SFM Elite Marketing Masterminds – No Nonsense

Yesterday saw the first of this year’s SFM Elite webinars with Stuart Ross. As a pleasant change, since he’s currently in the UK, the webinar took place at 3pm GMT. In these webinars his aim is to cover marketing in some depth. He’ll be concentrating on the money producing side of things so these will be invaluable to SFM Elite and DEA members old and new.

Stuart started by explaining that it’s often the case for anyone starting an online business that it’s easy to get stuck in education mode. At every step of the journey it can seem that there is always some detail that needs to be mastered before “jumping in” to the stuff that actually produces leads, sales and customers.

So his aim on this and future webinars will be to stress the need above all else, to get traffiic, leads and sales happening. When that’s happening then all the other stuff can be attended to. The other stuff includes: Perfecting websites, tracking and optimising ad campaigns, branding, scaling and outsourcing. SFM Elite members get training on all this too but it all needs to be absorbed carefully.

SFM Elite Members Get The Goods

Since the SFM system – for those who are promoting SFM Elite as affiliates, is designed to be a plug and play set up, this makes sense. A high percentage of the company’s most successful affiliates have done just that: They’ve simply concentrated on sending traffic to the ready-made marketing funnels supplied by SFM.

This is an earn as you learn scenario after all. Once your online business has some cashflow the SFM system is designed to be applicable to any niche. The idea is that you learn the basics, master them and then rinse and repeat.

So after framing the way these ongoing SFM Elite webinars are going go, Stuart got into the nitty gritty: Generating traffic. He covered the 4 main types of advertising that can be used in online traffic generation. This wasn’t a woolly overview either: He actually shared some campaigns he is running himself. Future SFM Elite webinars will use real time case studies.

The big 4 Online Advertising Styles

Search advertising.

This is the familiar – Type what your looking for into a search engine – advertising. As an advertiser this involves paying for your ad to appear on page one of any search for what people are typing. You can pay for every time your ad receives a click (pay per click) or for a chosen number of views your ad gets.

Display Advertising

When someone clicks on an ad via a search they are generally taken to a website. Display advertising involves placing an ad on these sites. So it’s like a second tier advert. If a search for franchise businesses leads to a franchise directory website for example – you can pay to place a banner or ad on that site.

Conceptual Advertising

This is really Facebook or other social media advertising. It’s a more indirect type of marketing. People don’t really go onto social media to buy things. They are there to connect with friends and to find and share interesting things. Conceptual advertising needs an approach tailored to working on those interests. Rather than going for out an out sales, the idea here is to create interest and provide more information that can eventually lead to sales.

Native Advertising

This can be quite broad. The idea is to advertise alongside content related to the interests being targeted. It could be in the form of blogs, articles or videos about a specific subject. If these provide relevant value to the visitor and a method of sending them to an offer it can be a very powerful method of advertising.

SFM Elite Training – A Cut Above The Rest

Search advertising on Google was where Stuart Ross and many of his 2007/2008 counterparts made their first giant steps in the online business world. As he explains, Google has over the last few years become a far more difficult place to do business. Like Facebook, they have become very demanding in terms of compliance, content value and their overall attitude to advertisers. It’s their ball and they make the rules so to speak.

The infamous Google “slap” following their Panda and Penguin updates made advertising certain areas – making money online and affiliate marketing – as prime examples, difficult. He went on to stress though that there are many, many alternative platforms out there that are less stringent in all four of the advertising areas we’ve looked at.

This is not to encourage, no holds barred, “wild west” marketing. No-one really wants that after all. It’s more a case of other platforms being less set in stone as regards what they deem to be suitable offers for their users.

To sum up though, these SFM Elite webinars are a cut above any online marketing training out there – they are after all, delivered by a guy at the top of his game. He will be sharing in detail his own approach to creating ad campaigns by demonstrating actual campaigns.

Understandably no-one who has spent money building effective campaigns is going to just hand them to you to copy and paste. This is as close as you’ll get to that though.

Find out more about SFM’s unique, earn as you learn platform and advanced online marketing training set up by clicking the link below. You’ll then be able to register for their complimentary 7-day video series and learn more about what SFM Elite membership has to offer.