I have a very wide circle of Internet Marketing acquaintances, ranging from complete newbie’s, to mega 8 figure successful people.

I have worked with all of them before in some capacity or another.

Whenever they ask me to promote any of their products, I do so without asking any questions. I don’t care what the commissions are, as long as the product is good, AND, as long as there is the common understanding of reciprocity.

I will promote your stuff any time, but, you have to do the same for me in the future. This is kind of this unwritten rule.

Right?

WRONG!!!

Most of these marketers will happily promote your stuff when they have a small list, and not so big a name online yet. As soon as they have 1 very successful launch, they become harder to convince to promote for you, BUT, they still have no problem coming and asking you to promote their stuff!

Now, as they become even more well known and successful online, you can’t even get hold of them! They don’t answer your instant chats, nor your emails! They STILL have no problem emailing you to promote for them when they have something new coming out.

Once or twice when they do actually respond, they always have SOME excuse NOT to promote your product. It’s too expensive, it’s not right for my list, the commissions are too low, etc, etc, etc.

Am I the only one experiencing this, and having a problem with this?

We all have heard the infamous saying: "The money is in the list"

If you have been doing Internet Marketing for a while, you know that this is very true. The bigger your list, the bigger your income, provided you USE the list, and you provide value to your subscribers.

Now, there are many ways to build your list, but, by far the quickest and easiest way, is giving away free stuff, or, low priced stuff.

So, you give away a free e-book, audio, video, or even software, or, you sell it using the very popular $7 script. Your list grows at an amazing rate, and you are sure you are on your way to the big time.

Well, I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but, I feel it my duty to give you some of my stats. Just because I get these results, don’t mean you will though!

So, I have built a fair size list giving away free products, and low priced ones. I also have some people on there that have bought some high priced products from me. The highest priced was my one on one mentoring at $997.

So, what do my stats look like when I mail this big list, comprised of many sub lists of course?

Of the free and low priced people on the list, only around 2.5% actually click on any link in any email I send them. Of that 2.5%, less than 1% ever buys anything I recommend, or any new product I bring out.

This SAME free/low priced list, will on the other hand have a click rate of around 70% when I send them something free, and make sure I mention it is free in the title of the email.

Now, on the flip side, the people that have bought $97 or higher products from me. THOSE people have an average click rate of around 15% on ANY email I send them, and of that 15%, around an average of 2.5% will buy products I recommend, or new products I produce.

Why then am I wasting time, money and energy building my lists with free or very low priced products? GOOD question, and the only answer I have right now is, habbit.

Well, enough allready! I am looking at how I can revamp my list building efforts away from cheap, and focus on the people who trust me, and my company enough to buy what we recommend or produce, provided of course it is something they need.

How does your free/low cost lists respond to your marketing?

Before we get into using geotargeting, let’s quickly look at what it is 1st.

Geotargeting, or geographical targeting, is a way for a website to display content specific to a geographical location.

Whenever you visit any web site on the Internet, your IP address is logged. Your IP address is given to you by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Each ISP is assigned a unique range of IP’s. Those IP’s are logged in a database which can be referenced, and thus, find out from which country you are from, and in the case of the larger countries like the US and the UK, even what state/county or even what city you are in!

Generally, smaller companies are not bothered with this information, as they believe it would be too difficult to use.

Well, hopefully in this article, I will show you how easy it is to use and drastically increase your online profits.

There are 2 ways you can use geotargeting on your site.

1. Adevertising targeting. You see this on almost any big site you go to. Say for instance you visit www.yahoo.com, from the UK, you magically see adverts for the UK, even though Yahoo is based in the US. This part is REALLY easy, and there are tons of solutions you can use on your own site to show geotargeted adds. Our favourate and free one is: www.openads.org. Google AdWords also offers geotargeting. As advertising geotargeting is very well established, and discussed in so many places, this article will ignore this part.
2. Site/content/page targeting. Just go to ask.com or google.com, and you will be presented with a version for your country. This is the main focus of this article. Not only how to do it, but, why to do it.

Geotargeting happens on the server, before the page is sent to the browser. When a user requests a page from the server, the server queries the user’s IP address against a database of worldwide IP addresses. The database identifies the country (sometimes even city!) of the user’s IP address, and then the server decides what to do.

 What can you use this for in your marketing efforts?

• Serve language specific pages to specific parts of the world. Just remember that an English user might be traveling to Germany on business, but, would still like to see the English page, instead of the German one. Make it easy for the user to switch to a different language.
• Maybe just change the language, or the style of the greeting to be regional.
• Display completely different sales pages to different geographies, even down to city level.

If you are creative with geotargeting, you can drastically increase your sales, and/or, improve customer loyalty.

One fair warning if you are on shared hosting! These databases are quite big. Around 60K entries. Searching through that puts a fair load on your server, and I know of people who has had their shared hosting suspended for using this. Best is to use this only if you have a dedicated server.

Now, let’s look at some code!

I would recommend downloading the GeoIP Lite database from MaxMind because it is free and updated on a monthly basis.

Getting GeoIP data into your database is quite an easy process and only requires a single table. Then, when a visitor loads a page on your website, you can convert their IP address to a value in the database and match it up with what country they are in. Here is a PHP script you can use:

// connect to the database
$db = mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "password");
mysql_select_db("databasename", $db);

// get the user ip address and convert to an array
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$ip_arr = explode(".", $ip);

// convert the ip address to an ip number
$ip_num = 16777216*$ip_arr[0] + 65536*$ip_arr[1] + 256*$ip_arr[2] + $ip_arr[3];

// get the country code
$result = mysql_query("SELECT country FROM geo_ip WHERE $ip_num BETWEEN begin_num AND end_num");
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$country = $row['country'];

The “$country” variable will now contain the user’s country code (US, GB, CA, etc) which you can then use to determine what content to show or where to redirect them.

For a better explanation on how to use the database, read the official instructions.

What To Do With The Country Code

If you do any programming, you will have already figured out what you can do once you have the visitor’s country code. For those of you who are not familiar with a programming language, here is an example.

Lets say you have three pages set up. One page is specifically designed for United States visitors, one is for Canada visitors, and the last page is for all other visitors. You would use a simple “if-then” statement that checks the country code and sends the visitor to the correct page. Here is the PHP code for this example:

if ($country == 'US') { header('Location: /united_states.html'); }
else if ($country == 'CA') { header('Location: /canada.html'); }
else { header('Location: /other.html'); }

I hope this has given you some ideas of what can be done with geotargeting!

Firstly, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you and your family, a happy New Year. May your best of 2007, be your worst of 2008!

Secondly, I would like to tell you that we here at Imnica, do NOT make New Year’s resolutions! We rather set specific goals, and then we build plans to achieve those goals.

SO, what are our goals for 2008?

• Do session 2 of our very popular coaching, "$3K Every 2 weeks, using PLR", in early March. http://www.imnicamarketing.com/3k.html
• Give away TONS more FREE stuff!
• Build LOTS more software which will empower you and your business.
• Build a much closer relationship with our customers.
• Do lots more video, much of it free.
• Grow our business, not only in revenue, but, in people, both as customers, as well as staff.
• Grow the services side of our business.

Does not look like a lot on the surface, but, overall, there is more work than we could do in 2008! Adding more staff, should be our priority.