Improve Your Internet Marketing

One of the most important components of a profitable, sustainable, long-term online business is your “Back-end” - your back-end business, that is, not what you sit on…! What is a back-end, and how to we build one?

When we say ‘back-end’, we are generally referring to any and all marketing activity after the first “action” - usually an ad click.

“After a click? What do you mean - either they buy or they don’t, right?”

The vast majority of Internet Marketers actually do begin and end their marketing efforts with an ad click. After all, the first things most of us learn about revolve around getting someone to click on our affiliate link, usually researching a niche, finding an offer, writing some ads, and launching a campaign. We’ve probably put a lot of time and effort into getting that far, maybe spent a considerable sum on tools to help us get that part right. Hopefully this results in sales and we can simply keep repeating the process.

However it’s precisely because you’ve invested so much time & money that you want leverage that expenditure as far as you can. Perhaps even more importantly: if you want to build a real, long-term business, you simply must develop a ‘back-end’ business.

Your back-end can be as straightforward as building a mailing list. Of it can go far beyond. (For a terrific real-world illustration and de-construction of two of the most successful back-ends in the business, read Chris Carpenter’s “Google Cash Strikes Back“. In it, he describes and examines in detail “Top-10-Reviews.com” and “Dannys-Scam-Review.com”. You can download it here.)

Obviously if you are doing nothing but “GoogleCash” direct-link PPC, you don’t have much opportunity to build a back-end. However, if you are relying solely on this, you need to seriously consider expanding your efforts. And even with GoogleCash direct linking, if you are selling Clickbank products, you already have the first part of your back-end. Clickbank provides you with the email address for every sale. It is either the first or last column of your sales detail screen. At the bottom of that screen is an option to download your sales as a csv spreadsheet. You should be downloading & saving these each pay period for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that you will then have the most qualified type of mailing list there is -  actual paying customers! (A word of caution -Clickbank has specific restrictions regarding using these email addresses. That being said, this is one of my own best list sources).

Email lists are one of the backbones of building a back-end. You should be soliciting and collecting email addresses at every opportunity. This does NOT mean buying email addresses, “safe-lists”, etc. They are almost always a waste of time and money, and will very likely put you in hot water with your ISP to boot.

Whether you are doing landing pages, your own products, a review site, or a blog, you should always have an “opt-in” form. The easiest way to include opt-in forms is through Aweber. I use Aweber for all my opt-in’s. In addition to providing easy templates & forms that you can drop into your page or blog, they provide you with the all-important ‘autoresponder’ function.

An autoresponder is simply an automatic response to an opt-in. When someone provides their email address, the autoresponder sends them whatever you tell it to, such as a ‘thank you’ email. In addition, Aweber allows you to configure your autoresponder to send out a timed series of emails, such as a weekly email. Obviously these would include your affiliate links. It is well accepted that many potential customers who don’t buy at their first opportunity will convert on a subsequent opportunity. By not using an autoresponder, you are simply throwing away a significant percentage of sales.

Aweber will also manage all of this for you, including click-tracking, telling you how many people actually “opened” your email, how many clicked, etc. This allows you to gauge our conversion.

We’ll be going into more detail on building your back-end in the future. In the meantime, you might want to visit Aweber - they have some excellent tutorials and guides!