effect of this reduction on the outcome in my next post.

My next post will include the ads conversion success rate. What I did right and what I did wrong. Corrections I made and all.

So till next time, cheers